PART II - PATHFINDER at JMWAVE and Dealey Plaza

                       PATHFINDER at JMWAVE and Dealey Plaza - Part II

As the CIA Operations officer told the NPIC official, and the CIA told the HSCA, there are no existing records on PATHFINDER at CIA, and we know why since we have three examples of how the PATHFINDER files were intentionally miss-filed.

 – 1) at JMWAVE where the Pathfinder records were kept in the NPIC section of the station instead of in the Operational Files, where they should have been kept; 2) RFK ordered the JFK assassination records at NPIC to be boxed and sent to the Smithsonian Institute instead of the National Archives, where they belong;  and 3) the NPIC memo on the JMWAVE techs who recalled Pathfinder in 1975 was placed in Frank Sturgis’ file, where it was buried until discovered by the CIA searching for records requested by the HSCA.

While the official investigations of the Pathfinder plans to kill Castro apparently ended there, we can continue the inquiry ourselves, to see where this lead goes, and some of us are doing just that, beginning with Carl Jenkins.

The NPIC technicians at JMWAVE said that “a number of our photo interpreters supported Carl Jenkins of the DD/P (Deputy Directorate of Plans) concerning a plan to assassinate Castro at the DuPont Veradero 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.”

Where are these annotated photographs and line drawings of the estate today? They should be in the JFK Collection at the National Archives and open to the public but apparently are among the missing Pathfinder records or the NPIC files, boxed and sent to the Smithsonian instead of the NARA.

Ah, yes, and we've learned a good deal more about Mr. Carl Jenkins, the CIA officer who was responsible for training some five shooters assigned to the Pathfinder mission and preparing to implement it, - the contingency plan for a sniper to shoot Castro as he rode in an open jeep at Veradero.

On hearing the NPIC technicians mention Carl Jenkins' name and description as a DD/Plans officer, the CIA Operations chief reviewed a folder on Jenkins. But since that communications with the NPIC’s Brugoni did not involve the Church Committee, that was active and investigating just those issues at that time – the Jenkins folder is not subject to the JFK Act and is not at the JFK Collection at the NARA. 

And because Jenkins is still alive, that folder is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).But because he is still alive, we can still talk to him, and will try to do that even though he is very elderly and living with family.

Since the NPIC assassination files were boxed and sent to the Smithsonian in 1964, the Church Committee was unaware of Pathfinder or the NPIC technicians statements in 1975; and since the failure of the HSCA to pursue Pathfinder in 1978, we have learned a lot about Mr. Jenkins over the years.

GENE WHEATON 

In the 1980s Eugene “Gene” Wheaton was one of the first to blow the whistle on what became known as the Iran-Contra affair. Wheaton was not a silly conspiracy theorist, but rather a former military investigator (Army and Air Force), policeman, private security consultant and Mid-eastern agent for Rockwell International, the overseas division of Rockwell-Collins, Inc. a major defense contractor.

Wheaton had received a prestigious presidential medal and award from President Nixon for his service in the Middle-East as a boarder security and drug smuggling expert.

Wheaton worked closely with Carl Jenkins at National Airlines, a cargo shipment company that may have been a front for the CIA (as described JFKcountercoup: CIAir ). Wheaton apparently owned the airline and hired Jenkins to be his Washington representative. When Wheaton was in Washington he stayed in a bedroom reserved for him at Jenkin’s home, and they were close personal friends and business partners for many years.

Wheaton and Jenkins became entwined in the Iran-Contra affair when their cargo airline was contracted to deliver arms to the Contras fighting the left-wing Sandinestas in Nicaragua in the civil war following the departure of long time dictator Anastiso Somoza, who some called the “Godfather of the Bay of Pigs.”

As Wheaton later put it, that was when he was “recruited into Oliver North’s Network." It wasn't long before Wheaton realized they were wrongfully appropriating hundreds of millions of dollars in military equipment (mainly missiles) and selling them to terrorist nations in the Middle East in exchange for hostages.

Wheaton said they were accumulating a multi-million dollar war chest that was to be used to fund covert intelligence operations without the approval of Congress.

First Wheaton went to President Reagan’s CIA Director William Casey, the last of the old OSS hands to hold that position, and he told Casey the whole story.

Now who gets to waltz right in to the office of the Director of the CIA? Wheaton had that capability and only used it once. Casey said he would look into it, but Wheaton realized that Casey was behind it. They didn’t like Congress deciding what covert ops could be funded and what couldn’t, especially when Congress balked at arming the Contras, and only approved humanitarian medical and food supplies.

So Wheaton then told the story to Dan Sheehan, Esq., the attorney for the Christic Institute who prepared a civil suit indictment against North, General Richard Secord and others involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. Some of North’s arms given to the Contras were used to kill and wound some Americans in Nicaragua. Sheehan represented them and their families, and used them to sue the “Oliver North Network,” that was then being detailed in daily news and media reports.

This was especially so after CIA contract agent and baggage kicker Eugene Hassenfras was captured by the Sandinistas after his plane was shot down. Hassenfras confessed to the CIA support of the Contras and was found to have in his possession, the phone number of covert commando Felix Rodriguez, a Bay of Pigs veteran working with the Contras and friend of George H.W. Bush. 

Rodriguez was also one of those named by Wheaton as being an associate of Jenkins and suspected of being one of the "shooters" Jenkins and Harper (and USA Ranger Ed Roderick ) trained at the Point Mary, Key Largo training site. 

While Wheaton only got a footnote in Sheehan’s legal brief, he was on the radar, and the case generated even more headlines, but a judge dismissed the suit and fined the Christic Institute enough to put it out of business. 

When Wheaton was asked why he blew the whistle on his friends and business partners in regards to the Iran-Contra scandal he responded, “Because I’m a cop.”

And Wheaton did work as a city policeman in Oklahoma for a few years between stints in the military. 

THE ARRB and the "CONVOLUTED PLOT." 

Things then went quiet for a decade or so, but Wheaton came out of the woodwork again in the mid-1990s when he learned about the Congressional passage of the JFK Act of 1992. That law, unanimously passed by Congress and reluctantly signed by President Bush, established the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) and JFK Collection at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and required all government agencies to release to the public any and all records regarding the assassination of President Kennedy.

Wheaton wrote a letter to ARRB chairman Judge John Tunheim, telling him some basic background, establishing the fact that he was not just another silly conspiracy theorists. He said he had information that might be of interest to the Review Board that they might want to pursue. And the Review Board took him seriously, at first.

Wheaton talked on the phone with ARRB investigator Anne Buttermer, an attorney, and he gave her the basic story as he knew it, and they arranged to meet in person in Washington D.C., when Wheaton gave Buttermer some supporting documents, including Carl Jenkins’ vita-resume and his passport, among other things.

Those items should be open to the public in the JFK Collection at the NARA. [BK Notes: For Jenkins’ Resume/Vita see: http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2018/10/carl-e-jenkins-vita.html - and A JFK Counter-Coup Research Feather for your cap to anyone who comes up with Jenkins' Passport.]

According to Buttimer's ARRB outside contact report, Wheaton told her "Cuban exiles who were originally trained by the CIA to kill Castro, killed Kennedy instead, considering him a traitor for his failure to support them at the Bay of Pigs." 

Wheaton said that "people above the Cubans wanted JFK killed for other reasons," and that "the matter is not complex, but convoluted."

Buttermer then suddenly quit her job at the ARRB and disappeared, and the Review Board never followed up on Wheaton’s information and failed to get files on the relevant individuals named by Wheaton. He belatedly received a ARRB form letter thanking him for contacting them.

TWO DOCUMENTARY FILMED INTERVIEWS 

Then at the turn of the century Matt Ehling, a documentary film maker from Public Records Media corresponded with and filmed an extensive interview with Wheaton. Although most of it concerned Wheaton’s role in the Iran-Contra scandal, he does touch on some interesting things – including the Zeta-Diogenes Program.

Wheaton:  “In Italy, in 1962, I was recruited into … I was approached to become part of an assassination network in the intelligence community. I was there (in Italy) from ’61-’63 - as an (Air Force) OSI agent working out of Aviano Air Base…In ’62, shortly after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and the embarrassment of the intelligence community, they … CIA covert operators in conjunction with some people in the Pentagon wanted to set up a secret cell –(a) worldwide cell of intelligence agents that would be called on for, uh, torture, interrogations, and assassinations, if necessary…I was approached.  A man came out from Washington, talked to me, and described it as … in the Air Force - I don’t know if it was that way in all the services and the CIA - but in the Air Force it was called the Zeta-Diogenes Program, and the ‘ZD Program’ for short.  And each agent that was indoctrinated, recruited into it would be given this secret identifier on his master military record in Washington DC, and only another ZD controlling officer would recognize it.  Nobody in personnel or anybody else would know that it was there.” 

“They went looking for young, super-patriotic … um, guys … flag-wavers … with military and police background … uh, above-average intelligence … who could work on their own.  Who would do anything for their country.  They thought.  I was rec - approached - because I fit that mold.  Conservative.  Oklahoma.  Big family.  Flag wavers.  Patriotic.  I had been in the Marine Corps before the Air Force, and I’d been a police officer before that.  And I fit the mold.  Because of the compartmentalization, and so forth, I never knew anybody else in that program, except I knew that General Joe Cappucci had been…for the Air Force portion of this thing. In ’65, I transferred from the Air Force to the Army … I don’t know if I was recruited in or rejected … they just came out and interviewed me, and told me what it was about, and if they needed me, the idea was that you’d be sent on temporary duty someplace, and then you’d disappear and you’d go where you were really supposed to go.  And then come back and your temporary duty would continue, and you’d go back to your regular base.  And they could call these individuals out from all over the world.  They wouldn’t be a team - they’d be individuals. The next time I was specifically approached by this - the next generation of these people - was during 1985, when I was being recruited into Ollie North’s network.”

[   https://www.publicrecordmedia.org/   /   http://www.publicrecordmedia.org/gene-wheaton/ ]

I thought Wheaton was unique in that he served in three branches of the military at different times – the Marines, Army and Air Force, and I could only think of one other person who did that – Oswald’s half brother John Pic, who enlisted in the Marines like his brothers, spent years in the Coast Guard and then joined the Air Force and was in training at Lackland AFB in Fort Worth when his kid brother was charged with killing the President. Larry Hancock however, tells me that is not uncommon for those who make the military a career.

In 2005 William M. Law and Hancock tracked Wheaton down and filmed an interview with him that was presented at the JFK Lancer Conference in Dallas that year, but wasn’t posted publicly until 2018.

[ Wheaton Interview with WML:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DPT9Oc0lsU ]

In that interview Wheaton made it clear that he had no personal knowledge of the assassination of President Kennedy, other than what he picked up in private conversations over the years, during dinner and drinking talk among his National Airline partner and housemate Carl Jenkins. Jenkins stayed friends with the Cubans he had trained for the Bay of Pigs and at JMWAVE, and apparently continued working with them operationally, as they did in Nicaragua in the 1980s as part of Oliver North’s Network.

Wheaton: “Chi Chi was a shooter, he was trained by I.F. Harper…Jenkins was from Louisiana and was the CIA’s liaison with  Carlos Marcello, the mafia boss connected in with Sam Giancana and John Rosselli who are on the public record as being part of that crowd – the Mafia guys they say were connected to the Kennedy assassination. …I had been working with Sen. (Hugh) Scott (Rep. Pa.) to see if we could get the record set straight on the Kennedy assassination – get total immunity for those involved. I talked to Senator Scott about it and I told them if you guys just tell the whole straight story you can get immunity.”

THE STRAIGHT STORY 

“The straight story is that there was a CIA fronted program to assassinate Castro and Carl (Jenkins) was  in charge of training the Cubans in Miami to assassinate Castro and it was paid for by the CIA. They would go from Texas down to Mexico and take some convertibles and things into the hills and rocky areas and set watermelons up in the back seat and they had what they called a triangulation shooting team. And they were according to THEM, THEY were the ones that diverted the Castro funds and training for their own agenda to snuff Kennedy. It was a paid element and they were CIA people. They were training to assassinate Castro, but if you are trained to assassinate one person, you can use that training to assassinate anybody with that same training. That’s what they were using – the paid training program to get Castro. The Cubans, because of the imprisonment of those guys and JFK backing off at the last moment in support of the Bay of Pigs invasion, they were still angry, still are to this day. There was another clique above them that was worried about Kennedy not increasing the program for escalating the hostilities in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. So at an extremely high level, I’m talking about the political elite level, the shakers and movers of the country – the top guys in the Pentagon and White House, did not want Kennedy to shut down that war because they were just getting it warmed up and wanted to escalate.”

“Chi Chi and Carl Jenkins were in charge of the main team.  Carl Jenkins was training Chi Chi (Quintero) and several other shooters, about five of them – and I.F. Harper helped train these guys to assassinate Castro. According to THEM, they just went off and decided to get their revenge on Kennedy for his failure to support the invasion of Cuba.”

“Lee Harvey Oswald was just a stooge that Carl and his friends…... Carl you see, back in the early 1950s, when he came back from Korea, he formed the first US Marine Corps Reserve unit in New Orleans. Carl was a Captain in the Marine Corps, and a CIA officer. He formed the first US Marine Corps reserve unit in New Orleans, La., and he was the CIA liaison between CIA Headquarters and Carlos Marcello, the organized crime boss there.”

“Lee Harvey Oswald was a young guy, and because of Carl’s connection with the US Marine Corps reserve, and his involvement in the CIA, helped recruit Lee Harvey Oswald while he was a Marines. Keep in mind this is not somebody sitting down and telling me this, this is over months and years of talking with them and them talking to each other in my presence. It was obvious Lee was a stooge that they set up. You always have what they call an 'Operational Security Plan' for deniability, - something that they put in the plan when they put the covert operation in place.”

In that 2005 interview Wheaton names a number of the Cubans, “Chi Chi” Quintero in particular, and “I.F,.” Harper, who Wheaton identified as one of those who, like Jenkins, helped train the Cubans and Contras.

British schoolmaster John Simkin  attempted to contact Rafael Quintero via his close friend Don Bohning, but Quintero refused to be interviewed though he did say that Gene Wheaton was telling the truth as "he knew it".

[https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKwheaton.htm]

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 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.”

Now Carl Elmer Jenkins has his own Wiki page:

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.

END WIKI

While Jenkins has his own Wiki page, I. F. Harper is more reclusive, and the only published reference I can find on him is in a Soldier of Fortune article. It would be hard to find a more colorful and elusive “legendary” character than “I.F.” Harper, whose only known mainstream published reference is a single line in a Soldier of Fortune magazine. 

https://www.sofmag.com/

I think the "I.F." is a nickname that stems from the Jewish Kentucky whiskey of the same name "I.F. Harper." 

And I call your attention to the fact that the first published reference to Operation Tilt – aka “The Bayo-Pawley Affair,” was in the very first issue of Soldier of Fortune (SOF), Volume One, Number One, an article and issue that is very rare and hard to get. (Brownie Points for any researcher who comes up with the Bayo-Pawley Article in the first issue of SOF.)

That Harper – and Jenkins, and Quintero and some of the Cubans, continued their careers as covert operators after 11/22/63, helps confirm an assumption and the hypothesis that those responsible for the Dealey Plaza operation had previously conducted similar missions in the past and continued to do them after Dallas. 

Among the covert ops that involved the Dealey Plaza crew and the intelligence network that sponsored them are a number of well known events. Those involved in the JFK assassination – who knew the operational details, had previously worked together on Operation SUCCESS in Guatemala in 1954, the Bay of Pigs in 1961, and after Dallas, they went to the Congo, Dominican Republic, Southeast Asia and Central America and some were caught at Watergate. They were also involved in the Iran Contra affair in the 1980s in cooperation with Manuel Noreiaga in Panama and Ed Wilson’s outfit in Gadhafi’s Libya.

In the movie “The Shooter,” Levon Helm portrays an aging Amos Heacock, the USMC Vietnam sniper with over 100 kills to his credit. When asked about the Dealey Plaza snipers, he says that they are buried in the desert, having been killed shortly after the mission was completed, just like Oswald. 

In fact, those who participated in the Dealey Plaza operation – and kept their mouth shut, were not treated as “Expendable Agents” and liquidated, but just went on to other, similar missions, "wet" operations in other countries.

And those who kept their mouths shut, like Carl Jenkins and I.W. Harper, are remarkably, still alive today, though Gene Wheaton himself has died.

Wheaton died suspiciously on December 31 – New Years Eve, 2015, of a head injury, apparently an accident at his California home. 

After Jenkins and Harper were confirmed alive, and contact information obtained, Stu Wexler called Harper, but his family said he can’t talk over the phone for health reasons, but does email.

In a brief email exchange, when Wexler asked Harper about Wheaton, Harper called him : “A two-faced Son of a Bitch!.”

But he didn’t call him a liar, or contest the substance of what Wheaton had to say.

As Bill Turner put it, “the mechanism was in place” to kill Castro, and they just switched targets, and instead of shooting Castro they redirected their fire to JFK at Dealey Plaza.

Knowing that, we have now narrowed down the covert operational plans to kill Castro to a few – including Pathfinder, that may have been the specific plan that was redirected to “snuff” JFK in Dallas. If it wasn't Pathfinder, it was one very much like it.

Now we will soon know the names of the shooters – the five first-class Cuban mechanic-snipers who were paid and trained by the CIA to kill Castro but one or two of whom shot JFK in the head instead.

Among the most recently released (2017) and long withheld JFK assassination records are thousands of pages and file after file of routine pay stubs for the Cubans who were paid by the CIA to fight Castro, some of whom were paid $100 a month, others $300-$500 a month – good money in those days. Watergate burglar Eugenio Martinez, a JMWAVE boat captain was paid an annual salary of over $8,000 a year to man the Rex and other CIA raider ships that were run out of JMWAVE. The names of the Cubans Wheaton gave us are among those files and pay stubs. 

“I took high powered rifles with scopes to Cuba,” Eugenio Martinez said, “and they weren’t going to be used to hunt rabbits.”

“Chi Chi” Quintero was a shooter, said Wheaton, who also names five or six other Cubans who were on that team, that maritime crew of anti-Castro Cuban commandos who were paid and trained to kill Castro. But when that mission was scrubbed – “disapproved” by “higher authority,” and they learned of the JFK- Castro backchannel negotiations at the UN (from Henry Cabot Lodge), they redirected the Pathfinder target to JFK at Dealey Plaza. And considered them selves patriots for doing so. 

Larry Hancock is working intently on the files of the Cubans involved and he may release the results of his study at the JFK Lancer conference in Dallas this November. 

Both Jenkins and Harper, will be invited to the CAPA "Last Living Witness" program at the Old Red Courthouse at Dealey Plaza, Dallas on Thursday, November 15, 2018, and given the opportunity to tell their stories and answer some of the outstanding questions. 

NEXT UP: JOHN ROSSELLI - THE JOKER AT JMWAVE - 

http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2018/10/pathfinder-part-iii-john-rosselli-joker.html