Nathaniel
Weyl was born in New York City on 20th
July, 1910. His
father, Walter Weyl, was an editor of the
New Republic. As a student at
Columbia, Weyl became one of the youth leaders of the Socialist
Party.
Weyl received his Bachelor
of Science Degree from Columbia College in 1931 and did postgraduate
work at the London School of Economics. After
his return to the United States he joined the
Communist Party. In 1933, he obtained
a medium level policy job in a New Deal
agency. Weyl later recalled that he was "sucked into a so-called
nuclear cell of government officials supposedly destined to rise rapidly,
I found secret membership in this cell while a US official duplicitous,
and resolved my personal problem by resigning from government."
Weyl was later to claim that this cell included Alger
Hiss.
In 1939 Weyl left the Communist
Party. This was mainly as a result of Adolf
Hitler and Joseph Stalin signing the
Nazi-Soviet Pact. Weyl now accepted
the post as head of the Latin American research unit at the Federal
Reserve Board. Later he moved to the Board of Economic Warfare. He
also spent two years in the US Army during
the Second World War.
After the war Weyl worked
as a journalist. In 1961 he published the best-selling Red
Star Over Cuba. Weyl
also helped John
Martino
write
I Was Castro's Prisoner (1963).
He also worked for a while with the
former United States diplomat, William
Pawley,
with
his autobiography.
In
an article published in January, 1964, John
Martino
claimed
in had important information about the death of John
F. Kennedy. Martino argued that in 1963 Fidel
Castro had discovered an American plot to overthrow his government.
It was therefore decided to retaliate by organizing the assassination
of Kennedy. In his book Someone Would Have
Talked (2003), Larry
Hancock wrote:
"In 1964... both he (John Martino) and Nathaniel Weyl actively
promoted the story that Oswald had been in Cuba beforehand and that
he had been in contact with Cuban intelligence and Castro himself.
Their story described Castro's motivation as revenge for continuing
attempts on Castro's life by the United States government."
Shortly
before his death in 1975 John
Martino
confessed
to a Miami Newsday reporter, John
Cummings, that he had been guilty of spreading false stories implicating
Lee Harvey Oswald in the assassination.
Cummings added: "He told me he'd been part of the assassination
of Kennedy. He wasn't in Dallas pulling a trigger, but he was involved.
He implied that his role was delivering money, facilitating things....
He asked me not to write it while he was alive."
Weyl is the author of books
and articles "relating to communism, especially in Latin America;
espionage and internal security in the United States; and racial,
ethnic and class analyses of political and intellectual elites"
Books by Weyl
include The Jew in American Politics
(1968), Traitors' End; the Rise and Fall
of the Communist Movement in Southern Africa (1970), American
Statesmen on Slavery and the Negro (1971), Creative
Elite in America (1979), Karl
Marx, Racist (1979), Encounters
With Communism (1981) and Geography
of American Achievement (1990).
Nathaniel
Weyl died at his
home in Ojai, California on 13th April,
2005.
Forum Debates
The Kennedy Assassination
Nathaniel Weyl
The Attempt to Remove Fidel Castro from Power
Assassination, Terrorism and the Arms Trade: The Contracting Out of U.S. Foreign Policy: 1940-1990
A Unified Theory of CIA Covert Activities: 1960-1990
Watergate
(1)
Larry
Hancock, Someone
Would Have Talked (2003)
At this point (1962), John
Martino was working with a right-wing ghostwriter named Nathaniel
Weyl (Red Star Over Cuba). Weyl was also working with ex-Flying Tiger
and millionaire William Pawley on his autobiography...
In 1964... both he (John
Martino) and Nathaniel Weyl actively promoted the story that Oswald
had been in Cuba beforehand and that he had been in contact with Cuban
intelligence and Castro himself. Their story described Castro's motivation
as revenge for continuing attempts on Castro's life by the United
States government.
(2)
Nathaniel Weyl, Encounters
With Communism (2003)
Alan Courtney, a commentator
on Miami radio, introduced me to John Martino and persuaded me to
help him write the story of his imprisonment for several years in
Castro's prisons. John told me he had helped set up gambling devices
in Cuban hotels under Batista and had been arrested for returning
to Cuba to get his employers' money out. I knew that the mob had largely
controlled Cuban gambling and assumed John worked for them in a minor
capacity.
The Martino story seemed
to me a fascinating account from the inside of the experiences of
his fellow prisoners, mostly political dissidents, as they faced execution.
John Martino turned out to be a mild, very likeable man whose ash-white
pallor revealed years of deprivation and suffering.
Although he was an American
citizen, Martino had received no help during his ordeal from the Embassy
in Havana. Considering the long history of pro-Soviet infiltration
of our Latin American foreign service, this did not astonish us. He
felt bitter resentment toward the State Department and attributed
its abandonment of him to pro-Castro American officials.
(3)
Nathaniel Weyl, email
to John
Simkin (5th May, 2004)
Yes, I collaborated with
John Martino on his autobiography, specifically having him send or
give me tapes, and then organizing them in a more coherent structure.
I would discuss anything with him that struck me as improbable, but
the book was his story of his prison experiences. You will find a
brief account of how I got involved in this in my brief political
autobiography (Encounters with Communism, Xlibris, 2004)
I worked with William
Pawley for several months on his autobiography, but the collaboration
didn't work out. I understand that he turned over the task to someone
else and that a published book emerged, but I haven't seen it.
Re the Martino "confession".
I first ran across it about a year ago when checking a few items on
the Internet for my Encounters with Communism book. Hadn't
seen it earlier because I had long since lost interest in Cuba. While
John Martino and I had had a pleasant and friendly collaboration,
the relationship more or less ended when he used the John Birch Society
to popularize his book despite my advice to the contrary.
My first impression of
the confession is that it was fictitious. My impression was that John
Martino had played a small role in political events and had a psychological
need to magnify it and that he invented conspiracies. If he had any
advance knowledge of the impending assassination of President Kennedy
he of course did not share it with me.
(4)
Nathaniel Weyl, Encounters
With Communism (2003)
In 1963, John Martino came
to me with a fascinating story. He had attended a meeting in Palm
Beach at which a Cuban who used the nom de guerre of Bayo claimed
that the Soviets had deceived President Kennedy and that Russian missiles
were still in Cuba. Bayo said he knew tills because two of the Soviet
officers guarding these clandestine missiles had defected, were being
hidden and guarded by the remnants of the anti-Castro underground
and were desperately anxious to tell their story.
I was told that this was
an emergency. The Russians could be captured by Castro's forces at
any time. John Martino said that their Cuban protectors could get
them safely to the northern coast of the island and thence by boat
to some agreed-upon rendezvous point in the Bahamas if we acted immediately.
Martino added that Bayo
and the other Cuban patriots would have nothing to do with anyone
from the CIA because they believed that the Agency had betrayed them
at the Bay of Pigs.
Could I get a yacht, designate
a time and place to meet on some remote Bahamas island, get there
and bring the Russian officers to the American mainland? If it was
to be done, it must be done immediately.
(5)
Nathaniel Weyl, Encounters
With Communism (2003)
The Bayo operation has
been covered in several article and books. It has been a hunting ground
for conspiracy theorists, such as Peter Dale Scott (Deep Politics
and the Death ofJFK, University of California Press), who suggest
that the Bayo affair was linked to the Kennedy assassination.
We know now that the defecting
Soviet colonels never existed, that there were no Russian missiles
left in place in Cuba, that the Bayo story was a hoax.
What happened to the Cubans
who were offloaded from the Flying Tiger, heavily armed with ClA-supplied
weapons? We know that the Pawley yacht weighed anchor ten miles to
sea from the port of Baracoa in Oriente Province on the night of June
8, 1963. Three CIA people kept machineguns trained on Bayo and his
Cuban commandos as the latter piled into the speedboat that was to
take them to shore (Warren Hinckle and William W. Turner, Deadly
Secrets, p. 194). Weapons were aimed at the Cubans because the
CIA considered the possibility that they were Castro agents and that
the operation was an ambush.
The commandos vanished
into the night. Pawley saw to it that a Catalina flying boat search
the skies for them until a week had elapsed. The generally accepted
theory is that their secret purpose had been to get modern arms with
which to kill Castro, but that they had been intercepted and killed
or captured in a firefight. A year or so after the tragedy, Bill Pawley
told me he believed that the men never landed. When they boarded the
speedboat, he warned them that it was dangerously overloaded and urged
them in vain to take rubber rafts aboard. Pawley heard a large freighter
pass between the Flying Tiger and the shore. He believed that the
Cuban boat was swamped in the freighter's wake and that the men drowned.
Was their secret purpose
to get CIA arms with which to kill Fidel Castro? This is the conclusion
researchers have arrived at, but it seems to me illogical. When I
was approached to find a yacht and meet the defectors at sea, there
was no mention of sending armed commandos ashore. Nor did I have any
access to assault weapons nor did Martino have any reason to imagine
I would be willing or able to supply them.
The source of guns was
the CIA and Bayo and his companions had made it abundantly clear that
they distrusted the agency and wanted to have nothing to do with it.
The conclusion I draw is
that Bayo's initial plan was to land two or three mysterious people
in Florida, to allege that they were Soviet colonels and spread the
story of missiles still in Cuba to influence the American presidential
elections. The purpose would have been to defeat Kennedy since many
Cubans believed he had betrayed them and their cause.
Would any such imposture
have been promptly detected and exposed? Or would continuing uncertainty
and suspicion have poisoned the air for the young President?
When the plan mushroomed
to comprise a Cuban commando force, heavily armed by the CIA with
weapons, none of which was, of course, of U.S. origin, plans may well
have changed. Assassination? Mere havoc and sabotage? We will probable
never know.
(6)
Nathaniel Weyl, Encounters
With Communism (2003)
Toward the close of the
Kennedy Administration, an American of non-Hispanic origin, called
on me at our oceanfront place in Highland Beach, Florida. He wanted
to interest me in a plan to send commandos secretly into Cuba to blow
up the petroleum storage facilities in the Havana area. This seemed
to me a senseless and criminal terrorist act.
Sabotaging oil facilities
would deprive the Cuban people of a vital resource without necessarily
weakening the dictatorial regime. Since we were not at war with Cuba,
any incidental loss of life would constitute murder.
I told the mysterious person
who approached me that this was not the sort of thing I do and that
I was not interested.
(7)
Nathaniel Weyl, email
to John
Simkin (10th May, 2004)
I agreed to work with Bill
Pawley on his book in 1964 or later. I would not call myself a ghost
writer or right wing, depending on how the latter term is defined.
Nor was Pawley an aviator. FDR gave him the sub rosa task of creating
the Flying Tiger organization in the months prior to Pearl Harbor.
He was also close to Harry Truman and pushed Ike to seek the presidency.
I can't comment on what Martino may have said or believed. I thought
at the time that the JFK assassination probably had Soviet or Castro
links. As for Oswald, not too long after the assassination a Special
Agent phoned me, said he understood I had claimed Oswald had tried
to infiltrate a Cuban anti-Castro group in Florida, but had been kicked
out and roughed up, and asked whether he could come up to our place
and talk to me. I said that my source was a reporter on the Sun Sentinel,
named him, and suggested that the Bureau might prefer to go directly
to that source, which I suppose they did.
As for your queries: (1)
No. I think Oswald may have tried to get Cuban support when he went
to Mexico, but doubt the Cuban government would have used that flaky
a character. (2) John Martino didn't give me any Cuban names nor did
he suggest that he was working with the CIA; in fact my recollection
is that he distrusted the CIA. He did say that the United States government
was turning over the job of killing Castro to the Mafia and that the
latter as professionals wouldn't botch the job. (3) Never heard of
David Morales.
(8)
Nathaniel
Weyl,
The
Intelligence of White Rhodesians, The Mensa Journal (March,
1967)
For the past five years, all Standard Two European, Coloured and Asiatic
students in the Salisbury District of Rhodesia (which contains over
50 per cent of the white population) have been given South African
group intelligence tests. Those scoring 130+ have then been tested
individually, using the latest international standardization of the
Terman-Merrill test.*
About 95 per cent of those
scoring 130+ on the group test did so on the individual test. The
Terman-Merrill tests revealed that about 7 per cent of the white children
in the government schools of the Salisbury district had IQs of 130
or better. This compares with about 2.5 per cent in that range in
the U.K. and the U.S. and about 3 per cent in New Zealand. Group testing
of pupils in privately operated schools indicated that their inclusion
would not have lowered the percentage of gifted children.
Thus, white Rhodesians
are an elite element within the English-speaking world in terms of
psychometric intelligence. This finding is reinforced by visual impressions.
Salisbury whites appear larger, healthier, more vigorous, alert and
bright than London whites. Beatniks, transvestites and obvious homosexuals
are conspicuously absent.
(9)
Nathaniel
Weyl, Envy
And Aristocide, The Eugenics
Bulletin (Winter 1984)
In this article,
I shall advance the hypothesis that envy of non-achievers against
creative minorities is the mainspring of modern revolutionary movements,
that this envy is incited and exploited by alienated intellectuals,
and that the result is aristocide - the murder of productive, gifted
and high-achieving people - along with consequent genetic decline.
By aristocide, I do not
mean destruction of artificial aristocracies of pedigree and status.
I use the term to denote the extermination of what Thomas Jefferson
called "the natural aristocracy among men" grounded on "virtues
and talents," and constituting "the most precious gift of
nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society"
(Jefferson, 1813). Jefferson believed that the preservation of this
elite was of cardinal importance. The "natural aristocracy"
possess not only high intelligence, but also "virtue"- in
more modern terms, character and humanity.
Envy should be distinguished
from ambition. Envy is not the desire to excel, but the spiteful urge
to pull down the more gifted...
It remained for the messianic
totalitarian movements of our century - Nazism and Communism - to
exploit envy on a massive scale as a vehicle for attaining power.
Propaganda of both movements depicted the envied people as bestial
and unfit to live. Nazi ideology stressed the extermination of the
Jewish people on the grounds that they were "sub-human."
The Jew was shown as a
hideous lecher in the Nazi press. Red artists made capitalists appear
comparably odious and despicable. The enemy must be made to seem vile
so that his future murderers (who may possess remnants of decency
and morality) can feel justified in their crimes.
The leadership element
of revolutions is rarely composed of indignant peasants or enraged
lupenproletarians. It generally consists of frustrated, alienated
and misguided intellectuals, without whom the envy of the masses would
remain directionless, nothing more than sullen and silent resentment.
Alienated intellectuals serve as catalysts, inciting and actuating
the prevalent sentiment of envy, providing it with a seemingly legitimate
target, even gracing it with an ideology and a meretricious sort of
moral justification. Yet many converts to totalitarian movements themselves
come from the upper and middle classes. They belong not to the ranks
of the enviers, but to those of the envied. How does one explain this
paradox?
I would suggest that, in
many cases, their original motivations are benevolent: sympathy for
the poor and passionate hatred of social injustice. However, to rise
up in the ranks of the movement, pity for the downtrodden must gradually
be supplanted by hatred of their supposed oppressors. The envy of
the masses is the revolutionaries' most potent weapon to overthrow
the social order, and the best method of exploiting it is to offer
a tangible, living object of hatred. Those who don't adequately grasp
this fact tend to drop by the wayside. Clearly, a revolutionary who
proclaims to the crowd that their poverty is due to sparse natural
resources, overpopulation, and their own shortcomings is not destined
to lead the revolution. Explanations of this sort fail to provide
the enormous psychological satisfaction of Marxist ideology that poverty
is caused by class exploitation. Marxist ideology also offers a wonderfully
direct and instantaneous "solution" - liquidation of the
exploiters - which is far more appealing to mob mentality than the
dreary prospect of a lifetime of patience, hard work and sacrifice.
(10)
Blurb
for Nathaniel Weyl's Geography of American Achievement (1990)
A Jewish authors
study of various ethnic stocks and their comparative successes in
America. Jews, Asians, Anglo-Saxons, Irish and British are compared
by noting the achievements made by each group in various fields. The
Black race is conspicuously absent from, "significant achievements".
(11)
Nathaniel Weyl, review of Amy Chua's World
on Fire (5th October, 2003)
This is a book of great
importance to anyone who cares to engage in a serious examination
of the strategic goals of American foreign policy toward the third
world. Its central thesis is that the simultaneous effort to create
free market economies and democracy invites disaster.
Amy Chua presents massive
evidence of the way these process have recently unravelled throughout
the impoverished lands of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Her style
is clear and vivid. Her account of these unfolding disasters is gripping.
The central thesis of World
on Fire is that the free market system, minus the social welfare
institutions of the modern world, has led to vast concentrations of
economic power in the hands of tiny ethnic minorities throughout the
third world. Chua shows case after case where these minorities have
had their property expropriated, their homes torched, their women
raped and they themselves expelled or massacred by enraged, impoverished
majorities. She argues that our national zeal to impose democracies
on these countries often leads to misrule by demagogues who attain
power by appealing to the envy and hatred of the masses. It can be
argued, however, that dictatorships may be just as likely to stir
up xenophobic frenzy as democracies.
The minorities which have
attained this enormous economic power in
the third world and whose rise to power is so brilliantly described
in this book include the ethnic Chinese throughout southeast Asia,
the Indians in Burma and east Africa, the Lebanese in west Africa,
the Tutsis in Rwanda and the Jews in post-Soviet Russia. These ethnic
minorities may have lived in the countries where they succeeded for
generations, but this does not protect them. Visible differences in
language, culture, physical appearance and perhaps religion conspire
to set them apart and make them far more vulnerable targets than a
native economic elite.
(12)
Nathaniel Weyl, email to John
Simkin (15th July, 2004)
I had no relationship with
JFK. I had a brief, uneventful meeting with him once when he was a
Senator. Senator Smathers, who knew him fairly well since they had
gone on double dates when both were in Congress, tried without
success to get him, when he was President, to read my book on Cuba.
Probably in 1962, a friend, who had been one of the top people in
Cuban Intelligence, introduced me to a gorgeous heiress with whom
he was having an affair. She was, or had recently been, one of JFK's
women. Both the lady and my friend, Manolo, wanted me to meet JFK
and talk to him about changing his policies toward Cuba. I was less
than enthusiastic. I thought backdoor approaches to a President through
his women a poor idea. If she made the attempt, it failed...
My father, Walter Weyl,
died when I was 9. He was an editor of the New Republic, minor adviser
to Theodore Roosevelt, more or less of a socialist, increasingly radicalized
by the senseless slaughter of WW1 and the vengeful peace of Versailles.
As a student at Columbia, I became one of the youth leaders of the
Socialist Party. After a year at the London School of Economics, returned
to USA and shifted to the Communist Party. In 1933, given a medium
level policy job in a New Deal agency. Sucked into a so-called nuclear
cell of government officials supposedly destined to rise rapidly,
I found secret membership in this cell while a US official duplicitous,
and resolved my personal problem by resigning from government. (The
cell at the time I left it merely read propaganda and talked; later
its members would be drawn into espionage and one of them, Alger Hiss,
would go to prison for perjury). Years of newspaper reporting and
writing, mainly in Latin America, followed. In 1939, Hitler and Stalin
signed a pact that would precipitate World War 2. I left the CPUSA
and rejoined the US Government to head Latin American research for
Federal Reserve Board, later to serve in Board of Economic Warfare,
then 2 years in a combat infantry division, then work on US grants
and loans to the postwar world. Resigned from government for a second
time around 1947 because the questionnaires in the Truman loyalty
program would have unearthed my red past and forced me to engage in
the distasteful task of testifying against former CP associates.
From 1947 on I wrote books
and articles and earned a living from investments. I shifted from
the Democratic to the Republican Party. My interest in Cuba made me
write a book, Red Star Over Cuba, which blamed Castro's rise
to power in part on covert State Department support of his cause,
engineered by a clique of officials whose loyalties seemed questionable.
Since the book sold about a quarter of a million copies, including
Spanish, Portuguese and German language editions, it brought me into
the world of Cuban anti-Castro exiles.
My attitude toward JFK
was largely shaped by his Latin American policies and was highly critical.
I agreed with my Cuban friends that the US Government had a moral
obligation toward the force of Cuban volunteers that invaded Cuba
and sought to liberate the island, that it had pledged them military
support. JFK's last minute decision to abort the planned air strike
that the small invading force needed for survival and/or orderly withdrawal
and to leave people we had sent into battle stranded was dishonorable
and unworthy of the United States. After the debacle of the invasion,
which we now know would probably have failed anyhow, JFK's people
advanced the slogan "Fidelismo without Fidel", in short
an endorsement of the dictator's domestic policies. At the same time,
the White House was pushing its Alliance for Progress, which sought
to impose some US social measures on Latin countries which did not
want them, and which helped cause a massive flight of domestic capital
from the area and encouraged left-wing upheavals in Argentina, Brazil
and Chile. I felt that Kennedy was a great charmer and master of rhetoric,
but that unsound ideas proliferated like rabbits in the brains of
those people who made policy decisions on Latin America for him. The
tragedy of his assassination made such negative judgments seem petty
and trivial.
|
This
memoir by perhaps its last surviving eyewitness casts new
light on communist penetration of the Federal Government
in 1930-50 and on the tides of pro-Soviet subversion which
overwhelmed Cuba and menaced Mexico and Brazil. Written
in a clear narrative style, Nathaniel Weyl's engrossing
account describes the shock waves on the American Intelligentsia
caused by the Alger Hiss espionage case and a decade later,
by the Cuban crisis. Involved in cold war activities, Weyl
enjoyed the company of such Latin American presidents as
Lazaro Cardenas of Mexico and Fulgenio Batista of Cuba.
(Nathaniel
Weyl, Xlibris, ISBN 1 4134 0747 1, $17.84)
|
Encounters
With Communism
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