Flawed Patriot Page 21

  3. This memorandum is to be considered in lieu of project and constitutes authorization for all travel, per diem, operational and other expenses.

  4. It is requested that this activity be handled strictly on an EYES ONLY basis.

  /s/

  Richard Helms

  Deputy Director (Plans).16

  [Emphasis added.]

  The memorandum says nothing about the purpose of QJWIN’s engagement, nor about the scope of ZRRIFLE. It also recognizes that the activity authorized in the memo was so sensitive that the operation(s) would not be subject to the usual project review and disbursement approval procedures. The amount of money discussed in the documents was not lavish at the time.17

  Harvey may have demanded the memo to cover his ass; he was one of the most security-conscious people in the CIA and would not have held documents of this sensitivity outside the office without good reason. Did he anticipate rough going ahead? Did he think some people might find his presence inconvenient? Or maybe he kept the papers simply as the basis for that unwritten book?

  It seems obvious that Bill wanted to protect himself by keeping a written copy of his orders as proof of Helms’s authorization of ZRRIFLE. He wanted this insurance to be where someone would find and know what to do with it after his death. It is most likely that Harvey felt strongly that his reputation, perhaps his pension, and maybe even his life might be in jeopardy at some future time.

  Still, a couple of other puzzles remain. First, we have Sally Harvey’s word that, almost immediately after her father’s death in June 1976, CG, on her husband’s instructions, burned a lot of very sensitive paper that had been in Harvey’s personal safe. Second, how did the handwritten notes, cleared for release only on August 28, 1985, ten years after Bill’s death, and Dick Helms’s memo authorizing ZRRIFLE, which seems to be based on the handwritten project outline, find their way into the Harvey family files while CG was still alive? Even if CG had used the Freedom of Information Act, the CIA likely would not have released them.

  One must also wonder whether these ZRRIFLE memos were among the papers thieves were after when they broke into the Harveys’ house in Indianapolis after Bill’s death. The burglars were interrupted when CG heard them, and they fled after having started to ransack Bill’s ground-floor-rear study.

  CASE OFFICERING

  For the Castro hit, Harvey needed a senior case officer whom he could trust as much as he had trusted Vyrl Leichliter, Clarence Berry, or Charlie Arnold back in the Berlin Tunnel days. Division D had its own case officer in Europe, described by Clarence Berry: “There was an individual in D … Arnold S., who had been stationed in Luxembourg or Hamburg. He just floated in and out of D, like O’Donnell. I never knew what he was about.” Arnold S. was the Luxembourg case officer for QJWIN. “[He] struck me as being a sort of dandy in dress, with blow-dried hair and a perpetual sun-lamp tan. I was not impressed with him professionally, although to be fair, I was not around him much.”18

  Harvey undoubtedly considered those involved in crypto procurement, including Arnold S., and found no one who met his exacting bill of particulars. Thus he felt duty and honor bound to handle the most sensitive parts of ZRRIFLE himself. Harvey felt he was one of very, very few CIA officers who could run QJWIN satisfactorily on the really dicey matters that Bissell handed him. So in effect, in the true sense of the silent service, he alone bore the responsibility for the assassination operations, which were called “wet affairs” by the Russians. He himself could hardly murder Castro, but one man to whom he was drawn, Johnny Rosselli, could. We’ll look at that relationship shortly.

  EUROPEAN MOBSTERS AND HARVEY

  Harvey had abundant reason to be sensitive on the matter of ZRRIFLE, and his sensitivity was heightened by the other pressures he was working under from the spring into the fall of 1962: all the ramifications of running more conventional operations, as head of Task Force W; his potentially explosive relationship with Johnny Rosselli, the mafioso in whom J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had a near-pathological interest—quite apart from his persistent feud with the attorney general of the United States.

  Overlooking his leaden ear for languages, Bill considered himself an operator, not a headquarters type. He would have felt obliged to look at the very foreign and very different playing field that now was of major interest to him. Harvey would have especially wanted to meet QJWIN, out of sheer curiosity, bordering on magnetic attraction; indeed, he might have been drawn to QJWIN in the same way he was drawn to Johnny Rosselli.

  QJWIN AND WIROGUE

  Other foreign intelligence agencies may cooperate routinely with the underworld, but American intelligence is expected by a puritanical Congress and the easily shocked media to hew to lily-white standards of ethics, even as it deals in a very nasty world.

  There is considerable circumstantial evidence that the Europeans who smuggled heroin into the United States in the 1950s and 1960s were of operational interest to the CIA. Some of this group of primarily Marseilles-based hoodlums were associated with Santo Trafficante, the Miami Mafia capo. They were rough and unscrupulous, but they operated by a singular code. Recall that Harvey took at least one spotting trip to Europe, apparently on the lookout for underworld talent for the crypto procurement operation, in October 1960.

  For our purposes, the agent referred to as WIROGUE seems the less interesting of the two surfaced criminal agents. QJWIN deserves more attention. The Agency hired both men precisely because they lacked scruples and were familiar with the illegal life.

  During the Lumumba operation, different case officers, thanks to an administrative snafu, lodged both WIROGUE and QJWIN in the Regina Hotel in Leopoldville. In a moment of delicious comedy, WIROGUE tried to recruit QJWIN for the Lumumba operation in the hotel bar one evening. QJWIN did not know that WIROGUE was CIA and refused the invitation. Stephen J. Rivele has it that QJWIN appears as an older, trusted colleague, and though of criminal background, not of unsavory reputation. The distinction between the two men is clear: WIROGUE was a cheap young hood; QJWIN was a high-placed criminal operator who had come from the world of sensitive secret work.19

  The senior case officer who had flown in to be on the spot, Justin O’Donnell, and the local officers must have either groaned or laughed hysterically when they heard of the episode, which sounds like something out of The Maltese Falcon. WIROGUE took the opportunity of the chaos in the Congo to engage in money-making propositions for personal gain, and in July 1961 he departed Leopoldville under a thunderhead.

  The circumstances of Lumumba’s death were eventually fairly well determined. While a CIA employee did not actually pull the trigger, the Agency certainly seems to have encouraged Mobutu to eliminate his rival. The denouement began on January 13, 1961. At that time, Harvey had been in charge of ZRRIFLE for fewer than six weeks. As mentioned above, he knew about the Lumumba-connected operations as chief of Division D, but he was probably more than content to allow Justin O’Donnell to represent D’s interest on the ground in the Lumumba affair.

  TERMINATING QJWIN

  O’Donnell denied that QJWIN had anything to do with Lumumba’s murder in early 1961. Still, a message Harvey wrote to the CIA’s finance division at the time says simply, “QJWIN was sent on this trip for a specific, highly sensitive operational purpose which has been completed.”

  The CIA put QJWIN on the polygraph in April 1961, after Harvey had taken over Division D. The agent was then described as “a 44 year-old Luxembourg citizen who has been utilized by this organization since the end of 1960 in several sensitive operations”; this makes it sound as though he helped the Second-Story Men on cryptographic procurement ops.

  QJWIN appears to have been the kind of law-dodging cutthroat with whom gentlemen don’t readily associate, but of whom intelligence agencies at times have need. In 1962 QJWIN “was about to go on trial in Europe on smuggling charges.” He probably lived in Cologne, Germany, in 1963–64 and may have opened a shop there. According to the IG’s report, while Harvey was clea
ring out his desk prior to his transfer to Rome, he wrote a memorandum to the chief, FI Staff, dated June 17, 1963, five months before the Kennedy assassination, stating that the original justification for employing QJWIN no longer existed.

  I believe the original purpose for which QJWIN was continued and sent on his present undercover assignment is no longer of sufficient validity….

  QJWIN … is a competent, usable agent who is capable of operating in certain circles in Europe where we have very few assets. … He is not being used at the present time. He is being paid but he is on ice….

  If after [discussions with other offices] a sensible framework for the operational use of QJWIN can be established, I would recommend we continue him. If not, I would recommend that he be terminated at the time his present contract expires.

  As far as the ZRRIFLE aspects … except for one precautionary “life line,” aspects of this case have been terminated.

  After an anonymous case officer noted that QJWIN was unstable and perhaps inclined to hedge his bets, QJWIN’s contract of employment with the CIA was allowed to lapse on February 29, 1964. Nothing in the file indicates that the executive action capability of ZRRIFLE/QJWIN was ever used. At the time the agent was terminated, Harvey was in Rome.

  Researchers into the John F. Kennedy assassination have spent countless hours trying to pin down the identity of QJWIN. Their search has taken them deep into the legends of the French intelligence and security services, the underworld, and France’s political seethings of the 1960s. Various names have cropped up from that rainbow of interests and attachments, each of them belonging to fascinating characters, but none of them indubitably the name of QJWIN. His identity remains elusive, though tempting, because he was part of Harvey’s story at a key juncture and because he just might have had something to do with JFK’s death.

  The QJWIN/WIROGUE/ZRRIFLE questions and complexities will not be decisively unraveled until, and if ever, the CIA decides to open whatever files it has on the JFK assassination.

  SUMMING UP

  Dick Helms acknowledged to the Church Committee, “I had very grave doubts about the wisdom of [the Castro assassination operations]…. We had some few assets inside Cuba at that time. I was willing to try almost anything.”

  Harvey summed up the liabilities of this “damned dicey operation” for the Church Committee by saying that it carried the “very real possibility of this government being blackmailed either by Cubans for political purposes, or by figures in organized crime for their own self-protection and aggrandizement.”

  The CIA IG’s report of spring 1967 states:

  This reconstruction of Agency involvement in plans to assassinate Fidel Castro is at best an imperfect history. Because of the extreme sensitivity of the operations … no official records were kept of planning, of approvals, or of implementation. The few written records that do exist are largely tangential to the main events, or were put on paper from memory years afterwards. William Harvey has retained skeletal notes of his activities during the years in question, and they are our best source of dates….

  We cannot overemphasize the extent to which responsible Agency officers felt themselves subject to the Kennedy Administration’s severe pressures to do something about Castro and his regime. The fruitless and, in retrospect, often unrealistic plotting should be viewed in that light.

  … After some discussion of the problems involved in developing an Executive Action Capability, Bissell placed Harvey in charge of the effort…. Harvey states that after the decision was made to go ahead with the creating of an Executive Action Capability, and while he was still discussing its development with Bissell, he briefed Mr. Helms fully on the general concept, but without mention of the then-ongoing plan to assassinate Castro. [Emphasis added.]

  Recall Harvey’s statement to the Church Committee that “I would like to make as clear as I can that … this was an ongoing matter which I was injected into.” This statement implies that the entire undertaking was out of control and that Harvey was brought in to try to make some sense out of a sorry catalogue of misjudgments made under nearly intolerable political pressures. The explosive potential of the operation was so great, Bill did not brief his boss in detail. This was his way of protecting Helms and, again, evidence that Harvey was prepared to take the fall for a matter he did not believe in, but for which he had assumed responsibility.

  LONG-RANGE EFFECTS

  In late 1962 and early 1963 those seniors in the know in the CIA drew the obvious conclusions from the Kennedys’ desire for insurrection in Cuba and for the assassination of Fidel Castro: the flamboyant, iconoclastic individualism that had flavored the CIA since World War II and the Office of Strategic Services had no place now in the gray pinstripe bureaucracy. The CIA had become a major agency, with all the bureaucratic appurtenances of the Department of Agriculture, and as important, if not more so, it had become an instrument of the president’s political will. The CIA could have tried to achieve the independent status of Britain’s MI-6, but from Eisenhower on, it didn’t stand a chance. The American system is results oriented; the CIA simply had to produce or, bluntly, its budget would have been—and later was—emasculated.

  In 1962 part of the trouble was that, after the Bay of Pigs, the administration felt it could not rely on the spooks. When it came to the crunch, Lansdale and the Kennedys sent U-2s to check on the pinpoint-accurate intermediate-range ballistic missile reports JMWAVE’s agents had sent.

  Only Harvey knew the lengths he went to to arrange Castro’s demise because only he knew the extent of ZRRIFLE. But people who knew Bill knew he could be ruthless in fulfillment of his duty. The anomaly of dealing with the underworld people Bobby Kennedy had vowed to exterminate was certainly not lost on Bill and others. In fact, many seasoned CIA hands became aware, in some cases only vaguely, of the Castro Thing, and they disliked it—even more so, as word spread—and it did, despite compartmentalization—that the mafioso, Johnny Rosselli, was cut in on the deal.

  The final report of the last group to look into the Kennedy assassination, the 1992 Assassinations Review Board, had this to say:

  William Harvey was intricately involved in … the various assassination plots against Fidel Castro. The Review Board received a query from a researcher concerning the possible existence of “operational diaries” that Harvey may have created. CIA searched its Directorate of Operations records and did not locate any records belonging to Harvey.

  The introduction to the 1967 CIA Inspector General’s (IG) report on plots to assassinate Castro notes that Richard Helms directed that, once the IG’s office produced the report, CIA should destroy all notes and source material that it used to draft the report.

  CIA may have destroyed Harvey’s alleged diaries in response to Helms’ directive…. Despite its efforts, the Review Board did not locate any diaries.

  Harvey’s position was undeniably delicate. He had learned much about the way the Kennedys’ Round Table worked. He was in a position to dent, perhaps to shatter, the shining white knight image. The Kennedys—Bobby, in particular—may have felt that Harvey’s knowledge of their passion to eliminate Fidel Castro was a threat to the dynasty. To lance Harvey at the weakest chink in his armor, his drinking, and to let it be known that he was no longer reliable was to subvert anything he might later say about the Kennedys’ addiction to violent vengeance. Recall that McGeorge Bundy of the JFK White House remarked to a senior CIA official, “Your friend doesn’t inspire confidence.”

  If nothing else, Harvey left Task Force W and ZRRIFLE having utterly baffled most of his superiors. The illustrious star had dimmed, even imploded. Many years after the fact, one of Bill’s closest associates, Dave Murphy, said, “After Cuba, Bill was a shell.” But Harvey lived on, and even if discredited, he had a storehouse of knowledge that did the Kennedy name no good.

  9

  BILL AND JOHNNY

  The individual most deeply involved in the attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, even before Bill Harv
ey, was Johnny Rosselli. The story of Bill and Johnny is complex and sorry. Only some of it can be reconstructed.

  The fifteen-year relationship between Harvey and Rosselli is the source of some fascination, but so too is the considerable speculation that Harvey was somehow involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. If there is a link between Harvey and the assassination, it almost definitely runs through Rosselli.

  From the beginning, their relationship was a twaining of yin and yang, a bonding of men from different sides of the moral tracks. In the end, Bill’s loyalty to Johnny contributed much to his own downfall, yet it was very, very Harvey.

  Rosselli was more than a gunsel. He was a player on various stages, some of them overt and visible, others deeply private, conspiratorial. He had killed for the Mafia, early in his career, yet he fancied himself a gentleman and a diplomat, as well as a devoted patriot.1 Businesswise, Rosselli had been involved with Al Capone in Chicago. He became the Chicago Mob’s ambassador to young and restless Los Angeles and was deep in LA’s popular gambling scene from his very first days on the coast in the 1930s.

  Rosselli’s path crossed those of Jack and Bobby Kennedy in various ways. The Kennedys’ father, Joe, did business with the Mafia during Prohibition and again in Chicago during World War II. The Mafia, particularly the Chicago family, helped finance Jack Kennedy’s 1960 election campaign, but Bobby Kennedy, both as chief investigator for the U.S. Senate’s Kefauver Committee of the 1950s, and then as attorney general, galloped roughshod over his family’s ties with and debts to the selfsame Mafia. At one point, Rosselli asked Frank Sinatra to get Bobby to lower the pressure on the Mob.

  Rosselli went to parties thrown by Peter Lawford, the Kennedy inlaw. He was an on-again-off-again boyfriend of Judith Exner Campbell, who had affairs with Sam Giancana and John F. Kennedy. He knew Marilyn Monroe, although probably not carnally. He also knew, perhaps at first only in passing, a couple who played a part in the latter stages of Harvey’s story, Michael and Marajen Chinigo, who had a sprawling villa in the expensive Thunderbird Heights enclave of Palm Springs. Mrs. Chinigo was the owner of the Champaign News-Gazette in Illinois. She also spent some of her time in Rome and Sorrento, Italy. The Chinigos attended parties at which Sinatra provided the glitter.