Flawed Patriot Page 2

  Bill’s remarkable mother was an academic whose field was Elizabethan literature. Indeed, Sara, who did doctoral research at Oxford, must have been one of very few women of her times to have earned a PhD, and she capped that by becoming a full professor at Indiana State University.

  The matter of Harvey’s birth is significant only because back then, in the first decades of the twentieth century, bastardy carried a stigma. If Harvey knew he was the natural product of a failed romance, his compulsion to best others—especially, as it turned out, those who were to an East Coast manor born—would have been strong.

  A SELDOM MOTHER: SARA KING HARVEY

  Home for Bill’s mother was Danville, which is today a western exurb of Indianapolis. William King, Bill’s maternal grandfather, owned the Danville Gazette, “the only Democratic newspaper in Hendricks County.” One of the CIA women who knew Sara in later years remembers her as “brilliant, brilliant, a kind and gracious lady as well as a distinguished professor of literature.”3

  Sally Harvey, the daughter Bill adopted while in Berlin in 1958, takes up the tale: “My father and grandmother had a very special bond between them. My father rarely addressed her as ‘Mother,’ always as ‘Sally,’ her nickname, not ‘Sara.’ Each thought the sun rose and set on the other.

  “Grandmother had a very adventurous side; she loved to travel almost as much as she loved to read. At eighty-five, she went on a safari in Africa! On one excursion her boat capsized in a river, and she had to swim to shore.”

  Bill’s mother was a lady, says Sally. “I never, ever heard her raise her voice or get angry with anyone in my life. Her speech was impeccable, never so much as a hint of nasal ‘hoosierese.’

  “She spent endless hours reading Shakespeare to me before I even went to kindergarten. She had the perfect tones and inflections to draw listeners in! She even taught me always to wash my hands before I read a book and how to turn the pages properly….

  “My grandmother died on June 9, 1975, which was her birthday. My father died on June 9, 1976. I live in my grandmother’s house, which has been in the family since it was built.”4

  PRECOCIOUS YOUTH

  Bill’s youth was Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post material; then, and later, he was way, way ahead of himself. Bill was Sara’s only child, and he did all of the things expected of an achiever: He graduated high school and made Eagle Scout well ahead of schedule. Summers, he worked as an apprentice laborer for the family’s Robert King Construction Co.

  Bill considered applying for an appointment to West Point but did not pursue the idea. Grandfather King ruled that Bill was too young for university at age fifteen, so Bill went to work at the family’s paper “as a reporter and printer” until grandpa felt the young man was ready. At Indiana University, he pledged Sigma Chi and lived at the fraternity house from September 1933 until September 1937.

  Bill got some fatherly counsel from a Terre Haute lawyer, B. F. Small, in 1933. Small wrote Bill a letter that is a masterpiece of the kind of advice sanguine elders gave to youth back in those days:

  You have been given by nature what may prove a blessing or a curse to you, depending upon how you handle it … a brain far above that of the average human being. At twelve and thirteen, you were registering the intelligence of twenty-one and twenty-two. Now, at your present age, you have a brain ability and a comprehension superior to the average man of thirty to forty…. When [this] happen[s] to a man in the course of his development, it leaves him pretty much in the situation of a Model T Ford fitted up with a twenty-four cylinder Duisenberg engine. He is overpowered or superpowered. Just as such a powerful engine would tear to pieces a Ford chassis, so will a powerful brain shatter the life career of an individual unless it is throttled down and managed by the sheer will power of the individual.5

  Small’s letter proved a prophetic vision of his godson’s life.

  2

  THE SECRET WORLD: TANGLING WITH BUDDHA

  The young Bill Harvey continued to race ahead. He completed enough course work at Indiana University to qualify for fast-track entry into law school after two undergraduate years. He got his LLB with distinction within another two years. Having entered the university in 1933, he passed out as a fully qualified lawyer in 1937.

  While at Bloomington in April 1934, only nineteen years old and still an undergraduate, Harvey married a fellow student, Elizabeth Howe McIntire, perhaps to prove his independence from his mother’s strong influence. In September 1937 the young couple moved to Maysville, a town on the Ohio River, southeast of Cincinnati, where, at that time, Rosemary Clooney was probably singing in the choir of St. Patrick’s Church and where Libby’s father was an influential local advocate.

  Harvey saw Germany invade Poland in September 1939 from this placid backwater, and he decided to get involved. He applied to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which quickly launched a preemployment full-field investigation.

  “THOROUGHLY AN AMERICAN BOY”

  At age twenty-five, Bill carried 195 pounds on his five-foot-eleven-inch frame. He later, under some pressure, went down to a Bureau-acceptable 175; he also grew an inch to make his height a nicely rounded six feet. Sam Papich, the FBI’s long-serving liaison officer to the CIA, remembers Bill in the early days as “slim,” a description hard for those who knew him later to envision. The FBI found that all of Bill’s “systems” were normal, although he had had treatment in 1938 for a goiter that was apparently responsible for the bulging, thyroidic eye condition so many people noted in his later life.1

  Special agent S. K. Moss nosed around Maysville in mid-October 1940 and found nothing amiss. “Law practice in Maysville grossed $2,215 in 1939…. Has been interested in obtaining employment with the Bureau ever since he left Law School…. Has indebtedness of $550 which he can clean up…. Denies subversive affiliations.” Bill said that the minimum salary he would accept was $3,200, which just happened to be FBI’s entry-level pay for someone with his qualifications.

  Bill had worked in Democratic politics, even organized delegates for a 1936 presidential candidate, should Franklin D. Roosevelt not run. Bill’s wife’s family was well up in the Maysville pecking order, and the Harveys were highly regarded for their social work as well as for their bridge game. A local judge opined, Bill was “a smart boy, very tactful, and knows his law pretty well…. better office lawyer than a trial lawyer … always a gentleman.” Special Agent Moss continued, Harvey “had expressed his opinion on several occasions against Communism and the Fifth Column activities in this country…. Level-headed…. Applicant and his wife are very happily married…. Neither indulged in intoxicants to excess…. Is very much interested in guns and is quite a marksman.” And even well before Pearl Harbor, “he spoke of joining the United States Army and becoming an officer, or endeavoring to become a member of the Department of Justice.” Chief of Police Harry Stewart summed Bill Harvey up as “one of the most respectable citizens in Maysville … thoroughly an American boy.”

  The background check also covered Bill’s childhood in Indiana. At high school in Terre Haute, “a brilliant boy … did not participate in athletics, but had a strong and healthy physique … a real leader possessed of a healthy confidence and self-assurance … not conceited. His mother is a brilliant and cultured woman.” His Indiana University record showed As in journalism, Bs in English and psychology, and a C and a D in military science, indicating that Bill might have had some campus ROTC exposure.

  Once the background checks were complete, Harvey’s ticket out of Maysville came from the FBI in an official telegram:

  VIA WESTERN UNION. NOVEMBER 26, 1940

  YOU ARE OFFERED APPOINTMENT SPECIAL AGENT THIS BUREAU…. PROCEED TO WASHINGTON AT YOUR OWN EXPENSE…. ARRANGE PERSONAL MATTERS THAT YOU MAY ACCEPT ASSIGNMENT WHERE SERVICES NEEDED. CONSIDER THIS STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL AND PRESENT WIRE UPON REPORTING….

  J. EDGAR HOOVER DIRECTOR

  Harvey replied:

  MAYSVILLE KY NOV 27 758P

 
; JOHN EDGAR HOOVER

  DIRECTOR FBI JUSTICE DEPT

  I ACCEPT APPOINTMENT SPECIAL AGENT AND … WILL REPORT

  DECEMBER 9, 1940. WILLIAM K HARVEY

  IN THE SERVICE OF HIS COUNTRY

  Harvey landed in an FBI intake of about fifty new special agents almost precisely a year before Pearl Harbor. His entry medical exam recorded, “Right hand mashed in press 1932; slight injuries in auto wreck [which had brought on the thyroid problem] 1938…. Tobacco—Yes; Alcoholics [sic]—No. Capable of strenuous physical exertion.” At the FBI academy at Quantico, Virginia, Bill qualified on the machine gun with a perfect 100; he scored only an 82 at shooting from the hip.

  Bill Harvey’s FBI record is catalogued in some three hundred pages of exquisitely stilted gobbledygook. After training, Harvey was sent to the Bureau’s glamorous New York field office at the U.S. courthouse and assigned to “custodial detention cases.” While working out of Foley Square, Harvey came up with an idea that the special agent in charge forwarded with enthusiasm. The concept was that mail carriers across the country be recruited to provide information “of interest to The Bureau … information that can be gathered with comparative ease.” Shortly thereafter, Harvey was transferred to the National Defense Squad; he expressed interest in learning about audio surveillance in a future Bureau course on the subject.

  OPERATION TRAMP

  Part of the Harvey legend is that, while still in his twenties, Bill was the lead case officer on a German counterespionage (CE) case that was the raw material for The House on 92nd Street, which won writer Charles G. Booth an Oscar.2 This exploit is not substantiated in Harvey’s personnel dossier, which, an FBI Freedom of Information Act official confirms, was stripped of considerable information before it was made available to inquirers. People who knew Bill in the late 1940s say he was miffed he did not receive the credit due to him for his part in the case.

  The case is reported in some detail in Ernest Volkman’s Espionage: The Greatest Spy Operations of the Twentieth Century.3 Volkman does not give sources for his account, nor does he name Harvey. He tells the tale of a German émigré named Sebold who returned to his native soil, was recruited by the Abwehr, reported his recruitment to the American consulate in Cologne, and when he later returned to the United States, was run successfully by the FBI. Much of the drama of the case came in the Bureau’s ability to deceive the Abwehr in clandestine radio transmissions. Volkman wrote, “A total of 37 agents with varying degrees of access in the American economy came into Sebold’s office; in turn Sebold radioed material back to Germany from a wireless station he and the FBI set up at Centerport, Long Island.” It was one of the FBI’s first counterespionage experiments, and if Volkman can be believed, it was very successful.

  Though it seems incredible today, the team that ran Sebold was by February 1941 headed by the new boy, Bill Harvey. (Robert A. Maheu, a Quantico classmate of Harvey and a figure who also appears later in this book, avers that he, too, was involved in the deception, particularly in its Long Island aspects.) Harvey’s squad put together skeins of disinformation for Sebold to transmit to the Abwehr from Long Island; to make the transmissions seem more realistic, the FBI peppered the transatlantic signal with static. The Abwehr was nonplussed. Many of their man’s reports were gold, but some came through in unusable bursts or were blocked by what seemed to be atmospherics. The Abwehr sent a second wireless telegraphy (W/T) agent to the U.S. station to check out the operation. He and Berlin were puzzled that his signal was too weak to be received at the Abwehr’s listening posts and that he ran into a few unexpected technical difficulties. The Abwehr never solved the puzzle.

  After Bill’s death, his second wife said, “They put [Bill] in charge of the squads that met the German submarines coming in to put saboteurs on shore. We weren’t sabotaged once! Bill caught them all. He had some really harrowing stories about his duties then. I thought it was more important than going off to war, but he felt that he had been a slackard [sic], staying in the States. He never got over that.”4

  Bill and his counterespionage team spotted and recruited a weak link in the staff of the German consulate in New York. The man was in charge of document destruction, and so, of course, had access to a trove of classified information. The new agent carefully selected the most important dispatches in the waste and stuffed them into a fireproofed pocket of the furnace. He recovered the documents from time to time and turned them over to Harvey. The Bureau shut down the consulate operation in June 1941, with the arrest of the thirty-seven Abwehr agents who had reported to Sebold.

  It was a very busy introductory six months for the young special agent in the FBI’s Foley Square office, and it was a major shift for the FBI from pure counterintelligence, i.e., arresting and prosecuting, to the more exacting work of counterespionage.

  CAREER MAN

  Bill’s first promotion came in November 1941. In accordance with FBI procedure, at that time, he was also due for rotation out of New York. In a special efficiency report on Harvey written for his six-month review, Percy E. Farnsworth, an assistant director, wrote, “Has taken pains to thoroughly study any matter upon which he is working…. A good example has been his work in Italian national defense case [perhaps Harvey’s first exposure to the Mafia] … in which he has made every endeavor to become expert in Italian matters, especially from the viewpoint of organizations and Italian societies…. Initiative … originality…. Should develop into an above-average Special Agent.” Bill was transferred from New York to Pittsburgh.

  Dennis Flinn (“the spelling is Protestant Irish”) was on the German Desk at FBI headquarters in 1942. As pressures on the desk increased with U.S. involvement in the war, Flinn asked for help. On March 28, 1942, Harvey moved to the National Defense Division, Internal Security Section, German Desk, at “the seat of government,” which is how Hoover habitually referred to Washington. For the next few years Harvey continued to work on penetrating German espionage and doubling Nazi agents. He was joined on that desk by Mark Felt, the man who years later became Deep Throat, the main source for Woodward and Bernstein’s Washington Post articles on the Watergate scandal.5

  Flinn recalls of Harvey, “We worked across the desk from each other from early 1942 until July 1943,” at which time Flinn was reassigned as legal attaché at Lisbon, Portugal. Flinn, Harvey, and Art Thurston formed a close trio.6

  As early as May 1942, Harvey was feeling restless at the German desk. “Agent advised he was married but that he definitely and conclusively had made up his mind that he was willing to leave the United States without his wife … felt it was his patriotic duty…. Recommend he be approved” for “special assignment,” a euphemism for the FBI’s operations in Central and South America. But on June 3, 1942, he was refused because of his “married status; more valuable on National Defense as a Supervisor.”

  Half a century later CG Harvey, Bill’s second wife, made an interesting point: “Bill’s … aim in life had been to be a Marine general. But the FBI wouldn’t let him out. He tried everything.”7 In fact, the FBI file shows that Harvey was repeatedly classified II-A, the draft category for those deemed indispensable to the war effort. October 1943: “Excellent knowledge of the German intelligence picture and organizations, both in this country and in Germany … has been of assistance in many of the Bureau’s national defense prosecutions.” Nothing could have made J. Edgar purr more than a fast-rising junior who helped nail the enemy in court. Further, “Agent has lectured before numerous new Agents and in-Service Schools.” This is the first reference to Harvey as a teacher; he later influenced many senior CIA officers in this role.

  Another of Harvey’s bosses, Hugh H. Clegg, made a significant point: “Agent has no personal problems … excellent personality…. Particularly well-grounded in the Bureau’s espionage cases…. Executive ability may be developed at some future date.” Supervisor Clegg recommended, though, that after the war, Harvey get some gumshoe experience, “in order to more fully develop him.”

&
nbsp; All of this praise brought Bill a promotion to CAF-12 at $4,600 in 1944.

  HIGH … AND LOW

  In February 1945, during the last wartime winter, Harvey was recognized for a major, meticulous analysis. He “took it upon himself to review all files in the Bureau on German organizations and prepared a compilation of all available information concerning the activities of the NSDAP [the Nazi Party]…. Followed the matter closely and instilled the necessary interest and enthusiasm in the field offices.”

  World War II ended and Bill was given an automatic in-grade raise in October 1945, but immediately thereafter he overstepped himself, at least in the view of the only person who counted, J. Edgar Hoover.

  That month the special agent in charge in New York sent an urgent wire to Washington asking for immediate permission to bug a certain dinner party. Harvey OKed the operation on his own authority. It was the first time—but far from the last—that he acted on what he thought was right, rather than waiting for superiors to give the go-ahead. Soon enough, Bill had to eat very humble pie, though he had, he claimed, only been acting for his boss, who was on leave. “I desire to assure you [Hoover] that there was no intent on my part to by-pass either your approval or that of Mr. Tamm. It is sincerely regretted that this inadvertently occurred.” But on November 1, 1945, Buddha frowned on Harvey.

  I feel that you exercised extremely bad judgment in assuming that the matter had previously been considered by higher officials and approved….

  Indiscriminate authorizations of this type cannot be permitted and more sound judgment on your part will be expected in the future.