Nestor 'Tony' Izquierdo

[James Richards]

I am pleased to announce that I can finally post a photograph of Tony Izquierdo.

James

[John Simkin]

I am pleased to announce that I can finally post a photograph of Tony Izquierdo.

James

Could you also post any information you might have on him? I will then create a web page on him.

[Lee Forman]

Nice work James! Phenomenal! I like his beret.

Any idea what year that was taken?

- lee

[James Richards]

Nice work James! Phenomenal! I like his beret.

Any idea what year that was taken?

- lee

Hi Lee,

I can't be 100% sure of the year but I would guess the early 1970's. This image below is from 1972 during a demonstration by the Halcones Dorados (Golden Hawks). That is Izquierdo in the middle. I don't know who the other two guys are.

I know you and I have discussed this privately so needless to say, I have come to the conclusion that Tony Izquierdo was indeed involved what what happened in Dealey Plaza.

Cheers,

James

[Ryan Crowe]

Excellent work James, I also believe the same as you. Didnt Hemming in the movie JFK place a black man in one of the sniper nests?

[James Richards]

Excellent work James, I also believe the same as you. Didnt Hemming in the movie JFK place a black man in one of the sniper nests?

Ryan,

I believe you are correct. From what I recall, GPH suggested to Oliver Stone that the actor who played the Dal-Tex spotter should be black. I don't think GPH gave Stone Izquierdo's actual identity though.

Maybe Gerry will read this and correct us if we have it all backwards.

Cheers,

James

[John Simkin]

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

[John Simkin]

J. Timothy Gratz and Mark Howell, Key West Citizen (11th March, 2005)

Gerry Hemming was the leader of a group of anti-Communist soldiers of fortune who trained anti-Castro Cubans in the early 1960s at a camp on No Name Key, an island 25 miles north of Key West.

Many assassination researchers believe Hemming knows at least some of the secrets of the Kennedy assassination (some believe he participated in or even planned it). Recently he has been sharing some of these secrets with Solares Hill and his revelations may bring us closer to what has been called the crime of the 20th century.

Hemming tells us the assassination was accomplished by several autonomous, separately funded, “teams,” consisting of a shooter and a spotter. (He has yet to identify the “master planner” and has suggested he does not know who the master planner was.)

This week Hemming revealed who he believed were two of the “sponsors” of the assassination. Two men met in Haiti in February of 1963 and contributed funds for the Kennedy assassination. Both were from the Dominican Republic. One, Ramfis Trujillo, and international playboy who dated Hollywood starlets, was the son of long-term Dominican Republican dictator Rafael Trujillo, who was assassinated in May of 1961. The second man was Johnny Abbes Garcia, former intelligence director for General Rafael Trujillo. It was not the first time Garcia had financed an assassination. In 1959, Garcia hired American adventurer Alexander Rorke to smuggle eight men into Cuba on one of the first missions to kill Castro. (See Rorke story.) The motives of Trujillo and Garcia were apparent: To revenge the assassination of Rafael Trujillo, widely believed to have been organized by the CIA.

A ranking member of Rafael Trujillo’s military wrote a book in which he stated that the assassination was organized with the support of CIA agent (and future Watergate burglar) E. Howard Hunt and flashy Mafioso Johnny Rosselli, although this report is uncorroborated.

Hunt, interestingly, returned from a fact-finding trip to Cuba in July of 1960 and reported to his CIA superiors that Castro was “popular” and the only way to eliminate him would be by his assassination. The next month, acting apparently on Hunt’s recommendation, the CIA initiated its alliance with the Mafia to kill Castro. The first Mafioso the CIA recruited was Johnny Rosselli. Some believe that Hunt and/or Rosselli were involved in the Kennedy assassination.

This week Hemming revealed to Solares Hill that the assassins had a back-up plan to ensure Kennedy never left Dallas alive. According to Hemming, there was a huge remote-controlled bomb planted in one of the cars parked beyond the triple overpass at the south end of Dealey Plaza. If the assassins were not sure Kennedy had been killed by the ambush in Dealey Plaza, they would detonate the car bomb as the motorcade sped toward the hospital, ensuring the death of all the occupants of the Presidential limousine.

Hemming told us this week that, through a source in a Central American intelligence organization, he learned that a shooter in the Texas School Book Depository, spoke German and used a shoulder-mounted, carbine-firing Mauser equipped with a scope and a silencer.

This man fired not from the sniper’s nest on the southeast corner of the sixth floor of the book depository, but from the window on the west end of the sixth floor. Hemming cannot identify this German-speaking shooter by name.

There is some evidentiary support for Hemming’s report. Photos show that the window on the west end of the sixth floor was open, and there is also a photo of witnesses, after the shooting, pointing to the west end of the building. In addition, one witness reported seeing a man with a “strange-looking weapon” on the sixth floor, but she assumed before the assassination that it must have been a secret service agent.

Although not a new revelation, we also want to note Hemming’s explanation for how the assassins escaped from the sixth floor. Immediately after the assassination, a Dallas police officer called Baker rushed into the book depository accompanied by its manager, Roy Truly. They first attempted to take the elevator, but it was not functioning, so they dashed up the stairs. They encountered Lee Harvey Oswald calmly drinking a Coke in the second-floor lunch room, no more than 90 seconds after the shooting stopped.

Many people find it doubtful that Oswald could have hidden the rifle and run down four flights of stairs and purchased a Coke in that time period.

Hemming states that the assassins had disabled the elevator before the assassination, and that they escaped by ropes down the elevator shaft.

Last week we reported Hemming’s identification of Nestor Izquierdo, a black Cuban member of Brigade 2506, as the spotter in the Dal-Tex Building. We also reported Izquierdo’s close relationship with Rip Robertson, a CIA operative who ran a CIA front company on Stock Island hauling packs of arms into Cuba before the Bay of Pigs. Robertson captained one of the two boats delivering members of Brigade 2506 into the ill-fated Bay of Pigs. Some believe Robertson may have been involved in the assassination, a belief fueled by a photograph of a man watching the motorcade in Dealey Plaza who bears a striking resemblance to Robertson, as well as by Robertson’s close association with flashy Mafioso Johnny Rosselli who was involved in the CIA’s plots to kill Castro. FBI reports indicate Rosselli met twice in Miami with Jack Ruby in the months preceding the assassination.

Since our story on Izquierdo last week, our intelligence source has advised us that Izquierdo also had a close relationship with a CIA officer named David Sanchez Morales, which raises even more troubling questions than his association with Robertson.

Morales joined the CIA in 1951 and was involved in many of the CIA’s most secret and dangerous covert operations. He helped the CIA overthrow the Guatemalan government in 1954. In the early 1960s, he was in South Florida working on the CIA’s secret war against Castro. He was instrumental in the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965. He helped capture guerilla leader Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967. In the late 1960s, according to an unpublished story by Bryan Abas, Morales was in Vietnam, assisting in the CIA’s notorious Phoenix program that killed thousands of Vietnamese civilians as suspected Communists.

His CIA colleague Thomas Clines said that Morales was one of the most feared undercover agents to the governments of Central and South America. “A lot of leaders figured that if Morales was there,” he said, “their government was going to cave in.” If the U.S. government needed someone or something neutralized, said Cline, “Dave would do it, including things that were repugnant to a lot of people.”

Gaeton Fonzi, a well-respected investigator who worked for both the Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, is convinced Morales participated in the assassination. In the course of his congressional service, Fonzi interviewed a long-time friend of Morales, and Morales’ Harvard trained attorney, both of whom were with Morales when he boasted, referring to the slain president, “We sure took care of that son-of-a-bitch!”

One of our sources tells us that Morales had assembled a group of approximately twelve Cuban exiles trained as assassins, to be used in anti-Castro operations, and that Izquierdo was a member of that elite hit squad. Our source has identified all the members of this operation but because several are still alive, we do not deem it appropriate to name them yet. But we can state that several researchers believe that Izquierdo was not the only member of Morales’ team who was involved in the Kennedy assassination.

It is possible Morales’ statement was nothing more than drunken braggadocio and that he had nothing to do with the assassination. However, Hemming’s identification of Izquierdo as a participant in the assassination adds strength to the conviction of those who believe that Morales was involved. This is particularly so because Hemming had no knowledge of the Morales’ “hit squad” or Izquierdo’s involvement in it. Like fellow CIA agent Rip Robertson, Morales was close to the Mafia leader Johnny Rosselli. Kennedy scholar Dennis Mahoney writes in “Sons and Brothers” that Rosselli was the only person who could make the ill-temprered Morales laugh, and that Morales and Rosselli engaged in all-night drinking binges, often joined by Robertson.

It was perhaps in one of those drinking sessions that Morales or Rosselli first raised the idea of turning the Cubans they were training to kill Castro against Kennedy instead. Morales and/or Robertson would supply the Cuban exiles, many of whom felt Kennedy had betrayed them and caused the death of many of their comrades at the Bay of Pigs, and Rosselli would supply Mafia funding and expertise (and, in the event, Jack Ruby to forever silence the patsy).

The House Select Committee on Assassinations put Morales on its witness list but was never able to interview or depose him. In May of 1978, Morales, then retired from the CIA, returned to his Arizona home from a business trip, complaining of chest pains. That night he collapsed at his home and was rushed to a Tucson hospital where he died several days later, at the age of 53.

Morales was not the only CIA officer involved with Rosselli to die during the investigation of the House Assassinations Committee. William Harvey was Rosselli’s case officer in the post-Bay of Pigs efforts to assassinate Castro. In fact it was Harvey who summoned Morales to work on the Cuban operations from the CIA base in South Florida. Harvey, like Morales, hated the Kennedys. Harvey died of complications following heart surgery in June of 1976, at age 61.

There is no evidence, and we do not suggest, that either Morales or Harvey died other than from natural causes. Several suspects in the assassination did, however, meet violent deaths while the Kennedy assassination was being reinvestigated, first by the Senate Church Committee and then by the House Assassinations Committee: Chicago Mafia don Sam Giancana was murdered in his Illinois home in June of 1975, only five days before he was to testify to the Church Committee; Jimmy Hoffa was murdered in Detroit in July of 1975; Johnny Rosselli was murdered in Miami in July of 1976; and George DeMohrenschildt, the mysterious Russian baron who had befriended the Oswalds in Dallas, apparently committed suicide in March 1977, on the same day that House Assassinations investigator Fonzi had scheduled a meeting with him.

Like Hemming’s identification to Solares Hill of Izquierdo as the Dal Tex spotter, his new revelations add additional avenues of inquiry to those who believe it is not yet too late to solve the murder that continues to haunt the American psyche.

[James Richards]

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

John,

Thanks for the page on Izquierdo.

This image below shows Tony Izquierdo in the middle. The kid on the right is Frank Castro's son. I don't know who the guy on the left is.

BTW, I like the new Spartacus page design.

James

[Zach Robertson]

Some info on Cuban Memorial Boulevard:

This two-block stretch in the heart of Little Havana is lined with monuments commemorating the heroes that fought for Cuban independence. Here an eternal flame burns in memory of the 94 Cuban exiles who gave their lives in the foiled 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba. A bronze map of Cuba is dedicated to the "ideals of people who will never forget the pledge of making their fatherland free." A statue of Jose Marti, leader of Cuba's independence struggle against Spain, holds a prominent space on this tree-lined boulevard. Other statues are dedicated to the Virgin Mary; Nestor "Tony" Izquierdo, a soldier at the Bay of Pigs, and General Antonio Maceo, an Afro-Cuban general who died fighting for Cuban independence.

In the center of the block stands a massive ceiba tree, a tree considered sacred by most African religions. Practitioners of Santeria, an Afro-Cuban religion, leave ritual sacrifices of chicken bones and bundles of cloth among the tree's roots in hopes of gaining the blessing of a saint. Other believers claim a miracle happens every afternoon at the Virgin Mary statue when a beam of light shoots through the leaves overhead onto the Christ child in Mary's arms.

Cuban Memorial Boulevard holds great cultural and historical significance to the exile residents of Little Havana. It's also a focal point for political demonstrations, community gatherings, celebrations, and daily socializing. Miami's Little Havana, centered around SW 8th Street, is the historical and geographical center of the Cuban exile community in the U.S. Known affectionately as Calle Oche, the 25-block enclave of Little Havana is the first place of settlement for newly arrived immigrants. This neighborhood was created in the 1960s when large numbers of Cubans fled to Miami from the newly-formed government of Fidel Castro. At the time, Miami was not the multicultural metropolis it is today. The non-English speaking Cubans were not welcomed, so they created their own community west of downtown Miami. Still today little English is spoken in Little Havana, where Spanish is the official language.

Nestor Izquierdo Memorial, (sculpture)

Summary:

A portrait of Nestor "Tony" Izquierdo holding a machine gun with his proper right hand on the trigger and his proper left hand on the barrel. He is dressed in military fatigues, a beret, and combat boots. He carries a canteen on his proper left hip. His facial expression is a near-smile. The sculpture is mounted on a three-tiered base composed of tile with a wood frame. The base is painted a high gloss black. The sculpture is installed in a brick courtyard surrounded by a three-foot-high wrought iron fence and locked gate. There are lamp posts on each side at the front and flag poles on each side at the rear. The American flag is flown from one pole and the Cuban flag is flown from the other pole.

Sculptor: Tony Lopez

-- Zach

Edited May 11, 2011 by Zach Robertson

[Zach Robertson]

Here is some more information about Tony at Cuban Special Operations Veterans Association Honor Roll

The Commandos: ‘Tony’ Nestor Izquierdo

Infiltration & Commando Services

Nestor Antonio Izquierdo was born on 20th March 1936, in the humble neighborhood of "Pogolotti," in Marianao City, Cuba. His parents were Camilo Izquierdo and Josefina Diaz. “Tony” was raised in the manner and with the values of decent, honest people. His father was a contractor and since Tony was very young he went to work with him. Tony studied for some time in the Belen Electro-mechanic School, where He was a member of the Catholic Youth. He was a close friend to Manuel Artime in the underground with the M.R.P., and with him went to the rural-commandoes at the beginning of the Cuban Revolution. Later on Izquierdo entered the clandestine movement fighting the growing communist dictatorship, and was soon persecuted by the Government. He escaped to Mexico and in 1960 he went to the camps in Guatemala where the Brigade 2506 was training for the Bay of Pigs invasion.

His first mission was before the invasion, and he made a parachute's night jump in the Oriente province in order to organize the guerillas in the area. He was successful but with the failure of the invasion he dissolved the groups and crossed to the Naval Base in Guantanamo from where he returned to Miami. Once in Miami he went with the "Company" as one of Miguel Orozco Commandoes, where he took part in many operations. When the "Mongoose" plan was closed, Izquierdo got the certificate of Jump Master and along with some others organized a parachutist's club. He took part in several exhibitions and sport festivals and act.

In Mexico city, two Cubans had been arrested and charged with attempting to kill one of Castro's agents. There was no hope for a fair trial and Tony volunteered to help them escape. He moved into a house close to the jail and began excavating a tunnel. Unfortunately the tunnel was discovered and the Cubans were placed in different jails. Izquierdo, however, was not discouraged, He donned a policeman's uniform and a fake ID and went to one of the jail and got away with one of the prisoners.

Some time later, he volunteered to train a group of paratroopers from the Nicaragua's National Guard, then fighting against the Sandinista Revolution. He took parts in several fire-fights with the Sandinistas, and then on September 10th 1979, a C-47 taking him and twenty-three others paratroopers crashed; all were killed.

His body was brought to Miami where it was buried, His widow Edith Izquierdo and his two twin son live in Miami. The loss of Tony Izquierdo left an empty place in our hearts, but the example he gave us will always be with us. A statue in his honor was placed in the "Martyr's Boulevard" in the SW section of Miami.(13th Avenue SW between 8 an 9th street).

*Synopsys of the writing by Mario Enriquez, published in "Giron" (December 1985)

Tony Izquierdo with The Free Jump Team

-- Zach

Edited May 11, 2011 by Zach Robertson

[David Andrews]

Another Miami institution: The Manuel Artime Theater

http://www.manuelartimetheater.com/pages/tech_specs/floor_plans.asp

[Zach Robertson]

Here is page with some nice images of Nestor Antonio 'Tony' Izquierdo:

Halcones Dorados

-- Zach

[B. A. Copeland]

This is very fascinating.....I look at these images and simply wonder about the 'dark complected man/negro

' but that would be referring to the TSBD. Anyone ever do a good analysis on who that man may have been in the TSBD? How did Izquierdo's plane crash? Please and thanks.

[Paz Marverde]

Hi. We found a big one, about what Hemming said, during his interview he made, that Ramfis Trujillo was a sponsor for the Assassination, and gave money to finance it. Well, it emerges that, just very few time before, Trujillo gave an enormous amount of money to an Italian bank named Credito Commerciale e Industriale. Head of that bank was an Italian fascist, deeply connected with James Angleton: Valerio Borghese. The name of a relative of Borghese was inside a Clay Shaw's address book Jim Garrison found at Shaw's home