Flawed Patriot Page 37

The conservator, brought up some key questions in a number of gentle interrogations of Marajen at Sorrento, back in Champaign in the fall of 2001, and finally, at Palm Springs, again, in December of the same year: Did Marajen recall ever mentioning to Rosselli that she believed Michael Chinigo wanted to kill her? Did Harvey arrange the killing of Michael Chinigo, whose death she has always insisted was not a suicide?

  “‘Oh, I just can’t remember that!’

  “Marajen turns blank. There are no signals from her eyes, or anything.” The conservator continues, “The idea that Harvey did the job … that was a first-time thought for [Marajen].”

  But, “Marajen sometimes says, ‘They’ll never make me believe he shot himself!’”

  On another occasion, the same man asked Marajen bluntly, “Could Bill Harvey have killed Michael?” Her first reaction was a grimace of distaste. Then, “Oh, I wouldn’t think so. They wouldn’t have known each other.” Which was false, although perhaps not intentionally so. “Rosselli knew Michael, but Harvey and Michael never met.”

  The conservator: “She doesn’t mind talking about Chinigo, but she brushes aside any talk of the possibility of Rosselli being responsible for, or involved in, Michael’s death. She covers it by saying, ‘I can’t imagine Johnny doing anything. He was always such a gentleman. So well dressed!’”

  Why had Marajen not gone to Rome from Champaign when she heard the news of the attack on Michael? Well, it was after she had thrown him and his belongings, physically, out of the Champaign house, and he had subsequently gone to live with “that woman.” Plus, she heard that that woman had gone to Rome to visit him in the hospital.

  When the conservator reported that Marajen Chinigo was slipping away, both mentally and physically, I told him my suspicion that Michael was the CIA contract agent/liaison to the Mafia in Sicily had hardened. He replied, “I’d bet on it. There were so many little things that didn’t add up with him.”

  SUMMARY

  To summarize, the death of Michael Chinigo may have been:

  a) a suicide;

  b) the result of a contract passed from Rosselli to Harvey, ostensibly on behalf of Marajen Chinigo, and then from Harvey on to one or more parties unknown but probably from the European underworld;

  c) because of Sicilian Mafia or Camorra dissatisfaction with Chinigo; or

  d) because of American Mafia dissatisfaction with Chinigo.

  It is possible that the murderer(s) had enough clout to ensure that the Rome police would not inquire too energetically into the circumstances of the attack, which could have been plotted by a Frederick Forsyth or a Ludlum.

  A couple of significant snippets of information came my way from an anonymous source who was friendly with Marajen late in the weaving of the story. The woman says that Mrs. Chinigo “went to see a fortune-teller in Peoria the day before Michael was attacked” and that “Marajen was very agitated during the whole trip!” The fortune-teller told Marajen that something very bad was going to happen to someone very close to her very soon, and “the next night Marajen received a call from Miami that Michael had been shot and died instantly.”

  In general, the idea of Marajen racing to a soothsayer does not seem surprising, but why the about-to-be widow would want supernatural guidance the day before her formerly beloved was to be wasted is intriguing, if only because it sheds some light on Mrs. Chinigo’s state of mind at the time.

  More specific is the report that she was informed of the hit on Michael in a phone call from Miami, which almost certainly would have come from Rosselli. This phone call, if it happened, indicates that Johnny knew about the hit. That in turn somewhat increases the likelihood that Harvey may have been involved, perhaps only as a knowledgeable bystander, perhaps as something more.

  It’s hard not to be suspicious, but there simply isn’t hard evidence to prove that Harvey was involved in the killing of Michael Chinigo. In the final stages of his life, Harvey didn’t have booze to corrupt his judgment. And committing murder would have been totally at odds with his newfound religious convictions, as well as with his lawyerly respect for the law.

  But something very, very strange did happen on that Roman street on the night of August 13–14, 1974.

  Gore Vidal: “Chinigo? It was a typical Camorra killing.”16

  15

  THE CONSCIENCE

  The U.S. Senate’s Church Committee looked into the entire matter of the government’s assassination programs in 1974 and 1975. When Bill Harvey was called to Washington to testify, he told the truth as he saw it, but he did not answer any questions that were not specifically posed to him. When he got his copy of the draft committee report, he made many at-times-biting marginal notes in it. And, in what was probably the final letter of his life, Harvey expressed the rage and frustration of a senior, career intelligence officer at the damage done by a group of politicians reacting to public naiveté and dismay and the lengths to which the president’s brother drove civil servants, trying to wreak vengeance on the man the family hated.

  Bill’s notes in the committee report are the bald comments of a man whose life was devoted to the covert service of his country, as sublime an intelligence-gathering officer as the United States has produced. The notes reflect disappointment, even disgust, with the charades that took place at the Church hearings, as sometimes-worthy intelligence officers, heretofore men of honor, writhed in their suits, feigned loss of memory, sought to protect reputations, or hustled to be seen as protecting secrets vital to the national interest.

  CG Harvey gave Bill’s annotated copy of the Church Committee report to Gus Russo, who used an excerpt as an illustration in Live by the Sword. That CG passed the copy to a non-CIA person seems to indicate that she thought Bill wanted his views published. Russo, in turn, passed the copy of the report along to me.

  HARVEY TESTIFIES

  The Church Committee hearings and other inquiries into the JFK assassination were analogous to the multiple post-9/11 hearings on and around Capitol Hill in the early twenty-first century.

  Harvey’s testimony to the Church Committee was the truth as he saw it. He made an indelible impression on the senators, all of whom showed up on the first day of his testimony to scrutinize the man they considered “America’s James Bond.” Right at the start, Bill put an object on the table in the hearing room and announced it was his recording device. Only after the senators gasped collectively did he chuckle and reveal it was his Zippo lighter. He had established his persona, and he had their attention.

  A prominent member of the committee, Senator Gary Hart, knew the tale of Bill shucking his guns just before entering the Oval Office to meet President Kennedy. “Harvey seemed delighted with the story. Given his appearance, demeanor and especially that distinctive voice and the yellow shooter’s glasses, he seemed everything but 007.

  “We were all struck by the friendship he developed with Rosselli. Highly improbable. But then, everything about our investigation, especially involving Cuba, turned out to be highly improbable.”1

  Sally Harvey says, “He wouldn’t lie under oath … but by then, Bill, physically, was a shell.”

  Sam Halpern: “He answered the questions that were put to him but gave only minimal information…. But he wouldn’t lie under oath.”

  F. A. O. “Fritz” Schwarz Jr., chief counsel to the Church Committee, met Bill outside the hearings to prepare him for testimony. “We didn’t subpoena him. Bill appeared voluntarily.

  “I was surprised when I first saw him. He wasn’t at all what I expected. No James Bond…. He was, well, pear shaped.”

  Schwarz and Harvey got on an easy, first-name basis. “Harvey told me the White House story with relish. Said he only gave up two of his guns, but that he habitually carried a third, too!

  “He was enjoyable to talk to…. A real human being….

  “Harvey was not a cold person…. He was reaching out…. He was very straightforward with us…. He had a sense of humor.

  “Our private sessions helped
refresh his memory…. He was candid…. He never seemed to evade questions….

  “He showed no hostility towards the committee.”

  I said I thought Harvey had kicked the booze for good by the time of the Church Committee. Schwarz countered, “Are you absolutely sure he wasn’t drinking? I’m not.”

  When our conversation moved on to the substance of the committee’s investigation, Fritz Schwarz had an interesting, lawyerly take on his witness. “I got the impression that the Castro operation was never something Bill found at the center of his passion. He was openly contemptuous of those he did not agree with…. I definitely got the flavor … he thought very little of his bosses … especially the political bosses….

  “Bill felt he’d been given a job.”

  Schwarz reflected the layman’s discomfort with the secret world’s doctrine of plausible deniability. “If I ever would be critical of Bill, it would be that he and Helms both had weird views of whom they should and should not tell about the Castro assassination operations. They saw no reason to tell McCone because they had Dulles’s approval, and they thought McCone wouldn’t want to hear about their plans….

  “Everyone was very, very careful not to dump on a person one level above them.”

  And then, an interesting comment from a quintessential New York lawyer. In contrast to Harvey, “people like Bissell, who were my [social] type … were incredibly amoral.” Senator Frank Church of Idaho also commented to Schwarz, “Bissell’s so very Ivy League!”2

  ELUSIVE BILL

  During the hearings Harvey went to some lengths to avoid the scrutiny of the Washington press corps and especially to avoid photographers. Sally Harvey recalls, “He had seen what happened to Johnny Rosselli, whose picture was all over the place, especially on the front page of the Washington Post. The committee guaranteed Bill’s security, but he didn’t believe them. He said he would take his own chances.”

  When he had finished his appearance, Schwarz got Bill out through a side door. Then, with typical ingenuity and a Harvey flourish, he mingled with the swarm of baying reporters and photographers, joining in the cry, “Hey, where’s Harvey…. Where’s Bill?” He surged along with the media frenzy, echoing their cries of frustration, until he slipped away, slid into the taxi CG had waiting for him, and rode off, probably chuckling merrily.

  While testifying, Bill stayed with Anita and Will Potocki, two old Berlin hands, because in their home he could escape media attention. One evening, after a day of being grilled, he was sitting in the living room, watching the evening news. Word came that George Blake, the KGB penetration of MI-6 who had been privy to the Berlin Tunnel, had escaped from the British Wormwood Scrubs Prison. Anita comments, “There may still be a grease spot on the ceiling where he hit it. He just exploded at the news.”3

  Ted Shackley: “When Bill came to Washington to testify for the Church Committee, he didn’t want me to know … didn’t want to get anyone else involved.”4

  Sam Halpern: “I didn’t see him…. We didn’t coordinate our testimony in any way…. I think he meant to teach those guys on the Hill what life is really like.”5

  Bill and CG were in Washington for a week. Sally was under strict orders not to go out of the Indianapolis house. “I mean, I was sixteen. You don’t think I totally obeyed, do you?”6

  Bill had, by now, ample reason for caution, even if he was not in the direct line of fire. On June 19, 1975, a week before he was due to testify to the Church Committee, Sam Giancana was murdered in the fortified basement of his Chicago apartment. The committee quickly scheduled Johnny Rosselli to testify on June 21. With all the skill of his Hollywood and Las Vegas years, Johnny regaled the enthralled senators with remarks such as “We don’t take notes [in my business].” Johnny was called a second time on September 22 and made a third appearance on April 23, 1976.

  Harvey died June 9, 1976. On July 16 Johnny, his sister, and her husband had dinner with Santo Trafficante. On July 27 Rosselli was warned by a Mob-connected lawyer in a phone call from Los Angeles to get out of Miami immediately. On July 28 Rosselli disappeared en route to a golf game. Ten days later his dismembered body was found floating in the oil drum in Dumfoundling Bay.

  THE CIA’S CHURCH COMMITTEE PERFORMANCE

  Bill’s sense of disgust at the events surrounding the Church inquiry was echoed in the letter Jim Angleton wrote Harvey and then repeated to CG Harvey, years after Bill’s death. Angleton and Harvey felt that their years of dedication to the service and to their country; their contributions toward building a tough, resourceful, alert, and nimble intelligence service as part of America’s superpower role in the world had been destroyed, most specifically in the airings of the Church Committee and, especially, in the testimony and revelations of Bill Colby.

  Dick Helms, whose prosecution for misleading Congress was enabled by Colby, and many others whose names did not become as widely known, believed in the practice of intelligence as a necessary bulwark for a nation with international responsibilities. They, and most other professional intelligence officers, felt the Church Committee report revealed far too much about the inner workings of the U.S. government. The final coup de grace came after Harvey’s death, in the gutting of the Agency conducted by the next director of central intelligence (DCI), Adm. Stansfield Turner, who preferred machines to human intelligence gatherers.

  BILL HARVEY’S NOTES ON THE CHURCH COMMITTEE REPORT

  Harvey’s margin notes underline the fact that the CIA had never gained the trust and status once enjoyed by the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6), which allowed it for many decades to be totally professional and wholly apolitical.

  Harvey sat in the wings in Indianapolis during most of the Church Committee’s inquiry. He watched what he could see, read what was available, and waited. His opportunity to amplify his views about the high drama in the CIA in the early 1960s came when he got an advance copy of the committee’s interim report at Thanksgiving 1975.

  Harvey’s often-scathing comments reflect practically every aspect of his personality and his view of the CIA’s hierarchy. They are Bill’s paper trail.

  And he found much to be scathing about. Even in 1975 he was probably still convinced he would have made a better DCI or, at the very least, deputy director of operations, than many, if not all, of the men who occupied or aspired to that chair during his time. But Harvey never would have made DCI, and by about 1960 he knew it. He was too impulsive and too confrontational in the eyes of the silky senior bureaucracy to be a reliable player in the intricate power game that crunches around Washington’s pinnacle. He had shown his recklessness, and his contempt for the structure, during his years in the FBI, again in unmasking Philby, yet again in Berlin—when he recommended the military show of force on June 17, 1953, suggested BOB as the Agency’s worldwide anti-KGB center, and recommended force again in October 1956, at the time of the Hungarian uprising—and finally, in his stewardship of Task Force W. Although Bill was a superb operator, for as long as he was capable, those who played at the top-stakes tables did not respect nor condone his habit of rocking the boat.

  Perhaps Harvey thought of writing a book, although its publication would have been a dire contrast to his decades of covert service. I suspect that Big Bill, who, despite legends and appearance and bellicosity, was actually as close to egoless as any senior person I have ever encountered, wanted his side to be available to someone, somewhere, sometime.

  The penultimate word on Harvey and the committee is Sally Harvey’s. “Bill was not the same after his testimony to the Church Committee. He did what he felt he had to do, although it hurt him terribly to talk. His testimony was blunt, honest, brazen.”

  HARVEYS COMMENTS: “DISNEYLAND EAST”

  Here’s a sampling of the flavor of Bill’s abrasive marginal comments on the Church Committee report:

  On Allen Dulles’s meeting calendar: “Signified nothing. Fearless Fosdick’s calendar was maybe 30% accurate…. Obviously Shef would shield AWD, and prope
rly so.”

  On the question of briefing McCone on ZRRIFLE: “Where was Jake the Fake?”

  About the discussion of Castro’s assassination in the Special Group Augmented in August 1962: “A loose, insecure assemblage…. This was said to McNamara and smilingly related to me by Mac the Knife [McCone] as part of his recounting his protest call to Mc the evening before.”

  About McCone’s personal opposition to assassination as a tool: “I very much doubt this as it here reads…. Pat Carter would not have dared tell McCone…. Also note McCone’s very close relationship with Little Brother.”

  On CIA Security Office figures recontacting Mafia figures: “O’Connell and Edwards should not have been discussing this in 1965.”

  On Helms’s testimony about Mafia involvement in ZRRIFLE: “Re this and other portions of the report, there is a gratifying absence of offloading by the Boy Diplomat.”

  And so the notes go for more than three hundred pages of the committee report.

  16

  INDIANAPOLIS AND DEATH

  Home was the heartland, where it had all begun, for both Bill and CG. Sally Harvey says their house, next door to Bill’s mother, “isn’t a farmhouse, but, oh, the land we have around us! It’s like we have our own private forest with deer, fox, squirrels, hedgehogs, and we’re within the city limits!”1

  It’s hard to imagine Bill in those surroundings in semiretirement, difficult to imagine him kicking the booze, strange to envision him kneeling in church. But he softened late in life, and when he learned to love, his love for CG, for Sally, and for the horses was all encompassing. Still, the only known photograph of Bill, taken a few years before his death, is a telling slice of an instant in time. Instead of the robust, hood-eyed, super-grade intelligence officer, brusque and bustling with self-confidence, the photo is a mug shot of a nearly broken man with the face of a wizened fellow who has been through a private hell. Behind tinted glasses lurk the eyes of someone who knew, though never admitted, ignominy.