William King Harvey
Spartacus
Frank Wisner, the
head of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) asked Harvey to investigate Kim Philby, the British Secret Intelligence
Service (SIS) liaison in Washington.
Harvey reported back in June 1951 that he was convinced that Philby was a KGB spy. As a
result Philby was forced to leave the United States.
Harvey was sent to West Germany where
he worked with Ted
Shackley at the CIA Berlin Station. In 1955 he was commander of
Operation Gold which succeeded in tapping Soviet phone lines via a 500-yard
tunnel into East Berlin. Until it was detected a year later, the tap gave the CIA information
about the military plans of the Soviet Union. It was
only later that it was discovered that George Blake, a MI6 agent in Berlin,
had told the KGB about
the tunnel when it was first built.
Tom Parrott, who worked with Harvey
in Berlin claims that Harvey was "anti-elitist". He disliked and
resented the "Ivy Leaguers in the CIA". According to another agent,
Carleton Swift: "He (Harvey believed that the elite had a guilty
conscience. Guilt was the upper-class pathology. Actually, he was envious as
hell. He wanted to be part of the establishment. He knew he wasn't, so he hated
it."
According to Swift he ruined several people's careers because of
their elite background.
After the Bay of Pigs disaster
President John
F. Kennedy created a committee (SGA) charged with overthrowing
Castro's government. The SGA, chaired by Robert F. Kennedy (Attorney
General), included John
McCone (CIA Director), McGeorge Bundy (National
Security Adviser), Alexis Johnson (State Department), Roswell Gilpatric
(Defence Department), General Lyman Lemnitzer (Joint Chiefs of Staff) and
General Maxwell
Taylor. Although not officially members, Dean Rusk (Secretary
of State) and Robert
S. McNamara (Secretary of Defence) also attending meetings.
At a meeting of this committee at
the White House on 4th November, 1961, it was decided to call this covert
action program for sabotage and subversion against Cuba, Operation Mongoose.
Attorney General Robert
F. Kennedy also decided that General Edward Lansdale (Staff
Member of the President's Committee on Military Assistance) should be placed in
charge of the operation.
On 12th March, 1961, Harvey arranged
for CIA operative, Jim O'Connell, to meet Sam Giancana, Santo Trafficante, Johnny Roselli and Robert Maheu at
the Fontainebleau Hotel. During the meeting O'Connell gave poison pills and
$10,000 to Rosselli to be used against Fidel Castro. As Richard D. Mahoney points
out in his book: Sons and Brothers: "Late one evening, probably March
13, Rosselli passed the poison pills and the money to a small, reddish-haired
Afro-Cuban by the name of Rafael "Macho" Gener in the Boom Boom Room,
a location Giancana thought "stupid." Rosselli's purpose, however,
was not just to assassinate Castro but to set up the Mafia's partner in crime,
the United States government. Accordingly, he was laying a long, bright trail
of evidence that unmistakably implicated the CIA in the Castro plot. This evidence,
whose purpose was blackmail, would prove critical in the CIA's cover-up of the
Kennedy assassination."
Harvey continued to keep in contact
with Johnny
Roselli. According to Richard D. Mahoney:
"On April 8, Rosselli flew to New York to meet with Bill Harvey. A week
later, the two men met again in Miami to discuss the plot in greater detail...
On April 21 he (Harvey) flew from Washington to deliver four poison pills
directly to Rosselli, who got them to Tony Varona and hence to Havana. That
same evening, Harvey and Ted Shackley, the chief of the CIA's south Florida
base, drove a U-Haul truck filled with the requested arms through the rain to a
deserted parking lot in Miami. They got out and handed the keys to
Rosselli."
Some researchers such as Gaeton Fonzi, Larry Hancock, Richard D. Mahoney, Noel Twyman, James Richards and John Simkin believe
that Harvey was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
William Harvey died as a result of
complications from heart surgery in June, 1976.
William K. Harvey, a squat, balding
tank of a man with eyes that bulged because of a thyroid condition... began
assembling a squad of assassins recruited from the ranks of organized criminals
in Europe....
He was a rough man for rough
assignments, a "boom and bang" type. He drank martinis to excess,
packed a .45 wherever he went, and freely resorted to obscenity in all kinds of
company With his aspect of an insolent fat plumber, he was not considered
especially bright among the better born, but the appearance was misleading.
Trained as an attorney, he had a penetrating command of intelligence work, with
ten years experience in the field, and was a former FBI agent who understood
the Hoover method of disguising tracks and disposing of enemies
bureaucratically or otherwise.
The author is a retired engineer,
and approaches his subject with an engineer's thoroughness (although he writes
that he approaches the subject as a prosecutor convinced of conspiracy). After
an obligatory retelling of the events in Dealey Plaza and the political climate
of 1963, an exacting analysis begins. Twyman quite reasonably envisions a power
elite threatened by JFK, and convinced it is powerful enough to both carry out
the assassination and cover it up. A long list of suspects, both groups and
individuals, is gradually narrowed down to just a handful of probable
conspirators...
Harvey has long been considered a
prime suspect in the case. And he certainly comes to mind when reading the
aforementioned chapter, "The Mastermind." In this fascinating
section, Twyman adopts the conspirator's point-of-view to "think through a
plot that conforms to all the known evidence and could have been concocted by a
logical mind." Twyman imagines this mastermind addressing the
assassination's sponsors and outlining a compartmentalized plot that shields
those at the top, and leaves a designated patsy, a supposed lone nut, holding
the bag.
When Twyman finally names his real
villains, we recognize three men whose involvement has been alleged for years:
Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, and H.L. Hunt. The author says they acted from
that oldest of motivations, self-preservation, and that "they had the the
power and the money to make it happen and cover it up." It is amusing, in
a sick sort of way, when Twyman says that Hoover seems to be the one person
involved who had no redeeming qualities. "I have searched the literature
and ... if there was something likable about him I haven't found it."
In most countries there is little or
no provision for change of political power. Therefore the strongman stays in
power until he dies or until he is removed by a coup d'etat - which often means
by assassination...
The CIA has many gadgets in its
arsenal and has spent years training thousands of people how to use them. Some
of these people, working perhaps for purposes and interests other than the CIA's,
use these items to carry out burglaries, assassinations, and other unlawful
activities - with or without the blessing of the CIA.
(5) Christopher Sharrett, Fair Play Magazine, The Assassination of John F. Kennedy as Coup D'Etat (May,
1999)
(6) Peter Wright, Spycatcher (1987)
I was a shade anxious about being
drawn into the Cuban business. Hollis and I had discussed it before I came to
Washington, and he made no secret of his view that the CIA were blundering in
the Caribbean. It was a subject, he felt, to steer clear of if at all possible.
I was worried that if I made suggestions to Angleton and Harvey, I would soon
find them being quoted around Washington by the CIA as the considered British
view of things. It would not take long for word of that to filter back to
Leconfield House, so I made it clear to them that I was talking off the record.
I said that we would try to develop
whatever assets we had down there-alternative political leaders, that kind of
thing.
"I doubt it," I told him,
"the word in London is steer clear of Cuba. Six might have something, but
you'd have to check with them." "How would you handle Castro?"
asked Angleton. "We'd isolate him, turn the people against him ..."
"Would you hit him?"
interrupted Harvey.
I paused to fold my napkin. Waiters
glided silently from table to table. I realized now why Harvey needed to know I
could be trusted.
"We'd certainly have that
capability," I replied, "but I doubt we would use it nowadays."
"Why not?"
"We're not in it anymore, Bill.
We got out a couple of years ago, after Suez."
At the beginning of the Suez Crisis,
M16 developed a plan, through the London Station, to assassinate Nasser using
nerve gas. Eden initially gave his approval to the operation, but later
rescinded it when he got agreement from the French and Israelis to engage in
joint military action. When this course failed, and he was forced to withdraw,
Eden reactivated the assassination option a second time. By this time virtually
all MI6 assets in Egypt had been rounded up by Nasser, and a new operation,
using renegade Egyptian officers, was drawn up, but it failed lamentably,
principally because the cache of weapons which had been hidden on the outskirts
of Cairo was found to be defective.
"Only peripherally," I
answered truthfully, "on the technical side."
Technical Services
officers from the London Station responsible for drawing it up. Dixon, Henry,
and I all attended joint M15/MI6 meetings to discuss technical research for the
intelligence services at Porton Down, the government's chemical and biological
Weapons Research Establishment. The whole area of chemical research was an
active field in the 1950s. I was cooperating with M16 in a joint program to
investigate how far the hallucinatory drug lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)
could be used in interrogations, and extensive trials took place at Porton. I
even volunteered as guinea pig on one occasion. Both M15 and M16 also wanted to
know a lot more about the advanced poisons then being developed at Porton,
though for different reasons. I wanted the antidotes, in case the Russians used
a poison on a defector in Britain, while M16 wanted to use the poisons for
operations abroad.
Henry and Dixon both discussed with
me the use of poisons against Nasser, and asked my advice. Nerve gas obviously
presented the best possibility, since it was easily administered. They told me
that the London Station had an agent in Egypt with limited access to one of Nasser's
headquarters. Their plan was to place canisters of nerve gas inside the
ventilation system, but I pointed out that this would require large quantities
of the gas, and would result in massive loss of life among Nasser's staff. It
was the usual M16 operation-hopelessly unrealistic and it did not remotely
surprise me when Henry told me later that Eden had backed away from the
operation. The chances of its remaining undeniable were even slimmer than they
had been with Buster Crabbe.
Harvey and Angleton questioned me
closely about every part of the Suez Operation.
"They don't freelance,
Bill," I told him. "You could try to pick them up retired, but you'd
have to see Six about that."
Harvey looked irritated, as if I
were being deliberately unhelpful. "Have you thought of approaching
Stephenson?" I asked. "A lot of the old-timers say he ran this kind
of thing in New York during the war. Used some Italian, apparently, when there
was no other way of sorting a German shipping spy. Probably the Mafia, for all
I know ..."
Angleton scribbled in his notebook,
and looked up impassively. "The French!" I said brightly. "Have
you tried them? It's more their type of thing, you know, Algiers, and so
on."
I told him that after the gas
canisters plan fell through, M16 looked at some new weapons. On one occasion I
went down to Porton to see a demonstration of a cigarette packet which had been
modified by the Explosives Research and Development Establishment to fire a
dart tipped with poison.
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