William Pawley, the Kennedy Assassination, and Watergate: TILT and the “Phase Three” Story of Clare Boothe Luce

By Prof Peter Dale Scott
Global Research, November 29, 2012

A new biography of William Pawley clarifies the millionaire’s 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 U.S. policies easily qualifies him to 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 overworld 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 U.S. Government ceased to support these men, Pawley maintained their confidence, which was one of the reasons elements of the U.S. Government chose on occasion to use him as an asset. Another reason is that all these dictators had developed contacts with the U.S. 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.
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