Prof Peter Dale Scott: William Pawley, the Kennedy Assassination and Watergate!

TILT and the "Phase Three Story of Clare Boothe Luce. A new biography of William Pawley clarifies the millionaires status as a friend and adviser to presidents, despite his reactionary views that often made the State Department and even the CIA reluctant to deal with him. His ability to modify and on occasion even overturn official US policies, easily qualifies him yo be considered part of that mostly invisible milieu I have clumsily called the American deep state, a milieu both inside and outside government with the power to steer the history of the public state and sometimes redirect it. It would be wrong to think that Pawley had such power, only because of his personal wealth and connections. I hope to show that from the beginning of his career to his sudden death by a self inflicted gun wound, Pawley always acted in conjunction with other powerful people from both the over-world and the underworld in short, with what I have called other dark forces of the deep state. The key to Pawley's controversial status was that he made, and sometimes lost his fortunes under foreign dictators he was personally close to: Chiang Kai-shek in China, Presidents Prio and Batista in Cuba, and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. Long after the US Government ceased to support these men, Pawley maintained their confidence, which was one of the reasons elements of the US government chose on occasion to use him as an asset. Another reason is that all these dictators had developed contacts with the US underworld, often because of their involvement in the trafficking of opium and heroin into America. As we shall see, Pawley himself had at least one CIA linked mob contact, John Martino. The book shows how Pawley's personal wealth and associations enabled him at times to mount his own foreign policy, one supported by friends inside government, and also by other wealthy individuals and corporations, who saw their wealth or policy objectives doomed by the fall of strongmen like Chiang Kai-shek and Batista. Among Pawley's closest influential friends were Henry Luce of Time Life, Henry's wife Clare Boothe Luce, Allen Dulles, and Richard Nixon. All of these people shared what has been called Pawley's pathological hatred of Fidel Castro.