Assassination Intrigue Swirls in DC Federal Court
Talbot Seeks William Harvey's CIA and Travel Records
N | April 4, 2017 | Courthouse News
Service
WASHINGTON (CN) – The journalist
behind Salon.com has brought a federal complaint to get records on
the ex-CIA official at the center of congressional investigations into the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
David Talbot, who has claimed in
books and articles that Kennedy’s assassination was a conspiracy, says he asked
the State Department and CIA for travel records and other documents about
William “King” Harvey.
At the CIA, Harvey worked on a
program known as ZRRIFLE that recruited criminals in Europe to help conduct
assassinations for the United States.
“F. Mark Wyatt attended a CIA
meeting with Harvey on Sardinia in Nov. 22, 1963,” the complaint states. “When
news of the Kennedy assassination reached them, Harvey blurted out remarks that
led Wyatt to suspect that Harvey had prior knowledge of the Kennedy
assassination.”
Talbot wanted any photographs that
the CIA had of Wyatt and Harvey. He notes that Harvey worked with Mafia members
to try to take out former Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, but was forced out
of the program in 1962 after he sent “a series of raiding parties into Cuba at
the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
In his 12-page complaint, filed
Friday with a federal judge in Washington, Talbot says the State Department
gave him just 5 full pages of the 10 documents on Wyatt it found.
Talbot says the department took two
years to let him know that it had no responsive records on Harvey.
The CIA meanwhile turned over 419
pages of records, but it denied Talbot a fee waiver reserved for members of the
media.
Talbot says these CIA files also
proved to be highly redacted. He says the agency searched only two departments
for Harvey’s travel records. The agency did turn over a single photo of Harvey.
The complaint includes little detail
about what Talbot hopes to find in the documents, beyond citing articles and
books he has written on the subject, including a November 2015 Salon article
titled “Inside the Plot to Kill JFK: The Secret Story of the CIA and What
Really Happened in Dallas.”
James Lesar, Talbot’s attorney, has
not returned a request for comment. A spokesman for the CIA declined to
comment, citing department policy to not comment on ongoing litigation.
On the same day Talbot filed his
suit, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth tossed out an unrelated suit
about footage of the Kennedy assassination.
While the most-complete film of the
shooting is credited to Abraham Zapruder, a Russian immigrant living in Texas,
the government also studied footage of it on Orville Nix’s home-movie camera.
Lamberth dismissed the suit for lack
of jurisdiction, saying the case belongs in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, not
U.S. District Court.
Nix’s footage captured the Kennedy
motorcade rolling through Dealey Plaza from opposite the grassy knoll.
The FBI and the House Select
Committee on Assassinations used the film to investigate the shooting, but Nix
also sold his footage to UPI for $5,000.
Jackson learned that the House
Select Committee on Assassinations took possession of the original footage in
1978, and that committee was supposed to turn over the film to the National
Archives when it completed its tenure.
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Civil Action No. 17-cv-588
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