CIA Pilot's Daughter Takes Action

By Elizabeth Saloom, November 20, 2003

When Janet Ray Weininger was six, her father, Thomas "Pete" Ray, an American pilot for the CIA, died during the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion when his plane was shot down. His body was kept frozen in a Cuban morgue for 18 years.

After years of searching for him, Weininger recovered her father's remains in Havana in 1979. This fall, she filed a wrongful death suit against the Cuban government for compensatory and punitive damages. Until the mid-1990s, there were no laws in place allowing this type of lawsuit, she noted.

Weininger is president of an organization she founded in 1998 in Miami, called Wings of Valor, Inc., (at www.wingsofvalor.org) to help others who suffer the effects of war, poverty and disaster.

She decided to file her suit last April after Cuban President Fidel Castro arrested more than 70 dissidents and three men trying to flee in a tugboat were executed.

When her father disappeared, Weininger did not believe he was dead. There were rumors he was imprisoned. Because Ray's work was secret, at first the government denied he was working for them.

Then in 1978 government officials read her family what they termed a blind memo describing how her father died. Ray made it out of his plane, a B-26, alive. He escaped but was injured in a gun battle, then later executed.

That year the family was given a medal and citations from the CIA, which acknowledged that Ray worked for the agency. One citation was the distinguished intelligence cross for heroism in an extremely hazardous mission. Ray is now buried in Birmingham, Ala. The Alabama air guard gave him a full military burial including a flyover by of RF-4's.

Weininger said when a federal employee dies in the line of duty, the attitude often is that employee was being paid. But these are people who devoted their lives to serving this country and making sure we have liberty, she said.