From the New JFK Files: Bill Harvey’s Secret Helper at the FAA
Description
Days before a secret trip to Florida in early April 1963, CIA officer William K. Harvey was in a jam.
Harvey, the portly, gun-toting operative in charge of the Agency’s ZRRIFLE assassination (“executive action”) program decided to break one of his main rules: “No other agencies.”
Harvey had stressed the point in explaining his assassination operations in closed door testimony to Senate investigators in 1975. But in April 1963 he made an exception.
A newly unredacted JFK file suggests that when Harvey wanted a credential from the Federal Aviation Agency (as the FAA was then known), he asked Nicholas Zubon, a CIA officer whom he knew from Cuba operations, to make an unusual request to the FAA: to vouch for a fake FAA credential for Harvey dating back to January 1963, “in accordance with existing arrangements.”
The request, obviously sensitive since the CIA would keep it secret for the next six decades, had to be handled at the highest levels of the FAA, then headed by Najeeb Halaby, a former Navy pilot and Defense Department official, appointed by Kennedy in 1961.
Zubon addressed the request to one “Charles F. Niles” at the FAA.
United States
