William Harvey

William King Harvey (born September 13, 1915; died June 9, 1976) was a CIA officer who ran the agency's Berlin base during the construction and operation of the Berlin tunnel, supervised the executive action planning program known as ZR/RIFLE, and then commanded the CIA's part of the anti-Castro campaign under Operation Mongoose. Evan Thomas described him as a physically imposing, chronically intemperate operator who represented an aggressive, technically skilled strain of early CIA culture.¹

FBI Service and Early CIA Career

Harvey's father was the most prominent attorney in Danville, Indiana, and his grandfather had founded the local newspaper. While a student at Indiana University law school, Harvey ran for prosecuting attorney of Hendricks County in 1936 as a Democrat in a staunchly Republican county and lost by 880 votes.²

Harvey worked for the FBI from 1940 to 1947.³ On October 23, 1947 the CIA wrote to the FBI's personnel officer that the personnel folder it had requested on Harvey on September 30 had arrived without a transcript of his leave record, and asked for the transcript.⁴ Thomas wrote that J. Edgar Hoover fired Harvey in 1947 after a drunk driving incident.¹ David C. Martin wrote in The Washington Post in 1976 that the incident followed a party, that Harvey had pulled over to the side of the road and gone to sleep, that he arrived at work late, that he was ordered transferred from his supervisor's post to that of a field agent, and that he resigned instead.⁵ In his 1980 account in Playboy, Martin placed the incident in the summer of 1947: Harvey's car stalled in a rainstorm, he slept in it until about ten the next morning, and an FBI summary prepared for Hoover recorded Harvey's statement that he "had about two cans of beer." Hoover approved a memorandum recommending that Special Agent Supervisor William K. Harvey of the Security Division be transferred to Indianapolis on general assignment, and Harvey resigned "with deepest regret."² Martin wrote that Elizabeth Bentley, the courier who reeled off the names of more than 100 people linked to the Soviet underground, would "consume the next two years of his life."²

Harvey was in the Office of Special Operations by March 1949, when a personnel order of March 31, 1949 appointed him to that office's promotion board.⁶ Thomas wrote that Harvey's analysis, presented to the agency's counterintelligence leadership in 1950 and 1951, identified Kim Philby as an agent of the Soviet Union before the extent of Philby's penetration was known, which made Harvey effectively the first American officer to identify Philby correctly.¹ Martin wrote in Playboy that after Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean disappeared in May 1951 the director of central intelligence, Walter Bedell Smith, directed every officer who had known Burgess to write down what he knew, and that Smith forwarded Harvey's memo to MI6 in London with a cover letter stating that Philby was no longer welcome as the British liaison officer in Washington.²

Berlin Base and Operation Gold

Harvey was chief of the Berlin Operating Base from 1952 to 1958.⁷ The project, codenamed PBJOINTLY and known as Operation Gold, rested on Soviet landline targets identified through technical collection. MI6 offered to share a tap from tunnels it had dug in Vienna, and exploratory talks took place in Washington in mid-1951. The Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, approved the terms of reference for formal negotiations with the British in December 1953.⁷

The tunnel was 1,476 feet long, running from a warehouse in the American sector into the Soviet zone of East Germany. Martin wrote that Harvey placed a sign at the point where the tunnel crossed from West into East Berlin, reading "You Are Entering the American Sector," and that Allen Dulles later called the tunnel "one of the most valuable and daring projects ever undertaken."⁵ It was completed on February 28, 1955, and by March 28, 1955 the tap chamber was built and its three target cables exposed.⁷ The discovery came on April 21, 1956, after eleven months and eleven days of operation, and Soviet work crews found the top of the tap chamber at about 0200 hours on April 22.⁷

The CIA's 1967 history gives as the conclusion of a memorandum of August 15, 1956 that the loss of the source "was purely the result of unfortunate circumstances beyond our control," a combination of a cable in very poor physical condition and a long period of unusually heavy rainfall.⁸ The same history states that in April 1956 MI6 discovered that George Blake, a case officer in British service, had been recruited by the Soviets while a prisoner in North Korea in 1952.⁷ The same history says that Blake had told his Soviet contact about the planned tunnel in the latter part of 1953.⁷ Blake was arrested in London in 1961.¹ Thomas wrote that Harvey did not learn Blake's identity until that arrest, and that the penetration embittered him toward British intelligence.¹ Murphy, Kondrashev and Bailey wrote that the KGB let the tunnel run for eleven months to protect Blake, and that the Soviet discovery was staged.⁹ Many theories have been advanced for the Soviet decision to let the tunnel operate for nearly a year.⁷

A memorandum of June 14, 1956 from the Chief, Eastern European Division, transmitted a commendation of Harvey dated June 1, 1956 for his leadership in an operation whose details were withheld from his personnel folder for security reasons, and quoted its statement that "Harvey's display of these attributes was outstanding."¹⁰ The CIA's history of the tunnel lists Harvey among those awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Medal for contributions to the project.⁸ Thomas wrote that the CIA did not publicly acknowledge Harvey's role in Operation Gold until considerably later.¹

In December 1953, while Harvey was at the Berlin base, a CIA memorandum on LSD reported that Germany held none, "although Mr. William Harvey recently expressed interest in the subject."¹¹

Harvey was appointed branch chief in the FI Staff on October 12, 1959.¹² The Inspector General's 1967 report describes him as "Chief of FI/D" when he was briefed in February 1961, by authority of Richard Bissell, on the gambling-syndicate operation.¹³ Thomas placed Harvey at the head of Staff D, the agency's communications intelligence section.¹ Martin wrote that by 1961 Harvey was head of Staff D, "a small agency component responsible for communications intercepts," and that KUTUBE/D was the agency's cryptonym for Staff D.² A dispatch of June 8, 1961 from "Chief, KUTUBE/D" to the Chief of Station in Rome, captioned ZRRIFLE, concerns the tracing in U.S. and Italian files of potential agents for "this KUTUBE/D purpose."¹⁴

ZR/RIFLE and the Executive Action Capability

In early 1961 Richard Bissell assigned Harvey to establish a general capability within the CIA for disabling foreign leaders, with assassination as a last resort. The capability was called Executive Action and was later covered by the cryptonym ZR/RIFLE.¹⁵ Harvey testified that he was "almost certain" he met Joseph Scheider and a CIA recruiting officer on January 25 and 26, 1961 to discuss the capability.¹⁵

His cryptic handwritten notes of those meetings, preserved at the CIA, contain phrases that suggest a discussion of assassination: "last resort beyond last resort and a confession of weakness," "the magic button," and "never mention word assassination." Harvey confirmed this interpretation.¹⁵ Harvey testified that the capability was intended to include assassination. Bissell described ZR/RIFLE as "internal and purely preparatory."¹⁵

A single agent, given the cryptonym QJ/WIN, was placed under Harvey's supervision. Harvey testified that during the whole project "no agent was recruited for the purpose of assassination."¹⁵ The Inspector General's 1967 report, as quoted by the Senate committee, found "no indication in the file that the Executive Action capability of ZR/RIFLE-QJ/WIN was ever used," and said that "after Harvey took over the Castro operation, he ran it as one aspect of ZR/RIFLE."¹⁵

Harvey testified that Bissell had told him that "the White House" had twice urged the creation of such a capability. The Inspector General's report quoted Harvey's notes, which are no longer in existence, as recording Bissell saying, "The White House has twice urged me to create such a capability."¹³¹⁵ The same report states that Harvey fixed the date of his briefing as February 1961 only after reviewing the events before and after it, and that he later said it might have been as early as late January or as late as March 1961.¹³ Bissell said in June 1975 that he had "no reason to believe that Harvey's quote is wrong," but his account changed across his appearances. In July 1975 he said there had been no White House urging for the project, though tacit approval by McGeorge Bundy was probably given after it was established.¹⁵

A memorandum for the record of May 23, 1967 by the Inspector General states that the Director of Central Intelligence returned his copy of the report on May 22, 1967 with instructions to retain it in personal, eyes-only safekeeping, to destroy the one burn copy, and to "Destroy all notes and other source materials originated by those participating in the writing of the report," and records that the burn copy, all notes and all derived source materials were destroyed on May 23, 1967. The memorandum lists memoranda concerning Harvey among the items filed with the report.¹³ The Assassination Records Review Board later reported that Richard Helms had directed the notes and source material for the report to be destroyed, that the CIA searched its Directorate of Operations records for the "operational diaries" a researcher asked about and located no records belonging to Harvey, and that the Board's own inquiries found no diaries.¹⁶

Harvey was the immediate superior of Michael Mulroney when Mulroney was asked in 1960 to go to the Congo. In his affidavit of September 14, 1975 Harvey said he recalled that QJ/WIN might have been sent to an African country other than the Congo, and that he was "almost certain that this was not connected in any way to an assassination mission."¹⁷

Task Force W and Operation Mongoose

Early in 1962 Harvey was appointed chief of Task Force W, the CIA component of the campaign against the government of Cuba.¹⁸ Thomas wrote that Harvey's ZR/RIFLE assets were incorporated into Mongoose planning.¹ A memorandum he sent to John McCone on April 10, 1962 appraised the effectiveness of the Mongoose operational plan.¹⁹ He attended meetings of the Special Group (Augmented) for the CIA. At the May 3, 1962 meeting he reported that three agent teams had been infiltrated and that 72 actual or potential reporting sources were in place.¹⁸

In a memorandum of July 24, 1962 written as the CIA operations officer for Mongoose to supply comments for Edward Lansdale's report on the end of Phase I, Harvey stated that "As of 23 July, 477 CIA staff personnel are devoting full time to this effort."²⁰ On August 6, 1962 he sent Lansdale a memorandum describing a CIA campaign to popularize "Gusano Libre" as the symbol of Cuban resistance, to be announced during the next "Voice of Free Cuba" submarine operation planned for mid-August.²¹ A plan he wrote on August 7, 1962 identifies him as the "CIA Representative for Operation Mongoose." Its mission was "Exert all possible diplomatic, economic, psychological, and other pressures to overthrow the Castro-Communist regime without overt U.S. military commitment."²²

On October 8, 1962, Harvey, as CIA project officer for Mongoose, asked Edward Lansdale to put before the Special Group a request for policy approval to sabotage Cuban-owned vessels "wherever and whenever secure access to them can be attained," normally in non-Bloc ports, as "targets of opportunity."²³

Martin wrote that Lansdale told the Senate committee that John F. Kennedy had remarked to him that he was the American James Bond, that Lansdale suggested the real 007 was Harvey, and that Harvey and Lansdale then waited outside the Oval Office; Harvey testified that the conversation with the President was brief and contained no mention of assassination.⁵ At the August 10, 1962 meeting of the Special Group, Harvey recalled that Robert McNamara had raised the question of assassination, and that "the consensus of the Group was to sweep that particular proposal or suggestion or question or consideration off the record and under the rug as rapidly as possible."²⁴

On August 13, 1962 Lansdale directed Harvey to include an option for the "liquidation of leaders" in a proposed Phase II plan for Mongoose.²⁴ Harvey's memorandum of August 14 to Richard Helms attached Lansdale's memorandum with the words excised, and stated that the Special Group (Augmented) "is not expecting any written comments or study on this point."²⁴ McCone said that McNamara agreed Lansdale's memorandum should be withdrawn.²⁴ Harvey's August 14 memorandum to Helms recorded: "It was the obvious consensus at that meeting, in answer to a comment by Mr. Ed Murrow, that this is not a subject which has been made a matter of official record." McCone's April 14, 1967 memorandum to Helms states that McCone took immediate exception to a suggestion to liquidate top people in the Castro regime, including Castro.²⁵ Walter Elder, McCone's executive assistant, testified that he had personally told Helms of McCone's opposition to assassination after the August 10 meeting.²⁶

Roselli and the Poison Pills

On November 16, 1961, Bissell asked Harvey to take over the gambling-syndicate operation from Sheffield Edwards, and they discussed the "application of ZR/RIFLE program to Cuba."²⁷ Bissell testified that the operation was not reactivated until after he left the agency in February 1962.²⁷

In early April 1962 Harvey, who testified that he was acting on "explicit orders" from Helms, asked Edwards to put him in touch with Johnny Roselli. A 1976 CIA memorandum dates Harvey's taking over as case officer to May 1962.²⁸ Harvey told Roselli to stop dealing with Robert Maheu and Sam Giancana, whom Harvey had decided were "untrustworthy" and "surplus."²⁷

Four poison pills were given to the support chief on April 18, 1962. Harvey arrived in Miami on April 21 and gave them to Roselli, who was already in touch with the same Cuban who had been involved in the pill passage before the Bay of Pigs.²⁷ Harvey procured explosives, detonators, rifles, handguns, radios and boat radar costing about $5,000. Harvey and the chief of the JM/WAVE station rented a truck under an assumed name and delivered the equipment to a parking lot, where the keys were given to Roselli.²⁷

Harvey met Roselli in Miami on September 7 and 11, 1962. Harvey testified that by then he had grave doubts that the operation would take place. In early January 1963 he paid Roselli $2,700 to defray the Cuban's expenses. The second three-man team never left for Cuba, the reason given being that "conditions" in Cuba were not right.²⁷ Harvey ended the operation in mid-February 1963 at a meeting with Roselli in Los Angeles.²⁷

In early 1963 Harvey told his underworld contacts that the CIA was no longer interested in assassinating Castro. The FBI learned of this in June 1963.²⁹

Harvey's operations involving Roselli began in early 1962 and ended in February 1963. Harvey, and to a lesser extent James O'Connell, remained in contact with Roselli from 1964 to about 1970.²⁸

In June 1963, before Harvey went on another assignment, he and Roselli had a farewell dinner. The FBI observed the meeting, and Sam Papich, the FBI liaison with the CIA, told Harvey that Hoover would be informed. Harvey told Helms of the incident, and Helms agreed that McCone need not be briefed unless a call from Hoover was expected.³⁰

The House Select Committee on Assassinations, which described Harvey in June 1963 as "chief of the CIA's Cuban Task Force," found it "unable to accept" the conclusion that the CIA-Mafia plots were irrelevant because they ended in February 1963, and reported that CIA files show Roselli continued to maintain direct contact with Harvey at least until 1967.³¹

In 1967 Roselli was arrested for fraudulent gambling at the Friars Club in Beverly Hills. He asked Harvey, who had left the agency, to represent him. Harvey contacted the agency and suggested that it prevent the prosecution, according to a December 11, 1967 memorandum by Howard Osborn.³²

The Clash with Robert Kennedy and the Missile Crisis

Harvey and Robert Kennedy were openly at odds over Mongoose. Thomas wrote that Harvey regarded Kennedy's micromanagement of the operations as incompetent and dangerous, and that Kennedy regarded Harvey as insubordinate and unreliable.¹ Harvey testified that during the Cuban Missile Crisis he gave an order sending agent teams into Cuba to support any conventional U.S. military operation that might occur. He said that Robert Kennedy "took a great deal of exception" to the order, and that McCone then ordered the agent operations stopped.³³ Walter Elder, McCone's assistant at the time, described the episode as Harvey having "earned another black mark as not being fully under control," and said that Harvey had attempted to get guidance from top officials during the crisis.³³

Martin wrote that Kennedy tied off a series of questions to Harvey with "and I've got 10 minutes to hear the answer," and that when Harvey exceeded his time limit Kennedy walked out and Harvey kept talking.⁵ Martin quoted McCone: "When you take a plant supervisor and make him president of the company, it doesn't always work out," and wrote that Dulles is said to have remarked, "That fellow Harvey is a conspiratorial cop."⁵ Thomas wrote that Robert Kennedy demanded Harvey's removal.¹

Rome and the End of Task Force W

Desmond FitzGerald replaced Harvey as chief of Task Force W in January 1963.³⁴ It is unclear whether Harvey or FitzGerald conceived the plan to present Fidel Castro with a contaminated diving suit.³⁴

Harvey was appointed chief of station at Rome, effective on or about June 30, 1963, to replace Francis I. G. Coleman, who was scheduled to attend the National War College.³⁵ He took up the Rome post before the November 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. Thomas wrote that Robert Kennedy had exiled Harvey to Rome.¹ Martin wrote in The Washington Post that some attributed the appointment to a wish to keep Harvey out of the country and others to the Rome station's need of a shakeup, that Harvey was hospitalized, that Desmond FitzGerald cabled a report to Helms, that Helms ordered Harvey relieved, that an aide sent to carry out the order sat seven hours across from Harvey, who held a loaded revolver in his lap, and that Harvey was then placed in a unit studying countermeasures against electronic surveillance.⁵

Testimony Before the Senate

Harvey testified before the Church Committee in executive session on June 25, 1975 and again on July 11, 1975. He signed an affidavit dated September 14, 1975.²⁷ He told the committee that he had acted on explicit orders from Helms, and that he believed the 1962 assassination activity carried over from the period when Allen Dulles was Director, a belief he based on what Bissell had told him.¹⁸

Harvey said he had not informed the Special Group, or anyone outside the agency, that he had given the poison pills to Roselli. He said he did not brief McCone on the pills because he did not believe it was necessary.¹⁸

Retirement, Death and Aftermath

In April 1967 Harvey was to be transferred from the European Division to the Office of Personnel, where he would be carried in casual status until his final retirement, and his sick leave required a physician's monthly certification.³⁶ By October 30, 1967 he had not yet set a retirement date, and retirement was expected on November 30.³⁷ He retired from the agency in 1967.²⁸

In November 1967, while leaving the agency to practice law, Harvey asked Sam Papich for reputable private investigators. Papich suggested Wackenhut Corporation or the Fidelifax Company, as Howard Osborn recorded in a memorandum of November 8, 1967.³⁸

Roselli died in August 1976. On August 11, 1976 George Bush, then Director of Central Intelligence, wrote that calls to Senators had suggested that the CIA was involved in the murder, and that he had asked Edward Levi to bring the FBI into the case.³⁹

According to the 1976 obituary, Harvey moved to Indianapolis in 1969 after leaving the agency, and was law editor for Bobbs-Merrill at the time of his death.³

Harvey died of a heart attack at an Indianapolis hospital on June 9, 1976, at the age of 60. He was buried at South Cemetery in Danville, Indiana, and was survived by his wife, Clara Grace, a daughter and a son.³ A CIA memorandum of August 9, 1976 gives the same date, "9 June 1976."²⁸ Martin wrote that surgeons had worked four hours to implant an artificial valve and that Harvey died, holding his wife's hand, at ten minutes past two in the afternoon of June 9.² A June 1976 press report named Harvey among ten agents whose identities the Senate committee had disclosed, and said that William Colby had argued that disclosure endangered agents.³ A CIA routing memorandum of June 16, 1976 records that the agency's information on his death came from the press reports.⁴⁰ Martin wrote that Harvey's wife told him reporters were trying to link his death to Roselli's murder, that there had been two attempted break-ins, and that people were "after his papers," to which she said she had "burned everything."⁵

In June 1977 Martin, an Associated Press correspondent, asked a retired agency employee for cooperation with a book about Harvey. The employee was irritated and believed that a retired CIA officer had given Martin his name.⁴¹