The Miami Herald
May 23, 1959. p. 7.
FBI Told He’s
Joined the Communist Party
By Westbrook Pegler
NEW YORK – William Alexander Morgan is a major on Fidel Castro’s general staff. The FBI in Washington has received reports from observers in Cuba that he has joined the Cuban Communist Party and is one of nine or 10 Communists on the general staff.
He was born in Cleveland 31 years ago, but was raised in Toledo where his father, of the same name, and his mother, Elira Morgan, still reside in a family home in an aging and slightly seedy neighborhood of old, large homes. Mr. Morgan, Sr. now 74 years old, was budget director of Toledo Edison for many years and is now retired and ailing in consequence of a heart condition.
Toledo police interviewed recently by John [Galingher], a reporter of The Detroit Times, described Maj. Morgan as a bully by nature. He quit school early and went to sea as a foremasthand for a number of cruises to Belgium and Germany. He got into his first official trouble when he was 15 and the police data has it that his mother always took his part while his father, not a robust man at best, lost authority over the boy in his early years.
Mrs. Morgan received a phone call from her son about May 13, ostensibly from Miami, in which he told her he was buying airplane parts in the U.S. for Castro’s forces. The FBI is inquiring whether such purchases would violate the Neutrality Act.
When it was no longer possible to keep Alex Morgan in school in Toledo his parents signed papers necessary to get him a seagoing job. He beached himself in the U.S. in 1946 or 1947, his mother’s memory being a little hazy as to that, and had in his possession a .45 automatic pistol
After drinking some beers in the Morgan home that night, he and some other boys set out to link together a chain of petty stickups, but were so well satisfied with $20 from their first stop at a lunchroom called Piggly Wiggly that they called it a night and hitched a hike toward Lorain, Ohio, with a man who they stuck-up soon after he took them aboard. They tied his hands, got $5 and, next, tried a drugstore. However, when the druggist laughed in their faces, the lost their nerve.
Morgan beat both stick-up charges because he was a “juvenile” under the law.
After his seafaring career, Maj. Morgan joined the 82nd Airborne and was sent to Japan where he slugged a sentry in a hospital, took his gun and uniform, and went over the hill to keep a date with a Japanese girl. He got five years and a dishonorable discharge after a general court martial on a charge of escaping from confinement and stealing government property. He was in the hospital for minor surgery, but it appears that he was a prisoner.
His next stop was Camp Cook, Calif., on May 18, 1948 and as a prisoner on Feb. 19, 1949, he was transferred to the federal prison at Chillicothe, Ohio whence he soon escaped. Recaptured, he was sent to the federal prison at Milan, Mich., to finish his term plus two years on additional charges.
The Toledo probation data sums up Maj. Morgan as a rebel always fighting authority. His family are otherwise markedly respectable.