TESTIMONY OF MR. HALLEY (ALIAS)
Agency: SSCIA
Originator: SSCIA
Document date: 08/19/1975
Document type: PAPER-TEXTUAL DOCUMENT

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157-10002-10084

Date: 09/30/93

Page: 1

JFK ASSASSINATION SYSTEM

IDENTIFICATION FORM

AGENCY INFORMATION

AGENCY : SSCIA

RECORD NUMBER : 157-10002-10084

RECORDS SERIES :

TRANSCRIPT

AGENCY FILE NUMBER :

DOCUMENT INFORMATION

ORIGINATOR : SSCIA

FROM :

TITLE :

TESTIMONY OF MR. HALLEY (ALIAS)

DATE : 08/19/75

PAGES : 132

SUBJECTS :

ASSASSINATIONS

CASTRO

5412 COMMITTEE

CUBA

CIA

DULLES, ALLEN

JMWAVE STATION

OPERATION MONGOOSE

BISSELL

MCNAMARA, ROBERT

KENNEDY, JOHN F.

KENNEDY, ROBERT F.

303 COMMITTEE

SPECIAL GROUP

40 COMMITTEE

LANSDALE, EDWARD

PARAMILITARY-

CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS

COVERT ACTION

POISON

ROSELLI, JOHN

TRAFFICANTE

GIANCANA, SAM

MAHEU, ROBERT.

ORTA, JUAN

GODOY, ARTURO

[R] - ITEM IS RESTRICTED

HH 50955

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Date: 09/30/93

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JFK ASSASSINATION SYSTEM

IDENTIFICATION FORM

AMLASH-1

HUNT, HOWARL

ZRRIFLE

QUWIN

ALPHA 66

FBI

VARONA

HARVEY

SHACKLEY

DOCUMENT TYPE : PAPER, TEXTUAL DOCUMENT

CLASSIFICATION

RESTRICTIONS: REFERRED

CURRENT STATUS : P

DATE OF LAST REVIEW : 09/30/93

OPENING CRITERIA :

COMMENTS :

Box 245

Folder 5

[R] - ITEM IS RESTRICTED

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matters pertaining to that survey to the team who was then in

charge of the operational activity in Miami. That team was

essentially headed bysMe.

At cox, who has since died.

Mr. Baron.

Was that team the equivalent of IMWAVE station?

MI. Halley. Yes.

COX

was the head, then, of what would

be the equivalent of the JMWAVE Station.

Mr. Baron. Was he the head of JMWAVE until the point when

you replaced him, or until the point you became Chief of the

JMWAVE Station?

Mr. Halley. That is correct. He was the head of that

unit until such time as I replaced him.

Mr. Baron. Were you aware during this survey that you

were conducting of any link between Task Force W and the so-called

Special Group in the White House which was part of the National

Security Council structure and used the project name MONGOOSE

for anti-Cuban operations?

Mr. Halley. My understanding at the time that I conducted

this survey was that there was a three-man group in existence

which was headed by MI. Robert Kennedy that was conducting a

survey to see what kind of activities could be conducted against

Cuba. The other members of that particular group were General

Lansdale and Mr. Helms.

This three-man group had subordinate to it for all practical

purposes the task force unit which was managed by Mr. Harvey.

I an not fanillar, however, with the other terminology that you

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put them into rubber rafts, where they would paddle in or use

a silent outboard motor if the surf was high.

MI. Baron. The people involved in manning those crafts

would not necessarily be employees of the Station directly?

They might be agents, even non-paid agents?

Mr. Halley. No, they were not paid. For instance, they

might work for a particular cover company. In other words, I

am only using this as an example. Let us say we had the ABC

Shipping Company. That shipping company was a subsidiary of

the Station, if you will,and the ABC Shipping Company ran

maybe one ICI and maybe two or three smaller boats which it

could deck load and that company might have fifty or seventy-

five employees, as an example, all Cubans, maybe some of them

was Nicaraguans or Costa Ricans as most of these vessels -- I

would have to go and look at each vessel.

Does that give you a feel for the size of the problem?

Mr. Baron. How many such companies would have baen in

existence at that time, companies operating as CIA proprietaries

or companies in cover and supplying the JMWAVE Station with

personnel or with equipment?

Mr. Halley. We are talking about all of these companies,

they probably

03t 4g

into the hundredda! I distinguish between

companies that ware set up simply to provide cover as opposed

to companies that were proprietaries. You know, these terms

mean different things to me. The nature of the Agency's

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involvement in each is different. I am having a little

trouble -

Mr. Baron. Could you explain what different categories of

companies you were receiving help from at that point, and about

how many of each there might have been?

Mr. Halley. I do not think I could. do that. We are

talking about hendredsko companies that we used during that

period of time. Some of them might simply have been a company

set up and registered and run out of some attorney's

office. It simply provided back stopping for the ownership of

the small boat.

Everything has to be owned by somebody, it has to have a

Coast Guard registration, you know, things like that. Even if

I had access to the files to answer your question, it would

take me weeks to pull all that together to give you an answer.

I don't think there is an overview statement.

MI. Baron. Would it be fair to say, that you had coopera-

tion on a grand scale from all kinds of people in private

enterprise.in the Miami area, or in Southern Florida?

Mr. Halley. I think it would be fair to say that we had

extensive cooperation.- I do not like your word "grand" -- that

we had extensive cooperation from the civilian sector in

Florida, in the state of Florida, to facilitate the conduct of

this clandestine mission.

Mr. Baron. Did you also have extensive cooperation from

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Phone (Area 202) 544-60

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Mt. Baron. Back to the structure of the relationships

between yourself as Chief of Station at JMWAVE and any operatives

or employees who worked underneath you at that Station, would

it be fair to say that any activities run out of the Station

ultimately were channeled out through you?

Mr. Halley. They should have been, and they were -- you

know this Station went through several mutations in organization

during its existence. I guess the organizational structure that

existed for the longest period of time was something like I am

going to describe to you.

There was a Chief of Station, which was myself. I had a

Deputy Chief of Station for operations.

That is the gentleman

who is now retired, I think he is still alive, by the name of

Moore, Robert Moose,

I had a second Deputy Chief of Station and

he was for Support Patterns. That is a gentleman who is also

retired,

Mro Corrise

Then the rest of the Station was organized into a number of

branches. Each branch was organized along functional lines.

Let me give you an example. There was a Foreign Intelligence

Branch. These were people in, what in my terminology would be

classical foreign intelligence operations. That is, trying to

recruit a Cuban diplomat abroad, as an example, dealing with,

you know, a Uruguayan diplomat in the Uruguayan Embassy in

Havana. They are working with resident agents in Cuba who might

live in some city like Havana and have a legal job as a baker or

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So they had agents in cuba that were reporting foreign

intelligence to them so they had collection assets that were

reporting to them along the same lines that we did. They did

work at a downstream point when FitzGerald came in with a

couple of groups - in other words, they had contact with

Artime.

I had no contact with the Artime group as a general

rule. They also had contact with Manolo Ray which I did not

have contact with. So they were working with these kinds of

larger exile groups.

The Task Force also specialized in much more economic

activity than I did. That is a question of looking at such

things as

negland bus expose tion creat britain. to Cuba,

Mr. Baron. In terms of paramilitary operations, if an

assassination operation had been run by Task Force W, would

You have assumed as Chief of Station in Miami you would have

been aware of such an operation?

Mr. Halley. No, I do not assume that.

Mr. Baron. Would it not have been sound managerial

practice to let you know that there was an operation that might

have been run through Florida into Cuba?

Mr. Hallay. No.

You know, the Agency is a highly compartmented mechanism.

You know, let us dispel one thing very promptly here. If you

are asking me was I aware of all these contacts, you know, with

the Mafia

-- and I think I can tell you

frankly at that time I

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attempt against Castro.

Mr. Halley. I certainly was not aware of that at the

time,

as I recall from, you know, looking at the files in the

'72-'73 period, seeing any evidence of that in the file at the

time.

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Mr. Baron. There are

fourteen folders in the AMLASH file.

Did you read all of those files?

Mr. Halley. No, I did not.

Mr. Baron. How did you gather your impression that that

was in the AMLASH files?

Mr. Halley. I think I may have read one or two volumes

of

whatever my question was at the time, because these cases

Keep coming up. You know, there must have been some inquiry

at

the time that necessitated my looking at the folder or

discussing it with my staff and so on.

Mr. Baron. As far as you knew, what was the objective of

the contact with Artime?

Mr. Halley. You mean the CIA contact with Artime?

MI. Baron. Yes.

Mr. Halley. As a concept, the Artime thing was looked at

as another track, an approach to the overall Cuban problem to

see if they could sort of do it on their own. If they could

simply be given, you know, & number of dollars, some equipment,

some guidance, and give them an opportunity to find a Cuban

solution to what was a Cuban problem. That was also, you know,

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money. I was opposed to it at the time.

And once it was set

up, and I did what I was supposed to do, which was to train

Artime and contribute to his training, I then did not pay an

awful lot of attention to the thing except what I picked up,

you know, over the years, and again in the '72-'73 period,

and talked to officers who had, you know, more intimate knowledge

Of it and got an appraisal of it as to what they thought had

occurrad.

MI. Baron. Had you heard at any point that Artime was

supplied weapons for the specific purpose of assassinating

Castro?

Mr. Halley. No, not for the specific purpose of assassina-

ting Castro.

Mr. Baron. Was it your general impression that AMLASH-1

was a reliable agent?

Mr. Halley. I really do not know that much about him,

you know. This was an operation that was run at that time out

of Washington and, you know, my knowledge was as I described it

to

you, the conversations with FitzGerald, Madrid: newspaper

articles, so forth, in that particular timeframe.

Mr. Baron. Did the CIA to your knowledge use any gambling

Syndicate contacts inside Cuba or people outside Cuba who were

connected to gambling interests inside Cuba for any operational

purpose including the intelligence gathering?

Mr. Halley. The only case that I recall is this case that

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years I have seen literally --

(Discussion off the record.)

Mr. Halley. Let me go back. You asked me about ZRRIFLE.

This is one of a thousand or hundreds of cryptonyms. Every day

I read, you know, hundreds of pages of traffic, so when you ask

me do I know what ZRRIFLE is, I must answer you off the top of

my head no. I have tried to be helpful. I have asked you

several times if you could give me a steering tip or show me

what direction you are going, I might be able to try to comment

on

it, but ZRRIFLE as such means nothing. to me. You really

could not expect that it would, given the thousands of these

things that come across my desk.

Mr. Baron. That is absolutely understandable. I want to

try to see what happens in the way of getting an unrefreshed

recollection from you, then I will go back over these two,

especially the next one, QJWIN. Do you recall a CIA asset who

went by the cryptonym QJWIN?

Mr. Halley. No, I do not. Krowing the system, and so

forth, normally it would have something to do with Spat

It

does not ring any bells with me. That is all I can give you,

a sort of Pavlovian response. You flash QJWIN on the screen,

I am telling you now I do not know, but it probably has

something to do witho

MI. Baron. Were you aware that a project involving the

development of a capability of carrying on assassination was

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Mr. diGenova. Were there any restrictions, once, for

example, those weapons caches were delivered either by land or

air - and we have spoken to

Mussay who was in the Havana

Station, for example, for awhile and Arthur Avignon who

was head of the Havana Station for awhile who indicated that

they were aware of the weapons drops and were intimately

familiar with where they would be.

Mr. Halley. That was all before my time. I have no

knowledge of that. During my time, we made no drops by air.

MI. diGenova. Were there any limitations that were

placed of how the weapons would be used that were delivered into

Cuba to these internal resistance groups?

MI. Halley. I cannot speak to this period that you are

addressing.

Mr. diGenova. During your period.

Mr. Halley. During my period, the weapons were issued

essentially as self-protection for the people who were living

in the bush. Secondly, to be used in a military operation at

such time as we got the whole package together. Thirdly, they

were to be used for self-protection if they conducted raids,

ambushes, sabotage operations.

Mr. Baron. There is one further guote from Martinez in

this article that I would lika to ask you to comment on.

He is quoted as saying: "I took a lot of weapons to Cuba, some

of them were very special weapons for special purposes. They

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Mr. Baron.

Are you aware of the dalot program?

Mr. Halley.

Yes, I am.

MI. Baron.

How was that spelled?

- -

Mr. Halley.

'....a"

Mr. Baron.

What was that program?

Mr. Halley. That was a program involving a Cuban emigre

group that was used as an operational support mechanism to

support the Miami Station.

Mr. Baron.

What kind of support did they provide?

MI. Halley. They were interviewers of refugees who came

out of Cuba. They provided translator personnel to translate

the Spanish language publications that were of interest to us.

They provided information on the various' mainstream activities

that were going on in the Cuban exile community.

Mr. Baron.. Did they provide support for paramilitary

operations against Cuba?

Mr. Halley. They might have identified people whom they

thought we should interviaw or look to or see if they would

fit into other paramilitary programs. In other words, they

had the contacts in the Cuban community. Say we had a require-

ment for a diesel engineer. We would say to the Alog organiza-

tion, we would say we are looking for a Cuban who is a diesel

engineer who has a first engine's license, and they would go

through all of their contacts until they would come up with

one, a week or ten days or whatever, having identified' :

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the

fellow, where he was, what he was doing. We would then

send somebody around to talk to him independent of them and

pick him up to work for us in our maritime activities.

It was that kind of operational support.

Mr. Baron. People who were part of this program were

not used as paramilitary operatives, at least insofar as they

operated under the aegis of this program. There were some of

them who may have been in the paramilitary program and then

laft it and were subsequently picked up

, the tann

organiza

tion.

tape. 7

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Could we go off the record for a moment?

(Discussion off the record.)

Mr. Halley. We are now back on the record.

The aMore

also worked with us on a common project, which

was monitoring Cuban saval tratfied things like that, so they

were used across the board for operational support tasks.

MI. Baron. One more general question.

Did the JMWAVE Station have an operational relationship

with the FBI?

Mr. Halley. I would not --

Mr. Baron. Was the FBI involved in supporting your

activities in any way?

Mr. Halley. I would rather phrase that in my language,

becausa I think --

Mr. Baron. Go right ahead.

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