Spartacus Blog: The Death of Bernardo De Torres by John Simkin

The initial censorship convinced me that Bernardo De Torres was an important figure that needed to be looked at very closely. At first most of my information came from a former employee of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS). I will call him Daniel Ralston (this is not his real name or the name that he currently uses). He went on to do freelance work for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). During this period he became friends with people who were intimately involved in the assassination. He claimed that David Sanchez Morales, who worked at JM/WAVE, the CIA station in Miami had organised the assassination. Morales was operations chief for the CIA’s covert operation to train and infiltrate teams into Cuba to destabilize the Fidel Castro government. The role of De Torres was to make sure that those involved in the assassination did not talk about it afterwards.

Ralston had a huge collection of photographs of people he told me were involved in the events surrounding the assassinations. This included CIA agents and people they used to carry out certain illegal activities. Some of these looked like surveillance photographs, whereas others were fairly intimate family photographs. He encouraged me to publish most of these photographs but some he asked me not to do this as it would get him into trouble with dangerous people. He seemed particularly scared of De Torres.

I tried to get an interview with De Torres but he refused to talk to me. However, one of his children, did agree to give me information on her father. Some of his former colleagues also gave me information. De Torres had also been mentioned in a couple of books on the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Orlando Letelier. He was also mentioned in books on the international drug trade and CIA backed coups in South America. This is his story.

Bernardo De Torres was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1934. He moved to the United States in 1955 and later worked as a private investigator in Miami. De Torres was a strong opponent of Fidel Castro and during the Bay of Pigs Operation was Chief of Intelligence for Brigade 2506 where he worked under David Sanchez Morales. During the invasion he was captured and was held in captivity until 24th December, 1962. On his release he joined his brother Carlos in Miami. (6)

According to his daughter: “He (De Torres) was already working with the CIA against him (Castro) in 1959. After he came back from the invasion he was in critical condition for a of couple months. He was shot in the back of his head beneath his cerebellum and the bullet broke into five pieces. He went under surgery and had four of those pieces removed. One had to stay because it was too close to an area that if accidentally harmed could make him paralyzed.” (7)

In 1963 De Torres resumed work as a private investigator. According to Gerry P. Hemming De Torres worked for Charles Siragusa, who was involved in foreign assassinations. (8) Hemming had established Interpen (Intercontinental Penetration Force) and De Torres became associated with several of the Interpen members, including Loran Hall, Roy Hargraves, William Seymour, Lawrence Howard, Steve Wilson, Howard K. Davis, Edwin Collins, James Arthur Lewis and Dennis Harber. (9)

Tom Bethell, who worked for New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, interviewed Hemming about Interpen and he claimed that in 1963 there were “numerous teams with paramilitary inclinations out to ‘get’ Kennedy. Some of these teams had been approached by wealthy entrepreneurs of the H. L. Hunt type, (though not, I think, in fact H.L. Hunt), who were interested in seeing the job done and even provided financial assistance.” (Haroldson L. Hunt, a wealthy oil man from Texas.) After the assassination of Kennedy members of these teams “have been returning to their sponsors, taking credit for the assassination, and at the same time requesting large additional sums of money so that they won’t be tempted to talk about it to anyone. In turn, the sponsors have apparently been hiring Mafia figures to rid themselves of these blackmailers.” (10)

Silvia Odio was a member of the anti-Castro group Junta Revolucionaria Cubana (JURE). Her father Amador Odio, was among Cuba’s wealthiest men, the owner of the country’s largest trucking business. However, he had fought Cuban dictators and helped to overthrow General Gerardo Machado in 1933. He was an early supporter of Castro, but had turned against him when “Fidel betrayed the Revolution” and along with Manuel Ray, had helped form one of the first anti-Castro groups within Cuba. (11)

Odio later told the FBI and the Warren Commission that on 25th September, 1963, while living in Dallas, she received a visit from three men who claimed they were from New Orleans. Two of the men, Leopoldo and Angel, were Cubans, who said they were members of JURE. The third man, who they named as Leon Oswald, was introduced as an American sympathizer who was willing to take part in the assassination of Fidel Castro. After she told them that she was unwilling to get involved in any criminal activity, the three men left. Odio later identified Leon as Lee Harvey Oswald. (12)

The following day Leopoldo called her on the telephone. He told her it was his idea to introduce the American into the underground “because he is great, he is kind of nuts”. Leopoldo also said that the American had been in the marine corps and was an excellent shot, and that the American said the Cubans “don’t have any guts because President Kennedy should have been assassinated after the Bay of Pigs, and some Cubans should have done that, because he was the one that was holding the freedom of Cuba actually.” (13)

A report carried out by the FBI suggested that the three men may have been members of Interpen (Loran Hall, William Seymour and Lawrence Howard). Hall admitted they “had gone to the apartment of a Cuban woman who lived in a garden style apartment located on Magellan Circle in Dallas… and said that he could not picture this woman in his mind now. He said that her name was possibly Odio. He said that he seemed to recognize this woman’s name as Odio because of the association with the name of the Cuban professor who had the same name.” (14)

Angelo Murgado was another member of the anti-Castro Cubans who was associated with Bernardo De Torres. He was a member of a group led by Manuel Artime. In August 1963, Murgado and Artime had a meeting with Robert F. Kennedy. Murgado warned the attorney general about the behaviour of some anti-Castro Cubans: “I told him that we have to keep a sharp look on those Cubans. I was afraid that one of our guys would go crazy… The same way that a lot of people are trying to hit Castro, there are a lot of people trying to hit the president of the United States… We have a lot of crazy sons of bitches and they’re willing to pull anything.” (15)

Joan Mellen, has carried out extensive research into the Odio incident. She claims that in an interview with Angelo Murgado she claimed he was “Angel” and “Leopoldo” was Bernardo de Torres. In an article published in 2005 she claimed that “Bernardo de Torres, who testified before the HSCA with immunity granted to him by the C.I.A., so that he was not questioned about the period of time leading up to the Kennedy assassination, as the C.I.A. instructed the Committee on what it could and could not ask this witness. Both the Warren Commission and the HSCA buried the anti-Castro theme, and never explored what Bobby (Kennedy) might have known.” (16)

According to his daughter, Bernardo De Torres was employed by the CIA to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy: “Yes, he worked for several years with the CIA at uncovering all the possible people that were on the their list. At one time, they put him under the spot light and he was proved without a doubt that he had anything to do with it. He was actually in Florida with my stepmother at the time of the assassination and was working on his other job as military coordinator for Brigade 2506. It’s located in Miami in Little Havana…. I think he came to a conclusion in his investigation and thinks he knows who were the people who killed JFK but doesn’t like or want to deal with what he found because all of sudden he stopped researching and never spoke about it again. Normally he doesn’t stop until he has found the answers.” (17)

In 1966 Bernardo De Torres joined Jim Garrison in his investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy. William Turner, the author of Rearview Mirror: Looking Back at the FBI, the CIA and Other Tails (2001) has argued: “A veteran of the Bay of Pigs, De Torres showed up on Garrison’s doorstep early in the probe, saying he was a private detective from Miami who wanted to help, and dropping the name of Miami DA Richard Gerstein, a friend of Garrison’s, as an opener. In retrospect, Garrison remembered that every lead De Torres developed ended up in a box canyon. He also learned that De Torres was forwarding reports on his investigation to the Miami CIA station.” (18)

Garrison asked Bernardo De Torres to find Eladio del Valle so he could be interviewed about the assassination. Del Valle, a wealthy former Cuban congressmen under Fulgencio Batista, had headed the Free Cuba Committee in Florida, and reportedly had links to Santos Trafficante. (19) He was also a close friend and associate of David Ferrie, another man who Garrison was investigating. “In the course of checking out all possible associates of Oswald’s in the city, we discovered that the alleged assassin had been seen during the summer with a man named David Ferrie. I got my people on the telephones right away to investigate a possible Oswald-Ferrie relationship.” (20) Del Valle had reportedly paid Ferrie $1,500 a mission to make air raids against Cuba. (21)

Dick Russell, while researching his book, On the Trail of the JFK Assassins (2008), interviewed Fabian Escalante, the former chief of Cuba’s G-2 intelligence agency. According to Escalante: “Del Valle was in charge of narcotics in a town south of Havana, where he had business dealings with Santo Trafficante… We managed to penetrate this organization. We came to know a lot of plans for exile invasions, secret overflights to provide arms to internal rebel groups. David Ferrie was the pilot for some of these flights. One of our agents talked on many occasions with Del Valle, who in 1962 told him that Kennedy must be killed to solve the Cuban problem.” (22)

Another member of this group was Herminio Diaz Garcia. He arrived in the United States in 1963 and that September the CIA considered recruiting him as an agent because of his ties to Efiigenio Amejeiras Delgado, Castro’s vice-minister of the armed forces, who was reportedly conspiring with Rolando Cubela. As David Kaiser pointed out: “It is not clear from available files whether he was in fact recruited.” (23) Diaz Garcia was killed on a penetration mission into Cuba on 29th May, 1966. (24)

Garrison became suspicious of De Torres and on 7th January, 1967, he ordered his staff “under no circumstances” to offer any information to him. Four days later he wrote at the top of one of De Torres’ memos: “His reliability is not established.” Garrison became convinced that De Torres was working for JM/WAVE, the Central Intelligence Agency station in Miami. Declassified documents show that De Torres gave the CIA’s final report on Jim Garrison on 2nd March, 1967. According to Gaeton Fonzi, De Torres’s CIA handler was Paul Bethel. (25)

Another researcher, Larry Hancock, has argued that “It certainly appears that De Torres’ role in the Garrison investigation is suspicious, and it supports Otero’s remarks to HSCA investigators that De Torres had ‘penetrated’ Garrison’s investigation. It also shows that De Torres had an agenda of his own in addition to getting intelligence about Garrison’s investigation and investigators. That agenda involved once again shifting attention to Fidel Castro and a Cuban hit team rather than the activities of the Cuban exiles.” (26)

On 17th February, 1967, The New Orleans States-Item reported that Jim Garrison was investigating the assassination of Kennedy. It also said that one of the suspects was David Ferrie. Five days later Ferrie’s body was found in his New Orleans apartment. Garrison pointed out that “suddenly the newspapers, the television, and the radio people had decided that Ferrie’s death – and the possibility it may have resulted from suicide or foul play – may have validated my investigation.” Although two suicide notes were found, the coroner did not immediately classify the death as a suicide, noting there were indications Ferrie may have suffered a brain hemorrhage. Eventually the coroner announced that Ferrie had died of “natural causes”. (27)

Eladio del Valle was murdered in Miami on 22nd February, 1967. He had been shot in the heart at point-blank range, and his skull was split open. (28) Diego Gonzales Tendera, a close friend, later claimed Del Valle was murdered because of his involvement in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. (29) It has been suggested by Garrison’s chief investigator, Louis Ivon, that Bernardo De Torres was involved in the killing. “Eladio del Valle’s body was left in the vicinity of Bernardo De Torres’s apartment.” (30)

Larry Hancock has suggested that “Bernardo De Torres… diverted Garrison to a certain extent as well as aggressively re-introducing Castro suspicions. He did that with his insistent media promotion of a story pertaining to Secret Service fears of a Castro hit team in Miami during Kennedy’s visit there shortly before the Texas trip. Between February 18 and February 22, the Garrison investigation received considerable unwanted publicity, much of it based upon inquiries within the Miami Cuban community as well as the involvement of Bernardo De Torres. De Torres was quite visible in his comments and declarations, eventually leading the whole matter off in a direction pointing at a threat against John Kennedy from Castro agents.” (31)