October 1, 2003
Man, I wanna tell ya, to talk to Janet Ray and hear her tell you that the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT came to her family and said that her Daddy had gone to work for a bunch of rich Cubans as as a mercenery and got killed, so tough luck- just kills my soul cause I remember everbody in my neighborhood in Dothan talking about how we had lost men at Bay of Pigs and NOBODY WAS TALKING ABOUT IT !!!! Now that's a Hell of a burden but think about what poor Janet has been through with her own government lying about the death of her Daddy!!!!
WE CAN FORGIVE BUT WE WILL NEVER FORGET!!!!
WE CAN FORGIVE BUT WE WILL NEVER FORGET!!!!
My name is Robert Register. I grew up near Fort Rucker but now I live in Northport across the river from Tuscaloosa.I am helping Janet Ray Weinenger piece together details of her time around Fort Rucker.
(Andy Garcia (Godfather III, Ocean's Eleven) is interested in this story.)
In January of '61, Janet Ray was 6 years old and was living near Dothan. We think she was living in Ozark. She may have been living in Dothan. Her Daddy was named Thomas Willard "Pete" Ray. He was from the B'ham area and a member of the Alabama Air National Guard. He was training at Ft. Rucker. Janet was in the 1st grade but she doesn't remember the school. She remembers that she was living by an overgrown Negro cemetery and that she saw a burial and lots of blackberries were growing there. Her Dad was given a special mission in January '61 and her family moved back to Tarrant to live with her grandmother.Her father was murdered in cold blood by Castro's troops in April of '61 at the Bay of Pigs.The U.S. government covered up Pete's death.
In 1978, Janet's work paid off and she was able to get her father's frozen body out of a Havana morgue. Pete crashed an old WWII B-26 at the Bay of Pigs in April of '61 and while he was strapped in his cockpit, one of Castro's troops walked up and blew his brains out. The CIA would not tell Janet's family what happened but they began sending them checks. Fidel froze Pete's body in order to prove that the CIA backed the Bay of Pigs invasion. Janet ,singlehandedly, finally got her Daddy's body back here in '78 and the FBI found the powder burns on his temple during the autopsy and her family was able to bury him here in Alabama.
The BBC has recently interviewed Janet about the "Kennedy Legacy" since the 40th anniversary of his assassination is coming up and if they air anything she said, I'll be surprised.
Talking to Janet has really helped me because the first person to walk up to me in the halls of Young Junior in Dothan on the afternoon of Friday, Novermber 22, 1963 and tell me Kennedy was dead was Pat Roney. He was celebrating. All the teachers, especially Mrs. Elmore were crying, so I have been bothered by this all these years. It makes sense now. Pat's Daddy, Jack, worked for the Alabama Air National Guard at the old Dothan airport and the Kennedy brothers had denied air support for the Bay of Pigs invasion(four members of the Alabama Air National Guard were killed) and after that the Kennedys hid the information from the families here in Alabama because they had a hissy fit cause they were afraid they'd have another U-2/Francis Gary Powers on their hands.
Please feel free to forward this email to anyone.
Anyway, we need to find out where the Ray family was living in January '61 and where Janet was going to school. I know you will do everything you can do to help. Check out my weblog at
http://www.robertoreg.
Don't have Janet's web address right off the bat but I think it's
at http://www.wingsofvalor.com
Best wishes,
Robert Register
[ Thu Aug 07, 05:38:12 PM | robert register | edit ]
This is so wild! Tony Delacova sends me this information about Pete Ray's daughter. I look up her website, find an article about recovering Bay of Pigs veterans bodies from Nicaragua and find Lino Gutierrez in the article! Lino was ambassador to Nicaragua when Janet Ray Weininger put together the team that excavated the bodies of two Cuban exile pilots of a B-26 that crashed on a Nicaraguan mountaintop after the Bay of Pigs invasion. I knew Lino when he was a student at the University of Alabama. The reason I got to know him so well is because I taught Biology at Druid High School in Tuscaloosa with his mother, our Spanish teacher.
If this story doesn't bring a tear to your eye, you don't have an idea about the horrors of communism.
This is so wild! Tony Delacova sends me this information about Pete Ray's daughter. I look up her website, find an article about recovering Bay of Pigs veterans bodies from Nicaragua and find Lino Gutierrez in the article! Lino was ambassador to Nicaragua when Janet Ray Weininger put together the team that excavated the bodies of two Cuban exile pilots of a B-26 that crashed on a Nicaraguan mountaintop after the Bay of Pigs invasion. I knew Lino when he was a student at the University of Alabama. The reason I got to know him so well is because I taught Biology at Druid High School in Tuscaloosa with his mother, our Spanish teacher.
If this story doesn't bring a tear to your eye, you don't have an idea about the horrors of communism.
Janet eventually received the information about her Ozark elementary school and her neighborhood.
On the Trail of the Truth / NewsweekMay 6, 1998
On the Trail of the Truth One woman's mission to find out about her father forces the CIA to come clean about the Bay of Pigs
by Evan Thomas, Newsweek
On the wall in the lobby of CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., are 71 stars, one for every CIA officer killed in action. Many of the stars are anonymous, because the CIA does not want to reveal the secret identities and missions of its spies. Next week, however, the names of four American pilots who died at the Bay of Pigs, the CIA's greatest fiasco, will be entered in a "Book of Honor" in a glass case below the stars. The CIA's willingness to pay public homage to these men, 37 years after they died, is largely owed to the obsession of a Florida housewife named Janet Ray Weininger.
Janet's father, Thomas Willard (Pete) Ray, was an Alabama Air Guard pilot recruited by the CIA for the invasion of Cuba in April 1961. Ray was only supposed to train Cuban emigres to fly old B-26s. But by the second day of the invasion, some of the Cubans were too exhausted and fearful to fly anymore, so Ray volunteered. Shot down over Cuba, Ray survived the crash but was gunned down
fleeing the plane.Janet Ray, 6, was told none of the facts about her father's death. "He just disappeared from the face of the earth," she recalled. The CIA fed her family a cover story: that Ray had been a mercenary hired by wealthy Cubans and had drowned when his plane crashed in the sea. Carrying an impression of her father's teeth, Janet began seeking out her father's old friends and comrades. In Miami's Little Havana, she handed out scraps of paper with her father's name on them, hoping to unearth some clue. The U.S. government was of little use: the CIA did not acknowledge that Ray had been on its payroll until 1972. Ray had long heard rumors that her father had been captured at the Bay of Pigs.
So she began writing Fidel Castro. The Cuban government wrote back: her father's body had been kept in a refrigerator in Havana. (When the United States denied any involvement in the Bay of Pigs in 1961, Castro had threatened to bring the body of an unidentified American pilot and lay it on a table at the United Nations.) With some belated help from the State Department, Janet--now married to an Air Force pilot named Michael Weininger--was able to bring her father's body back for a proper burial in 1979.
With an open face and a cheerful manner, Janet Ray Weininger had by now become a well-liked figure in the exile community in Little Havana. About five years ago, she was approached by the families of a pair of Cuban pilots who had also been killed at the Bay of Pigs. Could Weininger help bring their bodies back? The men had died when their B-26 plunged into a mountainside while returning to the CIA's secret base in Nicaragua after a mission over Cuba. When the CIA would not reveal the crash site, Weininger vowed to find it herself. In 1995, traveling by mule with a former Nicaraguan contra fighter, Weininger located the wreckage of the plane--but no bodies--near a remote village. During the cold war, the CIA was notorious for abandoning native "freedom fighters." This time, when Weininger asked the CIA for help in finding the bodies of the Cuban pilots, a team from the Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii was dispatched to Nicaragua in four Blackhawks with an armed guard. She went into the jungle with them. In early April, after a month of digging, the team located the bones of two men believed to be the Cuban pilots. When the time came to leave, Weininger was overcome by emotion. One of the Nicaraguans took
her arm and said to her in Spanish, "Valor"--courage. She climbed onto the helicopter and tried not to look back.
On the Trail of the Truth One woman's mission to find out about her father forces the CIA to come clean about the Bay of Pigs
by Evan Thomas, Newsweek
On the wall in the lobby of CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., are 71 stars, one for every CIA officer killed in action. Many of the stars are anonymous, because the CIA does not want to reveal the secret identities and missions of its spies. Next week, however, the names of four American pilots who died at the Bay of Pigs, the CIA's greatest fiasco, will be entered in a "Book of Honor" in a glass case below the stars. The CIA's willingness to pay public homage to these men, 37 years after they died, is largely owed to the obsession of a Florida housewife named Janet Ray Weininger.
Janet's father, Thomas Willard (Pete) Ray, was an Alabama Air Guard pilot recruited by the CIA for the invasion of Cuba in April 1961. Ray was only supposed to train Cuban emigres to fly old B-26s. But by the second day of the invasion, some of the Cubans were too exhausted and fearful to fly anymore, so Ray volunteered. Shot down over Cuba, Ray survived the crash but was gunned down
fleeing the plane.Janet Ray, 6, was told none of the facts about her father's death. "He just disappeared from the face of the earth," she recalled. The CIA fed her family a cover story: that Ray had been a mercenary hired by wealthy Cubans and had drowned when his plane crashed in the sea. Carrying an impression of her father's teeth, Janet began seeking out her father's old friends and comrades. In Miami's Little Havana, she handed out scraps of paper with her father's name on them, hoping to unearth some clue. The U.S. government was of little use: the CIA did not acknowledge that Ray had been on its payroll until 1972. Ray had long heard rumors that her father had been captured at the Bay of Pigs.
So she began writing Fidel Castro. The Cuban government wrote back: her father's body had been kept in a refrigerator in Havana. (When the United States denied any involvement in the Bay of Pigs in 1961, Castro had threatened to bring the body of an unidentified American pilot and lay it on a table at the United Nations.) With some belated help from the State Department, Janet--now married to an Air Force pilot named Michael Weininger--was able to bring her father's body back for a proper burial in 1979.
With an open face and a cheerful manner, Janet Ray Weininger had by now become a well-liked figure in the exile community in Little Havana. About five years ago, she was approached by the families of a pair of Cuban pilots who had also been killed at the Bay of Pigs. Could Weininger help bring their bodies back? The men had died when their B-26 plunged into a mountainside while returning to the CIA's secret base in Nicaragua after a mission over Cuba. When the CIA would not reveal the crash site, Weininger vowed to find it herself. In 1995, traveling by mule with a former Nicaraguan contra fighter, Weininger located the wreckage of the plane--but no bodies--near a remote village. During the cold war, the CIA was notorious for abandoning native "freedom fighters." This time, when Weininger asked the CIA for help in finding the bodies of the Cuban pilots, a team from the Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii was dispatched to Nicaragua in four Blackhawks with an armed guard. She went into the jungle with them. In early April, after a month of digging, the team located the bones of two men believed to be the Cuban pilots. When the time came to leave, Weininger was overcome by emotion. One of the Nicaraguans took
her arm and said to her in Spanish, "Valor"--courage. She climbed onto the helicopter and tried not to look back.
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