Who is William Pawley?
1896: William Douglas Pawley was born in Florence, South Carolina on September 7, 1896. His father was a wealthy businessman based in Cuba, and young Pawley attended private schools in both Havana and Santiago de Cuba. He later returned to the United States, where he studied at the Gordon Military Academy in Georgia.
July 25, 1919: Pawley married Annie Hahr Dobbs of Marietta, Georgia.
1925: The couple moved to Miami.
1927: Pawley began a connection with Curtiss-Wright that would make him an extremely wealthy man.
1928: He returned to Cuba to become president of Nacional Cubana de Aviación Curtiss, which was sold to Pan American Airlines in 1932. He then became president of Intercontinent Corporation in New York, evidently founded by Clement Keys, the former president of Curtiss. Pawley had also owned major sugar interests in Cuba, as well as Havana's bus, trolley, and gas systems. Eugene Pawley, his brother, then joined William in Havana, where they founded a public transportation system which served locals and tourists visiting the Mafia controlled casinos.
1933: The Pawleys then moved to Shanghai, China, with the baby, leaving their other children in Miami Beach with family. He became president of China National Aviation Corporation an airline running between Hong Kong and Shanghai at this point. Pawley finally sold out to Pan Am again. He later assembled aircraft in partnership with the Chinese Nationalist government under the corporate name of Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company in Hangzhou, Wuhan, and finally Loiwing on the China-Burma border. (CAMCO was owned in partnership with the Chinese government, with the Pawley family interest represented by Intercontinent, which now served as a Pawley family holding company.)
Of note: China National Aviation Corporation Inc. was to establish air routes between a few of the major treaty ports and manage all operations. This was Chiang’s airline. Aviation Exploration Inc. was a personal holding company of the U.S. aviation magnate Clement Melville Keys, who at the same time was the president of Curtiss-Wright and a few other aviation firms. By 1933, Keys had retired under a cloud of scandal and near bankruptcy. Thomas Morgan was his successor as the head of Curtiss-Wright which through cross holdings ultimately controlled both North American and Intercontinent. After a series of disastrous accidents and disagreements with Chinese leaders, Morgan decided to sell the 45 percent stake held by Intercontinent in CNAC to Pan American Airways on April 1, 1933. Morgan concluded the sale with PanAm president Juan Trippe. Trippe almost immediately put PanAm vice-president Harold Bixby in charge of the airline's new far east operation: Bixby was well known in banking and aviation circles as the man who had put up the money for the trans-Atlantic flight of Charles Lindbergh in the Spirit of St Louis.
The remaining 71 aircraft in Hong Kong were sold by the Nationalists, who had retreated to the island of Taiwan, to the Delaware-registered Civil Air Transport Inc (CAT) in an effort to save the aircraft from the Communists. After a lengthy legal battle (which went on appeal from Hong Kong to Privy Council in UK, as reported in 1951 Appeal Cases) the planes were delivered by the Hong Kong government to CAT in 1952.
1940’s: Eugene Pawley is the OSS desk officer for China.
William Pawley was an active member of the Republican Party. A close friend of both President Dwight Eisenhower and Central Intelligence Agency director Allen W. Dulles, he took part in a policy that later become known as Executive Action, a plan to remove unfriendly foreign leaders from power.
1940: Hindustan Aircraft Limited was set up in India with Pawley providing the initial organization. As a pioneer in outsourcing to India, Pawley had “organized and became president of Hindustan Aircraft Manufacturing Co. in India in 1940.” Pawley’s 38 technicians trained 11,500 Indian aircraft workers who later helped in the war effort supplying planes needed by the Flying Tigers to engage the Japanese pilots in air battles over Burma.
1941: With his brothers Edward and Eugene, he was involved with the organization and support of the 1st American Volunteer Group, popularly known as the Flying Tigers. The brothers established an assembly plant at Mingaladon airport outside Rangoon, Burma, where the AVG's Curtiss P-40 fighter aircraft were assembled, while an Intercontinent office in Rangoon (now Yangon) provided payroll and other housekeeping services to the group while it trained upcountry at Toungoo. Later, when Allied forces were driven out of lower Burma by the Japanese, the CAMCO factory and airfield across the border in Loiwing, China, served as a base for the AVG. When Loiwing in turn was captured by Japan
During World War II, Eugene Pawley was among a group of Americans who escaped internment following the fall of Hong Kong to the Japanese.
May 1942: Pawley moved his operation to India as a partner in Hindustan Aircraft Limited.
1945: Pawley was appointed as U.S. Ambassador to Peru by Harry Truman.
1948: He was named U.S. Ambassador to Brazil amongst multiple coups in Brazil during this period.
December 21, 1948: Douglas C-54B XT-104 struck a mountain on Basalt Island in poor visibility and poor weather, killing all 35 on board. One of the passengers killed in the accident, Quentin Roosevelt, was the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt and son of WWII Medal of Honor recipient, Ted Roosevelt Jr. Quentin Roosevelt, who had served in WWII in France, attaining the rank of Major. Quentin was a Director of CNAC at the time of his death. Coincidence?
1949: Pawley founded the Cuban transportation/bus system.
1950’s: Eugene moved to Mexico to set up a silver mining enterprise with a group of Mexican businessmen.
1951: Pawley is promoted to Spec. Asst. to the Secretary of State.
1951-2: Pawley is promoted to Spec. Asst. to the Secretary of Defense.
1954: Pawley is promoted to Special Asst to the Sec of State. Pawley played a role in Operation PBSuccess, a CIA plot to overthrow the Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz after Arbenz introduced reforms affecting the United Fruit Company.
Pawley attends the InterAmerican Conference for the Maintenance of Continental Peace and Security in Brazil and the 9th International Conference of American States in Columbia. (Awards from Peru, Brazil, Dom Republic, Cuba, China.) Pawley served in Peru, Brazil, Panama, Guatemala, Cuba and Nicaragua between 1945 and 1960.
1958: Special Secret Emissary to Cuba for Washington D.C. under Eisenhower to get Batista to establish a junta.
Winter of 1962: Eddie Bayo (Eduardo Perez) claimed that two officers in the Red Army based in Cuba wanted to defect to the United States. Bayo added that these men wanted to pass on details about atomic warheads and missiles that were still in Cuba despite the agreement that followed the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Bayo fought alongside Raul Castro and was his military aide who was working with the CIA. He conducted missions out of Gitmo. He was apart of the CIA’s Tejana III, who were gunrunners on the US Navy submarine chaser, which supplied weapons to Cubans within Cuba against Castro. Bayo was in the US Army during WWII. Bayo used at least one bomb inside the US while working for the CIA at a house of suspect to the CIA, which held a Castro agent inside. By early 1963, Bayo had plans to regime change in Haiti (Duvalier or Papa Doc), because the CIA wanted it maintained to launch anti-Castro raids. Others in his circle were Jerry Patrick Hemming, Gladio and of Trujillo fame, had also been working on the Haiti assassinations.
Meanwhile, they go to New York to visit Theodore Racoosin, which maintained contacts inside JFK. Another contact was Howard Davis’s pilot, who flew anti-Batista rebels (CIA). Racoosin was a personal friend of Radio Free Europe (CIA). These members held meetings in the office of Miami News editor Bill Baggs. It was revealed the CIA was funding them all, unbeknownst to them or not. Another meeting was held in Jack Gore’s office in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with Florida congressman Kramer. This is where many of the Watergate familiars fall into the mix.
Bayo's story was eventually taken up by several members of the anti-Castro community including Nathaniel Weyl, William Pawley, Gerry P. Hemming, John Martino, Felipe Vidal Santiago, and Frank Sturgis. Pawley became convinced that it was vitally important to help get these Soviet officers out of Cuba.
If true, this operation would have meant the end of JFK’s political career — a soft coup. The upcoming 1964 election would have been a disaster. Known as Operation Red Cross, it was a win-win scenario. Disclosure of the Russians still there would have forced JFK to send in troops and to take Cuba back or they would produce the ‘Russians’ and embarrass him either way to win.
William Pawley contacted Ted Shackley at JM/WAVE. Shackley decided to help Pawley organize what became known as Operation Tilt or the Bayo-Pawley Mission. He also assigned Rip Robertson, a fellow member of the CIA in Miami, to help with the operation. David Sanchez Morales, another CIA agent, also became involved in this attempt to bring out these two Soviet officers.
1963: Singer Frank Sinatra sponsored Roselli for membership in the exclusive Los Angeles Friar's Club. Soon after his acceptance, Roselli discovered an elaborate card-cheating operation run by one of his Las Vegas friends, Maurice Friedman, and asked for his cut. The card cheating was finally discovered in July 1967 by FBI agents tailing Roselli. Scores of wealthy men, including millionaire Harry Karl, the husband of actress Debbie Reynolds, and actor Zeppo Marx, were bilked out of millions of dollars. Grant B. Cooper represented some of the defendants in the case, including Roselli. Roselli was eventually convicted and fined $55,000. During the trial, secret grand jury transcripts were discovered on the defense attorney's table. Cooper eventually pleaded guilty to contempt for possessing the documents. INS tries to deport Roselli.
Further article reading: The Bayo-Pawley Affair: A Plot to Destroy JFK and Invade Cuba
June 8, 1963: A small group, including William Pawley, Eddie Bayo, Rip Robertson, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, John Martino. Richard Billings and Terry Spencer, a journalist and photographer working for Life Magazine, boarded a CIA flying boat. After landing off Baracoa, Bayo and his men got into a 22-foot craft and headed for the Cuban shore. The plan was to pick them up with the Soviet officers two days later. However, Bayo and his men were never seen again. It was rumoured that he had been captured and executed. However, his death was never reported in the Cuban press.
Continued in 1963, John Martino told a fascinating story. He had attended a meeting in Palm Beach at which a Cuban who used the name de Guerre of Bayo claimed that the Soviets had deceived President Kennedy and that Russian missiles were still in Cuba. Bayo said he knew this because two of the Soviet officers guarding these clandestine missiles had defected, were being hidden and guarded by the remnants of the anti-Castro underground and were desperately anxious to tell their story. I was told that this was an emergency. The Russians could be captured by Castro's forces at any time. John Martino said that their Cuban protectors could get them safely to the northern coast of the island and thence by boat to some agreed-upon rendezvous point in the Bahamas if we acted immediately.
Martino added that Bayo and the other Cuban patriots would have nothing to do with anyone from the CIA because they believed that the Agency had betrayed them at the Bay of Pigs. Could Pawley get a yacht, designate a time and place to meet on some remote Bahamas island, get there and bring the Russian officers to the American mainland? If it was to be done, it must be done immediately.
After having shilled the project around reactionary circles Florida, Martino and Bayo pitched the idea to Pawley, who in turn took it to JM/WAVE chief Ted Shackley. Pawley told Shackley that he had gotten a call from the chief counsel to the Senate Intenal Subcommittee, Jay Sourwine, promising that chairman James O. Eastland of Mississippi would launch hearings if the Soviet officers were sprung. When Shackley learned from Pawley that Martino was involved, he was not pleased. He called Martino a "lowlife." Shackley nonetheless signed on. The operation was a long shot but, if it panned out, a career maker. It might also serve to rehabilitate Shackley's demoted mentor. Bill Harvey. CIA headquarters at first balked at the proposal, having been sufficiently embarrassed by renegade heroics by the Cuban exiles. Then Senator Eastland telephoned Ambassador Pawley to inform him, incredibly enough, that John Martino, a Mafia operative, had personally briefed him on the mission, called Operation Red Cross. The CIA gave Shackley the go-ahead.
It is possible Rosselli and Martino actually believed in the Bayo-Pawley mission. It is equally possible that they were developing an elaborate alibi for another murderous contingency. On June 4, the day before the mission was to be launched, Martino and Bayo told an astounded Pawley that they had agreed to let Life magazine cover the raid in exchange for $15,000. Loren Hall, a Trafficante associate later investigated for his contact with Oswald in Dallas, claimed that the Mafia, not Life, had in fact put up the $15,000.
On June 5, Pawley's yacht, the Flying Tiger II, towing a smaller craft, set sail for its rendezvous point off the coast of Oriente province. Three days later, Pawley himself, accompanied by the ever-ready Rip Robertson, a Life photographer, Bayo, and nine other raiders boarded a CIA flying boat. (Pawley was so suspicious about the intentions of Bayo and his raiders that he locked them in the center cabin during the flight.) OffBaracoa, Cuba, they joined up with the yacht. Robertson passed out a full complement of arms to the fighters before they piled into the 22-foot craft and headed for the Cuban shore. The plan was to meet up with the Flying Tiger II two days later with the Soviet officers in hand. But Bayo and his comrades were never heard from again. Station chief Shackley later determined that the Soviet defection story had been cover for a "free-lance strike" by Bayo and the others. A review of Cuban army documents relating to the capture or killing of anti-Castro raiders, research done in June 1997, revealed no record of Bayo.
But the Bayo-Pawley mission fit nicely with Rosselli's later claim that President Kennedy was assassinated by an anti-Castro sniper team sent in to murder Castro, captured by the Cubans, tortured, and redeployed in Dallas. Through the handiwork of Rosselli's assistant, John Martino, the CIA, Lift, Pawley, and Senator Eastland were all variously implicated.
The Bayo operation has been covered in several article and books. It has been a hunting ground for conspiracy theorists, such as Peter Dale Scott (Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, University of California Press), who suggest that the Bayo affair was linked to the Kennedy assassination. We know now that the defecting Soviet colonels never existed, that there were no Russian missiles left in place in Cuba, that the Bayo story was a hoax. by the CIA to seed the Castro Cuban JFK link.
What happened to the Cubans who were offloaded from the Flying Tiger, heavily armed with ClA-supplied weapons? We know that the Pawley yacht weighed anchor ten miles to sea from the port of Baracoa in Oriente Province on the night of June 8, 1963. Three CIA people kept machineguns trained on Bayo and his Cuban commandos as the latter piled into the speedboat that was to take them to shore (Warren Hinckle and William W. Turner, Deadly Secrets, p. 194). Weapons were aimed at the Cubans because the CIA considered the possibility that they were Castro agents and that the operation was an ambush.
The commandos vanished into the night. Pawley saw to it that a Catalina flying boat search the skies for them until a week had elapsed. The generally accepted theory is that their secret purpose had been to get modern arms with which to kill Castro, but that they had been intercepted and killed or captured in a firefight. A year or so after the tragedy, Bill Pawley told me he believed that the men never landed. When they boarded the speedboat, he warned them that it was dangerously overloaded and urged them in vain to take rubber rafts aboard. Pawley heard a large freighter pass between the Flying Tiger and the shore. He believed that the Cuban boat was swamped in the freighter's wake and that the men drowned.
Was their secret purpose to get CIA arms with which to kill Fidel Castro? This is the conclusion researchers have arrived at, but it seems illogical. When approached to find a yacht and meet the defectors at sea, there was no mention of sending armed commandos ashore, nor access to assault weapons, nor did Martino have any reason to imagine I would be willing or able to supply them.
The source of guns was the CIA. Bayo and his companions had made it abundantly clear that they distrusted the agency and wanted to have nothing to do with it. The conclusion drawn is that Bayo's initial plan was to land two or three mysterious people in Florida, to allege that they were Soviet colonels and spread the story of missiles still in Cuba to influence the American presidential elections. The purpose would have been to defeat Kennedy since many Cubans believed he had betrayed them and their cause.
Would any such imposture have been promptly detected and exposed, or would continuing uncertainty and suspicion have poisoned the air for the young President? When the plan mushroomed to comprise a Cuban commando force, heavily armed by the CIA with weapons, none of which was, of course, of U.S. origin, plans may well have changed. Assassination? Mere havoc and sabotage? We will probably never know.
Rip Robertson was brought back into CIA operations for the Bay of Pigs commanding the supply ship Barbara J and leading exile frogmen onto the beach. Robertson later became affiliated with JM WAVE operations and was the officer who debriefed John Martino upon his release (Florence Martino identified someone she knew only as "Rip" making numerous visits to their house). Robertson died in 1970, supposedly of the aftereffects of malaria contracted during service in Vietnam.
In addition to Bayo, Pawley, Martino and Robertson, the expedition was accompanied by Dick Billings, a LIFE staff writer obtained through the Pawley-Luce connection. Billings would later head the LIFE team in Dallas which purchased the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, as well as Marina Oswald's story rights (neither of which saw public exposure under LIFE auspices). Much later. Billings was hired by Robert Blakey, the second head of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, as editorial director for the final report of the HSCA.
JFK was assassinated a few months later. Meanwhile, it is of note the CIA had leaked Bay of Pig information to Hal Hendrix to kick off the exposure of classified information to the public. Senator Kenneth Keating (R from NY) was also being fed the same classified information. The ex-pat Cuban community in Miami was pissed at the Khrushchev peace deal with Kennedy. They were determined to undermine the deal and prove Soviets hid missiles.
One of the first leads Schweiker was asked to check came from a source he considered impeccable: Clare Boothe Luce. Luce is one of the wealthiest women in the world, widow of the founder of the Time Inc. publishing empire, former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, former Ambassador to Italy, successful Broadway playwright, international socialite, and longtime civic activist. Clare Boothe Luce was the last person in the world Schweiker would have suspected of leading him on a wild goose chase, yet the chase began almost immediately. Right after Schweiker announced the formation of his Kennedy assassination subcommittee, he was visited by Vera Glaser, a syndicated Washington columnist. Glaser told him she had just interviewed Clare Boothe Luce and that Luce had given her some information relating to the assassination. Schweiker immediately called Luce and she, quite cooperatively and in detail, confirmed the story she had told Glaser.
Luce said that some time after the Bay of Pigs she received a call from her "great friend" William Pawley, who lived in Miami. A man of immense wealth, who had made his millions in oil during World War II, Pawley had gained fame setting up the Flying Tigers with General Claire Chennault. Pawley had owned major sugar interests in Cuba, as well as Havana's bus, trolley and gas systems and he was close to both pre-Castro Cuban rulers, President Carlos Prio and General Fulgencio Batista. (Pawley was one of the dispossessed American investors in Cuba who early tried to convince Eisenhower that Castro was a Communist and urged him to arm the exiles in Miami.)
Luce said that Pawley had gotten the idea of putting together a fleet of speedboats-sea-going "Flying Tigers" as it were, which would be used by the exiles to dart in and out of Cuba on "intelligence gathering" missions. He asked her to sponsor one of these boats and she agreed. As a result of her sponsorship, Luce got to know the three-man crew of the boat "fairly well," as she said. She called them "my boys" and said they visited her a few times in her New York townhouse. It was one of these boat crews, Luce said, that originally brought back the news of Russian missiles in Cuba. Because Kennedy didn't react to it, she said she helped feed it to Senator Kenneth Keating, who made it public. She then wrote an article for Life magazine predicting the missile crisis. "Well, then came the nuclear showdown and the President made his deal with Khrushchev and I never saw my young Cubans again," she said. The boat operations were stopped, she said, shortly afterwards when Pawley was notified that the U.S. was invoking the Neutrality Act and would prevent any further exile missions into Cuba.
Luce said she had not thought about her boat crew until the day that President Kennedy was killed. That evening she received a telephone call from one of the crew members. She told Schweiker his name was "something like" Julio Fernandez, and he said he was calling her from New Orleans. Julio Fernandez told her that he and the other crew members had been forced out of Miami after the Cuban missile crisis and that they had started a "Free Cuba" cell in New Orleans.
Luce said that Fernandez told her that Oswald had approached his group and offered his services as a potential Castro assassin. He said his group did not believe Oswald, suspected he was really a Communist and decided to keep tabs on him. Fernandez said they found that Oswald was, indeed, a Communist, and they eventually penetrated his "cell" and tape-recorded his talks, including his bragging that he could shoot anyone because he was "the greatest shot in the world with a telescopic lens." Fernandez said that Oswald then suddenly came into money and went to Mexico City and then Dallas. According to Luce, Fernandez also told her that his group had photographs of Oswald and copies of handbills Oswald had been distributing on the streets of New Orleans. Fernandez asked Luce what he should do with this information and material...
Note from an author:
December of 1976, when I was about to start working for the Assassinations Committee, I stumbled across some other fascinating facts related to Clare Boothe Luce's tip to Senator Schweiker. That was when I learned, for instance, that her "great friend" in Miami, William Pawley, was a longtime associate of the CIA. Never an official spook, Pawley was nonetheless a member of the Old Boys network and was especially close to CIA Director Allen Dulles. He had helped transform his Flying Tigers into one of the first CIA proprietary airlines, Civil Air Transport, and had set up for the Agency a front called the Pacific Corporation as an offshoot of the Tigers. He had been involved in the CIA's overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala and he had backed more than one Castro assassination attempt. But Pawley was not just a backer of exile groups, he wanted to be a participant, and I came across a bizarre story about one of his secret excursions to Cuba.
Early one morning in the summer of 1963, a 65-foot luxury yacht named the Flying Tiger II slid away from its dock behind a mansion on Miami Beach's Sunset Island and headed for Cuba. The yacht belonged to Pawley. Aboard were three CIA paramilitary operatives; a cache of heavy firearms and explosives was locked in its stateroom. The yacht was scheduled to rendezvous off the coast of Cuba with an amphibious aircraft, a Catalina PBY, provided by the CIA. Aboard the aircraft were Pawley; a fellow named John Martino, who had worked for Mob bosses in Havana's casinos and had been imprisoned by Castro; Life magazine's Miami bureau chief Richard Billings (the same fellow who would later become the Assassinations Committee's chief writer); Billing's photographer, Terrence Spence; a daring Alpha 66 veteran Cuban infiltrator named Eduardo ("Eddie Bayo") Perez; and a raiding party of eleven CIA-trained Cuban exiles. The aim of the mission was for Eddie Bayo and his exile party, using a small, high-speed boat provided by the CIA, to sneak ashore, capture two Russian military technicians from a Cuban missile site and bring them back to the United States. Then, using the documentation that Life magazine's staffers would provide, a major press conference would proclaim that here was living proof that Soviet missiles were still in Cuba. The mission was a tragic failure. Radio contact with Bayo and his raiding party was lost and they were never heard from again. The Flying Tiger II and Pawley returned to Miami and Life never wrote a story about the mission.
1964: Eugene was living in Belle Glade, Florida as a vice president of Talisman Sugar at the time William took over the company. After the sugar cane workers went out on strike and the troubled company was sold in the
Early 1970’s: Eugene moved to Graham, Texas and founded Pacific Oil Company.
January 7, 1977: While many Americans were coping with one of the worst winters in U.S. history, an 80-year-old Miami Beach resident, whose fortune had been made off the public’s desire for refuge from the cold, composed a note in his Sunset Island home. Then, he lifted a pistol to his chest and fired a bullet into his heart.
He was still alive when the ambulance arrived, “but died a short time later” according to the Miami police who told reporters William Pawley “had been in failing health.” His death came as Frank Sinatra fans mourned the death of his mother, Dolly Sinatra, in a plane crash that also claimed the life of her close friend from New Jersey, Ann Carboni, coincidentally the wife of the former China National Aviation Corporation dentist in Calcutta.
That night, the national broadcast of CBS Evening News devoted less than half-a- minute to reporting that William Douglas Pawley, a former Ambassador to Brazil, had committed suicide.
The Washington Post, two days later, referred to him as an aviation expert and devoted 309 words to his life.
The New York Post announced “Flying Tigers’ Founder Dies” and noted that Pawley had raised over $250,000 for the election campaign of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956 and another $100,000 for Vice President Nixon's unsuccessful race against John F. Kennedy in 1960.
Time magazine noted William Pawley’s passing in its customary inch of coverage which stated that in 1958 President Eisenhower had dispatched Pawley to Cuba on a secret mission to persuade President Fulgencio Batista that a caretaker government should be installed to prevent revolutionaries from taking control of the island. Batista refused to step down, and three weeks later Fidel Castro took power. The underpinnings and aftermath of the incident would lead to animosity between Pawley, State Department members and the next President, John F. Kennedy.
Pawley’s life as a world financier, envoy, and philanthropist merited 15 inches in The New York Times.
Down in South Carolina, where an island is named for the Pawley family, The Florence Morning News obituary pointed out that General James Doolittle had “once served as a test pilot for Pawley,” when he sold planes to China.
The Florence Morning News also stated that Pawley had moved to “Havana, Cuba in 1949 to found a bus company but returned to Washington in 1951.” After retiring, he served on the board of the “George C. Marshall Research Foundation, U.S. Strategic Command, the Eisenhower Presidential Library Commission and the Boys Club of America.”
The U.S. Strategic Command in Nebraska trained Air Force pilots for doomsday combat in the event of nuclear war. The introduction to Pawley’s autobiography was completed by his friend, Gen. Bruce K. Holloway, on June 21, 1975.
Holloway’s career that took him from flying prop fighter planes against the Japanese in World War II to overseeing, during the first term of the Nixon Administration, the Strategic Air Command’s nuclear strike force including “more than 1,000 intercontinental ballistic missiles and 500 long-range jet bombers.” Holloway’s responsibilities included listing potential nuclear targets and determining what weapons should be used on them. His early training in such matters was gained during the Cuban crisis when he was deputy commander of the U.S. Strike Command stationed in Tampa at MacDill Air Force Base.
Holloway and Pawley had an earlier common bond that predated the threat of communism in the Caribbean. From January to July of 1942, Holloway was in China with the Flying Tigers while they were “under contract to the government of Chiang Kai-shek” prior to being absorbed into the U.S. 14th Air Force. Holloway outlived Pawley by more than two decades.
William Douglas Pawley was survived by his second wife, Edna Cadenhead Pawley; two daughters from his first marriage, Annie Hahr McKay and Irene Baldwin; and a son, William Jr.; and a niece and long-time secretary and sharer of CIA anti-Castro secrets, Anita Pawley, who said he suffered with painful, incurable shingles for more than a year. Anita lived four decades longer, passing away on January 9, 2023, a month shy of her 100th birthday.
Anita was the daughter of William’s older brother George Plummer Pawley who died in 1936—motivating William to bring his other brothers, Eugene, Edward and Wallace, into his business ventures.
Of note: In 1923, Anita grew up in Port au Prince Haiti during the period of US occupation, so George must have had business in Haiti. She served as William’s executive assistant. Apparently, the Pawley family were part of the International Syndicate that made bank from CIA/Gladio style operations even before they had a name.
William employed Anita’s sister, Marcia Ragsdale Pawley, at his Miami Transit Company. She passed away in 2011. She and Anita were involved in the art world, which lends the question — money laundering? She worked for Pan American Airways and for her uncle’s Miami Transit Company until retirement. While at Pan Am, Marcia took flying lessons and soloed on small seaplanes but never used her license. Marcia was the second president of Beaux Arts, support groups for the Lowe Gallery of the University of Miami. Her creative Beaux Arts Ball costumes are legendary.
Seven months after William’s death, the Florence Morning News announced the July 10th death in Graham, Texas, of one of William’s surviving brothers, the 71-year-old “Eugene D. Pawley, a descendent of one of South Carolina's earliest families, for which Pawley's Island is named.” Survivors included his wife, two sons, “numerous distant relatives in this area of South Carolina” and his brother, Edward P. Pawley of Coral Gables who had worked with William in China, the Dominican Republic and at Talisman Sugar, Eugene and his brothers were aviation trailblazers “before and during World War II and helped found the Flying Tigers which operated in Mainland China before the Mao regime takeover.”
Eugene was living in Graham TX, two-and-a-half hours west of Dallas, when his brother committed suicide.
Wallace Pawley, another Pawley brother, was born in 1908 in New York City, where he eventually worked for William out of the InterContinent office in Rockefeller Center. Later, he was a U.S. Coast Guard Reserve pilot, who happened to observe William’s Flying Tiger II as Operation TILT was getting under way in Florida waters. He just so happened to see his brother in operation? Who believes that?
Shingles can be triggered by stress. Pawley’s disease spread across his body and feet as Watergate hearings focused attention on the Cuban exiles he had helped organize and the DRE’s involvement with TILT and Oswald came into focus. By the time Gaeton Fonzi wanted him to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the shingles had become so excruciating that Pawley exited his illustrious life. His relative Cash Pawley joined the choir of shingles shills.
October 1975: Pawley was interviewed by Soldier of Fortune for the spring of 1976 article about the “Bayo-Pawley Affair” (TILT). Gaeton Fonzi, investigator for the 1975 Church Committee and 1977 House Select Committee on Assassinations, wrote in his 1993 book, The Last Investigation, that on his first day as a HSCA investigator, “I sent to Washington a list of witnesses I planned to interview and notified those I thought should testify under oath. William Pawley was near the top of the list.” When speaking to him by phone after reading the HSCA report, Fonzi told me Pawley was the first person he would have called to testify.
Pawley’s animosity toward Kennedy had never subsided. When he worked with Richard R. Tryon on Why the Communists are Winning as of 1976, the manuscript included his sentiments about the slain Commander in Chief whom he wished Admiral Arleigh Burke had mutinied against along with himself.
“When I reflect upon all of this today, and the narrow margin between the success or failure of my mission, I often wish that I had violated my instructions, as I believe that the Admiral commanding at the Bay of Pigs should have violated the orders he was to receive from President Kennedy. Either violation could have saved Cuba from Communism. Under normal conditions, a government official is honor-bound to abide by his instructions. But in a time of such unusual crisis, the admiral could have answered Kennedy, “Sir, I didn’t get your message in time.”
I am compelled to conclude that the deliberate ouster of Batista by Wieland and Matthews and Rubottom combined, is nearly as monumental a tragedy as the surrender of China to the Communists by a similar group of State Department officials, abetted by others, a decade earlier.”
Gaeton Fonzi, investigator for the 1975 Church Committee also revealed that during his questioning of Clare Boothe Luce “she simply sweetly smiled” when he asked why “she had concocted the name of Julio Fernandez” when she called CIA Director Colby with her tale linking Oswald to Castro. “I also discovered that Clare Boothe Luce was on the Board Of Directors of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers ... formed in 1975” by “the Agency’s top-psych warfare expert ... David Atlee Phillips.”
Clare Boothe Luce lived well into the next decade. Her sources for claims about Oswald being pro-Castro were never substantiated. She was also the Ambassador to Italy during Operation Gladio’s beginnings.
A September 7, 1976 document revealed that Pawley was “verbally advised that the proposed interview [with the FBI] would concern knowledge he might have concerning Cubans coming to this country at any time in the past for the purpose of carrying out any plot against former United States President John F. Kennedy in retaliation for alleged plots on the part of CIA against Cuban Premier Fide Castro. He was further advised that this inquiry was being conducted pursuant to an Obstruction of Justice inquiry into the causes for which John Roselli had been recently murdered and his body found in Dumfoundling Bay, Dade County, Florida.” Roselli worked for the CIA and was involved in the attempts to assassinate Castro. He was part of the Chicago mob. (pull up his pic and tell me who he looks like). Roselli’s real name is Filippo Sacco from Esperia Italy which is between Rome and Naples. He moved to LA in 1924 to bootleg liquor for mob. Al Capone moves him back to Chicago. Roselli friends with Columbia Pics Harry Cohn. Roselli was indicting for racketeering with unions. Kicked out of the army and convicted of extortion working with movie studios. He moves to Las Vegas. The documents showed that, in September 1960, the CIA recruited Robert Maheu, an ex-FBI agent and aide to Howard Hughes in Las Vegas, to approach Roselli under the pretense of representing international corporations that wanted Castro dead due to lost gambling interests. Roselli introduced Maheu to mobster leaders Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante Jr. Supplied with six poison pills from the CIA, Giancana and Trafficante tried unsuccessfully to have people place the poison in Castro's food. Further attempts were canceled soon thereafter due to the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. Seems a bit round about for the CIA bc the mafia worked hand in hand with them.
On June 24 and September 22, 1975, Roselli testified before the 1975 U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCIA) led by Idaho Senator Frank Church about the CIA plan to kill Castro, Operation Mongoose. Shortly before Roselli testified, an unknown person shot and killed Giancana in the basement of his Illinois home. This happened just days before Giancana was to testify before the committee. Giancana's murder supposedly prompted Roselli to permanently leave Los Angeles and Las Vegas for Miami, Florida. On April 23, 1976, Roselli was called before the committee to testify about a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. Three months after his first round of testimony on the Kennedy assassination, the Committee wanted to recall Roselli. However, at this point, he had been missing since July 28. On August 3, Senator Howard Baker, a member of the new SSCIA, requested that the FBI investigate Roselli's disappearance. On August 7, 1976, ten days after his disappearance, Roselli's decomposing body was found by a fisherman in a 55-gallon steel fuel drum floating in Dumfoundling Bay near Miami, Florida
Conveniently, after Roselli's death, journalists Jack Anderson and Les Whitten published an editorial stating that Roselli had told associates that individuals he had been recruited to kill Castro but had been turned by the Cuban leader to assassinate President John F. Kennedy instead. Jack Anderson is CIA. CIA kills the guy and then pins their assassination of JFK on him.
Returning to the story where Pawley hates JFK, Pawley stated that he personally had no knowledge whatsoever nor had he heard any rumors concerning individuals coming to this country from Cuba or any other location with the purpose of carrying out a plot against President Kennedy, in response. He noted that he had many Cuban friends and contacts over the years but that he never received any indication that such activity had occurred.” Because this is technically true, there were no Cubans coming here to kill JFK. It was CIA, OAS, and Cuban exiles, or our Gladio just helped to hide the operation.
A carefully stated denial if one considers that Pawley’s “hitmen” and friends in the Cuban Exile community already were in America. On April 30, 1986, Pawley’s first wife, Annie Hahr Dobbs Pawley, died at 88 in Miami Beach. She was the mother of William D. Pawley, Jr., whose dark hair, movie-star good looks led to his 1949 brief engagement to beautiful 17-year-old actress, Elizabeth Taylor, which the media reminisced about in 1995. William Jr. had cooperated with Anthony Carrozza on the writing of the biography of his father and passed away a few months after its March 2012 publication. William was in the oil business in Texas.
Annie Pawley (wife) had two sons one of which, Clifton Pawley, had died of polio in Mexico in 1951. A decade after Annie’s death, her grandson, Clifton Pawley, Jr. was gunned down in the driveway of his Coral Gables home near Riviera Country Club in April of 1996, and lay there for two hours before he died. “Defending the family's white Toyota Land Cruiser and black 1995 Buick from an intruder, the father of three collapsed beneath the spreading oaks, mortally wounded in the chest, handgun at his side, just a few hundred feet from the driving range of one of Dade's most exclusive country clubs. Pawley was 45. His violent death closes a chapter in the saga of his well-connected family.” Clifton Jr has spent time in Cuba
The shooting of Clifton Pawley was believed to be part of a pattern of crime—“robberies, driveway carjackings and the brutal double murder on the University of Miami campus”—unrelated to the murders and bombings in the Cuban exile community A $25,000 reward was offered, but there were no takers. A year later, a Metro-Dade homicide detective said there was an unnamed suspect. They were still seeking evidence against the suspect in November when another Coral Gables resident, Dr. Rolando Gomez was shot in his Alhambra Circle driveway.
William Douglas Pawley’s second wife, Edna Cadenhead Pawley, had passed away at age 98, in 2004, in the Sunset Island home, where she had resided for sixty years, nearly half of which were without him. Survivors at the time of her August 28, 2004 death had included her stepson, William D. Pawley, Jr., and stepdaughters, Annie Hahr McKay and Irene Baldwin.
Only the Miami Herald truly recognized Pawley’s importance in the world and made his suicide the front-page feature headline with a separate, virtually full-page article inside devoted to “A Swashbuckler in Gray Flannel Suit; Arch Conservative Left his Mark Around the World” which detailed Pawley’s extraordinary life and his willingness to personally pay for Fidel Castro’s assassination in 1959— “Find me,” he said, “one man, just one man who can go it alone and get Castro. I’ll pay anything — almost anything.” But Pawley retracted his offer two days later. “I’ve talked to someone myself,” he said, “and they’re all doubledealers these days.”
One of the writers of the Miami Herald article about Pawley’s self-inflicted death was Jim Buchanan who had stamped “‘Communism killed Kennedy’” on each copy of Frank Fiorini’s IACB monthly bulletin.
Pawley’s suicide eliminated any questioning of him about Operation TILT; Luce; the cuban exiles interaction with Oswald; assassination plots against foreign leaders; his relationships with the CIA, E. Howard Hunt, Frank Fiorini/Sturgis, Bernard Barker, the other anti-Castro Cubans at Watergate; and Pawley's activities surrounding JFK’s assassination in Dallas where his brother was in the oil business.
On Sunday, October 30, 1977, the “House Select Committee on Assassinations staff members Elizabeth Palmer, Patricia Orr, Jonathan Blackmer, and William Triplett” met the liaison “at Agency Headquarters to review sanitized DDO material relating to the Bayo-Pawley Action. Staffer notes were classified and retained for review by DDO.”
The coverage of William Pawley’s death failed to note that he was not only one of the wealthiest men of his era but had been among the most powerful men in the nation as a member of the Doolittle Committee (Doolittle worked for Pawley) reviewing the effectiveness of the Central Intelligence Agency. The top-secret Doolittle Special Study Group (DSSG) report would lead to a deadly CIA covert policy that was at odds with the principles of diplomacy and democracy—and would be cited twenty years after it was written as perhaps the darkest document in U.S. history, sanctioning Federal government lawlessness, both domestically and internationally. This was a whitewashing of the CIA and its conduct, in short.
Some eight months before Pawley’s death, Senator Frank Church asserted that the Doolittle Special Study Group report created the atmosphere in which the CIA found it acceptable to violate the rights of U.S. citizens by opening the public’s mail, breaking into homes and offices, interfering with the Constitutional right to free assembly, compiling derogatory information on critics, and plotting to overthrow foreign governments as well as assassinate world leaders.
During World War II, Senator Church had been a U.S. Army intelligence officer in the China who became disgusted with corruption thriving within Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalists which probably did not sit well with the Generalissimo’s friend Pawley. Ten months after William Douglas Pawley took his life, I called William Franke. He said he had kept in touch with Hadley and Doolittle but was shocked to hear that Pawley had taken his life. “I will call Doolittle’s wife about it,” Franke said. When I told him Hadley rambled some when I interviewed him, Franke said, “I heard he was ill but decided not to call.” He added, “I’m 83 now, my voice is in better shape than my body.”
Attorney Hadley died at home in New York City on January 19, 1979 at age 84. Ex-Navy Secretary Franke in his beloved Rutland, Vermont on June 30, 1979 from gall bladder surgery complications at age 85. Daredevil General Doolittle in Pebble Beach California from a stroke at age 96 on September 27, 1993.
The 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon ended most cries for restraint on the CIA. Intelligence failures would be blamed on the prohibitions placed on the Agency in the 1970s by Congress. While the new millennium should have seen an investigation to determine if the CIA had been hijacked by the political agenda of those whose vision of America’s role in the world is distorted by the military-industrial complex, religious fervor, and paranoia stoked by media looking for ratings, the CIA instead was absorbed into a super apparatus created for homeland security.
The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 amended the National Security Act so that the CIA answers to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) which in turn provides daily reports to the President. Robert Gates, who turned down being named as DNI because of its cumbersome bureaucracy, eventually agreed to return to Washington to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense and continued to hold the position into the administration of President Barack Obama.
Before he died William Douglas Pawley got in some praise for the Luces and final jabs at President Kennedy and his policies. In Russia Is Winning, Pawley noted it was “in 1935 that I first began to feel a growing alarm at the threat of world communism ... the subject of this book.” He noted that “Less than twenty years ago, my good friend Henry Luce of Time, Inc. proclaimed the ‘American Century.’ Today Americans of equal responsibility and intellectual distinction are asking not whether the century belongs to us, but whether we can survive as a nation.”
Pawley called for continuing the fight against communism through “the vital rebuilding of our defenses, military and otherwise.” This was “ably stated by Clare Boothe Luce, former member of Congress and former U.S. ambassador to Italy. This true statesman, a keen observer of both domestic and foreign affairs, [made her statement] in a speech before the Association of the United States Army” on the Army’s 200th anniversary. In her 1975 speech, Luce asserted that democracy’s weakness is “‘its inability to formulate, support and conduct a coherent foreign policy ... I plead that on the matter of our national survival as we face the Communist challenge, we unite as one great people.’”
Pawley lamented, “JFK on China scoffed at us ‘witch hunting’ and ‘red happy.’ Then he turned his focus to JFK and Cuba. ‘I did all in my power to help Cubans prevent the forces of Communism from taking over their country–-only in part because they have been my cherished friends; my first concern was the welfare of my country. Without question, the Latin American Affairs Division of our State Department must bear the full responsibility for the loss of Cuba to Castro, while others outside government like Herbert Matthews of the New York Times and other members of the media must also share the blame. True, John F. Kennedy took the responsibility for State Department officials answerable to him. No matter, and I hate to have to say this about an assassinated President for the Bay of Pigs and for his surrender of American interests, while he was praised for fortitude, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, young John Kennedy may well go down in history as the worst President we ever had. More than courage was needed. As a result of his helmsmanship and navigation from the bridge of the ship of State, the Monroe Doctrine was scuttled and along with it the entire fabric of inter- American security that had thus far been so painstakingly woven.
A year after William Pawley’s “suicide”, a man entered the U.S. State Department, received his “top secret” security clearance, and began to spy on the U.S. for Cuba for the next three decades. Walter Kendall Myers of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and his wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, were indicted in June 2009, just as the Obama administration sought to normalize relations with Cuba nearly half a century after the nation’s suspension from the Organization of American States.
The couple had first been contacted in New York and eventually passed information to Cuban intelligence agents in over half-a-dozen countries in the Caribbean, Central America and South America through means as imaginative as switching of supermarket shopping carts to hand off secrets. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered a comprehensive review of the case to provide insight that would feed into decision-making regarding administration policy on issuing security clearances.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking at the University of Kentucky on April 9, 2010, was asked about normalization of relationships between the U.S. and Cuba. Pawley would have liked her response: “Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening while the Castros are still in charge ... because they would then lose all of their excuses for what hasn’t happened in Cuba in the last 50 years.” Clinton explained that it was “the first time, a lot of countries that have done nothing but berate the United States for our failure to be more open to Cuba have now started criticizing Cuba because they’re letting people die. They’re letting these hunger strikers die. They’ve got 200 political prisoners who are there for trivial reasons. And so I think that many in the world are starting to see what we have seen a long time, which is a very intransigent, entrenched regime that has stifled opportunity for the Cuban people, and I hope will begin to change and we’re open to changing with them, but I don’t know that that will happen before some more time goes by.”
For another politician, Florida Republican U.S. Senator Mel Martinez, the spy incident was the perfect opportunity to revive Pawley’s old Cold War fears of an assault from the island, rather than to suggest that the island was keeping an eye out for its own interests after witnessing invasion plots, bazooka attacks, assassination plots and the bombing of one of its airports. Senator Martinez asserted that the spying was “a stark reminder that just 90 miles from our shores, there is a government hostile toward the people of the United States, a regime that seeks to do us harm and works against our interests around the world.”
The Senator commended the FBI and called upon the Obama administration to counter Cuba’s unwavering conspiracy against America—the Castro “regime’s clandestine assault against the U.S.—an assault that has continued for more than half a century.” After becoming the first Cuban-American member of the United States Senate, Mel Martinez announced he would not run for re-election in 2010 but resigned before his term was over to become a lobbyist and then a Latin American regional banker at at what is now JP Morgan Chase.
In 2023, President Biden announced that he would be withholding from release the final 4,000+ documents relating to the JFK assassination for national security reasons to the dismay of researchers like myself. Soon thereafter, he made the CIA Director a cabinet position for the first time and time marches on.
This is great! As a resident of Pawleys Island, I can tell you - there are mysteries abound in regard to some of the residents - like Oliver North. Some of the last names mentioned in the article also ring a bell.
Yep. Talk about Gladio...