Flawed Patriot Page 28

  At first, Hardway and another investigator were given a secure office at CIA headquarters in Langley. “The deal was we could see any document we wanted, provided we left our notes in that room. They provided us with the unexpurgated documents. We had remarkable access.” This was heady stuff for a law student on a case that had made world headlines. “We had operational action information … operational criteria which didn’t fit into the rules of evidence but, I thought, were enough to make probable cause.”

  Hardway now says, with the skepticism of years of contemplation, “It was an active disinformation operation. [The CIA] moved so fast after the assassination. Must have been planned in advance.”24 Suddenly, the scent he had been following so avidly dissipated when the Agency simply shut down Hardway’s access to documents of the time. He was reassigned to Mexico City to look into CIA links with Oswald there. He spent nine months on that job.

  The key to the sudden shutdown was the CIA liaison officer who had at first been so forthcoming to the young investigators but then stonewalled them. The officer’s name was George Joannides.

  THE STRANGE CASE OF GEORGE JOANNIDES

  The story of George Joannides and his possible involvement in the Kennedy assassination is the result of many years’ work by Jefferson Morley, the Washington Post reporter. More may well be revealed as a result of a federal court case that Morley and Jim Lesar of the Kennedy Assassination Archives are pursuing to force more documents that they now know exist, out of the CIA. Those documents may indicate that Joannides knew of an assassination plot by students of the DRE against John F. Kennedy. Such a sensational revelation will certainly lead to more speculation that Harvey was knowledgeable as well because he was Joannides’s superior, albeit several levels removed.

  Morley provided me with a copy of his exhaustive piece documenting the link between Joannides and the Cuban exile group in New Orleans. It contains much information that was only partially available to Dan Hardway in 1978 and makes bleak reading for anyone who wants to believe there was no CIA involvement in the JFK assassination. The details are complex and are not overly relevant here, but they are part of the Harvey background, and so deserve some attention.25

  Morley credits his knowledge of the link between Joannides and the JFK assassination to Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, which caused a stir when it appeared in 1991 and led to the JFK Assassination Records Act, which “created an independent civilian panel with unique powers to declassify JFK files, even over the objections of federal agencies. Between 1994 and 1998, when its funding ran out, the panel, known as the Assassination Records Review Board, dislodged four million pages of classified documents.”

  The tale began when the HRSCA started to work in 1978. “Officials at the Agency grew concerned. How could they filter the questions? The CIA’s deputy general counsel, Scott Breckinridge [who had been one of the two inspectors to write the 1967 inspector general’s report for Helms], thought Joannides would be just the man to handle requests for records…. ‘He was a good man with a good reputation,’ Breckinridge recalled [in a 1999 interview]. He knew his way around…. He could find things in a hurry.” In July 1978 Joannides came out of retirement to handle liaison with Hardway and other congressional investigators.

  The crux of Morley’s accusation is that Joannides was the CIA case officer on the DRE, which was at one time “the single most popular exile group in Miami…. It had been receiving funding, training and logistical support for its leaders, thanks to a CIA officer named David Atlee Phillips…. The Agency was giving the group’s young leaders $25,000 each month.”

  The DRE students were difficult. Morley quotes Joannides’s predecessor as saying, “they were scarcely less hostile to the President than to Castro.” Ted Shackley wired Washington “that DRE’s attitude toward US policymakers ‘was one of contempt, repeat contempt.’” Yet DRE happily continued to accept the CIA’s subsidies.

  Then DRE got into a publicity flap that went to Helms personally. Morley: “For [DRE case officer], Helms selected up-and-coming political action officer, George Efythron Joannides, who had been transferred to Miami earlier that year, and was working as deputy chief of psychological warfare operations against the Castro government…. ”26

  As CIA case officer on the DRE, Joannides had knowledge of Phillips’s operations in New Orleans in 1963–64. Thus, if Phillips were involved in a JFK assassination plot, Joannides had a personal as well as a professional interest in covering up what really happened. Again, all this transpired after Harvey had been sacked, but it had roots in the time when Bill had been in charge.

  “As [Joannides] worked with congressional investigators [Hardway among them], he betrayed nothing about his own participation in or knowledge of the events of 1963 … nothing to suggest he knew of the DRE’s contacts with Oswald.”

  “‘I worked closely with Joannides,’ says G. Robert Blakey, former general counsel of the HRSCA. ‘None of us knew that he had been a contact agent for the DRE in 1963.’ Another investigator, Gaeton Fonzi, told Morley, ‘We got the run around, from day one, on the DRE.’”

  IN-HOUSE AGENCY REACTION

  The Joannides story is a classic example of the deep schism between the Agency’s FI and PP branches. Yet former FI officers find it extraordinarily difficult to think that their PP cousins could have been involved in such explosive operations as those touched on here or that the icon they worshipped, Dick Helms, was personally and in detail knowledgeable, and indeed authorized some of the activity. FI men to this day cannot believe that PP could have dealt with, even supported, such a flagrant, undisciplined rabble as DRE. Or maybe they just don’t want to believe in yet another conspiracy theory that denigrates the CIA.

  For background, it’s useful to bear in mind that, according to Morley, “in April 1964, Joannides … was transferred to Athens with a job evaluation that praised his performance as ‘exemplary.’” And, “when Ted Shackley became CIA station chief in Saigon, Joannides followed him there and ran covert operations against the Vietcong in 1970 and 1971. He returned to CIA headquarters to work in the General Counsel’s office until he left the Agency in 1976 to start an immigration law practice in Washington, DC.” Joannides was recalled from his law practice to the CIA to deal with the congressional investigators in 1978.

  In the article about his petition to open CIA’s records, Morley says, “Tom Crispell, spokesman for the CIA, insisted that the Agency is ‘absolutely not stonewalling.’ While declining to answer questions about Joannides actions in 1963 and 1978, Crispell said the CIA has made public ‘all known records’ about Joannides that are relevant to the Kennedy Assassination story”27—at least in the CIA’s judgment. Later developments proved this and previous statements were false.

  REBUTTING JEFFERSON MORLEY

  After I first heard of Morley’s work and read his Miami New Times piece, I got in touch with Warren Frank, who was pulled down to Miami to head the FI section of JMWAVE, then was deputy to Herb Natzke in Berlin in the late 1960s, and later was a senior FI officer. Warren replied, “I am sure that there is no factual info connecting Bill H. to the assassination.”28 Warren’s flat denial was symptomatic of the faith Harvey’s subordinates—and not just the Berlin Brotherhood—had in their erstwhile leader.

  Joannides gets mixed marks from CIA/FI officers who knew him. Frank, again: “I knew George Joannides quite well in Miami. I recall that he was definitely there in 1964 when he headed up the publications side of the project. Always a dapper dresser, and I remember that he was always very wrapped up in his writing; not the type to go out and do a lot of street work….

  “I don’t ever recall that he was in New Orleans. There was never an ops base there. Maybe something in Domestic Contacts, which kept changing its name every few years.”

  In a later e-mail, Warren notes, “I found a note I made of a call from a Washington Post reporter on 19 August 1999…. The Post guy reminded me that George was brother-in-law of George Kalaris, longtime Agency hand who rep
laced Angleton as chief of CI [Counterintelligence] Staff and later headed SE [Soviet-East Europe] Division.”29 Both Kalaris and Joannides are now dead.

  Frank checked his recollection with Shackley shortly before Ted’s death. Shackley emphatically denied any connection between Joannides and the JFK assassination. Finally, Frank talked with another former CIA officer, who preferred to remain anonymous.

  Jack said he could not say positively since he was not in chain of command but also thinks Morley account most unlikely. He said he had absolutely never heard anything about George [Joannides] being involved in anything in New Orleans. I noted Morley’s comment that Helms had personally put [Joannides] in charge of DRE group. It is conceivable that Morley has some document which would indicate this, but I doubt it. I doubt that Helms ever knew the names of the various Cuban groups in Miami.

  Frank’s assertion is the reflex action of a long-serving FI officer, steeped in the discipline and tradition of compartmentalization.

  Like all the various and changing groups which we supported at one time or another, there was little direct control over what DRE did, except [their publications]. There is similarity to our support in ’50s of various East German anticommunist groups in Berlin, which you will recall.

  The groups, both in Miami and Berlin, were sizeable, consisted of very active, often zealot types, presumably penetrated by the East Germans, Soviets, or Cubans, so it is almost inconceivable that the Agency would have used DRE for any sensitive activity in the United States or elsewhere for that matter.

  Helms never to my knowledge visited JMWAVE when I was there. Also, Helms was always careful to distance himself from PM [paramilitary] activity, I think both from lack of interest in it and his preoccupation with regular intelligence.

  As you probably know, Helms and Bissell literally did not speak to each other prior to the Bay of Pigs, partly personal, but also because of Helms’s tendency to avoid PM stuff.

  Also, while I guess Helms somehow was technically in the chain of command, we always heard about Harvey [bypassing Helms to confer with McCone], or that Harvey was meeting with Bobby Kennedy. McCone was interested in Cuban activity and he is on record at the time of the missile crisis about his distrust of Castro….

  I only recall Harvey visiting JMWAVE twice, maybe three times. I think he came on very few other occasions to Miami to confer with the Chicago types. Ted drove him on one occasion but did not participate in any discussions which Harvey may have had.30

  CONCLUSIONS: THE DRE CONNECTION

  I suspect the CIA is to this day so embarrassed by its slipshod dealings with DRE that it remains reluctant to confess its laxity, especially because the Agency has again become a target of criticism in the fraught atmosphere of the Iraq War. But sloppy case officering is not enough to link Harvey to the JFK assassination.

  I simply cannot conceive of any reason the PP warriors and David Atlee Phillips, a highly regarded officer, would have collaborated with the DRE students in killing the president. More likely, it seems to me, is the possibility that Joannides heard excited talk in DRE circles in, say, late summer or early autumn 1963 but discounted it as just another wild Cuban fantasy and didn’t report it to higher levels with any degree of emphasis or urgency.

  I wrote Morley, “PP were, basically, such bumblers, I can’t imagine them ever carrying the assassination off, even if they had wanted to. If it had been their caper, you can almost bet someone would have forgotten to give Oswald the ammunition … or it would have been the wrong caliber.

  “Next question: was the Joannides–David Atlee Phillips–Oswald link a cover—a diversion—organized by Trafficante and Rosselli, with, perhaps, some early assistance from Harvey, to attract attention away from the real plot?

  “Possible. But. again the CIA I knew … would never, repeat never, have contemplated assassinating the president.”31

  GUILTY?

  So, does all this prove anything about Harvey’s conjectured participation in, or knowledge of, the plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy?

  The forthright answer is: No. There are filaments in the glow of suspicion that Harvey was somehow connected with the events of November 22, 1963, but those suspicions are based, to a great degree, on people’s reading of the unpolished character of Harvey—which serves to confirm their own dark suspicions that the CIA and the Agency’s Bad Boy were somehow involved.

  To sum up, let’s stipulate that Harvey knew of DRE before Joannides appeared on the scene. Recall that Harvey was a detail man. He worked through, and signed off on, stacks of paper daily. In those stacks were undoubtedly correspondence, maybe project outlines, recruitment proposals, and the like, from the PP side of JMWAVE. Recall that Bill was ultra-security conscious and, with his Berlin experiences in mind, that he would have looked at PP ops sternly for potential security breaches and flap potential.

  DRE started as a Phillips operation but apparently began to use its $25,000 monthly CIA subsidy in ways that made the Agency uncomfortable. The students ran an apparently freelance raid against Cuba on August 25, 1962, at a time when Bill and Johnny were still in close touch and when Rosselli may have been involved in the same type of activity. Ted Shackley acknowledged that he was aware of DRE’s activities; this is perfectly normal. It is possible that Shackley and Harvey earlier discussed DRE, as they did much else, face to face, perhaps even out at sea on a fishing trip, and/or in their many telephone conversations of the period. The two pragmatic old FI hands probably decided to give the DRE operation the rubber-glove treatment—to stay as far away from the students as they possibly could.

  In late 1962, after Harvey had been removed from Cuban operations and a year before JFK was killed, Joannides worked two levels under Shackley at JMWAVE. Shackley’s prejudice against PP would have held, even with Bill out of the picture.

  Joannides did not become the DRE case officer until after the student leadership went public at the time of the October missile crisis, trying to force an American invasion of Cuba. When Joannides took over responsibility for DRE, it was on direct order of Dick Helms, who told the Cubans that Joannides would report out of channels directly to himself. Again, however, this was after Harvey had been removed from the Cuban scene.

  In Little Havana, everyone knew about everyone else’s plots, so it’s highly probable that Johnny Rosselli was aware of the Cuban students in exile. He may have asked Harvey to have someone seine the DRE pool, to look for people for his raiding parties and perhaps to spot students who might be useful as decoys. Too far-fetched? Much surrounding the murder of the president on November 22, 1963, is so strange that all possibilities must be at least aired.

  Every time I raise the question of CIA involvement in the assassination with former CIA officers, the reaction is disbelief, horror, and/or absolute rejection. And in most cases, these are men who look at their former employer with some loyalty but also with skepticism verging on cynicism.

  DAN HARDWAY REDUX

  Let’s return to the recollections of Dan Hardway. After Joannides shut down the House Select Committee team’s access to CIA files in 1978, “we moved back to the HRSCA offices, and started requesting documents, which gave the CIA time to be careful. Previously, they hadn’t had the time to vet the documents.

  “One of the documents was Sheffield Edwards’s debriefing of Johnny Rosselli. It was two inches thick. When I first saw it, whole pages of it were blanked out … not blackened as they usually are. Blanked. We never got that version. When we finally got it, it had been totally retyped.”32

  When I asked the CIA in May 2002 for a copy of the interrogation report under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), I was told that a search of the files had failed to reveal any such document. Perhaps, indeed, by 2003, the interrogation no longer existed.

  Back to Hardway, recalling 1978:

  In my opinion, the Agency was obstructing justice. After three months … we were stymied in trying to prove conspiracy. Then I was assigned to Mexico City.

&n
bsp; If we had had six months more, we would have had enough evidence to go to a grand jury, or to Justice Department prosecutors.

  I wrote a memorandum on Harvey…. He had motive and opportunity … probable cause. The memo was written in [the Select Committee’s] secure room. You couldn’t take anything into or out of the room. Everything stayed there. Bob Blakey saw it, read it…. The memo doesn’t exist any more….

  I proved that Harvey was the pivotal connection….

  The assassination was a Mob hit, but it wasn’t a Mob hit like the ones they had done previously. They used a different MO…. In JFK, they used a patsy, and they used disinformation, both of them techniques they had learned from the Agency…. You have to look at the JFK assassination as an operational plan … and disinformation.

  Phillips was no slouch, a master of disinformation…. He was very, very good at what he did.

  My analysis, based on a lot of material from the FBI, was that a significantly large proportion of the assassination could be traced back to Phillips. But I didn’t have any support….

  [At a session with the Select Committee] Philips admitted he had lied. The chairman, [Rep.] Louis Stokes, called a break for lunch, and that was that.

  By the time we had proof of a conspiracy … the senior staff on the committee was winding up. They weren’t interested…. Said “it could be coincidence.” … They didn’t have time or money to look into it…. I’m not sure I would have found anything … except for the full debriefing of Rosselli by Sheffield Edwards.33

  Somewhere in the more than three hundred thousand pages of documents turned over by the CIA to HRSCA there may be one or more leads that connect Harvey directly to the murder of John F. Kennedy. The papers have not been fully indexed; perhaps they never will be. To put it mildly, the CIA is disinclined to be helpful. And it is increasingly doubtful that the Agency actually did turn over everything in its files on the JFK assassination.