Robert K. Wilcox - Target JFK: The Spy Who Killed Kennedy?

Copyright 2016 by Robert Wilcox

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To Robert

Table of Contents

Contents

I could hardly believe what Id just read. An Argentine-born American clandestine named Ren A. Dussaq was allegedly intimately involved in one of the most momentous and disturbing events in Americas historythe assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Dussaq had been a celebrated and much-honored war hero, a public speaker of note, a member of an Olympic rowing team, and in his post-WWII life a military instructor and a mentor to fellow Prudential insurance agents. How could it be possible that he had also participated in one of the twentieth centurys greatest crimes?

His father had been an important Cuban diplomat around the turn of that century, a pacifist Sufi holy man involved in the creation of the League of Nations and a man who urged international unity and worked for peace. In contrast, his son, Ren, had been a soldier of fortune; a man of violence in my younger years, as Dussaq himself admitted. But he was more widely known as a respected businessman and charismatic military leader, a master of many languages renowned for his icy calm in the face of mortal danger. While these are traits common to able assassins, the charge that Ren Dussaq had been involved in the killing was virtually unbelievable.

Yet there it was in my hands; passage after passage inscribed in secret diary entries written by Ren Dussaqs close friend and clandestine colleague, Douglas Bazata. Like Dussaq, Bazata had been a decorated OSS commando and spy. As vaunted Jedburghsthe forerunners of todays tough, daring, courageous, and deadly U.S. Special Forcesboth Bazata and Dussaq had been OSS assassins. It was a profession that Bazata had practiced for several governments after World War II. He was an undeniable part of Ren Dussaqs murky, mysterious past. If anyone shared Dussaqs secret, it would have been Bazata. He and Dussaq had trained together in the OSS, conducted missions during World War II in concert with one another in occupied France, and created a freelance mercenary group in postwar Europe.

Bazata wrote that the two men had known each other since the late 1920s, meeting first as young men in Cuba, where Dussaq had been involved in revolution. In his diaries, Bazata, to preserve his friends anonymity by disguising Dussaq, referred to him variously as Peter or Paul, after the Biblical apostle who had undergone a conversion on the road to Damascus. There were so many references in the diaries about Peter/Paul that inevitably Bazata stumbled and accidentally wrote Ren or Dussaq several times instead. The more I read, the more obvious it became. There were too many instances, life parallels, and similarities for it to be mere coincidence. It had to be Dussaq to whom Bazata was referring. Suddenly, stories Id heard about the Argentine-born adventurer, who had recently died in Los Angeles, loomed large.

What role had Dussaq really played, besides machine gunner and spy, in the various early Cuban and other Latin American revolts?

What forced him to flee the Latin civil wars and, in 1933, surface in Hollywood, where he became a movie stuntman and, after World War II, an actor, undercover agent, and later a successful insurance executive?

What really occurred the night of February 23, 1933, when the car the young, newly-arrived Dussaq was driving careened over a Los Angeles cliff, killing socialite Daisy Canfield Moreno, oil fortune heiress and wife of Spanish-born Antonio Moreno, the reigning Hollywood Latin-lover of the era? There were persistent rumors that Moreno was gay and that Daisy was threatening him with divorce, thus cutting him off from her huge inheritance. Had Dussaq, the burgeoning stunt driver and wing-walker, himself desperately in need of money, accepted a devils bargain to save the troubled Morenos career and access to his wifes fortune?

As World War II in Europe and Asia widened, was Dussaq acting as a U.S. spyor perhaps one for a foreign governmentduring his Atlantic and Pacific sailing ventures as a treasure hunter and deep-sea diver? Were his well-attended public lectures, which centered not only on his own exploits but also on the need to respect each nations right to self-determination, particularly Latin American nations, a clue to deeply-held political beliefs? Was his outrage at the traditional U.S. interventionist policy towards the Latin nations, especially Cuba, the motive, as Douglas Bazata believed, for Dussaqs involvement in President John F. Kennedys assassination?

Why had the U.S. Army wanted to court martial Dussaq after he returned from extraordinary and successful missions as a WWII Allied resistance leader, by then known as Captain Bazooka, behind German lines? Was it because hed gone AWOL (as certain documents indicate) following the tragedy that befell his wife following his return to America after mistakenly being reported dead?

Or had the threatened court martial had a more sinister genesis?

After the warand after personally being honored by President Truman himselfwas he, as he claimed, only an undercover agent for the FBI hunting down Hollywood communists? Or was he, as his postwar commanding officer in Germany charged, a double-agent?

And if he was a double-agent, for whom was he spying?

Did Dussaq simply work undercover for the CIA after the war? Or, as Bazata claimspresuming Dussaq was CIAwas his real job to penetrate the U.S. spy agency? The CIA, in its standard reflexive response intended to conceal anything potentially damaging to it, will neither confirm nor deny any association with Dussaq.

Did he also work for Cuba, which Bazata notes that Dussaq oddly and occasionally claimed as his birthplace, but also his political passion and love? Had he secretly helped Fidel Castro mount the 1950s Cuban Revolution? And had he directed a reluctant but complying Bazata to alert high-level U.S. intelligence authorities that Kennedy was to be murdered in retaliation for the CIAs bungled attemptsundertaken with JFKs approvalto assassinate Castro?