William Pawley, the Kennedy Assassination, and Watergate
TILT and the “Phase Three” Story of Clare Boothe Luce
A new biography of William Pawley clarifies the
millionaire’s status as a friend and adviser to presidents, despite his
reactionary views that often made the State Department and even the CIA
reluctant to deal with him. His ability to modify and on occasion even overturn
official U.S. policies easily qualifies him to be considered part of that mostly
invisible milieu I have clumsily called the American “deep state,” a milieu
both inside and outside government with the power to steer the history of the
public state and sometimes redirect it.
It would be wrong to think that Pawley had such power only
because of his personal wealth and connections. I hope to show that from the
beginning of his career to his sudden death by a self-inflicted gun wound,
Pawley always acted in conjunction with other powerful people from both the
overworld and the underworld– in short, with what I have called other dark
forces of the deep state.
The key to Pawley’s controversial status was that he made
(and sometimes lost) his fortunes under foreign dictators he was personally
close to: Chiang Kai-shek in China ,
Presidents Prio and Batista in Cuba ,
and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic .
Long after the U.S. Government ceased to support these men, Pawley maintained
their confidence, which was one of the reasons elements of the U.S. Government
chose on occasion to use him as an asset. Another reason is that all these
dictators had developed contacts with the U.S.
underworld, often because of their involvement in the trafficking of opium and
heroin into America .
As we shall see, Pawley himself had at least one CIA -linked
mob contact, John Martino.
The book shows how Pawley’s personal wealth and associations
enabled him at times to mount his own foreign policy, one supported by friends
inside government and also by other wealthy individuals and corporations who
saw their wealth or policy objectives doomed by the fall of strongmen like
Chiang Kai-shek and Batista. Among Pawley’s closest influential friends were
Henry Luce of Time-Life, Henry’s wife Clare Boothe Luce, Allen Dulles, and
Richard Nixon (who according to Anthony Summers had is own web of associations
men who had links to organized crime).[1]
All of these people shared what has been called Pawley’s
“pathological hatred of [Fidel] Castro.”[2]
On at least two occasions I believe Pawley’s support for a
minority right-wing clique led to significant and lasting changes to American
foreign policy. The first was after Chiang Kai-shek’s expulsion from mainland China
to the island of Taiwan ,
when “Pawley became the point man for an end run around American policy toward
It was the official policy of the U.S. State Department
under Dean Acheson to plan for a containment policy in East Asia
in which Taiwan
would not be defended. But Pawley lobbied Acheson to allow for Chiang in Taiwan
to be assisted by “a small group of American civilian, economic, industrial and
[retired or ex-officers] military advisors.”
This plan when implemented, apparently with assistance from
at least one underworld figure along with Frank Wisner’s Office of Policy
Coordination (OPC ), became a significant
factor in the survival of an independent Taiwan ,
and also in the growth of the post-war Asian drug traffic.[4]
(Though the book does not mention this, Pawley was also
“instrumental in setting up the infamous Civil Air Transport [CAT ,
later Air America ],
an airline that later became notorious for ferrying drugs from the Golden
Triangle in Asia .”[5])
The Taiwan plan also enabled the notorious “China Lobby” to
continue to lobby and pass money to the American Congress, helping among other
things to secure the election to the presidency of Richard Nixon in 1968, and
again of Ronald Reagan in 1980.[6]
The Carrozza biography describes Pawley’s lobbying for a
private Taiwan
defense mission as a one-man campaign. But the definitive history of the Korean
War by Bruce Cumings shows how the end run around the State Department was
fostered by other important individuals inside and outside government,
including General Douglas Macarthur as the head of U.S. forces in Japan,
Macarthur’s intelligence chief Charles Willoughby, former OSS Chief William
Donovan, mob figure Sonny Satiris Fassoulis, and “Texas oilmen” presumably
including H.L. Hunt.[7]
This ad hoc coalition was not all-powerful, and fell apart
the next year when H.L. Hunt tried and failed to promote Macarthur, after he
was relieved of his command by Truman, as a candidate for the presidency. This
fluidity exemplifies the reasons why I argue that the so-called “deep state”
should not be seen as a structure, but as a milieu.
With the support of elements from the same milieu, Pawley
affected U.S.
policy again under Eisenhower, with perhaps even more long-lasting and
widespread consequences. By 1952 Frank Wisner’s free-wheeling OPC
had gone so far afoul of U.S.
laws and policy that it incurred the wrath of both President Truman and CIA
Director Walter Bedell Smith. As a result OPC
was merged into the CIA and was known
thereafter as the CIA ’s Department of Plans.
However Smith’s and Truman’s intentions of curbing OPC
were soon thwarted, thanks to their ill-advised appointment of Allen Dulles, an
OSS veteran who was again a practicing Wall Street lawyer, to be the CIA ’s
assistant director in charge of the former OPC .[8]
Wisner’s OPC “cowboys,”
now merged into the CIA ’s new Department of
Plans, continued to operate as before, especially after Dulles was promoted by
Eisenhower to become the new CIA Director.
But tensions and ill-will continued in the Department of
Plans, between the veterans of OPC and those
of the old CIA ’s Office of Special
Operations (OSO). Matters came to a head in 1954, with the CIA ’s
preparation to overthrow the Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz in
operation PBSUCCESS. Eisenhower asked his friend Pawley to participate in a
planning group for the operation, along with the Latin American representative
of U.S. Steel. Eventually Arbenz was defeated, with the aid of three planes
paid for by Pawley’s personal advance of $150,000 to the Nicaraguan government
of Anastasio Somoza.[9]
Pawley was personally commissioned by his friend
President Eisenhower to obtain the planes, after the two men heard first hand
from Allen Dulles that the chances of winning without them were “Nil.”[10]
More importantly for American history, Pawley noticed that
plans for PBSUCCESS were being leaked to the U.S.
press, and he learned that the source was a high official in the CIA ’s
Department of Plans (presumably an old-guard opponent of the ex-OPC
“cowboys”). Pawley brought the problem of the inside leaking to Eisenhower,
“whose response surprised him, ‘I want you to conduct a thorough investigation
of the covert side of CIA operations for
me.’”[11]
Pawley declined to lead the new commission, giving as a
reason “ a possible breakdown in the special relationship Pawley had with
Dulles brothers.” Instead Pawley’s old friend Gen. Jimmy Doolittle became head
of the Commission, with Pawley as a member.[12]
The Doolittle Commission’s report in 1954 led to a complete
victory for the OPC faction in the
Department of Plans.[13]
In addition to purging old officers deemed inefficient, the
report also urged that the CIA become an
“organization more effective, more unique, and, if necessary,
more ruthlessthan that employed by the enemy.”[14]
The door was opened to far larger CIA
operations, including the waging of a war with a drug-financed army in Laos .[15]
“Dirty tricks” such as assassinations were now sanctioned as
a covert adjunct to U.S.
foreign policy. Today, with use of lethal drones at the core of the U.S.
war on terror, it might be said that “dirty tricks” have become U.S.
foreign policy.
Seen from a different perspective, the Doolittle Commission
represented a consolidation of control over the CIA
by Allen Dulles, Wisner, and the OPC . Behind
Pawley’s recommendation more than one historian has seen the hand of Dulles
himself;[16] for
Pawley had the reputation of being a member of the CIA ’s
“Old Boys network and … especially close to CIA
Director Allen Dulles.”[17]
My chief criticism of Carrozza’s excellent biography is that
it repeatedly highlights Pawley’s image as a maverick lone entrepreneur. In
fact Pawley consistently acted in concert with other influential figures from
the overworld, united in lobbying groups for the military-industrial complex
like the American Security Council [ASC] and the Committee on the Present
Danger [CPD]. Carrozza does note how in 1969 Pawley used the newsletter of the
ASC to publish his recommendation that Nixon’s withdrawal plans for Vietnam be
supplemented by unleashing “the armed forces of the Chinese Nationalists on
Taiwan.”[18]
But he treats as a personal initiative Pawley’s publication
in 1974 of a newspaper ad supporting “funding outlays of $20 billion for the
B-1 bombers and Trident submarines.”[19]
In fact these two expensive and highly controversial weapons
systems were being fiercely debated in post-Vietnam Washington ,
where the campaign on their behalf was being led by the American Security
Council and later the Committee on the Present Danger (a member of which was
Pawley’s close friend Clare Boothe Luce, the wife of Henry Luce of Time/Life).[20]
Pawley’s actions in short were not just idiosyncratic, but
rooted in the agendas of a militant sector of the overworld. Given
Pawley’s status in this overworld, and above all his ease of access to Dulles
and his circle, including Henry Luce (another personal friend), one has to ask
whether Pawley did not have high-level support in the following episodes,
detailed in Carrozza’s book, with respect to both Cuba and possibly even the
Kennedy assassination.
New Information about Oswald’s First Approach to Carlos
Bringuier: He Was Taped
If Carrozza is to be believed, Pawley’s well-known role as a
supporter of anti-Castro activities outside the CIA
made him aware of an important tape of Lee Harvey Oswald in New
Orleans , a tape which for some reason did not reach
the Warren Commission, and would seem to contradict the account of Oswald’s
activities in the Warren Report.
An early and energetic opponent of Fidel Castro, Pawley
(according to David Kaiser) “may have been the man who first suggested to Ike
that Castro should be assassinated.”[21]
From the time of Castro’s takeover, Pawley became a
well-known backer of anti-Castro operatives. Many of these he vetted and
then referred to the CIA ’s JM/WAVE
station in Miami , with such
regularity that he was assigned his own special CIA
cryptonym, QDDALE. But his own preferences for a post-Castro leadership were
wealthy Batistianos like Dr. Antonio Rubio Padilla, who was too reactionary for
the CIA , too reactionary even for Howard
Hunt.[22]
Pawley in short was acting as a spokesman for those forces
in Cuba ,
including both Cuban landowners and businessmen, and also American corporations
like American and Foreign Power, who ran the risk of losing their Cuban
investments, even under the kind of moderately conservative government with
which the CIA hoped to replace Castro. The
same was true of those mob owners of Havana
casinos who had not, like Meyer Lansky, had the foresight to hedge their
political bets, by developing new casinos in the Bahamas .
Thus it was no accident that Pawley, in his Cuban policies,
according to Carrozza, also dealt with mob and casino-related figures who were
also too shady for the CIA . Thus, “Pawley’s
involvement with anti-Castro groups brought him in contact with shadowy figures
such as Mafia gangster John Martino, Watergate [figure] Frank Sturgis,” and
others. In the same sentence, Carrozza also lists “Howard Hunt, and an
unidentified anti-Castro youth who tape-recorded Lee Harvey Oswald during an
interview when Oswald tried joining a New Orleans
anti-Communist group as a hired gun.”[23](This claim
is not supported; and according to the book’s Index, Pawley’s contact with the
unidentified youth is not referred to again.)
This reference resurrects the unresolved allegation of
Pawley’s close friend and political ally Clare Boothe Luce, about a story from
her “young friend,” the skipper of one of the anti-Castro raider boats she and
Pawley were sponsoring. Luce claimed that her friend (to whom she gave the
pseudonym “Julio Fernandez”), told her the night of Kennedy’s assassination
that he “had these tape recordings of Oswald” in New Orleans, tapes which
included Oswald’s “bragging that he could shoot anyone, even the Secretary of
the Navy.”[24]
This story, never explained, supplies an alternative to the
FBI and Warren Report account of Oswald’s contact in early August 1963 with New
Orleans DRE delegate Carlos Bringuier in his
shop Casa Roca, a remarkable visit even before this new information.
It is important to note that both Philip Geraci and Vance
Blalock, the two witnesses to Oswald’s visit to Bringuier’s shop, testified (in
divergent and mutually exclusive versions) that, after Oswald left, they
“started following him home.”[25]
In Luce’s version as she told a journalist in 1975,
“Fernandez”’ contacts “followed him and found he was in a Fair Play for Cuba
Communist cell.”[26]
We seem to have two different accounts of the same event.
The FBI and Warren Commission version, as we might expect, is what I have
called a “phase two version,” in which nothing conflicts with the picture they
present of Oswald as a lone assassin.
Geraci and Blalock were interviewed by the Warren Commission
but said nothing about having taped him (10 WH 76, 82). The Luce-Hernandez
version, in contrast, is a “phase one” story, in which Oswald appears as
a hired gun working ultimately for Castro: “The young Cuban who
called me,” Mrs. Luce continued, “said that there was a Cuban Communist
assassination team working somewhere – in Dallas, New Orleans, or wherever …
[and] Oswald was their hired gun.”
Luce’s Cuban added, somewhat paradoxically, that Oswald,
before deciding to work for Castro, “had tried to report the Communist plans to
the FBI some time before the assassination.”[27] This
switch from anti-Castro to pro-Castro roles for Oswald, unlikely as it may
sound, closely mirrors the Warren Report’s account of Oswald between August 5
and August 9, 1963 .
Bringuier himself told the Washington Post after the assassination
that on August 5 “I thought he might be an agent for the FBI or the CIA ,”
before Bringuier caught him on August 9 distributing leaflets from the Fair
Play for Cuba Committee.[28]
[Today I shall skip what the taping of Oswald implies about
the Lake Ponchartrain
training camp that Oswald asked about, and go directly to what I say about the
so-called Bayo-Pawley plot, the CIA -backed
operation TILT that brought in Jerry Hemming and Frank Sturgis, the two men
behind the Lake Ponchartrain
training camp.]
Pawley, Sturgis, Hemming, Martino, and the Bayo-Pawley Plot
Pawley, Hemming, and Sturgis (along with John Martino) were
actively involved with the CIA in a conspiratorial
penetration of Cuba
in April 1963, the so-called Bayo-Pawley plot (known to the CIA
as Operation TILT).
The Bayo-Pawley story has been told many times. David Kaiser
has seen in it the hand of Martino’s associate John Roselli, and concludes that
in the Bayo-Pawley plot “Roselli and Trafficante were using Martino and Pawley
as cut-outs to enlist the help of the CIA .”[29] The
Carrozza account differs from Kaiser’s in attributing a more forceful role to
Pawley, claiming that it was Pawley himself who “began assembling a team
[which] included mob figures, Cuban exile leaders, CIA
operatives, and mercenary soldiers, some of whom would become well known names
during the Watergate investigation a decade later.”[30]
David Kaiser, in contrast, claims that Pawley “became a pawn
in an elaborate scheme hatched by John Martino.”[31] But
Pawley’s and Martino’s outlooks on Cuba
were so similar, that there is no need to think that one of them duped the
other. It is symptomatic of their convergence that both men used the
anti-communist writer Nathaniel Weyl to ghost-write their memoirs.[32] Pawley,
Martino, and Weyl all had links to the John Birch Society, which Gus Russo and
others have also linked to the Lake Ponchartrain training camp.[33]
Furthermore it is not disputed that on April 18, 1963 , Pawley contacted Ted Shackley
of the CIA ’s Miami JM/WAVE
Station about the raid; and told him “that Martino was to play a role in the
operation.”[34] This
seems an odd requirement if the purpose of the mission was (as Pawley told
Shackley) to extricate Soviet technicians who would testify to the on-going
presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba .
But it makes perfect sense if (as Carrozza suggests) Pawley knew that this was
planned to be (or at least look like) an assassination mission, which members
of the mob (Roselli and Sam Giancana, according to participant Loran Hall) were
paying for.[35]
[Jack Anderson’s Phase-Three Report of a “Political H-bomb”
and Watergate]
Pawley’s biographer, Anthony Carrozza, corroborates the
story given in 1976 by one of the participants, Loran Eugene Hall, and endorsed
by David Kaiser: that a deeper purpose of this raid was to assassinate Castro.[36] And
Carrozza speculates that the team of Cubans exfiltrated into Cuba
for this purpose may have been the team that (according to a John Roselli story
published by Jack Anderson) came “back to the United
States as the team that killed President
Kennedy and set up Oswald as the fall guy.”[37] Anderson
referred to this possibility as “a political H-bomb.”[38]
In other words, Carrozza gives support to a story first
spread by Martino and Roselli in 1963 (and reported by myself three decades
later) both of whom “told the FBI that the assassination of John F. Kennedy had
been Castro’s retaliation for Kennedy’s CIA -Mafia
plots against himself, even to the point of Castro’s having ‘turned’ an
assassination team and sent it back to Dallas.”[39]
This “retaliation” story was first published nationally by
Jack Anderson, after meeting with Roselli’s lawyer Edward P. Morgan, on March 3, 1967 . I suspect however that
it was circulated much earlier, and may even have been the substance of the
long discussion between John McCone and Robert Kennedy on the afternoon of
November 22, 1963.[40] We
know that on that same afternoon RFK voiced a version of the “plot that
backfired” theory when he spoke to his Cuban friend Harry Ruiz-Williams. What
makes the following quote so meaningful is the fact that in 1963 RFK, at odds
with CIA plans for the replacement of
Castro, was using Williams as his go-between with Cuban exiles for alternative
covert operations not sponsored by the CIA .[41] According
to journalist Haynes Johnson, who was present, Kennedy turned to Williams that
fateful afternoon and said, “One of your guys did it.”[42]
From early in his presidency, Lyndon Johnson also reportedly
believed, perhaps from what he was told by CIA
director McCone, that JFK was killed in retaliation for U.S.
assassination plots against Castro.[43] Joseph
Califano, a former Army member of Cuban Coordinating Committee under both JFK
and LBJ, later formulated this belief more precisely as a “plot that backfired”
theory: I have come to share LBJ’s view [that Castro "got him
first"]….Over the years I have come to believe that the paroxysms of grief
that tormented Robert Kennedy for years after his brother’s death arose, at
least in part, from a sense that his efforts to eliminate Castro led to his
brother’s assassination.[44]
I like to think of the “plot that backfired” theory as a
“phase three” story, because of my arguments elsewhere that it, and more
specifically the Bayo-Pawley mission, was planned precisely to coerce the CIA , Life, and
even the Kennedy family “into an assassination cover-up.”[45] For
many years I have suspected that the true target of the Bayo-Pawley mission was
neither the mythical Soviet defectors, nor even to assassinate Castro, but
President Kennedy, on a level even deeper than its avowed intention to sabotage
Kennedy’s policy of détente with Cuba
and the Soviet Union . (As Robert K. Brown and Miguel
Acoca wrote in their 1976 account, “The Bayo-Pawley Affair,” “It was a plot to
destroy President Kennedy politically, and the CIA
played a major role. Without the CIA , in
fact, the weird adventure could not have taken place.”[46] It is
indeed true that proof of missiles in Cuba would have completely discredited
Kennedy’s claim to have successfully resolved the Cuban Missile Crisis, and put
an end to his efforts to develop a policy of détente towards the Soviet Union).
No Soviet defectors were actually obtained, so the plot
might at first glance seem to have been ineffective. That however did not at
all impede the use of the “phase three” retaliation story as post-assassination
political blackmail. By enlisting both regular CIA
personnel from Shackley’s JM/WAVE station,
and also Richard Billings from Life magazine, the plot may have helped ensure
that the CIA ,Life, and others would
later engage in a post-assassination cover-up.[47]
The plot may also have blackmailed Robert Kennedy: Brown and
Acoca report (as Kaiser and Carrozza do not) that the organizers of the raid
had at the outset brought in a wealthy Kennedy supporter, Theodore Racoosin;
Racoosin reported later that he had contacted “someone in the White House, who
had authorized him to organize meetings of Cuban exile leaders, in order to
obtain information on the CIA ’s Cuban
operations.”[48]
Such an authorization, if granted, would be enough to
explain why Robert Kennedy “immediately moved to shut down” Roselli’s “phase
three” story when Jack Anderson published it in March 1967. According to David
Talbot, Kennedy first requested “a copy of the FBI memo on the … meeting when
he was first informed by the CIA about the
Mafia plots.” and the arranged to have lunch, on March 4, 1967 , with CIA
Director Richard Helms. Three days later, on March 7, 1967 , theWashington Post finally published a
bowdlerized version of the March 3 Jack Anderson column. It no longer contained
Anderson ’s reference to “a
political H-bomb – an unconfirmed report that Senator Robert Kennedy (Dem-N.Y.)
may have approved an assassination plot which then possibly backfired against
his late brother.”[49]
One does not have to believe in the truth of the “plot that
backfired” story to believe in the importance of it. Robert Kennedy was not the
only major figure to feel threatened by Anderson ’s
“political H-bomb;” so, four years later, did President Nixon. In January 1971
a Jack Anderson column reported again about CIA
plots, this time naming mob figure John Roselli, ex-CIA
officer William Harvey, and CIA contract
agent Robert Maheu, their go-between in the CIA -mafia
plots of 1960, (plots involving Nixon but not Kennedy). In 1971, “Could the
plot against Castro have backfired against President Kennedy?”[50]
As I noted in 1976, the column ”caused a flurry of
investigative memos inside the Nixon White House,” including a warning from one
of the White House “dirty tricks” operatives, Jack Caulfield, that “Maheu’s
covert activities … with CIA … might well
shake loose republican skeletons from the closet.”[51]
According to Anthony Summers, Attorney General John Mitchell
promptly phoned Maheu, who was currently “under pressure to appear before a
grand jury in connection with a Las Vegas
gambling prosecution,” and arranged a deal whereby, in exchange for Maheu’s
silence on “the entire Castro story,” Maheu would not have to testify.[52]
This was noted and investigated by two members of the staff
of the Senate Watergate Committee, Terry Lenzner and Mark Lackritz, who
concluded that White House concern about Anderson ’s
phase-three story “could have been a possible motivation for the [Watergate]
break-in to the office of the DNC.”[53] The
two staffers questioned Caulfield about his “skeletons” memo. Anthony Summers
writes that “Caulfield first asked to go off the record. After discussion in
private, he conceded that his reference to ‘covert activities’ related to [Anderson ’s]
Castro plot revelations.”[54]
At the end of a lengthy chapter, Summers
concluded, Nixon had good reason to fear exposure of his part in the Cuban
intrigues. The information marshaled here shows starkly why it was that in
1971, in the wake of the Anderson
articles and the Maheu scare, he renewed his demands for the CIA ’s
files on the Bay of Pigs . He hoped, to be sure, that
they contained embarrassments for the Kennedys. At the same time, he knew the
agency’s records probably contained material compromising to himself. Nixon
needed to see them, as he explained to [his aide John] Ehrlichman, in order to
know what to “duck,” to “protect” himself.[55]
In January 1974 Senator Sam Ervin, Chairman of the Senate
Watergate Committee, rejected the request of the staffers Lenzner and Lackritz
to issue subpoenas to their witnesses. [56] But
six months later, on the “smoking gun” tape which led promptly to his
resignation, Nixon was heard by the committee to say to his chief of staff Bob
Haldeman, ”Look, the problem is that this [Watergate break-in] will open the
whole Bay of Pigs thing.”[57] Summers notes that Haldeman later wrote in his memoir
that “It seems that in all those Nixon references to the Bay of Pigs ,
he was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination.”[58]
Let me close this section with a letter from Pawley to Richard
Nixon, dated April 15, 1963 ,
three days before Pawley contacted Shackley about Operation TILT:
Focusing again on Cuba ,
Pawley recounted the disastrous decisions that both the Eisenhower and the
Kennedy administrations had made. There was only one way out of the mess,
according to Pawley: [QUOTE]‘All of the Cubans and most of the Americans
in this part of the country believe that to remove Castro you must first remove
Kennedy, and that is not going to be easy.’ [END QUOTE]”[59] [repeat]
These were suggestive words to communicate to the man who,
along with Allen Dulles, had back in 1960-61 supported Pawley’s efforts for a
more decisive anti-Castro policy than that adopted by Eisenhower and Kennedy.[60]
I want to close with some remarks from my concluding
section, Why Did Clare Boothe Luce Not Release Her Oswald Story Until
1975?
Pawley and Luce were enthusiastic supporters of Nixon in his
1968 campaign to be elected president, and Pawley joined the “Ambassadors for
Nixon Committee.”[61] But
their support predictably waned with Nixon’s moves in 1971-72 to redefine America ’s
relationship to China
and the Soviet Union . Pawley wrote in his unpublished
memoir, “Russia is Winning,” that “The whole pattern is now colored with a
thin, pasty coating called ‘detente,’ a Communist tactic to prepare the
trusting democracies for the kill…It can end only in surrender.”[62]
After Nixon’s resignation in 1974, Pawley was even more
uncomfortable with the foreign policy of his successor Gerald Ford. In 1975 the
John Birch Society publication American Opinion quoted Pawley as
stating that Kissinger, whom Ford had retained as Secretary of State, “scares
me to death.”[1]Pawley
was particularly incensed to learn that Ford and Kissinger might lend support
to a move in the Organization of American States (OAS) to lift economic and
diplomatic sanctions against Cuba .[63]
It was inevitable that Pawley’s political preference in 1976
would be for his friend, and Ford’s primary opponent, Ronald Reagan, whom
Pawley had urged Nixon to consider as his vice-presidential choice in 1968.[64] Clare
Boothe Luce was also a supporter of Reagan in both 1976 and 1980. Moreover she
was a member of two important neocon groups that helped prepare for the 1980
“Reagan Revolution,” by lobbying for an end to détente and an increase in
defense spending: the Committee on the Present Danger (1976) and the Coalition
for Peace through Strength (1978, of which Reagan also was a member).[65] In
1981 Reagan rewarded Luce for her efforts with a seat on the President’s Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB).
More importantly, in 1964 both Pawley and Mrs. Luce had been
important figures in the campaign to elect their friend Barry Goldwater as
president. Clare Boothe Luce seconded the nomination of Goldwater at the Republican
Convention, and thereafter co-chaired a Citizens group (with General James
Doolittle) to elect him. Pawley meanwhile had served as chairman of Florida
Citizens for Goldwater-Miller.[66] After
Goldwater’s ignominious defeat in 1964, Mrs. Luce continued to be close to him,
dining with him at least twice (in 1965 and again in 1967) with their mutual
friend William Buckley.
With the unprecedented resignation of Nixon in 1974,
American politics were left in disarray, with both left and right struggling
(and expecting) to prevail in the post-Nixon era. Major topics, usually too
sacred for public discussion, were briefly debated in both Congress and the
media, including the size of the post-Vietnam defense budget, the future of the
CIA , and even the CIA ’s
past role in assassinations. At the time there was an unprecedented outpour of
books attacking the CIA from both the left
and the right.[67]
In this post-Watergate turmoil Democrats and Republicans in
the Senate agreed to the formation of the Church Committee to investigate the CIA
and FBI. On this Committee the Republicans were represented by Senator
John Tower
as Co-Chair, and also Senator Goldwater.
Inside the Church Committee a bitter contest, between the
advocates or a more open America
versus the advocates of a more authoritarian one, became crystallized about the
question of who had been responsible for past assassinations: the Kennedys or
the CIA . In his massive defense of the
“phase three” retaliation story, Gus Russo sums up the positions of Republican
Senators Schweiker and Goldwater: Senator Richard Schweiker headed the Church
Committee’s investigation into the Kennedy assassination’s possible connection
to intelligence activities. He has said, “My impression is that the presidents
not only knew but ordered these policies by and large… Past presidents have
used the CIA as their secret police at home
and their secret army abroad.”
Perhaps the most forthright Committee member was Senator
Barry Goldwater of Arizona . At
the time of the hearings, Goldwater remarked that there was friction on the
Committee between “those who want to protect the Kennedys and those who want to
tell the truth.” Years later, he stated it more succinctly, saying, “We spent
nine of the ten months trying to get Kennedy’s name out of it.” When asked by
the press who was behind the attempts on Castro’s life, Goldwater motioned
towards the White House and said, “Everything points right down there.”[68]
Goldwater’s description of the Democrats’ behavior in the
94th Congress is corroborated by the Democrats’ subsequent behavior in the
95th. A new House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), first set up in
1976, was severely reorganized by Democrats in 1977 and put in the hands of
Robert Blakey, who had been a former close ally of Robert Kennedy in the
Justice Department. Although the HSCA achieved much of value, it also
studiously avoided the Bayo-Pawley story. The HSCA Report did not mention it,
nor did it point out that the Report’s author, HSCA editorial director Richard Billings,
had himself been a participant in the Bayo-Pawley mission.
But the CIA appears to
have been as industrious in protecting its secrets as the Kennedy loyalists.
The CIA gave an undercover assignment to one
of its officers, psychological warfare expert George Joannides, and assigned
him to work as its liaison officer with the HSCA. The Committee never learned
that Joannides had also been the case officer for the Cuban exile group DRE ,
whose publicity director Carlos Bringuier had been repeatedly in contact with
Lee Harvey Oswald.[69]
In the course of their debates, the Church Committee
established a subcommittee “to review the role of federal agencies in investigating
the Kennedy assassination.”[70]
Goldwater’s viewpoint was represented on the subcommittee by
Senator Richard Schweiker, a Republican from Pennsylvania .
According to Church Committee investigator Gaeton Fonzi , the subcommittee was
established on September 8, 1975 .
Schweiker’s move coincided almost exactly in time with Clare
Boothe Luce’s decision to go public with her “phase three” story that Oswald
had been “turned” by Castro. In Fonzi’s words.
Right after Schweiker announced the formation of his Kennedy
assassination Subcommittee, he was visited by Vera Glaser, a syndicated Washington
columnist.[71] Glaser
told him she had just interviewed Clare Boothe Luce and that Luce had given her
some information relating to the assassination. Schweiker immediately called
Luce and she, quite cooperatively and in detail, confirmed the story she had
told Glaser.[72]
It makes strong political sense that Luce would be anxious
to launch her version of a “phase three” story in 1975. Nixon was no longer
there to be protected; the president who would be injured by it was now Gerald
Ford; and Ford, besides being a member and spokesman for the Warren Report,[73] was
the leader of the anti-Reagan forces in the Republican Party, and perhaps above
all the ally and protector of Henry Kissinger with his hated policy of detente.
But if Luce’s motives for launching her story at this time
were political, she badly underestimated the political explosiveness of the
“phase three” story. Eventually the Church Committee would document how both
the Secret Service and the FBI found Jack Anderson’s story too hot to handle (5
AH 80-82). The reaction of the CIA was quite
different: after LBJ asked DCI Richard Helms
about it (having been alerted by Earl Warren, who had heard about it from Drew
Pearson before the March 1967 story), the CIA
produced an Inspector-General’s Report of over 100 pages, which even then dealt
only obliquely and evasively with Anderson’s story.[74]
Buried near the end of the Report was a section headed with
the ominous question, “Should we try to silence those who are talking or who
might later talk?”[75] The
Report’s response to the question was low-keyed and quite benign, ending two
pages later with the sentence, “There might be some value to be gained from
endorsing [Robert Maheu’s] suggestion that he approach [Edward P.] Morgan and
perhaps Roselli and urge discretion.”
But in 1975, after Nixon’s two CIA
directors (James Schlesinger and William Colby) had demanded an accounting of
the CIA ’s past illegalities, the CIA
was in a far more desperate plight than it had been back in 1967. We have to
ask whether it is only coincidental that the years 1975-78 saw so many violent
deaths among those involved in the CIA -mafia
plots, and more specifically with the Bayo-Pawley plot.
On June 19, 1975 ,
“a week before his scheduled appearance before the Church Committee to be
questioned about the CIA -Mafia plots…Sam
Giancana [was] shot in the back of the head with a .22-caliber pistol.”[76] John
Martino also died in May 1975, allegedly after telling his wife, a business
partner, and a journalist friend that he had been peripherally involved in the
plot to kill Kennedy.[77]After John Roselli had testified to the Church Committee, his
mutilated body, on August 7, 1976 ,
was discovered in Biscayne Bay , floating in an oil drum.
Committee investigator Gaeton Fonzi records the deaths of three other witnesses
he had planned to question: George de Mohrenschildt by alleged suicide, Carlos
Prio by suicide, and Manuel Artime, weeks after his diagnosis with cancer.[78]
Extensive as it is, Fonzi’s list of questionable deaths is
not complete. William Harvey, the CIA
officer who was also a friend of Roselli and one of the three sources Anderson
named for his “backfire” story, testified to the Church Committee in 1975; on
June 8, 1976, he died suddenly, at age 60, from a heart attack.[79] William
C. Sullivan, head of the FBI’s Intelligence Division that so strangely handled
(or mishandled) Oswald’s FBI files in the weeks before the assassination, was
shot in November 1977 with a high-powered rifle, by a hunter who claimed to
have mistaken him for a deer. Journalist Robert Novak, a friend of Sullivan, later
wrote, “Bill told me I would probably read about his death in some kind of
accident but not to believe it. It would be murder.”[80] On
May 8, 1978, David Morales, the CIA
Operations officer who is said to have selected his close friend Mickey Kappes
for Operation TILT, died, after having reportedly told friends, “I was in
Dallas when I, when we got that mother fucker, and I was in Los Angeles when we
got the little bastard.”[81]
But there is one death in particular that could suggest that
Clare Booth Luce may have underestimated the political explosiveness of “phase
three” stories. It can be seen also as an ironic comment on the fluidity of the
dark forces underlying American politics, and the danger of dabbling with them.
I shall close with a quote from Gaeton Fonzi’s description of how in early 1977
he began to continue his investigations on behalf of the recently created House
Select Committee on Assassinations:
On my official first day, I sent to Washington
a list of witnesses I planned to interview… William Pawley was near the top of
that list. Exactly one week later [on January
7, 1977 ], William Pawley, in bed in his mansion on Miami
Beach with a nervous ailment [shingles], put a gun to
his chest and committed suicide.[82]
Although I have never hear of any other person committing
suicide because of shingles, Pawley’s death by itself proves nothing at all.
However I believe that the story of a story I have been telling you today, of a
“phase three” story that was indeed a political H-bomb, makes at least two
things clear. The first is that President Kennedy was not assassinated by a
marginal neglected loner who was quickly killed, but by some deep enduring
force in our society, with the power to affect bureaucratic behavior.
And despite their lip service to the findings of the Warren
Report, a lot of public figures knew this, and felt very threatened.
Notes
[1] William P. Hoar, “Henry Kissinger: This Man Is On The
Other Side,” American Opinion, June 1975,
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/797596/posts.
[1] Anthony Summers, The Arrogance of Power: The Secret
World of Richard Nixon (New York :
Viking, 2000), 50-53, 194-99, 213-15, 240-45, etc.
[2] Gus Russo, Live by the Sword: The Secret War Against
Castro and the Death of JFK (Baltimore:Bancroft Press, 1998), 9.
[3] Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean
War (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990), II, 133.
[4] Pawley memorandum of November 7, 1949 to Secretary of
State Acheson; quoted in Anthony R. Carrozza, William D. Pawley: The
Extraordinary Life of the Adventurer, Entrepreneur, and Diplomat Who Co-Founded
the Flying Tigers (Washington: Potomac Books, 2012), 176. Cf.
Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, II, 133, 511-12, 521-22; Peter
Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War (Lanham ,
MD : Rowman & Littlefield, 2010),
109-10; Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine (Lanham ,
MD : Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 55,
80.
[5] Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA
and the Legacy of America’s Private Intelligence Network (New
York : Carroll & Graf, 2005), 9.
[6] See in general Scott, American War Machine, 73-75,
93-95. For the role of Anna Chan Chennault in helping to elect Nixon in 1968,
see Anthony Summers, The Arrogance of Power, 298-306. For the role of Taiwan
in subsidizing the 1980 Reagan campaign, see Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale
Scott, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection (Boston: South End
Press, 1987), 54-57.
[7] Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 512-15
(Hunt, Fassoulis, and Donovan), 521-25 (Macarthur and Willoughby ).
[9] Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 102. Pilots were
recruited from the CIA ’s airline CAT
by Pawley’s old ally Whiting Willauer, another collaborator in the earlier
pipeline of aid to General Chennault’s Flying Tigers (loc. cit., 94). Cf.
Carrozza, William D. Pawley, 196, 199-201.
[10] Carrozza, William D. Pawley, 200.
[11] Carrozza, William D. Pawley, 198.
[12] Ibid. Tim Weiner gives a completely different version of
the genesis of the Doolittle Commission in Legacy of Ashes (107-08),
attributing it to the concerns of the left-leaning CIA
officer Jim Kellis. I find Carrozza’s account far more persuasive.
[13] Among the more prominent liberals to leave the CIA
at this time was the future antiwar activist William Sloane Coffin.
[14] Athan G. Theoharis and Richard H.
Immerman, The Central Intelligence Agency: Security Under
Scrutiny, 23.
[15] Scott, American War Machine, 90-119.
[16] Cf. The Central Intelligence Agency: History and
Documents, ed. William M. Leary (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,
1984), 64: “Early drafts of instructions to General Doolittle were prepared by
the agency. The four members of the committee were well known in the agency….
Doolittle himself was a friend of Wisner’s; Morris Hadley, a New
York lawyer, was an old friend of Allen Dulles…”
[17] Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation (New
York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1993),56.
[18] William Pawley, “A Way Out of Vietnam,” American
Security Council Washington Report,” December
1, 1969 ; quoted in Carrozza, William D. Pawley, 320.
[19] Paid advertisement by William Pawley, “Have You Ever
Faced the Possibility That Your Country Might Cease to Exist?” Miami
Herald, April 2, 1974 ; as
summarized by Carrozza, William D. Pawley, 321.
[20] Ray A. Geigle and Peter G. Hartjens, Representation
in the United States Congress, 1973(Washington: American Political Science
Association, 1975), 35; Edward N. Luttwak, Strategy and Politics:
Collected Essays (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1980), 157-58;
Robert A. Strong, Working in the world: Jimmy Carter and the making of
American foreign policy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
2000), 25-27; Jerry W. Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the
Present Danger (Boston: South End Press, 1983), 226, 279.
[21] Kaiser, The Road to Dallas ,
160. Cf. Lamar Waldron, Watergate: The Hidden History (Berkeley :
Counterpoint, 2012), 217.
[22] Carrozza, William D. Pawley, 244.
[23] Carrozza, William D. Pawley, 5; cf. 244, etc.
[24] 10 AH 84 (House Select Committee on
Assassinations, Hearings, Vol. 10, p. 84). In the Luce version of the
“Fernandez” story, Oswald was taped after “Fernandez” and his friends had
“penetrated Oswald’s Communist ‘cell’” – not, as Carrozza reported, during his
interview with “a New Orleans anti-Communist group.”
But there was of course no such “Communist ‘cell,’” making the “Fernandez”
story sound completely fictitious. On the other hand, no one disputes that
Oswald did visit the anti-Communist DRE
group in New Orleans , making the
Carrozza version the more credible one.
[25] 10 WH 85; cf. 78 (Warren
Commission, Hearings, 85; cf. 78). The two young men gave wildly differing
accounts of how far they followed Oswald from Bringuier’s store at 107
Decatur Street . In Geraci’s very confused and
self-contradictory account Oswald “he crossed Canal Street and he was – he kept
going that way, I think on St. Charles or Claiborne – way down there near the
end [of Canal Street]” (10 WH 78). Blalock testified that “we started to
[follow him] to the corner [i.e. of Canal Street ,
a few steps away] and we didn’t see him, so we went on our way” (10 WH 85). One
or both accounts must be wrong, even though both men agree they did not follow
Oswald to his address (which they knew) on Magazine
Street . As both deponents were “duly sworn,” it
would appear that at least one of them may have committed perjury.
[26] Beale, “Clare Boothe Luce Weaves a Fascinating Tale.”
[27] Beale, “Clare Boothe Luce Weaves a Fascinating Tale.”
[30] Carrozza, William D. Pawley, 256.
[31] Kaiser, The Road to Dallas ,
160. Kaiser’s narrative follows closely what Shackley reported Pawley told him,
in a memo of May 22, 1963 (NARA
#104-10312-10379). But I believe Pawley was dissembling to conceal his own
role. Hinckle and Turner report that John Martino “arranged for two ex-CIA
agents on Pawley’s payroll to attend” a planning meeting which
was before Pawley contacted Shackley on April 16 (Hinckle and
Turner, The Fish Is Red, 170). In addition Shackley’s account treats
Nathaniel Weyl as someone presented to Pawley by Senate aide Jay Sourwine in a
phone call, whereas in fact Weyl was already collaborating with Pawley on a
biography (never published), just as Weyl had collaborated earlier with
Martino. Back in 1976, one of the plotters, Loran Hall, also told Warren
Hinckle and William Turner that “Pawley was conned” (Hinckle and
Turner, The Fish Is Red, 349-50). In a similar vein, David Corn writes
that “Shackley was conned” when authorizing the TILT operation (David
Corn, Blonde Ghost, 100). But Shackley was in contact with Roselli, whom
according to Hall was behind the assassination effort. I suspect that Pawley,
Weyl, Luce, and perhaps Shackley were on the same page: they all had the same
politics, and Pawley was close to them all.
[32] Pawley’s memoir was never published
(Carrozza, William D. Pawley, 257). On other political matters Pawley was
a Nixon man, while Martino, after the JFK assassination, became a spokesman for
the John Birch Society (WCD 561.5). Hall and Hemming also had John Birch
contacts (Kaiser,The Road to Dallas ,
161-62). Weyl also had been associated with the John Birch Society, but had
reportedly severed the connection by February 1964 (CIA
memo, February 12, 1964, MFF Pagelink: 579938).
[33] Gus Russo, Live by the Sword, 186, 187.
[34] Carrozza, William D. Pawley, 258. Cf. Kaiser, The
Road to Dallas , 161: “Pawley… said
that he had to continue to use [Pawley].”
[35] Hinckle and Turner, The Fish Is Red, 350.
[36] Carrozza, William D. Pawley, 264; cf. Hinckle and
Turner, The Fish Is Red, 349-50; Scott. Deep Politics, 116;
Kaiser, Road to Dallas ,
161-63,
[37] Carrozza, William D. Pawley, 265; citing Dick
Russell, “Loran Hall,” Village Voice, 23. Cf. Jack Anderson (from
Roselli), San Francisco Chronicle, March 3, 1967; Richard D.
Mahoney, Sons and Brothers, 273: “the Bayo-Pawley mission fit
nicely with Rosselli’s later claim that President Kennedy was
assassinated by an anti-Castro sniper team sent in to murder Castro, captured
by the Cubans, tortured, and redeployed in Dallas.”
[38] Anderson, San Francisco Chronicle, March 3, 1967;
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&sqi=2&ved=0CCkQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fjfk.hood.edu%2FCollection%2FWhite%2520Materials%2FWhite%2520Assassination%2520Clippings%2520Folders%2FKennedy%2520Family%2520Folders%2FKennedy%2520Robert%2520F%2FRFK%25200063.pdf&ei=7Q6DUI_aKuni0gGMm4H4Cw&usg=AFQjCNHDLCr6j4JRSxXaPAkId-3pMSI8Xw&sig2=uKJS-RaISi8NyvTjBzsRCQ.
[39] Scott, Deep Politics, 112-13; citing Warren
Commission Memo of April 1, 1964 from W, David Slawson to J. Lee Rankin, 11 AH
439: “The substance of Mr. Martino’s assertions is that the death of the
President resulted from a Castro plot, which itself resulted from a plot by
President Kennedy to overthrow Castro” (citing Warren Commission documents 657
and 662); cf. WCD 657.1-2 “Mr. Martino… said he was quoted correctly in the
statement that his sources informed him that President Kennedy was
engaged in a plot to overthrow the Castro regime…. Martino… said it was the
opinion of his sources, as well as his personal opinion, that President Kennedy
was assassinated because Castro had learned of this preparation for a new
invasion of Cuba .”
See also Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-Up, 19-30, on the John Roselli
story in the San Francisco Chronicle, May 3, 1967 , as “political blackmail.”
[40] McCone to William Manchester, conversation, April 14,
1964, NARA # 104-10306-10017, p. 4; David
Talbot, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (New York:
Free Press, 2007), 6.).
[41] Scott, Deep Politics II, 44-57, 61-66, 114.
[42] David Talbot, Brothers: The Hidden History of the
Kennedy Years (New York :
Free Press, 2007), 10, 212, quoting Haynes Johnson in Washington Post,
April 17. 1981. Cf. Jefferson Morley,Our Man in Mexico :
Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA ,
330.
[43] According to journalist Leo Janos in 1973, Johnson had
told him that on taking office in November 1963 he discovered that “we had been
operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean;” he noted that a CIA -backed
assassination team had been picked up in Havana, and he reportedly speculated
to Janos that Dallas had been a retaliation for this “thwarted attempt” (Leo
Janos, “The Last Days of the President,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1973, 39;
Scott et al., The Assassinations, 302-03). We know that in McCone’s
briefing of the incoming president on November
25, 1963 , McCone covered “a number of topics, including ongoing
efforts via the CIA to overthrow Fidel
Castro’s dictatorial regime” (Max Holland, The Kennedy Assassination
Tapes [New York : Knopf,
2004], 82).
[44] Joseph A. Califano Jr., Inside: A Public and
Private Life, 126.
[45] Scott, Deep Politics, 117; cf. Peter Dale Scott,
“The CIA -Mafia Plot as Political Blackmail,”
in Scott, Crime and Cover-Up, 23-27.
[46] Robert K. Brown and Miguel Acoca, “The Bayo-Pawley
Affair,” Soldier of Fortune, February 1976, 13.
[47] The CIA personnel
from JM/WAVE on the mission included two
officers: William “Rip” Robertson (a controversial “cowboy” who when briefly
furloughed from the CIA was involved in
business with Pawley’s friends the Somoza brothers), Mickey Kappes (perhaps the
father of future CIA senior officer Mickey
Kappes). A third participant was CIA agent
Eugenio Martinez (a future Watergate burglar along with fellow TILT plotter
Frank Sturgis).
[48] Brown and Acoca, “The Bayo-Pawley Affair,” 19. Cf. Larry
Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked (Southlake ,
TX : JFK Lancer, 2006), 7.
[49] Talbot, Brothers, 348. Cf. Scott, Crime and
Cover-Up, 23; Scott, Deep Politics, 66-67.
[50] Miami Herald, January
19, 1971 ; reprinted in Peter Dale Scott et al., The
Assassinations: Dallas and
Beyond (New York: Random House , 1976), 379.
[51] Scott et al., The Assassinations, 375; quoting from
memo from former New York policeman Jack Caulfield to John Dean, 21 Wat 9755
[Senate Watergate Hearings, Volume 21, 9755]).. Cf. Scott, Crime and
Cover-Up, 23-34, etc. The Anderson columns produced a reaction inside the
CIA as well, see Memo of 15 February 1972 on
John Roselli, CIA “Family Jewels,” June 25,
2007 Release, 39, https://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=60409&relPageId=39.
[52] Summers, The Arrogance of Power, 197: “Meanwhile,
Assistant Attorney General Will Wilson was quickly assigned to review whatever
the Justice Department might hold on the CIA -Mafia
contacts. The Nixon White House, he would later tell Watergate investigators,
was hoping to turn up proof that it was the Kennedy brothers who tried to kill
Castro.”
[53] Undated memo from Terry Lenzner and Mark Lackritz to
Senator Ervin; reprinted in Waldron,Watergate, 731-32. Roselli was subsequently
interviewed in February 1974 by Mark Lackritz and two other committee
investigators. At the interview Roselli’s attorney explained that Roselli
“would rather go to jail than be compelled to testify” about his Cuban
activities, but the investigators persisted anyway (undated memo from Bob Muse
to Terry Lenzner, 734; reprinted in Waldron, Watergate, 734; cf. 702-03).
Leslie Scherr, one of Roselli’s attorneys, later said that, “judging from the
questions posed to Roselli…the prosecutors felt that the reason why the
break-in occurred … was because Nixon or somebody in the Republican Party
suspected that the Democrats had information as to Nixon’s involvement with the
CIA ’s original contract with Roselli”
(Charles Rappleye and Ed Becker,All American Mafioso [New York:
Barricade, 1995], 307; quoted in Waldron, Watergate, 703).
[54] Summers, The Arrogance of Power, 198. Watergate
burglar Frank Sturgis later told Andrew St. George that one of the motives for
the Plumbers’ burglaries was to obtain “a thick secret memorandum from the
Castro government” on the topic of plots to assassinate Castro (Summers,The
Arrogance of Power, 413). Leslie Scherr concluded from the questions posed to
her client Roselli that the White House believed that a “document existed
showing Nixon was involved with or knew what was going on with the CIA
and the assassination of Castro” (Sally Denton and Roger Morris, The Money
and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947-2000[New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001], 307). Massive evidence to corroborate this
allegation has recently been presented by Lamar Waldron in his
book Watergate: The Hidden History.
[55] Summers, The Arrogance of Power, 198.
[56] Summers, The Arrogance of Power, 198.
[57] Fred Emery, Watergate: The Corruption of American
Politics and the Fall of Richard Nixon(New York: Random House/ Times Books,
1994), 191.
[58] Summers, The Arrogance of Power, 198; cf. Len
Colodny and Tom Schachtmen, The Forty Years War: The Rise and Fall of the
Neocons, from Nixon to Obama (New York :
Harper, 2010), 142; Waldron, Watergate, 632.
[59] Carrozza, William D. Pawley, 235; quoting from
letter of Pawley to Nixon, April 15,
1963 , Nixon Pre-Presidential Papers).
[60] Carrozza, William D. Pawley, 235; cf. 229.
[61] Carrozza, William D. Pawley, 315.
[62] David Price Cannon, More Ruthless than the Enemy:
The Dark Diplomacy of Ambassador William Douglas Pawley, web-published,
http://williampawley.blogspot.com/2009/12/chapter-57-detente-betrayal.html.
[63] Carrozza, William D. Pawley, 267.
[64] Carrozza, William D. Pawley, 315.
[65] Jerry W. Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee
on the Present Danger (Boston: South End Press, 1983), 226. See also Peter
Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of
America (Berkeley : University
of California Press , 2007), 58-61,
etc. Although not one of the self-denominated neocons, Luce could have claimed
the title: in the 1930s she had been close to leftists like the San
Francisco waterfront leader Harry Bridges.
[66] Carrozza, William D. Pawley, 313.
[67] A relevant example of a right-wing attack on both the Kennedy
brothers and a cabal in the CIA was The
Losers by Paul Bethel (1969). In 1963 Bethel
had organized and directed an anti-Castro coalition called the Citizens
Committee for a Free Cuba. Clare Boothe Luce was a member of this committee,
and according to Gaeton Fonzi one of its major backers was William Pawley
(Fonzi, The Last Investigation, 321-23).
[68] Gus Russo, Live by the Sword, 438-39.
[70] Fonzi, The Last Investigation, 429.
[71] Glaser was a journalist with the intelligence-related
news agency North American News Alliance (NANA), owned by former senior OSS
officer Ernest Cuneo. “Serious students of the JFK Assassination have long been
interested in NANA, which supplied Priscilla Johnson [better known now as
Priscilla McMillan] with the job [or, to some, cover] by which she worked in
Moscow, and there interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald on the urging of U.S. Consul
Snyder. After the assassination, Johnson developed a close relationship with
Marina Oswald, in connection with a book contract originally arranged by C.D.
Jackson of Life Magazine at the urging of Allen Dulles….[T]he person
who forwarded Linda Tripp’s tapes of Lewinsky to the FBI is a book agent and
pseudo-journalist called Lucianne Goldberg, who in 1972 “told the McGovern
campaign that she worked for the North American Newspaper Alliance.” Goldberg’s
role was not simply that of a cut-out or messenger for Linda Tripp. On Jan. 22
she told the press “that she encouraged her friend Linda Tripp… to tape
conversations with intern Monica Lewinsky.” [All quotations are from an article
in the January 23 San Francisco
Chronicle, A11.] She kept the tapes for Tripp and later turned them over
to the FBI. If Tripp instigated Lewinsky, it would appear that Goldberg
instigated Tripp. …. Goldberg was exposed in 1973 as “a spy for Nixon while she
traveled with the press corps” covering McGovern’s 1972 campaign. It was at this
time that she said she worked for NANA [North American Newspaper Alliance], and
supplied an address for NANA which “is the same as her current residence” in Manhattan .
Watergate investigators “said the Nixon campaign paid her $1,000 a week.” Not
mentioned in the Chronicle story is the relevant fact in 1972, as
today, Lucianne Goldberg was snooping for sex. She told the late Anthony Lukas
(Nightmare, p. 161) that the Nixon people “were looking for really dirty
stuff…who was sleeping with whom, what the Secret Servicemen were doing with
the stewardesses, who was smoking pot on the plane — that sort of thing.” Her
predecessor on this assignment was Seymour Freidin, who at the time was
credibly accused by Jack Anderson of being a former CIA
agent. [By the 1970s NANA was co-owned by Fortune Pope, whose brother Generoso
was another self-confessed former CIA
agent.]” (Peter Dale Scott, “NANA NANA NANA,”
http://www.copi.com/articles/nana.html).
[72] Fonzi, The Last Investigation, 53. Russo adds that,
at Schweiker’s request, “Luce herself contacted ‘Fernandez’” (Russo, Live
by the Sword, 313).
[73] Gerald Ford was the only Commission member with the poor
sense to defend its findings in a book: Portrait of the assassin, by
Gerald R. Ford and John R. Stiles (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965).
[74] Scott, Deep Politics II, 58-69.
[75] CIA
Inspector-General’s Report, 129, NARA
#1993.06.30.17:15:56 :650140, 1137;
title cited also in 10 AH 194n227.
[76] Fonzi, The Last Investigation, 429.
[77] Larry Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked, 15-18:
“John Martino had pre-knowledge of the plan to kill John Kennedy in Texas .
John Martino ‘talked’ in a very believable and credible fashion. At first, he
talked only to his immediate family, nervously, hesitantly, and excitedly.
Shortly before his death, he talked with two long time friends – part
confession and part simply recollection. He made no grand claims, downplayed
his own role and limited his statements to things he would have personally come
in contact with in playing the role he described with the Cuban exiles whose
cause he was demonstrably devoted to at the time. His story is certainly
consistent and totally in context with his documented activities and personal
associations in 1963.“
[78] Fonzi, The Last Investigation, 430, 432-33.
[79] David Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors, 219-22. In
1967, after the publication of the Anderson story, Harvey (by then retired) saw
Roselli in a series of meetings that aroused concern in both James Angleton and
the CIA ’s Security Director Howard Osborn;
see Memo of 11 December, 1967 on “Meetings Between William K. Harvey and Johnny
Roselli,” NARA # 1993.07.01.10:53:07:500800,
https://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=110951&relPageId=2.
[81] Talbot, Brothers, 399. For what it is worth, Howard
Hunt also told his son St. John Hunt that he, along with David Morales and
others, had been involved in the killing of JFK (Erik Hedegaard, “The Last
Confessions of E. Howard Hunt,” Rolling Stone, April 7, 2007 ).
[82] Fonzi, The Last Investigation, 57.
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