David Morales - We Took Care of That SOB

JMWAVE Chief of Operations David Morales.

David Sanchez Morales, aka "El Indio," worked for the CIA under the cover of Army employment. He was involved in PBSUCCESS, the CIA's 1954 overthrow of the Guatemalan government, and rose to become Chief of Operations at the CIA's large JMWAVE facility in Miami. In that role, he oversaw operations undertaken against the regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba.

Morales was involved in other covert operations of the CIA, reportedly including plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, training intelligence teams supporting the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the CIA's secret war in Laos and its controversial Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, and the hunting down of Che Guevara in Bolivia.

After Morales' retirement in 1975 he returned to his native Arizona, and died of a heart attack in 1978. HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi traced Morales to Wilcox, Arizona shortly after Morales' death, and talked to his lifelong friend Ruben Carbajal and a business associate of Morales' named Bob Walton. Walton told Fonzi of an evening, after many drinks, when Morales went into a tirade about Kennedy and particularly his failure to support the men of the Bay of Pigs. Morales finished this conversation by saying "Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn't we?" Carbajal, who had been present at the confession, corroborated it.

Morales was also named by Howard Hunt as a participant in the JFK assassination.

Carbajal described the long line of cars and men in dark glasses who paid their respects at the funeral of Morales, whose tombstone reads simply: "David S. Morales, SFC US Army, World War II Korea, 1925 - 1978." Morales operated under deep cover for such a high-level officer, one who is discussed in books by insiders like David Phillips, Bradley Ayers, and John Martino. The released CIA records on Morales are a faint outline of the files the CIA must maintain.

In November 2006, a BBC Newsnight program alleged that film footage showed that David Morales, George Joannides, and Gordon Campbell were present at the Ambassador Hotel when Robert Kennedy was murdered. Subsequent research by Mel Ayton and a more thorough investigation by David Talbot and Jeff Morley has failed to uphold these identifications.