Page 49 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 49 of 237

From these states, some two dozen pilots were signed up by the CIA, acting through Double-Chek. The majority
were from Alabama, and, in turn, the bulk of these were from the Birmingham area. The unit's doctor was from
Montgomery.

General Reid Doster, the congenial, bulldog-faced commanding officer of the Alabama Air National Guard, was a
key man in the CIA operation at Retalhuleu. (Doster had left the CIA and was back running the Alabama Air
Guard and its 117th Reconnaissance Wing as of 1963.)

Because the Alabama Air Guard was under the supervision of the 9th Tactical Air Force at Shaw Air Force Base,
South Carolina, Doster went to see Major General David W. Hutchinson, the commanding general there.* He
asked for a leave of absence for himself and about a dozen of his men in the Alabama National Guard. Hutchinson
approved the leaves of absence; the men, including Doster, joined the CIA as civilians.

Each of the American pilots was sworn to secrecy by the CIA, with the exception of Doster, who gave his word as
a general officer. All pledged they would never talk about what happened in the training camps or at the Bay of
Pigs.

Thomas Willard Ray, age thirty when he died, was born in Birmingham on March 15, 1931. He began dating
Margaret Hayden while he was still in Tarrant High School. He served in the Air Force from 1950 to 1952 and
was discharged as a staff sergeant.

In December of that year "Pete" Ray joined the Hayes International Corporation, a large aircraft modification
company with its main plant at the Birmingham airport. Ray was a technical inspector at Hayes, but he kept up his
pilot's proficiency by flying the B-26s and F-84s at the Alabama National Guard.

He married Margaret and they had two children: Thomas, a crew-cut blond-haired boy of eight when his father
died, and Janet Joy, six. Five years before the Bay of Pigs, the Rays built a handsome brick home in Center Point,
a Birmingham suburb.

Ray did not particularly like flying jets, and, with several buddies, he switched to the Army Reserve. He took
leave from Hayes, and for one year before he joined the CIA he was on active duty at Fort Rucker, 170 miles
south of Birmingham. In January, 1961, Ray received a telephone call. He told his wife he would be leaving to go
to a "combined service school."

On February 5, 1961, Mrs. Ray and the children moved into her mother's home in Birmingham. Her husband left
the same day. He did not say where he was going. He told his wife she could write to him at this address:

c/o Joseph Greenland
Box 7924
Main Post Office
Chicago, Illinois

(There was no Joseph Greenland listed in the Chicago telephone book in 1960, 1961 or 1962. The box was a CIA
mail drop; the CIA official who selected "Greenland" apparently was unable to resist choosing a code name
suggested by the verdant tropical vegetation of the target island.)

Margaret wrote to her husband c/o Joseph Greenland, and he wrote back, with his letters bearing the return
address of different Air Force bases. Pete came home only once, on April 10, for a two- day visit; he had a deep
suntan. During that time he did not tell his wife what he was doing, but she had begun to piece it together from
newspaper stories and her own suspicions. She gave voice to these suspicions.