14. These documents were also provided to me by Anthony Summers.
15. Both versions of the memo were provided to me by Anthony Summers.
16. This memo was also provided to me by Anthony Summers.
17. QJWIN was run in the late 1950s, at the behest of the then–Bureau of Narcotics, out of the Luxembourg station by Arnold S., the Division D/Second-Story Group case officer. Where QJWIN materialized from is unknown. The drug enforcement people gave him an “excellent” performance rating.
18. Berry, e-mails, June 2001.
19. Stephen J. Rivele, The National Spectator, date unknown (c. 1976, although maybe considerably later), 6. Also, untitled essay by Rivele in Eric Hamburg, ed., Nixon: An Oliver Stone Film (News York: Hyperion, 1995); and Rivele, phone conversation with the author, October 13, 2002.
CHAPTER 9: BILL AND JOHNNY
1. Much of the biographical material on Johnny Rosselli in this chapter is digested from Charles Rappleye and Ed Becker, All American Mafioso: The Johnny Rosselli Story (New York: Doubleday, 1991).
2. Central Intelligence Agency, Report of the Inspector General, U.S. Government: Documents on the Cold War in Berlin, 1946–196? (Washington, DC: CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence, March–May 1967).
3. Sally Harvey, quoting CG, in conversation with the author, March 12, 2001.
4. Rappleye and Becker, All American Mafioso,187 and 211. See also Ted Shackley, Spymaster: My Life in the CIA, with Richard A. Finney (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005), 51–53ff.
5. Robert Maheu, phone conversations with the author, April 2 and 4, 2001.
6. Rappleye and Becker, All American Mafioso, 187.
7. CIA, Report of the Inspector General, 81.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. David C. Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors (New York: Harper & Row, 1980).
11. Ibid.
12. Cecil B. Currey, Edward Lansdale: The Unquiet American (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988).
13. The official version of the Rosselli handover, was covered in a memorandum from the CIA to Bobby Kennedy dated May 22, 1962.
SUBJECT: THE JOHNNY ROSSELLI MATTER:
1. In August 1960 Mr. Richard Bissell approached the then Director of Security, Colonel Sheffield Edwards, to determine if the Office of Security had any assets that may assist in a sensitive mission requiring gangster-type action. The mission target was Fidel Castro.
2…. Maheu was asked to approach Rosselli…. Maheu was to tell Rosselli that he had recently been retained by a client who represented several international business firms which were suffering heavy financial losses in Cuba as a result of Castro’s action…. It was to be made clear to Rosselli that the United States Government was not and should not become aware of this operation….
In May 1962 Mr. William Harvey took over as Rosselli’s case officer and it was not known if he was used officially from that point on.
After a heated discussion between CIA topsiders and RFK, the Agency general counsel wrote, “If you have seen Mr. Kennedy’s eyes get steely and his jaw set and his voice get low and precise, you get a definite feeling of unhappiness.” Still in May 1962 the two top brass assured Kennedy that the plot to kill Castro had been terminated, a statement that one of them knew to be a lie. Sheffield Edwards returned to the CIA from that meeting and wrote a memo for the record stating that “Mr. Harvey called me and indicated he was dropping any plans for the use of Subject [Rosselli] for the future.” The memo “was not true,” Harvey later commented, “and Colonel Edwards knew it was not true.” But then, as General Carter, the Agency’s deputy director once said, “Memorandums for the record have very little validity in fact.” David C. Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 138.
14. Joe Shimon, interview by Anthony Summers, May 7, 1994; and Anthony Summers, phone conversation with the author, January 4, 2002.
15. Toni Shimon, phone conversation with the author, May 2, 2004.
16. CIA, Report of the Inspector General, 1967.
17. Rappleye and Becker, All American Mafioso, 223.
18. Ted Shackley, in conversation with the author, May 21, 2001.
19. David E. and Star Murphy, e-mail to the author, June 8, 2002. Warren Frank, meeting with the author, March 14, 2001.
20. Richard D. Mahoney, Sons and Brothers (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1999), 166–170. Mahoney quotes in part Bradley Earl Ayers, The War That Never Was: An Insider’s Account of CIA Covert Operations Against Cuba (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976). Ayers’s book is impossible to find these days. An interesting coincidence is that it was published by Bobbs-Merrill, for whom Harvey worked in Indianapolis until shortly before his death. I have heard one claim that Harvey actually edited the book, but I cannot confirm the story.
21. Ibid., 170.
22. Ibid., 167.
23. U.S. Senate, Alleged Assassination Plots, 85.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. CIA, Report of the Inspector General, 1967.
27. Rappleye and Becker, All American Mafioso, 293.
28. I asked some former CIA people whether Ken Greer and Scott Breckinridge were old FI hands who had been handed an unenviable job. Dave Murphy responded: “Scott Breckinridge was in the Agency from 1953 to 1979…. He was a very likable chap, very straightforward. He wrote a book, The CIA and the Cold War, about his career.”
29. CIA, Report of the Inspector General, 1967.
30. See Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: The CIA’s Master Spy Hunter (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), for detailed discussion of the Golytsin and Nosenko cases.
CHAPTER 10: BILL HARVEY AND THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY
1. Jim Lesar, director of the Assassination Archives and Research Center, the private group that took over when the publicly funded JFK Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) went out of business in 2000, in conversation with the author, 2002.
2. Gus Russo, author of Live by the Sword and The Outfit, e-mails to the author, December 2005–January 2006. Russo has spent more than thirty years looking into the JFK assassination. In his discussion of that affair, he included the comments I reprint herewith, based upon his investigations into the Chicago Mob, which led to The Outfit. At the end of the quoted segment, Gus writes, “There is much more I could write about the Frank Ragano contentions about Marcello’s alleged involvement, but for starters, see Posner, p. 462–463.” I did not follow that lead, although I knew of Posner’s work, because it did not appear to bear directly on Harvey.
Russo has collaborated with noted German filmmaker Wilfried Huismann to write a documentary on JFK’s assassination, Rendezvous With Death, which premiered on German television in early January 2006.
3. Charles Rappleye and Ed Becker, All American Mafioso: The Johnny Rosselli Story (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 244–248. Also, Ed Becker, phone conversations with the author, 2002 and January 25, 2004.
4. Rappleye and Becker, All American Mafioso.
5. Ibid.
6. Russo, e-mails, December 2005–January 2006.
7. G. Robert Blakey and Richard N. Billings, The Plot to Kill the President (New York: Times Books, 1981), 245.
8. The Outfit, exerpted from Russo, e-mail, December 31, 2005. Fratianno’s quotes are from Ovid DeMaris, The Last Mafioso.
9. Harvey’s copy of Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, 94th Cong., 1st sess., 1975, 295.
10. Ibid.
11. Stephen J. Rivele, Untitled Essay, in Eric Hamburg, ed., Nixon: An Oliver Stone Film (News York: Hyperion, 1995); and Rivele, phone conversation with the author, October 13, 2002.
12. Gus Russo, Live by the Sword: The Secret War Against Castro and the Death of JFK (Baltimore: Bancroft Press, 1998), 304.
13. Mark Wyatt provided me with the information that Harvey flew back to Rome in an official Italian plane, but he omitted t
he details about Bill’s boozy state at the time of the assassination. The “deputy” cited in the Russo quotation is almost undoubtedly Wyatt, who bore Harvey no goodwill for a series of real and imagined slights. Harvey did terminate Wyatt’s tour of duty in Rome abruptly and earned Wyatt’s undying enmity, but not because Wyatt was telling stories about Bill’s condition at the time of the Kennedy assassination. Mark Wyatt, in conversation with the author, March 13, 2001. Wyatt died in June 2006.
14. CG Harvey, in conversation with David E. Murphy, November 15–16, 1993.
15. House Select Committee on Assassinations, Testimony of John Scelso, May 16, 1978, 144ff. This also appears in his testimony: “Helms never forgot my work as a polygraph operator from 1948 on for a few years…. And I was immediately given all your really nutsy cases to go over, and I cracked one of them after another. Helms never forgot this.”
16. Michael Goldsmith, former staff counsel to the HRSCA, Select Committee on Assassinations, phone interview by the author, March 3, 2002.
17. HRSCA, Scelso testimony.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Anonymous, e-mail to the author, February 4, 2003.
21. Blakey and Billings, Plot to Kill the President, 179ff.
22. G. Robert Blakey, e-mail to the author, March 13, 2002.
23. David Corn, Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA’s Crusades (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 107.
24. Dan Hardway, phone conversations with the author, March 19 and 23, 2002.
25. Jeff Morley, “Revelation 1963,” Miami New Times, April 12, 2001. Exerpts are used here with the explicit permission of the author. The lead was, “After nearly four decades, the CIA has been forced to disclose the identity of a Miami agent who may have known too much too early about Lee Harvey Oswald.”
26. Untitled draft article provided by Jefferson Morley.
27. Virtually all the information in this section came from Jeff Morley’s draft and published articles, all of which he provided most graciously over a period of about a year. After the Miami New Times publication in 2001, interest in the subject languished, but Morley persisted with his research. At the time of the fortieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, it began to pay off, first in an article in the Washington Monthly for December 2003, next in a piece in Salon.com, December 17, 2003. The Salon.com piece announced a lawsuit aimed at forcing the Agency to open its files and followed up on a call on the CIA by a group of well-knowns, including Blakey, Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo, and the retired judge who presided over the records review board, to come clean. That petition first appeared in an open letter in the New York Review of Books for December 18, 2003. The CIA’s Tom Crispell’s response was also quoted in that article.
As this is written, Morley continues to investigate. See also “The Lie That Linked CIA to the Kennedy Assassination,” Studies in Intelligence, Fall–Winter 2001, http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/fall_winter_2001/article02.html.
28. Warren Frank, e-mails to the author, May 9, June 4, and October 9, 2002, including his discussions about George Joannides with Ted Shackley and another former JMWAVE officer who preferred to remain anonymous.
29. Warren Frank, e-mail to the author, date unknown (c. February or March 2003).
30. Frank, e-mails, May 9, June 4, and October 9, 2002.
31. Bayard Stockton, e-mail to Jeff Morley, October 30, 2002.
32. Hardway, phone conversations, March 19 and 23, 2002.
33. Ibid.
34. Blakey and Billings, Plot to Kill the President, 386ff.
35. Toni Shimon, phone conversation with the author, March 18, 2002.
36. Joe Shimon, interview by Anthony Summers, May 7, 1994, transcript provided by Anthony Summers; and Anthony Summers, phone conversation with the author, January 4, 2002.
37. Russo, Live by the Sword 445–446.
38. Jack Anderson, phone conversation with the author, February 6, 2002; and Ed Becker, phone conversation with the author, January 25, 2004.
39. David Atlee Phillips, The Night Watch: 25 Years of Peculiar Service (New York: Atheneum, 1977). Phillips not only fails to mention Harvey in his memoir, he also does not mention any operations involving New Orleans. He does write of his time in Mexico City and makes slightly more than passing reference to Lee Harvey Oswald’s appearance there.
40. Sam Halpern, in conversastion with the author, May 23, 2001.
41. Ted Shackley, in conversation with the author, May 21, 2001.
42. Sam Papich, e-mail to the author, July 23, 2002.
CHAPTER 11: ROME
1. Tom Polgar, e-mail to the author, July 13, 2002.
2. David Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 147.
3. Ibid.
4. Peter Karlow, e-mail to the author, March 13, 2002.
5. Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors, 146.
6. “Cold Warriors’ Tales,” Special Report, U.S. News & World Report, October 18, 1999. Wyatt confirmed in a conversation with the author, March 2001, that he had acted as a courier for British intelligence in prewar Germany. Wyatt intimated in the U.S. News report that he had set up the CIA’s stay-behind program in Italy.
7. Mark Wyatt, in conversation with the author, March 2001. After Rome, Wyatt was content with the peace of being number two at the Agency’s training establishment, the Farm. Then he was transferred to Saigon. “I was ordered to go with Shackley.”
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. CG Harvey, videotaped monologue, given at the Indianapolis Lutheran Church, February 22, 1998. Sally’s comments were made during my visit to Indianapolis, March 2001.
11. Henry Woodburn, in conversation with the author, May 20, 2001.
12. Wyatt, conversation, March 2001.
13. House Select Committee on Assassinations, Testimony of John Scelso, May 16, 1978.
14. Sam Halpern, conversation with the author, June 3, 2001.
15. David E. Murphy, e-mail to the author, June 8, 2002.
16. Anonymous, e-mail to the author, July 2002.
17. Joe Wildmuth, comment to an anonymous friend, undated.
18. Murphy, e-mail, June 8, 2002.
19. Anonymous, e-mail, July 2002.
20. Murphy, e-mail, June 8, 2002.
21. Halpern, conversation, June 3, 2001.
CHAPTER 12: THE DOLDRUMS
1. Sam Halpern, in conversation with the author, June 3, 2001.
2. Tom Parrott, phone conversation with the author, December 20, 2005.
3. This and a number of other official documents used in this chapter, bearing on Harvey’s relations with the CIA and the FBI during the late 1960s, before he moved to Indianapolis, were graciously provided me by Anthony Summers, from his voluminous files. He in turn got them using FOIA. Each document is identified and dated in the chapter text.
4. George Bailey, phone conversation with the author, April 11, 2001.
5. Richard W. Montague, letter to the author, March 2, 2004.
6. James Hanrahan, “Soldier, Manager, Leader: An Interview With Former CIA Executive Director Lawrence K. ‘Red’ White,” CSI Intelligencer, Winter 1999–2000, 29–30, http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/winter99-00/art3.html. Red White was a West Pointer, and a career Army officer until he was invalided out of the service in 1945. Thereafter, he became a career CIA administrative officer; he was executive director–comptroller of the CIA from 1965 until his retirement in 1972.
7. Joe Shimon, interview by Anthony Summers, transcript provided by Summers, May 7, 1994.
8. Tom Polgar, e-mail to the author, July 13, 2002.
9. Ted Shackley, in conversation with the author, May 21, 2001.
10. John Barron is the celebrated author of several books on the KGB, including the standard reference work of the 1970s, KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents (New York: Readers Digest Association, 1974), which he wrote while working for Readers’ Digest. John Barron, phone conversations with the author, July 7 and 13, 2003. Harve
y’s contribution to Secret Work is acknowledged on p. 436.
11. Sally Harvey, in conversation with the author, March 9–March 12, 2001.
12. Hazel Shackley, phone conversation with the author, June 18, 2003. Ted Shackley had been working on his book for some time, despite his advancing prostate cancer. Warren Frank, Ted’s deputy and close friend, read an early version of the chapter on Cuba, in which Ted tells at some length how Bill Harvey selected him for the Miami job. “Respectful tone, but as I recall, no real details of his opinion of Bill. Ted tended to be rather short and cryptic in his opinions of people. But Ted and Bill obviously were close. I recall that, after Bill died, CG often was guest of Ted and Hazel in Bethesda.” In an email of February 4, 2003, Warren reported on Ted Shackley’s funeral: “Ambassador Jim Lilley gave very fine eulogy at Ted’s funeral. He mentioned only three of Ted’s associates in the agency, Bill Harvey, Gordon Stewart, and myself. Jim said, Ted, two days before he died, had specifically instructed him to mention only these three names. I feel quite honored to have been included…. Don’t recall old Berlin hands at funeral. There are not very many left.”
CHAPTER 13: BACK HOME IN INDIANA
1. Sally Harvey’s recollections, which appear throughout the chapter, are condensed from our conversations from March 9 to March 12, 2001, in Indianapolis.
2. Dennis Flinn, phone conversation with the author, March 13, 2002.
3. David Martin writes a version of Harvey’s last years in Indianapolis and his appearance in front of the Church Committee in Wilderness of Mirrors (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 218–222. Martin’s take on Bill’s performance at Bobbs-Merrill and his struggles with alcohol are probably more accurate, though tinged with skepticism-verging-on-malice, than those given by CG Harvey, who was, of course, a fierce defender of her husband.
4. Herb Natzke, in conversation with the author, February 11, 2001.
5. The account of Harvey’s conversion, baptism, and relations with the minister is a combination of a letter to me from Pastor Kahlenberg, dated February 2, 2001, and a lengthy conversation I had with Kahlenberg on March 11, 2001, at Sally Harvey’s house in Indianapolis.
Flawed Patriot Page 42