Flawed Patriot Page 13

  FALLOUT

  The Soviets invited Western correspondents to view America’s shameful perfidy, expecting they would reap a huge propaganda coup from the discovery of the tunnel. Instead, much to Harvey’s delight, the New York Times, Washington Post, and almost all the American media lauded the operation. For once, the Agency was given credit for doing something right. And, symbolically, this victory in the East-West propaganda war came not as the result of covert efforts but because of slogging, determined, undramatic foreign intelligence stick-to-it-iveness. Somewhat later came the sour-grapes argument, advanced mostly by KGB mouthpieces in the West, that the Berlin Tunnel had really been no big deal because George Blake had betrayed it at its inception to Soviet intelligence.

  Questions arose. How much valuable intelligence had the KGB been willing to yield to protect Blake? Or how much disinformation did the Soviets play into the tapped cables to deceive CIA and NSA? Clarence Berry believes “the KGB did not engage in disinformation. The possibility was studied very carefully in a postmortem, and no particular evidence was found to bear it out.

  Thanks to the tunnel, American and British analysts got a keen insight into the manner in which the Soviet military, logistical, and economic systems operated, and with that knowledge, they were able to estimate the strength of the West’s opponent.

  Berry: “Other than order of battle troop movements and the like, we also learned volumes about Soviet and East Bloc personalities and their MOs including who was dealing in black marketing and other rather interesting activities.”36

  KUDOS

  When Harvey returned to Washington in 1959, he was awarded the thirteenth-ever Distinguished Intelligence Medal, which he was then told he could not take home for security reasons. He protested, and eventually the matter was resolved in his favor. Dick Helms, in his autobiography, wrote, “In retrospect, The Tunnel was an operational triumph. Bill Harvey, who pushed the operation through its innumerable, and sometimes apparently unsolvable, problems, deserves great credit.”37

  Forty years later, when Robert Hanssen, the FBI turncoat, was arrested, it became known that he had blown the FBI-NSA tunnel-audio surveillance operation at the Russian embassy in Washington. The two agencies had adapted the technique from Harvey’s Berlin exploit. For all one knows, there may well be other tunnels elsewhere in the world even now yielding fascinating and valuable intelligence to the U.S. government, although the likelihood is that American communications intelligence today is more likely gathered by the less nerve-wracking method of catching and recording radio transmissions.

  THE ROLE OF CARL NELSON

  After Harvey and Rowlett received clearance to proceed, they urgently needed two very special men: a knowledgeable, technically versed executive on the spot, Fleetwood, and a top-flight electrical engineer. They found the engineer close at hand, in the person of Carl Nelson, the CIA’s chief communications officer in Germany. Nelson was known as “Old Haah,” for “Hot Air and Hyperbole,” and as “Wafflebottom-1.”

  Clarence Berry got to know Nelson right after he got to Frankfurt. “Carl was always congenial and helpful, but he had nothing to do with phone taps, per se …

  “All the commo people provided tech advice during the tunnel planning stages, and even when it came to processing the take in Washington. But their tech help did not mean that they were in the loop on operational matters.”38

  Some of the information about Nelson in Wilderness of Mirrors surprised Berry and others. Nelson probably attended at least one of the preliminary planning meetings in London, “but I find some of the statements in Wilderness about his role generally overblown and self-serving…. I don’t recall ever seeing him in our restricted-entry Staff D office.” And Berry comes down hard on the main point: “I certainly don’t recall that Carl was ‘the technical mastermind’ of the tunnel, nor do I think he was the sole ‘inventor of Bumblebee,’” the demuxing machine they used in T-32 to separate out the various teletype messages on a single transmission.39

  Berry recalls that in the late 1970s, a fellow CIA retiree told him Carl was planning to write a book about the tunnel. “I was dumbfounded because, to my mind, that was sacred ground!” The summing up: “I have often thought Carl felt he had been slighted by the operational types and didn’t receive appropriate credit for what he may have considered his major contribution to the success of the tunnel op.”40

  Wilderness of Mirrors came out in 1980 and quoted Nelson extensively.

  THE ROLE OF THE GEHLEN ORGANIZATION

  Another consistent legend has it that the Gehlen Organization was the brains and the organization behind the Berlin Tunnel. Gen. Reinhard Gehlen ran a section of the Wehrmacht in World War II that kept tabs on the Red Army on Germany’s eastern front. When the war was ending, Gehlen farsightedly moved his intelligence files to a safe location in Bavaria to use as high-value bargaining chips. The U.S. Army took Gehlen over, kit and kaboodle. In 1948 the CIA became the sponsor of Zipper, the Agency’s in-house name for the Gehlen Org, which became the Federal Intelligence Service—Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND)—with the return of German sovereignty in 1955. Throughout its early history, former German military people dominated Zipper.

  In Gentleman Spy, the biography of Allen Dulles, Peter Grose credits Zipper with early reconnaissance for the Berlin Tunnel. It is possible that the incident Grose mentions—a blown Gehlen operation that attempted to place a cable in East Germany across the Heidenkamp Canal—may have led to the considerable misunderstanding that GOLD was actually German. Grose says that after the canal op crashed, “Gehlen then contacted Allen [Dulles] in Washington, according to German accounts of the operation, and the CIA director approved the ambitious idea of a man-sized tunnel from the American sector to the edge of Soviet East Berlin.”41

  Clarence Berry has a possible explanation for speculation that Gehlen was involved in the tunnel. Berry ran a communications intelligence op near Nuremberg, with very experienced, wartime German army personnel who had been recruited by Fleetwood in the early 1950s. They intercepted Morse code messages, mainly from Czechoslovakia and Poland; did preliminary analysis; and located by triangulation the site of the target transmitter. Another Agency staff officer ran a similar German navy group. Berry says, “Neither operation had anything to do with Zipper, which upset General Gehlen greatly…. It’s possible that the rumors about Gehlen and the tunnel arose from the activities of the two radio-monitoring operations which employed German veterans.”42

  Jim Critchfield, the long-serving CIA base chief at Pullach, the Gehlen headquarters, adds that there was not “a thread of truth in any of the stories of Gehlen’s involvement in the tunnel, which occurred during my time. Fleetwood doubled as my SIGINT officer in Pullach and for some months divided his time between Berlin and Pullach. I have no recollection of Harvey ever meeting Gehlen, or in fact visiting Pullach.”43 Thus, no face-to-face meeting between Harvey and General Gehlen at Pullach ever took place, except in Harlot’s Ghost.

  Bob Kilroy gives another possibility. “We used Zipper transcribers on wiretaps which came out of the Berlin post office. It’s possible some of the transcribers may have indulged in some understandable preening. It’s possible, too, that Gehlen’s people didn’t deny that they had been involved in the tunnel from day one.”

  BRONZE

  Harvey was a man of appetites, inclined, perhaps, never to have enough of a good thing. Even before GOLD blew, he was working on something else.

  Clarence Berry says that Bill wanted to press on and dig another tunnel, which came to be known as BRONZE. Berry sent Washington lists of Germans to be name-traced, “including some phony name checks on nonexisting people to cover the ones we were really interested in.”44

  Peter Grose: “David K. E. Bruce had become ambassador to the newly sovereign West Germany. Upon learning that the CIA men in his embassy were contriving to build another Berlin Tunnel, he ordered the station chief not to put ‘a shovel in the ground without telling me first.’”45 />
  Bill finally gave up the new op, but only after repeated refusals from Washington. Berry: “As ever, headquarters were a bunch of chicken-livered bureaucrats!”46 Anyone who ever associated with Harvey can almost hear his none-too-dulcet tones expatiating on the myopia that so thoroughly afflicted headquarters’ vision.

  A footnote to Bill’s involvement with communications intelligence procurement while still in Berlin: For years, decades even, the Russians had relied on the old-fashioned-but-very-secure one-time pad for their sensitive communications, a system that was basically unbreakable, but tedious, because it required hand encoding and decoding. In the 1950s the Soviets started positioning at their outposts something referred to elliptically as “Albatross,” an encoding-decoding device that was, of course, a highest priority procurement item for the entire American intelligence community. The new cryptographic equipment was a severe challenge to NSA. Harvey, while still in Berlin, and later, in the United States, regarded procurement of an Albatross—referred to as “the Bird acquisition dream”—as one of his main priorities. Years later, the Glomar Challenger spent considerable time hovering over a sunken Soviet submarine, hoping to raise Russian nuclear technology and communications expertise from the depths of the Pacific.47

  SUMMING UP

  GOLD was Harvey’s personal and professional triumph. Clarence Berry feels Harvey “was an outstanding intelligence operations officer … one of the best in the history of the CIA in accomplishing a given mission … assuming he considered it worthy of pursuit…. Of course he may have ruffled some feathers at times, but Bill was tailor-made for the multitude of problems which faced the United States during the Cold War. I think it’s unfortunate we didn’t have more like him.”

  Tom Polgar, who was not always charitably disposed to Harvey, judged the chief of BOB as “a full speed ahead type of guy who was on top of his career…. The tunnel experience may well have contributed to Harvey’s overeagerness in Cuba ops.”48

  Peter Lunn commented to me years later about his American opposite number. “Once one had come to like and trust him, you couldn’t have had a better friend. He held you closely in his heart, as I did him in mine.” Lunn’s comments reflect the closeness of two men of diametrically different backgrounds who, working under intense pressures on the tunnel project, had their disagreements, some of them probably flaming, but overcame them. “Bill was somebody whom I both greatly liked and admired. He was certainly a tough character who would tell the truth as he saw it and damn the consequences. But as a friend, he was very relaxed and easy-going, so that it was a great pleasure to be with him.”49

  6

  HARVEY’S SUPPORT SYSTEM: MARRIED WITH CHILDREN

  After the triumph of the tunnel, Bill Harvey’s workload in Berlin eased to something approaching human level. Of course, he still worked crazy hours; he drank; he smoked; he twirled revolvers; he pared his nails. That was the image of the CIA’s top maverick in those days. Those who accepted this facade without question neglected Bill Harvey’s attachment to his family, which was a rich and rewarding counterbalance, when he allowed it into his schedule.

  Harvey’s divorce from Libby was sad and bitter. David Martin notes that locals in Maysville blamed Bill for, in effect, keeping Libby subjugated by plying her with booze. Some accused him of domestic abuse and violence. Within the CIA, the gossip was that Libby had been unable to keep up with her surging husband. And there were the never-proven-but-juicy allegations of Bill’s repeated infidelity.

  Whatever the truths and lies of the gossip, as Bill wrote in an application for admission to the D.C. bar in 1967, “On January 26, 1954, I was divorced from Elizabeth Howe McIntire (Plaintiff) by order of the Circuit Court of Fleming County, Kentucky…. [The] attorney for the Defendant was William K. Harvey. The grounds were cruel and inhuman treatment…. Custody of a minor child was granted to the Defendant.” The divorce came less than two years after Harvey met CG Follick in Frankfurt.

  WOMANIZING

  But what about the persistent rumors that Harvey—despite his ungainly appearance and often-obnoxious habits—was a legendary womanizer? What better cornerstone to the Harvey facade than the story that he had been caught having his way with a secretary on a desk in L Building?

  It’s highly probable that Bill, a wily-but-often-heavy-handed joker, cultivated his image as a rake. In the late 1940s, when Harvey arrived at the CIA, America was still in puritanical mode. Hollywood affected twin beds and pajamas; there were girls who did and girls who didn’t. Harvey would have loved to tweak the Ivy League effete who, in his eyes, invariably married anemic graduates of the Seven Sisters colleges and whose affairs were usually kept well within the charmed circle. If they assumed Bumpkin Harvey marched to a rougher social drummer, Bill was only too happy to provide them gossip.

  No one I have talked with has been able to shed any light on Harvey’s alleged sexual adventures and not because they were polishing his reputation. Dave and Star Murphy mention Rita Chappiwicki, who was Harvey’s BOB secretary after Maggie Crane.1 Star once happened upon CG “shrieking” at Rita at a Berlin party. Maybe, indeed, there was more to Harvey’s relationship with his secretary than pure business, but CG’s jealousy may well have been about business because Rita knew all the secrets, including the tunnel, which were denied to CG.

  With the exception of Adam Horton’s story, which I have also heard third- or fourth-hand elsewhere, no one has ever described Harvey in anything but sexually monastic terms. Those who knew him, even in the 1940s, cannot imagine him womanizing flagrantly, if only because he was so devoted to his work.

  CG FOLLICK

  Bill and CG (Clara Grace) Follick first met in the late 1940s, when she was a personnel officer at the young CIA and Harvey was the new transfer from the Bureau. Sally Harvey, the couple’s daughter, years later commented of their first meetings, “She called him a ‘pompous jackass.’”2

  CG told Dave Murphy in 1993, “At first, he was so serious, pompous, and arrogant, and all the other things I didn’t approve of! … Such a bear! I used to have to check my double agents with him, and I just hated even to go to [Bill’s] office in Staff C!”

  Who was the woman Harvey, despite the rocky start, came to love deeply and to whom he remained married for more than twenty tempestuous years? What manner of woman could have tolerated, and later adamantly sought to defend, a man who might have said, as others before him, “I’m indefensible!”?

  CG was viewed with awe by people who met her in Frankfurt in the early 1950s, or, later, when she became Berlin base den mother. Henry Woodburn, who knew and observed her over many years in various locations, describes her as “tough-minded, intelligent, and a very determined woman who supported her husband through thick and thin.”3

  Clara Grace was a daunting, chunky figure, a perpetual enthusiast, a cheerleader for the home team. She bubbled constantly, but she was also tough, efficient, and not inclined to tolerate any form of malingering, much less opposition. In Germany, we maintained happy face in her effervescent presence and then ducked into our fusty nooks and crannies for relief from all that enforced good cheer.

  Sally Harvey takes up the story. “My mother loathed being called Clara Grace. We children changed CG to ‘commanding general’ because her personality was bigger than life, but really, it was a term of endearment.”

  CG was born in a log cabin on February 9, 1914, in Morgan Township, White County, Ohio. She was the first of three children born to Roscoe C. Follick and Josephine Tibbatts Follick. The obstetrician had a terrible time getting to the cabin on horseback through half a foot of snow, and CG’s mother had had a difficult birth—so difficult that she became unconscious. When the doctor asked Ross for the baby’s name for the birth certificate, CG’s father blurted “Clara” and “Grace,” the names of two old girlfriends. When Josephine came to, she was none to happy, but she called the baby CG, it stuck, and from that day on, there were never any periods between the initials.

  CG’s fath
er was a horseman. Josephine had to work two jobs to make ends meet because Ross bet on his own ponies. By the age of eighteen months, CG was riding. In time, she took on the role of mother. “She was driving at the age of twelve—what else?—a Model T Ford!” says Sally.

  Ross’s fortunes didn’t improve. CG scrubbed floors for wealthy neighbors. In 1932 she finished high school in Hamilton, Ohio. Her mother wanted her to stay home to work, but Ross saw her potential and sent her to Ohio State, where she got a scholarship. There, she chauffeured a family in return for room and board. She graduated with distinction in 1935 with a BS in chemistry and physical education. She also greatly admired her classmate, Jesse Owens.

  CG understandably had her sights on financial security and social stature. “Mom wanted to be a doctor but could not afford all the required tools and books; instead she got an MS in psychology from OSU in 1937 and began work on her doctorate in international studies.” The switch in emphasis came after she led a Youth Hostel bicycle trip through Europe in 1936. In Berlin, she saw Jesse Owens win, then be denied, his Olympic medals. The injustice became a driving force in her life.

  Back home, she had to be content in the academic world until World War II gave her a chance to move out. In July 1942 she joined the Women’s Army Corps, became a lieutenant, and was assigned to the Army adjutant general’s office in the Pentagon. For a while, she was an aide to Eleanor Roosevelt, whom she greatly admired. She was the first woman to attain the rank of major.

  In 1945 she was in Santa Barbara, California, debriefing Americans who had been in Japanese POW camps. Sally: “Years later, tears still welled in her eyes when she described the tortures the prisoners, many of them women, endured in those camps. The salt-in-the-wound stories were unbearable; she described them as ‘beyond ghastly.’”