Signals Intelligence Pt. 1: New JFK Files Reveal 1963 ZRRIFLE Cover Operation
William Harvey-led covert operation to locate and access a Soviet military cipher machine was generously funded, leaned heavily on Jack Ledford's OSA
The content of one of the most closely held secrets in the JFK assassination records collection was almost all declassified by President Donald Trump in 2025. The secret: CIA officer William King Harvey was running a generously funded, whole-of-government effort in 1963 to capture an extremely rare and complex Soviet military cipher machine.
The operation, revealed in a collection of memos from the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), was the outgrowth of a direction-finding operation that began in the waning days of the Eisenhower administration.
It was those earlier efforts that led then-Deputy Director of Plans Richard Bissell to connect Harvey, chief of Foreign Intelligence and Division D at the time, with Air Force Colonel Jack C. Ledford, an electronic intelligence (ELINT) and weapons development expert, in January 1961. Harvey’s sections worked in tandem with the National Security Agency (NSA) on signals intelligence operations, and Ledford was seconded to the CIA in August 1962. That is when he took the reins of the government’s covert contracting and payments system as the Deputy Director of the Office of Special Activities (OSA).
For more than 60 years, the CIA has sought to hide Ledford’s connection to the CIA’s assassination program. Newly unredacted portions of the PFIAB memos directly link Ledford, the OSA, and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) to Task Force W, the Harvey-led CIA component of the multi-agency regime-change program known as Operation MONGOOSE. This, by extension, linked Ledford to the JFK assassination.
