Eladio
del Valle was born in Cuba.
He was a supporter of Fulgencio Batista
and served as a congressman in Havana. He went into exile just before
Fidel
Castro
gained power
in January, 1959.
Del
Valle moved to Florida where he was active in the Free Cuba Committee.
He also worked for Santo
Trafficante and
with his friend, David
Ferrie
he was involved
in fire-bombing sugar fields in Cuba.
During
his investigation of the Kennedy case, Jim
Garrison wanted to interview Eladio
del Valle to obtain information against Clay
Shaw.
However, he was unable to find him.
Eladio
del Valle
was murdered on 22nd February, 1967. He had been shot in the heart.
He died only hours after his friend, David
Ferrie.
Diego
Gonzales Tendera, a close friend, later claimed de Valle was murdered
because of his involvement in the assassination of President
John
F. Kennedy.
In
1975 Harry Dean claimed he had been an
undercover agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In 1962 he infiltrated the John Birch Society.
He later reported that General Edwin
Walker and
John
Rousselot had
hired two gunman, Eladio del Valle and Loran
Hall, to kill President John F. Kennedy.
However, Dean was unable to provide any evidence to back up his claim.
Three
years later further evidence emerged linking Del Valle with the assassination.
Tony
Cuesta
had been
captured during a mission at Monte Barreto in the Miramar district
of Cuba on 29th May, 1966. A member of his
team, Herminio Diaz Garcia, was killed
during the raid. Cuesta, who always vowed that Castro would never
take him alive, attempted suicide by setting off a grenade, which
blinded him and blew off his right hand. Cuesta spent a long time
in hospital as a result of his serious injuries.
In 1978
President Jimmy Carter arranged for a
group of imprisoned exiles to be released. This included Tony
Cuesta.
Just before leaving Cuba
Cuesta asked
to see General Fabian Escalante, the
head of Cuba's G-2 Spy Agency. Cuesta told Escalante that he had been
involved in the assassination of President John
F. Kennedy.
He also named De Valle and Herminio Diaz
Garcia as
being involved in the conspiracy.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
(1)
Robert
Morrow,
First Hand Knowledge
(1992)
My involvement with the
plans to assassinate John F. Kennedy commenced at the end of June,
1963. On July 1, I was contacted by (CIA head of Domestic Operations
Officer) Tracy Barnes. He requested that I purchase four Mannlicher
7.35 mm surplus rifles. According to Barnes, the rifles were available
in the Baltimore area from Sunny's Supply Stores. Upon my agreement
to make the purchase, Barnes requested that I alter the forepiece
of each rifle so that the rifles could be dismantled, hidden and reassembled
quickly. I thought this last request odd until I was informed that
the rifles were to be used for a clandestine operation.
One day later I received
a second phone call. It was Eladio del Valle calling from, I assumed,
Miami. He asked me to supply him with four transceivers which were
not detectable by any communications equipment then available on the
market. Although his request seemed impossible, I told him that I
had an idea which might fulfill his requirement. I could provide him
with sub-miniaturized units whose operation would be confined to a
range of fifty or one hundred kilohertz. To operate any sizable distance,
the units would require an antenna at least several feet in length.
A wire taped to the user's leg would easily suffice for this purpose.
The set-up would not be pretty, but I could assure him that no one
would be monitoring these low frequencies.
Del Valle then requested
that I deliver the transceivers and the rifles to David Ferrie. I
was surprised by Ferrie's involvement in the transaction. Barnes,
in our previous conversation, had neither informed me that the rifles
were being made for Clay Shaw in New Orleans nor that David Ferrie
would be the person responsible for picking them up once I had completed
the required alterations. Del Valle explained to me that the rifles
and communications equipment were for his Free Cuba Committee, and
that Clay and Ferrie were assisting him in the operation. I assured
him that the equipment would be ready on time as I would immediately
order the Motorola-made special transceiver units. Motorola was manufacturing
the units for railroad communications equipment; they were relatively
easy to secure.
The radio transceivers
for del Valle were more difficult to create than I had originally
thought they'd be. An unusual amount of power was required for them
to transmit over any significant distance. To solve this dilemma,
I included an extra pack of four "D" type battery cells
to be used for transmitting purposes only. The pack was plugged into
the transceiver unit and could easily be carried in the user's pocket.
Ironically, I later learned from del Valle that the transmission time
was to be limited to five minutes, which meant my additional adjustments
had been unnecessary.
(2)
Fabian
Escalante,
Cuban
Officials and JFK Historians Conference
(7th December,
1995)
Eladio Del Valle worked
for two police services - military intelligence and the traditional
police. He was in charge of narcotics. He was also a legislature in
the government - a representative. He was from a little town from
the south of Havana. He was a captain in the merchant marines. In
1958 he was doing business dealings with Santos Trafficante in a little
coastal town south of Havana. There he brought in contraband whose
destination was Santos Trafficante. When the revolution triumphed,
he went to Miami. Eladio Del Valle went to Miami. He settled in Miami,
we don't know the address and he allied himself with Rolando Masferrer
and other Batista supporters and they formed an organization called
the Anti Communist Cuban Liberation Movement. From that moment on,
Eladio was involved in many project against Cuba. But as I told you
yesterday, we managed to penetrate this organization. And we came
to know of a lot of projects, efforts, for an invasion of Cuba in
secret. In order to provide arms to internal rebel groups, they needed
David Ferrie as the pilot on these flights. In 1962 Eladio Del Valle
tried to infiltrate Cuba with a commando group of 22 men but their
boat had an English key - a little island. In the middle of 1962.
Of course, we knew this. I tell you about this, because one of our
agents who was one of the people helping to bring this group to Cuba,
was a man of very little education. They talked English on many occasions
on this little island with Eladio Del Valle told this person, on many
occasions, that Kennedy must be killed to solve the Cuban problem.
After that we had another piece of information on Eladio Del Valle.
This was offered to us by Tony Cuesta. He told us that Eladio Del
Valle was one of the people involved in the assassination plot against
Kennedy. As you know, he was taken prisoner and he was very thankful
to be taken back - he was blind.
He
asked that this information not be public. I am only saying it here,
because he is already dead. It is finished. We didn't have any other
kind of information to give. There are some things you must respect.
He gave us this information and in 1978 we didn't know if it was true
or not. In 1978, we were not aware of the participation of Eladio
Del Valle. We didn't know who he was. Remember that I explained to
you yesterday that when the Select Committee when they came to Havana
- they didn't give us any specific information. They just came to
question us. We didn't know the relationships.
(3)
Dick
Russell,
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1992)
The most intriguing
news to come out of the Nassau conference, however, was Escalante's
revelation about what another leader of the Alpha 66 group allegedly
told him. As we have seen, Nagell would never reveal the true identities
of "Angel" and "Leopoldo" - the two Cuban exiles
who he said had deceived Oswald into believing they were Castro operatives.
Instead, on several occasions when I prodded him, Nagell had cleverly
steered the conversation toward a man named Tony Cuesta - indicating
that this individual possessed the knowledge that he himself chose
not to express. Cuesta, as noted earlier, had been taken prisoner
in Cuba during a raid in 1966.
"Cuesta was blinded
(in an explosion) and spent most of his time in the hospital,"
Escalante recalled. In 1978, he was among a group of imprisoned exiles
released through an initiative of the Carter Administration. "A
few days before he was to leave," according to Escalante, "I
had several conversations
with Cuesta. He volunteered, 'I want to tell you something very important,
but I do not want this made public because I am returning to my family
in Miami - and this could be very dangerous.' I think this was a little
bit of thanks on his part for the medical care he received."
Escalante said he was
only revealing Cuesta's story because the man had died in Miami in
1994. In a declaration he is said to have written for the Cubans,
Cuesta named two other exiles as having been involved in plotting
the Kennedy assassination. Their names were Eladio del Valle and Herminio
Diaz Garcia.
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