William King Harvey

William King "Bill" Harvey (September 13, 1915 – June 9, 1976) was an American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer, best known for his role in the terrorism and sabotage campaign against Cuba, known as Operation Mongoose. He was known as "America's James Bond", a tag given to him by Edward Lansdale. the son of Sara King Harvey, an English professor at Indiana State Teachers College in Terre Haute. (where he specialized in German and Soviet counterintelligence) throughout World War II and its immediate aftermath.

In July 1947, he broke a regulation on being available on two-hour call after sleeping late after heavy drinking at a party the night before. He refused the resulting demotion and reassignment to Indianapolis, preferring to resign. He joined the Central Intelligence Agency shortly thereafter.

Central Intelligence Agency

As he plotted to reduce the FBI's overseas powers, Harvey's knowledge of the FBI proved valuable. Along with James Angleton, he became one of the foremost operatives in the secret war against the KGB during the Cold War. According to journalist David Martin, Harvey swiftly gained a reputation for consuming more alcohol than any other person in the United States government; however, no one ever saw him drunk during this period. In 1951, his investigation of the career history of Kim Philby, noting suspicious coincidences which suggested he had long been a Soviet agent, had the CIA demanding that Philby be kept out of his position as MI6 liaison; Philby was fired. Six months earlier, Harvey had got into a fight with Guy Burgess at a party after Burgess had drunkenly drawn a lewd cartoon of Harvey's wife.

From 1952 to 1960, Harvey was posted to West Berlin as the chief of Berlin Operations Base, where he led the operation that built a tunnel to the Soviet sector to spy on their communication channels. This operation was called PBJOINTLY. Harvey became good friends with Roselli, so much so that his daughter took to calling him "Uncle Johnny".

Harvey was also involved in Operation Mongoose, a CIA operation run from Miami that ran various attempts to undermine or overthrow the Cuban Revolution. He was appointed as chief of Task Force W, which Harvey named after a hero of his, William Walker. At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, Harvey sent ten intelligence operatives into Cuba to gather intelligence and prepare for an invasion Harvey thought inevitable. The unauthorized operation tarnished Harvey's reputation. Reportedly Harvey was called into the White House where he lost his temper and told Attorney General Bobby Kennedy that “If you fuckers hadn’t fucked up the Bay of Pigs, we wouldn’t be in this fucking mess!”. The argument ended with Kennedy storming out of the room. CIA director John McCone would say "Harvey has destroyed himself today. His usefulness has ended". Harvey had come to resent Bobby Kennedy, according to a friend he hated him "with a purple passion". He was eventually reassigned to Rome as station chief in 1963 following a punitive administrative post at CIA headquarters, he failed to acclimate to the milieu and was denied a high-profile assignment in the Laotian Civil War by Richard Helms. However, his drinking and health deteriorated, and he was ultimately relieved. In the April 5, 2007, issue of Rolling Stone, Saint John Hunt detailed a number of individuals implicated by his father, including Harvey, Lyndon B. Johnson, Cord Meyer, David Sánchez Morales, David Atlee Phillips, Frank Sturgis, and an assassin he termed "French gunman grassy knoll", who many presume was Lucien Sarti.

The two sons alleged that their father excised the information from his memoirs, "American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond", to avoid possible perjury charges.

Death Harvey died in Indianapolis on June 9, 1976, from a heart attack, at the age of 60. Additionally, after the JFK Records Act was passed in 1992, the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) which was set up in accordance with the act, sought out Harvey's Cuban "operational diaries". It discovered that after the CIA Inspector General report of 1967 on plots to kill Castro, the director of the CIA, Dick Helms, ordered all files on which the report was based to be destroyed. The ARRB believes Harvey's diaries may have been destroyed as a consequence of this order.