my goodness - no wonder the CIA needed help!

Fri 18 Jul 2014, 12:04 pm

Ha ha - here's a juicy one. This is Thayer Waldo, one of the reporters who saw Jack Ruby outside the DPD (and apparently also the source of some of Dorothy Kilgallen's material, just before she died):

The general situation was described clearly by Thayer Waldo, American reporter, who wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle concerning the Cuban operation:

"This reporter spent the first half of last year (1960) in Cuba. At that time, with the U.S. Embassy still in operation and fully staffed, eight of its personnel were C.I.A. agents, three worked for the F.B.I. and each of the Armed Services had from one to five operatives assigned to intelligence work.

"No special effort was required to learn these facts or to identify the individuals so engaged. Within thirty days of arrival in Havana, their names and agency affiliations were made known to me, without solicitation, by other correspondents or Embassy employees.

"The latter included one C.I.A. man who volunteered the identities of all three persons accredited to the F.B.I., and a Cuban receptionist, outspokenly pro-Castro, who ticked off the names of six C.I.A. agents - with entire accuracy, a later check confirmed.

"In addition to Embassy staffers, the C.I.A. had a number of operatives (I knew fourteen, but am satisfied there were more) among the large colony of resident U-S. businessmen. One of these, a roofing and installation contractor, had lived in Cuba from the age of six, except for service with the Army' during World War II - as a master sergeant in G-2, military intelligence. Predictably, that known background made the man a prime target for observation by Castro's people when U.S.-Cuban relations began to deteriorate seriously. He was shadowed day and night, his every contact reported. Yet the C.I.A. made him its chief civilian agent in Havana."

This is 1960, the year when the planned assassination of Castro first heated up.

This is also a year before the Bay of Pigs, and two years before the Missile Crisis (give or take).

And this was the "condition of things" at the time?

Jeez, no wonder the CIA felt it needed some "expert assistance"! Rolling Eyes

My real question is about Thayer Waldo though. What do we know about this guy? Is/was he by any chance an intelligence asset of some kind? He says weird stuff, like he knows more than he's telling. I just read a whole long piece of testimony where he says he's asking someone outside the DPD what's up and where the cops are, and then I read another thing where it says he was "right next to the Stemmons freeway sign" at the time of the shooting... so if both of those things are true, he must have been one of the very first reporters at the TSBD, and in that case this guy should be a rock star! But... he's not, and why is that?