Mitchell WerBell, the son
of a former Czarist calvary officer, was born in Philadelphia
in 1918. During the Second World War Werbell
joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)
and saw action in Burma and China. According to Gaeton
Fonzi,
this enabled WerBell to join "the superspy fraternity" that
included Allen
W. Dulles,
William Casey, Richard
Helms and
E.
Howard Hunt.
After the war, WerBell
lived outside of Atlanta. He also worked as an arms dealer. WerBell
ran a series of weapon manufacturing and marketing firms including
Military Armament Corporation, Defense Services and Quantum Ordnance
Bankers. WerBell distributed advanced weaponry to selective foreign
groups.
In 1959 WerBell did covert
work for Fulgencio Batista in Cuba.
During this period be became friends with Gerry
P. Hemming,
Bernardo De Torres and Gordon
Novel. Hemming and Torres were both representatives of WerBell
in his arms sales business. WerBell was also rumoured to be involved
in the assassination of John
F. Kennedy.
Roy
Hargraves told
Noel Twyman that WerBell supplied silencers
used by the gunmen in Dallas.
WerBell also did covert
work in the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam.
In 1966 WerBell served as adviser on Project Nassau, a planned invasion
of Haiti by Cuban and Haitian exiles to oust the dictator Francois
“Papa Doc” Duvalier.
In 1967 WerBell formed
a partnership with Gordon Ingram. Together they distributed the Ingram
M-11, a hand-held, quiet machine gun. Six years later WerBell and
his arms company, Defense Services, were indicted for allegedly trying
to sell some of these Ingram submachine guns to a federal undercover
agent. He was also indicted for proposing to sell 2,000 of these weapons
to Robert Vesco in Costa Rica. Later, both these charges were dropped.
Mitchell Livingston WerBell
III died of cancer in 1983.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
(1)
Gaeton
Fonzi,
The Last Investigation
(1993)
When Conein set up
his Special Operations branch of the DEA, he recruited at least a
dozen field operatives from the CIA and set them up in a safe house,
an office suite in the La Salle Building on Connecticut Avenue in
Washington. The reason for operating outside of DEA headquarters was
because the branch was developing a very special plan, which included
assassinating the key drug suppliers in Mexico. The question has been
raised by syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, among others, of whether
or not the White House Plumbers group was at some point developing
an assassination capability not as a foreign policy weapon but for
domestic political reasons. (Anderson claimed that a contract was
put out on him at one time.) At any rate, the Connecticut Avenue office
was funded not by the DEA but by the CIA. Mitch WerBell has admitted
that he was in business there with two former CIA men manufacturing
ultrasophisticated assassination devices.
So there was much to discuss
(or try to), in my meeting with Mitch WerBell that long Georgia day
in his gun-filled den, although it turned out to be a verbal paso
doble with a drunk-or a man who acted drunk. By the time I got to
him, WerBell was coming off a long bout with the booze, the result
of being caught between the pressures of a few Congressional investigating
committees probing his intelligence, arms and drug connections and
the even tougher squeeze by Federal agencies he worked for who wanted
him to keep his mouth shut. So although we spent several hours talking,
WerBell was determined to dance drunkenly around my key areas of interest.
"There's a helluva
lot I ain't said yet," he blathered at one point, "and there's
a helluva lot I ain't gonna say yet" At times he claimed loss
of memory: "I've been in so many places, so many countries, so
many revolutions, it's beginning to get all mixed up in my mind."
Yet the transcript of the
tape I made during that session with WerBell reveals, despite the
staccato verbal ellipses he drunkenly affected, some interesting responses.
He admitted his involvement with some Castro assassination attempts
("I was sittin' in Miami with a goddamned million dollars in
cash for the guy who was gonna take Fidel out"), but disclaimed
any knowledge of the Kennedy murder. "Now I didn't like Jack
Kennedy," he said. "I thought he was a shit to begin with.
But I was certain not to be involved in the assassination of an American
president, for Christsakes!"
WerBell also denied any gun smuggling or business dealings with Jack
Ruby, but half admitted a contact. First he said he had no connection,
then added: "And the reason we didn't . . . I think we may have
had an incoming . . . but we don't play with people like that. I mean,
it's as simple as that. This guy Ruby, he called, I didn't know who
the hell he was, but that was years ago. ..." WerBell then lapsed
into a drunken mumble.
Later, when I was with
the House Assassinations Committee, I thought it might have been fruitful
if the Committee, with its subpoena power and power to grant immunity,
had called WerBell for formal questioning. But Mitchell Livingston
WerBell III was just another one of the characters who didn't fit
into the game plan.
(2)
Ron Ecker, Our
Man in Powder Springs: Mitch WerBell (24th November, 2004)
In 1967 WerBell went into business with Gordon Ingram, designer of
a small submachine gun, slightly larger than a conventional pistol,
on which WerBell suppressors were mounted, for a quiet and compact
weapon with military contracts in mind. (11) In 1973 WerBell’s
arms company Defense Services, Inc. and his son Mitchell IV were indicted
for allegedly trying to sell some of the silenced Ingram submachine
guns to a federal undercover agent. The case was eventually thrown
out of court, but the indictments happened to coincide with WerBell
being subpoenaed by a Senate committee that was investigating Robert
Vesco, a fugitive financier living in Costa Rica. Vesco had sought
through an intermediary to purchase 2,000 silenced Ingrams from WerBell,
with the intent, some suspected, of taking over Costa Rica. (Also
temporarily residing in Costa Rica at this time were Mafia don Santo
Trafficante and anti-Castro Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch.) The indictments
prevented WerBell from testifying before the Senate committee, and
WerBell himself believed that the indictments were a gag order to
keep him from talking about Vesco. “From now on, call me Mitch
the Fifth,” WerBell said after the indictments were dropped.
Bitter that his family had been dragged into the affair, WerBell soon
got out of the arms sales business, concentrating instead on security
work and counter-terrorism. (12)
In 1976 WerBell was in
trouble again. He and four other men were tried in Florida on charges
of conspiring to import marijuana from Colombia for a profit of $100,000
each. WerBell’s lawyer Edwin Marger said that WerBell would never
get involved in a conspiracy to import marijuana. “Guns, revolutions,
maybe even assassinations,” Marger said, “but he’s
not being tried for that.” (13)
(3)
Ron Ecker, Our
Man in Powder Springs: Mitch WerBell (24th November, 2004)
The late Roy Hargraves
told researcher Noel Twyman in a 2001 interview that WerBell supplied
silencers used in the JFK assassination. Hargraves was an explosives
expert and member of Hemming’s Interpen group. Hargraves said
that he was in Dallas on November 22, 1963 as part of a four-man support
team led by anti-Castro activist Felipe Vidal Santiago. (Vidal was
captured on a mission into Cuba in 1964 and executed.) The team, according
to Hargraves, was ordered to Dallas by CIA operative William Bishop,
whose instructions likely came from someone at the CIA’s JM/WAVE
headquarters in Miami. (41) JM/WAVE’s chief of operations was
David Sanchez Morales, who reported to station chief Theodore Shackley.
One night in 1973 Morales got drunk on scotch and told three friends,
after ranting about JFK, “Well, we took care of that son of a
bitch, didn’t we?”
Many of the earwitnesses
in Dealey Plaza (74% of the 178 considered by the HSCA) said they
heard three shots (the official Warren Commission number), but others
said they heard more, ranging from four shots (reported, for example,
by railroad supervisor S.M. Holland, who was on the triple underpass,
from which he also saw a puff of smoke from the trees on the grassy
knoll), to eight shots (reported in a signed sheriff’s office
statement by construction worker A.J. Millican, who subsequently received
a terrifying phone threat and was not called to testify by the Warren
Commission). The echoes that are produced by gunfire in a man-made
canyon like Dealey Plaza also made it difficult for people to tell
where all the shots came from. In addition, while a silencer suppresses
a rifle’s muzzle blast, the sonic boom created by the supersonic
bullet is heard only as the bullet is moving past an earwitness, who
might therefore think that the shot came from a direction opposite
from the actual shooter. The overall confusion and ballistic evidence
suggest that more than one weapon was used, and that one or more shots
were suppressed, in addition to an unsilenced shot or shots from the
Texas School Book Depository Building to draw attention and thus implicate
Lee Harvey Oswald.
Having multiple shooters
in Dallas - with silencers used to mask certain positions - was not
only necessary to ensure a successful kill, but was consistent with
an intent, evident by the continuous efforts to get Castro and by
the pre-assassination creation of Oswald’s pro-Castro legend,
to paint the assassination as a Castro plot, carried out by a hit
team, thus hopefully precipitating a vengeful invasion of Cuba. According
to this theory, the lone nut scenario - Oswald implausibly did it
all by himself with three shots - was concocted out of panic when
Oswald, who had supposedly been destined for elimination either immediately
or outside of the country, was taken alive by the Dallas police.
(4)
Warren
Hinckle &
William
Turner,
Deadly Secrets: The CIA-Mafia War Against Castro and the Assassination
of JFK (1992)
Mitch WerBell was a charter
member of the intelligence Old Boy Network. He had been a secret agent
with the OSS during World War II; thereafter he was always on the
spot on the griddle where the Cold War was heating up. He was a player
in the CIA's secret cross-border war against China in the 1950s through
the 1960s; he went to Vietnam as a weapons adviser with the simulated
rank of Brigadier General; and he did the prep work for the 1965 invasion
of the Dominican Republic. He frequently worked with the CIA and infrequently
worked against them. While the agency was fumbling the ball on its
attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, the ever gung-ho WerBell initiated
his own assassination plots. His wild nocturnal speedboat rides to
Cuba were scenes out of some paramilitary Strangelove movie-Mitch
playing the pipes under a moonless Caribbean sky, the Confederate
flag flapping from the rear of the boat. (Sometime later, the U.S.
government hypocritically indicted WerBell for his anti-Castro plots
while ignoring its own.)
The last decade of WerBell's
life was filled with sufficient adventures and misadventures for the
lifetimes of ten men. In 1973 WerBell began a "New Country Project"
for a group of capitalist revolutionaries on Abaco Island in the Bahamas
who wanted to shed the bondage of Nassau. The secessionists believed
that the black population of the tourist islands was turning whites
off and that sparsely settled Abaco, with a lower profile of blacks,
could become a haven for investment money in gambling casinos, resorts,
and housing restricted to the wealthy. The new currency would be called
the rand, not in emulation of South Africa's medium of exchange but
in honor of Ayn Rand, the dowager empress of rugged egoism.
WerBell sounded out his
contacts in the high Arctic of the CIA and the State Department. He
got the word that there would be no great American objection, provided
there was no violence. WerBell was confident there would not be. He
proceeded to sign up Soldier of Fortune-supreme Robert K. Brown to
recruit a dozen Vietnam vets as the nucleus of an Abacoan standing
army strong enough to dissuade Bahamian Premier Lyndon Pindling from
invading with his own puny armed services. The date for seccession
was set for New Year's Day 1975.
However, three months before
liberty day WerBell was indicted in Atlanta, and the plan had to be
canceled. That indictment, later dropped, stemmed from his aggressive
marketing of his silencer equipped Ingram machine gun, which starred
in the movie Killer Force. (There are some interesting connections
here. WerBell was manufacturing the Ingram under the name Defense
Services, Inc., and marketing it through an outfit called Parabellum,
which was headed by Anselmo Alliegro, Jr., an heir to the shadowy
Ansan millions. Parabellum employed Gerry Hemming and Rolandito Masferrer,
nephew of the dreaded El Tigre Rolando Masferrer. When Anastasio Somoza's
dictatorship in Nicaragua was collapsing in 1979, Cuban veterans of
the Secret War rallied to his cause. Some engaged in combat against
the insurgent Sandinista guerrillas; others acted as instructors with
the elite National Guard, which had enabled the Somoza family to remain
in power over the decades. One of the instructors was WerBell's partner
in arms dealing, Anselmo Alliegro, Jr. In September 1980 Somoza, in
exile in Paraguay, met a violent end. There were many flowers but
few tears at his funeral.)
Available from
Amazon Books (order below)
