MIAMI MILLIONAIRE WILLIAM DOUGLAS PAWLEY BECOMES CIA ASSET QDDALE

William Douglas Pawley was the son of a merchant at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba at the turn of the 20th century. He acquired his wealth, prestige and power when he presided over Cubana National Airlines in 1929, then manufactured fighter planes for Clare Chennault's Flying Tigers to defend China against Japan during World War II. Pawley's divorce from Annie Hahr Dobbs, his first wife, was contested by her all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, while William's second wife, Edna Cadenhead (pictured here), helped advance his career in India, South America, the Caribbean, and Miami.

President Truman appointed Pawley as Ambassador to Peru and Brazil. President Eisenhower tapped him in 1954 not only to assist the Central Intelligence Agency in overthrowing the democratically elected head of Guatemala, but to also critique the CIA as one of the four members of a Committee headed by WWII hero pilot General James H. Doolittle. The Doolittle Report  recommended that the CIA become more ruthless than the enemy: "There are no rules in such a game ... if the United States is to survive, long-standing concepts of 'fair play' must be reconsidered."

When Fidel Castro appeared on the verge of taking power in Cuba, Pawley at the urging of Ike tried to convince Fulgencio Batista to step aside so as to defang Castro's rallying cry, but Batista refused to cooperate. Pawley then offered to pay any amount for the assassination of Castro, and at least twice  bragged of having his own hitmen. 

Because of his superior knowledge of Cuba, Pawley was relied on by Ike and CIA Director Allen Dulles to vet and organize thousands of Cuban exiles. The CIA bestowed the cryptonym QDDALE to hide his covert relationship with the agency. After assisting the CIA in plan the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Pawley then helped ransom back Brigade 2506 Cuban-exile prisoners held by Castro, putting up $25,000 (a quarter-million dollars in 2023 money) for one hostage. 

When President Kennedy threw Pawley out of the White House for advocating the bombing of Cuba, he became a high-profile critic of JFK's failure to rid Cuba of Castro. With upwards of 300 Cuban exiles working out of his office building in Miami (located up U.S. 1 from the CIA's expansive JMWAVE operations base on the University of Miami's southern campus), Pawley then used his yacht, Flying Tiger II, to transport members of the militant DRE Cuban-exile group off the coast of Cuba. Their mission was to extract Soviet technicians from Cuba who would publicly disclose that missiles still remained 90 miles from the U.S. providing reason to attack Castro and to undermine Kennedy's re-election campaign. The CIA dubbed it Operation TILT while participants knew it as the Bayo-Pawley affair and Operation Red Cross. 

TILT's failure in June 1963 was followed in August by DRE leaders getting into a scuffle, and then a radio debate, with Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans where Oswald was passing out Fair Play for Cuba Committee literature stamped with a 544 Camp Street address--the address of anti-Castroites at a time when the CIA and FBI were trying to destroy the FPCC, other anti-war groups and civil rights organizations under COINTELPRO. 

Oswald was a former U.S. Marine radar operator who learned Russian to monitor CIA U-2 flights over Russia from the U.S. air base in Atsugi, Japan. He then defected to Russia offering U-2 secrets, returned to the U.S. with a Russian wife, and was not interrogated for months by the CIA and FBI unlike other defectors, making some wonder if he had been on a covert mission to see what the Soviets knew about the U-2 program.   

After the Kennedy assassination, the DRE, Pawley and Clare Booth Luce immediately identified Lee Harvey Oswald as pro-Castro on November 22, 1963, and called for retaliation--a reaction that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had hoped for when it proposed Operation Northwoods to President Kennedy who rejected the idea of creating a terrorist attack on American soil as pretext for blaming Castro and bombing him back to the Stone Age. 

   

Oswald that day was working at the Texas School Book Depository, owned by D. H. Byrd, a wealthy oil entrepreneur, had been a founder of the Civil Air Patrol, which Oswald later joined where he met David Ferrie, a pilot played by Joe Pesci in Oliver Stone's JFK movie. Coincidentally, Byrd on November 22nd, was on an African safari with General Doolittle. Byrd's friend, the new President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, insisted that the Warren Commission find that Oswald acted alone. Doctors involved in the autopsy were pressured to claim all the shots came from the rear, though they saw evidence to the contrary. And even the knew head of JMWAVE requested a report on what Cuban exiles may have been involved in the assassination. That report has not been released; nor have 4,000 other CIA/FBI documents.      

When the Warren Commission was formed, its members included John J. McCloy, law partner of one of the three other men with Pawley on the Doolittle Committee, and former CIA Director Allen Dulles who carried out the Doolittle recommendations and worked with Pawley on Cuban matters until he was fired by JFK after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. 

In 1964, Pawley provided pro-CIA propaganda to Readers Digest to coounter The Invisible Government, a newly published book that was critical of the agency. A few years later, Pawley's friend, Alberto Fowler, volunteered to be a Spanish translator for New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison when he challenged the Warren Commission findings that Oswald acted alone. Fowler then informed the DRE of Garrison's prosecutorial strategy at the same time the CIA was attempting to discredit Garrison. 

In the mid-1970s, Pawley was at the top of the list of people the House Select Committee on Assassinations wanted to have testify about the JFK assassination. But he never did.    

Pawley's QDDALE years are detailed on this website, based upon thousands of pages of CIA and FBI documents that were declassified between 1999 and 2023. For details of QDDALE's early life, his role in preparing the Doolittle Committee Report on CIA Activities which opened the door to assassinations and other ruthless activities, visit www.williampawley.blogspot.com. It also includes my analysis of Zapruder Frame 413 based on visiting the Grassy Knoll to replicate what the film captures.