Operation Tilt (Bayo/Pawley Mission) Options

[John Simkin]

I am of the opinion that Operation Tilt could be a key incident in understanding the assassination of JFK.

In the winter of 1962 Eddie Bayo (Eduardo Perez) claimed that two officers in the Red Army based in Cuba wanted to defect to the United States. Bayo added that these men wanted to pass on details about atomic warheads and missiles that were still in Cuba despite the agreement that followed the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Bayo's story was eventually taken up by several members of the anti-Castro community including Nathaniel Weyl, William Pawley, Gerry P. Hemming, John Martino, Felipe Vidal Santiago and Frank Sturgis. Pawley became convinced that it was vitally important to help get these Soviet officers out of Cuba.

William Pawley contacted Ted Shackley at JM/WAVE. Shackley decided to help Pawley organize what became known as Operation Tilt or the Bayo-Pawley Mission. He also assigned Rip Robertson, a fellow member of the CIA in Miami, to help with the operation. David Sanchez Morales, another CIA agent, also became involved in this attempt to bring out these two Soviet officers.

On 8th June, 1963, a small group, including William Pawley, Eddie Bayo, Rip Robertson, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, John Martino. Richard Billings and Terry Spencer boarded a CIA flying boat. After landing off Baracoa, Bayo and his men got into a 22-foot craft and headed for the Cuban shore. The plan was to pick them up with the Soviet officers two days later. However, Bayo and his men were never seen again. It was rumoured that he had been captured and executed. However, his death was never reported in the Cuban press.

The operation involved several people who were later to feature in the investigation of the JFK assassination. In fact, I believe that several of those mentioned above took part in the assassination. Two of these men, Morales and Martino both confessed to friends their role in the assassination.

I believe there is a chance that William Pawley paid for the assassination. We also know that Dick Billings played an important role in the cover-up. See for example the role he played in undermining the Jim Garrison and the HUAC investigations.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKbillings.htm

Nathaniel Weyl was a member of the forum until his recent death. He was reluctant to talk about this event, claiming that William Pawley and the CIA took over the operation in its early stages. This is what he said in his book, Encounters With Communism (2003):

The Bayo operation has been covered in several article and books. It has been a hunting ground for conspiracy theorists, such as Peter Dale Scott (Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, University of California Press), who suggest that the Bayo affair was linked to the Kennedy assassination.

We know now that the defecting Soviet colonels never existed, that there were no Russian missiles left in place in Cuba, that the Bayo story was a hoax.

What happened to the Cubans who were offloaded from the Flying Tiger, heavily armed with ClA-supplied weapons? We know that the Pawley yacht weighed anchor ten miles to sea from the port of Baracoa in Oriente Province on the night of June 8, 1963. Three CIA people kept machineguns trained on Bayo and his Cuban commandos as the latter piled into the speedboat that was to take them to shore (Warren Hinckle and William W. Turner, Deadly Secrets, p. 194). Weapons were aimed at the Cubans because the CIA considered the possibility that they were Castro agents and that the operation was an ambush.

The commandos vanished into the night. Pawley saw to it that a Catalina flying boat search the skies for them until a week had elapsed. The generally accepted theory is that their secret purpose had been to get modern arms with which to kill Castro, but that they had been intercepted and killed or captured in a firefight. A year or so after the tragedy, Bill Pawley told me he believed that the men never landed. When they boarded the speedboat, he warned them that it was dangerously overloaded and urged them in vain to take rubber rafts aboard. Pawley heard a large freighter pass between the Flying Tiger and the shore. He believed that the Cuban boat was swamped in the freighter's wake and that the men drowned.

Was their secret purpose to get CIA arms with which to kill Fidel Castro? This is the conclusion researchers have arrived at, but it seems to me illogical. When I was approached to find a yacht and meet the defectors at sea, there was no mention of sending armed commandos ashore. Nor did I have any access to assault weapons nor did Martino have any reason to imagine I would be willing or able to supply them.

The source of guns was the CIA and Bayo and his companions had made it abundantly clear that they distrusted the agency and wanted to have nothing to do with it.

The conclusion I draw is that Bayo's initial plan was to land two or three mysterious people in Florida, to allege that they were Soviet colonels and spread the story of missiles still in Cuba to influence the American presidential elections. The purpose would have been to defeat Kennedy since many Cubans believed he had betrayed them and their cause.

Would any such imposture have been promptly detected and exposed? Or would continuing uncertainty and suspicion have poisoned the air for the young President?

When the plan mushroomed to comprise a Cuban commando force, heavily armed by the CIA with weapons, none of which was, of course, of U.S. origin, plans may well have changed. Assassination? Mere havoc and sabotage? We will probable never know.

This is what Richard D. Mahoney, Sons and Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy (1999) had to say about the matter:

After having shilled the project around reactionary circles Florida, Martino and Bayo pitched the idea to Pawley, who in turn took it to JM/WAVE chief Ted Shackley. Pawley told Shackley that he had gotten a call from the chief counsel to the Senate Intenal Subcommittee, Jay Sourwine, promising that chairman James O. Eastland of Mississippi would launch hearings if the Soviet officers were sprung. When Shackley learned from Pawley that Martino was involved, he was not pleased. He called Martino a "lowlife." Shacklley nonetheless signed on. The operation was a long shot but, if it panned out, a career maker. It might also serve to rehabilitate Shackley's demoted mentor. Bill Harvey. CIA headquarters at first balked at the proposal, having been sufficiently embarrassed by renegade heroics by the Cuban exiles. Then Senator Eastland telephoned Ambassador Pawley to inform him, incredibly enough, that John Martino, a Mafia operative, had personally briefed him on the mission, called Operation Red Cross. The CIA gave Shackley the go-ahead.

It is possible Rosselli and Martino actually believed in the Bayo-Pawley mission. It is equally possible that they were developing an elaborate alibi for another murderous contingency. On June 4, the day before the mission was to be launched, Martino and Bayo told an astounded Pawley that they had agreed to let Life magazine cover the raid in exchange for $15,000. Loren Hall, a Trafficante associate later investigated for his contact with Oswald in Dallas, claimed that the Mafia, not Life, had in fact put up the $15,000.

On June 5, Pawley's yacht, the Flying Tiger II, towing a smaller craft, set sail for its rendezvous point off the coast of Oriente province. Three days later, Pawley himself, accompanied by the ever-ready Rip Robertson, a Life photographer, Bayo, and nine other raiders boarded a CIA flying boat. (Pawley was so suspicious about the intentions of Bayo and his raiders that he locked them in the center cabin during the flight.) Off Baracoa, Cuba, they joined up with the yacht. Robertson passed out a full complement of arms to the fighters before they piled into the 22-foot craft and headed for the Cuban shore. The plan was to meet up with the Flying Tiger II two days later with the Soviet officers in hand. But Bayo and his comrades were never heard from again. Station chief Shackley later determined that the Soviet defection story had been cover for a "free-lance strike" by Bayo and the others. A review of Cuban army documents relating to the capture or killing of anti-Castro raiders, research done in June 1997, revealed no record of Bayo.

But the Bayo-Pawley mission fit nicely with Rosselli's later claim that President Kennedy was assassinated by an anti-Castro sniper team sent in to murder Castro, captured by the Cubans, tortured, and redeployed in Dallas. Through the handiwork of Rosselli's assistant, John Martino, the CIA, Life, Pawley, and Senator Eastland were all variously implicated.

Probably the best coverage of Operation Tilt can be found in Larry Hancock's Someone Would Have Talked (2003)

Rip Robertson... was brought back into CIA operations for the Bay of Pigs commanding the supply ship Barbara J and leading exile frogmen onto the beach. Robertson later became affiliated with JM WAVE operations and was the officer who debriefed John Martino upon his release (Florence Martino identified someone she knew only as "Rip" making numerous visits to their house). Robertson died in 1970, supposedly of the aftereffects of malaria contracted during service in Vietnam.

In addition to Bayo, Pawley, Martino and Robertson, the expedition was accompanied by Dick Billings, a LIFE staff writer obtained through the Pawley-Luce connection. Billings would later head the LIFE team in Dallas which purchased the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, as well as Marina Oswald's story rights (neither of which saw public exposure under LIFE auspices). Much later. Billings was hired by Robert Blakey, the second head of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, as editorial director for the final report of the HSCA.

See also:

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKtilt.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PHOTOtilt2.htm

[Larry Hancock]

Of the many strange things about the TILT project, one of the strangest is the massive violation of CIA security procedures. The idea of sending operational personnel on a mission with unvetted participants and then consciously allowing photography for a major media outlet like LIFE should have sent security personnel into fits...even more so with no firm control over the photos or their use(just a gentleman's agreement).

However we now have documents that show this action was approved in personal correspondance between Pawley and Marshall Carter, CIA Deputy Director....soon to become head of the NSA. Carter told Pawley "his people" in D.C. and Miami had decided to go along with the idea of a LIFE photographer on the mission.

And the photos that were released do show at least one opertional CIA employees as well as a nice set of deniable weapons....gee, guess you didn't have to have American weapons to be on an American mission, how about that.

Details and RIF references upcoming in the second edition of SWHT. Larry