JFK The Enduring Secret

In this fourth installment of our miniseries, Ground Zero: JM WAVE and the Cuban Question (Episode 3A), we explore how the secret war against Fidel Castro dramatically escalated in the summer and autumn of 1963 while Operation Tilt unraveled. The CIA partnered with the U.S. military to train a formidable exile commando force, placing Army Captain Bradley Ayers and explosives expert Major Edward Roderick under civilian cover at Ledbury Lodge on Elliott Key to prepare strike teams for sabotage against Cuban oil refineries, power plants, and sugar mills. Military bases across the country—including Fort Stewart, Camp Mackall, and Eglin Air Force Base—provided live-fire, airborne, and survival training, while station chief Ted Shackley and paramilitary head David Sanchez Morales operated their own deniable strike unit, the Commandos Mambises, launching raids from Central America off the CIA mother ship Rex. At the exact same time, federal authorities cracked down ruthlessly on non-sanctioned exile groups, engaging in high-speed boat chases through South Florida canals, raiding William McLaney’s Lake Pontchartrain weapons cache in Louisiana, and arresting raiders who were attempting to relocate operations abroad.

We trace how JM WAVE’s psychological warfare branch, directed by case officer George Joannides, financed and guided the militant student group DRE (Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil) under code name AMSPELL. In August 1963, 23-year-old unemployed ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald walked into Casa Roca on Decatur Street in New Orleans, offering to help DRE delegate Carlos Bringuier train anti-Castro guerrillas before turning around days later to distribute Fair Play for Cuba Committee leaflets on Canal Street. Following a street confrontation, their police arrest, and a heated live debate on WDSU radio, DRE military chief Isidro "Chilo" Borja confirmed that a comprehensive intelligence file on Oswald was dispatched straight to their CIA contacts at JM WAVE in Miami. We also follow the trail connecting Oswald's Spanish language instructor, Ernesto Rodriguez, to his brother Emilio Rodriguez—Tony Sforza’s partner in the Havana stay-behind network and chief of the AMOT intelligence service at JM Wave.—revealing direct pipelines linking the accused assassin to the CIA’s Miami nerve center.

We dissect the delicate, high-stakes diplomatic dialogue unfolding simultaneously behind the scenes between Washington and Havana. Spearheaded by ABC News journalist Lisa Howard and U.S. diplomat William Attwood, secret bilateral talks were initiated in September 1963 in the corner of a crowded cocktail party inside Howard’s Manhattan apartment with Cuban UN Ambassador Carlos Lechuga. As Attwood established communication with Castro’s personal physician, Dr. René Vallejo, Castro offered to send a private plane to Key West for face-to-face negotiations that excluded Che Guevara, an initiative President Kennedy personally approved in the Oval Office under strict conditions of plausible deniability. Yet, this fragile peace overture stood in stark, dangerous contrast to CIA covert plots: just hours after Castro issued a public warning at the Brazilian embassy that U.S. leaders aiding terrorist assassination plots "themselves will not be safe," CIA headquarters cabled instructions to approach Cuban Major Rolando Cubela (code name AMLASH) as a chief coup conspirator.

Finally, we examine the fateful autumn weeks when these conflicting tracks collided with catastrophic consequences. In late October 1963, CIA Special Affairs Staff chief Desmond Fitzgerald flew to Paris, presenting himself to Cubela as Robert F. Kennedy’s personal representative while Cubela requested a high-powered rifle with telescopic sights to assassinate Castro. Meanwhile in Miami, anti-Castro exiles caught wind of rumors regarding a secret White House accommodation with Moscow for a "Tito-type" communist regime, transforming exile grief and disillusionment into personal, burning fury against President Kennedy. As operatives like Felipe Vidal Santiago and CIA-connected trainers reported that street-level Cubans openly branded JFK a traitor who deserved to be killed, and as French journalist Jean Daniel carried Kennedy’s private message to Havana, the stage was set for President Kennedy’s arrival in Miami on November 18, just four days before Dallas.

In this third installment of our miniseries, Ground Zero: JM WAVE and the Cuban Question, we examine the dangerous two-track contradiction of U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba during the summer and autumn of 1963. While one hand of the United States government was quietly exploring diplomatic backchannels to Fidel Castro through UN diplomats and ABC News journalist Lisa Howard, the other hand was funding, arming, and launching anti-Castro exile commandos onto Cuban beaches under the secret war run out of the CIA’s Miami station. We explore how this jarring duality left the Cuban exile community feeling deeply double-crossed—echoing the bitter aftermath of the Bay of Pigs—as they watched federal agencies arrest non-sanctioned exile raiders on the water while state-backed operations received secret funding, fueling a mounting exile rage aimed directly at President John F. Kennedy.

We go inside the secretive world of "autonomous operations," where Washington approved U.S.-funded exile raids mounted strictly outside American territory—most notably Manuel Artime’s Robert F. Kennedy-backed AMWORLD project in Nicaragua and Costa Rica, and Manuel Ray’s JURE organization. We expose the intense paranoia and bureaucratic infighting inside JM WAVE, detailing how station chief Ted Shackley ("The Blonde Ghost") dismissed AMWORLD as an exercise in futility, while fears that JURE was spying on the Miami station led to shocking directives authorizing exile boat crews to fire on rival exile vessels at sea.

Finally, we reconstruct the tragic narrative of Operation Tilt—the June 1963 Pawley-Martino raid. We trace how former Havana casino technician John Martino and exile Eddie Bayo convinced wealthy benefactor William Pawley, Life Magazine, and Senate investigators that Soviet military officers in Cuba’s Oriente Province were ready to defect with photos proving nuclear missiles remained on the island. We reveal how the CIA’s Miami station secretly backed the "private" expedition with weapons, a mother ship, a PBY flying boat, and CIA operatives David Sanchez Morales and Rip Robertson—culminating in a fateful night at Hogsty Reef in the Bahamas where ten Cuban exiles boarded a 21-foot motor launch, slipped into Cuban waters, and vanished forever, leaving behind an operation later written off as a con game and ten families with no answers.

I owe many of you a sincere and overdue apology. Over the years, I have always strived to be prompt in answering every single email I receive from listeners of JFK: The Enduring Secret. However, over the past 10 to 11 months, balancing a full-time consulting role alongside researching and producing the podcast during off-hours created an unintended bottleneck, leaving many of your thoughtful messages temporarily unanswered.

Following the overwhelming response and feedback during our Jack Ruby miniseries, I decided to conduct a thorough audit of my inbox. To my complete surprise and dismay, I realized just how many emails had accidentally slipped through the cracks during busy stretches. I want to assure you that hearing from you is never a burden or an obligation—it is a genuine joy, a source of intellectual stimulation, and something I deeply respect.

I am currently working my way through the backlog, including messages dating back into last year, and I promise that every single email will receive a personal reply in the coming days. If you sent me a message that has not yet received a response, please feel free to re-send it—that way, it will jump right to the top of my inbox so I can get back to you even faster. Thank you so much for your patience, your incredible support, and for being such a smart, respectful, and mindful audience.

I made some minor additions, deletions, and edits to Episode 360 and I also added a little something from President Kennedy himself at the end of the episode. Please remove your previous download (if it occurred before 1PM EST October 25, 2026 and replace it with the latest available download from your podcast provider. You can be sure you have the updated version of the podcast by checking for the Kennedy speech excerpt placed near the end of the podcast. My apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused you!  Jeff 

In this second installment of our 15-part miniseries, Ground Zero: JM WAVE and the Cuban Question, we explore the chaotic aftermath of the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the secret agreements that fundamentally altered President John F. Kennedy's relationship with the anti-Castro exile movement. We trace the Christmas Eve 1962 return of Brigade 2506 prisoners landing at Homestead Air Force Base, culminating in President Kennedy’s famous Orange Bowl address where he received the brigade's battle flag and promised it would be returned in a "free Havana." Yet behind this public spectacle lay a covert reality: Kennedy’s secret letters to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev offering assurances against an invasion of Cuba alongside the confidential removal of U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey. We examine the internal fallout inside the CIA, where task force chief William Harvey's unauthorized dispatch of ten Cuban agent teams during the crisis sparked a furious clash with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, resulting in Harvey’s exile to Rome, his replacement by Desmond Fitzgerald, and a seismic shift in which JM WAVE's 300-plus American officers and thousands of exile operatives were transformed almost overnight from an army of liberation into a volatile political liability.

We detail the Kennedy administration's aggressive 1963 federal crackdown on independent anti-Castro paramilitary factions operating out of South Florida. We examine the U.S. Customs raid on Gerald Patrick Hemming’s Interpen group on No-Name Key, which prompted the exiles to send a white feather of cowardice to the White House, as well as the CIA’s appointment of psychological warfare specialist George Joannides ("Howard") to rein in the student group DRE (Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil) and redirect their efforts toward controlled propaganda rather than unsanctioned raids. We follow the Justice Department's prosecution of militant exile groups Alpha 66 and Commandos L following their high-profile attacks on Soviet freighters in Cuban ports, an escalating confrontation that drove Cuban Revolutionary Council leader José Miró Cardona to resign in protest while accusing the White House of a second catastrophic betrayal.

Finally, we expose the secret, high-stakes White House backchannel to Fidel Castro that operated in direct opposition to the CIA's ongoing covert operations. We trace how ABC journalist Lisa Howard ("TV's first lady of sin"), building on Bay of Pigs ransom negotiator James Donovan's private talks with Castro, secured a groundbreaking 10-hour interview in Havana with the Cuban leader, returning with Castro's message that U.S. crackdowns on exile raiders were viewed as a "proper step toward accommodation." We examine a top-secret March 1963 White House memorandum recording President Kennedy’s personal decision to overrule CIA Director John McCone and State Department hardliners by refusing to demand a break with Moscow as a non-negotiable condition, instructing aides to dangle "flies" and explore a "Titoist" model for Cuba. We highlight the dangerous paradox of late 1963, where White House diplomats quietly pursued peace while the CIA continued plotting sabotage raids and poison-laced scuba wetsuits—leaving the radicalized exile community in South Florida convinced of a double-cross while Castro interpreted federal enforcement as a signal of rapprochement.

In this opening chapter of our new 15-part miniseries, Ground Zero: JM WAVE and the Cuban Question, we journey to South Florida in November 1963, just four days before President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas. On Monday, November 18, President Kennedy stood inside the Americana Hotel in Miami Beach to address Cuban exile newspaper publishers, withholding the explicit military commitment to retake Cuba that the exile community desperately sought. We pull back the curtain on the clandestine universe of JM WAVE—the CIA’s massive, air-gapped Miami station operating on the University of Miami’s South Campus under the cover name Zenith Technical Enterprises. Spanning 1,500 acres with hundreds of American staff officers, thousands of exile operatives, and what grew to be the third-largest naval fleet in the Caribbean, South Florida became the epicenter of a secret, multi-million-dollar war against Fidel Castro.

We trace the architects and operatives who drove this covert apparatus, reuniting key veterans from the 1954 Guatemalan coup (Operation PBSuccess)—propaganda chief David Atley Phillips, fearsome paramilitary officer David Sanchez Morales ("El Indio"), and combat agent Rip Robertson. We examine the shadowy web of alliances linking wealthy benefactor William Pawley, mob-connected casino technician John Martino, and mobster Johnny Roselli. We follow legendary CIA officer Tony Sforsa, who posed as a high-rolling gambler in Havana casinos to recruit stay-behind networks—including Fidel Castro’s own sister, Juanita Castro—while the agency stood up and secretly funded the militant student group DRE (Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil) under code name AMSPELL.

Finally, we examine the catastrophic fallout from the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, where Brigade 2506 was crushed on the beach, leaving 1,200 exiles in Cuban prisons and instilling a bitter, enduring sense of betrayal against President Kennedy. We detail how Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy put into motion  Operation Mongoose and the local station JMWAVE chief Ted Shackley ("The Blonde Ghost") operationalized the program. A program meant to  to unleash "boom and bang" sabotage across the island and ultimately to remove Castro and his communist government. We explore the infamous  U-Haul truck loaded with CIA weapons placed directly into mob hands by William Harvey and Ted Shackley. We expose how local police, customs, and Coast Guard officers were co-opted to support the efforts. We see examples of simple covert mechanisms such as using daily sealed code words to protect armed exile raiders. And finally we set the stage for an explosive clash of agendas between a White House secretly seeking backchannel diplomacy and an armed, radicalized exile community primed for action.

We have a new  wander to go on together.  After a massive 70-plus episode run through the J.D. Tippit shooting, the 28-part Jack Ruby saga, and the mysterious death of Dorothy Kilgallen, we  return  to tell the story of South Florida, the CIA and the secret war that they waged, along with the anti-Castro Cubans,  against Fidel Castro.  The new  miniseries is  named Ground Zero: JM WAVE and the Cuban Question. For me personally, it  brings back some of my own childhood memories. Memories that came about from growing up in South Florida during the 1960s and beyond.  I experienced real time some of the elements of the early years of the Cuban exodus and resettlement in South Florida. That makes these episodes especially personal for me. Get set for a deeper  look at JMWAVE and the men who ran it. 

At the heart of this upcoming series is a chilling, unsealed CIA cable sent on November 24, 1963, from JMWAVE,  the agency’s massive clandestine Miami station, to headquarters in Washington. The cable documented that prior to the assassination, prominent Cuban exile leader Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo was overheard warning that "something very big was coming." Applying Occam’s razor to the sprawling web of JFK assassination theories, we pose a  fundamental question: in the autumn of 1963, who possessed a greater motive or ideological rage than the anti-Castro exile community? From the devastating abandonment at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961 to federal crackdowns on exile raiding parties. Contrast this with  secret White House backchannel diplomacy with Havana,  which manifested in confusing changes for the  very men trained and armed by the CIA.  The result was an increasingly antagonistic view of  President Kennedy with many anti-Castro Cubans seeing him as a traitor to their cause.

This upcoming 15-part miniseries promises an unsparing look into the architects and covert operatives of JM WAVE, featuring key figures like legendary station chief Ted Shackley ("The Blonde Ghost"), , David Morales ("El Indio"), and other CIA operatives.  The series explores what the Miami station knew about the assassination, and whether the seeds of the assassination were planted in the enclaves of South Florida. Prepare for a gripping journey into ground zero of the Cold War’s secret war, launching this weekend!

In this dramatic finale to our Jack Ruby miniseries and six-part Dorothy Kilgallen investigation, we dissect the chilling aftermath, timeline cover-ups, and forensic revelations surrounding the November 8, 1965 death of syndicated columnist Dorothy Kilgallen. We expose the glaring four-to-six-hour delay between the early morning discovery of her body by her butler and hairdresser and the official notification of the police at 1:00 p.m., contrasting her husband Richard Kollmar’s false statement—that she came home and was in bed by 11:30 p.m.—with verified phone records and eyewitness accounts placing her at PJ Clarke's, the Regency Hotel lounge, and making Western Union calls past 2:20 a.m. We detail the immediate, total disappearance of her locked black accordion "assassination file"—containing two years of Jack Ruby interview notes, leaked Warren Commission transcripts, and draft chapters of her upcoming Random House book Murder One—which her husband ominously vowed would "go to the grave with me."

We examine the explosive toxicological evidence unsealed years after the official ruling of "undetermined" cause of death. We reveal how Manhattan Chief Medical Examiner toxicologist James Broich re-tested her preserved tissue samples in 1968, uncovering three distinct barbiturates in her system—Seconal, Tuinal, and Nembutal—despite only Seconal ever being prescribed to her, as well as dissolved Nembutal powder residue inside her bedside drinking glass. Furthermore, we trace the tragic, suspicious loss of her backup research "insurance policy" given to her confidante Florence Pritchett Smith, who died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage less than 24 hours after Kilgallen, taking any duplicate manuscript chapters to her grave before her apartment could be searched.

Finally, we track the decades-long crusade to uncover the truth and honor Dorothy Kilgallen's fearless legacy. We chronicle the cold case petitions brought before the Manhattan District Attorney's Office by investigative author Mark Shaw, the legal battles surrounding a proposed exhumation at Gate of Heaven Cemetery, and the enduring power of her investigative reporting. We close by reflecting on the street corner dedication of "Dorothy Kilgallen Way" at East 68th Street and Park Avenue in New York City, commemorating a pioneering journalist whose vow that "this story is not going to die as long as there's a real reporter alive" continues to echo through history.

In this gripping  part five of our miniseries on the  Dorothy Kilgallen investigation, we retrace the final hours of syndicated columnist and television star Dorothy Kilgallen leading up to her mysterious death on November 8, 1965. On Sunday evening, November 7, a composed and sharp 52-year-old Kilgallen took her regular seat on CBS’s What’s My Line?, correctly guessing that a contestant sold industrial dynamite before heading out to PJ Clarke’s and later stepping into the Regency Hotel lounge around 1:00 a.m. to meet an unidentified "mystery man" in a dark booth. Less than fifteen hours after her live broadcast, Kilgallen was found dead inside her East 68th Street Manhattan townhouse, and her locked "assassination file"—containing two years of explosive, unreleased research on Jack Ruby, Carlos Marcello, and the JFK assassination—vanished without a trace.

We examine Kilgallen’s complex relationship with 30-year-old Columbus film critic Ron Pataki, to whom she confided details of her investigation and read draft excerpts of her upcoming Random House book Murder One, including her Jack Ruby story. We detail the mounting paranoia during her final weeks as she warned her trusted hairdressers, Mark Sinclair and Charles Simpson, that her private files were somehow leaking, ominously stating, "If the wrong people knew what I know now, it would cost me my life." We also analyze Pataki's contradictory recollections, his casual admissions about editing her assassination copy and knowing Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, and the surprising lack of law enforcement follow-up after police accepted a single phone call from his newspaper colleagues in Ohio as a complete alibi.

Finally, we dissect the alarming physical contradictions of the death scene and the massive timeline cover-up by authorities. Kilgallen’s body was found in the third-floor master bedroom—a room she had stubbornly refused to sleep in for years following a marital rift with her husband, Richard Kollmar—propped up in bed in full television makeup, false eyelashes, a hairpiece, and a dressy blouse over a peignoir, holding a novel she had already finished weeks earlier with no reading glasses in sight. Furthermore, while official reports claimed her maid discovered the body at noon, primary witnesses establish that hairdresser Mark Sinclair discovered her body between 8:30 and 9:00 a.m., but even that was after the staff or her husband had likely found her and altered the scene. Dr. Saul Heller was summoned by 9:30 a.m., and the police precinct was notified before 10:30 a.m, yet the official time of the police involvement seems to be around 1PM. And why was Dr. David Baldwin, the Kilgallen family physician, separately called to the townhouse later that afternoon to pronounce Dorothy dead for a second time, creating a major contradiction of facts that make the  official record even more suspect.  We explore the tragic, unsettling reality of an investigation silenced in its final miles, leaving behind a staged room, missing files, and two years of secret evidence gathered by Dorothy that is now  buried forever.

In this gripping fourth installment of our Dorothy Kilgallen miniseries, we follow the relentless syndicated columnist as she escalates her independent investigation into the JFK assassination following her standoff with the FBI. Just two days after refusing to surrender her source for Jack Ruby's sealed testimony, Kilgallen published the Dallas Police Department radio logs from November 22, 1963, exposing that Police Chief Jesse Curry's very first order after shots rang out was to send officers to the triple overpass, railroad yard, and grassy knoll—not the Texas School Book Depository. We reveal how FBI files unsealed under FOIA show Director J. Edgar Hoover personally reading her columns and scrawling angry corrections in the margins, proving the federal government was intensely monitoring her reporting. When the Warren Commission Report was released in September 1964 claiming Oswald and Ruby acted alone, Kilgallen publicly blasted it as "pure baloney" and a "fairy tale designed to reassure the public," pledging to travel to Dallas and New Orleans to break the case wide open herself.

We go behind the scenes to examine Kilgallen’s extraordinary, hands-on investigative methods and her covert partnership with attorney Mark Lane. To test key witness Howard Brennan’s claim that he observed the assassin’s height and weight from over 100 feet away, Kilgallen conducted a late-night experiment outside her East 68th Street townhouse, watching her husband Richard Kollmar lean out a fifth-floor window with a broomstick before concluding Brennan’s identification was physically impossible. We trace her secret collaboration with Lane as they communicated from public payphones using code names "Parker" and "Robinson" and exchanged sensitive documents under Manhattan streetlights. Together, they unearth the Warren Commission's suppressed lead regarding an unnamed "rich oil man" present during a pre-assassination meeting at Jack Ruby's Carousel Club, while tracking the chilling, suspicious deaths of reporters Bill Hunter and Jim Koethe, who had both entered Ruby's apartment on the night of the shooting.

Finally, we follow Kilgallen as she identifies New Orleans and Louisiana Mafia boss Carlos Marcello as the true center of gravity in the assassination conspiracy. We detail her secret research trips to New Orleans—where she flew her hairdresser Mark Sinclair on a separate plane for security—and analyze her investigation into David Ferrie, Guy Banister's 544 Camp Street office, and Oswald's ties to anti-Castro exiles. As Kilgallen compiled her explosive findings into an accordion folder that was kept under lock for a planned chapter in her upcoming book Murder One, we explore the atmosphere of terror surrounding her final weeks: buying a gun, updating her will, sending her 11-year-old son trick-or-treating in a limousine following a mysterious surveillance photograph, and entrusting duplicate research files to JFK’s close confidante Florence Pritchett Smith. We close on her bold, fateful declaration to friends that she was "five days away from busting this case wide open" before her sudden, mysterious death in November 1965.

Music includes excerpts from  "Hot Swing" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0
 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ and from  "Take Off and Shoot a Zero" by Chris Zabriskie (chriszabriskie.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/