Flawed Patriot Page 27

  Recall that Harvey met Rosselli in Washington around June 21, 1963. On June 27, Harvey, winding up his headquarters responsibilities prior to departure for Rome, wrote a memo stating that the original justification for employing QJWIN—“asset developed for the original ZRRIFLE project”—no longer existed, and he raised the question of QJWIN’s termination. QJWIN was not finally let go until February 14, 1964. Note that executive action against Cuba was officially terminated by Bobby Kennedy on October 30, 1962, but some efforts continued beyond that date. Again, inconclusive evidence suggests that French criminal elements were in Dallas on November 22, 1963. I am aware of no further indications of direct European involvement in the assassination, but let’s examine the possibility further.

  Even if we accepted, for the sake of argument, that Harvey met and assessed QJWIN or WIROGUE, or both, on the 1960–61 Europe trip, it is still a considerable leap to assume that he recruited one of them to participate with either the CIA or the Mafia in the JFK assassination. Stephen J. Rivele, a contributor to a book on Oliver Stone’s Nixon and author of a lengthy expose on the French Connection, asserts that QJWIN was “a Luxembourg-based smuggler” named Jose Mankel and that WIROGUE was “a Soviet-born Paris bank robber named David Dzitzichvili [also spelled Tzitzichvili], alias David Dato.” Rivele says flatly that he never came across any definitive connection between Harvey and the French underworld figures who may have been involved in the events of November 22, 1963.11

  ROME AND THE ITALIAN CONNECTION

  Did Harvey play any role in the assassination plot after his arrival in Rome in early July 1963?

  By the time of the JFK assassination, Harvey had been stationed in Rome over four months. On November 22, he was at a Mediterranean island stay-behind training site. “Bill Harvey … was unconscious. His drinking had progressed from habit to disease after his exile to Italy…. When the telex noting Kennedy’s murder was received by his deputy, Harvey had to be awakened from a late-day martini stupor. The man who hated the Kennedys … staggered to his feet.” (The news would have hit Italy sometime after seven in the evening.)

  “What he is reported to have said to his deputy should be taken with Harvey’s condition in mind; the auditor recorded it for posterity: ‘This was bound to happen,’ blurted Harvey, ‘and it’s probably good that it did.’ Soon, when Harvey discovered that his deputy was spending time helping local officials with condolences, he sent the deputy packing for the U.S. ‘I haven’t got time for this kind of crap, Harvey told him.’”12

  Mark Wyatt, Harvey’s deputy in Rome who may have been the source of the above account, told me forty years later, “One night, we got the call that JFK might not live. Bill was so pie-eyed drunk, we could hardly get him on his feet. The Italians were saying to him, ‘Mr. Harvey, we have to get you back!’ It was a stormy night, so we had to get back to the mainland by ship.” I have also heard that a high officer put his personal plane at Harvey’s disposal to get him back to Rome.

  Wyatt, again, enigmatically: “Harvey said to me later, ‘Mark, we tried so hard, but no one will ever know who shot JFK!’ Bill interpreted it as the Mob getting to Oswald. I felt terrible about it.”13

  CG Harvey’s recollection not surprisingly contrasts sharply with Wyatt’s. At the time of the JFK assassination, CG claimed, “Bill was in Sicily, on an operation with the Mafia, trying to stop the drug trafficking. He had to get back to Rome immediately. The Mafia gave him a wooden thing which allowed him safe passage throughout Sicily.” (It was a three-inch carving that was bolted to the front of the car, or perhaps displayed on the dashboard.)14

  Intermittent, top-level liaison with the Sicilian Mafia, maintaining an American intelligence contact dating back to World War II, was probably among Harvey’s responsibilities while he was stationed in Italy. In this role Harvey likely met Michael Chinigo, who had served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and played a minor but key role in the American landings in Sicily in 1943, and then probably handled mundane, routine contact between the CIA and the Mafia. Chinigo was an ideal candidate for CIA recruitment, if, indeed, he had ever been out of the employ of OSS and its successors. Harvey and Chinigo may also have been in touch with the Camorra, the Italian-American dominated criminal underground of southern Italy, based around Naples.

  What these wisps add up to is unprovable, of course. But it seems certain that Bill Harvey had direct or indirect contact with various European criminal elements; that he dealt with unseemly elements through Chinigo, who was a CIA contract agent; and that, if the American Mafia was involved in the Kennedy assassination European elements might have been implicated.

  LEE HARVEY OSWALD

  Did Harvey have anything to do with Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union? Was Oswald a CIA agent, dispatched to the Soviet Union for some intelligence purpose? Did Harvey hold a watching brief or have anything to do, directly or indirectly, with Oswald after his return to the United States from the Soviet Union? Is it conceivable that Harvey might have fingered Oswald for the mafiosi who needed to divert attention from their role in the actual assassination? I have come across no evidence to substantiate any of the above speculation.

  Harvey, as chief of Task Force W, was lord over much of the CIA’s Mexican activities. David Atlee Phillips, a man who fascinates Kennedy conspiracy theorists, was the initial case officer on DRE, served in Cuba, and later was the Cuban desk chief and a PP officer at Mexico City. Violating the CIA charter that forbade domestic operations, Phillips may have run anti-Castro agents in the United States, specifically in the New Orleans area, where Oswald operated for a while. Assassination analysts have long been intrigued by some evidence that suggests that the CIA (possibly purposely) misidentified photographs of an individual entering the Soviet Russian and Cuban embassies in Mexico City in 1963, calling the man Oswald, when in fact he was an impostor, subsequently identified as a French or Belgian criminal.

  A side note: Jack Whitten, alias John Scelso, who later provided congressional investigators with scathing testimony on Harvey, was head of the CIA’s Mexican Branch at Langley in 1963 and was therefore privy to some, but not all, of the operational traffic between Mexico City and Harvey, as head of Task Force W.15

  Is it conceivable that Harvey fingered Oswald as a possible patsy for the Mob murder of JFK? This is one of many vague possibilities in the tangled skeins that weave around the JFK assassination. But only a remote possibility.

  THE WHITTEN/SCELSO TESTIMONY

  The person who cast the most direct suspicion on Harvey, by outright bitterness and also by carefully phrased innuendo, was a man who spent his working career in the OSS and CIA, John (Jack) Whitten, who chose the alias John Scelso when he testified to the HRSCA in 1978. Whitten’s true identity became public only after he died in 2002.

  Michael Goldsmith, staff counsel for the committee, who conducted the interview with Whitten, commented nearly twenty-five years later, “We really focused on the CIA … trying to determine the quality of the product the Agency had given the Warren Commission….

  “We had five or six staff members, among them, two conspiracy theorists, who were really pushing on Harvey…. Harvey was a central figure, not the central figure. But we were unable to pin anything on him.”16 Goldsmith bored in while he had Whitten on the stand.

  Q: Do you know whether Harvey was running any operations outside the ordinary course of business?

  A: I did not know at that time. I just heard about this assassin he had on the payrolls and so on…. I would like to say first, among officers of my grade, and I was a super-grade, and I had as broad a view as anyone of Agency operations, the thought of, or engaging in, assassinations as distinguished from guerrilla warfare or coups d’etat … setting out by stealth and surprise to kill an important foreign person … was abhorrent to the standards of the clandestine service…. In the Lumumba case, they refused to carry out the order, but they were guilty of conspiracy to commit homicide….

  The consensus of officers
, including the greatest cynics, was that we would never do anything like that, as indeed we did not, as far as I know.

  Q: You just characterized Mr. Harvey as a thug.

  A: I do not like to speak that way of him, but Harvey …

  Q: Mr. Harvey is the central figure in the Committee’s concern here. I would like you to be as candid as you can be.

  A: Harvey was not the kind of personality who appeals to me and I certainly was not the kind of personality that appealed to him. I have wondered—I wonder if the government has ever looked into the possibility that Harvey did not knock off Giancomo [sic, Giancana]. He lived in the same area, when he was retired. He was a great one with guns.

  I read it in the newspaper. I was overseas and I said to myself, I wondered if they look into Bill Harvey.

  Q: This question may come to you out of right field, but do you have any reason to believe that Mr. Harvey himself may have been involved in the President’s assassination?

  A: I do not have any reason to believe it…. 17

  Whitten is one of very few professional CIA officers who criticized Harvey openly, venomously, on the record. He may have reflected a feeling common to that of some of CIA’s Ivy Leaguers, those who still believed in the romantic OSS-style ethic.

  Whitten made the following comments, in a more personal vein, almost as if he were seeking revenge. Note that Whitten had been Helms’s first choice as head of the JFK investigation, but he was then sidelined in favor of Angleton.

  Harvey was a really hard-boiled, unsubtle, ruthless guy who was, in my opinion, a very dangerous man. I had run-ins with him several times. I also had to investigate one of his big cases and although I was always on friendly terms with him—we never slugged it out with each other—he never liked me and I never liked him….

  The very thought of Helms entrusting Harvey to hire a criminal to have the capacity to kill somebody violates every operational precept, every bit of operational experience, every ethical consideration. And the fact that he chose Harvey….

  Harvey could keep a secret, you see. Harvey could keep a secret. This was one way to make sure that nobody ever found out about it.

  I just cannot understand Helms doing this.

  But Harvey, in my opinion … the whole thought of Helms appointing Harvey … the very thought of [Harvey] using a former criminal for anything, let alone to assassinate people or to be on a standby basis to assassinate people—here Helms cannot turn around … [after] low-rating people for deviating from certain principles, and so on…. He cannot turn around, just because he is the DCI, and appoint a thug like Harvey to hire some criminal to commit assassinations. The best thing you can say was [Harvey] was a buffoon for doing it, or perhaps he never intended to use it and just would be able to say he had the capacity. That is the kind of interpretation I put on it.18

  Whitten, however, supplied no evidence implicating Harvey in the assassination, either with Rosselli and the Mafia or with Phillips and the DRE students.

  JACK WHITTEN

  In early 2003 the determined investigative reporter, Jefferson Morley, became interested in the elusive figure of Jack Whitten and found a reason, in Whitten’s HRSCA testimony, for Whitten’s dislike of Harvey.

  Whitten: Then I investigated a famous communications intelligence case that Harvey was mixed up in when he was the Chief of the Communications Intelligence, the Deciphering Staff, [Division D] and so on. This turned out to be one of the biggest hoaxes in our history.

  Mr. Goldsmith: What happened there?

  Whitten: For a number of years, the Agency had been running a source in Austria who was to procure for us the Soviet codes, and so on, Soviet intelligence, say for instance. And I, as a polygraph operator, had to polygraph this guy a couple of times.

  By that time, we had spent a fortune on the operation and they have never been able to crack this guy. He was interrogated at length. He was on drugs, hypnosis, under the polygraph by the Blue Bird team and he beat them cold. And they gave him to me to interrogate for the second time, and I cracked him and made him admit that it was a hoax which made them all look bad.19

  A definite note of triumph marked Whitten’s claim that he had beaten the Agency’s top gun by showing that one of Division D’s prime sources had been a fabricator.

  I asked a former top CIA FI officer for his view of Whitten. The officer, who chooses to remain anonymous, replied,

  I knew Jack from couple of cases in the ’50s and ’60s. He was bright, rather acerbic in nature, had high opinion of himself. Was polygraph operator in early days after World War II. Highly security conscious to point where he would sometimes type own dispatches rather than let secretaries do it….

  It’s strictly speculation on my part, but I think he probably was not suited for managerial role in view his acerbic personality and this probably impeded his career.

  I know nothing of any dispute [he may have had] with Bill Harvey….

  I would guess that using another name when testifying at congressional committee was Jack’s idea of being secure….

  I remember once he bragged to me about what a great operator he was which I thought was a bit heavy.20

  THE INVESTIGATORS

  Of the many official investigations of the Kennedy assassination, the most thorough, the most compelling, and the last was that of the HRSCA, the House Select Committee on Assassinations. In his book about the case, G. Robert Blakey, chief counsel of the committee, says, “We concluded from our investigation that Organized Crime had a hand in the assassination of President Kennedy. We had come to the investigation predisposed to conclude that Organized Crime figures would not have taken the considerable risk entailed in plotting the assassination of the President. The reasoning process that led us to change our minds only becomes explicable when the myth and folklore are put aside.”21

  Expanding on these thoughts, Professor Blakey replied to my direct inquiry as follows:

  [There was] the connection between the Agency and Rosselli, who, as The Plot to Kill the President points out, arguably had inside information on the assassination (shots from the front, not, early on, a major question, that he shared with Anderson).

  Harvey was no fan of JFK and a “cowboy” during the period when he was in our focus…. Even if he were involved, I don’t read it as Agency-sponsored; it would have been on his own, though with his clients.

  I once thought that the Agency was as reasonably candid with us as could be expected, but now there’s recent information [about George Joannides], who … turns out to have headed a Cuban desk in New Orleans at the time of the assassination, a fact not shared with us at the time….

  In short, a conspiracy existed; it was most likely Mob connected; the Agency was connected with at least one possible Mob player, if not a person who had inside information; and your guy was that connection…. The committee staff people who looked into him swear that he was involved.22

  CIA INVOLVEMENT?

  The supposition—what I above call the Lesar Theory—that the CIA was somehow involved in the JFK plot is based on the Agency’s links to anti-Castro groups in Miami, New Orleans, and elsewhere and on the possibility that the Agency was in touch with Oswald.

  Right-wing Cuban exiles in Miami whispered about a momentous event due in mid-November 1963. Some of them were students grouped under the banner of the rabidly anti-Castro Directio Revolutionario Estudiantil de Cuba. If the DRE students knew something, their gossip would have spread through Little Havana like an oil fire on water. According to David Corn, “Shackley’s station did not unearth any significant information in this regard…. Shackley believed that since the CIA did not have primary responsibility for probing Oswald and the assassination; his station only had to collect information ‘in a passive way’ from existing sources…. In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations judged Shackley harshly, without naming him. His station ought to have debriefed thoroughly all its sources.”23 In his autobiography, Shackley dismisses the DRE witho
ut mentioning the Kennedy assassination aspect.

  But the possibility remains that Oswald was in touch, in one way or another, with the CIA, and the murky relationship between Oswald and the Cuban students remains unclear.

  None of these intimations of CIA foreknowledge of the assassination have to do with Harvey directly; he would have seen operational traffic detailing the CIA’s link with the DRE leadership as a matter of routine, up until his ousting from Task Force W in late October 1962. Most of the heat that has built up around DRE surrounds its activity in 1963, at least six months after Harvey was removed from Cuban operations. Still, it is worth pushing the examination a bit farther.

  DAN HARDWAY

  Dan Hardway, was a first-year law school student when he joined HRSCA in July 1977, although he didn’t actually get to work on the case until September. Although Hardway was youthful, he played a role which in later years assumed considerable importance.

  In conversation in 2002, Hardway readily admitted he was gunning for Harvey from the get-go. “What little I could do on Harvey was on my own, and only insofar as I could relate it to what was officially being investigated.

  “I had placed him in the middle of a web of intrigue. Harvey was central to everything that went on…. Harvey was a natural suspect. He had the assassination teams. He was in charge of JMWAVE. I was convinced that Bill Harvey was involved in the assassination.

  “I wanted to investigate Harvey vigorously…. I was determined to prove his complicity in the assassination, if I could.”