Carl Jenkins - Key Date Chronology
1965-66 Senior Advisor, Dominican Republic National Police for counterinsurgency program design and training.(David Atlee Phillip in Dominican Republic as CIA Chief of Station and Col. Nestor Pino there as US Army)
1964-65 Senior Operations Advisor for a
still-sensitive Cuban project (Handwritten notation – Castro
assassination program)
1961-1963 Special Warfare Advisor to I Corps
Commander, Danag, SVN; Chief of Hoa Cam training cetnr; responsible for
counterinsurgency program design & operational activities of 1 “B” and 11
“A” Detachments, U.S. Army Special Forces.
1960-61 Chief of Base for Cuban project, first in
Florida, then in Guatemala; responsible for selection & training of cadre,
assignment of officers for invasion brigade, maritime infiltration &
operational management of small teams and individual agents
1958-59 Training & Operations Officer for maritime infiltration of small teams in SE Asia project involving Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines (When Oswald was there and recruited for special project involving Cuba)
1955-58 Far East Training Station – Instructor in
paramilitary tactics and resistance organizations; Station Plans &
Operations Officer; trained cadres for Thai Border Police and Chinese
Nationalist Special Forces
1953-55 Inspector-Instructor of Infantry Reserve
Unit, Captain USMCR (New Orleans)
Full Resume -
Carl E. Jenkins, Consultant (703) 243-3977
Resume-December 1985
Box 2640, Falls Church, Virginia, 22042 U.S.A.
SUMMARY OF U.S. GOVERNMENT EXPERIENCE
Feb-Nov 85 Consultant, DOD/ISA/Africa, designed
Coastal Security Program
1984-85 Consultant (pro bono public) Central
American Specialist with Undersecretary of State for Security Assistance,
Science, & Technology.
1973 – Requested early retirement from CIA at
conclusion of hostilities in SE Asia.
1971-73 Chief of Base, South Laos. Command
responsibility for 50 U.S. & 600 local and third country national
employees, annual budget @ $15 million; operational guidance, training and
support for 10,000+ regular & guerrilla forces; liaison among U.S., Lao,
& third country units & officials.
1969-70 Plans/Programs/Budget Officer for Laos
Country Program
1966-68 Senior Advisor, Internal Security Operations
& Training, Republic of Nicaragua
1965-66 Senior Advisor, Dominican Republic National
Police for counterinsurgency program design & training.
1964-65 Senior Operations Advisor for a still-sensitive Cuban project (Handwritten
notation – Castro assassination program)
1961-1963 Special Warfare Advisor to I Corps
Commander, Danag, SVN; Chief of Hoa Cam training cetnr; responsible for
counterinsurgency program design & operational activities of 1 “B” & 11
“A” Detachments, U.S. Army Special Forces.
1960-61 Chief of Base for Cuban project, first in
Florida, then in Guatemala; responsible for selection & training of cadre,
assignment of officers for invasion brigade, maritime infiltration &
operational management of small teams and individual agents
1958-59 Training & Operations Officer for
maritime infiltration of small teams in SE Asia project involving Indonesia,
Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines
1955-58 Far East Training Station – Instructor in
paramilitary tactics & resistance organizations; Station Plans &
Operations Officer; trained cadres for Thai Border Police and Chinese
Nationalist Special Forces
1953-55 Inspector-Instructor of Infantry Reserve
Unit, Captain USMCR
1952-53 Paramilitary, Survival, Evasion & Escape
Instructor for CIA
1950-52 USMC infantry officer, 2ndLT & 1stLt
1947-48 USMC, first member and First Sergeant of
Reserve Rifle Company, commissioned 2ndLt in 1948
1944-46 USMC,
Central Pacific Theater, Private to Staff Sergeant
CARL JENKINS Wiki
Carl Elmer Jenkins a Central Intelligence
Agency officer, closely connected to several key figures behind
the JFK assassination.
Background
Jenkins was born in Louisiana and joined
the United States Marine Corps during World War II, becoming a commissioned
officer in 1948.
CIA career
Jenkins joined the Agency in 1952.
Executive Action
For several years Jenkins was involved
with Executive Action, a covert program for instigating regime
change in Latin America, including mostly notably the government
of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala. During this time he worked
with William "Rip" Robertson and many figures implicated in
the JFK assassination, including Tracy Barnes, E. Howard
Hunt, David Atlee Phillips and David Sanchez Morales.
Bay of Pigs
On his return to the United States he joined
Phillips and Morales in becoming part of Theodore
Shackley's JMWAVE station in Miami, Florida. He is also
frequently named[1] in
surviving documentation from the AMWORLD project (the CIA's codename
for its role in the Kennedy administration's plans for overthrowing Fidel
Castro).
In the summer of 1963 Jenkins worked closely with
Morales in providing paramilitary training for Manuel Artime (MRR)
and Rafael 'Chi Chi' Quintero. He also become Qunitero's handler.
Laos
Jenkins also worked with the Shackley organization
in Laos, appointed Plans/Programs/Budget Management Officer in 1969 and
served as Chief of Base from 1970 to 1973.[2] Jenkins
officially retired from the CIA in 1973 in Laos and moved
to Malaysia for a couple of months followed by Australia.
Eventually went to the U.S. after the dollar dropped in Australia.
Iran-Contra
Jenkins played a significant role in the covert
efforts to resupply the Nicaraguan Contras in the mid-1980s, in
circumvention of Congressional proscriptions, as led by Oliver
North and Richard Secord.
Sparticus
Carl Elmer Jenkins
Carl Elmer Jenkins was born in Louisiana on 1st October, 1926. During the Second World War he joined the United States Marines. He was commissioned as an officer in 1948.
In 1952 Jenkins joined the Central Intelligence
Agency. According to Larry Hancock, the author of Someone Would Have
Talked (2006), in the early 1950's Jenkins "became a CIA
paramilitary, survival, evasion and escape trainer for the CIA." It was
during this period that he first worked with Tracy Barnes, E.Howard Hunt, William
(Rip) Robertson, David
Atlee Phillips and David Morales.
Larry
Hancock adds that: "From 1955-1958 Jenkins served
as an instructor for paramilitary tactics and resistance and trained cadre for
both the Thai Border Police and the Chinese Nationalist Special Forces".
Carl Jenkins became Training & Operations Officer for maritime infiltration
of small teams in SE Asia Project. This involved Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia
and the Philippines (1958-1959).
On his return to the United States he joined Ted
Shackley and David Morales at JM WAVE in
Miami. In 1960 he was appointed as Chief of Base for Cuban Project. He was
responsible for selection and training of cadre, assignment of officers for
invasion brigade, maritime infiltration and operational management of small
teams and individual agents.
Carl Jenkins was also involved in AMWORLD, a CIA
program to overthrow Fidel
Castro. In the summer of 1963 he worked closely with David Morales in
providing paramilitary training for Manuel Artime and Rafael
'Chi Chi' Quintero and other members of the Movement
for the Recovery of the Revolution (MRR).
According to the historians, Lamar
Waldron and Thom Hartmann (Ultimate
Sacrifice) AMWORLD was a plan to replace Fidel
Castro with a coalition government led by Enrique
Ruiz-Williams, Manuel Artime, Manolo Ray, Eloy Menoya
and Tony
Varona.
In 1965 Carl Jenkins was appointed as Senior Advisor
to the Dominican Republic National Police for Counter-Insurgency Program Design
& Training. The following year he held a similar post in Nicaragua.
Ted
Shackley was placed in charge of CIA secret
war in Laos.
He appointed Thomas G. Clines as
his deputy and in 1969 Jenkins became Plans/Programs/Budget Management Officer
in Laos. Two years later he was appointed as Chief of Base in South Laos.
Carl Jenkins retired from the CIA in 1973. However,
he continued to do freelance work for the agency. This included work in Iran,
Saudia Arabia, Pakistan and Egypt.
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In October, 1985, Congress agreed to vote 27 million
dollars in non-lethal aid for the Contras in Nicaragua.
However, members of the Ronald Reagan administration
decided to use this money to provide weapons to the Contras and
the Mujahideen in
Afghanistan.
Gene
Wheaton was recruited to use National Air to transport
these weapons. He agreed but began to have second thoughts when he discovered
that Richard
Secordwas involved in the operation and in May 1986
Wheaton told William Casey,
director of the CIA,
about what he knew about this illegal operation. Casey refused to take any
action, claiming that the agency or the government were not involved in what
later became known as Irangate.
According to David Corn (Blonde
Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA Crusade) in 1985 Jenkins introduced Gene Wheatonto Paul Hoven.
Jenkins and Wheaton were at this time involved in trying to "win federal
contracts to transport humanitarian supplies to anticommunist rebels, including
the Mujahedeen of Afghanistan and the Contras". They failed in this
venture and then complained to the State Department about the activities
of Richard
Secord, Oliver North, Ted
Shackley, Edwin
Wilson and Tom Clines..
Hoven arranged for Wheaton to meet with Daniel Sheehan,
a left-wing lawyer. Wheaton told him that Tom Clines and Ted
Shackley had been running a top-secret assassination
unit since the early 1960s. According to Wheaton, it had begun with an assassination
training program for Cuban exiles and the original target had been Fidel
Castro.
Paul
Hoven also put Wheaton into contact with Newt Royce
and Mike Acoca, two journalists based in Washington.
The first article on this scandal appeared in the San Francisco Examiner on
27th July, 1986. As a result of this story, Congressman Dante Fascell wrote a letter to
the Secretary of Defense, Casper
Weinberger, asking him if it "true that foreign money,
kickback money on programs, was being used to fund foreign covert operations."
Two months later, Weinberger denied that the government knew about this illegal
operation.
On 5th October, 1986, a Sandinista patrol in
Nicaragua shot down a C-123K cargo plane that was supplying the Contras. Eugene
Hasenfus, an Air America veteran, survived the crash and
told his captors that he thought the CIA was
behind the operation. He also provided information on two Cuban-Americans
running the operation in El Savador. This resulted in journalists being able to
identify Rafael
'Chi Chi' Quintero and Felix
Rodriguez as the two Cuban-Americans mentioned by
Hasenfus. It gradually emerged that Clines, Oliver North, Edwin
Wilson and Richard Secord were
also involved in this conspiracy to provide arms to the Contras.
On 12th December, 1986, Daniel Sheehan submitted
to the court an affidavit detailing the Irangate scandal. He also claimed
that Tom
Clines and Ted
Shackley were running a private assassination program
that had evolved from projects they ran while working for the CIA. Others named
as being part of this assassination team included Rafael
'Chi Chi' Quintero, Richard Secord, Felix
Rodriguez and Albert Hakim.
It later emerged that Gene Wheaton and
Carl E. Jenkins were the two main sources for the Secord-Clines affidavit.
It was eventually discovered that President Ronald Reaganhad
sold arms to Iran. The money gained from
these sales was used to provide support for the Contras,
a group of guerrillas engaged in an insurgency against the elected socialist
Sandinista government of Nicaragua.
Both the sale of these weapons and the funding of the Contras violated
administration policy as well as legislation passed by Congress.
On 23rd June, 1988, Judge James L. King ruled that
Sheehan's allegations were "based on unsubstantiated rumor and speculation
from unidentified sources with no firsthand knowledge". In February, 1989,
Judge King ruled that Sheenan had brought a frivolous lawsuit and ordered his
Christic Institute to pay the defendants $955,000. This was one of the highest
sanction orders in history and represented four times the total assets of the
Christic Institute.
In 1995 Gene Wheaton approached
the Assassination
Records Review Board with information on the death
of John
F. Kennedy. Anne Buttimer, Chief Investigator of the ARRB,
recorded that: " 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." It was later revealed
that Wheaton's friend was Carl Jenkins.
In an interview with William Law and
Mark Sobel in 2005, Gene Wheaton claimed
that Carl Jenkins and Rafael
Quinterowere both involved in the assassination of John
F. Kennedy.
John
Simkin attempted to contact Rafael
Quintero via his close friend Don Bohning.
Quintero refused to be interviewed but he did say that Gene Wheaton was
telling the truth as "he knew it". His explanation of Wheaton's story
was that he and Carl Jenkins had been lying to him when they said they were
involved in the assassination. However, Quintero was once quoted as saying: “If
I were ever granted immunity, and compelled to testify about past actions,
about Dallas and the Bay of Pigs, it would be the biggest scandal ever to rock
the United States.”
Primary Sources
(1) Edward S. Cates, Chief, Imagery Exploitation
Group, Memorandum (21st March, 1975)
1. On 19 March, Dino A.Brugioni, Chief, Western
Geographic Division, informed me that three personnel assigned to his division
had told him that while serving at JMWAVE, Miami, Florida or in the Imagery
Analysis Service in Washington during the 1960's, they had ,heard references to
assassination plans on Fidel Castro
2. On 20 March, I met with the following NPIC
personnel who had either served in the Imagery Analysis Service or at JMWAVE on
Cuban related problems: Gordon Duvall, Earl Shoemaker, Tom Helmke, Bruce
Barrett, Reyes Ponce, George Arthur; Eugene Lydon, and William Hanlon. The
purpose of this meeting was to ascertain whether their participation was
related to case officer generated materials or bona fide operations.
3. There appeared to be two plans involving Fidel
Castro and an incident that may have been related to Raul Castro.
The plans involving Fidel, to the knowledge of our
people, were:
(a) A folder, stored in the Photo Interpretation
area at JMWAVE contained materials relating to a plan to assassinate Castro in
the Bay of Pigs resort area where he maintained a yacht and was known to
vacation. The plan, possibly with the codeword : PATHFINDER, apparently had
been disapproved and was not under active consideration at the time. Our people
did not participate actively in the plan in any regard.
(b) While assigned to the Imagery Analysis Service,
a, number of our photo interpreters supported Carl Jenkins of the DD/P
concerning a plan to assassinate Castro at the DuPont Varadero Beach Estate,
east of Havana. Castro was known to frequent the estate and the plan was to use
a high-powered rifle in the attempt. The photo interpretation support was
restricted to providing annotated photographs and line drawings of the estate.
To our knowledge, this plan also was never implemented.
4. The incident involving Raul Castro was not a
formalized plan. It considered of a paramilitary raid on Santiago de Cuba
harbor. There was a rumor at JMWAVE that, while exiting the harbor, Raul
Castro's home had been fired upon by a paramilitary case officer named
"Rip" Robertson.
5. To the best of my knowledge, these facts
represent the totality of any participation by our personnel in these matters.
We have no further knowledge that the Fidel Castro operation ever advanced
beyond the planning stage.
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."
(4) Gene Wheaton,
note to the Assassination
Records Review Board on National Air notepaper
(undated)
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.
(6) Letter from Eileen A. Sullivan, Press and Public
Affairs Officer, Assassination
Records Review Board, to Gene Wheaton (20th
April, 1998)
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.
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.
On July 29, 1986, North had a meeting with retired
Air Force Major General Richard Secord, who was running the Contra resupply
effort as well as handling arms shipments to Iran. They discussed Ron Martin
and Sergio Brull, along with Miami gun dealer David Duncan and the use of an
East German ship that Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was holding.
Brull was also named by Secord in an interview he
had with the FBI in July 1986. Secord said Brull was an associate of Jack
Terrell, who had been involved in efforts to resupply the Contras.
In 1989, Brull was sued by a bank in Haiti for
allegedly absconding with the proceeds of a $1.4 million letter of credit that
was to buy 5,000 tons of Brazilian sugar for Haiti. The bank couldn't locate
Brull to serve him with the lawsuit and alleged that he had fled the country.
The bank was able to track the $1.4 million that Brull took to a bank in
Madrid, Spain."
Another member of this circle who was in Belize
around this time was Carl Jenkins, an old CIA agent whose previous claim to
fame was his role as Rafael "Chi Chi" Quintero's case officer during
the Bay of Pigs fiasco." (Quintero, an infamous CIA operative who worked
with Thomas Clines and Edwin Wilson, among others, was brought in by
Secord and Clines to help with the Contra resupply effort.)" Jenkins is
mentioned in a number of places in North's notebooks, including one memorable
list by North that reads "Gene Wheaton, Carl Jenkins, [John] Hull, [Rob]
Owen, [Oliver] North." This list was compiled by North on April 18, 1986,
apparently during a telephone conversation with Alan Fiers, director of the
CIA's Central American Task Force, who would later plead guilty to misleading
Congress on the Contra affair.
Almost every time Jenkins appears in North's notebooks,
he is in the company of Wheaton, the former Pentagon criminal investigator.
Wheaton said Jenkins was using the tiny nation of Belize as a training area for
Latin Americans and Laotians to fight in Nicaragua against the Sandinistas.
One of Jenkins's first assignments with the CIA was
in the 1954 coup in Guatemala. Jenkins and his helicopter company in Guatemala
were also customers of Commercial Helicopters in Baton Rouge, Louisiana."
(This company got most of its financing from Louisiana mobster and
savings-and-loan looter Herman K. Beebe, and one of its principals was a close
friend of drug dealer and CIA asset Barry Seal. More on this later.)
On January 11, 1984, the day after North had
scheduled a meeting with S. Cass Weiland and Senator Roth regarding Belize,
North got another phone call from George Woodworth. He wrote in his notebook
that it was about Weiland, who "wants to contact [the next word is
illegible] people in Belize camps." The word that is illegible appears to
be a four-letter word that begins with "dr" and ends with a
"g." However, it doesn't appear to be the word "drug."
About the same time that Jenkins was training
anti-Sandinistas in Belize and Corson's future attorney was saying the White
House was interested in moving on a project in Belize, a friend of George
Bush's, and Ronald Reagan's biggest campaign fundraiser in 1980 - i.e., Walter
Mischer - was getting involved in small English-speaking Belize. He started out
in 1984 in a shrimp business with his close friend, the late Houston developer
Keith Jackson..
Ross, while denying that the company ever did
business with his childhood buddy, Barry Seal, or the CIA, volunteered:
"We used to lease helicopters from Flying Tiger Airlines." This
airline company was established by General Claire Chennault in the 1950s as a
cargo company, and became one of the largest private cargo companies in the
world. It was not a CIA proprietary, but it did work for the CIA. It took its
name from the group of pilots organized by Chennault during World War II to fly
supplies to Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist Chinese. This group formed the
foundation for the CIA's proprietary airline, Civil Air Transport, a branch of
which became the infamous Air America.
Commercial Helicopters also negotiated the sale of helicopters
to Saudi Arabia for use as medical ambulances, and provided parts and services
to a helicopter company in Guatemala. This company, Helicopteros de Guatemala,
was run by Wheaton's buddy Carl Jenkins, the old CIA agent from Louisiana who
was living in Guatemala and training Contras in Belize. At the time Commercial
Helicopters filed for bankruptcy, it was holding for repair about $150,000
worth of helicopter parts belonging to Jenkins's company.
A letter filed with the bankruptcy court on April
11,1985, from Gary Villiard, the general manager of Commercial Helicopters,
states that on May 30, 1984, Jenkins and Ricardo Moratoya from Helicopteros de
Guatemala instructed him to transport a helicopter owned by the company from
New Orleans to Commercial Helicopters' facilities in Lafayette, and then to
ship it to Guatemala along with an engine belonging to them. Villiard said in
the letter that he complied.
Jenkins had other connections to the Ed Wilson/Tom
Clines/Ted Shackley/Dick Secord group. As previously noted, he was Chi Chi
Quintero's CIA case officer during the Bay of Pigs, after which Tom Clines
became Quintero's case officer. (Shackley was Clines's boss and headed up the
CIA's Miami station after the Bay of Pigs disaster; he was also involved in the
CIA's use of the Mafia to try to assassinate Fidel Castro.)
Jenkins also headed a large CIA base in Laos from
1970 to 1973, during which time Shackley, Secord and Clines were all involved
in CIA operations in that area. Also working with these individuals in that
theater were General John Singlaub and a Marine officer named Oliver North.
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...
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.
In the area of paramilitary operations, Rip
Robertson joined the former PB/SUCCESS alumni. However the officer in charge of
paramilitary operations may have been an individual not found in the official
(or the CIA histories) of the Cuba project, one Carl Jenkins. According to
papers submitted to the ARRB, Jenkins reportedly had served in the Marine Corp
in WWII, and in the early 1950's became a CIA paramilitary, survival, evasion
and escape trainer for the CIA. From 1955-1958 he served as an instructor for
paramilitary tactics and resistance and trained cadre for both the Thai Border
Police and the Chinese Nationalist Special Forces. He was also training and
operations officer for maritime infiltration and worked in Indonesia, Malaysia,
and the Philippines.
Jenkins came into the Cuba project in 1960 and
served with it until the Bay of Pigs; he performed selection and training of
paramilitary cadre, selected officers, and managed small teams and individual
agents in maritime infiltration of Cuba.
In general terms, it appears that while Morales
dealt with the development and deployment of security and intelligence forces
in conjunction with the landing, Jenkins selected and prepared paramilitary
cadre for small, individual missions in advance and support of the invasion
force. There are also documents which connect him to at least one Castro
assassination project, involving a small team using rifles. After the Bay of
Pigs, Jenkins became Special Warfare Advisor to I Corps in Danang, South
Vietnam prior to returning for further service with Cuban exiles in 1963...
1963 saw the inauguration of a new and highly
confidential project. The CIA cryptonym for its activities in the project was
AM/WORLD. In general terms the project involved a new attempt to establish an
autonomous Cuban leadership which could assemble the military force and
political clout to produce a coup inside Cuba and create the conditions for the
United States to come to the aid of a new, non-communist Cuban leadership.
Manuel Artime (AM/BIDDY-1) was a key figure in this project and a small task
group was organized to support AM/WORLD; it operated out of compartmentalized
facilities in the Miami Station (LORKE) and conducted activities in venues
ranging from New York to Mexico City to Spain. Henry Hecksher was attached to
AM/WORLD as Artime's case officer (among other responsibilities). Carl Jenkins
was brought back to oversee paramilitary support and serve as case officer to
Artime's second in command, Rolando Quintero (AMJAVA-4).
Jenkins and Hecksher were also involved in the
Artime's initial travel to Europe for contact with Rolando Cubela (AM/LASH).
These AM/WORLD activities began in mid-1963 and continued through 1964. Very
few CIA station personnel were allowed knowledge of the AM/WORLD project; in
Mexico City the only officer authorized for AM/WORLD was David Phillips.
Morales and Jenkins had been the first of the
JM/WAVE alumni to move to the Latin American fight against Communist expansion.
By the early 1970's the list would include Tom Clines at the Chile desk in CIA
HQ, while David Phillips had moved to Washington to become Chief of the Cuban
Operations Group Western Hemisphere covering all of Latin and South America. He
would remain in this position during the CIA's effort to remove Chilean
President Allende, eventually being named by the Church Committee as the CIA
officer in charge of Track 2 of the Allende project-the track involving CIA
efforts to produce a military coup.
I had met Carl Jenkins at a party thrown by a
magazine editor. I met both Carl and his wife. I knew him as a retired Military
ops. Guy and his wife as a current psychologist at the company. Being from
Minnesota I got along with her because of her Wisconsin birth and upbringing. I
was surprised at Carl’s acceptance of my working at the Project of Military
Procurement and working with the Military Reform Movement. While most
conservatives were not crazy about anyone attacking the Pentagon, not only did
it not bother Carl he was very encouraging. After meeting Jenkins I found out
that he knew a friend of mine retired Lt. Col. Carl Bernard from service in
Laos and possibly further back in Indonesia.
As it turned out I lived close to Carl and spent
time visiting at night at a safe house he ran close to his town house. Like
many of us conservatives he was not crazy about George Bush for President. I
remember one night at Otoole’s Bar ( Agency hang out in Langley) Carl showing
me a picture on the wall where George Bush and Agency people had held the first
meeting for his presidential bid. Sometime later the picture disappeared before
the bar closed (Jenkins was not in the picture).
Along with his dislike of Bush for President he was
upset that the White House NSC was being used as an active intelligence
operation rather than a clearing house from other intelligence agencies for the
President. In particular Lt. Col. Oliver North’s activities bothered him. To
such a point that in June of 1986 I set up a meeting for him with the then
Commandant of the Marine Corp. I had met the S2 of the Headquarters Marine Corp
socially and he arranged the meeting in which Carl (being an ex-Marine) had
tried to get Lt. Col. North transferred out of the White House. His argument
was that if he stayed in his current position he would be an embarrassment to
the Corp. Having been a Marine for a short time myself I understood the pride
Marines had for the honor of the Corp. I believe that the Marine Corp did try
to transfer North but it was thwarted. As I recall the meeting took place on a
Thursday and 2 days later I suffered a major heart attack. Two ambulances from
the same county showed up and had a fight over me and the second one to arrive
won and took me to a hospital that was not mine and there they saved my life.
Unfortunately I lost half of my heart function. I am alive today because of a
heart transplant in 2005. Of the number of people involved in Iran Contra that
had heart attacks I believe that I was the only one that lived.
I will try and add to the story as I have time and
would address any questions that Forum members might have. A couple of heart
surgeries screw up your memory a little bit. It seems that I am affected most
when it comes to remembering names.
The last I heard was that Carl Jenkins was in
Panama. That he had remarried a school teacher there. I guess that he and
Elisabeth got a divorce after the Sheehan document. When Sheehan submitted his
document, I understand that Elisabeth Jenkins resigned from the company and
went to work for the State Dept. checking on the Embassy guards in Africa and
Central Asia. I believe after it all blew over she returned to Langley and
resumed her old position checking out potential new employees. She was a
fascinating woman. Brilliant and beautiful. Almost out of a spy novel. As a
teenage girl had read spy novels and decided that’s what she would do as an
adult. Had a well earned hatred of Bobby Kennedy. During the Bay of Pigs she
was 8 months pregnant and at the National Reconnaissance Office as a
translator. One morning at about 2:00am she was walking done the hall when
Kennedy came around the corner in a hurry and knocked her on her back. At which
point the started to curse her out and called her a fat cow for getting in his
way. I doubt that she mourned when he was killed. She was in Laos when Carl was
there and that is where they got together. I believe at that time she
interviewed our guys when they returned from trips over the fence into North
Vietnam. Knowing some people that where there said she was the prettiest round
eye in Laos.
From what Carl told me he was in Mexico training the
Cubans for the Bay of Pigs. And has he hated the Kennedy’s also. The operation
was designed for 5,000 Cubans to go ashore. But the White House cut it of at
1,500. Carl was especially hot when the Kennedys started sending down Mafia
types in place of Cubans. Old man Kennedy’s mob friends where interested in
their old holdings when Castro feel. The real hatred of the John Kennedy came
from what he did during the actual invasion. Besides the rag tag Air Force of
the Cuban invasion force the US Navy was to supply air cover. I am told that as
the rebels were being slaughtered on the beach Kennedy personally called off
the Navy. There is supposed to be a tape of that and I have friends that say
they have heard it. I have never been able to get a copy of it our to here it.
I Corps Commanders –
I Corps S. Vietnam
I Corps Today
Ivan Cahill MID The Only Australian to ever command
a USMC Rifle Company. Captain Ivan Cahill MID
Vietnamese
Rangers
1 comment:
Great research.
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