Flawed Patriot Page 14

  Out of the service, CG applied to the State Department, in hopes of being stationed overseas. But State assigned her to the Central Intelligence Group. While interviewing new entrants there, she first met and formed an instant impression of Bill Harvey.

  CG finally went abroad in a personnel job on the staff of the U.S. high commissioner for Germany. Then she was assigned to a temporary position with General Truscott.

  Sally Harvey says that during all this time “she always sent money home to her family.

  “Mom is listed in Marquis Who’s Who of American Women. She is also listed on the WWII Women’s Memorial in Arlington.”4 Years later, after CG’s death, Sally added, “She was more than remarkable in her own right. I miss her so.”

  UNDER THE MISTLETOE

  At Christmastime 1952, Harvey traveled down to Frankfurt to meet with General Truscott. Bill’s marriage was over, although he was not yet divorced. He had custody of but was separated from his son, who was in the care of Harvey’s mother.

  Sally: “Truscott felt sorry for how lonely my father was, and said to CG, ‘Take this guy in hand!’ Remember, she still thought he was a jackass.”

  CG, talking to Dave Murphy years later: “I thought, ‘God, he’s going to ruin my Christmas,’ but of course, anything General Truscott told me to do … Well, ‘Yes sir!’ I said….

  “I had a really heavy holiday schedule because I was having the time of my life…. I was dating the lieutenant colonel who was in charge of the Military Police in Frankfurt. Since he was head of the MPs, I had a car and a chauffeur at my disposal, and I was treated like the colonel’s best girlfriend.” She simply brought Bill along. “I took him to all the cocktail parties, to the dances and the dinners … had him scheduled over the whole holiday.” The MP officer’s reaction has not been recorded.

  “By the time the holiday season was over and he’d gone back to Berlin, he decided I really liked him!”5 Sally adds, “He began to think she was chasing him, on orders from Truscott. Still, they soon fell in love.”

  Peter Karlow, who years later was one of the victims of the internal CIA witch hunt conducted by Jim Angleton, had dated CG Follick casually in Frankfurt, where he was head of the branch that manufactured intelligence gadgetry. Karlow claims credit for having introduced CG and Bill at a party at Christmas 19526—so does Tom Polgar, who adds, “I believe I took first photo of them, kissing under the mistletoe.”

  The romance was very discreet. Bill rarely, if ever, discussed his private affairs with anyone. CG was outwardly garrulous, even overwhelming, but, she, too, well knew how to remain silent. After the 1952–53 holiday season, CG went to Heidelberg to do two weeks’ reserve military training. “Bill called from Berlin every single day…. That’s when it really started.”

  When CG was back at her roost in Frankfurt, Harvey took to flying down from Berlin early on Friday mornings, conferring for a couple of hours with Truscott, Fleetwood, and others, then spending the weekend with CG. Sometimes, CG came up to Berlin for the weekend, “But I wasn’t interested in getting tied down.”

  The proposal doesn’t sound very romantic, but these were two pretty pragmatic people. “Bill asked if I would consider leaving Gen. Truscott, coming to Berlin and working for him, and then we would be married. I told him I would.” So Bill went in to ask the general for CG’s hand. “I’d just like to have your blessing and permission,” he said. Truscott replied, “Well, I’m not sure you deserve her, but I’ll give you my blessing.”

  “Bill and I had been going together for two years before that [It was actually just over a year.]…. I was thirty-nine and I always wanted to be married before I was forty.” The wedding was on February 3, 1954.

  Bill’s mother had brought Jim, who was about seven years old, to Berlin. Sally Harvey: “In Berlin, it was tough on Jim. Dad was always in a hurry … in a rush to get back to the office. Jimmy thinks of his early childhood as ‘formal.’ He had no resentment against Dad. I guess he just accepted it.”

  CG loved Jim right from the start, and she made “a very conscious effort to explain that Bill was doing really important work. Jim and I really hit it off…. I really loved him…. The day Bill and I were married, he was standing at the foot of the steps with some flowers, and he said, ‘CG, now that your name is Harvey, may I call you Mommy?’ That was the best thing that happened to me on my wedding day!

  “When Bill arrived in Berlin in December 1952, he had two suitcases and $750 in debts. He didn’t care about money. He had nothing when I married him, whereas I had a house, a car, and a bank account….

  “I had to work if I was going to get things [at BOB] straightened out…. I tried to make the base feel like a family.”7

  “OUR CHEERLEADER”

  When CG took charge of the domestic side of Harvey’s life, she wanted more substantial premises than the art deco villa at Lepsius Strasse, and she found them at 18/20 Milinowski Strasse, which was almost in Dahlem, Berlin’s social equivalent of Greenwich or Beverly Hills. It was a large, rambling house not too far from the office, and it had a pond, which later became a swimming pool. CG could coop her chickens and raise her vegetables on the premises. Periodically, Mrs. Harvey brought eggs around to other base wives.

  Part of the role CG took on, once married and settled in Berlin, was keeping a benevolent eye on base families. In the mid-1950s, Star Hellmann Murphy arrived in Berlin with her then-husband. “Someone whisked him away, and someone else took me and my children away to the Harveys….

  “CG scared the hell out of me with stories about spies being everywhere … even the men working on the U-Bahn subway tracks…. I don’t think I spoke for days afterward, for fear of saying something wrong…. I was terrified of her at first, but later we became great friends.

  “She was a bundle of energy…. She would do anything for you…. A complete teetotaler. Not even wine…. [She was] preoccupied with her health, a hypochondriac…. She ignored Bill’s drinking in public.” Dave Murphy adds, “CG could get on Bill’s case, but not when subordinates were around.”8

  Herb Natzke agrees: “She was always tolerant of Bill’s fondness for alcohol…. Well, maybe she would say, afterwards, by way of explanation, ‘Bill had had a few drinks, you know!’

  “She was an excellent cook. Solid, all-American, meat-and-potatoes food, but very, very good. She was like a midwestern farm woman. Kept an immaculate house. Self-confident … Very bright … Very likable.”9

  CG HARVEY AND BOB

  CG Follick Harvey was not born to be a stay-at-home, pinafore’d wife. In Harlot’s Ghost Norman Mailer makes much of her role as a sort of BOB sergeant major den mother, and to some extent, Mailer is correct. She became, de facto, the base real estate officer, renting, staffing, and supplying safe houses. She recalled in 1993, “I made the deliveries, put in all the supplies, assigned the houses to case officers.”

  Then there was the matter of the East German scientists whom the United States badly wanted for their expertise on rocketry and other defense hardware. BOB’s Sig Hoxter brought a number of such Germans to the West, out of the grasp of the Soviets. CG mused, “These were the guys who were going to get us to the moon. But they were scared to death…. General Truscott thought that if I got them onto a military plane and flew with the families to the States, it would reassure them that they weren’t going to be pushed out over the Atlantic. We used to have some wild flights. I made twenty-six of them between 1951 and 1955.”10 The tale may have been a slight exaggeration.

  ENTER SALLY

  Something happened on August 20, 1958, to change the man behind Harvey’s belligerent, take-no-prisoners image, even if the facade itself didn’t alter. A year later, Bill’s mother, Sara, the professor, handwrote a comprehensive account of the complicated and touching affair.11

  On the evening of August 20, Bill and Dave Murphy were called away from a party. CG took Dave’s wife, Marion, home. When they arrived at the house entrance, in heavy rain, they noticed a brown cardboard shoe
box on the doorstep. Marion picked up the carton and shrieked. Through air holes in the box, they could see a baby’s head. The baby, cold and wet, awakened and yawned. Cops arrived on the scene shortly after CG and Marion and told Marion she could not take the German baby. But the two women took off—fast. By the time they got to the Harveys’, CG had claimed the baby.

  CG telephoned friends, and in a surprisingly short time and although it was nearly midnight, they supplied the baby with a bed, clothes, formula, and everything else she needed.

  When Dave Murphy got home from the office, he found a posse of policemen, waiting to arrest him for kidnapping. The baby’s mother didn’t know that Murphy was CIA. “She had come over from the East, registered as a refugee, and been sent to a maternity home near our house. She cased the neighborhood, and spotted what she yearned for—obvious signs of reasonably well-to-do occupants.”

  At Milinowksi Strasse, CG Harvey said to Bill as he arrived, “‘Come in and look what the Lord has sent us! The little girl that we really wanted! Can we keep it?’ and he said, ‘Of course we can!’ and right then and there, Sally had a good American home.”

  When Murphy got to the Harvey house, “Bill was flustered, although he tried to conceal his bubbling excitement. More cops came … and Bill told them to get lost. Thereafter, he pulled all the strings he knew how to. He was absolutely determined they were going to keep Sally, and the hell with what German law said.”

  The police were, at first, equally determined to take the baby to a children’s home and were also inclined to bring charges against CG. The U.S. Army provost marshal arrived to mollify the police. At some point, Murphy told a U.S. Army MP liaison officer “that he would resent any interference on the part of the police”—probably not in such formal language.

  The Germans didn’t know what to do. The baby stayed.

  For the next twenty-four hours, chaos reigned at Milinowski Strasse. Grandmother Sara noted, “a continual procession through the house: police, the mayor of Zehlendorf [the borough in which the Harveys lived], welfare workers, the Army chaplain, doctors, friends, newspaper men, photographers. It took almost strong-arm methods to maintain a measure of quiet for the child.”

  The official English translation of the German precinct report reflects some of the confusion. “Mr. Harvey contacted, it is assumed, Col. Salisbury, which, on the other hand, Mr. Gilardi [the liaison officer] did, too, who received orders by Col. Salisbury to step off the case immediately.” Thereupon, the local precinct, by now realizing this was a very, very sticky, nowin matter, tried to buck the case up to criminal police at headquarters, but the Kripo, as they are known, wisely “refused to have any German detective officer take charge of the case, in view of the circumstances surrounding it.”

  A criminal exposure of a helpless person report was filed. A puffy note of Teutonic frustration crept into the stilted translation. “Since the American parties involved did counteract the efforts of the police concerning an investigation into the case, going so far as to avail themselves of Col. Salisbury’s good offices, no further action on the part of this bureau [the local station] should be taken into consideration, Germans having no jurisdiction over the said American parties involved.

  “Rules of procedure would have required, under normal circumstances, that the infant child be taken to a hospital immediately.

  “A Special Events Teletype was issued on the part of the 164th Precinct.”12

  Police identified the father and reported that he felt he could not leave the East without jeopardizing his parents in Leipzig, so the mother, Christa, came alone, determined to have her baby in the West. Thereafter the legal struggle began in a country not known for the flexibility of its official attitudes. Sara King noted that Henry Woodburn was a tremendous help because his “mastery of German was an invaluable aid.”

  Christa was imprisoned on child-abandonment charges for three weeks, and then she was paroled to face trial. Bill ensured that she had the best available legal counsel. The lawyer testified that “not one German baby in 10,000 is as fortunately situated as [Sally].” Christa got a six-month suspended sentence and two years probation, but she wanted to see her child. “She came to the Harvey home…. She was much moved. Still she conducted herself with great composure and great dignity.”

  She told the Harveys her father was an executive in a pharmaceutical company and that Franke’s dad was a professor of social studies at Leipzig University. “Obviously, Sally comes of fine stock.”

  The now-defunct Washington Star ran the story on Sunday, August 24, 1958.

  Diplomat Gets a Baby from Berlin Doorstep

  Berlin, Aug 23. (AP) The William Harveys of Washington D.C. went to a friend’s party the other night in West Berlin and came home with a baby girl.

  “It’s a strange feeling to become a mother overnight without knowing it,” said Mrs. Harvey.

  “It’s all very, very simple,” said Mr. Harvey, a 42-year-old diplomat in the United States mission here. Mr. Harvey has served in isolated West Berlin for five years and knows “this city is seldom dull.”

  The German media were flooded with tear-jerking reports that were not entirely favorable to the Harvey’s insistence that Sally was theirs. The mass-circulation Bild covered the trial under the headline, “I Was So Ashamed!” The Tagespiegel clucked, “Our sympathy lies with the baby, for whom we hope that the humanity and readiness of a strange mother can replace the lost love of her true mother.”

  Nowhere in the German or American press was there even a hint that Harvey had been the mastermind behind the Berlin Tunnel only a few years earlier.

  FAREWELL, BERLIN

  On July 1, 1959, the German authorities issued a birth certificate in the name of Sally Josephine Harvey.

  Almost exactly a year after the doorstep incident, the Harveys left Berlin. One of the city papers splashed their departure with an emotional farewell and a shot of Jimmy Harvey embracing the year-old baby. Another ran a photo of a grinning Pan Am stewardess and CG with Sally between them.

  As soon as Bill and CG checked into headquarters, Harvey wrote a lengthy memorandum to the chief of the CIA Security Office, dated September 30, 1959. “It should be noted that this incident and the publicity which ensued did not cause any political or other embarrassment either to undersigned or to the American occupying forces and, in fact, the German public reaction … was universally favorable, sentimental and sympathetic.”

  He closed with a stern request “that any pertinent excerpts [of this memorandum] be placed in [Harvey’s] administrative personnel file.” Bill also asked that any senior officer of the Agency who needed to know be shown the memorandum, “after which it is requested that the copy be destroyed.” The Agency’s Alien Affairs Staff quickly indicated that there would be no problem in the naturalization of young Sally.

  In August 1968 CG brought Sally back to Berlin, and once again the Berlin press turned out to cheer. A tabloid accorded them front page and centerfold. Berliner Morgenpost ran a shot of CG pointing out the very spot at which she and Marion Murphy had found the shoebox. CG told the reporter, “I had to get together 160 documents before everything finally was cleared up … and everyone was satisfied I would be a good mother.” Morgenpost also ran several photos of the ten year old, in sneakers, reading German comics with some difficulty “because she barely speaks a word of German.”

  More than four decades later, Sally Harvey, a once-divorced mother of a now-grown son, a devoted innercity teacher, and a PhD candidate, leaves the room where she has been dispassionately discussing the turbulent events of her birth and adoption. She returns with a nondescript brown cardboard shoebox and some other items: German-manufactured baby powder and ointment and the like. Sally looks at the familiar objects with detachment. I find them moving in the extreme.

  “I was found in that shoebox. CG always told me she wanted a child more than anything else, and I was the answer to her prayers.

  “Christa had several requests of my
parents. She wanted me raised a Lutheran, wanted me to play the piano, and never wanted to see me again. It would have been too painful for her, and she wanted a chance to start a new life.

  “I’ve never heard from her. I’m still not intensely curious about her, nor passionate to locate her. The only real reason I would have to locate my birth mother is just to get medical history.

  “CG always answered all my questions with information and truth.

  “As far as I am concerned, I only had two parents. They are the ones whom I mourn and celebrate. I thanked Mom for bringing together and so fiercely loving our ragamuffin family!”

  7

  INTO THE CAULDRON: MONGOOSE AND TASK FORCE W

  Before Bill Harvey returned to CIA headquarters in triumph in September 1959, he and CG went on an extended duty tour of Europe and the Middle East. I have found no reason for the trip. Bill liked history and literature, but his taste was Elizabethan, not Biblical; and it’s difficult to imagine him taking several weeks off to admire old stones. Jim Critchfield, who had come back from Germany, “had no recollection of Harvey making a trip to any part of the Middle East at that time…. I became quite involved in both the U-2 flights out of Turkey and all of the intercept stations in Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan in my early months in Near Eastern Division…. [There was] no evidence that Harvey had been there.”1

  Upon their return from abroad, the Harveys bought a house at 28 West Irving Street in Chevy Chase, Maryland, which they rented out when they later went to Rome and reoccupied when they came back from Italy. Sally Harvey later commented, “I loved Chevy Chase. But the house was huge,” even compared to the palatial housing in Berlin and Rome.