Nestor
Izquierdo
Nestor
'Tony' Izquierdo was born in the Matanzas Province in Cuba in 1936.The son of
Camilo Izquierdo and Josefina Diaz, he was a devoted Roman Catholic. As a young
man, Nestor worked with his father in a construction business.
In
1959 Manuel Artime emerged as a leading
anti-Communist. He worked closely with the Catholic University Association
(CUA). Later that year he moved to the Manzanillo region where he joined up
with Carlos Prio and Tony Varona.
Along with Huber Matos they planned a counter-revolution. Izquierdo joined
Artime's Rural Commandos.
In 1960
Izquierdo left Cuba and entered the United States via Mexico. Along with Manuel Artime, Tony Varona, Rafael Quintero, Aureliano Arango and Jose
Cardona established the Movement for the Recovery of the Revolution (MRR
Party).
Izquierdo
took part in the Bay of Pigs as a member of Brigade
2506. In the early 1960's, he worked closely with Rip Robertson and David Sanchez Morales in the many aggressive and
successful raids against Cuba.
Izquierdo also worked under Frank Castro in the Halcones Dorados
(Golden Hawks)
In
1963 Manuel Artime obtained funds from
the CIA via Ted Shackley head of the JM/WAVE station
in Florida. Artimemoved to Nicaragua where he formed a 300 man
army. Artime was joined by several other anti-Castro Cubans including Nestor
Izquierdo,Frank
Castro, Rafael Quintero and Felix Rodriguez.
It is
believed that Nestor Izquierdo was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Independently of each
other, James Richards and Gerry Hemming have claimed that Izquierdo was involved with
the events in Dealey
Plaza. Specifically, his role being the Dal-Tex spotter.
In April
of 1977, Nestor Izquierdo, Rafael Quintero, Rafael Villaverde, Raul Villaverde, Jesus Lazo and
Valentine Hernandez were the subjects of a U.S. Justice Department inquiry. In
Izquierdo's case, no identifiable information could be sourced.
Izquierdo,
a devout anti-communist, fought the Sandinistas in Nicaraguaa. His CIA case officer was Harold
Feeney.
Nestor
Izquierdo was killed in Nicaragua in a plane crash in 1979. Because of
Izquierdo's constant fight against Communism and for his bravery, in
1992, Gilberto
Casano raised
the necessary funds to construct a bronze statue of Nestor Izquierdo in Miami's
Little Havana. It was created by sculptor Tony Lopez.
Nestor
Izquierdo in 1972
Primary
Sources
(1) J.
Timothy Gratz and Mark Howell, Key West Citizen (11th March,
2005)
Gerry
Hemming was the leader of a group of anti-Communist soldiers of fortune who
trained anti-Castro Cubans in the early 1960s at a camp on No Name Key, an
island 25 miles north of Key West.
Many
assassination researchers believe Hemming knows at least some of the secrets of
the Kennedy assassination (some believe he participated in or even planned it).
Recently he has been sharing some of these secrets with Solares Hill and his
revelations may bring us closer to what has been called the crime of the 20th
century.
Hemming
tells us the assassination was accomplished by several autonomous, separately
funded, “teams,” consisting of a shooter and a spotter. (He has yet to identify
the “master planner” and has suggested he does not know who the master planner
was.)
This
week Hemming revealed who he believed were two of the “sponsors” of the
assassination. Two men met in Haiti in February of 1963 and contributed funds
for the Kennedy assassination. Both were from the Dominican Republic. One,
Ramfis Trujillo, and international playboy who dated Hollywood starlets, was
the son of long-term Dominican Republican dictator Rafael Trujillo, who was
assassinated in May of 1961. The second man was Johnny Abbes Garcia, former
intelligence director for General Rafael Trujillo. It was not the first time
Garcia had financed an assassination. In 1959, Garcia hired American adventurer
Alexander Rorke to smuggle eight men into Cuba on one of the first missions to
kill Castro. (See Rorke story.) The motives of Trujillo and Garcia were
apparent: To revenge the assassination of Rafael Trujillo, widely believed to
have been organized by the CIA.
A ranking
member of Rafael Trujillo’s military wrote a book in which he stated that the
assassination was organized with the support of CIA agent (and future Watergate
burglar) E. Howard Hunt and flashy Mafioso Johnny Rosselli, although this
report is uncorroborated.
Hunt,
interestingly, returned from a fact-finding trip to Cuba in July of 1960 and
reported to his CIA superiors that Castro was “popular” and the only way to
eliminate him would be by his assassination. The next month, acting apparently
on Hunt’s recommendation, the CIA initiated its alliance with the Mafia to kill
Castro. The first Mafioso the CIA recruited was Johnny Rosselli. Some believe
that Hunt and/or Rosselli were involved in the Kennedy assassination.
This
week Hemming revealed to Solares Hill that the assassins had a back-up plan to
ensure Kennedy never left Dallas alive. According to Hemming, there was a huge
remote-controlled bomb planted in one of the cars parked beyond the triple
overpass at the south end of Dealey Plaza. If the assassins were not sure
Kennedy had been killed by the ambush in Dealey Plaza, they would detonate the
car bomb as the motorcade sped toward the hospital, ensuring the death of all
the occupants of the Presidential limousine.
Hemming
told us this week that, through a source in a Central American intelligence
organization, he learned that a shooter in the Texas School Book Depository,
spoke German and used a shoulder-mounted, carbine-firing Mauser equipped with a
scope and a silencer.
This man
fired not from the sniper’s nest on the southeast corner of the sixth floor of
the book depository, but from the window on the west end of the sixth floor.
Hemming cannot identify this German-speaking shooter by name.
There is
some evidentiary support for Hemming’s report. Photos show that the window on
the west end of the sixth floor was open, and there is also a photo of
witnesses, after the shooting, pointing to the west end of the building. In
addition, one witness reported seeing a man with a “strange-looking weapon” on
the sixth floor, but she assumed before the assassination that it must have
been a secret service agent.
Although
not a new revelation, we also want to note Hemming’s explanation for how the
assassins escaped from the sixth floor. Immediately after the assassination, a
Dallas police officer called Baker rushed into the book depository accompanied
by its manager, Roy Truly. They first attempted to take the elevator, but it
was not functioning, so they dashed up the stairs. They encountered Lee Harvey
Oswald calmly drinking a Coke in the second-floor lunch room, no more than 90
seconds after the shooting stopped.
Many
people find it doubtful that Oswald could have hidden the rifle and run down
four flights of stairs and purchased a Coke in that time period.
Hemming
states that the assassins had disabled the elevator before the assassination,
and that they escaped by ropes down the elevator shaft.
Last
week we reported Hemming’s identification of Nestor Izquierdo, a black Cuban
member of Brigade 2506, as the spotter in the Dal-Tex Building. We also
reported Izquierdo’s close relationship with Rip Robertson, a CIA operative who
ran a CIA front company on Stock Island hauling packs of arms into Cuba before
the Bay of Pigs. Robertson captained one of the two boats delivering members of
Brigade 2506 into the ill-fated Bay of Pigs. Some believe Robertson may have
been involved in the assassination, a belief fueled by a photograph of a man
watching the motorcade in Dealey Plaza who bears a striking resemblance to Robertson,
as well as by Robertson’s close association with flashy Mafioso Johnny Rosselli
who was involved in the CIA’s plots to kill Castro. FBI reports indicate
Rosselli met twice in Miami with Jack Ruby in the months preceding the
assassination.
Since
our story on Izquierdo last week, our intelligence source has advised us that
Izquierdo also had a close relationship with a CIA officer named David Sanchez
Morales, which raises even more troubling questions than his association with
Robertson.
Morales
joined the CIA in 1951 and was involved in many of the CIA’s most secret and
dangerous covert operations. He helped the CIA overthrow the Guatemalan
government in 1954. In the early 1960s, he was in South Florida working on the
CIA’s secret war against Castro. He was instrumental in the U.S. invasion of
the Dominican Republic in 1965. He helped capture guerilla leader Che Guevara
in Bolivia in 1967. In the late 1960s, according to an unpublished story by
Bryan Abas, Morales was in Vietnam, assisting in the CIA’s notorious Phoenix
program that killed thousands of Vietnamese civilians as suspected Communists.
His CIA
colleague Thomas Clines said that Morales was one of the most feared undercover
agents to the governments of Central and South America. “A lot of leaders
figured that if Morales was there,” he said, “their government was going to
cave in.” If the U.S. government needed someone or something neutralized, said
Cline, “Dave would do it, including things that were repugnant to a lot of
people.”
Gaeton
Fonzi, a well-respected investigator who worked for both the Church Committee
and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, is convinced Morales
participated in the assassination. In the course of his congressional service,
Fonzi interviewed a long-time friend of Morales, and Morales’ Harvard trained
attorney, both of whom were with Morales when he boasted, referring to the
slain president, “We sure took care of that son-of-a-bitch!”
One of
our sources tells us that Morales had assembled a group of approximately twelve
Cuban exiles trained as assassins, to be used in anti-Castro operations, and
that Izquierdo was a member of that elite hit squad. Our source has identified
all the members of this operation but because several are still alive, we do
not deem it appropriate to name them yet. But we can state that several
researchers believe that Izquierdo was not the only member of Morales’ team who
was involved in the Kennedy assassination.
It is
possible Morales’ statement was nothing more than drunken braggadocio and that
he had nothing to do with the assassination. However, Hemming’s identification
of Izquierdo as a participant in the assassination adds strength to the
conviction of those who believe that Morales was involved. This is particularly
so because Hemming had no knowledge of the Morales’ “hit squad” or Izquierdo’s
involvement in it. Like fellow CIA agent Rip Robertson, Morales was close to
the Mafia leader Johnny Rosselli. Kennedy scholar Dennis Mahoney writes in
“Sons and Brothers” that Rosselli was the only person who could make the
ill-temprered Morales laugh, and that Morales and Rosselli engaged in all-night
drinking binges, often joined by Robertson.
It was
perhaps in one of those drinking sessions that Morales or Rosselli first raised
the idea of turning the Cubans they were training to kill Castro against
Kennedy instead. Morales and/or Robertson would supply the Cuban exiles, many
of whom felt Kennedy had betrayed them and caused the death of many of their
comrades at the Bay of Pigs, and Rosselli would supply Mafia funding and
expertise (and, in the event, Jack Ruby to forever silence the patsy).
The
House Select Committee on Assassinations put Morales on its witness list but
was never able to interview or depose him. In May of 1978, Morales, then
retired from the CIA, returned to his Arizona home from a business trip,
complaining of chest pains. That night he collapsed at his home and was rushed
to a Tucson hospital where he died several days later, at the age of 53.
Morales
was not the only CIA officer involved with Rosselli to die during the
investigation of the House Assassinations Committee. William Harvey was
Rosselli’s case officer in the post-Bay of Pigs efforts to assassinate Castro.
In fact it was Harvey who summoned Morales to work on the Cuban operations from
the CIA base in South Florida. Harvey, like Morales, hated the Kennedys. Harvey
died of complications following heart surgery in June of 1976, at age 61.
There is
no evidence, and we do not suggest, that either Morales or Harvey died other
than from natural causes. Several suspects in the assassination did, however,
meet violent deaths while the Kennedy assassination was being reinvestigated,
first by the Senate Church Committee and then by the House Assassinations
Committee: Chicago Mafia don Sam Giancana was murdered in his Illinois home in
June of 1975, only five days before he was to testify to the Church Committee;
Jimmy Hoffa was murdered in Detroit in July of 1975; Johnny Rosselli was
murdered in Miami in July of 1976; and George DeMohrenschildt, the mysterious
Russian baron who had befriended the Oswalds in Dallas, apparently committed
suicide in March 1977, on the same day that House Assassinations investigator
Fonzi had scheduled a meeting with him.
Like
Hemming’s identification to Solares Hill of Izquierdo as the Dal Tex spotter,
his new revelations add additional avenues of inquiry to those who believe it
is not yet too late to solve the murder that continues to haunt the American people.
Taylor Branch and George Crile, III "The Kennedy Vendetta", Harper's (1975).
ReplyDelete"In Washington, during the investigation into the CIA's handling of the invasion, (Rip) Robertson appeared as a witness and talked at length with Robert Kennedy. He told his Cuban commandos that Kennedy was all right, which they took as a high compliment, since Robertson hated all politicians...Ramon Orozco (note: also known as AMTABBY-15), one of his commandos, remembers what the paramilitary operations were like: "After the Bay of Pigs...I was on one of his teams, but he controlled many teams and many operations. And everything was good through 1963. Our team made more than seven big war missions. Some of them were huge: the attack on the Texaco refinery, the Russian ships in Oriente province, a big lumber yard, the Patrice Lumumba sulfuric acid plant in Santa Lucia, and the diesel plant in Casilda...at the end of December, 1961, (Orozco and other commandos) sought to escape in a rubber boat where Rip and (Rolando Martinez, one of the Watergate burglars) waited for them...Rip loaded a rubber boat with rockets and recoilless rifles, ordered another commando, Nestor Izquierdo, to get in with him, and then motored up and down the coast looking for signs of his men. He was back on Martinez' ship when Orozco called him from the shore...(Robertson's) superiors became so angry that they resorted to ordering the Cuban boat captains not to allow him to board the intermediary ships that took the teams to the shore...Rip Robertson and his paramilitary cowboys (later) joined in the (Vietnam) effort and helped run the Phoenix program."