Gene Wheaton -
Wolfgange Petersen
https://en.wolfgangpetersen.net/4243-gene-wheaton.html
Throughout 1985, Paul Hoven, a friend of Sheehan's and a
Vietnam veteran, regularly attended parties of ex-Agency men and weekend
warriors, some associated with Soldier of Fortune magazine. (Hoven
worked at the Project on Military Procurement, an outfit funded by liberals and
devoted to exposing Pentagon waste.) At a bash near Christmas, Carl Jenkins, a
former CIA officer who had been assigned to Miami and Laos, introduced Hoven to
Gene Wheaton, a balding middle-aged fellow.
Wheaton was an odd bird. As Wheaton has related his life
story, he was a Marine in the 1950s and then joined the Tulsa police force. He
was an army detective in Vietnam and in the mid-1970s a security officer at a
top-secret CIA-Rockwell surveillance program in Iran called Project IBEX. In
1979 he returned to the United States, went through a string of
security-related jobs, and became obsessed with the covert world and drug-trafficking.
When he met Hoven, Wheaton, now representing a California aviation company, was
scheming with Jenkins and Ed Dearborn, a former CIA pilot in Laos and the
Congo, to win federal contracts to transport humanitarian supplies to
anticommunist rebels, including the Mujahedeen of Afghanistan and the Contras.
So far, the trio had failed to collect any. They had even complained to a State
Department official that Richard Secord and Oliver North improperly controlled
who got the Contra-related contracts. They badmouthed Secord, noting that he
had been mixed up with Shackley, Wilson, and Clines. One set of spooks was
pissed at another.
At the Soldier of Fortune party, Hoven pegged
Wheaton as someone who thought he was a player but who truly was not. Nevertheless,
he agreed to assist Wheaton. Hoven set up a meeting with a congressional aide
who followed the Afghan program. Hoven did not realize that Wheaton had more on
his mind than contracts. Wheaton had spent much of the previous year hobnobbing
with arms dealers, ex-CIA officers, and mercenaries, and he had collected
information on past and present covert operations, including the secret
Contra-arms project.
Wheaton was obsessed with the 1976 assassination in Iran of
three Americans who worked on Project IBEX. He believed the killings were
linked to U.S. intelligence, that a ring of ex-spooks was running wild in
Central America and elsewhere.
So when Wheaton met with the congressional staffer and
Hoven, he skipped the presentation on supplying the Mujahedeen. Instead he
launched into a speech about political assassinations related to U.S.
intelligence. He rattled on about the mysterious IBEX murders. Hoven had a hard
time following Wheaton. His claims were based on a mishmash of speculative
hearsay, fanciful information, and some actual facts. But Wheaton made his
bottom-line point obvious: a rogue element in the U.S. government had engaged
in a host of nefarious activities, including assassinations.
The congressional staffer wanted nothing to do with the
rambling intrigue Wheaton was peddling. But Hoven was interested. He called
Danny Sheehan, thinking he ought to hear Wheaton's tale.
Sheehan already had developed an interest in the murky
community of mercenaries, Cuban exiles, and others secretly aiding the Contras.
By early 1986, press accounts had revealed that a clandestine Contra support
network ran all the way into the White House and that Oliver North, a low-level
aide, was involved-even though Congress had seemingly barred the administration
from militarily aiding the rebels. (The White House claimed these stories were
wrong.) Here was the perfect target for Sheehan: a furtive program supporting a
covert war against a leftist government. He wondered if he could strike at it
in the courts. He always was looking for cases that made good stories-ones in
which he could be a hero. Then he met Gene Wheaton, who had a helluva tale for
Sheehan.
Sheehan and Wheaton sat down in the kitchen of Hoven's house
in early February of 1986. It was magic. To a wide-eyed Sheehan, Wheaton,
posing as an experienced operator, tossed out wild stories of clandestine
operations and dozens of names: Wilson, Secord, Clines, Hakim, Singlaub, Bush.
A whole crew was running amok, supporting Contras, conducting covert activity elsewhere.
Drugs were involved. Some of this gang had engaged in corrupt government
business in Iran and Southeast Asia. Now the same old boys were running weapons
to Latin America. Central to the whole shebang was a former CIA officer named
Ted Shackley. Sheehan was captivated. He had struck the mother lode.
Sheehan spoke a few times with Carl Jenkins. At one session,
Sheehan listened as Jenkins and Wheaton discussed what Wheaton was calling the
"off-the-reservation gang"- Secord, Clines, Hakim, and Shackley - and
the operations they ran in and out of government. According to Hoven, Wheaton
and Jenkins wanted to see information about this crowd made public and saw
Sheehan as the mechanism of disclosure.
Wheaton and Jenkins did not tell Sheehan that they hoped to
settle a score with a band they believed had an unfair lock on the air-supply
contracts they desired. But to Hoven it was clear that one faction of spooks
was whacking another. Hoven was not sure who was on what side. He guessed that
somebody somewhere - maybe even in the Agency itself - was upset with the
freelancers and wanted to see them reined in. But if Jenkins or anyone else
thought they could use Sheehan as a quiet transmitter of damaging information,
they were as wrong as they could be.
Throughout the winter and spring, as Sheehan talked to
Wheaton and Jenkins, he had something else on his mind: a two-year-old bombing
in Nicaragua. On May 30, 1984, a bomb had exploded at a press conference in La
Penca, Nicaragua, held by Eden Pastora, a maverick Contra leader who resisted
cooperating with the CIA and the main Contra force. Several people were killed,
but not Pastora. Afterward, Tony Avirgan, an American journalist who suffered
shrapnel wounds at La Penca, and his wife, Martha Honey, set out to uncover who
had plotted the attack. A year later, they produced a book that charged a small
group of Americans and Cuban exiles-some with ties to the CIA and the
Contras-with planning the murderous assault. One of the persons they fingered
was John Hull, a Contra supporter with a spread in northern Costa Rica and a
relationship with North and the CIA. Their report noted that some Contra
supporters were moonlighting in the drug trade.
Hull sued the couple for libel in Costa Rica. He demanded $1
million. Avirgan and Honey, who lived in San Jose, received death threats. They
considered retaliating by filing a lawsuit in the States against individuals in
the secret Contra-support network. But they could find no lawyer to take such a
difficult case. Eventually Sheehan was recommended to them. They checked him
out. The reports were mixed. But he had one undeniable positive attribute: he
would accept the case. The couple retained him.
Come late spring of 1986, Sheehan was mixing with spooks in
the Washington area, and he was pondering how to craft a lawsuit for Avirgan
and Honey. He collected information on the Contra operation. He drew closer to
Wheaton, who had a new tale every time they met. Then Sheehan made a pilgrimage
to meet the dark angel of the covert crowd: Ed Wilson.
The imprisoned rogue officer made Sheehan's head swim. The
essence of Wilson's story, Sheehan claimed, was that the Agency in 1976 had
created a highly secretive counter terrorist unit modeled on the PRUs of
Vietnam and had run this entity apart from the main bureaucracy. The mission:
conduct "wet operations" (spy talk for assassinations). After the
election of Jimmy Carter, this group was erased from the books and hidden in
private companies, and Shackley was the man in charge of the unit both in and
out of government. The program was divided into different components. CIA man
William Buckley supposedly had directed one out of Mexico with Quintero and
Ricardo Chavez. Another unit was headed by a former Mossad officer. Felix
Rodriguez was involved in yet one more in the Mideast. Sheehan took Wilson at
his word. "Wilson went into such detail," Sheehan later maintained.
"It's not something that's being made up."
At one point after Sheehan met with Wilson, it dawned on
him: everything was connected. The La Penca bombing, the North-Contra network,
the Wilson gang, all those CIA-trained Cuban exiles, the whole history of
Agency dirty tricks, the operations against Castro, the war in Laos, the nasty
spook side of the Vietnam War, clandestine Agency action in Iran. It was an
ongoing conspiracy. It did not matter if these guys were in or out of
government. It was a villainous government within a government, a plot that had
existed for decades, a permanent criminal enterprise. Sheehan had a unified
held theory of covert U.S. history. And Shackley was the evil Professor
Moriarty, the man who pulled all the strings. The avenging Sheehan now was
determined to take Shackley down.
Sheehan melded the La Penca bombing case to his Wheaton -
influenced investigation of the old-boy network. Avirgan and Honey shared with
him all the information they carefully had developed on the Contra support
operation. Names and stories he threw at them - including Shackley's - were
unfamiliar. They took it on faith that Sheehan knew what he was doing when he
blended the results of their professional investigation with the grab-bag of
information he had collected from Wheaton, Wilson, and others. "We saw
John Hull as the center, and Sheehan saw it as Shackley," Honey recalled.
"Shackley was the main ingredient. I don't know why Danny fixated on him.
He told us he had lots of information on Shackley's involvement in La Penca.
That was b.s. But what do we know, sitting in Costa Rica?" Sheehan was
looking for a case he could play before a large audience. He repeatedly told
Avirgan and Honey the public did not care about La Penca. But people would pay
notice if the enemy was one grand conspiracy headed by a dastardly figure.
Sheehan applied the resources of his small Christic
Institute to the case. Wheaton continued investigating the Wilson crowd and
other covert sorts. He started telling Jenkins that he believed he was chasing
a decades-old, top-secret assassination unit. Wheaton claimed it had begun with
an assassination training program for Cuban exiles that Shackley had set up in
the early 1960s. The target was Castro. The secret war against Cuba faded, but
the "Shooter Team" continued. It expanded and was now called the Fish
Farm, and Shackley remained its chief.
Sheehan knitted together all this spook gossip and
misinformation with a few hard facts, and on May 29, 1986, he dropped the load.
In a Miami federal court, Sheehan filed a lawsuit against thirty individuals,
invoking the RICO antiracketeering law and accusing all of being part of a
criminal conspiracy that trained, financed, and armed Cuban-American
mercenaries in Nicaragua, smuggled drugs, violated the Neutrality Act by
supporting the Contras, traded various weapons, and bombed the press conference
at La Penca. Sheehan's plaintiffs were journalists Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey.
The conspirators were far-flung: John Hull in Costa Rica; Cuban exiles based in
Miami (including Quintero); drug lords Pablo Escobar and Jorge Ochoa in
Colombia; arms dealers in Florida; Contra leader Adolfo Calero; an Alabama
mercenary named Tom Posey; Robert Owen, a secret North aide; the unknown bomber
at La Penca; and Singlaub, Hakim, Secord, Clines, and Shackley. Sheehan alleged
that Shackley had peddled arms illegally, plotted to kill Pastora, and (with
Secord, Clines, and Hakim) accepted money from drug sales for arms shipments.
Sheehan demanded over $23 million in damages.
With this lawsuit, Sheehan believed, he could break up the
Contra support operation and cast into the light shadowy characters who had
been up to mischief for years. Sheehan and Wheaton had stumbled across some
real players and some real operations. But they both possessed hyperactive
imaginations, and whatever truth they did uncover they had twisted into a
false, cosmic conspiracy.
The filing-drafted sloppily by Sheehan-surprised Shackley
and his fellow defendants. Hoven and Jenkins were stunned. Neither expected
Sheehan to produce such a storm. Sheehan clearly was in this for politics and
ego. He was not about to be a quiet disseminator of information. "I had
been left with the assumption," Hoven noted, "that I was set up to
pass information to Sheehan. But they" - whoever they were - "mucked
it up because Sheehan was not playing it close to the script."
I am faxing you one page of a CV prepared by a retired CIA
officer who was a very close friend of mine in the mid-1980s. Our friendship
was so close that I kept a bedroom in his home in Adington, Va, socialized with
him and his wife (a high-level active CIA officer) and was virtually with them
24 hours a day.
Through him I met many of the Bay of Pigs veterans, both
Cuban and American. We had many intimate discussions about covert operations,
Kennedy assassination, etc.
He was totally in charge of infiltrating sabotage and
assassination teams into Cuba from 1960 onward (see * on his bio).
I had discussions with him and one of his key Cuban agents
about obtaining immunity for them if they would come forward about their
knowledge of involvement in the Kennedy assassination plots. This man's
programs included JMWAVE, Mongoose, ZR-RIFLE, among others, operating out of
the Miami Station.
If you think I can help, we will have to meet. Dr. Tunheim
has my bio. If you need another copy please let me know.
Note: The USMC Reserve Unit that my associate established
was in the New Orleans area to act as a cover for CIA Latin-American
Operations.
I have blanked out his I.D. until we can meet to discuss
this further.
Wheaton began by telling me he would only give me limited
information over the telephone although he was willing to meet me face to face
to provide as much information as he had. He said he had no physical proof of
what he would eventually tell the Board; however he said he does have a number
of documents which he will need to show me in order for me to believe what he
has to say.
By way of providing background on himself Wheaton explained
he is a 59 year old retired military intelligence officer. He works as a
consultant investigating terrorist attacks around the world and said he expects
his telephone will ring in the next few days with an offer to work on the
Oklahoma City federal building bombing. He said if this happens he will also
probably be called to Washington DC and would meet with me here. If he does not
he would still agree to meet with us but would have to do so on the West Coast.
He lives in Riverside County, California near Palm Springs.
Wheaton told me that from 1984 to 1987 he spent a lot of
time in the Washington DC area and that starting in 1985 he was "recruited
into Ollie North's network" by the CIA officer he has information about.
He got to know this man and his wife, a "'super grade high level CIA
officer" and kept a bedroom in their Virginia home. His friend was a
Marine Corps liaison in New Orleans and was the CIA contact with Carlos
Marcello. He had been responsible for "running people into Cuba before the
Bay of Pigs." His friend is now 68 or 69 years of age.
Over the course of a year or a year and one-half his friend
told him about his activities with training Cuban insurgency groups. Wheaton
said he also got to know many of the Cubans who had been his friend's
soldiers/operatives when the Cubans visited in Virginia from their homes in
Miami. His friend and the Cubans confirmed to Wheaton they assassinated JFK.
Wheaton's friend said he trained the Cubans who pulled the triggers. Wheaton
said the street level Cubans felt JFK was a traitor after the Bay of Pigs and
wanted to kill him. People "above the Cubans" wanted JFK killed for
other reasons.
Wheaton said we must look at his friend and his associates
in order to know what really happened to JFK. One of those associates was I.
Irving Davidson who was/is "the bag man for the intelligence
community." Davidson runs a group called the Timber Center which handles
payoffs and payments for the CIA, the NSA and the Pentagon. He is a friend of
Jack Anderson's and was indicted with Carlos Marcello in the 1980's on a
Teamster's kick-back charge. Davidson is a non-practicing attorney in
Washington D.C. He is now about 70 years old.
Wheaton said he would speak to the Board confidentially but
would not allow his name to be used publicly because his friend and the
friend's associates "said they would destroy me in the media with a blitz
of disinformation to destroy my professional reputation. They will make me out
to be a conspiracy nut. I'm not afraid of them, I've been a cop too long and
besides, they only kill the people on the inner circle. The rest of us end up
having our reputations destroyed."
Wheaton concluded by saying "this matter is not complex
but it is convoluted. I need to show you the paper trail to show the contacts
of these people."
Carl (Jenkins) was my (National Air) Washington, D.C. rep.
who connected me to Nestor Pino, Bill Bode, Rob Owen, Vaughn Forrest, Chi Chi
Quintero, Nestor Sanchez, et al. I was V.P. of National Air in 1985-86 (see my
Bio).
Ref the attached letters from your former Chief Investigator
Anne Buttimer, Edq dated 16 May 95, and 12 July 1995. Ms Buttimer and I had
several contacts by phone/fax as well as the meeting on 11 July 95, in the
Washington, D.C. area.
At the July meeting I furnished her with rather sensitive
documents, photos, and information related to the CIA covert connections to
Cuba, Florida, Louisiana, Texas and Mexico during the months and years prior
to, and after, the assassination in Dallas.
During and after the July 95 meeting Ms. Buttimer stated she
wanted to follow-up and expand on the data I provided.
However, she shortly thereafter appears to have suddenly
departed from the Board. I have never heard from her again, and no subsequent
Board investigator has contacted me. The only thing I receive are the periodic
news releases.
I would appreciate it if you would advise me as to any
action, research, or follow-up inquiry re the data I provided. I would also
request you have Ms. Buttimer contact me, or provide a means for me to contact
her.
Thank you for your March 31,1998 letter. Over the years we
have received thousands of leads and suggestions regarding the existence and
location of records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
We appreciate that you furnished Ms. Buttimer with materials
related to the CIA, Cuba, Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and Mexico City. These are
all areas we have explored extensively. Please be assured that all leads are
carefully reviewed and always helpful to our efforts. However, due to limited
resources, it would be virtually impossible to link any records that have been
released as being opened as a result of materials provided by a particular
individual.
Our mandate is to be completed on September 30, 1998, and I
hope that you understand our priority is to release the remaining records that
relate to the assassination. But please know that your contributions to our
efforts are appreciated.
Again, thank you for writing. I hope this information is
helpful to you.
While running back and forth to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan
and Egypt in the ‘80s, early, mid 80s... I kept my contacts with the embassies
around the world and with the State Department, and with the Agency, so that I
could get quicker access into countries whenever I got a project that I could
work on. In 1985 I became the vice-president of a cargo airline called National
Air. It was during that period, summer of ’85, that some of my old CIA contacts
-- who were no longer full-time employees of the agency -- but when they retire
these guys they usually give them a contract as an outside contractor on the
side, and then they have deniability for working for the agency. They can say,
"No, he’s not an employee of the agency," but in fact they are
contractors and they still carry security clearances and have to be polygraphed
once in a while. I was recruited into Ollie North’s network by that group
during the summer of ’85 because they wanted my airplanes for missions to the Contras,
and they wanted my Middle East background for helping devise a plan for
movement of weapons to the Mujahadin in Afghanistan. I had traveled across
Afghanistan before, and again, I speak the language, and had been in and out of
in Afghanistan and Pakistan more so than anybody they could find within the
agency.
The guys that I had known for several years, uh, primarily
Carl Jenkins, who was a long-time career CIA paramilitary mercenary operator,
uh, probably the most highly respected of those people in that division of the
agency... he was the commander of the biggest CIA base in Laos while Shackley
was over there, and while Bill Sullivan was over as ambassador. Carl and I
became very close friends in the early 80s, to the point where I would keep a bedroom
in his home in Washington with clothes and papers and things so I didn’t have
to carry them from California. I was commuting regularly back and forth when I
was going overseas, and Carl and his wife, who was an active super-grader in
the agency - he was her case officer and she had been his interpreter, and then
he got her a master’s degree and then she got her Ph.D. She went on to head one
of the branches of the agency - we became like brothers and sisters, between me
and them.
So I was back in Washington trying to drum up business for
this little cargo airline, and Carl agreed to be my Washington representative,
uh, for marketing purposes to open doors for me in Washington, D.C. ... to see
if I could get some cargo contracts. It was in that vein that Carl told me it
was time... that the guys in the national security council wanted to bring me
into the inner circle. And that’s where I sort of got at the very national
level of this. I had previously attended some black-tie functions with Bill
Casey and the veterans of the OSS; had been invited to a party where the guest
of honor was Vice President Bush. My wife and I were invited. We were running
with a fairly high-level crowd. In December of, uh, ’85 was the scheduled time
for me to actually meet with Ollie North, so they had a black-tie dinner at the
Palm Restaurant in Washington D. C. on the 4th of December. It was the day that
Bud McFarland resigned as national security advisor.
At that black tie party at the Palm Restaurant on the 4th of
December in 1985, I was specifically invited by Neil Livingston and to come in
and meet Ollie North, and it was a party to promote Neil Livingston’s book,
called "Fighting Back", and the subtitle was "The War on
Terrorism". He and a State Department/CIA spook by the name of Terry
Arnold wrote that book together and this was the coming-out party for the book,
and all the covert operations community, the real snake eaters, were going to
be there with black ties. Ollie North was there and Bud McFarland and I don’t
know, 75 or 100 people in black ties, having drinks and dinner and hobnobbing
and they felt like... the atmosphere at that party was one of ‘We are the
shadow government running the United States.’ It was almost like a diplomatic
party or a State Department coming out party for a regime. These guys were in
charge, and that was how they presented it.
There was a plan that was approved later on by the Congress
in August, no, excuse me, October of 1985 - Congress was going to vote in 27
million dollars in non-lethal aid for the Contras and it was going to be a
legitimate but covert, uh, program to supply the Contras with everything from
medicines to tents and uniforms and food and whatever else they might need that
was non-lethal, but as it turned out, that program became a lethal one too,
because they would ship what they would laughingly refer to as hard rice,
meaning weaponry, in with the $27 million worth of stuff.
Carl took me to the, what they called the Humanitarian Aid
Office for the State Department in Roslyn, Virginia, and I met with Chris Arcos
who was the deputy for that program to a guy, an Ambassador Dumeling. We were
trying to get some of the 27 million dollars of cargo to haul to Honduras for
the Contras that Congress had approved, and we were told several times in no
uncertain terms that the only way we could do it was to work through Dick Secord
and that aviation supply route, and I refused to do that because I knew that
Secord had an unsavory reputation; he been forced into retirement out of the
Air Force as a major general in ’83 over the Ed Wilson scandal in Libya. So I
was advising the people around Ollie North, the liaison people between me and
him, that they were dealing with a bunch of unsavory characters that had a
reputation, an official public reputation, of causing extreme embarrassment to
the government. At that time I didn’t... I thought the contractors - Secord and
that group - I thought they had a legitimate covert contract with the
government, but they were also diverting aircraft and hauling illegal cargo on
the side, and I was receiving direct information about their movement.
Well, in May of ’86, I personally briefed CIA director Bill
Casey, and of course he looked startled. I had no idea at the time that he was
one of the masterminds behind all this illegal stuff, but he said he’d look
into it and get back to me. And he said he had to leave the country the next
day, and would be back in touch with me in two or three weeks. It was exactly
the same weekend, or the week, I think the 30th of May, when I met with him, or
the 31st, when Ollie North was on that secret trip with Bud McFarland to
Tehran. So I suppose Casey was going over to Israel to brief them about it. I
didn’t know that at the time. Casey sent a message to me after he got back
saying that the agency wasn’t involved in any of this stuff, and that the
government wasn’t involved in this illegal diversion, and "If you think
you can do anything about it, let the chips fall where they may," as a
bluff. I’m just a raggedy little old Oklahoma country boy, retired chief
warrant officer, and I guess he figured I couldn’t do it.
Anyway, as result of those briefings in the summer of ‘86,
and I was kind of - this struck me as being treason and grand larceny on a
major scale, stealing from the taxpayers’ money, - and having been a cop all my
life, I thought it was kind of wrong. So I got with a couple of Washington D.C.
journalists that I knew. And one of them was a two-time Pulitzer prize winning
journalist by the name of Newt Royce. And Newt Royce and Mike Icoca, who was a
free-lancer who was writing with him - Newt at that time was with the Hearst
newspaper chain in Washington D. C., with their bureau. I had information -
direct knowledge from the Saudi royal family - that kickbacks were being, from
the Saudi AWACS program, were being used to help fund the Contras, to buy weapons
from different countries around the world. And I furnished Newt with the names
of other people that could back up what I was saying, and that this was a scam
because Secord, who was on active duty after the Iranian revolution, was the
chief architect of the Saudi AWACS program. The Saudi AWACS program was
identical to our Iran IBEX program that we had to close down in Iran. They just
moved it across the Persian Gulf to Saudi Arabia and renamed it. It was an 8
billion dollar program, and those guys were talking about 10 % or 15%, so
you’re talking about an 800 million dollars minimum, estimate, that that these
guys could get whenever they wanted it, out of the bag.
And Newt and Mike Icoca wrote it up on the wire service for
Hearst newspaper chain, and it went out on the wires and was made a front page
headline of the San Francisco Examiner on the 27th of July of 1986. As a result
of that article in August of ‘86, Congressman Dante Facell wrote a letter to
then secretary of defense Casper Weinberger asking him if it was true that
foreign money, kickback money on programs, was being used to fund foreign
covert operations. And in September of ‘86 Cap Weinberger wrote a letter back
to Facell denying that it was being done by the U.S. government, with any knowledge
of it being kickback money. That eventually, one of George Bush’s last acts -
and Larry Walsh, the special prosecutor, indicted Weinberger as a result of
that correspondence - and Bush pardoned him as one of his last acts. And that’s
how this whole mess got started.
This stuff goes back to the scandals of the 70s... of
Watergate and Richard Helms, the CIA director, being convicted by Congress of
lying to Congress, of Ted Shackley and Tom Clines and Dick Secord and a group
of them being forced into retirement as a result of the scandal over Edmond P.
Wilson’s training of Libyan terrorists in conjunction with these guys, and
moving C-4 explosives to Libya. They decided way back when, ‘75-’76, during the
Pike and Church Committee hearings, that the Congress was their enemy. They
felt that the government had betrayed them and that they were the real heroes
in this country and that the government became their enemy. In the late 70s, in
fact, after Gerry Ford lost the election in ’76 to Jimmy Carter, and then these
guys became exposed by Stansfield Turner and crowd for whatever reason... there
were different factions involved in all this stuff, and power plays... Ted
Shackley and Vernon Walters and Frank Carlucci and Ving West and a group of
these guys used to have park-bench meetings in the late 70s in McClean,
Virginia so nobody could overhear they conversations. They basically said,
"With our expertise at placing dictators in power," I’m almost
quoting verbatim one of their comments, "why don’t we treat the United
States like the world’s biggest banana republic and take it over?" And the
first thing they had to do was to get their man in the White House, and that
was George Bush."
Reagan never really was the president. He was the front man.
They selected a guy that had charisma, who was popular, and just a good old
boy, but they got George Bush in there to actually run the White House. They’d
let Ronald Reagan and Nancy out of the closet and let them make a speech and
run them up the flagpole and salute them and put them back in the closet while
these spooks ran the White House. They made sure that George Bush was the
chairman of each of the critical committees involving these covert operations
things. One of them was the Vice President’s Task Force On Combating Terrorism.
They got Bush in as the head of the vice president’s task force on narcotics,
the South Florida Task Force, so that they could place people in DEA and in the
Pentagon and in customs to run interference for them in these large-scale
international narcotics and movement of narcotics money cases. They got Bush in
as the chairman of the committee to deregulate the Savings and Loans in ’83 so
they could deregulate the Savings and Loans, so that they would be so loosely
structured that they could steal 400, 500 billion dollars of what amounted to
the taxpayers’ money out of these Savings and Loans and then bail them out.
They got hit twice: they stole the money out of the Savings and Loans, and then
they sold the Savings and Loans right back to the same guys, and then the
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation - the taxpayers money - paid for bailing
out the Savings and Loans that they stole the money from.. and they ran the
whole operation, and Bush was the de facto president even before the ‘88 election
when he became president.
See, when Harry Truman signed the National Security Act
creating the CIA, he specifically stated in that act that they could not have
any police powers. And they could not operate domestically in the United
States, because he feared a secret police coup. By creeping in a little at a
time, that coup has taken place.
This crowd really believes that the unwashed masses are
ignorant, that we are people who are not capable of governing ourselves, that
we need this elitist group to control the country, and the world -- these guys
have expanded. They look at the United States not as a country, not in any kind
of patriotic mode now, but they look on it as a state within a world that they
control. And that’s this attitude that they have. They’re not unlike any other
megalomaniac in the world. They’re nutty as fruitcake, but they’ve got
distinguished gray hair, three-piece dark suits and they carry briefcases, and
they’ll stand up and make speeches just as articulate as anybody in the world,
but they don’t socialize and function outside their own little clique. My
experience with them is that they could be certified as criminally insane and
put away in a rubber room and have the key thrown away. That’s how dangerous
they are. But they’re powerful, and they’re educated. And that makes them twice
as dangerous. And that’s basically what’s running the world right now.
If I had not been part of this, and hadn’t seen it first
hand, I would not believe a word I’m saying. You couldn’t convince me that
something like this - and the American people will not believe it. Because you
can’t get the average citizen... I’ve talked to judges and lawyers who have
invited me in to talk to them. Some of them really patriotic concerned people.
It turns them off, because it changes their entire life experience, and the
reason that they have existed, and the things they have believed in all their
life if you tell them this.
I have sat on the banks of the Potomac in restaurants with
75 and 80-year-old retired CIA people and retired generals, West Point
graduates, honorable people... these old men have sat with tears in their eyes
and told me that, "Gene, what you’re into, you understand it more than we
did, and it’s absolutely true, but it’s just so big you can’t do anything about
it." I guess if I believed that, I’d go off to some South Sea island and
drink a few Cuba Libres laying in the sand or something, but somebody has to
keep charging in there, you know. The biggest chink in their armor - and it
would take somebody smarter than me to figure out how to exploit it - is their
insecurity. They are afraid of a peasant with a pitchfork. And the reason they
react so strongly and violently against anybody who opposes them, is because
they’re afraid someone will grab a thread and unravel it, and their whole
uniform will come unraveled...
The only way I can think of to get this thing exposed, would
be to coordinate with all of the different independent small newspapers and
radio stations in the United States - and television networks - and get them to
start blasting this thing - and some universities - because the major media’s
not going to do anything about it.
In the summer of 1991 I got to know William Northrup, the
Israeli arms dealer who was arrested in Bermuda in 1986 for selling arms to
Iran. Before leaving for the States in September, he told me to try and get out
to California and meet Gene Wheaton. "Gene's a good man," he assured
me.
Wheaton had been investigating Reagan-Bush covert operations
since the early 1980s and had seen from the inside how these secret agendas
operated. In addition to his 25 years' experience as a criminal investigator
for the U.S. Army, he had designed security systems for airports in the Middle
East and served as an anti-smuggling narcotics advisor to the Shah.
By that time I had interviewed covert operators like Richard
Secord, and Iran-Contra players such as Yaacov Nimrodi. Now I had someone who
looked at the world of covert operations from the perspective of an
investigator. Unlike intelligence agents, Wheaton didn't thrive on lies and
deceit. Judging from his very modest home, he obviously wasn't in it for the
money.
In 1985 Wheaton was vice president of a small cargo airline
company that Oliver North's network wanted to use to haul arms to the Contras
and rebels elsewhere, such as in Afghanian Wheaton had the expertise the secret
team wanted, so they set out to recruit him. While Wheaton may have fit their
political profile, he was conservative and right-wing; he was a cop, not an
intelligence agent. He was brought into the center circle, where he stayed long
enough to learn about the White House's ties to drug runners, the massive arms
transfers to rebel groups, the mountains of falsified documentation and
miscarriages of justice.
"I had no objection to the covert end of it, as long as
it was legal," says Wheaton. "It wasn't. Whenever I asked about the
legality of a certain operation I was told, `It's all right, this is a vital
national security issue.' I talked myself out of the inner circle but I was in
it long enough to get to know the players and their method of operation. The
government officials I met in the Pentagon called supporting the private covert
operator 'intelligence support activity.' These covert operators trampled on
our Constitution and made a mockery of our judicial system. They aren't
motivated strictly by anti-communism, power, or money, but by the adrenaline
that stems from being able to create chaos. They would gladly destabilize a
democratic ally of America just so they can go back in and save it."
Wheaton explains that the origins of Oliver North's network
was in the mid-1970s. There were, he says, literally tens of thousands of
ex-covert operators and former Air America "employees" running around
loose in the U.S. These weren't the kind of guys to lay back and run 7-11
stores, so they set up an array of covert airlines using the assets of Air
America, the former CIA proprietary airline which had helped fly heroin out of
Burma and Laos.
When Air America was liquidated it created scores of smaller
airlines, including Global, Capital, and Southern Cross. All tolled, these
companies employed over 15,000 people. The subsidiary companies of Air America,
Southern Air Transport, Continental Air Services, and Air Asia were also broken
up. This meant this secret team was able to supply pilots and mechanics,
logistics and control people for future, privatized covert operations.
The 800 or so covert operators who got thrown out of the CIA
by Jimmy Carter in 1977 allied themselves with the conservative element of the
Republican Party. Their goal was to get George Bush elected to either president
or Vice President. They didn't care which one it was, as long as their man got
into the White House. They rallied around Bush and worked like a political action
committee. They put their unique talents into action. They were going to do in
America what they had done throughout the 1960s and 1970s in Africa and South
and Central America: rig elections and overthrow governments.
One aspect of the covert operators' activities was the
"October Surprise" theory, which claims members of Reagan's 1980
campaign team, including George Bush and William Casey, made a deal with
Iranian leaders not to release the 52 American hostages they were holding until
after the November presidential election.
Wheaton claims Quayle was brought "into the game,"
Bush and Casey's network of the Secret Team, early on. He believes that a major
source of Quayle's political power in his home state of Indiana comes from an
old friend of William Casey's, Beurt SerVaas, who was on the executive board of
the Veterans of the OSS, the predecessor organization of the CIA. SerVaas's
daughter is married to what Wheaton describes as an "off-the-books"
French intelligence asset, Bernard Marie. Wheaton says that he introduced Marie
to Defense fense Intelligence Agency officials who were part of the Reagan-Bush
White House's secret arms deals with Iran in the early 1980s.
"Quayle is being groomed," says Wheaton.
"Quayle was a true believer and they wanted to bring him up through the
ranks. It wasn't easy for Bush and Casey to find people who would go along with
their far right-wing philosophy, who at the same time were articulate and
presentable." Quayle's "smoking gun" was Robert Owen and Owen's
ties were to John Hull, a native of Indiana who owned and managed 8000 acres of
land in northern Costa Rica 30 miles from the Nicaraguan border. The CIA and
Oliver North used Hull's ranch as a supply depot to move weapons to the Contras.
Hull used American government protection to fly drugs from there into the U.S.,
sometimes on the very same planes.
Wheaton points to a October 15th, 1980, "Memorandum for
the Record," written by then - Assistant Secretary of State - Harold
Saunders, stating that "Bob Owen had been made privy to the details of a
pre-1980 election arms-for-hostages offer made by Iranian arms dealer Houshang
Lavi to President Carter's State Department and the CIA. In her 1989 book,October
Surprise, author Barbara Honegger cites an unnamed source that claims Owen, Dan
Quayle's legislative aide, covertly "worked" (i.e., reported to) for
Donald Gregg in October 1980 when Gregg was still serving in Carter's National
Security Council. (When Bush became Vice President, Gregg was appointed his
National Security Advisor. Gregg is assumed to have played a major role in the
"October Surprise" operation.)
If Owen knew about the 1980 deal, then it's likely that
Quayle also knew, and therefore he would be privy to many of the Reagan-Bush
White House's deepest secrets and covert agendas.
John Hull visited Washington in July 1983 to convince
Congress that Contra leader Eden Pastora should not be supported, claiming he
was being controlled by the Sandinistan government. Pastora and Hull both
visited Quayle and his legislative assistant, Robert Owen. Owen arranged for
other congressional aides to talk to the visitors too, such as Vaughn Forrest,
an administrative assistant for Representative Bill McCollum (R-Florida), and
also introduced Hull to Oliver North.
In November 1983 Owen began working for Gray and Co., a
powerful Washington, D.C., public relations and lobbying firm known for its
close ties to the Administration and U.S. intelligence bodies.
In April 1984 Contra leader Adolfo Calero, head of the
Nicaraguan Democratic Front, the largest Contra group, asked Gray and Co. to
represent the Contras. Owen was given the assignment and came up with plans to
raise money in the U.S. through non-profit organizations and companies to
purchase weapons for the Contras.
On May 16, 1996, Buttimer followed up the telephone call
with a letter to Wheaton in which she offered to meet with Wheaton should he
find himself in the Washington D.C. area. We have also a copy of another letter
from Buttimer to Wheaton in which she refers to a personal meeting with him in
July 1996, at which time Wheaton delivered additional reference material to
Buttimer. Unfortunately no contact report has been found for this meeting.
There is no further record of any contact by Buttimer or
anyone else from the ARRB with Wheaton. In March, 1998 he again faxed the Board
and noted that Buttimer seemed to have departed from the Board. He was never
contacted again and only received generic Board news releases. The only
response to his effort at follow-up is a very general reply from Eileen
Sullivan, Press and Public Affairs Officer. In this "form letter"
response, she refers to the Board as having received thousands of leads and
suggestions and not being able to link any document releases to information
provided by a particular individual.
Apart from this generic "thank you," there is no
expression of further interest from the Board. And there was no further record
of any comment from Gene Wheaton on the subject until Malcolm Blunt located the
Wheaton ARRB files and brought them to the attention of this author, who then
pursued the matter with the help of William Law. Law contacted and interviewed
Wheaton in 2005, where he confirmed what was in the ARRB records.
A good deal of background research has been done on the
Wheaton documents and on the names which Wheaton eventually disclosed to the
ARRB in the documents submitted to Buttermer. These include the CV which
Wheaton eventually identified as that of Carl Elmer Jenkins; a copy of Jenkin's
passport circa 1983; and business cards for Carl Jenkins (ECM Corporation -
International Security Assistance Specialists, New York, Washington DC,
California, PO Box in Falls Church Va., Consultants for Human Development,
Falls Church Va., identified as a mail drop and National Air, Liaison Officer).
The National Air card has a note on it indicating that Jenkins had connected
Wheaton to Raphael "Chi Chi" Quintero, Nestor Sanchez, Nestor Pino,
Bill Bode, Rob Owen, and Vaughn Forrest.
Research confirms that beyond a doubt, Carl Jenkins was
indeed a senior CIA officer who worked on paramilitary activities in support of
the Bay of Pigs project and that by 1963-64 he was indeed directly involved
with the AM/WORLD project, with Artime (AM/BIDDY) and Quintero (AM/JAVA-4).
In September, 1963 Jenkins wrote a general memo describing
Artime's operational philosophy and concepts. This summarized his views about
commando teams, infiltration teams, and guerrilla actions. The memo addresses
military operations as Artime conceives them to be organized and conducted
under a single organization (AM/WORLD) in which the Cubans can have faith. In a
section on Commandos, there is discussion of the use of abductions and
assassinations targeted against Cuban G-2 intelligence informants, agents,
officers, and foreign Communists to raise the morale of people inside Cuba.'
In December, 1964, Jenkins prepared a summary report of
Quintero's visit to Europe for a dialogue with Rolando Cubela in preparation
for further meetings with Artime. The goal of this meeting was to develop
contacts with a group inside Cuba which was capable of "eliminating Fidel
Castro and of seizing and holding Havana, at least for an appreciable time that
would be sufficient to justify recognition."'
There seems to be no doubt that Jenkins was indeed involved
in a very special project in 1963-64 just as the CV Wheaton provided to the
ARRB indicates. It should be noted that these AM/ WORLD activities were
completely segmented from JM/WAVE and communications from Jenkins and Hecksher
were not run through JM/WAVE. In fact the AM/ WORLD group operated its own
facility in Miami (cryptonym "LORK")...
There seems some reason to at least speculate that both
Quintero (who became second in command to Artime) and Rodriguez (who also
joined Artime's offshore autonomous effort in 1963) may have been associated
with CIA paramilitary officer Carl Jenkins before the Bay of Pigs. It also
seems possible that Rodriguez may have been involved with the assassination
project described in the NPIC memo and that the project was overseen by Carl
Jenkins - this being the operation described by the NPIC personnel.
It appears that Carl Jenkins' paramilitary activities in
support of Cuban operations were exactly as described to Gene Wheaton and
exactly as summarized in the Jenkins CV submitted to the ARRB. There is also no
doubt that Jenkins was very closely associated with Quintero in this period, as
described by Wheaton. There are two books in print that also confirm these
descriptions of Jenkins.
In The Death Merchant: The Rise and Fall of Edwin P.
Wilson, author Joseph Goulden presents information from the CIA officer whom
Quintero went to when he became suspicious of an assassination assignment being
promoted to Quintero and other exiles by Ed Wilson. The officer (given the
pseudonym "Brad Rockford") talks about entering the CIA on detached
duty from the Marines, being career paramilitary, and running CIA
paramilitaries out of JM/WAVE. It seems clear that Rockford was in fact Carl
Jenkins.
In his book Manhunt: The Incredible Pursuit of a CIA
Agent Turned Terrorist, Peter Maas mentions Carl Jenkins by name as the case
officer for Quintero prior to the Bay of Pigs. Quintero was part of an advance
team sent in before the invasion by Jenkins. After the landing failed, he hid
out in Cuba for six weeks before making his way back to Florida. Afterwards
Clines would assume a case officer role for Quintero, who would go on make to a
number of sabotage and assassination missions into Cuba."
It seems worth pointing out that Jenkins' name has never
been mentioned in any of the numerous works on the Bay of Pigs, the Miami
station, or the secret war against Castro. Prior to this investigation of
Wheaton's ARRB communications, Carl Jenkins had a far lower profile than even
David Morales.
Interestingly, Gene Wheaton recommended that William Law
read these books in a 2005 interview. Wheaton suggested that they would
describe the individuals he had been associating with or had source information
on from what has become known as Iran-Contra.
Additionally, it is of interest that Ted Shackley and Tom
Clines (who was to succeed Jenkins as Quintero's case officer) would be
familiar names from both JM/WAVE and the Wilson affair. It is also of interest
that David Morales's long time friend Ruben independently mentioned that
Morales had introduced him to Shackley, Clines and Wilson on a trip to
Virginia-and later, to Artime.
Another name mentioned in Wheaton's communication with the
ARRB was that of Irving Davidson. Wheaton implies no direct role for Davidson
in the conspiracy, however he seems to suggest that Davidson may have
unwittingly served as a sort of cut out, bagman, or facilitator. Davidson was a
very long time "arranger" in Washington, a registered lobbyist for
clients including the Samozas of Nicaragua, the Trujillos of the Dominican
Republic, and the Murchisons of Dallas.
In Chapter 16 we examined Davidson's role as the broker of a
Murchison deal involving a Haitian meat packing plant in which Bobby Baker had
been involved. Baker and VP Johnson had traveled to the Dominican Republic in
1963 and Baker had gone back shortly afterwards, possibly leveraging Johnson's
name in regard a casino deal involving his Las Vegas business partners. During
the Dominican crisis, tapes record President Johnson and Abe Fortas discussing
an intermediary involved in discussions with potential leaders. The name used
in the conversation is "Davidson."
Murchison had introduced Davidson to FBI Director Hoover
(Anthony Summers relates an interview with Davidson, who lived only a block
away from Hoover, in which he describes frequent visits to Hoover and Tolson).'
Davidson represented Carlos Marcello in Washington and was
running information between Murchison and Marcello in 1963: it was a government
sting of a Murchison/Marcello project that resulted in Marcello's arrest.
Reportedly Davidson had also been in contact with Marcello after his forced
deportation by Robert Kennedy, helping him to covertly return to the United
States. In Interference, Dan Moldea writes that Murchison had gotten Teamster
investments for California land development and that there were many
connections between Murchison and Marcello, including their joint use of
Davidson. Moldea also describes Robert Kennedy's major 1963 Justice Department
initiative against sports gambling and its potential impact on both Marcello
and Murchison, both heavily involved with professional sports gambling.'
Davidson also had a history as an intermediary in arms
transactions, as a collaborator with Cuban exile activities, and as an
informant (apparently a protected informant) to both the FBI and CIA. One 1959
FBI memorandum concerns a report by Davidson about a purchase of military
weapons. Howard Davis was seeking Davidson's assistance in obtaining quantity
of 50 caliber machine guns to be used by Cuban counter revolutionaries. A 1959
CIA report describes Davidson being involved with Cuban exiles interested in
forming a government in exile, shows Davidson making introductions for them in
Washington.' Other memos show Davidson under FBI electronic (ELSUR)
surveillance. And in November - December 1963, Davidson was the subject of NSA
monitoring, apparently at the request of the FBI. The NSA made reports to the
FBI on November 17, 19, and 27, 1963.
Also, as previously noted, Davidson was Jack Anderson's
office mate and may have helped focus Anderson's attention on the bombshell
lead from John Roselli that JFK had been killed by a team originally formed and
trained to kill Castro. Anderson's "scoop" helped undercut Jim
Garrison's early focus on CIA officers and anti-Castro exiles as the main
actors in the conspiracy.
Carl Jerkins was a senior CIA officer with exactly the
background described by Wheaton to the ARRB. Rafael Quintero was a well
respected, covert operations activist associated with anti-Castro and
anti-Communist activities over several decades. He was taken seriously at the
highest levels of the Kennedy administration. Indeed, DDP Richard Helms himself
once commented on an Operational Plan drafted by Quintero to Thomas Parrott,
Executive Assistant to the Military Representative of the President in June of
1962."
Quintero had presented the plan to Attorney General Robert
Kennedy and General Maxwell Taylor. Beyond that, Quintero was one of only a
handful of exiles to be brought into both the AM/ WORLD and AM/LASH (Cubela)
projects, initiated by Fitzgerald and eventually turned over the Artime
autonomous group project. Quintero was well enough respected to be brought into
the secret "extra-governmental" Contra effort, and was eventually
solicited by Edward Wilson for an assassination project. In both cases Quintero
eventually determined that improper activities were going on and informed on
them, in the case of Wilson through his old friend Carl Jenkins.
Gene Wheaton claims that he heard discussions of the
conspiracy that killed John Kennedy in Dallas during the time when he was in
close personal touch with both Jenkins and Quintero. He never raised this issue
when he himself attempted to blow the whistle on various aspects of the Contra
supply project. He only raised it confidentially to the ARRB-and was quite
surprised to find that his correspondence had been released to public view.
However when interviewed in 2005, he continued to stand by
his story that he heard from people involved in the "secret war," who
knew that Cuban exiles were incited to execute President Kennedy. These
individuals had their own agendas. The exile shooters considered themselves
above all as patriots. They had been trained to assassinate Fidel Castro, but
in the end they turned their guns on John Kennedy.
Rafael Quintero died October 1, 2006, in Baltimore at the
age of 66. A New York Times obituary by Tim Weiner notes that his fellow
veteran, Felix Rodriquez, attended the memorial service. The obituary describes
Quintero's insertion into Cuba prior to the Bay of Pigs and his escape
afterwards. It also states that after his escape from Cuba, Quintero continued
working on operations against Fidel Castro, including assassination plots and
eventually was paid $4,000 a month to support clandestine arms shipments to the
Contras in Nicaragua (despite the Congressional ban on direct U.S. support).
Gene Wheaton's name is not unknown to writers and readers of
more recent conspiracy material. As Nick Schou related in an 1997 Orange County
Weekly newspaper article, "although he said he was never a CIA employee,
Gene Wheaton s experience has brought him into the murky world of
agency-connected public-private partnerships."
After a long career with the U.S. Army's Criminal
Investigations Division, including several years in Vietnam and Iran, Wheaton
went to work for the Anaheim-based autonetics division of Rockwell
International in 1976 (the company is now based in Costa Mesa). Three company
executives had just been murdered in Tehran, Iran, and Rockwell needed Wheaton
to direct its security operations for Project IBEX, a top-secret airborne
electronic-surveillance system the company was building for the CIA in Iran.
At Wheaton's disposal were several other Rockwell officials
with either CIA or NSA clearances and an elaborate encoding system provided by
the CIA." Schou concluded that whatever else may have been written about
Wheaton, his "credentials as a onetime covert operative are impossible to
deny.""
The reason that Wheaton's name has appeared in print began
with his and Carl Jenkins conversations with Paul Hoven in 1985. Hoven worked
with a non-profit group devoted to exposing waste in government and the two had
some interesting remarks to him about illegal arms shipments and government
money being spent for things definitely not approved by Congress. As other
leaks eventually began to occur over the North arms deals in the Middle East
and Latin America, Hoven introduced Wheaton and Jenkins to Daniel Sheehan.
Sheehan was engaged in an attempt to expose a variety of such activities and
was happy to receive new sources."
David Corn writes that Wheaton s bottom line for Sheehan was
that a "rogue element of the U.S. government was engaged in a host of
nefarious activities including assassinations." Corn also describes the
names that Wheaton offered to Sheehan. These included: Wilson, Secord, Clines,
Hakim, Singlaub, Shackley and Bush.
Sheehan would include Wheaton's (and reportedly Jenkins')
information about illegal arms deals and the names of those involved in his
crusade and later legal actions.
In 1988 Wheaton offered an affidavit in support of Sheehan s
legal action; Jenkins, another source for Sheehan, refused to give a similar
affidavit and when questioned asserted that Sheehan must have totally
misunderstood any conversations they might have had.
In a 2005 interview with William Law, Wheaton related the
following: At some time in 1985/1986 (while he and Jenkins were beginning to
talk to parties about illegal arms deals) Wheaton brought up the earlier
discussions he had heard in regard to the JFK conspiracy and broached the
subject of disclosure of that as well. He states that after a short time the
pair declined and told him that if he ever raised the issue they would make him
look totally unreliable and ruin his career as a security consultant. It is
this author's speculation that once Wheaton was known to his friends as a
"whistle blower", they may immediately have begun providing
dis-information which would damage his credibility and undermine any remarks he
might make in regard to their earlier conversations about the JFK
assassination.
Eventually the Contra portions of Wheaton's assertions seem
to have been substantially verified. North's own notebook confirms all the
names except Shackley. Shirley Brill, a former CIA official, submitted an affidavit
with the same names and claimed she heard Clines, Secord, Quintaro and Shackley
plotting to frame Wilson.
Cameron Holmes, a Congressional investigating committee lead
investigator, was convinced that Shackley was deeply involved in the Iran-Contra
scandal. As he explained when he was interviewed by David Corn: "How could
Shackley be the one person in this mob unaware of what was going on? Why was he
so insistent he had not picked up a single whiff of the Contra operation or the
Iran initiative? There was no crime in knowing. Shackley proclaimed his
ignorance too much." Holmes was shocked when special counsel Lawrence
Walsh decided not to pursue Shackley. He was not even called as a witness.
Walsh did not even take Shackley's deposition until after Congress had finished
its hearings on the affair.
However, many of Sheehan's assertions became highly
controversial. In particular these seem to relate to a grand elaboration of the
"secret team" assertions involving Shackley as the leader of a secret
COA "wet ops" unit which had been created as far back as 1976.
Sheehan also introduced another crime, the La Penaca, bombing and made it part
of his overall case and cause. Clearly Wilson's information and the La Penaca
bombing helped raise Sheehan's claims to that of extreme, global conspiracy and
had a good deal to do with his losing his legal action. It is also clear that
Wheaton's basic information about illegal arms sales, extra-legal "secret
teams" and even about sanctioned assassinations dating back to the Cuban
secret war have been validated as of 2005.
By virtue of his visibility in Iran-Contra and as virtually
the only experienced security person to ever serve as a "whistle
blower", Wheaton become sought after for comment in virtually every case
to follow where it appeared that the Government might be covering up covert
activities. As an example, families from the 1985 Gander crash hired Wheaton to
investigate rumors that the government was not telling the full truth about the
crash. He concluded the plane was operated by Arrow Airlines which had served
as a CIA front company and that the airlines had transported arms from Israel
to Iran as part of North's Contra project. Wheaton posited that the bombing of
the plane was a form of retaliation by the Iranians for North's arms sale scam.
Eventually mainstream media sources, including Time
magazine, reached the same general conclusion that the crash was extremely
questionable and that Middle Eastern interests of some sort were behind it.
Wheaton is even quoted in one Time article on Gander."
Wheaton's views, his goal of exposing secret agendas and
secret teams plus his willingness to comment result in reporters and writers
calls (and citations) whenever anything possibly terrorist associated
happens-such as the OKC bombing. For the mainstream press and for some
researchers, the fact that Wheaton has become a "lightning rod" for
conspiracy commentary and speculation certainly affects his perception as a
source. Interestingly there is only one subject he has never addressed in his
public remarks, that of the Kennedy assassination. That he saved only for
confidential disclosure to the ARRB.
At present, Wheaton's reports of the individuals and
conversations he heard discussing the attack on JFK (heard prior to his and
Jenkins involvement with people investigating Iran-Contra) appear consistent
and credible. However it is reasonable to speculate that virtually anything
shared with him following his proposal that Jenkins and Quintaro go on the
record about the Kennedy matter may have been "contaminated".
Wheaton himself may have become a target for disinformation
at that point, cultivated to ensure that he would be greeted with skepticism if
he ever chose to disclose the conversations he had heard.
The Non-profit project that I worked for was formed under
the Stewart Motts foundation. Danny Sheehan was on the board of that
organization. I knew Danny from January 1981. Went to Christic Institute book
parties there. I knew the Jesuit priest Father Bill Davis at the institute. He
was the priest sent down to investigate the death of the American filmmaker
during the military coup in Chile. The wife of the dead filmmaker was a girl
from my home town that I had dated a couple of times in High School (some
coincidences are real). The long and the short of it is that I knew Danny
Sheehan for years before Gene Wheaton or Carl Jenkins ever heard of him. Danny
was on my board of directors and was very supportive of what we were doing at
the project. I thought what he and the Christic Institute did in the Karen
Silkwood case was commendable.
Like wise I had met Carl and Elisabeth some time before I
was introduced to Gene. One of the reasons that I listened to Gene was because
I had a friendship with Carl. The night of the party where Gene was introduced
to me, Carl Jenkins along with (IW) John Harper introduced me to Gene there was
no talk about illegal arms or federal contracts. Carl was the sole speaker with
IW and Gene nodding in agreement. What he said was that we had to stop George
Bush from becoming President and that the wrong people in Afghanistan where
getting our aid.
I knew the people that where the principles in Congress that
allocating the money for our support of the Afghans that where fighting the
Soviets. Carl said that Gene knew that area of the world and that he could help
these people. I don’t recall that the Contra’s where brought at all that
evening. I supported aid to the contras so it would never haven discussed as a
problem. The Lt.Col. Carl Bernard that I mentioned earlier had a civilian
brother in the Pentagon who was running the program that developed weapons for
the Afghan fighters. Afghanistan was the only shooting war at the time and so
it was the topic of conversation with just about everyone I knew including Carl
Jenkins. There were two Congressmen who where the main funders of the Afghans
in Congress. Cong. McCullam R Florida and Cong. Wilson D Texas. Von Forest was
the main staffer for the Florida congressman and I knew him well. They were
also big Israel supporters and had an Israeli citizen on staff ( Steffe
Bodansky) as a military expert.
I set up a meeting with a senate staffer that I knew to
start to introduce Gene to the network of staffers in congress who where the
players in support of the Afghans. It is at this meeting that Gene dropped the
bomb shell and after a very short time talking about Afghanistan started taking
about the assignation of Americans by Americans. There where 10 examples of
assassinations but the one that he spent the more than 50% of time talking
about was the Ibex killing in Iran. This proved to be an interesting emphasis
because of the ten so called assassinations the Ibex killings was the only
where I had access to someone who was there at the time it took place. Remember
that up to this point my background and job was dealing with military hardware
testing and procurement and the waste in the Defense Budget. My interest in the
wars in Afghanistan was in the weapons that where being supplied to the Afghans
that would be effective but not giving away technology to the Soviets. The
covert nature and the spying component held little interest to me then.
A very close friend of mine’s father was in State Department
Counter Intelligence in Tehran when the Ibex killing took place. And was
investigating the case. I talked to him about what I had heard and he confirmed
that it was a strange case. The man killed was coming back from the USA after a
going home to report massive diversion of funds (stolen) to American Generals
that where overseeing the program that had been sold to the Iranian Government.
It was a program that the Pentagon had passed on but was then successfully sold
to the Iranians. The man was killed immediately after arriving in Tehran. This
was not the pattern of either the Moslem or Communist groups trying to topple
the Shah’s government. They would stalk for at least two weeks before pulling
off an assassination. The actual assassination used a VW bug as a blocking car
against the victims Mercedes Benz sedan with a driver and if memory is right
the driver was not killed. The big sedan could have easily driven through the
VW bug blocking car. The telling information supplied by my friends father was
that the Shah’s secret police who where fearless where afraid of this case and
kept saying white man in Parse. At this stage I was convinced that Wheaton was
telling me the truth. I assumed that the 9 other cases Gene had talked about
involved American assassins as well. The senate staffer was scared to death as
this was way out of his league and wanted nothing to do with Wheaton after
that. This was not my area either but I could not let it go.
Knut Royce was a personal friend of mine. He was one of five
of us who used to meet once a week at a bar in downtown DC. He then brought in
his friend Mike Accoca to help on the story. [I was working on a story about
the invasion of Panama as consultant to 60 Minutes with Mike Wallace when
Wallace the producer Charlie Thompson and Myself all got violently sick and
almost died and Mike Accoca did die.]
Knut took the story to Senator John Kerry D Massachusetts.
The names that Wheaton mentioned had nothing to do with the Contras based on
what Wheaton told me . They where the people that where involved in the
assassinations. When Iran Contra became public that October I was shocked
because the people mentioned where the same people that Wheaton told me where
involved in the ten assassinations of Americans. When I introduced Wheaton to
Danny Sheehan the reason was assassinations for my part it had nothing to do
with illegal arms shipments to anyone. At that time Danny was looking in to
assassinations relative to the Contras and that is why I had the meeting and
introduced Wheaton to Sheehan. As I said before I was not opposed to aid to the
Contras and would not have had the meeting between the two of them if that was
the subject. At some point in those first few months after meeting Wheaton I
had a meeting set up with the man who I had originally talked to about Wheaton
and the Ibex assassination. After the meeting with the State Department Counter
Intelligence Officer (he also held a Lt. Col. Rank in the Army) he advised his
son ( a Republican Senate staffer) and myself to not deal with Wheaton anymore.
He said that he did not believe Wheaton was on the level.
Jenkins never once mentioned contracts with me and he never
indicated that he was involved in the JFK assassination. Remember his wife was
on active duty at CIA. Both he and his wife were very bright people and Carl
was a professional case officer with decades of service. And Carl was smarter
than Wheaton in my estimation. In a million years I can not see him admitting
to any part in the assassination of JFK to an outsider if he had played a role.
Especially to an outsider like Wheaton. Gene like myself was an outsider. He
had non agency bon fides for his work in the Army and I believe that he may
have played a role in IW Harpers escape from Libya after IW attempted to
assassinate Kaddafi. (Blew up a plane Kaddafi was to board but Kaddafi changed
his mind at the last minute. A bunch of his East German bodyguards where
killed, however.) I was accepted because I had served in Viet Nam as an Army
Helicopter Pilot. And I had been recruited to fly for Air America, I turned
them down because I thought I had used up all my luck. But in certain areas you
where still considered an outsider.
If Jenkins wanted it known to the world that he planned,
trained, etc. the people that killed JFK why not tell me rather than Wheaton. I
was dealing on a day to day basis with over 300 plus journalists and in the
beginning Wheaton with none. More important I had credibility with them all
where Wheaton was a total unknown to them.
I was not happy with Sheehan’s final document. I had no
first hand information about the actions that where in the document. And I was
never told that I would be listed as a source. Plus his description of me did
nothing to protect me. I was listed as a Army Helicopter Pilot in Viet Nam and
a Military Reformer, that described a universe of exactly one person in DC at
that time. Two days after it was out I was having lunch with a reporter that I
had never dealt with before and after introductions she said, “oh you must be
the number 48 (I believe that was the number source in Sheehan’s suit). The pay
off came a week later when Ted Shackley showed up on my doorstep with a shaved
headed gorilla about six foot four that looked like someone out of a terminator
movies and wanted to talk about Sheehan’s suit.
I first met Carl Jenkins in Iran in 1976... In 1985 he
became my Washington representative when I became Vice President of the cargo
airlines National Air, this was during the Iran-Contra thing and they wanted my
airplanes for the Contras... We became like brothers...
Carl Jenkins was the head recruiter and trainer of the
Cubans for the Bay of Pigs, for the assassins and saboteurs going into Cuba. He
became their father figure... Ted Shackley was the head of the CIA Miami
Station and Jenkins worked for him. Chi Chi Quintero was one of those Bay of
Pigs guys who got caught and when they got him out Chi Chi became like a son to
Carl. He and two or three others, Félix RodrÃguez and Nestor Pino, all went
through Vietnam with him and in the African Congo when they were trying to
overthrow Patrice Lumumba. Chi Chi Quintero would come up to Carl's place in
Fairfax, Virginia... from his home in Miami... We were just like a family, they
would talk directly to me and to each other in my presence, as if I was one of
the spook crowd, the covert crowd... There was a CIA funded program to
assassinate Castro and Carl was in charge of training the Cubans in Miami to
assassinate Castro. They would go to Texas and Mexico and take old
convertibles, stick old water melons on the back seat, is something they called
triangulation shooting teams...
According to them, they were the ones that diverted the
Castro funds and training for their own agenda to snuff Kennedy... They were
CIA people who were training people to assassinate Castro, but if you are
training people to assassinate one man, you can use that training to
assassinate anybody... They were furious with JFK because he backed off at the
last moment at the Bay of Pigs... There was another clique above them who were
worried about Kennedy not increasing the program to escalate hostilities in
Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Carl was training Chi Chi and several other
shooters, about five of them...
Carl Jenkins formed the first Marine Corps Reserve Unit in
New Orleans in Louisiana and was the CIA liaison officer between CIA
headquarters and Carlos Marcello and organized crime in the area. Carl helped
recruit Lee Harvey Oswald into the CIA while he was a marine... Lee was just a
stooge they set up as part of a Operation Security Plan for deniability when
they put a real dirty operation into place.
Milton Gene Wheaton passed away peacefully on Dec. 31, 2015
at the age of 80 at the Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs after
suffering from a traumatic head injury due to a fall at his home in Hemet.
He was born in Pawnee, Oklahoma in a Post Office on an
Indian reservation. His parents were Bert and Ruth Wheaton.....
He spent a brilliant career in the military as a criminal
investigator, ending his career at the rank of Chief Warrant Officer 3.
An example of his many accomplishments was when he was
awarded the U.S. Legion of Merit from President Nixon for his exceptionally
meritorious conduct in his performance as the Narcotics and Smuggling advisor
of the U.S. Military Mission with the Imperial Iranian Grandarmerie from May
1971 through July 1973.
He retired from the military on June 30, 1975. After that he
spent many years as a private investigator consultant. Then retired and spent the
remaining years in Winchester and Hemet, California.
Television series and films Edit
In the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation,
Wesley Crusher first arrives on the Enterprise-D with his mother, soon
after Captain Jean-Luc Picard assumes command. Crusher's father was killed
while under Picard's command, with Picard delivering the message to Wesley and
to his mother, Beverly. Picard initially found Wesley irritating, as he is often
uncomfortable around all children, a fact which he discloses to his first
officer, Commander William Riker, in the pilot episode "Encounter at
Farpoint". In early episodes of the series, Picard does not allow Wesley
on the bridge of the ship. However, during the first season, Picard comes to
realize that he understands many things beyond his age and has inherited his
mother's high level of intelligence, and grants him more opportunities on board
the ship. An alien known as The Traveler tells Captain Picard that Wesley
possesses a unique intelligence and great potential when provided encouragement
and opportunity, comparing him to a child prodigy like Mozart. [1] Picard soon
appoints Crusher as acting ensign. [1]
Crusher eventually takes the entrance exam for Starfleet
Academy. His test score ranks lower than required, and he is not accepted into
the Academy in his first attempt, as shown in the episode "Coming of
Age". Later, he misses his second chance to take the Academy entrance exam
during the episode "Ménage à Troi" in which he assists the Enterprise-D
crew in rescuing Riker, Deanna Troi, and Lwaxana Troi from hostile Ferengi, for
which Picard grants him a field promotion to full ensign.
In the third-season episode "The Bonding", Wesley
reveals that following his father's death, he harbored animosity towards
Picard, because Picard was in command of the Stargazer during the
mission in which Wesley's father was killed. By the end of the episode, he no
longer harbors these feelings.
Crusher is then invited to reapply the following year,
taking the exam and being accepted into the Academy where he joins an elite
group of cadets known as Nova Squadron. His involvement with this group leads
to his losing academic credits when, as shown in the fifth-season episode
"The First Duty", a squadron-mate is killed attempting a dangerous
and prohibited flight maneuver and, under pressure from the team leader Nick
Locarno, Crusher abets the squadron's efforts to cover up the truth. Although
the crew's intervention and Crusher's own testimony saves him from expulsion,
all of Cadet Crusher's academic credits for the year are canceled and he is
required to repeat the year and graduate after most of the rest of his class.
[2] He remains in the Academy thereafter until the Traveler re-contacts him in
the final season's "Journey's End", whereupon he resigns his
commission and goes with the Traveler to explore other planes of reality. [3]
He is next seen sitting next to his mother in the background
of the wedding scenes in the feature film Star Trek: Nemesis. In a scene
deleted from the movie, [4] Captain Picard asks Crusher if he is excited to
serve on board the USS Titan (Captain Riker's ship), and Crusher
tells him that he will be running the night shift in Engineering, which would
have indicated that Wesley returned to Starfleet at some point prior to the
events of the film, if the scene had not been deleted.
The Wesley Crusher character was unpopular among more than a
few Star Trek fans. [5] [6] Many fans considered the character to be
a Mary Sue and a stand-in for Gene Roddenberry, whose middle name was
"Wesley". The character's role in the show was greatly downplayed
after the first season when Roddenberry's involvement in the show's production
became more peripheral. [7]
Some fans disliked the idea of a boy who seems to constantly
save the whole ship as a deus ex machina plot device. Commentators
have observed at least seven times in which Wesley, "who has trouble
getting into the Starfleet Academy" and is on a ship "filled with
Starfleet's best and brightest crew members", has come up with "the
needed solution". [8] [9] Fans' dislike for Wesley Crusher has become
something of a pop-culture meme, reflected in other TV shows such as The
Big Bang Theory (which features a recurring fictionalized Wheaton as one
of Sheldon Cooper's main nemeses though Sheldon admired and self-identified
with the Wesley character, he held a grudge against the actor who
failed to appear at a convention decades earlier, and later lied to win a card
game, but they eventually become friends), SteinsGate, and in a 2009 Family
Guy episode, "Not All Dogs Go to Heaven", which included the
main The Next Generation cast and featured Wil Wheaton in character
as Wesley being bullied by Patrick Stewart.
In 2016, Wesley was ranked as the 31st most important
character out of 100, of Starfleet in the Star Trek science fiction
universe by Wired magazine. [10]
JFKcountercoup
SOMEONE TALKED - GENE WHEATON RECONSIDERED - Part 1 As
Amended.
It is often said by Warren Commission appologists that if
there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, since no one can keep a
secret, someone would have talked.
Well someone did talk, but no body paid much attention.
As Larry Hancock clearly points out in his book
"Someone Would Have Talked" (JFK Lancer), John Martino talked, John
Roselli talked, David Atlee Phillips talked, Antonio Veciana talked, Bradely
Ayers talked, and now, most significantly, Gene Wheaton talked.
While each of the others deserve - in James Jesus Angleton's
terminology, a serial of their own, I am currently concentrating on what former
investigator Gene Wheaton tells us, even though it comes under the category of
hearsay. While hearsay may not be admissible in court at a trial, it is admissible
in grand jury hearings, and often leads to more substansive evidence, as
Wheaton's story does.
In evaluating Wheaton, I use the CIA's case study method
that evaluates sources and defectors by considering how much new, significant
and verifiable information they provide, especially new names, places and
events that are not on the record or in the files. In that regard, Wheaton
comes up in spades.
Wheaton first came to my attention in Larry Hancock's book
"Someone Would Have Talked," which I wrote about in my JFKCountercoup
blog at the time. I quoted Wheaton extensively, but I failed to follow up on
the many leads he provided, something I am trying to do now.
To establish Wheaton's bonifides right off the bat we will
begin with excerpts from his obituary:
Funeral Home Memorial Page for:
May 19, 1935 - December 31, 2015
Milton gene Wheaton passed away peacefully on Dec. 31, 2015
at the age of 80 at the Desert Reginal Medical Center in Palm Springs after
suffering from a traumatic head inury due to a fall at his home in Hemet.
He was born in Pawnee, Oklahoma in a Post Office on an
Indian reservation. His parents were Bert and Ruth Wheaton.
He spent a brilliant career in the military as a criminal
investigator, ending his career at the rank of Chief Warrent Officer 3.
An example of his many accomplishments was when he was
awarded the U.S. Legion of Merit from President Nixon for his exceptionally
meritorious conduct in his performance as the Narcotics and Smuggling advisor
of the U.S. Military Mission with the Imperial Iranian Grandarmerie from May
1971 through July 1973.
He retired from the military on June 30, 1975. After that he
spent many years as a private investigator consultant. Then retired and spent
the remaining years in Winchester and Hemet, California.
Wheaton first came into the public arena when he was mentioned
in a footnote to a legal civil suit prepared by attorney Dan Sheen for the
Christic Institute against those principles involved in what would become known
as the Iran-Contra affair.
Wheaton was an early whistle blower who first took his
inside knowledge of the affair to then CIA director William Casey, who did
nothing because he was behind it.
Wheaton realized Casey was in on it and when asked why he
blew the whistle on them, Wheaton said that Casey and those invovled were
taking millions of dollars from a foreign terrorist state (Iran) in exchange
for US military supplies (missiles) and using the money to finance secret
covert operations without the approval of Congress.
While Sheenan's case was dismissed by the judge, Sheehan was
ordered to pay the defendants $900,000, that put the Christic Institute out of
business.
The judge said the charges were based on
"frivilous" hearsay, and just how frivilous it was became sensational
a few months later when a CIA Contra support plane was shot down and baggage kicker
Eugene Hassenfraus was captured alive. Hassenfraus confessed the CIA was behind
the operation and had phone numbers on his possession that linked him to (
"Shadow Warrior") Felix Rodriguez, who took pride in tracking down
Che Guevera, executing him and taking his Rolex watch.
The Iran-Contra affair then played out on its own in public
and behind the scenes, and Wheton went quiet, for years. Then the JFK Act of
1992 was passed by Congress ordering all of the government records on the
assassination of President Kennedy be made public in full by October 2017,
something that still hasn't happened.
Wheaton wrote a letter to Judge John Tunheim, the chairman
of the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB), establishing himself as a
responsible person, and saying he knew of people and records that the Review
Board would be interested in, and Tunheim reponded favorably.
ARRB staff attorney Ann Buttermer had a telephone
conversation with Wheaton, after which she wrote an outside contact report on
the details. She then met Wheaton in Washington and got more details, as well
as documents and records that Wheaton said supported his story.
According to Buttimer's ARRB outside contact report, Wheaton
told her Cuban exiles who were originally trained by the CIA to kill Castro,
killed Kennedy instead, considering him a traitor for his failure to support
them at the Bay of Pigs.
Wheaton said that "people above the Cubans wanted JFK
killed for other reasons," and that "the matter is not complex, but
convoluted."
While there is only the outside contact report of
Buttermer's phone conversation with Wheaton, her report on their meeting in
Washington is missing, and shortly after their meeting Buttermer suddenly
resigned from her job with the Review Board and disapeared. Malcolm Blunt notes
that unlike every other ARRB staff member, there is no separate file for
Buttermer's papers, though some of her records are scattered among the ARRB
files.
Wheaton then faxed the review board, but only received a
generic form reply thanking him for contacting them.
Then things went quiet again, at least on the public front,
for over a decade, except for English professor John Simkin, who started the
JFK Assassination Debate on his Education Forum web site, and kept track of all
of the important players, including Gene Wheaton.
Also during this time some determined researchers plowed
through the millions of pages of documents at the National Archives and Records
Administration (NARA) Archives II in College Park, Md., where the JFK
Collection is kept. Among the records released under the JFK Act are the
records of the ARRB, including Wheaton's letter to Judge Tunheim, Ann
Buttermer's outside contact report on their phone coversation, and the items
Wheaton gave Buttermer as supporting records to what he had to say.
If how many new, significant and verifiable names are the
barrometor for bonifides, then Wheaton comes clean, as there are many, they are
significant, and many have been verified.
Top of the list is Carl Jenkins, who Wheaton says was his
close friend, housemate and business associate in National Airlines, one of
many CIA front companies that I wrote about back in the 1980s.
[See: CIAir at JFKCountercoup.blogspot.com the story of
Ralph Cox and United Overseas Airlines].
As Hankock reported in his book, "Research confirms
that beyond a doubt, Carl Jenkins was indeed a senior CIA officer who worked on
paramilitary activities in support of the Bay of Pigs project and that by
1963-64 he was indeed directly involved with the AM/WORLD project, with Artime
(AMBIDDY) and Quintero (AMJAVA4)."
In a September, 1963 memo Jenkins wrote how the anti-Castro
Cuban commandos (he was training at JMWAVE) could, "use abductions and
assassinations targeted against Cuban G-2 intelligence informants, agents, officer
and foreign Communists to raise the morale of people inside Cuba."
Actualy, they were planning, training and preparing to kill
Castro, an operation that Wheaton and Jenkins said was redirected to JFK at
Dallas.
One of the working hypothesis of this inquiry is that
whoever pulled off the Dealey Plaza Operation - they were very good, had done
such things before and did it again afterwards, as the careers of Carl Jenkins
and the Cubans he trained confirm.
Carl Jenkins was a United States Marine Corps (USMC) Captain
in Japan, where he possibly crossed paths with Oswald. Wheaton suspects that is
where Wheaton recruited Oswald, as they again crossed paths in the summer of
1963 in New Orleans, where Captain Jenkins established a new USMC Active
Reserve unit, and became acquainted with mob boss Carlos Marcello.
Jenkins was known as a commando infiiltration - exfiltraion
specialist, working closely with the anti-Castro Cubans before the Bay of Pigs,
and at JMWAVE afterwards. At JMWAVE he trained a team of Cubans who Wheaton
named as Ralphel "Chi Chi" Quintero, Nester Sanchez, Nestor Pino,
Felix Rodriguez, Ricardo Morales, Tony Izquierdo, and others. While we were
acquainted with some of these names, like Rodrriguez, others were new.
English professor John Simkin, who was in contact with a CIA
media asset who knew Quintero, asked Quintero if Wheaton was correct in his
allegations, and Quintero said Wheaton knew part of the story, and if the whole
story got out it would be the biggest scandle ever.
Jenkins - and some of his team of Cubans, went on to work
other operations - in 1964 Quintero was sent to Europe to meet Rolando Cubella
(AMLASH), a significant player in the lead up to the assassination of the
president.
They all worked for a time in the Congo, another key place
of interest to those following the Dealey Plaza drama. And then Jenkins was
sent to the Dominican Republic where the dictator Trujulio was assassinated. In
response the CIA also sent David Atlee Phillips as the emergency Chief of
Station while LBJ sent in the Marines, just to show the generals he would give
them some action when JFK wouldn't.
Another name Wheaton gave out was I. Irving Davidson, who
Wheaton described as a middleman, cut-out and fixer, whose clients included
Clint Murcheson of Dallas, Carlos Marcello of New Orleans and Rafael Trujulio,
a client he lost. Oh, yea, Davidson's office mate was Jack Anderson, the
muckraking Washington columnist who exposed the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro,
a scoop he got from Roselli, probably becaues of the Davidson connection.
A year before Larry Hancock's book came out, in 2005,
Wheaton was located and interviewed on videotape by Hancock and William M. Law,
a short but concise tape that was premiered at the 2005 JFK Lancer conference
in Dallas. But its significance was not immediately recognized. That tape sat
on the shelf for another decade, and only this year (2018) was it posted on
line for the world to see.
In it, Wheaton confirms all of the above, explains why he
became an Iran-Contra whistle blower - "I'm a cop," and gives us more
new names, including that of a Minnessotta documentary film maker Matt Ehling,
who recorded "hours and hours" of tapes in which he gives more details.
Another new name is that of one of those CIA small arms and
explosive experts who assisted Jenkins in training the Cuban commandos at
JMWAVE.
As I listened to the tape I thought Wheaton says the CIA
trainer is "Ira" Harper, and could not find anyone by that name, but
after I reposted the Wheaton video interview online, a Facebook friend (Pat
Dugan) said the name is "I.W." Harper.
And that hit paydirt as "I.W." Harper was,
according to a Soldier of Fortune Magazine article, a CIA explosives expert,
small arms specialist who also trained Contras in Nicaragua.
While I.W. Harper is the name of a Kentucky whiskey, it's
Jewish founder said he named the brand after a horseman he knew, I. W. Harper.
It is likely that "I.W." is a nickname applied to the legendary CIA
small arms and explosives expert since its not his real name.
There's a photo of Harper in the SOF article, The Wild
Bunch, a mission photo of the armed specialists who were then training Contra
commandos to fight the leftist Sandinistas in the struggle for power after the
fall of the Somoza regime.
Besides Jenkins, Quintero and the Cubans, Davidson and
Harper, Gene Wheaton also coughed up the names of others who were in the loop -
Bill Bode, Rob Owen, Vaughn Forest and others we have yet to get to.
Located the Minnessotta film maker who has hours of tapes of
Wheton giving more details on these affairs.
