Another Test for Biden's JFK Order
The CIA is concealing long-secret testimony of its assassination chief
As noted in yesterday’s post about C.G. Harvey, widow of the chief of the CIA’s assassination program in 1963, Bill Harvey’s testimony to Senate investigators is still heavily redacted. Behind closed doors, Harvey explained how he organized assassination operations in considerable detail. Many of those details are still hidden from public view 47 years later.
Last year, an impatient President Biden ordered federal agencies to practice “maximum” disclosure of assassination-related records by December 15, 2022.
Will the CIA fully declassify Harvey’s testimony this year? I doubt it. There is one passage that strikes me as pregnant with damning possibilities for the agency.
Look at page 6 of Harvey’s testimony, available at the web site of the Mary Ferrell Foundation. Harvey explained that first principle of assassination operations was:
“Maximum security + within Kubark [CIA] only. (eg. how much does [one or two word redaction] now know?)”
If that redaction covers the words “White House” or “president,” that will be big news. The agency has always claimed it had presidential authorization for its assassination operations. (The redaction might also cover the word “State,” referring to the State Department, which would not be news.)
In his discussion of “cover” Harvey said “planning should include for provision of blaming Sov[iet]s or Czechs in case of blow,” meaning if the cover of a recruited assassin was blown, the CIA planned to blame communists for the CIA’s actions.
Another three lines related to “cover” and blaming communists are redacted in their entirety.
The agency is loathe to give up its “sources and methods,” especially when they relate, even tangentially, to Kennedy’s assassination. And Harvey’s techniques are especially nasty. What the CIA is hiding recalls Operations Northwoods where the Joint Chiefs of Staff (with CIA assistance) planned false flag operations in which “trusted” U.S. operatives would stage a spectacular attack in the United States and blame it on Cuba.
When fully declassified, Harvey’s testimony will shed new light on the events of November 1963 when there was spectacular attack in the United States that immediately was blamed on a communist.
This ten-page document is a simple stark test of whether the CIA intends to obey the JFK Records Act, which mandated release of all assassination files by October 2017.
If Biden can’t get this document into the public record 80 days from now—five years after the legal deadline for full disclosure—his order on JFK files will be denounced as a failure and a continuation of the CIA’s cover-up.
E. Howard Hunt, before his death, told his son, St. John Hunt, that he was aware of plans by certain CIA operatives to assassinate the president in 1963. He said he declined to participate, not because he liked JFK (he loathed him), but because he refused to take part in any operation involving Bill Harvey, whom he called a raging alcoholic.