Tuesday, January 11, 2022

CONFIRMING WHEATON AND JENKINS

CONFIRMING WHEATON AND JENKINS

I don’t consider Gene Wheaton a national hero, or Carl Jenkins a villain; I think they were both patriots in their own ways and each adds important aspects to the JFK assassination story that deserves close attention.  

As this 2021-2022 New Year eve came and went I couldn’t help but think of Gene Wheaton after spending the past two weeks transcribing excerpts of his interviews with Matt Ehling and William Matson Law from our 2021 CAPA Conference presentation.

[https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2021/12/bill-kellys-2021-capa-conference.html ]

It was on December 31, 2015 when Gene Wheaton suffered an injury to his head that caused his death, reportedly from a fall at his home in a trailer on the side of a mountain in a remote area of California. He either got drunk and fell and hit a corner of some furniture, ala William Holden -

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/ - search/William+Holden/FFNDWMQWGHVzZZTLFNzcpFfqlgpbSpTm?projector=1&messagePartId=0.1 )                                                                    Or he was murdered by those trained killers who thought he talked too much. I will try to obtain Wheaton’s autopsy report for Dr. Wecht to review to see if there was any foul play involved. I think the fall is most probable, but he certainly could have been the victim of some professional killers who he accused of being involved in political assassinations, so being killed himself is certainly possibility.

In fact, he had been sued by former FBI agent Oliver “Buck” Revell, for saying Revell, as part of an anti-terrorist Task Force, had organized a murder squad to assassinate those who were considered terrorists. Wheaton was later dropped from the suit.

 [https://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2021/12/oliver-buck-revell-sues-wheaton-for.html ]                                      

While others are interested in what Gene Wheaton has to say about Iran-Contra, OBIX, the Revell suit, the CIA Island in the Bahamas he mentioned, his Presidential award for his security work in the Middle East, and Jenkins operations in the Congo, Vietnam, the Middle East and Central America, I am focused strictly on what Wheaton and Jenkins have to say about the Kennedy assassination. But I use what they have to say about other aspects of their careers in order to independently confirm their veracity.

Larry Hancock and Russ Baker have said that we should treat Wheaton with skepticism, and I do.

As Ronald Reagan said, "Trust but confirm."

Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall both talked with Wheaton around the time of the Iran-Contra affair (1985), and Marshall said that Wheaton didn’t tell him anything he could independently verify so he didn’t use anything Wheaton supplied him. Scott said he was suspicious of Wheaton because of his close association with Carl Jenkins, and he warned Dan Sheehan not to use Wheaton as a source in his Iran-Contra suit.

Paul Hovan, a Vietnam vet who led a group trying to expose Pentagon waste, met Wheaton at a party and described him derisively as “someone who thought he was a player but who was truly not,” and whose “claims were based on a mishmash of speculative hearsay, fanciful information, and some actual facts.” But Wheaton’s bottom line remained clear - “a rogue element in the U.S. government had engaged in a host of nefarious activities, including assassinations,” and that part has been sustained. And Wheaton never said he was a covert player, but that they accepted him as one.

I have been able to independently verify some of what Wheaton has said about various things, such as the IBEX murders in Iran.

[Ie: IBEX : https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/01/02/ibex-deadly-symbol-of-us-arms-sales-problems/be83dfc8-5998-441a-84c0-f376b240c83d/ ]

In addition, Wheaton mentioned to Matt Ehling that he once worked with Dr. Cyril Wecht as an investigator, hired by the families of the victims of the Gander, Newfoundland plane crash on December 12, 1985 that killed 248 passengers and crew, mainly U.S. Army soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division, an event that Wecht remembered.

https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2015/12/09/101st-airborne-marks-30-years-since-gander-plane-crash-killed-248-soldiers/  ]

When Wheaton was asked why he tried to blow the whistle on the Iran-Contra affair, and why he informed John Tunheim and the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) of the association of his friends with the assassination, he replied simply, “Because I’m a cop.”

When Carl Jenkins was asked about Wheaton, he said “He was a nobody. We knew he was a cop so we didn’t talk about anything important around him.”

Well, admitting involvement in plots to kill Fidel Castro and redirecting one of those plot to engage in the assassination of a President,- if that is not the most important information you have, what could be greater than that?

One of Carl Jenkins closest protégés, Rafael “Chi Chi” Quintero, shortly before he died, said that Wheaton was telling the truth “as he knew it,” – didn’t say he was lying or even mistaken. And Quintero went on to say, “If I was to tell wat I know about Dallas and the Bay of Pigs, it would be the greatest scandal that has ever rocked the nation.”

[ Thank you John Simkin:  https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKquintero.htm ]

Quintero was one of about twenty especially selected anti-Castro Cubans who were trained in explosives, as snipers and in radio communications. They were commandos and assassins, like the WWII Jedburghs before D-Day, sent into Cuba a few weeks before the Bay of Pigs, with instructions to organize resistance cells, blow up bridges, create general havoc and if possible, assassinate high priority targets, like Fidel Castro. They were called Pathfinders. 

Felix Rodriguez, one of the original Pathfinders, is quoted as saying (in Peter Wyden, Bay of Pigs – The Untold Story, Simon & Schuster, 1979 p. 75) that one of his trainers, “Carl,” – undoubtedly Carl Jenknis, said “If this goddamn operation succeeds, it will be a goddamned miracle.” 

Some of the original Pathfinders were captured (like Nestor Peno) and imprisoned until they were bargained for with tractors and medical supplies and released, while others made it out of Cuba. Eventually those that survived reunited at JMWAVE, the CIA station in Miami, Florida, where they resumed their commando raids and assassination attempts against Castro under the Mongoose operation and then continued even after Mongoose with commando raids and the Pathfinder plan to kill Castro.

During the Church Committee investigation of CIA activities, eight National Photo Interpretation Center (NPIC) technicians came forward to make it known that there was a plan to kill Castro by snipers with high powered rifles as he rode by in an open jeep on his way to the DuPont estate in Veradero, on the north shore, where he was known to frequent. They said that the plan, called “Pathfinder,” and was led by Carl Jenkins, but was “disapproved by higher authority.” That CIA NPIC memo was intentionally misfiled in Frank Sturgis’ CIA Security File and relessed under the JFK Act. 

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=104139&relPageId=14 ]

The NPIC technicians said that the Pathfinder plan folder was kept in their section of the JMWAVE station instead of the Operational File where it belonged. That folder has since disappeared, but a NPIC secretary told the ARRB she received a call from then attorney general Robert Kennedy and instructed to box all of the NPCI records that had to do with assassination and send them to the Smithsonian Institute, rather than the National Archives, where they belonged. When I asked the NARA if the ARRB followed up on that with a request to the Smithsonian for any JFK, RFK or NPIC assassination records, they responded in the negative, the ARRB did not follow up on it. But we are and preparing a FOIA request to find out.

Gene Wheaton said that from conversations among themselves, Carl Jenkins and the former Pathfinders, including Rafael Chi Chi Quintero, admitted to being trained by the CIA to kill Castro, but redirected their plan to kill Kennedy.

Wheaton became especially close to Quintero, and asked him if he obtained immunity from prosecution for them, would he and the others talk about what they knew about the assassination? And they would, so Wheaton approached U.S. Senator Hugh Scott (D. Pa.) and they went to the White House and Senate committees attempting to obtain the immunity necessary for them to talk about the assassination but they failed. The government didn’t want to know the truth.

David Atlee Phillips also admitted that Oswald used the same plan they had devised to kill Castro. Just before his death Phillips told Kevin Walsh, an investigator with the House Select Committee on Assassinations: "My final take on the assassination is there was a conspiracy, likely including American intelligence officers."

David Atlee Phillips died of cancer on 7th July, 1988, leaving behind an unpublished manuscript, a novel about a CIA officer who lived in Mexico City, in which the character states: "I was one of those officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald... We gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba... I don't know why he killed Kennedy. But I do know he used precisely the plan we had devised against Castro. Thus the CIA did not anticipate the president's assassination, but it was responsible for it. I share that guilt."

When asked about the assassination of President Kennedy, Carl Jenkins showed no remorse, but said he didn’t know who killed Kennedy, and was out of the country at the time.

That reminded me of what Gene Wheaton told Matt Ehling in one of their interviews. Wheaton explained that while an Air Force investigator he was approached and an attempt was made to recruit into a military outfit that was specially trained for “wet operations” – assassination. The procedure they used to protect the assassins was called “Diogenes.”

Larry Hancock, in his detailed analysis of the backgrounds of the names Wheaton provided, asks the question of whether we can place any of them in Dallas at the time of the assassination, and the answer is “no,” and I believe the answer is Diogenes.

Taking its name from Diogenes, a fourth century B.C. Greek philosopher and Cynic who made poverty a virtue, and when asked what he was doing replied: “I am just looking for an honest man,” but found nothing but rascals and scoundrels. In one of Matt Ehling’s interviews with Wheaton 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 (Italy) from ’61-’63 - as an (Air Force) Office of Special Investigations (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 torture, interrogations, and assassinations, if necessary….A man came out from Washington, talked to me, and described it as - in the Air Force it was called the Zeta-Diogenes Program, 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.” 

Wheaton: “They went looking for young, super-patriotic, guys … flag-wavers … with military and police background …, above-average intelligence …who could work on their own.  Who would do anything for their country. I was 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."

[General Joseph J. Cappucci, head of Air Force Counter-Intelligence, and close friend of J. E. Hoover, at a party at the Rome Hilton in 1969, told his assistant Col. William Henry Amos that LBJ had JFK killed. BRIGADIER GENERAL JOSEPH J. CAPPUCCI > U.S. Air Force > Biography Display]

Wheaton: "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.”

While that doesn’t sound too far fetched, it is confirmed by at least one other military man - Sgt. Daniel Brad MacBolan III, who informs us that he too was recruited into Diogenes:

“So basically they built this platform which was built on Zeta Diogenes Clear-Eyes. There are five levels with that. I’m a level five. Able to handle other elements within the five membered cells. Its unacknowledged special access programs deep coordinates cell. We are pretty much I guess you would say the darker part of the CIA’s non official cover-type, where you got CIA agents which have a different name. Nonofficial cover are employed somewhere and that’s their day job. And then you turn a key and they become someone else. And go about doing their spooking so to speak. They’re a spook and some may know it and some may not. Most know it because they have to have special training to make sure they’re, they’re extremely careful not to compromise themselves…Non-official cover are employed somewhere and that’s their day job. And then you turn a key and they become someone else. And go about doing their spooking…..”

In the movie The Shooter, a former expert military sniper played by Levon Helm, says that the guys from the grassy knoll were themselves killed before the day was out, and buried in the desert.

In fact, as we know from Felix Rodriguez book Shadow Warrior and the records of the Pathfinders released under the JFK Act, after the assassination of JFK and the closing down of JMWAVE in 1964, these men went on to work on other on other covert and “wet” operations, including AMWORLD in Central America, and fighting Communists in the Congo, Dominican Republic, Vietnam and Nicaragua.

So far I have posted this Confirming Wheaton and Jenkins blog, excerpts of mainstream books that mention Carl Jenkins, along with Felix Rodriguez’s key references to Rafael Chi Chi Quintero in his book Shadow Warrior, and a transcript of the 2021 CAPA presentation on Wheaton, with excerpts of Matt Ehling and William Matson Law’s interviews with Wheaton and Lee Shephard’s report on his meeting with Carl Jenkins.

But we are not done with this yet, as we are still pursuing a number of important leads. Wheaton had a grandson in California we are tying to locate, as well as the autopsy report of Wheaton’s death for Dr. Wecht to evaluate. We have also located Sen. Hugh Scott’s papers and will go through them to see if there are any documentary records of the attempts by Wheaton and Scott to obtain immunity from prosecution for Quintero, Jenkins and others who would talk of what they knew of the JFK assassination.

Felix Rodriguez is still alive and we are trying to obtain the two Oral History interviews he did with the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas to review before we question him about these things, as we have made contact with him.

We are also filing a FOIA request for the Smithsonian to see if they have the NPIC documents and the Pathfinder folder that the NPIC secretary said she sent to the Smithsonian under orders from RFK.

I am waiting on William Matson Law to type up his notes on his telephone conversations with Wheaton as well as any out takes of his filmed interview that we don’t have.

After I supplied Jefferson Morley with Carl Jenkins address in Southeast Pennsylvania, Morley, like Shephard, went to visit him and got in the door. Morley reported back to me that Jenkins “didn’t say anything new,” but that Jenkins did say some things that Morley will be including in his next book on Watergate, due out later this year. So we will just have to wait for that.

Lee Shephard also tracked down Jenkins’ second wife, a former high level CIA officer, and had a pleasant conversation with her and the son she had with Jenkins, and we await his report on that.

In the meantime, Jenkins somewhat suddenly left his home in Southeast Pa., which he shared with his third wife, but we have located him at an assisted living facility in Texas, and hope to question him one more time, though he is in his 90s.

Matt Ehling is also preparing a compilation of the six interviews he did with Wheaton, full transcripts of each, as well as all of the documents Wheaton faxed him over the years, that will be published in a book without commentary, for use by researchers who want to pursue the many leads he has provided on a number of subjects. I am fixated on the JFK Assassination however, and will pursue that angle.

I will be leaving this subject alone for awhile as we quietly pursue these leads and will be writing and posting on other related topics, including a review of Dr. Wecht’s new book - “The JFK Assassination Dissected,” as well as a summary of significant records released under the JFK Act, and a review of where we’ve been, what we know, and where we have to go from here.

Thanks for paying attention, as I think this is an important lead. Possibly the most important I have tried to run down.

Send comments, corrections and critiques to Billkelly3@gmail.com

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