Flawed Patriot Page 29

  It must be added that even former CIA/FI officers feel very strongly that David Atlee Phillips, a PP man, was a straight and honest Agency officer. They cannot conceive that Phillips operated outside his charter or was in any way involved in the Kennedy assassination.

  BLAKEY ON THE MOB AND ROSSELLI

  Robert Blakey’s book, written in 1980, dispassionately details the Mafia’s tradition of silence, loyalty, and bloody vengeance if its rules are broken. As Blakey winds down his take on the Mafia, he turns to Rosselli’s role in the assassination.

  Rosselli, according to Jack Anderson, confided in him what he knew about the Kennedy Assassination, on the condition that Anderson not reveal his identity…. The details that Rosselli supplied in their face-to-face meetings, according to Anderson, linked the Mafia directly to The Assassination. It was the work of Cubans connected to Santo Trafficante, according to Rosselli, and Oswald had been recruited as a decoy. Oswald may have fired at the President, but the fatal shot was fired from close range.

  Once Oswald was captured, The Mob arranged to have him killed by Ruby who, Rosselli told Anderson, had not been in on The Assassination itself. (Anderson told us that Rosselli had characterized Ruby as a “punk.”)

  Rosselli said it was also his theory that Castro was behind The Assassination, along with Trafficante. He said he knew that a team had been sent to kill Castro, had been captured and tortured, and he believed Castro may have formed an alliance with Trafficante to kill Kennedy.

  … Certain aspects of Rosselli’s account came tellingly close to what we knew to be the truth…. Rosselli could not have been aware of the fact of a shot from the knoll unless he had inside information, for up until the time of his death in July, 1976, the official view was that all the shots had come from behind. We knew from the acoustics evidence that there was, in fact, a close-range ambush in Dealey Plaza, as Rosselli said there had been…. Rosselli’s report that Kennedy was killed by a close-range ambush, therefore, had the ring of inside information to it, information that could only have originated with the gunman himself….

  Taken together with the fact of the second gunman and the Rosselli account of how Oswald was recruited by Cuban agents of Santo Trafficante, the pattern of Oswald’s Latin associations could be stitched, we believed, into a tapestry that depicted the true nature of the plot.34

  HARVEY’S POSSIBLE PHYSICAL INVOLVEMENT

  While I was looking into the various hints that Harvey was physically involved in the Kennedy assassination, I actually heard a rumor that Bill had been present in Dallas on November 22, 1963. While this rumor is patently absurd, some other potential physical connections to the event are not so easy to dismiss.

  In late winter, early spring 1963, Harvey was coming out of the limbo of his awkward banishment to the outer office of what had been Task Force W in the Langley basement and moving into the office of the chief of the Italian Branch of CIA’s Clandestine Services. We don’t know whether Helms curtailed Harvey’s unlimited travel warrant after he was removed from the Cuban effort. Maybe not. So perhaps Harvey still had the freedom to travel wherever he chose, and in his accustomed style, perhaps he did not bother to tell anyone where he was going or had been. But he probably filed accountings, which might be somewhere in the CIA’s records.

  He might have traveled in the United States. We know of only that one trip to Florida from April 13 to 21, 1963, during which Bill and Johnny went out to sea for a couple of days.

  From July 1, 1963, until April 1966, Harvey was stationed in Rome. He conducted vest-pocket operations, was senior contact to the Italian intelligence and security services, and was involved in the overall stay-behind program, in addition to many other duties. I believe Harvey was also the top American official liaison to the capos of the Mafia in Sicily, even though Henry Woodburn, his chief of operations at the time, denies the contact. I assume that Harvey was also in contact with the Camorra in the Naples area, perhaps indeed with Lucky Luciano, who had helped the United States with arrangements for the Sicily invasion in 1943. Perhaps the key go-between on routine matters was Michael Chinigo, the mysterious figure we examine fully in a later chapter. It is also possible that Harvey was in indirect touch with Rosselli after his arrival in Rome, through Mafia couriers or through some other communications system they had established.

  On November 22, 1963, Harvey was either on the island of Elba, on Sardinia, or in Sicily. I think Mark Wyatt’s story of Harvey returning to the mainland on a stormy night ferry is more plausible than CG Harvey’s recollection, two and a half decades later, that Harvey was actually in Sicily, talking to the Mafia about smuggling drugs to the United States. I accept CG Harvey’s recollection of Harvey’s contact with the Mafia and his hasty return to Rome, but I think that trip (and others) did not take place on the day JFK was killed. Perhaps before.

  No one in the CIA who knew Harvey at his prime believes, or believed, that he possibly could have been involved in the JFK assassination. No one. Not even those who had reason to dislike him. The very idea was and is to this day, among the still-living, anathema to them. It is also hard to imagine that CG Harvey would have so enthusiastically endorsed the concept of this book if she had the slightest inkling that her late husband had been involved in the crime of the century.

  JOE SHIMON, SOUL MATE

  And what about detective inspector Joe Shimon, a member, by his own admission, of Harvey’s tight circle, especially after their respective retirements? Joe’s daughter, Toni, finally got her stepmother to talk, a little bit, about Joe’s relations with Harvey.

  “Harvey used to come over, sometimes with Johnny Rosselli, and they’d sit in the kitchen. Joe was extremely fond of Johnny. It was like he was a soul mate, and that feeling extended to Harvey. Yes, they were soul mates. Joe liked Harvey very much.”

  Shimon would never discuss the JFK assassination with his family. Toni: “It was the only time I saw Dad afraid. He was actually afraid to talk about the Kennedy assassination. That was it. He was afraid of what he knew, and the consequences of it.”35

  Anthony Summers, the British investigative reporter, told me that “Joe Shimon was deeply involved throughout in the aftermath of the JFK killing. Harvey told Shimon … they were great pals … that Jack was killed as a result of a plot steered by Castro…. Harvey was sure Trafficante had JFK killed.” Summers based his statement on the interview he conducted with Shimon on May 7, 1994, when Shimon was in his eighties. His memory seemed clear, but a certain amount of embellishment may have taken place between fact and narration. Some of the conversation is missing, lost when the tape cassette was turned over.

  Shimon: … working under Castro directly, the head man’s name, the way I heard it, the way I understood his name, was Hernandez…. When he went back to Cuba, he disappeared.

  Summers: This is Harvey saying that a Castro agent, Hernandez, was behind the assassination and set up Oswald as a patsy?

  Shimon: Oh, no doubt. He was completely satisfied on that front, I think. Between you and me, Harvey probably caught the ear of somebody on the Committee….

  You couldn’t afford to put Oswald on the stand, or let any public statement be revealed to the American people concerning that assassination to where it concerns the Cubans…. There would have been a hell of a mess in the country. That’s what LBJ was afraid of.

  Shimon skips to the details of Oswald’s shooting by Jack Ruby.

  “All they had to do was contact somebody who had control over Ruby…. Ruby had the access to the [Dallas] police department. His control was Trafficante…. You know [Ruby] was a friend of Trafficante. They were both from Chicago originally. When Trafficante was in jail in Cuba, Ruby was over there visiting him….

  Summers: Did Harvey say what you just said about Ruby?

  Shimon: We discussed that part of it because of the Chicago angle….

  Summers: The main thing that Harvey told you was that Castro’s people set Oswald up?

  Shimon: Harvey was satisfied t
hat this had to be a Castro hit…. I’m talking about after Harvey retired from the CIA, and we used to talk about this at The Madison [Hotel, in Washington] with Johnny…. We discussed it back and forth, all the angles, and it all led back to Trafficante…. He was a double agent.

  Summers: What was Harvey’s basis for saying that Castro’s agents had [killed JFK]?

  Shimon: I don’t know. He had a hell of a lot of information, and he couldn’t tell me where he got it. The fact that he developed the connection between Trafficante and Castro, that Trafficante was the guy who was the double agent … that had to come from a pretty good source of information….

  [Shimon and Summers talk about a story that appeared “in a New York newspaper … about Trafficante being a double agent.”]

  Summers: Who leaked it?

  Shimon: Between you and me, Harvey leaked it…. He wanted to show this, to the world, what this was all about. He knows he couldn’t talk about the case. That was the rule with the CIA, and Harvey was well respected by the boys in the press…. He had a lot of friends in the press.

  Summer: Harvey … actually named an agent … Hernandez? Shimon: … That’s what comes to me now. I don’t know if it’s correct. I remember a Number One guy directing all the activities for a hundred-some-odd Cuban agents working through Florida, and you know that Florida was infiltrated with all of Castro’s guys.”36

  The Summers papers suggest that Jack Anderson submitted a secret report to president-elect George Bush in 1988, alleging that he had more information from Rosselli and Harvey than he had printed two decades earlier. “William Harvey was convinced that Oswald operated as Castro’s agent. He communicated this to his CIA superiors, who had already confirmed this suspicion from ‘independent sources.’”37

  I am inclined to agree with Anderson and also Ed Becker, “if Rosselli knew, Harvey knew.”38 Note that Anderson and Becker come at the riddle of the assassination with widely different knowledge. But then again, the burden of Gus Russo’s evidence weighs heavily against Mafia plotting or involvement.

  TENTATIVE CONCLUSION

  The question of Harvey’s potential culpability in the assassination is not mentioned in any of the CIA or FBI documents that have been released for public scrutiny. If the CIA suspected him, the assumption must be that the Agency is still covering up whatever it knows. It may, indeed, have learned its lesson well and destroyed any lingering paper.

  Soon after the assassination, the CIA came under real as well as imagined pressure. The Agency simply could not afford to have a huge scandal erupt. The Mafia connection was dicey; the DRE connection even more explosive.

  The circle of those who knew about the DRE’s bluster, in 1962, would have included Harvey, but that does not make him guilty of conspiracy.

  I find it very hard to believe that sworn officers of the CIA plotted the death of the president of the United States. I think the Agency’s top echelon knew more than it has admitted and was embarrassed that it had not yielded its knowledge instantly.

  The Rosselli contact is another matter. CIA’s top echelon was extremely suspicious of Harvey beginning in 1967, solely, as far as I can determine, because he refused to cut his ties to Johnny. What, Helms and his immediate subordinates wondered, what the hell was Harvey doing, continuing to pal around with a hoodlum like Rosselli? No doubt J. Edgar Hoover made acerbic back-channel comments to Helms on the same subject. But Bill repeatedly made it clear that he would not end his friendship with Rosselli to suit the tastes of the Agency leadership.

  If we accept the Mafia theory, how could Rosselli be sure Harvey would not tell the CIA, during the planning stage, or thereafter? Was it because Rosselli had turned the tables and achieved the kind of hold over Harvey that a CIA case officer is trained to have over an agent? What was that control factor? Something Bill had done while drinking?

  The Agency apparently still, four decades after the fact, prefers obfuscation to revelation on matters pertaining to the death of JFK. Without the CIA’s cooperation, the case against Harvey as an active or passive conspirator in the assassination of John F. Kennedy must remain moot.

  There’s another possibility, albeit a backhanded one. When the CIA, in the person of Jim Angleton, suspected that Peter Karlow might be a KGB mole in the Agency, based on, at best, a shaky analysis anchored in a suspect defector’s misleading tip, the U.S. government acted ruthlessly. The FBI interrogated Karlow mercilessly, and Peter suffered much—the least of which was humiliation and financial loss (much later, apologetically compensated). If the CIA’s upper echelons had knowledge, or even suspected, that Harvey had information on the JFK assassination, would it not have detained Bill and questioned him exhaustively? (The Agency might not have called in the Bureau on Harvey, for reasons of face if nothing else.)

  No evidence suggests that Bill was even interviewed on the subject. Thus, it may be surmised that Harvey had suspicions and reported them to Helms, meaning that such knowledge, if ever committed to paper, may still be locked away in Agency files. Or, the CIA simply did not feel there was cause to haul Harvey over the coals.

  REBUTTAL: SAM HALPERN

  Sam Halpern, that font of information on the Agency’s dealings with Cuba during the early 1960s, doubts that Bill was in any way involved in the Kennedy assassination. I also asked Halpern about Santo Trafficante. “None of us ever talked about Trafficante…. Everyone knew we weren’t involved with him.”

  Halpern says that Harvey probably did have contact with Dave Phillips. Halpern knew Phillips well, but “Dave Phillips never talked of any contact between Phillips and Harvey.” Phillips does not even mention Harvey by name in his memoir.39 And, as before, other FI officers are quick to praise and defend this particular PP cousin; this praise is in itself remarkable.

  Halpern:

  And you’ll never find any written records because there weren’t any. There’s simply nothing there. For instance, there was not much cable traffic between JMWAVE and Task Force W…. We handled most of it on the phone, double talking our meaning….

  Bill was a very, very senior guy who didn’t encourage inquiries. I doubt even Helms knew where Bill went when he traveled. He didn’t write memoranda for the record. He carried it all in his head. It was a very difficult period. Bill was only head of Task Force W for eleven months….

  I think the suspicions are made up out of whole cloth…. Harvey was never involved in anything [like the JFK Assassination]. If anyone would have known, it would have been Shackley. Maybe he would talk about it. Maybe.

  It was a very strange period.40

  Ted Shackley died without shedding any further light on the matter. During my last conversation with Ted, he had this to say, with tight lips: “My relationship with Bill in the latter years was such that he would have said something about it…. I never had the impression that he knew anything about the JFK assassination. I guess it’s possible, but any specific answer has to be a value judgment…. The speculation that the Mob went after JFK was not substantiated.”41 The phrasing is awkward, stiff, formal, but that’s the way Shackley talked.

  SAM PAPICH SUMMARIZES

  Sam Papich, the long-serving liaison officer from the Bureau to the Agency, summarizes his feelings thus:

  Very early I did make it clear [to CIA] that I couldn’t understand why the Agency ever considered getting involved with Johnny and his tribe…. Bear in mind that Harvey had little or no experience working in the organized crime field while in the Bureau. What he may have learned [was] from research, but … I can say he was entering a completely new atmosphere with Johnny…. In fact I doubt if any of the organizers in the Agency had any background in the organized crime field.

  Don’t forget the Bureau did not participate in any of the [Castro] planning where Johnny and associates were involved. We were never briefed on any part of the planning. I realize it was so handled because of the tight security.

  One could say that because he was green in the OC field, Harvey would have been complet
ely dominated by Johnny. However I do not exclude that H, in his own way, established a relationship which benefited the objectives of the Agency. After all, Johnny did not have any background in the Intelligence field. Also I do not know [how] Johnny, despite a long criminal background, looked at the matter of service to his country.

  What you need is access to H’s reporting…. Did they actually develop a friendship or was it all business-business? I suppose it is unavailable but you would be cooking if you ever get access to Johnny’s appraisal of his association with Harvey.42

  Papich and Halpern both put their fingers on the missing link—operational files, especially those extending from, say, 1960 to Harvey’s retirement in 1967, and the equally fascinating-but-distinct operational files on Rosselli. But, Harvey did not keep files, and the CIA is not about to oblige, even if any files do exist. Since Helms was even more aware of the pain and misery caused the CIA by public investigation, and since his inner circle was totally devoted to him, it is not beyond belief that key documents bearing on the CIA and the assassination of John F. Kennedy no longer exist. And who’s to say there ever were such incriminating papers?

  Finally, Dick Helms spoke some haunting words, when he was still DCI, in April 1971. They sound eerily apt once again, in the first decade of the twenty-first century. “The nation must to a degree take it on faith that we, too, are honorable men, devoted to her service.”

  As Sam Halpern said, it was, indeed, a very strange period.

  11

  ROME: DECLINE AND FALL

  Beginning in late October 1962, when he was summarily relieved of duty as boss of Task Force W and ZRRIFLE, Bill Harvey found himself on a slippery slope—not yet careening, but on his way down. After that demeaning spell in the Langley basement purgatory, he was brought upstairs to the Italian Desk, then Harvey’s road led him to Rome. It was there that Bill’s plunge into the abyss snowballed. Tom Polgar, who had known Bill since the late 1940s, observed, somewhat acerbically, “Helms threw him what many would have considered a life-saving ring by getting him to Rome, but Rome required quiet finesse, tact, and sophistication in dealing with proud foreigners. And in Rome Harvey did not have the kind of branch chiefs who made him look as good as his subordinates made him look in Berlin.”1