Wilderness of Mirrors

by David C. Martin

  In the heat of the moment, Harvey ordered ten more teams dispatched to Cuba, not for sabotage but to be in place with beacons and flares that could light the way if the President ordered a military invasion. The Attorney General learned of the order by accident when “one of the fellows who was going to go … got in touch with me and said … we don’t mind going, but we want to make sure we’re going because you think it’s worthwhile.” Kennedy ordered the missions scrubbed, but Harvey said that three of the teams were beyond recall. “I was furious,” Kennedy later related. “I said, ‘You were dealing with people’s lives … and then you’re going to go off with a half-assed operation such as this.’ ” On whose authority had Harvey dispatched no less than sixty of these brave men into Cuba at a time when the slightest provocation might unleash a nuclear holocaust? Kennedy demanded to know. “[Harvey] said we planned it because the military wanted it done, and I asked the military and they never heard of it.” Kennedy demanded a better explanation and said, “I’ve got two minutes to hear your answer.” Two minutes later Harvey was still talking. Kennedy got up and walked out of the room. That evening when McCone returned to CIA headquarters in Langley, he told Ray Cline, his Deputy Director for Intelligence, “Harvey has destroyed himself today. His usefulness has ended.”

  McCone was furious, not only with Harvey but also with Sherman Kent, head of the Board of National Estimates, which had failed to predict the presence of the missiles in Cuba despite the urgings of “the honeymoon cables.” One at a time, McCone called Harvey and Kent into his office. “I’ve just been made a charter member of the bleeding asshole society,” Kent said afterward, “but Bill Harvey’s the president.” McCone replaced Harvey as head of Task Force W with Desmond FitzGerald, chief of the Agency’s Far East Division. FitzGerald was a man of considerable wealth, sophistication, and charm who sprang from the same Boston Irish roots as the Kennedys. He would be able to deal with the White House as a colleague, not an adversary. To fill the hole left by FitzGerald in the Far East Division, McCone picked an intense, unflappable fellow Catholic named William Colby. FitzGerald descended to the Task Force W vault, and Harvey moved into a nearby cubicle, where he tidied up his papers and waited for the officials on the seventh floor to decide what to do with him.

  There was one loose end still dangling from the Cuba operation that required Harvey’s personal attention. He flew to Los Angeles to advise Rosselli that the plot to kill Castro had been terminated. By now it was nothing more than a formality, since Harvey had long ago given up any hope that the deed would be done. During the months they had shared their little secret, Harvey, the former FBI agent, and Rosselli, the ex-con, had developed a genuine fondness for one another. Harvey saw in Rosselli a man much like himself, a dedicated anti-Communist whose motive in wanting to kill Castro was nothing more complicated than patriotism. Rosselli had never requested a cent for his services, not even money to cover his expenses, although Harvey must have realized that the gangster had maneuvered himself into an excellent position from which to stave off with threats of blackmail any future criminal prosecution by the Justice Department. The two men also shared a hatred for Bobby Kennedy—Rosselli because of the Attorney General’s war on organized crime, Harvey for Kennedy’s meddling with his precious tradecraft.

  Rosselli flew to Washington for a farewell dinner at Harvey’s home. Harvey picked him up at National Airport, where they were placed under surveillance by FBI agents assigned to keep tabs on Rosselli. Not recognizing Harvey but sensing that he was something more than an underworld crony, the agents contacted Sam Papich, the FBI’s liaison with the CIA, reaching him at Angleton’s dinner table. Angleton and Papich immediately identified Harvey from the physical description given by the agents. Papich later told Harvey that his consorting with organized crime would have to be brought to Hoover’s attention, which immediately raised the prospect that it would get back to McCone. That would require some rather complicated explanations to a man who had said he might be excommunicated if he became involved in assassination. Harvey and Helms discussed the wisdom of briefing McCone and again decided against it.

  Figuring out what to do with Harvey had become something of a problem for Helms. Harvey suggested Laos, but Helms gently deflected that idea, citing Harvey’s weight and thyroid problems. The truth was that Harvey would never again be allowed near an operation in which the White House was likely to take an active interest. Helms decided to send him to Rome as station chief. The assignment was stunning in its incongruity. The tough-talking, hard-drinking, gun-toting Harvey would be serving in a post whose chief duties were liaison with the Italian intelligence services. Having offended almost every high-ranking national security official in the Kennedy administration, he would now have a chance to offend almost every high-ranking national security official in the Italian government. “They couldn’t have picked a bigger bull for a better china shop,” one CIA officer snorted. But Harvey had to be got out of the country fast, and Rome was the first available slot for an officer of his rank. The irony cannot have escaped Harvey that it was he, the loyal government servant, and not Rosselli, the Mafioso, who was being deported to Italy.

  “He lost his self-confidence for the first time in his life,” Angleton said of Harvey. Angleton tried to cheer him up by handcrafting a small leather holster for Harvey’s .38 Detective Special. The task force threw a party for him. “It was a tearful kind of thing,” one participant said. Everybody there felt Harvey had been “shafted.” Instead of being relieved of his command, they felt, he should have been decorated for having put together the worldwide intelligence network that had discovered the missiles in time. “We went to great pains to try to buoy him up because he was bitter, very bitter— and hurt,” a member of the task force said. There were mock presentations: a stuffed mongoose (in fact a ferret, since Washington taxidermists did not carry so exotic an item) and a roll of toilet paper with every sheet stamped “PSM” for “Please See Me,” Harvey’s standard way of summoning subordinates. And there were speeches—a satire on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in which Harvey was Caesar, stabbed in the back. When Harvey’s turn came, he picked up the cue. “Brutus was Bobby,” he said.

  No Innocent Explanation

  7

  With the notable exception of Harvey, the CIA emerged from the Cuban missile crisis with its honor restored. MONGOOSE had been a disaster, but the Agency’s intelligence-collection apparatus had spotted the missiles in time, blending human and technical intelligence into an accurate picture of Soviet capabilities that enabled the President to call the Soviet hand. It would be a long time, if ever, before the system worked so well again, for deep within the Agency, in his heavily curtained second-floor office, James Angleton had fallen under the spell of the defector Golitsin, who warned that a KGB mole had penetrated the secret corridors of the CIA. Angleton had as yet been unable to track down Golitsin’s leads, but the strange appearance of three Soviet “walk-ins”—SCOTCH, BOURBON, and Yuri Nosenko—in what seemed like a deliberate KGB scheme to discredit Golitsin, had convinced him that he was on the right path. As the world let out its breath at the news that the Soviet Union had begun to dismantle its nuclear missiles in Cuba, Angleton set off down that path, heading deeper and deeper into the wilderness of mirrors.

  After his initial debriefings, the difficult Golitsin had grown increasingly aloof, refusing to deal with anyone but Angleton or his assistant, Raymond Rocca, and demanding that he be allowed to live in England. The CIA had already gone to the trouble and expense of providing him with a new identity, John Stone, and a $40,000 home in suburban Washington, complete with color television, but Golitsin insisted that he be in England by January of 1963. The Agency procrastinated, but it could hardly hold him against his will, so in March of 1963, after persuading Rocca and a fellow defector named Nicholas Shadrin to watch over his two German shepherds, Golitsin boarded an ocean liner bound for Britain.

  It had been fifteen months since Golitsin knocked on the
door of the CIA station chief in Helsinki. During that time he had caused consternation in the ranks of Western intelligence with his warnings about Soviet spies in virtually every capital of the free world. To test his claim that whole volumes of NATO’s most sensitive documents were available in Moscow, interrogators had shown Golitsin classified NATO files interspersed with a number of bogus papers. All of the papers he claimed to have read in Moscow were authentic NATO documents.

  So far, however, Golitsin’s tantalizing information had produced only limited results. He had directly named only one Soviet penetration agent, Georges Pacques, a deputy press officer at NATO headquarters in Paris. He had aroused suspicions about the possibility of a Soviet penetration of the British Admiralty, but it was not until Nosenko provided additional details to his CIA handlers in Geneva that investigators were able to identify William John Vassall as the culprit. His warnings about Soviet penetration of British intelligence had provided the occasion for the final denouement of the Philby case, but Golitsin had not added one iota of evidence against Philby. Besides, the final unmasking of Philby had little effect on the secret balance of power between Soviet and Western intelligence, since his career as a high-level penetration agent had been brought to an end twelve years before by Harvey’s memo. Compared to Goleniewski’s information, which had led swiftly to the arrests of George Blake, Heinz Felfe, Gordon Lonsdale, and a multitude of accomplices, Golitsin’s contribution had been a modest one. But his contribution had only just begun. In July of 1963 his English idyll was broken by a news report that a high-ranking Soviet defector named “Dolnytsin” was hiding somewhere in Great Britain. The garbled account struck too close for comfort. Stirred from his lair, Golitsin returned to the United States, bearing new and timely warnings of KGB machinations.

  The recent ideological rupture between the two Communist giants, China and the Soviet Union, was a fraud, Golitsin cried, a massive disinformation campaign designed to lull the West into a false sense of security. Beyond his infinite faith in the devious capabilities of the KGB’s Disinformation Directorate, the only evidence Golitsin could produce to support his claim was the identities of certain KGB officers and Soviet scientists who remained in China despite the split. Operatives and experts of that caliber would not stay on in Peking unless the Russians were still in league with the Chinese, Golitsin said. Angleton was persuaded and urged Helms to arrange for Golitsin to meet with a panel of CIA experts on Sino-Soviet affairs. The panel was singularly unimpressed. “He did not adduce anything of a factual nature to support his theory,” one member of the panel said. “He had no evidence that it was a fabricated affair. He simply posited that the split was a fake. He couldn’t conceive of it being anything else…. It was strictly a hypothesis, very forcefully presented…. He got angry and overbearing because we didn’t agree with him…. He shifted the burden of proof to us. We had to prove that it was true. He demanded to see every classified report with true source identification that reported on the split. He proposed to show that all these reports were deceptive…. He wanted to know who the sources were by name so he could discredit them…. We, of course, couldn’t do that.” Angleton was as upset with the panel’s incredulity as Golitsin and harshly reprimanded one member who circulated a report debunking the defector’s claim.

  Golitsin’s message about the Sino-Soviet split was only one of several urgent warnings he brought with him from England. He recalled that the chief of KGB operations in Northern Europe had once told him of a plan to kill the leader of an opposition party in the West. The only opposition leader in Northern Europe to die in the interim had been Hugh Gaitskell, head of Britain’s Labour Party, who had unexpectedly succumbed to a massive infection of the heart, kidney, and lungs. Golitsin was convinced that the KGB had poisoned Gaitskell in order to promote the new leader of the Labour Party, Harold Wilson, who Golitsin said was a Soviet asset.

  Then came the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. For Angleton and the small coterie of American and British intelligence officers privy to Golitsin’s suspicions about Gaitskell’s death, the President’s murder could only have brought visions of a KGB plot of unspeakable malevolence. For Harvey and the even smaller number of officers aware of the CIA’s own plot to kill Fidel Castro, the President’s murder must have appeared as dreadful retribution. There was a wealth of circumstantial evidence linking Lee Harvey Oswald to both the Cuban and Soviet governments. Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 and had taken up the cause of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee when he returned to the United States in 1962 with his Russian wife, Marina. In late September of 1963, less than two months before Kennedy’s murder, Oswald had visited both the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City, ostensibly seeking a visa to return to Moscow by way of Havana. The CIA station in Mexico, through its routine surveillance of Communist embassies, had intercepted a phone call that Oswald made from the Cuban to the Soviet Embassy, demanding in his broken Russian to speak to “Comrade Kostikov” about his visa application, a curious request since his visa application was on file with the Soviet consulate in Washington. Valery Kostikov and his boss, Pavel Yotskov, chief of the embassy’s consular section, who was later overheard to say that he had actually met with Oswald, were both “known officers” of the KGB, a CIA memo reported.

  Immediately after the assassination, headquarters at Langley cabled Mexico City for the names of all contacts of Yotskov and Kostikov. Early on the morning of November 24 the Mexico City station cabled its response. One of the names on the list was Rolando Cubella, a high-ranking Cuban official and confidant of Fidel Castro. Cubella was already known to the CIA as AM/LASH, the prime asset in yet another Agency plot to overthrow Castro, this time under the direction of Desmond FitzGerald, head of the Special Affairs Staff (SAS), successor to Harvey’s Task Force W. The chief of SAS counterintelligence had warned FitzGerald that Cubella’s “bona fides were subject to question,” meaning that AM/LASH might be a double agent sent by Castro.

  At a meeting with his CIA case officer in São Paulo, Brazil, AM/LASH had stated that he wanted American support in attempting an “inside job” against Castro, a reference the case officer took to mean the “execution” of Castro as the first step in a coup. AM/LASH’s bold proposal was cabled to CIA headquarters on September 7, 1963. That evening, Castro walked into a reception at the Brazilian Embassy in Havana and warned a startled reporter that “United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.” Even to those unaware of the eerie coincidence involved in Castro’s choice of the Brazilian Embassy so soon after the meeting in São Paulo, the threat represented what Angleton’s aide Rocca called “a more-than-ordinary attempt to get a message on the record in the United States.”

  FitzGerald, one of the few who knew enough to appreciate the Brazilian coincidence, did not get the message. On October 29 he flew to Paris to assure AM/LASH personally that his efforts had the backing of the President’s brother, Bobby Kennedy. When FitzGerald returned to Washington he authorized the case officer to tell AM/LASH that the rifles, telescopic sights, and explosives he had requested would be provided. Another meeting was set with AM/LASH for November 22. At that meeting, the case officer gave AM/LASH a ball-point pen fitted with a hypodermic needle and suggested it be used with Blackleaf-40, a deadly poison commercially available. A CIA report later noted that “it is likely that at the very moment President Kennedy was shot, a CIA officer was meeting with a Cuban agent … and giving him an assassination device for use against Castro.”

  The implication was inescapable—the AM/LASH operation was known to Castro and had provoked him to order Kennedy’s death. FitzGerald sized up the problem at once and ordered AM/LASH’s case officer not to include any mention of the poison-pen device in his contact report for the November 22 meeting. The operational file on Cubella, which contained the details of the plot, was withheld from the investigators who had turned up h
is name in running down the contacts of the two KGB officers, Yotskov and Kostikov, in Mexico City. None of the information about AM/LASH, or any of the other CIA plots to kill Castro, was turned over to the Warren Commission.

  One month after the assassination, the Agency’s Western Hemisphere Division prepared a report for President Lyndon B. Johnson summarizing the findings to date. Other than his contacts with the Cuban and Soviet embassies, Oswald’s activities during the five days he had spent in Mexico remained largely unknown. Even less was known about his two and a half years in the Soviet Union. Much more work needed to be done before the United States could satisfy itself on the question of foreign involvement in the President’s murder. Late in December, Angleton suggested and Helms agreed that the Counterintelligence Division should take over the investigation for the duration of the Warren Commission’s inquiry.

  Angleton’s timing was exquisite, for a potential solution to the riddle of Oswald’s years in Russia loomed just over the horizon in the person of Yuri Nosenko, who was expected to reemerge from the Soviet Union in January as the KGB security officer with the Soviet delegation to the disarmament talks in Geneva. As a former member of the American Department of the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate, Nosenko was in a perfect position to provide information on Oswald’s stay in the USSR. Angleton was convinced that Nosenko was a disinformation agent dispatched by the KGB in 1962 to sidetrack the CIA’s hunt for the mole. but that did not diminish his value as a potential source of information about Oswald. The lies he told could be as revealing as the truths. On December 19 Nosenko’s case officer, Pete Bagley, who had recently been promoted to chief of counterintelligence for the Soviet Bloc Division, circulated a twelve-page memo on the subject, recommending that if Nosenko recontacted the CIA upon his return to Geneva, he should be regarded as under Soviet control.