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  “No, there was no obvious tension between Bobby and Harvey at that meeting … no showdown. But it was convenient to get rid of Bill.

  “Everyone was fed up with Bobby. He was a dreadful little guy. I didn’t see any saving grace in him…. He would come into meetings with his necktie down and his shirt unbuttoned when everyone else was formally dressed. He was always picking, picking. Bobby affected everyone. No one wanted to deal with him if they didn’t have to…. He was abrasive.”

  Still, “after the meeting, driving back to the White House, Mac Bundy said to me, ‘Bill doesn’t inspire confidence, does he?’”

  THE MAN WHO NEVER WAS

  The trouble with Bobby Kennedy was the start of Bill’s decline from the peak of power and capability. Whether what happened on October 26 crushed the inner Harvey is moot. Suffice it that within the next few years, his drinking became a huge, visible problem, and reasonable questions were raised, even among friends, about his judgment.

  Harvey accepted the consequences of his actions. The consequences of his work in Berlin had been praise and a medal. In Washington and Miami, they were argument, frustration, fury—shaming and reassignment. He had held sway over his empire for nine hectic months in 1962, a huge, nearly overt yet clandestine juggernaut aimed at Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

  The “First Intelligence History Seminar” run by the Agency’s Center for the Study of Intelligence on October 19, 1992, dealt with the CIA and Cuba. Not once was Harvey mentioned in all the panel discussions, nor in written handout material.

  Decades later Bill’s boss in the 1960s, Dick Helms, observed in his memoir that Harvey was “an aggressive officer and a demanding and conscientious executive, and he had a good knowledge of the operations personnel he could count on.”28 The Boy Diplomat, then at an advanced age, chose to ignore the friction between Bobby Kennedy and Harvey.

  The various accounts above leave out what else was going on in Harvey’s bailiwick, two related matters that later led to much questioning and soul-searching: the ongoing political assassination operation, code-named ZRRIFLE, and the association between Harvey and Filippo Sacco, aka Johnny Rosselli.

  8

  PLOTTING ASSASSINATION: ZRRIFLE

  Whether or not he agreed with its objectives, the ungainly Bill Harvey ran the Agency’s hit squad, the designated instrument of the Kennedys’ revenge on Fidel Castro, from November 1961 until his degradation in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. He performed the assignment in his customary clandestine fashion, which called upon all the skills he had accumulated during his years of covert practice and required secrecy that almost made the Berlin Tunnel look like an open book.

  Right out of the gate, Bill decided he would have to be the only person who knew precisely what was going on in the assassination operation. If the case blew, Harvey would take the rap. The tactic afforded plausible deniability to the U.S. president and his brother, the attorney general, as well as to Bill’s own underlings. It was tradecraft very much in keeping with the code of the intelligence service.

  In what follows, I have had to rely almost exclusively on official documents, with the exception of a few comments from people who worked with Harvey during the period. The reason for this is simple and typical Harvey: he consulted no one, not even, in many cases, his boss, Dick Helms, or his closest associates, among them Ted Shackley and Sam Halpern. Part of his reserve was the conspiratorial persona of Harvey; part of it was his realization that he was playing with dynamite; part of it was his acceptance of the rote that the ball stopped with him. He did not want to involve his subordinates in matters that might become messy. Harvey accepted total responsibility for matters which, later, others did their utmost to shrug off or to lie or plead ignorance about.

  ACCEPTING RESPONSIBILITY

  Richard Bissell, CIA’s deputy director of plans, carried the can for the humiliating failure of the Bay of Pigs operation. A brilliant, Ivy League, staunch PPer, Bissell, the man behind the U-2, had become a personal and political embarrassment for the Kennedys. He knew he was on the way out when he intimated to Harvey, toward the end of 1961, that the Cuba portfolio, and all that came with it, would be his.

  The first time the U.S. government had become involved in foreign assassination planning and/or execution was in the botched, seriocomic 1960 attempt on the life of Gen. Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican Republic’s dictator at the time, undertaken at the behest of President Eisenhower, who felt the world would be a better place without the Caribbean dictator. The attempt on Trujillo happened to coincide with the interests of the Mafia, which had gambling investments in in the Dominican Republic. “There was some talk about it but that was it. All talk. I think people got cold feet,” says Sam Halpern. The Church Committee later exonerated the CIA of any responsibility in Trujillo’s death in 1960. In 1960 there was also the Lumumba affair, dealt with below.

  Now the target was Cuba. Helms says in his memoir, “At the Agency, the impression was that Robert Kennedy, whom none of us knew well enough to judge, would serve as his brother’s vengeful hatchet man…. It was easy to imagine the probable result—an upending of the Agency with the espionage and intelligence production elements blistered in the heat generated by the failed covert action [of the Bay of Pigs].”1

  At their meeting in November 1961, Bissell designated the tight-lipped Harvey as the CIA’s executioner of Fidel Castro, specifically. The appointment to run what became known as ZRRIFLE was a logical one. Harvey was the only CIA executive who had both the leadership ability and the street smarts to handle this diciest of operations—undertakings that ran against the spirit of everything upon which America’s free society was based. Leading ZRRIFLE was, at once, the most explosive and the most unenviable assignment on the Agency’s books. If asked, Harvey probably would have grunted, “That’s what I get paid for,” and bleakly discouraged any further speculation. Refusal of the assignment probably never occurred to him.

  What he got paid for got very, very messy. And because Harvey did not enlighten anyone, a number of latter-day gainsayers have sneered that power lust drove him to commit and to sanction dishonorable acts. Few, if any, of these gainsayers ever bore responsibility for covert presidential directives involving the lives and careers of others, and few, if any, understood the Intelligence Service. I doubt Bill ever considered refusing the assignment, even if it was likely to blow up in his face.

  If Harvey allowed himself to savor the appointment at all, he probably grinned sardonically at the thought that the Ivy Leaguers had to turn to the roughneck from Indiana to handle something that was way beyond them. Bill could not have wished for a more powerful slot, except for the deputy director of plans berth itself, yet he may well have known his new assignment was doomed from the start. He also undoubtedly knew through verbal-only warnings from Helms (perhaps from Bissell as well) that Cuba and Fidel Castro were very, very personal matters to Bobby and his brother.

  Neither Bruce Cheever nor Sam Halpern, Bill’s closest subordinates during the Cuba operation days, even knew the ZRRIFLE cryptonym. “It was Bill’s personal responsibility. His very own vest-pocket operation. Skip, his secretary probably knew, but he created it and kept it to himself…. Bill had a phobia about committing sensitive matters to paper.”2

  Bill strongly felt that Cuban operations should be left to professionals and removed from the politics of ego. He personally took over ops that were so touchy—specifically, but not only, the Agency’s dealings with Johnny Rosselli, the mafioso who had been involved in the Trujillo assassination attempt—that they had potential to wreck the CIA as well as to besmirch an administration he disliked.

  Bill’s own pithy and profane views of ex post facto posturing on the matter of assassination plotting by senior CIA officials and Kennedy apologists appear in his margin notes on the report of the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, which was otherwise known as the Church Committee, after Sena
tor Frank Church, a liberal agrarian from Idaho. Harvey received a draft copy of the Church report on November 22, 1975. The timing—right around Thanksgiving—might have brought an ironic smile to his now-gaunt face.

  Harvey set about poring over the document’s close-set 339 pages, and he left behind at his death, less than seven months later, his comments on the committee’s conclusions, most searingly, on the testimony of those who found it convenient to bend history.

  Bill made it clear that he thought Senator Church gravely harmed American national security in holding the hearings at all. The fact that Bill privately made his margin notes, and kept a few other classified documents after his retirement from the CIA, hints that Harvey might have been thinking of writing a book to clear the record and his own name. Some years later CG Harvey said she thought Bill had been planning as much, even though such a memoir would have been in stark contrast to his decades of conspiratorial secrecy.

  WHAT WAS ZRRIFLE?

  ZRRIFLE is a digraph some writers have thrown around recklessly. The Castro assassination effort was contained in and covered under an existing activity. ZR was the digraph for Division D, Cryptological Procurement. It seems to have served purposely to confuse the Castro hit ops with Earl Harter’s closely held series of operations to procure cryptographic materials by breaking-and-entering target premises. Very few, even in D, knew what Harter’s boys did: their activities were far less generally known in foreign intelligence (FI), even less in the other Clandestine Services, and not at all in the whole of the CIA; this was exactly how it should have been. Precisely because Division D was so secure and already involved in matters gentlemen preferred not to know about, it was the logical administrative compartment in which to house CIA’s newest and touchiest activity, the projected assassination of political leaders whose further existence impinged on U.S. interests.

  That ZRRIFLE quietly became another element in Division D’s ultrasecret activities was nobody’s business. The cryptonym and the activities it concealed became the personal duchy and responsibility of the chief of division, Harvey.

  THE SECOND-STORY MEN

  The National Security Agency (NSA) had been established to tap the communications of anyone, anywhere. It did a fine job of capturing communications and decoding material on its own supercomputers. But its task could be made much easier if someone provided it with codebooks and other materials on which encrypted messages were based. Procurement of such cryptographic materials was the original raison d’etre of Staff D.3 For the sake of clarity, let’s deviate to look briefly at this procurement endeavor.

  The team that provided such documentary gold was part of Division D, where they were referred to jovially as the Second-Story Men, CIA’s licensed burglars. They were run by Earl Harter, a CIA legend in his own right. Their feats are to this day highly classified, but the members of the team were greatly admired among those few who knew them. When they dropped by Staff D’s offices, the acquisitors responded to the admiration they received in kind, retailing severely bowdlerized versions of some of their exploits.

  In a report prepared in 1967, the CIA’s inspector general (IG) noted that the Second-Story Men were recruited precisely because they knew how to “break into safes and kidnap couriers.” Evan Thomas, author of The Very Best Men, adds, “They were a very rough bunch with strong ties to [if not full-fledged membership in] the underworld. ‘We had to keep the FBI informed when one of them traveled,’ said Sam Halpern. Bill Harvey knew where to find men of this caliber.”4

  Clarence Berry, the former Berlin Tunnel support officer, knew the team casually.

  I interacted with our Second-Story bunch, which was a super group…. [They] had a small building south of Alexandria, inside a U.S. Army warehouse compound…. They had a pretty good security setup.

  Those guys were a very tight, fearless group, with absolute confidence in each other’s ability … not a motley crew, true professionals. Basically top-of-the-line locksmiths, photo experts, and building tradesmen…. They were very good … and were always getting more commendations and spot, in-grade promotions, probably, than any other unit in the Agency. They were without peer in opening and resealing one-time [cryptographic] pads, which were wax-sealed and grommeted….

  They did not work on anything inside the States, only abroad. Overseas, they depended on station chiefs to help out as appropriate. When they went on a job, they utilized station personnel in support, making sure that all target people were accounted for at all times, otherwise there was an abort. They ran probably dozens of crypto missions and, to my knowledge, never came close to being caught in the act.5

  Halpern recalls, “Earl Harter was absolutely wonderful. His boys were very, very good. They never talked…. No one will ever know the number of embassies all over the world that they entered and relieved of crypto materials.”6 The very secrecy in which Harter operated was an obvious attraction for Harvey, who needed to hide any trace of the CIA’s attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro.

  THE CIA’S STRUGGLES WITH THE ASSASSINATION MANDATE

  As 1960 turned to 1961 and his personal charter expanded, Harvey had to find hit men to carry out the ZRRIFLE assassination mission. I asked Halpern if Harvey objected to assassination in principle. “He may have objected to the practice, but he didn’t object to it in principle.”

  In 1960 Patrice Lumumba, a left-leaning, charismatic political star in Central Africa was killed, allegedly while trying to escape from custody. His killer was Sese Seko Mobutu, one of his rivals for supreme power in the part of mineral-rich Africa that became Zaire. The order for the Lumumba hit came from Richard Bissell, authorized by President Eisenhower. In fact, a lengthy history about the CIA’s involvement in the affair indicates that, although Lumumba’s death came at the hands of a political rival, who was perhaps supported by the CIA, the Agency was itself prepared to kill Lumumba.

  Harvey’s notes in the margins of the Church Committee’s report confirm that he knew of the Lumumba assassination planning, though he was not directly involved in the operation. He appears to have been uncomfortable with his knowledge of the undertaking.

  In his memoir, Dick Helms asserts that political killing, for the CIA as a whole and for FI officers in particular, is morally repugnant. “The Agency had no influence in the action whatsoever…. Lumumba … was by any standard unfit to rule the Congo. That said, in peacetime, the assassination of troublesome persons is morally and operationally indefensible.”7 That ambivalence meant that each such authorization had to be signed by the president in a “finding.”

  Helms succeeded Bissell as deputy director of plans effective February 1, 1962. He didn’t then know that the Castro assassination effort would consume an inordinate amount of time in his future. The Church Committee notes, “Office of Security files reflect that Mr. Allen Dulles had approved the entire operation against Castro…. Our files reflect that six Agency people were [at the outset] aware of the operation—Allen Dulles, William Harvey, Richard Bissell, Sheffield Edwards, Col. J. C. King and Jim O’Connell.”8

  When, in 1967, Helms demanded his own internal investigation of ZRRIFLE, the CIA’s inspectors general reported,

  IG Comment: After Harvey took over the Castro operation, he ran it as one aspect of ZRRIFLE; however, he personally handled the Castro operation and did not use any of the assets being developed in ZRRIFLE. He says that he soon came to think of the Castro operation and ZRRIFLE as being synonymous. The over-all Executive Action came to be treated in his mind as being synonymous with QJWIN, the agent working on the over-all program. He says that when he wrote of ZRRIFLE/QJWIN, the reference was to Executive Action Capability; when he used the cryptonym ZRRIFLE alone, he was referring to Castro. [Emphasis added.]9

  THE LANSDALE FLAP

  The CIA IG’s report, cataloguing the Agency’s actions regarding the Kennedys’ passion for the assassination of Castro, concludes with a section titled “Discussion of Assassination at High-Level Government Meetings.” There were
two such discussions: one “was in the Secretary’s Conference Room at the Department of State on 10 August 1962" and the second meeting was on July 30, 1964, and it did not include Harvey.

  The purpose of the Special Group Augmented (SGA) in 1962 was to overthrow the Castro regime in Cuba. The CIA’s own analysts had concluded that the United States could not expect indigenous revolt to overthrow the Cuban dictator. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara noted privately that a degree of hysteria marked the Kennedys’ anti-Castro posture.

  The SGA meetings on MONGOOSE, the external code name for anti-Castro operations, were about as high-level as a U.S. government meeting could get without the presence of the president and his brother. The cast included Secretary of State Dean Rusk and his deputy, U. Alexis Johnson, as well as Richard Goodwin, a high-level national security adviser; the White House sent Gen. Maxwell Taylor and McGeorge Bundy, pinch-hitting for Bobby Kennedy; Robert McNamara, his deputy, Roswell Gilpatric, and chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, attended by Brig. Gen. Ed Lansdale, came from the Pentagon; Edward R. Murrow was present from USIA; the CIA weighed in with Director of Central Intelligence John McCone and Bill Harvey. Tom Parrott of the CIA was secretary of SGA. McNamara, General Taylor, McCone, Murrow, Bundy, Goodwin, Lansdale, Helms, and Harvey were present at the explosive August 10, 1962, meeting.

  At the meeting Lansdale presented “the touchdown play” that he thought would eliminate Castro. It involved the use of all conceivable pressures—diplomatic, economic, political, and psychological warfare—everything short of full-scale military intervention. There was discussion of a possible Castro assassination, perhaps mentioned first by McNamara. After the meeting, McCone, at Harvey’s urging, called McNamara. “The subject you just brought up. I think it is highly improper. I do not think it should be discussed. It is not an action that should ever be condoned. It is not proper for us to discuss, and I intend to have it expunged from the record.” McCone also told those close to him—perhaps only half jokingly—that if he even contemplated assassination, he feared he would be excommunicated.