PIATHFINDER AT DEALEY PLAZA – Revised and Updated
Bobbs-Merrill ID of William Harvey - Task Force W - JMWAVE and Pathfinder Commander
Note- This is a first draft that is being continously edited. I will be adding additions, notes, footnores and links
Just as the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler was the overall
general Strategic plan adapted by the CIA to use against Castro, the Pathfinder
plan was the specific, detailed tactical plan to kill Castro that was diverted
to President Kennedy in Dallas.
The original pathfinders were the U.S. Army Rangers, special
forces parachuted into France to lay the groundwork for the D-Day Normandy
invasion.
The Pathfinder name was appropriated by the CIA trainers of
the anti-Castro Cubans who were to be sent into Cuba before what became the failed Bay
of Pigs invasion. They were the elite, specially selected and trained to
infiltrate Cuba, make contact with the anti-Castro partisans and lead the
attacks against Castro to overthrow him, some – E. Howard Hunt, say they were to
kill him.
At first Air Force–CIA general Ed Lansdale and his
Phillipine associate Napoleon Valentine and US Marine Col. Hawkins, had laid
out a plan to train all of the anti-Castro Cubans as commandos, infiltate them
into the eastern Cuba and have them establish a base of operations in the
Escombay mountains as Castro himself had done.
But at some point Lansdale was forced out of the training,
and the plan was revamped to become a full scale mechanized invasion with
ships, tanks and air planes. I have never been able to figure out who was responsible and when
this plan was changed, But I have a felling it was done by Gen. LeMay, who is
mentioned in some of the Bay of Pigs documents, because he had a pronounced
dislike for Lansdale and the unconventional warfare that he proposed.
The Pathfinders however, were kept together and sent in to
lay the groundwork for the invasion, but when it failed, some were killed,
others captured and a few made it out and back to Florida. There they regrouped
at the JMWAVE CIA Miami station, controlled by the Cuban Task Force W. located in the basement of the CIA HQ
at Langley, run by William Harvey.
When President Kennedy told the CIA he wanted to meet “America’s
James Bond,” who was licensed to kill in the line of duty, they sent William
Harvey over to the White House. The
portly, pear shaped Harvey didn’t look like 007, but he checked his pistols
with the Secret Service at the Oval Office door and met the President.
Harvey
was assigned to lead the CIA’s assassination program code named ZR/RIFLE, as
well as the administrative Task Force W and the operational JMWAVE base in Flordia at the University of Miami.
But Harvey didn’t get along with the president, or especially Robert F. Kennedy,
who after the Bay of Pigs was put in charge of covert Cuban operations and
served on the NSC.
Harvey’s official biography “Flawed Patriot – The Rise and Fall of CIA Legend Bill Harvey” was written by
Bayard Stockton (Potomac Books, Washington D.C., 2006, p. 125). In it h says: “By early
Spring 1962 Task Force W’s headquarters staff was in place. Bill’s throne room
during the fraught Cuban days was, of course, in the Langley basement, but his
empire was in Miami, masquerading as Zenith Technical Enterprises (aka JMWAVE) on two
thousand acres of CIA-leased property (on the University of Miami south
campus).”
There at JMWAVE the Pathfinders were given additional training by
former USMC and CIA trainer Carl Jenkins, whose specialty was covert
infiltration and exfiltration, and legendary CIA trainer John “I.F.” Harper,
whose specialty was explosives and training snipers.
In addition they got help from General Victor Brute Krulak (SACSA) the
Special Assistant for Coutnerinsurgency and Special Affairs, whose job at the
Pentagon was to give military assistance to the CIA for covert ops in Cuba and
Vietnam. Krulak cross posted two U.S. Army Rangers to the CIA to assist them in
the training of the Pathfinders, Capt. Edward Roderick and Capt. Bradley Ayers.
Ayers wrote extensively about his experiences at JMWAVE in two books, “The War That Never Was: An Insider’s Account
of the CIA Covert Operations Against Cuba,” (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
1976), and “The Zenith Secret – A CIA Insider Exposes The Secret War Against Castro
And the Plot That Killed The Kennedy Brothers,” (Vox Pop, NY, May
2006). Vox Pox was a very obscure publisher that was run out of a Bronx, NY storefront.
Unbelievably, both Sylvia Meagher’s “Accessories After the Fact” and Ayers’ first book were published by
Indiana publisher Bobbs-Merrill. They specialized primarily in schoolbooks and reportedly had an office on the fourth floor ot the Texas School Book
Depository (TSBD). Even more unbelieveable is the fact that when William Harvey
left the CIA he returned home to Indiana and became the legal counsel for
Bobbs-Merrill and edited Ayers’ book. Among the items edited out, Ayers told me, were all references to Gordon Campbell, the head of Maritime operations at JMWAVE.
An official CIA Public Affairs officer, in response to a
media request as to whether or not Bradley Ayers “was ever a CIA agent,” wrote:
“According to our records, he was never an Agency employee. As an Army officer,
Mr. Ayers was detailed to work with the CIA from May of 1963 to December 1964.
Because he never was an Agency employee – and, as such, never signed a
pre-publication agreement with us – any suggestion that the CIA tried to censor
or suppress his writings is incorrect.”
So since Ayers was never a CIA agent he never signed a
confidentiality agreement requiring the CIA to review any manuscript before
publication, but Harvey was in position to take care of that.
In his second Zenith Secret book, not vetted by Harvey, Ayers recalled
that, “Rod (Capt. Ed Roderick) described an interesting new guy, Colonel
Rosselli from Washington with whom he was working in operations.”
Ayers says that Roderick “had been drinking before he got to
the house that night…confided, he and the recently arrived Colonel Rosselli
were working on plans to ambush Fidel Castro, and they had been on a
weekend binge together. They’d become close friends as they spent time
together; their drinking friendship was a natural extension of their on-duty
relationship.”
“While we ate I discussed my training activities,” Ayers
continued, and “Rod began to tell me about the new things that were ‘in the air’ at
the station….It seemed the administration was ready to begin making an even
more concerted effort to unseat Castro…The Special Group had already removed a
number of targets from the restricted list, and there were more to go. It was
up to the CIA, specifically the Miami station, to plan the new missions,
recruit and train exiles, and mount operations to strike the Communist dictator
where it really hurt. Other espionage activities were being carried out to
coincide with this paramilitary effort, and still more attempts to eliminate
Castro were being developed.”
“Then he dropped it,” Ayers says. “He told me Rosselli was a high level Mafia boss with Havana connections. I was speechless. The American
government collaborated with organized crime? I couldn’t believe it. I was
anxious to meet this guy.”
Harvey's authorized biography “Flawed
Patriot” was vetted and approved by the CIA, and its author, Bayard Stockton was a former CIA officer who worked with Harvey. Strangely. at least to me, he died before the book was published.
In it Stockton
wrote: “…The stories about JMWAVE are legion. Among them is the tale of a visit
by Robert Kennedy to JMWAVE – an incursion that in itself must have put Harvey
into something south of a slow burn because CIA operating premises were
off-limits to non-Agency personnel, regardless of rank or stature. As Kennedy
roamed the building, he heard a telex machine chattering away. He ambled over
to it, ripped the message out, and began to read it. Incensed beyond courtesy,
Harvey, in turn, ripped the copy from the attorney general’s hands and
thundered words to the effect that Kennedy was not cleared to read classified
Agency correspondence. Both smoldered. The incident naturally became legendary
and was symptomatic of relations between the two men.”
While RFK and Harvey were natural enemies who were forced to
work together, one aspect of the Valkyrie plan was to get JFK/RFK to approve a plan, the Pathfinder Plan to kill Castro, as they had approved the industrial
sabotage plans through the Special Group of the National Security Council (NSC).
There were a number of Pathfinder teams at JMWAVE, but I
only know of three, each with a Cuban team leader, a CIA case officer and a
trainer, as well as three civilian millionaires who sponsored and supported
them – William Pawley, former owner of the Havana bus system (and other industries),
mobster John Rosselli, who came in from the early CIA-Mafia plots to kill
Castro. and Clare Booth Luce, wife of the publisher of Time-Life.
There were many dozens of case officers, each of whom handled a number of Cubans. Carl Jenkins was a case officer for a number of Pathfinders, including Rafel Chi Chi Quintero. Another case officer was Porter Goss, who would rise up in the ranks of the CIA to the top to become Director, and today he should be questioned about his JMWAVE case officer days
Bradley Ayers’ team leader was a young Cuban, Julio
Fernandez, and their team was co-sponsored by Clare Booth Luce, who wrote about them in her Life Magazine column, calling the Cuban commandos "My Boys."
On the night of the assassination Julio Fernandez called Luce and told her his group (probably DRE) had photos, tape recordings and other evidence associated with the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, linking him to Castro. Luce also gave the keynote address at the Association of Former Intelligence Officers - David A. Phillips organization, when Congressional investigator Gaeton Fonzi introduced Phillips to Antonio Veciama. I'd like to get a transcript of that speech.
Ayers trained the Fernamdez-Luce team in small boat maneuvering and tactics at the Pirates Lair base deep in the Everglades swamp while the snipers were trained at Point Mary.
Besides supporting some JMWAVE commandos William Pawley also used his own boat for covert mission
including the Bayo-Pawley operation that included Rosselli’s mobster friend John
Martino, who expressed foreknowledge of the assassination.
Roderick’s team was co-sponsored by Rosselli, and
trained primarily in first class sniper techniques and tactics by John “I.F.” Harper and Carl Jenkins at Point Mary, then a
remote area off Key Largo.
At some point Rosselli asked his case officer William Harvey for some additiomal special arms and weapons. It was arranged for a special
U-Haul trailer full of arms, ammo, explosives and sniper rifles that were to be
infiltrated into Cuba and used against Castro. The contents of this cache were
inventoried by the CIA but never released.
As Stockton writes about it in his approved biography of Harvey, “Another
popular JMWAVE story is the U-Haul truck deal. Writers like this one because,
to them, it proves that the CIA and Harvey provided arsenals to the Mafia.”
Shackley: “Bill came down with a list…four or five pages….of
equipment he wanted. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary in that. We
turned the list over to the JMWAVE warehouse manager, who loaded the stuff into
watertight containers. All very standard procedure. I rented a truck through
three or four cutouts and drove it into the JMWAVE compound. The stuff was
manifested in and out. I drove the truck out of the compound and turned it
over. Bill and I followed it to a parking lot in South Miami. The driver of the
truck took a hike and caught a cab. Bill and I waited; maybe up to an hour….It
was no different from any other odd request for equipment.”
According to Rosselli however, while Harvey approved of and
made arrangements for the U-Haul truck load of arms, he recalls James O’Connell as
being the one with him on the hour long stakeout of a vacant lot behind a Cuban
restaurant in Miami. They watched as Cuban #3 picked up the truck drove it away. In his 1975 Church Committee testimony, Rosselli said
Cuban #3, who he refused to name, often made runs to Cuba in his powerboat,
sometimes depositing teams of commandos and snipers. The U-Haul arms cache,
inventoried in a detailed manifest, included high powered rifles with scopes
and ammo that Shackley says were packed by the JMWAVE warehouse man in
waterproof containers so they could be easily and safely shipped to Cuba.
Stoxkton writes, "During…. the climax of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it looked
as if the United States was going to war.” He quotes Shackley
as saying: “American military teams were ready to be infiltrated ….pathfinders
and people like that. I was to be in a plane with the airborne commander. The
presumption was that the American military would pacify Cuba, and then J-2 –
military government would take over. I guess I would probably have been Havana
station chief…Then Bobby heard there was a commando team on the water, which he
had not authorized, and he called them back.”
Yes, “American military teams were ready to be
infiltrated….pathfinders and people like that…Then Bobby heard there was a commando team in the water, which he had not authorized, and he called them back."
All of the Pathfinder missions to Cuba were planned in
detail and either approved or “disaproved” by the National Security Council (NSC)
and the President.
The primary approved missions were to sabatoge and destroy key
industrial targets – such as oil and sugar refineries, and three or four a month were approved. Some of these Pathfinder commandos were captured, and
revealed that they were trained by the CIA and their missions approved by the government, a fact that Castro mentioned in speeches.
"In Washington (on September 10, 1963),
Ambassador-at-Large Llewellyn E. Thompson prepared a memo of his conversation
with the Russians and JFK’s response. As described by Mark White, the
editor The Kennedys and Cuba, 'In
a secret message to JFK, Khrushchev makes clear that he is aware of the recent
resumption of sabotage by the United States against Cuba. He
also warns Kennedy that the Soviet Union will respond
if Cuba is attacked.'”
Despite the official State Dept. declaration of March 1963
that no attacks would be made against Cuba from US Shores, the NSC Special Group approved five such missions in April and June and carried out in the fall of 1963.
As Watergate burglar and JMWAVE Pathfinder boat captain
Rolando Martinez said, “I took many men to Cuba, some with high-powered rifles
with scopes, that weren’t meant to kill rabbits.”
And killing Castro was certainly on their agenda, was propised numerous times and seriously considered by the NSC Special Group, and the President.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis William Harvey sent the Pathfinder
teams into Cuba to prepare for a possible invasion, their original task thwy were trained for. but when RFK found out, he had them recalled
He then dismissed Harvey
as head of the Cuban Task Force, replacing him with Desmond FitzGerald, who had the Kennedy charisma, and many thought he was somehow related,
though they actually weren’t.
The CIA sent Harvey as Chief of Station to Rome, where
James Jesus Angleton had served in the OSS during WWII and Clare Booth Luce had
been ambassador. But Harvey maintained his case officer relationship with John
Rosselli, who remained a close friend and drinking partner, and both were heavily
involved in the Pathfinder Plan.
The last time Harvey and Roselli officially met was in Miami in June 1963 when they wined and dined together and Harvey paid for their hotel bill on the ZR/RIFILE assassination account.
And there is a good reason why it was called that, as the sniper rifle became the prefered mechanism of death.
Just as there are five aspects of the strategic Valkyrie
plan to kill Hitler that fit like a glove over the Dealey Plaza operation, the
Pathfinder Plan served as a detailed tactical plan, but didn’t use the one part of the origional Valkyrie plan that didn’t work – a bomb.
The one CIA document that remained in their files that mentions the July 20, 1944 Valkyrie
plot to kill Hitler and was belatedly found, was a one paragraph
mention of it in a Cold War fifties-era propaganda pamphlet that blames the
failure of Valkyrie plan on Communists.
Rather than Communists however, there are three generally acknowledged
reasons why the bomb failed to kill Hitler. For one the meeting that was
supposed to be held in windowless concrete bunker was moved because of the hot
weather to a wooden clapboard map room with open windows that instead of
absorbing the shock of the bomb, allowed the explosion to extend outwards. A
second reason was the fact that Von Stauffenberg didn’t have time to set the
fuse for both bombs, and only put one active bomb in the leather case. If the
unfused bomb had been included, the explosion of the first bomb would have
activated the second and everyone in the room would have been killed. The third reason
was that after Von Stauffenberg had placed the bomb on the floor under the
table next to Hitler, he used a phone call as an excuse to leave, and someone moved the bomb case a few feet away from Hitler, behind a large, oak table leg that
deflected the explosion away from Hitler, saving him.
Hans B. Gisivius, the military officer who was also an agent
of Allen Dulles, advised against using an unreliable and insecure bomb, when
they could just shoot Hitler to kill him.
Dulles and Gisevius had opposed the use of a bomb,
preferring a pistol up close or a sniper in an ambush as more likely
to succeed and their fears proved true. Gisevius supported the coup and killing Hitler but was against the use of a bomb. as he told Von Stauffenberg: "I just I have
the feeling we'll never succeed. I'm not speaking through fear. But I have
a feeling very few of us will be alive this time next year, regardless of what
happens with your bomb."
So rather than poison or exploding sea shells and cigars, it was decided to try to kill Castro by having him shot by snipers with high powered rifles - as he drove by in an open jeep, his usual mode of travel.
Some of the Pathfinders were still trained in explosives by John “I.F.”
Harper, but some of them, at least one in each team, were trained as a first
class sniper by Harper, Carl Jenkins and Army Ranger Capt. Ed Roderick.
And so the planned mechanism of death for Castro was to shoot him in the
head from a distance with a high powered rifle, which would also allow for the
assassins to escape.
Now as every hunter knows, there are two different
approaches to killing your game, either stalking them until an opportunity
presents itself to shoot and kill them, or setting up a stand, like an tree elevated deer stand along the trail the intended victim was known to use or would be using.
All of the Pathfinders were expert marksmen, but the best
standouts were given special first class sniper training by Capt. Roderick, I.F. Harper, Carl Jenkins. And John
Roselli was with them, dressed in a US Army officer’s uniform and known around
the camp as “Colonel Rawlins,” whose speciality was “strategy.”
There are three types of snipers, third class – civilians,
in civilian clothes, with minimial possible military training. They use a third class weapon, leave it behind like a Saturday night special, and escapes by simply blending into the crowd, as the Sixth Floor sniper did.
Second class snipers are regular military, in uniform, with a standard issue sniper rifle with scope.
First class snipers are tested, specially chosen, trained by other first class snipers, and given the best, most modern and
efficient weapon. They work with a spotter, and are throoughly trained more so in camelflague,
insertion and exfiltraion than in actual shooting, as they are already really
good shots.
While the presence of Rosselli at JMWAVE training bases has
been used by some to say that the whole operation was a Mafia hit, sniping is not their style. The mob traditionaly just shoot the victim in the back of the head and leave his
body where it can be found as an example to others. The only known mob hit that
utilized a sniper with a high powered rifle that I am aware of was the murder of Bugsy Siegal. He was shot in the eye through a window while sitting on a couch in the apartment of
his girlfriend (Virginia Wolf). That hit was approved by the Board of Directors
of the National Crime Syndicate that was
formed in Atlantic City in 1929 for the purpose of resolving such disputes between mobsters.
When Bissell/O’Conner and Robert Mahu asked Roselli to help the
CIA kill Castro, as Sam Giancana’s man in California and Vegas, he had to
get permission from Giancana. The Chicago mob boss brought Tampa and former Havana
crime boss Santo Traficante into the picture. Traficante was left out of the
deal when his plan to poison Castro failed and it was decided to use the JMWAVE commando snipers.
Giancana later said that their involvement in the CIA plots
to kill Castro would get them all killed, and he was murdered by someone he knew before he could
testify before Congress about these things.
Rosselli did testify before Congress in secret sessions twice, and
then told Washington columnist and investigative reporter Jack Anderson about
what he had to say. Rosselli claimed that his JMWAVE commando team was sent in
to Cuba to kill Castro, but was captured, tourtured by Castro, turned and sent back to kill
JFK in Dallas.
But these anti-Castro commandos hated JFK as much as they
hated Castro and would have killed him on their own if given the chance. And
some of them were given that chance.
One such secret covert maritime mission to Cuba, as
described by Rosselli, was set for late October, 1963, around Halloween. The JMWAVE
commandos were let off a CIA raider ship, The Rex, a large former Sub Chaser. Maneuvering their small crafts as Brad Ayers had trained them, they were ambushed as soon as they got ashore. The mission was betrayed, and
the Rex barely got away from Cuban patrol boats with machine guns firing.
Castro paraded the captured commandos on Cuban TV and said
they were captured with high powered rifles with scopes and admitted to being
trained by the CIA to kill Castro.
A day later, on November 1, 1963 the New York Times ran a front page
cover story along with a picture of the Rex, that they found docked in Key West, not
far from the Kennedy compound. The NYTs reported that Rex was owned by the
Nicaraguan Somoza family, and leased to Collins Radio, of Richardson, Texas “for
electronic research.”
THE PATHFINDER PLAN
The details of the Pathfinder Plan to kill Castro did not
surface until 1975, when it was announced that the Church Intelligence
Committee would investigate the CIA’s plots to kill Castro, and eight CIA
National Photo Interpretation Center (NPIC) technicians came forward and told
their director, Dino Brugioni, that they were knowledgeable about a plot to
kill Castro because they had worked on it at Task Force W and JMWAVE.
Dino A. Brugioni’s Memo for the record 19 March, 1975: https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=104139
- relPageId=14
As Brugioni explained in a memo to his boss at the CIA, the
plan the NPIC technicians knew about and worked on was called the Pathfinder
Plan, and was director by Carl Jenkins. They also reported that Jenkins led a
motorboat drive by machine gun shooting of a beach house thought to belong to
Fidel Castro’s brother Raoul.
The plan they said was for snipers to shoot Fidel Castro in
the head with high powered rifles as he drove by in an open jeep at two
locations he was known to visit, including the Bay of Pigs, where he kept a
boat and was made into a sort of tourist attraction.
The other location was in Veradero, a high end North Shore
resort where Castro was known to visit the once exclusive DuPont estate known
as Xandau. There was only one road to Veradero, and it just so happened that Dr.
Rolando Cubella (AMLASH), had an apartment in Veradero that the CIA considered
using as a staging area for the attack on Castro.
One of the Pathfinder snipers, Felix Rodriguez, wrote in his
book Shadow Warrior:
“I was given a weapon… a beautiful German bolt-action rifle
with a powerful telescopic sight, all neatly packed in a custom-made padded
carrying case… a box of ammo, twenty rounds. I was told that I wouldn't
have to sight the rifle, as it had already been zeroed in. Apparently the
resistance had obtained a building facing a location that Castro frequented at
the time....We were supposed to debark onto a Cuban boat near Varadero
Beach, an area I knew from my childhood. From there we would be taken to
rendezvous with members of the anti-Castro resistance…..We would be provided a
safe house, then move to the room where we'd be able to shoot Fidel….”
But according to Rodriguez, the three times he was sent to
Cuba to carry out the Pathfinder mission, he was called back each time, just as
John Rosselli said his commandos were recalled three times.
In addition, the NPIC employees said that as far as they
knew the Pathfinder Plan to shoot Castro was never carried out, and in fact it
was, as they put it, “disapproved by higher authority.”
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.”
The NPIC employees said they compiled maps and photos of the
area and probably aerial and U2 photo and blueprints of buildings. They also
said that the Pathfinder Plan folder was kept in the NPIC section of the JMWAVE
station instead of the Operational Files where it belonged.
When a retired NPIC secretary was asked by the
Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) about the disposition of the NPIC
files that may have a bearing on the assassination, she said that Attorney
General Robert F. Kennedy had instructed her to box those records and have them
delivered to the Smithsonian Institute. When asked if she meant the National Archives,
where they belonged, she said no, she specifically recalled it was the
Smithsonian, but the AARB did not ask the Smithsonian for the NPIC records or
any records they may have relevant to the assassination.
When G. Robert Blakey of the House Select Committee on
Assassinations (HSCA) requested any records the CIA may have on the Pathfinder
Plan, they said they had none, but later, the Brugioni document was discovered
buried in the middle of the CIA’s Frank Sturgis Security file, even though
Sturgis had nothing to do with Pathfinder and was operational run by Air Force
Intelligence rather than the CIA.
So the Pathfinder Plan file was intentionally misfiled three
times that we know of – in the NPIC section of JMWAVE, at the Smithsonian
instead of the NARA on RFK’s instructions, and the only CIA document that
mentions Pathfinder in the Sturgis Security file.
Carl Jenkins, named in the NPIC Pathfinder Plan document, worked
closely with Gene Wheaton 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 was a military investigator by profession and earned
a Presidential citation for his work on security in the Middle East and was not
a silly conspiracy theorist. When he learned that Congress had established the
Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) in 1992 to search government records
for documents related to the assassination of President Kennedy, he wrote a
letter to ARRB chairman Judge John Tunheim. Interviewed by ARRB staff attorney
Anne Buttermer, he presented her with Carl Jenkins’s vita-resume, an old
passport and other documents that proved he knew the man personally.
Jenkins’ Resume/Vita see: http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2018/10/carl-e-jenkins-vita.html -
According to Buttermer'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 film makers interviewed Wheaton before he
died, Matt Ehling and William M. Law, both featured in a virtual presentation
I made with Ehling for the 2020 CAPA Conference.
[ JFKcountercoup: Bill Kelly's 2021 CAPA Conference Presentation on Gene Wheaton and Carl Jenkins ]
In one interview Wheaton says:
“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,”
Wheaton continued, “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.”
With his personal association with Jenkins and the Cubans,
Wheaton echoed what Bill Turner said at a COPA Conference in Dallas in the
1980s:
"We now know to a fairly good degree of certainty what
happened at Dealey Plaza. The motives were piling up - the Bay of Pigs, Cuban
Missile Crisis, Vietnam, the back channel to Cuba, - the motives were piling up
to the point they had to assassinate him. I think it’s' pretty obvious, with
the compilation of the information we have today, that the mechanism of the
crime came out of the allegiance between the CIA and the Mafia. They already
had an assassination apparatus set up for killing Castro and they just switched
targets and killed Kennedy instead."
And the specific plans to kill Castro that were redirected
to JFK in Dallas were the strategic Valkyrie Plan and the tactical Pathfinder
Plan, both of which we now know a lot about.
Comments, critiques and corrections can be sent to: Billkelly3@gmail.com
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