John Bevilaqua Posted December 21, 2009 Share Posted December 21, 2009 Before Nathaniel Weyl died, he related to me the real story of Operation Red Cross also known as the Bayo/Pawley affair or Operation Tilt. I have documented this elsewhere on this site but for the sake of the historical record Weyl essentially implicated himself in the murder of the occupants of the rubber life rafts used by the anti-Castro infiltration unit, including Eddie Bayo when they returned from Cuba with NO Russian Military Officers in tow. There was no speedboat involved as later alleged by Weyl and since these infiltrators used rubber rafts with small Evinrude motors to both breach and then exit the island of Cuba, Weyl and Company HAD TO BE within the 5 or 10 mile territorial waters limit in effect at that time. And by aiding and assisting in this attack on a foreign power, Weyl and all the occupants of that mother ship, essentially violated The Neutrality Act. It is now thought that there were never any Russian Missile Officers on the island and Bayo and Company just wanted some modern weaponry and logistics support to launch either a major boom and bang operation or to launch an attempt on the life of Fidel Castro. The reason why Cuban newspapers never reported the deaths of Bayo and Company is because there were no Cuban reporters at the scene of the murder of the raft's occupants and because Fish Can't Read even Cuban Fish. The original plan sponsored and supported by both Senator James O. Eastland and Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona was to bring these alleged turncoat missile officers back to Goldwater's Arizona ranch where he was going to hold a press conference showcasing his prize catches in an attempt to cause untold damage to JFK's election chances in 1964 and thus catapault himself into the Presidency by a landslide vote. Weyl fabricated the story of a large freighter passing horizontally between the mother ship and the Cuban coast line to cover his tracks as an accessory to murder. Because he described to me with glee in his voice, the scene as the trio who were manning the 50-cal machine guns opened up on the Bayo contingent in the rubber raft or rafts after a short conference. Weyl described how these men, weighted down with machine gun belts, heavy boots, camouflaged uniforms, pistol belts and similar heavy gear sank beneath the surface never to be seen again. I think the historical record should be revised to reflect these newly discovered facts. Now with the new information about the association of Robert J. Morris, Guy Banister and Senator James O. Eastland in the 1956 Times Picayune article about Banister's, Eastland's and Draper's roles with The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, this story looms even larger in the JFK conundrum. Goldwater and Eastland were also technically guilty of violations of The Neutrality Act including Richard Billings and William Pawley. See: Where Rebels Roost: Civil Rights in Mississippi by Susan Klopfer. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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, a journalist and photographer working for Life Magazine, 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. Operation Tilt: Photographs Open Debate on the Kennedy Assassination Forum Debate: Life Magazine and the Assassination of JFK Forum Debate: Operation Tilt Forum Debate on Watergate (1) Nathaniel Weyl, Encounters With Communism (2003) In 1963, John Martino came to me with a fascinating story. He had attended a meeting in Palm Beach at which a Cuban who used the nom de guerre of Bayo claimed that the Soviets had deceived President Kennedy and that Russian missiles were still in Cuba. Bayo said he knew this because two of the Soviet officers guarding these clandestine missiles had defected, were being hidden and guarded by the remnants of the anti-Castro underground and were desperately anxious to tell their story. I was told that this was an emergency. The Russians could be captured by Castro's forces at any time. John Martino said that their Cuban protectors could get them safely to the northern coast of the island and thence by boat to some agreed-upon rendezvous point in the Bahamas if we acted immediately. Martino added that Bayo and the other Cuban patriots would have nothing to do with anyone from the CIA because they believed that the Agency had betrayed them at the Bay of Pigs. Could I get a yacht, designate a time and place to meet on some remote Bahamas island, get there and bring the Russian officers to the American mainland? If it was to be done, it must be done immediately. (2) Richard D. Mahoney, Sons and Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy (1999) 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.) OffBaracoa, 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, Lift, Pawley, and Senator Eastland were all variously implicated. (3) Nathaniel Weyl, 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. (4) Larry Hancock, 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. (5) Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation (1993) One of the first leads Schweiker asked me to check came from a source he considered impeccable: Clare Boothe Luce. One of the wealthiest women in the world, widow of the founder of the Time, Inc. publishing empire, former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, former Ambassador to Italy, successful Broadway playwright, international socialite and longtime civic activist, Clare Boothe Luce was the last person in the world Schweiker would have suspected of leading him on a wild goose chase. Yet the chase began almost immediately. Right after Schweiker announced the formation of his Kennedy assassination Subcommittee, he was visited by Vera Glaser, a syndicated Washington columnist. Glaser told him she had just interviewed Clare Boothe Luce and that Luce had given her some information relating to the assassination. Schweiker immediately called Luce and she, quite cooperatively and in detail, confirmed the story she had told Glaser. Luce said that some time after the Bay of Pigs she received a call from her "great friend" William Pawley, who lived in Miami. A man of immense wealth-he had made his millions in oil-during World War II Pawley had gained fame setting up the Flying Tigers with General Claire Chennault. Pawley had also owned major sugar interests in Cuba, as well as Havana's bus, trolley and gas systems and he was close to both pre-Castro Cuban rulers, President Carlos Prio and General Fulgencio Batista. (Pawley was one of the dispossessed American investors in Cuba who early tried to convince Eisenhower that Castro was a Communist and urged him to arm the exiles in Miami.) Luce said that Pawley had gotten the idea of putting together a fleet of speedboats-sea-going "Flying Tigers" as it were-which would be used by the exiles to dart in and out of Cuba on "intelligence gathering" missions. He asked her to sponsor one of these boats and she agreed. As a result of her sponsorship, Luce got to know the three-man crew of the boat "fairly well," as she said. She called them "my boys" and said they visited her a few times in her New York townhouse. It was one of these boat crews, Luce said, that originally brought back the news of Russian missiles in Cuba. Because Kennedy didn't react to it, she said she helped feed it to Senator Kenneth Keating, who made it public. She then wrote an article for Life magazine predicting the missile crisis. "Well, then came the nuclear showdown and the President made his deal with Khrushchev and I never saw my young Cubans again," she said. The boat operations were stopped, she said, shortly afterwards when Pawley was notified that the U.S. was invoking the Neutrality Act and would prevent any further exile missions into Cuba. Luce said she hadn't thought about her boat crew until the day that President Kennedy was killed. That evening she received a telephone call from one of the crew members. She told Schweiker his name was "something like" Julio Fernandez, and he said he was calling her from New Orleans. Julio Fernandez told her that he and the other crew members had been forced out of Miami after the Cuban missile crisis and that they had started a "Free Cuba" cell in New Orleans. Luce said that Fernandez told her that Oswald had approached his group and offered his services as a potential Castro assassin. He said his group didn't believe Oswald, suspected he was really a Communist and decided to keep tabs on him. Fernandez said they found that Oswald was, indeed, a Communist, and they eventually penetrated his "cell" and tape-recorded his talks, including his bragging that he could shoot anyone because he was "the greatest shot in the world with a telescopic lens." Fernandez said that Oswald then suddenly came into money and went to Mexico City and then Dallas. According to Luce, Fernandez also told her that his group had photographs of Oswald and copies of handbills Oswald had been distributing on the streets of New Orleans. Fernandez asked Luce what he should do with this information and material... A year later, in December of 1976, when I was about to start working for the Assassinations Committee, I stumbled across some other fascinating facts related to Clare Boothe Luce's tip to Senator Schweiker. That was when I learned, for instance, that her "great friend" in Miami, William Pawley, was a longtime associate of the CIA. Never an official spook, Pawley was nonetheless a member of the Old Boys network and was especially close to CIA Director Allen Dulles. He had helped transform his Flying Tigers into one of the first CIA proprietary airlines, Civil Air Transport, and had set up for the Agency a front called the Pacific Corporation as an offshoot of the Tigers. He had been involved in the CIA's overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala and he had backed more than one Castro assassination attempt. Pawley once told a Miami reporter: "Find me one man, just one man who can go it alone and get Castro, I'll pay anything, almost anything." But Pawley was not just a backer of exile groups, he wanted to be a participant, and I came across a bizarre story about one of his secret excursions to Cuba. Early one morning in the summer of 1963, a 65-foot luxury yacht named the Flying Tiger II slid away from its dock behind a mansion on Miami Beach's Sunset Island and headed for Cuba. The yacht belonged to Pawley. Aboard were three CIA paramilitary operatives; a cache of heavy firearms and explosives was locked in its stateroom. The yacht was scheduled to rendezvous off the coast of Cuba with an amphibious aircraft, a Catalina PBY, provided by the CIA. Aboard the aircraft were Pawley; a fellow named John Martino, who had worked for Mob bosses in Havana's casinos and had been imprisoned by Castro; Life magazine's Miami bureau chief Richard Billings (the same fellow who would later become the Assassinations Committee's chief writer); Billing's photographer, Terrence Spence; a daring Alpha 66 veteran Cuban infiltrator named Eduardo ("Eddie Bayo") Perez; and a raiding party of eleven CIA-trained Cuban exiles. The aim of the mission was for Eddie Bayo and his exile party, using a small, high-speed boat provided by the CIA, to sneak ashore, capture two Russian military technicians from a Cuban missile site and bring them back to the United States. Then, using the documentation that Life magazine's staffers would provide, a major press conference would proclaim that here was living proof that Soviet missiles were still in Cuba. The mission was a tragic failure. Radio contact with Bayo and his raiding party was lost and they were never heard from again. The Flying Tiger II and Pawley returned to Miami and Life never wrote a story about the mission. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
William Kelly Posted December 21, 2009 Share Posted December 21, 2009 I don't suppose that while you were talking to him you told him that you considered him an accessory to murder and a criminal? - BK Before Nathaniel Weyl died, he related to me the real story of Operation Red Cross also known as the Bayo/Pawley affair or Operation Tilt. I have documented this elsewhere on this site but for the sake of the historical record Weyl essentially implicated himself in the murder of the occupants of the rubber life rafts used by the anti-Castro infiltration unit, including Eddie Bayo when they returned from Cuba with NO Russian Military Officers in tow. There was no speedboat involved as later alleged by Weyl and since these infiltrators used rubber rafts with small Evinrude motors to both breach and then exit the island of Cuba, Weyl and Company HAD TO BE within the 5 or 10 mile territorial waters limit in effect at that time. And by aiding and assisting in this attack on a foreign power, Weyl and all the occupants of that mother ship, essentially violated The Neutrality Act. It is now thought that there were never any Russian Missile Officers on the island and Bayo and Company just wanted some modern weaponry and logistics support to launch either a major boom and bang operation or to launch an attempt on the life of Fidel Castro. The reason why Cuban newspapers never reported the deaths of Bayo and Company is because there were no Cuban reporters at the scene of the murder of the raft's occupants and because Fish Can't Read even Cuban Fish. The original plan sponsored and supported by both Senator James O. Eastland and Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona was to bring these alleged turncoat missile officers back to Goldwater's Arizona ranch where he was going to hold a press conference showcasing his prize catches in an attempt to cause untold damage to JFK's election chances in 1964 and thus catapault himself into the Presidency by a landslide vote. Weyl fabricated the story of a large freighter passing horizontally between the mother ship and the Cuban coast line to cover his tracks as an accessory to murder. Because he described to me with glee in his voice, the scene as the trio who were manning the 50-cal machine guns opened up on the Bayo contingent in the rubber raft or rafts after a short conference. Weyl described how these men, weighted down with machine gun belts, heavy boots, camouflaged uniforms, pistol belts and similar heavy gear sank beneath the surface never to be seen again. I think the historical record should be revised to reflect these newly discovered facts. Now with the new information about the association of Robert J. Morris, Guy Banister and Senator James O. Eastland in the 1956 Times Picayune article about Banister's, Eastland's and Draper's roles with The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, this story looms even larger in the JFK conundrum. Goldwater and Eastland were also technically guilty of violations of The Neutrality Act including Richard Billings and William Pawley. See: Where Rebels Roost: Civil Rights in Mississippi by Susan Klopfer. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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, a journalist and photographer working for Life Magazine, 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. Operation Tilt: Photographs Open Debate on the Kennedy Assassination Forum Debate: Life Magazine and the Assassination of JFK Forum Debate: Operation Tilt Forum Debate on Watergate (1) Nathaniel Weyl, Encounters With Communism (2003) In 1963, John Martino came to me with a fascinating story. He had attended a meeting in Palm Beach at which a Cuban who used the nom de guerre of Bayo claimed that the Soviets had deceived President Kennedy and that Russian missiles were still in Cuba. Bayo said he knew this because two of the Soviet officers guarding these clandestine missiles had defected, were being hidden and guarded by the remnants of the anti-Castro underground and were desperately anxious to tell their story. I was told that this was an emergency. The Russians could be captured by Castro's forces at any time. John Martino said that their Cuban protectors could get them safely to the northern coast of the island and thence by boat to some agreed-upon rendezvous point in the Bahamas if we acted immediately. Martino added that Bayo and the other Cuban patriots would have nothing to do with anyone from the CIA because they believed that the Agency had betrayed them at the Bay of Pigs. Could I get a yacht, designate a time and place to meet on some remote Bahamas island, get there and bring the Russian officers to the American mainland? If it was to be done, it must be done immediately. (2) Richard D. Mahoney, Sons and Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy (1999) 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.) OffBaracoa, 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, Lift, Pawley, and Senator Eastland were all variously implicated. (3) Nathaniel Weyl, 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. (4) Larry Hancock, 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. (5) Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation (1993) One of the first leads Schweiker asked me to check came from a source he considered impeccable: Clare Boothe Luce. One of the wealthiest women in the world, widow of the founder of the Time, Inc. publishing empire, former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, former Ambassador to Italy, successful Broadway playwright, international socialite and longtime civic activist, Clare Boothe Luce was the last person in the world Schweiker would have suspected of leading him on a wild goose chase. Yet the chase began almost immediately. Right after Schweiker announced the formation of his Kennedy assassination Subcommittee, he was visited by Vera Glaser, a syndicated Washington columnist. Glaser told him she had just interviewed Clare Boothe Luce and that Luce had given her some information relating to the assassination. Schweiker immediately called Luce and she, quite cooperatively and in detail, confirmed the story she had told Glaser. Luce said that some time after the Bay of Pigs she received a call from her "great friend" William Pawley, who lived in Miami. A man of immense wealth-he had made his millions in oil-during World War II Pawley had gained fame setting up the Flying Tigers with General Claire Chennault. Pawley had also owned major sugar interests in Cuba, as well as Havana's bus, trolley and gas systems and he was close to both pre-Castro Cuban rulers, President Carlos Prio and General Fulgencio Batista. (Pawley was one of the dispossessed American investors in Cuba who early tried to convince Eisenhower that Castro was a Communist and urged him to arm the exiles in Miami.) Luce said that Pawley had gotten the idea of putting together a fleet of speedboats-sea-going "Flying Tigers" as it were-which would be used by the exiles to dart in and out of Cuba on "intelligence gathering" missions. He asked her to sponsor one of these boats and she agreed. As a result of her sponsorship, Luce got to know the three-man crew of the boat "fairly well," as she said. She called them "my boys" and said they visited her a few times in her New York townhouse. It was one of these boat crews, Luce said, that originally brought back the news of Russian missiles in Cuba. Because Kennedy didn't react to it, she said she helped feed it to Senator Kenneth Keating, who made it public. She then wrote an article for Life magazine predicting the missile crisis. "Well, then came the nuclear showdown and the President made his deal with Khrushchev and I never saw my young Cubans again," she said. The boat operations were stopped, she said, shortly afterwards when Pawley was notified that the U.S. was invoking the Neutrality Act and would prevent any further exile missions into Cuba. Luce said she hadn't thought about her boat crew until the day that President Kennedy was killed. That evening she received a telephone call from one of the crew members. She told Schweiker his name was "something like" Julio Fernandez, and he said he was calling her from New Orleans. Julio Fernandez told her that he and the other crew members had been forced out of Miami after the Cuban missile crisis and that they had started a "Free Cuba" cell in New Orleans. Luce said that Fernandez told her that Oswald had approached his group and offered his services as a potential Castro assassin. He said his group didn't believe Oswald, suspected he was really a Communist and decided to keep tabs on him. Fernandez said they found that Oswald was, indeed, a Communist, and they eventually penetrated his "cell" and tape-recorded his talks, including his bragging that he could shoot anyone because he was "the greatest shot in the world with a telescopic lens." Fernandez said that Oswald then suddenly came into money and went to Mexico City and then Dallas. According to Luce, Fernandez also told her that his group had photographs of Oswald and copies of handbills Oswald had been distributing on the streets of New Orleans. Fernandez asked Luce what he should do with this information and material... A year later, in December of 1976, when I was about to start working for the Assassinations Committee, I stumbled across some other fascinating facts related to Clare Boothe Luce's tip to Senator Schweiker. That was when I learned, for instance, that her "great friend" in Miami, William Pawley, was a longtime associate of the CIA. Never an official spook, Pawley was nonetheless a member of the Old Boys network and was especially close to CIA Director Allen Dulles. He had helped transform his Flying Tigers into one of the first CIA proprietary airlines, Civil Air Transport, and had set up for the Agency a front called the Pacific Corporation as an offshoot of the Tigers. He had been involved in the CIA's overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala and he had backed more than one Castro assassination attempt. Pawley once told a Miami reporter: "Find me one man, just one man who can go it alone and get Castro, I'll pay anything, almost anything." But Pawley was not just a backer of exile groups, he wanted to be a participant, and I came across a bizarre story about one of his secret excursions to Cuba. Early one morning in the summer of 1963, a 65-foot luxury yacht named the Flying Tiger II slid away from its dock behind a mansion on Miami Beach's Sunset Island and headed for Cuba. The yacht belonged to Pawley. Aboard were three CIA paramilitary operatives; a cache of heavy firearms and explosives was locked in its stateroom. The yacht was scheduled to rendezvous off the coast of Cuba with an amphibious aircraft, a Catalina PBY, provided by the CIA. Aboard the aircraft were Pawley; a fellow named John Martino, who had worked for Mob bosses in Havana's casinos and had been imprisoned by Castro; Life magazine's Miami bureau chief Richard Billings (the same fellow who would later become the Assassinations Committee's chief writer); Billing's photographer, Terrence Spence; a daring Alpha 66 veteran Cuban infiltrator named Eduardo ("Eddie Bayo") Perez; and a raiding party of eleven CIA-trained Cuban exiles. The aim of the mission was for Eddie Bayo and his exile party, using a small, high-speed boat provided by the CIA, to sneak ashore, capture two Russian military technicians from a Cuban missile site and bring them back to the United States. Then, using the documentation that Life magazine's staffers would provide, a major press conference would proclaim that here was living proof that Soviet missiles were still in Cuba. The mission was a tragic failure. Radio contact with Bayo and his raiding party was lost and they were never heard from again. The Flying Tiger II and Pawley returned to Miami and Life never wrote a story about the mission. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pat Speer Posted December 21, 2009 Share Posted December 21, 2009 Before Nathaniel Weyl died, he related to me the real story of Operation Red Cross also known as the Bayo/Pawley affair or Operation Tilt.I have documented this elsewhere on this site but for the sake of the historical record Weyl essentially implicated himself in the murder of the occupants of the rubber life rafts used by the anti-Castro infiltration unit, including Eddie Bayo when they returned from Cuba with NO Russian Military Officers in tow. There was no speedboat involved as later alleged by Weyl and since these infiltrators used rubber rafts with small Evinrude motors to both breach and then exit the island of Cuba, Weyl and Company HAD TO BE within the 5 or 10 mile territorial waters limit in effect at that time. And by aiding and assisting in this attack on a foreign power, Weyl and all the occupants of that mother ship, essentially violated The Neutrality Act. It is now thought that there were never any Russian Missile Officers on the island and Bayo and Company just wanted some modern weaponry and logistics support to launch either a major boom and bang operation or to launch an attempt on the life of Fidel Castro. The reason why Cuban newspapers never reported the deaths of Bayo and Company is because there were no Cuban reporters at the scene of the murder of the raft's occupants and because Fish Can't Read even Cuban Fish. The original plan sponsored and supported by both Senator James O. Eastland and Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona was to bring these alleged turncoat missile officers back to Goldwater's Arizona ranch where he was going to hold a press conference showcasing his prize catches in an attempt to cause untold damage to JFK's election chances in 1964 and thus catapault himself into the Presidency by a landslide vote. Weyl fabricated the story of a large freighter passing horizontally between the mother ship and the Cuban coast line to cover his tracks as an accessory to murder. Because he described to me with glee in his voice, the scene as the trio who were manning the 50-cal machine guns opened up on the Bayo contingent in the rubber raft or rafts after a short conference. Weyl described how these men, weighted down with machine gun belts, heavy boots, camouflaged uniforms, pistol belts and similar heavy gear sank beneath the surface never to be seen again. I think the historical record should be revised to reflect these newly discovered facts. Now with the new information about the association of Robert J. Morris, Guy Banister and Senator James O. Eastland in the 1956 Times Picayune article about Banister's, Eastland's and Draper's roles with The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, this story looms even larger in the JFK conundrum. Goldwater and Eastland were also technically guilty of violations of The Neutrality Act including Richard Billings and William Pawley. See: Where Rebels Roost: Civil Rights in Mississippi by Susan Klopfer. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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, a journalist and photographer working for Life Magazine, 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. Operation Tilt: Photographs Open Debate on the Kennedy Assassination Forum Debate: Life Magazine and the Assassination of JFK Forum Debate: Operation Tilt Forum Debate on Watergate (1) Nathaniel Weyl, Encounters With Communism (2003) In 1963, John Martino came to me with a fascinating story. He had attended a meeting in Palm Beach at which a Cuban who used the nom de guerre of Bayo claimed that the Soviets had deceived President Kennedy and that Russian missiles were still in Cuba. Bayo said he knew this because two of the Soviet officers guarding these clandestine missiles had defected, were being hidden and guarded by the remnants of the anti-Castro underground and were desperately anxious to tell their story. I was told that this was an emergency. The Russians could be captured by Castro's forces at any time. John Martino said that their Cuban protectors could get them safely to the northern coast of the island and thence by boat to some agreed-upon rendezvous point in the Bahamas if we acted immediately. Martino added that Bayo and the other Cuban patriots would have nothing to do with anyone from the CIA because they believed that the Agency had betrayed them at the Bay of Pigs. Could I get a yacht, designate a time and place to meet on some remote Bahamas island, get there and bring the Russian officers to the American mainland? If it was to be done, it must be done immediately. (2) Richard D. Mahoney, Sons and Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy (1999) 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.) OffBaracoa, 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, Lift, Pawley, and Senator Eastland were all variously implicated. (3) Nathaniel Weyl, 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. (4) Larry Hancock, 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. (5) Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation (1993) One of the first leads Schweiker asked me to check came from a source he considered impeccable: Clare Boothe Luce. One of the wealthiest women in the world, widow of the founder of the Time, Inc. publishing empire, former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, former Ambassador to Italy, successful Broadway playwright, international socialite and longtime civic activist, Clare Boothe Luce was the last person in the world Schweiker would have suspected of leading him on a wild goose chase. Yet the chase began almost immediately. Right after Schweiker announced the formation of his Kennedy assassination Subcommittee, he was visited by Vera Glaser, a syndicated Washington columnist. Glaser told him she had just interviewed Clare Boothe Luce and that Luce had given her some information relating to the assassination. Schweiker immediately called Luce and she, quite cooperatively and in detail, confirmed the story she had told Glaser. Luce said that some time after the Bay of Pigs she received a call from her "great friend" William Pawley, who lived in Miami. A man of immense wealth-he had made his millions in oil-during World War II Pawley had gained fame setting up the Flying Tigers with General Claire Chennault. Pawley had also owned major sugar interests in Cuba, as well as Havana's bus, trolley and gas systems and he was close to both pre-Castro Cuban rulers, President Carlos Prio and General Fulgencio Batista. (Pawley was one of the dispossessed American investors in Cuba who early tried to convince Eisenhower that Castro was a Communist and urged him to arm the exiles in Miami.) Luce said that Pawley had gotten the idea of putting together a fleet of speedboats-sea-going "Flying Tigers" as it were-which would be used by the exiles to dart in and out of Cuba on "intelligence gathering" missions. He asked her to sponsor one of these boats and she agreed. As a result of her sponsorship, Luce got to know the three-man crew of the boat "fairly well," as she said. She called them "my boys" and said they visited her a few times in her New York townhouse. It was one of these boat crews, Luce said, that originally brought back the news of Russian missiles in Cuba. Because Kennedy didn't react to it, she said she helped feed it to Senator Kenneth Keating, who made it public. She then wrote an article for Life magazine predicting the missile crisis. "Well, then came the nuclear showdown and the President made his deal with Khrushchev and I never saw my young Cubans again," she said. The boat operations were stopped, she said, shortly afterwards when Pawley was notified that the U.S. was invoking the Neutrality Act and would prevent any further exile missions into Cuba. Luce said she hadn't thought about her boat crew until the day that President Kennedy was killed. That evening she received a telephone call from one of the crew members. She told Schweiker his name was "something like" Julio Fernandez, and he said he was calling her from New Orleans. Julio Fernandez told her that he and the other crew members had been forced out of Miami after the Cuban missile crisis and that they had started a "Free Cuba" cell in New Orleans. Luce said that Fernandez told her that Oswald had approached his group and offered his services as a potential Castro assassin. He said his group didn't believe Oswald, suspected he was really a Communist and decided to keep tabs on him. Fernandez said they found that Oswald was, indeed, a Communist, and they eventually penetrated his "cell" and tape-recorded his talks, including his bragging that he could shoot anyone because he was "the greatest shot in the world with a telescopic lens." Fernandez said that Oswald then suddenly came into money and went to Mexico City and then Dallas. According to Luce, Fernandez also told her that his group had photographs of Oswald and copies of handbills Oswald had been distributing on the streets of New Orleans. Fernandez asked Luce what he should do with this information and material... A year later, in December of 1976, when I was about to start working for the Assassinations Committee, I stumbled across some other fascinating facts related to Clare Boothe Luce's tip to Senator Schweiker. That was when I learned, for instance, that her "great friend" in Miami, William Pawley, was a longtime associate of the CIA. Never an official spook, Pawley was nonetheless a member of the Old Boys network and was especially close to CIA Director Allen Dulles. He had helped transform his Flying Tigers into one of the first CIA proprietary airlines, Civil Air Transport, and had set up for the Agency a front called the Pacific Corporation as an offshoot of the Tigers. He had been involved in the CIA's overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala and he had backed more than one Castro assassination attempt. Pawley once told a Miami reporter: "Find me one man, just one man who can go it alone and get Castro, I'll pay anything, almost anything." But Pawley was not just a backer of exile groups, he wanted to be a participant, and I came across a bizarre story about one of his secret excursions to Cuba. Early one morning in the summer of 1963, a 65-foot luxury yacht named the Flying Tiger II slid away from its dock behind a mansion on Miami Beach's Sunset Island and headed for Cuba. The yacht belonged to Pawley. Aboard were three CIA paramilitary operatives; a cache of heavy firearms and explosives was locked in its stateroom. The yacht was scheduled to rendezvous off the coast of Cuba with an amphibious aircraft, a Catalina PBY, provided by the CIA. Aboard the aircraft were Pawley; a fellow named John Martino, who had worked for Mob bosses in Havana's casinos and had been imprisoned by Castro; Life magazine's Miami bureau chief Richard Billings (the same fellow who would later become the Assassinations Committee's chief writer); Billing's photographer, Terrence Spence; a daring Alpha 66 veteran Cuban infiltrator named Eduardo ("Eddie Bayo") Perez; and a raiding party of eleven CIA-trained Cuban exiles. The aim of the mission was for Eddie Bayo and his exile party, using a small, high-speed boat provided by the CIA, to sneak ashore, capture two Russian military technicians from a Cuban missile site and bring them back to the United States. Then, using the documentation that Life magazine's staffers would provide, a major press conference would proclaim that here was living proof that Soviet missiles were still in Cuba. The mission was a tragic failure. Radio contact with Bayo and his raiding party was lost and they were never heard from again. The Flying Tiger II and Pawley returned to Miami and Life never wrote a story about the mission. Am I reading this right? Are you claiming the CIA and Pawley killed Bayo and his crew? If so, why? It makes no sense. It only makes sense, furthermore, that if f they'd known these men to be dead, they would have exploited this in the Cuban community. Imagine the mileage they'd have gained from some phony story claiming Castro's agents murdered these men in cold blood, etc. Weyl was a member of this forum, and seemed quite earnest in his inability to remember much when questioned. I began to give him grief on this, but then thought better of it after I realized he was over ninety years old. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Bevilaqua Posted December 21, 2009 Author Share Posted December 21, 2009 (edited) Before Nathaniel Weyl died, he related to me the real story of Operation Red Cross also known as the Bayo/Pawley affair or Operation Tilt.I have documented this elsewhere on this site but for the sake of the historical record Weyl essentially implicated himself in the murder of the occupants of the rubber life rafts used by the anti-Castro infiltration unit, including Eddie Bayo when they returned from Cuba with NO Russian Military Officers in tow. There was no speedboat involved as later alleged by Weyl and since these infiltrators used rubber rafts with small Evinrude motors to both breach and then exit the island of Cuba, Weyl and Company HAD TO BE within the 5 or 10 mile territorial waters limit in effect at that time. And by aiding and assisting in this attack on a foreign power, Weyl and all the occupants of that mother ship, essentially violated The Neutrality Act. It is now thought that there were never any Russian Missile Officers on the island and Bayo and Company just wanted some modern weaponry and logistics support to launch either a major boom and bang operation or to launch an attempt on the life of Fidel Castro. The reason why Cuban newspapers never reported the deaths of Bayo and Company is because there were no Cuban reporters at the scene of the murder of the raft's occupants and because Fish Can't Read even Cuban Fish. The original plan sponsored and supported by both Senator James O. Eastland and Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona was to bring these alleged turncoat missile officers back to Goldwater's Arizona ranch where he was going to hold a press conference showcasing his prize catches in an attempt to cause untold damage to JFK's election chances in 1964 and thus catapault himself into the Presidency by a landslide vote. Weyl fabricated the story of a large freighter passing horizontally between the mother ship and the Cuban coast line to cover his tracks as an accessory to murder. Because he described to me with glee in his voice, the scene as the trio who were manning the 50-cal machine guns opened up on the Bayo contingent in the rubber raft or rafts after a short conference. Weyl described how these men, weighted down with machine gun belts, heavy boots, camouflaged uniforms, pistol belts and similar heavy gear sank beneath the surface never to be seen again. I think the historical record should be revised to reflect these newly discovered facts. Now with the new information about the association of Robert J. Morris, Guy Banister and Senator James O. Eastland in the 1956 Times Picayune article about Banister's, Eastland's and Draper's roles with The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, this story looms even larger in the JFK conundrum. Goldwater and Eastland were also technically guilty of violations of The Neutrality Act including Richard Billings and William Pawley. See: Where Rebels Roost: Civil Rights in Mississippi by Susan Klopfer. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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, a journalist and photographer working for Life Magazine, 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. Operation Tilt: Photographs Open Debate on the Kennedy Assassination Forum Debate: Life Magazine and the Assassination of JFK Forum Debate: Operation Tilt Forum Debate on Watergate (1) Nathaniel Weyl, Encounters With Communism (2003) In 1963, John Martino came to me with a fascinating story. He had attended a meeting in Palm Beach at which a Cuban who used the nom de guerre of Bayo claimed that the Soviets had deceived President Kennedy and that Russian missiles were still in Cuba. Bayo said he knew this because two of the Soviet officers guarding these clandestine missiles had defected, were being hidden and guarded by the remnants of the anti-Castro underground and were desperately anxious to tell their story. I was told that this was an emergency. The Russians could be captured by Castro's forces at any time. John Martino said that their Cuban protectors could get them safely to the northern coast of the island and thence by boat to some agreed-upon rendezvous point in the Bahamas if we acted immediately. Martino added that Bayo and the other Cuban patriots would have nothing to do with anyone from the CIA because they believed that the Agency had betrayed them at the Bay of Pigs. Could I get a yacht, designate a time and place to meet on some remote Bahamas island, get there and bring the Russian officers to the American mainland? If it was to be done, it must be done immediately. (2) Richard D. Mahoney, Sons and Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy (1999) 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.) OffBaracoa, 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, Lift, Pawley, and Senator Eastland were all variously implicated. (3) Nathaniel Weyl, 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. (4) Larry Hancock, 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. (5) Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation (1993) One of the first leads Schweiker asked me to check came from a source he considered impeccable: Clare Boothe Luce. One of the wealthiest women in the world, widow of the founder of the Time, Inc. publishing empire, former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, former Ambassador to Italy, successful Broadway playwright, international socialite and longtime civic activist, Clare Boothe Luce was the last person in the world Schweiker would have suspected of leading him on a wild goose chase. Yet the chase began almost immediately. Right after Schweiker announced the formation of his Kennedy assassination Subcommittee, he was visited by Vera Glaser, a syndicated Washington columnist. Glaser told him she had just interviewed Clare Boothe Luce and that Luce had given her some information relating to the assassination. Schweiker immediately called Luce and she, quite cooperatively and in detail, confirmed the story she had told Glaser. Luce said that some time after the Bay of Pigs she received a call from her "great friend" William Pawley, who lived in Miami. A man of immense wealth-he had made his millions in oil-during World War II Pawley had gained fame setting up the Flying Tigers with General Claire Chennault. Pawley had also owned major sugar interests in Cuba, as well as Havana's bus, trolley and gas systems and he was close to both pre-Castro Cuban rulers, President Carlos Prio and General Fulgencio Batista. (Pawley was one of the dispossessed American investors in Cuba who early tried to convince Eisenhower that Castro was a Communist and urged him to arm the exiles in Miami.) Luce said that Pawley had gotten the idea of putting together a fleet of speedboats-sea-going "Flying Tigers" as it were-which would be used by the exiles to dart in and out of Cuba on "intelligence gathering" missions. He asked her to sponsor one of these boats and she agreed. As a result of her sponsorship, Luce got to know the three-man crew of the boat "fairly well," as she said. She called them "my boys" and said they visited her a few times in her New York townhouse. It was one of these boat crews, Luce said, that originally brought back the news of Russian missiles in Cuba. Because Kennedy didn't react to it, she said she helped feed it to Senator Kenneth Keating, who made it public. She then wrote an article for Life magazine predicting the missile crisis. "Well, then came the nuclear showdown and the President made his deal with Khrushchev and I never saw my young Cubans again," she said. The boat operations were stopped, she said, shortly afterwards when Pawley was notified that the U.S. was invoking the Neutrality Act and would prevent any further exile missions into Cuba. Luce said she hadn't thought about her boat crew until the day that President Kennedy was killed. That evening she received a telephone call from one of the crew members. She told Schweiker his name was "something like" Julio Fernandez, and he said he was calling her from New Orleans. Julio Fernandez told her that he and the other crew members had been forced out of Miami after the Cuban missile crisis and that they had started a "Free Cuba" cell in New Orleans. Luce said that Fernandez told her that Oswald had approached his group and offered his services as a potential Castro assassin. He said his group didn't believe Oswald, suspected he was really a Communist and decided to keep tabs on him. Fernandez said they found that Oswald was, indeed, a Communist, and they eventually penetrated his "cell" and tape-recorded his talks, including his bragging that he could shoot anyone because he was "the greatest shot in the world with a telescopic lens." Fernandez said that Oswald then suddenly came into money and went to Mexico City and then Dallas. According to Luce, Fernandez also told her that his group had photographs of Oswald and copies of handbills Oswald had been distributing on the streets of New Orleans. Fernandez asked Luce what he should do with this information and material... A year later, in December of 1976, when I was about to start working for the Assassinations Committee, I stumbled across some other fascinating facts related to Clare Boothe Luce's tip to Senator Schweiker. That was when I learned, for instance, that her "great friend" in Miami, William Pawley, was a longtime associate of the CIA. Never an official spook, Pawley was nonetheless a member of the Old Boys network and was especially close to CIA Director Allen Dulles. He had helped transform his Flying Tigers into one of the first CIA proprietary airlines, Civil Air Transport, and had set up for the Agency a front called the Pacific Corporation as an offshoot of the Tigers. He had been involved in the CIA's overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala and he had backed more than one Castro assassination attempt. Pawley once told a Miami reporter: "Find me one man, just one man who can go it alone and get Castro, I'll pay anything, almost anything." But Pawley was not just a backer of exile groups, he wanted to be a participant, and I came across a bizarre story about one of his secret excursions to Cuba. Early one morning in the summer of 1963, a 65-foot luxury yacht named the Flying Tiger II slid away from its dock behind a mansion on Miami Beach's Sunset Island and headed for Cuba. The yacht belonged to Pawley. Aboard were three CIA paramilitary operatives; a cache of heavy firearms and explosives was locked in its stateroom. The yacht was scheduled to rendezvous off the coast of Cuba with an amphibious aircraft, a Catalina PBY, provided by the CIA. Aboard the aircraft were Pawley; a fellow named John Martino, who had worked for Mob bosses in Havana's casinos and had been imprisoned by Castro; Life magazine's Miami bureau chief Richard Billings (the same fellow who would later become the Assassinations Committee's chief writer); Billing's photographer, Terrence Spence; a daring Alpha 66 veteran Cuban infiltrator named Eduardo ("Eddie Bayo") Perez; and a raiding party of eleven CIA-trained Cuban exiles. The aim of the mission was for Eddie Bayo and his exile party, using a small, high-speed boat provided by the CIA, to sneak ashore, capture two Russian military technicians from a Cuban missile site and bring them back to the United States. Then, using the documentation that Life magazine's staffers would provide, a major press conference would proclaim that here was living proof that Soviet missiles were still in Cuba. The mission was a tragic failure. Radio contact with Bayo and his raiding party was lost and they were never heard from again. The Flying Tiger II and Pawley returned to Miami and Life never wrote a story about the mission. Am I reading this right? Are you claiming the CIA and Pawley killed Bayo and his crew? If so, why? It makes no sense. It only makes sense, furthermore, that if f they'd known these men to be dead, they would have exploited this in the Cuban community. Imagine the mileage they'd have gained from some phony story claiming Castro's agents murdered these men in cold blood, etc. Weyl was a member of this forum, and seemed quite earnest in his inability to remember much when questioned. I began to give him grief on this, but then thought better of it after I realized he was over ninety years old. When I talked to him perhaps 5-6 years ago, maybe more, he was quite lucid, in full charge of his senses and his memory and quite talkative, too. And, yes, I told him that what he just described to me made him an accessory to murder, and a bona fide violator of The Neutrality Act as well and he stammered, stuttered and harrumphed as well. It was only later that I read where he concocted that story about this gigantic ocean going vessel plowing between the mother ship and the shoreline, running parallel to he shoreline which allegedly swamped the speed boat. Well bull crap to that as well. There is no frigging way that these little rafts, inflated with air could have made it out to a point 10 miles from shore after trying to murder Castro or after running a major boom and bang operation against Castro. No way in hell. And how about trying to find the mother ship in the pitch black darkness? Again, no way in hell. I honestly can not recall whether he said that these rafts were oar powered or motorboat powered but to cover 10 miles at 10 miles an hour would have taken an hour. 1) The mother ship was within the 10-mile statutory limit. 2) Weyl only added this little safety zone buffer after I called him a 2-time felon and a Neutrality Act violator. 3) Weyl only made up this ocean going vessel story with the wake allegedly swamping the speed boat story long after I put the fear of God in him. How many vessels large enough to swamp a speed boat would be travelling left to right within 5 miles of shore in the middle of the night anyway? Another total fabrication. Most ocean going vessels that large would be going nose in, perpendicular to the shore, within well defined, well lighted, channels in order to avoid scraping bottom. 4) Weyl described with a certain glee in his voice the pleasure with which he watched these "lying sons of bitches" and infiltrators sink beneath the surface, riddled with 50-cal machine gun bullets, and weighed down by their boots, gunbelts and ammo clips. 5) He stated that these infiltrators had tried to make fools of the entire crew, by making up the stories about the alleged Russian Missile Officers and he indicated that the terrible swift sword and the 50-caliber machine guns had been used as cover upon their departure since they were suspected of possibly leading the boat into some sort of ambush, and then used to wreak revenge and punishment because they returned empty handed. When everyone realized that they had been had, the response was swift, sure and lethal, very lethal. Bayo and company were not even allowed to board the mother ship. They were shot as they sat in the raft or rafts. Plain and simple. It is also possible that Weyl mentioned that whoever was in charge of the mission, was worried that if they were caught near Cuban shores with these commandoes in tow or on board, that it would have been a very difficult thing to establish plausible deniablility as I am sure you can understand. 6) "A review of Cuban army documents relating to the capture or killing of anti-Castro raiders, (based on) research done in June 1997, revealed no record of Bayo." No body, no evidence, no record of ever catching the infiltrators. EXACTLY what Weyl had described to me. 7) As to your bald faced "assumption" about the role of the CIA in this little gambit. Even Weyl put that to rest when he related how John Martino in an article in 2003, who was a close friend of Dr. Revilo P. Oliver a founder of the John Birch Society where they often appeared together on the John Birch Speaker's Tour Platforms, was the one who actually approached Nathaniel Weyl, a Eugenicist and a right wing extremist, in the Wickliffe Draper mold and someone who wrote about Frederick Osborn, a Pioneer Fund director in the early 1950's and even co-authored a book with him. So in fact Operation Red Cross was a John Birch gambit and a Pioneer Fund project since Bayo specifically insisted that he would have nothing to do with the CIA, due to the perceived double cross at the Bay of Pigs. And now I am certain that not only the anti-Castro exiles, but even E. H. Hunt IN 2007, plus many members on multiple JFK forums have a distinct personal or political grudge against the CIA, and just automatically respond with a knee-jerk reaction whenever they think they can blame something on the CIA when in fact the event in question, had NOTHING TO DO with the CIA. E. H. Hunt lamented the fact that he was sold down the river after Watergate, blaming the CIA himself, and he probably spent the rest of his life writing and selling books in order to put food on the table. Even William F. Buckley, Jr. had long since parted company with the CIA and turned to proselytizing, writing and wagging that serpentine tongue. Billy Buck did not even need the income from the CIA since he was "The Mastah" and very wealthy. So can we all agree that Operation Red Cross was indeed, a John Birch, Pioneer Fund and SISS project of James Eastland, Robert Morris his legal counsel and Nathaniel Weyl and put this one to bed once and for all? "In 1963, John Martino came to me with a fascinating story. He had attended a meeting in Palm Beach at which a Cuban who used the nom de guerre of Bayo claimed that the Soviets had deceived President Kennedy and that Russian missiles were still in Cuba. Bayo said he knew this because two of the Soviet officers guarding these clandestine missiles had defected, were being hidden and guarded by the remnants of the anti-Castro underground and were desperately anxious to tell their story. I was told that this was an emergency. The Russians could be captured by Castro's forces at any time. John Martino said that their Cuban protectors could get them safely to the northern coast of the island and thence by boat to some agreed-upon rendezvous point in the Bahamas if we acted immediately. Martino added that Bayo and the other Cuban patriots would have nothing to do with anyone from the CIA because they believed that the Agency had betrayed them at the Bay of Pigs. Could I get a yacht, designate a time and place to meet on some remote Bahamas island, get there and bring the Russian officers to the American mainland? If it was to be done, it must be done immediately." You can debate as long as you want what a "better strategy" would have been, or what "publicity value" could have been obtained by coming home with no Russian Missile Officers, with a tale of woe about murdered patriots and murdered Freedom Fighters, but I am telling you what Weyl told me. Nothing more nothing less. I forgot to add the fact that Weyl also told me that the Cuban patrol boats with spotlights and the aerial reconnaissance planes also with spotlights were circling around in the near vicinity trying to locate either the raft(s) or the mother ship. Not knowing whether or not they would be able to evade the Cuban search party, they decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and they destroyed the incriminating evidence, the commandos, their guns and their raft(s), rather than run the risk of creating a major international cause celeb and an international crisis which might end up putting them in jail or causing a whole lot of headaches for Life Magazine, C.D. Jackson, Henry B. Luce, the other occupants of the boat including any case officers, SOFs, and Senators Eastland and Goldwater, and for whomever Weyl was working for at that time. This next conclusion is just a supposition on my part, but somehow they must have felt that coming back from Cuba WITH Missile Officers, and WITHOUT being buzzed and identified by patrol boats or reconnaissance planes would result in their being declared conquering heroes, and they could have made up any lies about territorial waters they wanted to since, after the fact, they would never have been EVER SEEN in Cuban territorial waters. Plus with either their "captured prizes" or "willing defectors" (yeah right) in tow whatever they did to accomplish their task would ostensibly have been either ignored or forgiven. I am certain that Eastland and Goldwater thought that JFK would either have been summarily impeached or even chickened out on a run for re-election in 1964, had their little plot worked out as planned. In any event, having failed at character assassination, they moved on to the real thing. I used to think that NSAM 263 (was it ?) about the ICBM gap was the FINAL denouement of JFK and the final nail in his coffin, but in fact Operation Red Cross might have sealed his fate instead and NSAM 263 was just icing on the cake. Not so hard to swallow, right? The fact is, that the occupants of that boat, whomever they worked for, decided very quickly that the best strategy was to kill the bastidges, and sink the bastidges to the bottom of the sea. Now they sleep with the fishes. And dead men tell no tales. And since Weyl and his associates feared discovery with their hands in the cookie jar more than anything else (as I have since surmised) they exercised their first, best option and eliminated the evidence, escaped the search posse, and then headed back to Florida only to face the wrath of Goldwater and Eastland. Plus Richard Billings realized that he had been totally taken in as well. What could he write after he came back with no officers and no commandos? Oh, gee, I violated the Neutrality Act, trying to get a story, I watched as these guys came back empty handed, and stood by as their raft and the men themselves were shot full of holes, and went to visit Davey Jones Locker, or whatever, while I did nothing. For JFK it would have been better had they actually found some incriminating evidence of Russian Missiles or Officers however flimsy. Then at least Goldwater and Eastland would have or could have waited for the election to determine the next president. As it was, this failure at Character Assassination quickly turned into the next logical step: the plot for Physical Assassination. The rest is history. Edited December 22, 2009 by John Bevilaqua Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Bevilaqua Posted December 22, 2009 Author Share Posted December 22, 2009 Am I reading this right? Are you claiming the CIA and Pawley killed Bayo and his crew? If so, why? It makes no sense.It only makes sense, furthermore, that if f they'd known these men to be dead, they would have exploited this in the Cuban community. Imagine the mileage they'd have gained from some phony story claiming Castro's agents murdered these men in cold blood, etc. Weyl was a member of this forum, and seemed quite earnest in his inability to remember much when questioned. I began to give him grief on this, but then thought better of it after I realized he was over ninety years old. Well, you might in fact, be "reading something into" this entire rendition as the facts morphed or evolved over the decades. 1) Nathaniel Weyl specifically said that Bayo and Company, and by logical extension all the other anti-Castro exiles, wanted NOTHING to do with the CIA after the Bay of Pigs. To me that means NOTHING to do with the CIA at Operation Red Cross and NOTHING to do with the non-rogue and non-trusted CIA officers during the Miami plot to assassinate JFK OR the Dallas plot to assassinate JFK. Bet that throws about 296+ illogical and biased theories (mostly the ones that included non-existent CIA contributions) into a cocked hat, now doesn't it? 2) Nathaniel Weyl gave the reasons why Bayo and his lying friends were executed on the spot when they returned with nothing but a posse of Cubans chasing after them riding patrol boats with spotlights and flying search planes with even more spotlights. Even if Weyl and his entourage were spotted, identified or worse yet trapped or cornered and boarded, there would be no incriminating evidence to tie them to this most recent boom and bang operation. 3) Weyl also indicated to me that he and his friends were close enough to shore to hear that boom and bang operation while it was ongoing. Weyl's lies for public consumption included a fabrication which indicated that he believed the landing party never landed because their boat was "swamped by a passing freighter" or whatever. In fact, once they landed and fired shots on foreign soil, the provisions for violations of The Neutrality Act kicked in, and he had to change his story to eliminate obvious self-incrimination in this felony. 4) Then to exonerate himself and all his associates from the murder charges he puts them at the bottom of the ocean BEFORE they even land. Sounds all very logical to me? Nathaniel Weyl in my estimation is a practiced professional xxxx and prevaricator. He willingly and wittingly made up lies about Alger Hiss in an attempt to smear him and to implicate him as a communist, spy and a traitor and now he goes to his grave as someone with at least 2 felony convictions hanging over his head. His name is MUD in my book and all the history books in the future should include these references. Nathaniel "mud-slinger" Weyl just another dirty, rotten scoundrel, and a total McCarthyite bastidge with Eugenicist right-wing John Bircher predilections. How much lower can you go? Not much further. Plus he was a Draper and Osborne Eugenicist, a Racist, a pro-Nazi and a McCarthyite Fascist par excellence. Pat, you were saying: "It makes no sense." Au contraire, what you are saying makes no sense in light of what I know about this incident and about all the persons involved. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Bevilaqua Posted December 23, 2009 Author Share Posted December 23, 2009 (edited) Did the Mob kill JFK? Unless you consider The John Birch Society, The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, the World Anti-Communist League, the Pioneer Fund, SISS or The Shickshinny Knights of Malta to be a "Mob" then I would say the answer is decidedly NO! Nothing like beating a dead horse or raising straw men! Here is a Full Text Searchable Index of CTKA for anyone to use: http://www.5000Watches.com/CTKA There are only about a half dozen hits on CTKA for "John Birch" and zero hits on either Shickshinny, Draper, Robert Morris or Vonsiatsky. To me that is just amazing, just totally non-comprehensible. Try some others like Misssissippi, WACL, Eastland, Sovereign, Knights of Malta, "Jesse Helms", "Strom Thurmond", SISS, HUAC, Willoughby, del Valle, Buckley, YAF, Congress of Freedom, Milteer, ANP, George Lincoln Rockwell, MacArthur, McCarthy, etc. That is not to say that one can not use the CTKA site to obtain some more gigantic gems of information, however. Having established in a previous post that Guy Banister was NOT WITH THE CIA, but rather in the employ of both Robert J. Morris and Senator James O. Eastland as well as the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission of Wickliffe Preston Draper since that Greenwood, Mississippi meeting with Eastland and Morris, this note from a review of Dick Russell's TMWKTM on the CTKA site has just GIGANTIC IMPLICATIONS: "From here, Russell describes some of the characters and events from Oswald's last summer on earth. Which he spent in New Orleans with a now famous cast of characters. He quotes William Gaudet saying he saw Oswald leafleting and Oswald did not know what he was doing. Guy Banister had put him up to it. (p. 253)" Hope you folks realize the implications of what is being said here. Banister was NEVER in the CIA, even Reitzes saw through that little ruse, but he WAS in the orbit of these obvious SISS operatives, like Eastland, Draper, Morris and company including Leander Perez the political boss of Plaquemines Parish, all of whom had been handling Oswald for years now for some yet to be determined role, from Klein's Sporting Goods through the Clinton, LA Voter Registration, maybe even the adolescent truancy study involving Oswald, and now even including the FPCC Leafleting Incident with Oswald and Banister. And weren't either Morris, Eastland or Banister involved with those studies of truants in New Orleans as well where they probably first discovered Oswald and realized his potential as a programmed assassin? Help me out here. Then people like H. Werner Klopfer helped out by monitoring both his progress and his potential as a Candidate (Manchurian). After Raikin highjacked Oswald from the docks in Hoboken and sent him to de Mohrenschildt he was in front of Klopfer shortly after that, correct? And both Raikin, Willoughby and Nunez Portuendo were involved together at the Foreign Intel Digest of Stetsko's ABN right? Just show me where there is any CIA involvement in this orbit of characters! Sounds like a bunch of White Russians, Fascists, John Birchers, Pioneer Fund types, SISS members, Eugenicists and miscellaneous malcontents. Garrison was indebted to and dependent upon the racist boss of Plaquemines Parish for his very existence and I am sure that nothing he would find would ever point back to the person who held Garrison's political future in his hands. Guy Banister, as a paid agent of Eastland, Morris and Draper had the sole role of setting Oswald up in as many ways as he possibly could. And set him up, he did. And so did both Angel and Leopoldo, one of whom was the person whose name appeared as the tenant in my neighbor's house rented out by Bernard Barker's Keyes Realty. And Robert Morris lived only 3 doors away on the same street in Grapeland Heights. Now do you know why I feel that not only was I an "eyewitness to history" but also the only one in that category who actually has pursued the case as an investigator? And a damn good one, too, if I may say so myself. Banister worked for Eastland, Draper and Morris since at least 1956 and perhaps even before that going back to the days of McCarthyism. And Draper was the one who paid Dr. Hans J. Eysenck to give him the secrets of MK/ULTRA which old Hans could easily have stolen during his official work on that project. Damn. Damn. Damn. And I only overlooked or minimized the possible roles of Banister in the past because I just felt that Garrison was way off base in even thinking that either Ferrie or Banister were ever in the CIA, or even considered CIA material for that matter. And I always suspected Leander Perez who ostensibly called that meeting at the Jung Hotel in New Orleans the week before the JFK hit of some very strong involvement in the JFK hit. Harry Augusts Jung, the owner of the Jung Hotel even once employed Albert Osborne there, the person running those Oaxaca, Mexico assassination mills. Jung once ran the American Vigilante Intelligence Assoc., a Draper project, along with that Army Major and his son, who worked with Draper on the Amer Coalition of Patriotic Societies and as a Director of The Pioneer Fund, Major John B. Trevor, Sr. and Jr. Turns out that John B. Trevor, Sr. was also a big time Eugenicist and a Hitler supporter as well and later with the American Security Council of Morris, Willoughby, Angleton and Cline. Damn. Damn. Damn. And now Garrison starts smelling like a Leander Perez crony in the back pocket of the boss of Plaquemines Parish, who was actually in on the cover-up ruse, rather than really being a citizen in search of the truth in the Kennedy assassination. Damn. Damn. How many others fall into that category do you think? Hundreds, dude, hundreds. Damn. I could have solved this 20 years ago given enough time, money and resources. 20 years ago. I coulda been a contendah! And how did I even come up with this reference in the New Orleans Times-Picayune from 1956 to that Guy Banister, DeLesseps Morrison and James Eastland meeting in Greenwood about the MissSovComm? (Susan Klopfer, in her blog and perhpaps in her book, too, originally wrote that this meeting involved a "Robert Morrison" but she was incorrect on this score. Thanks to Bill O'Neill for pointing this out to me. At the time of that meeting, Robert Morris was either the current or the former Chief Counsel to James Eastland and Thomas J. Dodd on SISS, which is how she probably made that mistake. But for her to be able to link together James Eastland and Guy Banister and the MissSovComm and Draper is a major feat of research regardless.) When you combine this piece of information with what I have just published about Operation Red Cross, which in fact was also a non-CIA sponsored SISS-based Senatorial project of James O. Eastland, Barry Goldwater, Nathaniel Weyl, William Pawley and probably Wickliffe Draper, you begin to see why these 2 stories when taken together essentially confirm major portions of my central thesis first proposed way back in the early 1990's. It was Draper, Morris, Banister, Eastland and both MissSovComm and SISS and Company who handled Oswald, who framed him, who used him as their agent and who placed him in Dealey Plaza. And it was indeed Morris, Willoughby, Draper and Vonsiatsky who snuffed JFK. Game, Set and Match. In 1993 a wrote about the DEATH anagram: Draper, Eastland, Angleton, Thurmond and Helms (and The Pioneer Fund and OSJL) Not much has changed in over 15 years on that score. Just more info to CEMENT that thesis as Gospel. Oh ye of little Faith. Now you have spent another 15 years dancing around the mulberry bush with little or no progress. Having fun yet? By doing a Google on myself, that's how. I think I used my name, Draper and Mississippi with or without the Klopfer or Eastland names and I found the link on Susan Klopfer's website about Eastland, Draper, Banister, the MissSovComm and COLD CIVIL RIGHTS CASES related to the State of Mississippi. What goes around, comes around. Imagine that! Amazing! Just amazing. Sometimes I manage to even impress myself, and this is indeed one of them. And I just indexed CTKA for grins and giggles then I find out that it was Guy Banister who put Oswald up to that little self-incrimination ruse. Guy "MissSovComm" Banister from that 544 Camp Street address. Damn. Edited December 24, 2009 by John Bevilaqua Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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