Saturday, July 29, 2017

Harvey's Itiniary

HARVEY'S ITINIARY



In his book "The Devil's Chessboard" David Talbot recounts the careers of Allen Dulles and his deputies including Tom Braden, Richard Helms, Cord Meyer, Desmond Fitzgerald and William Harvey. Harvey was described as "America's James Bond." lethally armed and licinsed to kill.

When President Kennedy asked to meet him, William Harvey gave his weapons to the Secret Service agent at the door.

After exposing Kim Philby as a Soviet doubleagent and running the Berlin Tunnel Harvey ran the Cuban Task Force in the basement of CIA Headquarters until he lost that job when he sent a commando team into Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis againt the orders of RFK. Harvey was replaced by Desmond Fitzgerald, though Harvey's official biographer, in Flawed Patriot, says that Fitzgerald was not informed of all of the operations Harvey had started that continued on unimpeded.

Assigned to Rome as chief of the CIA station, Harvey knew Clare Booth Luce as a former Ambassador to Italy, where James Jesus Angleton also served in the OSS during World War II.

After learning from an associate that Harvey traveled to America sometime before the assassination, Talbot sought Harvey's itiniary, and a March 1963 document relates that Harvey received official permission to return home from his post in order to meet with Clare Booth Luce.

Wife of Time Life publisher Henry Luce, and Allen Dulles' mistress, Clare Booth Luce was the keynote speaker at the AFIO conference where Gaeton Fonzi introduced Anthomy Veciana to David Atlee Phillips.

Luce told reporter Vera Glasser that on the night of the assassination she received a phone call from Julio Fernandez, one of her Cuban "boys" who she wrote about and financially supported in their commando raids against Cuba. Fernandez was in New Orleans, and said that he had a tape recording of Lee Oswald the accused assassin of the president and other evidence.

The HSCA investigated but the CIA could not come up with this "Julio Fernandez," and Gaeton Fonzi concluded Luce made up the name.

But there was a Julio Fernandez and he did lead a maritime team at JMWAVE according to US Army Ranger Captain Bradley Ayers, who wrote about his experiences there in two books - "The War that Never Was" and "The Zenith Secret."

While Ayers and former Havana embassy officer Wayne Smith were discredited, possibly intentionally, by their false identificaion of two CIA officials in a film, Ayers was an Army Ranger assigned by General Krulack to the CIA to train anti-Castro Cuban commandos at JMWAVE and he gives us a window into what happened there.

Captain Ayers and Major Roderick were tasked with training the Cubans, and the team Ayers was assigned was led by Julio Fernandez, while the team Roderick trained was supported by a "Colonel Rosselli," who Roderick said was well-connected to mobsters in Vegas and Havana.

As we have seen with Frank Sturgis being under Air Force Intelligence control, and Alpha 66 being monitored and possibly controlled by Army Intelligence, not every operative and operation is under CIA control. And now we know that the officially National Security Council approved JMWAVE commandos were also financially supported by others besides the CIA. So who were they working for - the US government (CIA) or Clare Booth Luce, William Pawley and "Colonel" Rosselli?

While Ayers trained his team in small boat tactics at Pirates Lair in the Everglades, Major Roderick trained "Colonel  Rosselli's sniper team at Point Mary off Key Largo.

As Brad Ayers recalls in The Zenith Secret:

"I was looking forward to having dinner with Rod. I'd been out of circulation at the station for several weeks and was eager to bring myself up to date. Rod had been drinking before he got to the house that night. In fact, he confided, he and the recently arrived Colonel Rosselli were working on plans to ambush Fidel Castro and had been on a weekend binge together. They'd become close friends as they spent time together, their drinking friendship was a natural extension of their on-duty relationship."

"While we ate I discussed my training activities and made a point of bringing up the matter of case officers and their lack of attention to training. I hoped that, through Rod, word would get back to operations. When we finished dinner, I turned up the sterio to cover our conversation as Rod began to tell me about the new things 'in the air" at the station. It seemed that the administrtaion was ready to begin making an even more concerted effort to unseat Castro. The election year 1964 was rapidly approaching, and President Kennedy's Cuban policy critics were putting on the heat. The Special Group had already removed a number of targets from the restricted list, and there were more to go. It was up to the CIA, specifically the Miami station, to plan the new missions, recruit and train exiles, and mount operations to strike the Communist dictator where it really hurt. Other espionage activities were being carried out to coincide with this paramilitary effort, and still and more attempts to eleminate Castro were being devised. Then he dropped it. He told me Rosselli had high level Mafia and Havana connections. I was speechless. The American government collaborating with organized crime? I couldn't believe it. I was anxious to meet this guy."

"With Russian help - including the delivery of a new, faster, better equipped coastal patrol craft - Cuban defenses had been tightened and sophisticated. The last American attempts to penetrate with larger craft such as the Rex and Leda had ended in near disaster. Though Rod didn't know about my trip to Cuba, I was tempted to vounch for that revelation."

There are two independent sources that confirm or coincide with Ayers' JMWAVE stories, including a defense contractor's order to design and develop a fast motor boat for use in Cuba, that eventually got more use in Vietnam. A former Nazi aeronautical engineer was brought in from Project Paperclip to work on the craft design.

Also, among the recently released records in the JFK Collection at the National Archives is a John "Rosselli chronology" file that includes a typewrnitten article by Jack Anderson that describes his exclusive interview with Rosselli immediately after he testified in secret congressional session.

Rosselli told Anderson that he was first recruited into the Cuban project by Robert Mahu in Las Vegas in 1960 during the Eisenhower administration, and his first case officer was "Big Jim" O'Connell. After the Bay of Pigs his case officer was "a man named William Harvey."

At first they tried to poison Castro, but later they planned on using high-powered rifles. There were four attempts in all.

Rosselli wouldn't tell the Congressmen where he lived and shortly there after he was found floating in a 50 gallon oil drum, a cold case murder directly related to the assassination of President Kennedy that remains unsolved. Sam Giancana is another.

Because Captain Ayers was U.S. Army and not an employee of the CIA, he didn't sign a CIA security statement and was not obligated to have his memoirs previewed by the Agency.

Coincidently, or ironically, the first publisher of Ayers' book "The War That Neve Was" the Indiana based Bobbs-Merrell, hired William Harvey as legal counsel after he retired from the CIA, and he proof read the book prior to publication, eleminiting key characters and events.

Bobbs-Merrell also leased officers on the fourth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.

And they also considered publishing some of Peter Dale Scott's early work on the assassination.

To compliment Rosselli's Chronology file, and Ayerss' books, there are a few outstaning records that could shed more light on these matters - including William Harvey's travel itiniary, Clare Booth Luce's Life Magaizine article on Julio Fernandez, Vera Glasser's original article about Luce and her Cuban "boys" and a transcript of her Keynote speech before the AFIO.

A feather for your cap for anyone who can come up with any of those items.






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