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  According to some expense account records for ZRRIFLE/QJWIN from April 13 to 21, 1963, Harvey was at the Plantation Yacht Harbor motel/marina in Plantation Key, Florida. “John A. Wallston” (one of Rosselli’s known aliases was John A. Ralston), who listed his address as 56510 Wilshire Boulevard (the Friars Club) in Los Angeles, was registered in the next room, which was also charged to Harvey’s bill.25 This stay occurred well after the Rosselli aspect of ZRRIFLE was supposed to have been shut down and as Harvey was reading into his upcoming assignment in Rome.

  Bill submitted precise accounting to a financial officer with an apologetic note, “These piled up on me while trying to figure out whether [ ] shouldn’t write to [ ] to tell them to address these differently…. Hope this late receipt of receipts hasn’t upset your book-keeping.” Harvey then listed his expenses, “all chargeable to Ops Expenses QJWIN/ZRRIFLE.” (Not all amounts are visible on the scratchy photocopy of the accounting.) First there appears a series of phone calls within Florida and to Los Angeles.

  It became necessary or advisable, perhaps as a result of the conversations listed in the above expense report, for Rosselli to visit Chicago. In an unusual move, Harvey paid for Johnny’s ticket. Perhaps during this trip Rosselli brought Giancana up to speed, relaying to him the news that the CIA connection was finished. Or perhaps Rosselli, who by now might have seized upon Harvey’s disgrace to gain the upper hand in the relationship, went to Chicago to discuss certain matters involving Harvey with the head of the Chicago Mob. Rosselli might have also visited the newspaper owner Marajen Chinigo in Champaign, Illinois, during the trip.

  Also, note that in the accounting, Harvey gave Rosselli (or, conceivably, a third party) a $1,000 termination payment; this one instance might contradict previous assertions that Rosselli paid all but limited operational expenses out of his own pocket.

  Last for now, around the middle of June 1963, Bill picked up Johnny at Dulles Airport. He “remembers having suggested to Rosselli that he bring only carry-on luggage so there would be no delay at the airport awaiting baggage.” Harvey had closed his own home prior to leaving the country and was staying in the house of a neighbor who was out of town. Rosselli spent the night with the Harveys in the neighbor’s home. That evening, Rosselli, Harvey, and CG went out for dinner. While dining, Harvey received a phone call from Sam Papich, the FBI liaison officer to the CIA, asking if Harvey knew the identity of his dinner guest. Harvey said that he did. Harvey speculated that he was picked up by the Bureau’s surveillance of Johnny and was identified through his car license number.

  “Harvey met Papich the next morning and explained that he was [in June, still] terminating an operational association with Rosselli. Papich reminded Harvey of the FBI rule requiring FBI personnel to report any known contacts between former FBI employees and criminal elements. Papich said that he would have to report to J. Edgar Hoover that Harvey had been seen with Rosselli. Harvey said he understood…. Harvey … asked Papich to inform him in advance if it appeared that Hoover might call Mr. McCone—Harvey’s point being that he felt that McCone should be briefed before receiving a call from Hoover. Papich agreed to do so. Harvey said that he then told Mr. Helms of the incident and that Helms agreed that there was no need to brief McCone unless a call from Hoover was to be expected.”

  The IG’s 1967 report concluded, “This was Harvey’s last face-to-face meeting with Rosselli, although he has heard from him since then. The later links between Harvey and Rosselli are described in a separate section of this report.”26

  What the IG’s report does not answer, or speculate on, is why Rosselli flew in from the West Coast only days before Harvey was due to take up his new post in Rome. To say good-bye to an old pal, whom he had been telephoning at home, but not in the office? To pass along some parting words of wisdom? Perhaps to ask that Bill perform certain very delicate services when he got settled in Italy? We shall never know.

  ROSSELLI CONVICTED

  The FBI had been trying to nail Rosselli for years. Then Immigration started breathing down his neck. Johnny figured he had markers he could call in. On May 12, 1966, he told Col. Sheffield Edwards that he was facing federal charges for being an illegal alien but promised that he did not intend to bring up his CIA activities.

  Yet Johnny began to feel the heat. In January 1967 Drew Pearson, the Washington Merry-Go-Round columnist of the day, learned from Rosselli that, a few years earlier, the Agency had engaged the Mafia to assassinate Castro. Pearson held back until March 3, 1967. “Robert Kennedy may have approved an assassination plot which then possibly backfired against his late brother.” On March 7, 1967, the same column reported, “A reported CIA plan to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro … may have resulted in a counterplot by Castro to assassinate President Kennedy.” Pearson had taken his story to Chief Justice Earl Warren and from there it spread in a tight circle.

  Almost simultaneously, on March 1, 1967, Jim Garrison, who had been looming on the periphery of the JFK assassination investigation, submitted an indictment in New Orleans that named fourteen CIA officials as conspirators in the murder of Jack Kennedy. The FBI heard whispers that the Mob had a contract ready for Bobby Kennedy if he got close to the Democratic presidential nomination the next year.

  Dick Helms, as DCI, had to know what the extent of the CIA’s Rosselli problem was. He asked the IG to get at the unvarnished truth. Harvey was “recalled from sick leave” to testify to the inspectors in the late winter, early spring of that year.

  In 1968 the Feds finally got their vengeance. Johnny was tried and, after six months in court, was convicted on December 2, 1968, of skimming winnings from high-stakes gambling at the Friars Club in Los Angeles. He was also sentenced to five years plus six months on immigration charges.

  Before he started to serve his time, a judge ordered Johnny to attend his mother’s funeral. Rosselli asked Joe Shimon to accompany him to Boston; they were there in June when Bobby Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles. According to Rappleye and Becker, Johnny showed little interest in the murder.27

  AGENCY POSTMORTEM

  The CIA IG’s report is the primary source of information about the CIA’s and Harvey’s role in the Castro assassination maze. The IG’s investigation, conducted under great time pressure, was written and typed by two officers, Kenneth E. Greer and Scott D. Breckinridge.28 The one “ribbon-copy” report was “delivered to the Director, personally, in installments, beginning on April 24th.” Helms returned his copy to the IG on May 22 with strict instructions that one copy only be retained in the IG’s eyes-only file. The report was finally released for public scrutiny under President Clinton’s “JFK Act” on February 3, 1999.

  The IG report winds down with this analysis:

  a) If Drew Pearson has a single source … then Bill Harvey emerges as the likely candidate. He was the only person we found in the course of this inquiry who knew all four of the key facts at the time the Pearson columns appeared. We preferred not to think that Bill Harvey was the culprit. We could find no persuasive reason why he would wish to leak the story deliberately and we doubted that he would be so indiscreet as to leak it accidentally. Further, if he were the source, we could expect Pearson’s story to be completely accurate because Harvey knew the truth. [Emphasis added.]29

  Thus Harvey was cleared of direct suspicion that he had leaked efforts to enact the Kennedys’ wrath against Castro. The inspectors strongly implied that they suspected Rosselli of passing the information to a lawyer, Ed Morgan, who was tight with Drew Pearson. It is doubtful that Rosselli would have taken such a thunderous step unless it had been approved at the highest Mafia level. Still, Rosselli was a patriot and wanted to be recognized as such. And there may have been other considerations as well.

  SUMMING UP

  Harvey testified to the Church Committee, “It is quite conceivable that [the Rosselli plot to kill Castro] had been penetrated.” There is considerable reason to believe that Santo Trafficante was a double agent and continued to ingratiate him
self with Castro by reporting on the CIA and Cuban exile activities. Ted Shackley recalled pointedly that JMWAVE had nothing to do with Trafficante during Ted’s tenure as chief.

  In mid-February 1963, as Harvey was in transit from the Langley basement to Rome, the obsessively fixated Jim Angleton fingered S. Peter Karlow, one of the Office of Strategic Services stalwarts who had carried over honorably into the CIA, the man who might have introduced Bill Harvey to CG in Germany, as the possible KGB mole in the Clandestine Services. The investigation came when Anatoli Golitsin and Yuri Nosenko defected in 1961 and 1962 and crippled the Agency with devious information, at least some of it presumably hatched in the brain of Kim Philby.30 The FBI handled the case with deliberate indelicacy, and although Karlow came out clean, the CIA behaved reprehensibly to him as an officer and a person for decades thereafter. Helms was one of several in the CIA who did not show any particular loyalty to Karlow during the investigation, although much else was going on at the time to preoccupy the beleaguered DCI. Others who played parts in the handling of his case were names familiar in this account, men at the top of the CIA pinnacle who appeared, in retrospect, to cherish their stature more than honesty and loyalty to an old friend.

  Thus, in the winter of 1963, the top tier of the CIA was dealing with the fallout from the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedys’ alarms and excursions, and the seemingly real possibility that a senior staff member might be a KGB penetration. Too, the Agency was beginning to get involved in Indochina. Plus whatever else may have been going on around the world. The atmosphere in the halls of Langley was not conducive to trust and good-fellowship. Harvey would have been aware of the stratospheric writhings over the Karlow case. He knew Angleton, even if they were not close. He also still had friends in high places in the FBI, which handled the interrogation and investigation of Karlow. One can almost hear Bill saying to himself, “If this is the way they treat a guy who has been a loyal officer for more than twenty years …” It’s possible that such thoughts led him to fraternize with Rosselli more than he might otherwise have. The two were of like, restive mind about bureaucracy and about the Kennedys.

  PEAS IN A POD?

  Harvey was the senior handling officer for Rosselli during nine months of intermittent, official association under highly conspiratorial circumstances. Together they ate, drank, and went out to sea, where no one could overhear their conversations.

  Johnny was the kind of guy whom Harvey’s FBI training would ordinarily have taught him to hold in contempt. The mafioso was also an iconoclast, a guy who rejected the system, a buccaneer, a man of guns, who had shown that he was willing to risk his life for his adopted country—whose government had imprisoned him once and still hounded him—a guy whose tell-it-like-it-is, four-letter-word, forthright manner clicked with Harvey’s own approach to life. The only personal attribute on which they diverged, and even here, there may have been some compatibility, was on women. Johnny was a Ladies Man, in capitals; Harvey was not. But Bill had had that reputation as a womanizer before he married CG.

  After ZRRIFLE lapsed, Bill may well have figured that Johnny could be a useful contact, as well as a buddy. In spring and early summer 1963, in the last days before Harvey went to Rome, the pair set the stage for speculation that stretched over the next decades: that they had come to be involved in considerably more than raids on Cuba and the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro.

  The intangible that brought the two closest together was their shared, intense dislike of Bobby Kennedy, a dislike that tarnished the president because Jack backed Bobby. Bobby had betrayed the family’s debt to the Mafia in particularly vicious ways. Harvey, for his part, was appalled by the Kennedys’ wholly unprofessional need to make Cuba a matter of personal revenge, regardless of the cost.

  The consequences of Harvey’s dismissal from Task Force W and ZRRIFLE might, in retrospect, have been truly disastrous for the nation. Bill’s pride must have been badly damaged. In the winter of 1963, or soon thereafter, after their official business should long have been settled, Johnny may have taken subtle control of their relationship and used that control in ways that may have influenced history.

  Harvey almost certainly felt he had, in blunt terms, been screwed, and he probably made no secret of his feelings to Rosselli when they talked privately; in the flights of fantasy that alcohol can inspire, who knows what might have developed. Rosselli may have even deliberately plied Bill with booze to gain control over the CIA officer. He undoubtedly recognized Bill as a useful contact for the future, whatever it might hold. In his world, it was always useful to have a friend to watch your back or perform other favors.

  Harvey’s assignment to Rome opened up various possibilities. It’s not beyond imagination to think that Rosselli introduced Harvey to the right people. Johnny had, for instance, visited Lucky Luciano, who had helped the United States invade Sicily, in his retirement near Naples. These things mattered. Rosselli may have discussed certain French and Corsican underworld types with Harvey, from his knowledge of the international drug trade; or Bill might have mentioned some names of people on the rim of ZRRIFLE to Rosselli.

  Whatever they chatted about on land or sea, a subtle, gradual reversal of roles took place. And when they renewed contact after Bill’s return in 1966 to Washington—if, that is, they had not been in touch during Harvey’s term in Rome—Rosselli assumed the upper hand. In the Agency, Bill was in disgrace, in recovery and therapy, on the ropes. No longer a henchman, Rosselli became the leader and even threw Bill some legal work, despite Harvey’s official protestations that he would not do law for Rosselli. Most dramatically, as we shall see, Johnny introduced Harvey to Marajen Chinigo.

  An FBI memo of May 4, 1967, the day after the CIA cut all official contact with Rosselli, says the CIA IG told the Bureau liaison officer “that CIA has instructed Harvey to avoid contact with subject if possible. CIA realizes that Rosselli may force a contact and it will be impossible for Harvey to evade the subject…. If contact is made, Harvey is to furnish the results which will be passed on to the Bureau…. Harvey on sick leave [pending] retirement…. CIA is in an extremely vulnerable position.”

  Convicted on the skimming and immigration counts in 1968, Johnny was first sent to a chill, dank prison on an island in Puget Sound, and later, he was moved to a more salubrious big house in Arizona. He finished his term at Lompoc Prison, near Santa Barbara, and was paroled on October 5, 1973. Almost immediately after his release, he moved to the Miami area to be with his sister.

  10

  BILL HARVEY AND THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY

  There are various complex theories about the events of November 22, 1963, some of which concern us here because they might have involved Bill Harvey, who was, however, demonstrably in Italy at the time of the assassination. If Harvey did play a role in the assassination, as some people have almost passionately suggested, it was almost definitely a passive one.

  The major Kennedy assassination theories are (1) it was a Mafia operation, (2) it was the work of a group of renegade CIA psychological warfare/paramilitary officers in cooperation with right-wing Cuban exile students, (3) it was the work of a lone gunman, and (4) it was an operation guided by Fidel Castro, employing various entities in the United States to gain revenge on the Kennedys.

  If it was a CIA job, Dick Helms, head of the Clandestine Services at the time, might have known, but if it was a Mafia hit, he would not have known unless Harvey knew and confided in his boss. Only Harvey could play a possibly credible, knowledgeable, senior-level role in the two major theories. In both theories, Harvey appears as an enigmatic, owl-like, before-the-fact bystander, not as an active participant but also not as a naysayer. His role might be described as “conflicted”; he was not tormented, but rather wary, silent, holding his own counsel—this would be very Bill Harvey.

  Harvey left behind a hint that he had some knowledge of the JFK killing. After he had testified to the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee in 1975, he commented, “
They didn’t ask the right questions,” implying that he might have had some answers to more pointed questions regarding the assassination.

  Countering all of the above, however, it must be said that as yet no convincing evidence suggests that the assassination was anything more sinister than what it appears to have been forty-plus years and countless hundreds of thousands of dollars in investigating expenses later: a oneman hit on the president of the United States. History may yet judge the veracity of the speculations of those theorists who doubt Lee Harvey Oswald, the only confirmed shooter, acted on his own.

  THEORY 1: MAFIA HIT

  The spokesman for theory 1 is G. Robert Blakey, a professor of law at Notre Dame University and chief counsel to the 1978 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HRSCA). Blakey believes that the assassination was a Mafia operation, specifically engineered by Santo Trafficante, the Miami boss, with the active support of Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans capo. Oswald was a dupe, recruited by Trafficante’s or Marcello’s people as a shooter and fall guy. One of Oswald’s shots killed JFK and wounded Texas Governor John Connally. A second shooter, a Mob soldier whose job might have been to kill Oswald, was stationed on the grassy knoll along the parade route in Dallas. The Mob recruited Jack Ruby, a smalltime crook, to eradicate Oswald when the second shooter failed to do so; Ruby was dying of cancer and so had nothing to lose by taking the assignment. No supportable evidence suggests that French or Union Corse gangsters were involved in the assassination; neither is there supportable evidence that Cuban exiles in Miami, including those of the Directio Revolutionario Estudiantil de Cuba (DRE), were directly involved in the assassination. Johnny Rosselli knew of the Mafia’s plans and may, indeed, have been a co-conspirator.