Flawed Patriot Read online

  JMWAVE’s priority was intelligence gathering. This priority was emphasized by the appointment of Ted Shackley as base chief, which automatically implied that Bobby Kennedy’s boom and bang would be subordinate to the scrutiny of a hard-eyed executive. Halpern comments drily that Shackley in turn “vacuumed the European stations” to get the people he wanted. Harvey and Shackley did business double-talking on a normal, commercial telephone line that didn’t go through the Agency’s secure switching system, and they also bypassed the Agency’s cable secretariat, which otherwise saw everything.

  TED SHACKLEY AT JMWAVE

  Neill Prew—the man who took the pistols from under Bill Harvey’s pillow, who in the early 1960s recruited agents in the Cuban community, ran raids, and landed equipment in Cuba—offers a caustic view of JMWAVE: “Bill and Shackley tried to bring BOB people to JMWAVE because they trusted them…. But our people in Miami were scared shitless of Shackley, because he simply went too far. I thought the whole thing was an exercise in treading water by a bunch of jerks.”14

  Years later Shackley set the record straight: “JMWAVE was actually six hundred people [some estimates ran as high as one thousand], but it was not particularly dominated by former Berliners. Sure, some of them had been at BOB and in Germany, the FI people. The PP and PM guys were mostly from Latin American operations, plus the professional PM group.

  “There was a lot of standard FI stuff going on … networks, singleton operations…. We were reasonably successful. Our communications with the island were good. The product was sound.

  “All Bill wanted was to get the job done!”15

  The stories about JMWAVE are legion. Among them is the tale of a visit by Bobby Kennedy to JMWAVE—an incursion that in itself must have put Harvey into something south of a slow burn because CIA operating premises were off-limits to non-Agency personnel, regardless of rank or stature. As Kennedy roamed the building, he heard a telex machine chattering away. He ambled over to it, ripped the message out, and began to read it. Incensed beyond courtesy, Harvey, in turn, ripped the copy from the attorney general’s hands and thundered words to the effect that Kennedy was not cleared to read classified Agency correspondence. Both smoldered. The incident naturally became legendary and was symptomatic of relations between the two men.

  Shackley recalls, his voice rarely changing from dry reportorial, “With Bobby Kennedy, Bill had a multiplicity of issues. There was irritation at the Kennedy level. Bobby was demanding, arrogant. Bobby’s personality and Bill’s were never destined to match. But Bill wasn’t always venting when I saw him. He’d complain … ‘I need authority. I need guidance, but I can’t get it by myself from the political level.’

  “[Harvey] came down to Miami every four to six weeks, mostly to see Johnny Rosselli. I went to Washington, mostly just for the day, maybe every two to three weeks.” In Florida, Bill sometimes went deep-sea fishing with Shackley to unwind from the Washington tensions. “He badly needed the breaks from the tensions and demands of President Kennedy’s team.

  “By the time of JMWAVE, [Harvey] was a binge drinker. We’d go out on a boat, and he’d drink all morning, and by one or two o’clock, he’d be drunk. But then he’d sleep it off in the afternoon and be ready to go again.” Ted makes the comment matter-of-factly; there is no criticism in his voice. Harvey drank. Period.

  Some of Ed Lansdale’s requirements, imposed in response to General Taylor’s misgivings, drove Harvey up the wall. “There was always pressure on us to develop schedules … plans. In April we had to schedule for June, which didn’t take into account any of the variables, like the nature of the team to go in, the length of time they had to be in isolation, the type of transportation, the weather, the condition of the beaches…. All those things that went into an operation. And we had to submit detailed plans … thirty to forty pages. An inch-thick document. In detail! …

  “In some cases, the guys were actually in the boats, near to landing when the operation was canceled, and no reason was given … no explanation. Maybe someone realized Castro’s patrol pattern had changed…. The whole thing was not a sparkling success!” Whether Shackley was referring here to a particular wave of landings or to boat operations in general is not clear.

  “Bobby was being besieged by Cubans. Everyone had access to him. The guys from Brigade 2506 … they were always whispering in his ear and influencing him.” Shackley is not specific, perhaps he cannot be; his tone is flat, not bitter.

  “Eventually, Bobby was running stuff parallel to the Agency. Every Cuban in Miami had ideas about killing Castro. Two or three of them together and you had a plot…. ‘Let’s kill him!’ and Bobby listened to them.” Shackley adds enigmatically, “Americans don’t think that way.”16

  Another popular JMWAVE story is the U-Haul truck deal. Writers like this one because, to them, it proves that the CIA and Harvey provided arsenals to the Mafia. The only known witness/participant to the event is Shackley.

  “Bill came down with a list … four or five pages … of equipment he wanted. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary in that. We turned the list over to the JMWAVE warehouse manager, who loaded the stuff into watertight containers. All very standard procedure. I rented a truck through three or four cutouts and drove it into the JMWAVE compound. The stuff was manifested in and manifested out. I drove the truck out of the compound and turned it over. Bill and I followed it to a parking lot in South Miami. The driver of the truck took a hike and caught a cab. Bill and I waited, maybe up to an hour.”

  Again, Shackley’s account is precise and phlegmatic. “It was no different from any other odd request for equipment.”17 With so much weird stuff going on around Miami, and especially because Harvey made the requisition, Ted Shackley did not question the consignment. Indeed, it probably never occurred to him to do so.

  During the last days of Task Force W, at the climax of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it looked as if the United States was going to war. Shackley: “Bill was in Washington, but he was maneuvering to go into Cuba.

  “American military teams were ready to be infiltrated … pathfinders and people like that. I was to be in a plane with the airborne commander. The presumption was that the American military would pacify Cuba, and then J-2—military government—would take over. I guess I would probably have been Havana station chief.

  “Then Bobby heard there was a commando team on the water, which he had not authorized, and he called them back.”

  Herb Natzke saw Harvey in Indianapolis in about 1973, and Harvey said to him that he had been on a plane to Guantanamo when President Kennedy called off a “thirteen-day invasion.”18 But Shackley says, “Bill Harvey was never on a plane that was called back from a flight to Gitmo during the peak of the tension or when the invasion was near reality. He was not in any boat headed for Cuba, either.” The surprise in the anecdote is that Bill persisted in embellishing his legend, more than a decade later, even though it was unnecessary for him to prevaricate, especially to someone he liked and who admired him.

  WARREN FRANK

  As JMWAVE heated up, Shackley needed to find a strong, proven FI man. He called Warren Frank, who had been in Czech operations in Germany while Shackley was at BOB and who later became deputy chief of BOB under Herb Natzke, down to Miami. “I wanted to go back to Germany, where things were civilized … maybe to Bonn, but then Shackley asked for me, and that was that.” The man Warren replaced as FI chief at JMWAVE in the summer of 1962 “went out in a strait jacket.” Frank adds wryly that JMWAVE counted as overseas service for retirement, so a lot of administration types sought cushy berths there since they needed five years abroad on their records.”19

  What was JMWAVE like?

  Bill Harvey hardly ever came to the FI element of JMWAVE. He was preoccupied with the PM staff. That’s where the politics were. That and the Mafia stuff.

  PM/PP went their way. We went ours. The base was constantly being reorganized.

  It wasn’t hard to get agents in Cuba, but a lot of them wer
en’t effective…. At the time of the [missile] crisis, we had about forty agents reporting from Cuba.

  We had one-way and two-way radios in there. Every afternoon at 3:30, we got the messages ready for one-way transmission. Upwards of thirty on any one broadcast. We had eight radios going until early in 1964.

  Around the time of the crisis, we had many incoming reports about ‘palm trees’—that’s what the Cubans called the IRBMs [intermediate-range ballistic missiles]. Anyone who was half awake in Havana would have noticed them. Once [the Russians] had to get the post office to take out a mailbox because they were so awkward to move through the streets.

  The reports certainly sounded genuine. Hell, the Soviets had their men wearing sports shirts but still sitting rigid in rows in military trucks!

  We pinpointed the missile sites through a network we ran with a whole bunch of subsources. No one knew their names, but they were giving us real-time information: the Sovs built a long antenna, maybe about a mile long.

  Confusion and politics entered the CIA’s reporting on the missile sites. The FI element of Task Force W had hard evidence that the Russians were installing IRBMs—weapons capable of hitting major targets in the United States. But the head of the Intelligence Analysis Directorate (DDI) and the scientific and technical officers couldn’t agree on what FI’s reports indicated.

  Warren Frank continues,

  Around March or May 1962, the National Intelligence Estimate [the CIA’s considered consensus on a given country] said ‘it was most improbable’ that the Russians would bring missiles into Cuba. They were trying to fit the facts to their theories.

  We were told, ‘HQ doesn’t want any reports from Cuban sources! That statement became dogma. Our reports officer was told not to [disseminate] what we had! I guess it reflected pressure from the top … and everyone had to toe the party line…. Everyone in the DDI skewed their reports to fit headquarters’ position. Otherwise you didn’t get ahead in the DDI. It was like a university faculty. People signed off on reports knowing they weren’t true.20

  Years after the frustration and anger, Frank recounts the deceit coolly, betraying no hint of the emotion of the times.

  Shackley: “We had a belt-buckle series of reports which we reevaluated. The trapezoid [launching site] had been identified by human sources. But the Kennedys only believed in photos. That’s all they wanted, even though we had the intelligence they had demanded. Then came the U-2 photos.” Intelligence analysts always prefer documentary evidence.

  Frank shifts to a different subject: “My star agent was Juana Castro, Fidel’s sister. Fidel let her come out to Mexico to see a sister…. I contrived a story to meet her … [and] met her for three days, during the missile crisis, then broke off. I didn’t talk with her about anything too deep. Mexico was studiously neutral…. Des FitzGerald, who had replaced Harvey by then, wanted more meetings, but I told him, we couldn’t treat her like an Opa Locka refugee.

  “She passed on a lot of family gossip, but she wouldn’t take money. So we bought a box of Cuban cigars from her for something like $7,000, and I later heard JFK was passing them around in the White House.”21

  TENSION BUILDING

  David Martin wrote the only account I’m aware of describing the tension between Bobby Kennedy and Harvey, about a decade and a half after the events. In it, he underlines the confusion and the crossed lines of action created by the attorney general as he asserted his mastery of operations.

  Kennedy browbeat Harvey and his aides so relentlessly that after one session, [General] Taylor turned to [Kennedy] and said, “You could sack a town and enjoy it!” The Attorney General seemed to delight in cutting across channels. He would call a junior officer in the Task Force W bunker at Langley, bark out an order, and hang up, leaving the CIA man wondering whether he had just talked to the President’s brother or a prankster. [Kennedy] gave one officer the name of “a man who was in contact with a small group of Cubans who had a plan for creating an insurrection.” When the officer reported back that the Cubans did not seem to have a concrete plan, Kennedy ordered him to fly to Guantanamo and “start working and developing this particular group.” The officer protested, saying that the CIA had promised the Defense Department not to work out of Guantanamo. “We will see about that,” Kennedy snapped.

  Sometimes, the Attorney General would take things into his own hands, and the CIA would not find out about it until after the fact. He sent Lansdale down to Miami in a futile effort to form a cohesive government-in-exile, and kept the trip a secret from the CIA…. The Attorney General frequently dealt directly with some of the Cuban exiles who were supposed to be Harvey’s agents. They would troop in and out of the Justice Department, bearing firsthand reports of CIA ineptitudes.22

  Predictably, Harvey took Bobby Kennedy’s interference and the fawning support the attorney general received from Lansdale as a professional and, increasingly, as a personal affront. Harvey had never had much use for diplomatic niceties, nor for the established chain of command, and here was a young man with no intelligence background, but with money and a record of crusading domestic politics, trying to tell him exactly what to do, not only out of channels but as if the attorney general had the operational background of, say, Dick Helms—or Harvey.

  For Harvey, it was all too much amateurish meddling. [Harvey] … began suggesting that some of the Attorney General’s actions bordered on the traitorous. It usually happened after he had been drinking and it made his friends wince…. In short, a friend said, “he hated Bobby Kennedy’s guts with a purple passion.”

  For his part, Kennedy thought that Harvey was “not very good.” The Berlin Tunnel “was a helluva project,” Kennedy conceded, “but … then he ended in disaster…. ” Stories began to circulate. One had it that Harvey had flatly refused a direct order from Kennedy, then slapped his gun down on the conference table and spun it around so that the barrel pointed at the Attorney General. The story was almost certainly apocryphal, but its very existence signaled that something was disastrously wrong….

  Harvey displayed his contempt in other ways as well. At meetings he would “lift his ass and fart and pare his nails with a sheath knife,” Helms’s aide, Walt Elder, once said. One day at the Pentagon, Harvey took his gun from his pocket, and began playing with the bullets in an elaborate show of boredom. The incident caused such a ruckus that the CIA issued new regulations regarding the carrying of firearms by employees.23

  Halpern provides the other side. When Harvey came back from his frequent, taut meetings with Lansdale, the SGA, or Bobby Kennedy, he was “uptight … steaming…. He clenched his jaws … shifted his weight from side to side. He blew off profanely … but nothing specific. He let you know he didn’t like what was going on at the high levels. It got so, that Skip, the secretary right outside his door, didn’t blush any more.”

  The CIA man who bore the brunt of Bobby Kennedy’s impetuousness was Helms, who was by that time head of the Clandestine Services. But Helms did not want to know too much about what was going on. He had put his trust in Harvey, his chosen operator. The arrangement gave Helms plausible deniability.

  Harvey was loyal to those he considered of like mind, up as well as down. Despite the “Boy Diplomat” nickname he pinned on Helms, Halpern recalls, “Bill never made any derogatory comment on Dick. He respected Helms, not as another case officer, but as an administrator…. A good politician, who kept his fences mended. But Bill didn’t think Dick would make good DCI material.

  “Bill didn’t share his personal comments or views on Dick Helms and RFK, but he felt strongly [that] the Kennedys should not be in charge.”

  And Helms at the time was unwilling to see, and/or deal with Harvey’s growing drinking problem.

  “WASHINGTON POLITICAL OPERA”

  In mid-February 1962 Lansdale produced a game plan that he claimed would lead to the violent demise of the Castro regime by October—just in time for the midterm congressional elections. Lansdale demanded a weekly listing
of agents of all varieties landed and operating in Cuba, and he wanted frequent accounting for arms and ammunition supplied to clandestine infiltrators—all very much in the manner of charts for a marketing campaign and very much against CIA custom. Lansdale applauded the thought of using “gangster elements” to further his operations. Predictably, Harvey reacted negatively to the Kennedys’ volatile impatience and to Lansdale’s attempts to control Agency activities.

  Halpern: “Everyone was happy when the SGA turned down Lansdale’s timetable of requirements and said it needed hard intelligence. That gave our spirits a big lift.”

  Partially in response and partially as a preemptive strike, Halpern tried to write a paper for the SGA on behalf of Harvey, who certainly wouldn’t have written as tactfully. Halpern’s paper said, in effect, “Sure, we’ll do what you want, boss! But we have to be honest about the limitations on us.”

  As the Kennedy domination of Cuban operations became more pronounced, Halpern developed the feeling that “this whole thing had nothing to do with the security of the United States. It was a Washington political opera, which had everything to do with saving face after the Bay of Pigs fiasco…. Our drafts were kicked back to us all through the holiday season, 1961–62.”

  The approved gem out of the basement was “Operation MONGOOSE—Appraisal of Effectiveness and Results Which Can Be Expected From Implementing the Operational Plan Approved at the Meeting of the Special Group on 16 March 1962, William K. Harvey through Richard Helms to DCI McCone, 10 April 1962.” The substance of the intragovernment debates is thoroughly covered in the postmortems on the maneuvering that led up to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Harvey and the CIA argued that nothing of an overt nature, such as landings or encouragement of insurrection against Castro, should be undertaken unless and until the Agency had developed a strong and reliable intelligence-gathering network inside the country. The professionals in the Langley basement spent days explaining to their superiors outside the CIA what intelligence gathering was all about and emphasizing, repeatedly, that covert intelligence could be won only by following meticulously planned steps.