Flawed Patriot Page 16

  The SGA held forty meetings from January to October 1962. This was an extraordinary number given the stature of its members and an indication of the priority the administration assigned to Cuba. The group rode herd on Operation MONGOOSE, a pseudonym intended to point away from Cuba. Harvey generally considered meetings a waste of time unless he was able to attune them to his own purposes. If they took place after lunch, well, he might have stopped at Aldo’s on the way into town.

  Bill writhed under the irksome goading of Brigadier General Lansdale, who had captured the Kennedys’ attention for his James Bond–style activities in the Far East. Lansdale, who had been an ad man before he found purpose in a life in uniform, was racking up chair time in the Office of the Secretary of Defense when Bobby Kennedy decided he needed a surrogate. “To Harvey, Lansdale was worse than wacky. He was a security risk. ‘Harvey seldom really talked to me,’ Lansdale said. ‘He would never initiate conversations. It was very hard to get information from him…. I’d ask for a full explanation, and I’d get one sentence back…. It used to burn me up…. If I was talking to Harvey, and he got a phone call, he’d start talking code. After a while, I caught on and realized he was talking about me. The son of a bitch. Why couldn’t he have just told me he had something he wanted to discuss in private, and ask me to step out for a moment? I would have understood that.’”9

  Part of the problem was that Lansdale took himself seriously, whereas the men in the Langley basement called him “the Man Who Walked on Water.” Sam Halpern had known Lansdale in the Philippines. “He could sell refrigerators to Eskimos, but it was inevitable that Lansdale and Harvey would clash.” And it was even more inevitable that Harvey and the president’s brother would tangle.

  INTO THE OVAL OFFICE

  President Kennedy’s curiosity had been aroused by what he had heard of the tunnel maker, and he asked to meet Harvey. The story goes that Harvey and his shepherd were waiting for the signal to enter the Oval Office. The escort leaned over to Bill and said, “You carrying?” Bill is alleged to have grunted and to have reached into his shoulder holster. He very slowly proffered his revolver to the Secret Service duty agent, butt first. Everyone relaxed. A few moments later, Bill grunted again, shifted his bulk, reached behind him, under his suit jacket, and extracted another, smaller weapon, which he also offered to the security man. In a few moments, the pair was called into the office. The chaperone is alleged to have said, “Mr. President, I’d like to introduce you to America’s James Bond.” Harvey later told a fascinated listener that he actually had a third weapon on his person when he went into the Oval Office.10

  PRESSURES

  The Kennedys made no bones of the fact that they did not trust military or intelligence professionals, but Harvey was intriguing, and maybe useful, even though he didn’t fit their stereotype of the clean-cut fighter for the American ideal. An Ian Fleming character? No book could have prepared them for the Pear.

  The Kennedy brothers had little patience with an irascible civil servant who did not know how to bow gracefully to his political masters. For his part, Harvey, at least at first, may have reveled in the appointment. He once told CG that when the going got really tough, the president had to turn to the only guy who could handle such a hot potato. Harvey quickly made it clear that he was the professional and that he was underwhelmed by the brothers’ concept of personalized clandestine warfare. Yet here he was, the imperial tunnel master, suddenly beholden to a rainbow of rank amateur bosses: the president and his brother, a new Catholic DCI, the Boy Diplomat, and from over across the Potomac, a full general and the Ugly American, not to mention assorted cabinet-level high rollers, like Bob McNamara and Ed Murrow. Harvey was on stage in heady company, but showing awe would have been out of character.

  CG Harvey commented to Dave Murphy, years later, “Fifth Avenue cowboys, that’s the way Bill used to describe the Bobby Kennedy group. It hurt me when they made all those derogatory statements about Bill and his backwoods upbringing.”11

  I suspect Harvey secretly loved the theatrics of the role into which he was thrust. It had everything: conspiracy within secrecy, headline players, international intrigue, a high-risk factor, drama. But I also suspect that, if someone had put Harvey on a couch, he would have growled a bit, maybe farted blatantly, but finally said, very deliberately and very profanely, “I wanted to do the best job possible under God-awful circumstances. Not, you understand, to save the Kennedys’ asses—they got us into this—but to do what I could to save the country from embarrassment, and maybe even disaster. I saw everything I did as my duty to my oath. Afterward—well, afterward, I didn’t want to see all the bastards who contributed to the mess get away with it. They tried to dump on me, but I tried to set the record straight in front of the Church Committee.” Had Harvey spoken for himself, the vocabulary would have been more colorful and emphatic.

  GETTING STARTED: TASK FORCE W

  Richard Goodwin, one of President Kennedy’s key staff members, wrote a White House memo, effective November 30, 1961, calling for a “command operation” under the attorney general “to unify the U.S. Government against Castro … get rid of Castro and the Castro regime.” The classification of the memo was so restrictive that DCI McCone had to ask JFK to relax the restrictions from eyes only so he could let his operators know what was afoot.

  The architect of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Richard Bissell, briefed Harvey in November 1961 and hinted that Bill would take over the entire range of Cuban operations. When Helms succeeded Bissell as deputy director of plans, effective February 1, 1962, Harvey was appointed head of what became a supranational, all-out anti-Castro effort.

  One of the memorable figures of the CIA at the time is Sam Halpern, who has testified at length at innumerable hearings, contributed to television analyses, and been a source for countless articles and books. He is as close to a living encyclopedia on the Cuban Missile Crisis as exists. Sam has also discussed those fraught days with Russians who were sitting in war rooms just as tense as the White House Situation Room or the tank in the basement of the CIA’s new Langley headquarters. Sam is one of those indispensable people who make things really work, not one of the self-enthralled chiefs who duel for rank and parking spaces. In November 1961 he had just come back from temporary tours of duty in Tokyo and Saigon to find himself, to his considerable surprise, named the new deputy chief of the Cuban Branch.

  Dick Helms asked Sam Halpern, upon his return to Washington, whom he thought might be right for the Cuba chief’s job. Halpern scoured the list of FI heavyweights for a senior intelligence officer, not a political action figure. But Helms rejected the names Halpern and others came up with. “Tom Karamessenes was in Rome or Vienna and was too valuable to move. Jim Critchfield was important as head of another division, etc., etc.

  “Then,” says Sam, “I’m thinking like a bunny, hippety-hop, and I say, ‘Oh, shit! Bill Harvey is sitting in FI/D, and no one cares about Staff D any more.’

  “Helms said, ‘I’ll get back to you!’” A few days later Harvey phoned Halpern over in Quarters Eye and said, “When’s a good time to come over to see you guys?”

  But before Harvey arrived, sometime in December 1961 or January 1962, Helms himself went to Quarters Eye to visit Halpern. Sam gave Helms a list of the Bay of Pigs headquarters staff still housed in the ramshackle, ex-Navy temporary buildings along the Potomac that had earlier housed the Berlin Tunnel processing operation. “Helms was appalled [at the list of names] … but tactfully.” Sam later reproached Desmond FitzGerald, his former boss in the Far East and a PP man: “You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You didn’t give the Bay of Pigs operation a fair share of good people!”

  Now, in Quarters Eye, Helms said to Sam, “We don’t know what we’re going to be asked to do, but we need the best men around.” Halpern later thought, “To the White House, it was just pressing buttons. They didn’t understand how long it took. Spies don’t grow on trees.” Helms upgraded the Cuban operation to task-force level; thi
s gave Harvey priority on anyone in the Clandestine Services.

  Halpern says he was actually warned off working with Harvey because Bill was reputed to be anti-Semitic. Halpern says, “He didn’t give a damn what color you were, or what religion. His criterion was, simply, could you get the job done?”

  Harvey and Halpern went to see Dan DeBardeleben, a West Point graduate and former chief in London who was now head of the Career Management Section, and requisitioned a list of all the people who had just been promoted and those recommended for promotion. The next day Harvey had a stack of personnel files on his desk. All division chiefs in the Clandestine Services were required to cut loose their best people, if they were tapped for Cuban ops. “Bill consciously played the heavy role; he used people’s fears. He knew when to yell and when not to yell at people,” says Halpern.

  Harvey named his bailiwick Task Force W. The “W” was Bill’s memorial to another maverick, William Walker, a colorful freebooter who could not stay away from Central America in the 1840s and 1850s. Walker mounted three expeditions of adventurers from San Francisco; fought in and over Baja California; became president of Nicaragua; and tangled from afar with New York power brokers, particularly Commodore Vanderbilt, and with the laws of the United States. He was eventually executed by American soldiers because he refused to reclaim American citizenship, even as he was facing a firing squad.12 The reference took Halpern by surprise; he had had no idea that Harvey was a student of history nor that he was widely read.

  The naming of the task force could have been a hint that Bill knew he was in a no-win situation, an indication that he was prepared to accept criminal prosecution, even a death sentence, for his role in ZRRIFLE. Farfetched? Perhaps. But Harvey had a vivid, if secret, imagination, and he was above all a thorough-going patriot, as well as the ultimate pragmatist.

  Task Force W officially came into existence on February 1, 1962, and at about that time, the group moved from the dank and crumbling Quarters Eye into the basement of the new building Allen Dulles had planned and built out at Langley, Virginia. The task force offices took up about a quarter of the Langley basement floor, which had originally been designed as a storage area for the Map Division, whose low, flat metal cases ranked against the wall.

  PERSONNEL

  In the Langley basement, Task Force W gelled quickly. Harvey’s deputy was Bruce B. Cheever, a colonel and a decorated member of the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve who was recalled from Paris because Bill needed someone who could talk with the Pentagon. Halpern was the executive officer. Covert action was the province of Seymour B.—who had been an Agency contact to Willy Brandt, first when he was lord mayor of Berlin and later when he was chancellor of the German Federal Republic—and Dave M., whom Halpern described as “Big. Huge. Not quite as hefty as Bill, but close to it…. He was the case officer who was trying to work with Cubans to take Castro out.” Art Maloney, an ex-Army colonel who had been wounded in World War II, handled paramilitary matters.

  And then there was Skip. “Middle-aged, plain looking, hard as nails, precise, but a good worker. She probably had a last name, but I never knew it. She wouldn’t even give Helms the time of day. Not even tell us if Bill was in his office, or if he had gone out to lunch. They seemed to work together by osmosis. If Bill told her to file something securely, she might have used her own body cavities…. That’s how loyal, and how secure, she was.”

  Skip was the latest in a select line of secretaries who served Bill with ferocious fealty. In Berlin, it had been Maggie Crane of Mobile, Alabama, who sat on the floor when she drank martinis “so she wouldn’t fall off the carpet.” Rita Chappiwicki succeeded Maggie. And then, in the Langley basement, it was Skip. The three knew all the secrets, but they never, ever betrayed Bill’s trust.

  As always, Harvey compartmentalized. Sometimes he’d tell Cheever something, but not Halpern. Sometimes it was the other way around. “Most of the time, he didn’t tell either of us. We didn’t compare notes, of course.”

  Once the pressure was on, Harvey worked his accustomed twenty-hour day. The stacks of PSM (“Please see me!”) and OSOD (“Oh shit, oh dear!”) cables that passed over Halpern’s desk? “By the time you got in to see Harvey, he had taken care of them all.”

  He could be a rough SOB, but he had a heart of melted butter, and he would defend his officers to the death. Once Col. J. C. King, the head of Western Hemisphere Division, chewed me out on the phone. Bill picked up his phone, and told JC flatly, ‘Stay away from my people. If you want to talk to them, you talk through me!’

  I learned to do my business with him in the morning…. From time to time, Bill stuck his head out his door, and said, ‘Lunch?’ and we’d go over to Aldo’s on Washington Circle at New Hampshire Avenue, a pleasant Italian place with a garden and above average Italian-American food. Bill always ordered pasta, and he would have two double martinis and one single. Afternoons, he’d nod off. I’d tell the secretary not to wake him. In the evening, he took his gun off, and he’d sit there, twirling it.

  When the situation got hairy and we didn’t have time to leave, we went up to the executive dining room for meals. There was the equivalent of a small community hospital in the building, which had beds we could use, if we needed to.

  HARVEY’S M.O.

  There was another aspect of work at Task Force W. Halpern notes emphatically, “The record was amended, even at the time, to make things look good. Even Des FitzGerald later said he didn’t want to know and told us to fill out the documents any way we felt like. It was such a combustible project, no one—even back in those days—wanted to leave much paper lying around where subsequent investigators might find it.” Harvey was a master obfuscator. He could, when he wanted to, spend pages of typescript saying absolutely nothing. The good stuff, that which was vital, he kept to himself or passed on to whomever needed to know; he put it on paper only when he absolutely had to.

  Harvey was also, as ever, elusive. “Right from the beginning, Bill went off on his own.” Most of the division chiefs had open travel orders, but they checked with the front office before they did something unusual. “With Harvey, we never knew where he was or where he was going. He could run as many vest-pocket operations as he wanted, and he didn’t have to worry about touching base with grandma every time he made a move.

  “Then,” Halpern recalls fondly, “there was this memo which he headed ‘Girth.’ Just that. He sent it to the travel office. Took two paragraphs to explain the size of economy-class airline seats and how difficult it was for him to sit in one. So he got a blanket authorization to fly first class from then on.”

  Harvey, of course, never explained his frequent absences to anyone. Maybe he was on a quick trip to Miami to talk with his people there, or even to spend a few hours relaxing at sea. Or maybe he flew to Europe.

  Almost immediately after Bill’s appointment to be overlord of Cuban ops, headquarters sent out a book message to CIA posts throughout the world announcing that William K. Harvey was in charge. Headquarters, under the assumption that some of them were penetrated by Soviet agents, specified that liaison services should also be informed of Harvey’s appointment.

  Halpern: “We wanted the KGB to know that Bill was running the show! The Sovs knew Bill well. They immediately realized we meant business over Cuba. So they started hanging tough.” Halpern thinks the Soviets decided to put missiles into Cuba as a direct response to Task Force W and Bill’s nomination as its chief. For them, “It was a matter of face!”

  JMWAVE

  By early spring 1962 Task Force W’s headquarters staff was in place. Bill’s throne room during the fraught Cuba days was, of course, in the Langley basement, but his empire was in Miami, masquerading as Zenith Technical Enterprises on two thousand acres of CIA-leased property. In the Agency the Miami station was called JMWAVE, and it was the largest operational base ever theretofore assembled by the Agency, bested only by Saigon during the Vietnam War and by the CIA’s operations base in Baghdad during the Iraq War. />
  JMWAVE was a body of men and women, case officers, contract agents, administration and support personnel, mostly in and around Miami. But Cuban operations were not confined to Florida. Considerable activity originated in the American embassy in Mexico City, which had its share of CIA personnel, and Task Force W had officers all over the world, milking air crew, merchant seamen, diplomats, and other intelligence services.

  Star Murphy, who went to Berlin in the 1950s, when her husband was assigned to BOB, has a vivid personal recollection of Harvey’s main outpost.

  It was almost run by Berliners … Ted Shackley, Jack Corris, who ran admin, and a lot of others.

  We were all issued jumpsuits and told we would only be in Cuba for six months after the American takeover. Headquarters actually thought that it would only take that long; case officers were assigned to various Cuban provinces for eventual take over…. We were some two hundred in number at the actual headquarters.

  Some other wives and I were given the joyous task of indexing all the voluminous files and records from the Bay of Pigs times…. Nothing had been carded….

  In November 1963, a year after the missile crisis, President Kennedy was to visit Miami and speak to the Cuban refugees. I was asked to list those Cubans we thought untrustworthy or suspicious. JMWAVE and Secret Service officers babysat them during the president’s visit. We all heaved an enormous sigh of relief when [Kennedy’s] plane left Miami without incident.

  Then, when it was announced that Lee Harvey Oswald had been arrested, I ran down to the registry card files. Sure enough, there were two cards on Oswald from Mexico City station. Both were from liaison and cited Oswald as having entered the Soviet embassy in September 1962. This scared the hell out of me, and I scurried to get [the information] to those in charge of communicating to headquarters.13