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.
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.
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/
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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