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  When he could, Harvey also went to Munich because his son was at the Army-sponsored branch of a stateside university there. Bill undoubtedly welcomed the trips because they gave him a chance to get back into the familiar, orderly German ambience.

  He once called one of his former Berlin subordinates, now stationed in the Bavarian capital, to ask if he could stay with the ex-BOB family. “Much as I loved Bill, it was awful. He nearly fell out of the lift on the way up to the base office. He walked around with a tear in his suit pants, and his knee showing bloody, without even noticing it…. He was twirling his revolver in public.”16

  In a Munich beerhall, one of those buxom, bucolic waitresses noticed something on the floor, leaned down, and came up with a revolver, which she offered to Harvey, with the Bavarian equivalent of, “Yours, I presume?”

  Joe Wildmuth, a fellow Hoosier who had been in Berlin, recalls sadly, “The last time I saw Harvey was in Munich, which he visited on his way home from that disastrous tour in Rome, where his Indiana attitude met Renaissance Italy. Bill was pale, a bit shrunken and, it seemed to me, totally defeated.”17

  Dave Murphy: “If he had been able to curb his drinking in Rome, CG would have been happy…. Harvey suffered a heart attack. Two Agency doctors were sent to minister to him…. They warned him that he would have to stop drinking and smoking and keep regular hours.”18

  “The word was out. Junior people back in Washington were talking. It had gone beyond self-immolation.”19

  Harvey’s recall from Rome in 1966 was probably organized by Dr. Arthur Tietjen, the Agency’s director of medical services, who was studying the effects of stress on CIA officers with Dr. Jack Hall. Jim Critchfield called Tietjen, “a really fine person, whose recommendations were respected by all of us.” Tietjen would have received the reports of the two doctors who examined Bill after his Rome heart attack. He also knew that Bill was suffering from blood clots in his legs, which were aggravated by his drinking. Perhaps, indeed, Tietjen persuaded FitzGerald to go to Rome, size up the situation, and recall Bill for medical treatment. The return from Italy may, in fact, have saved Bill’s life.

  “CG was heartily in favor of leaving Rome and getting Bill back to the States.”20

  Sam Halpern: “When [Harvey] came back, Helms gave him ‘special assignments’ at which he could work at his own pace and didn’t have to show face in public.”21

  Bill was spiraling down.

  12

  THE DOLDRUMS

  Bill Harvey was never an open book, but during the first twenty years of his career, he left a fairly well-blazed trail. Where records were missing or unavailable, there were, early in the twenty-first century, still people who vividly remembered him. After Rome, the trail becomes sketchy, and this is the way Bill wanted it. He intensely disliked the possibility that his history could be documented, even before he got into trouble, unless he controlled it. Others in the bureaucracy were not so chary of the written word.

  In 1966–67 Harvey moldered in disgrace, his rare talents unused and largely unwanted; he was an object of sympathy, not adulation, when he showed up at the office. Sam Halpern’s is the only evidence that Harvey was active at all. “He worked on ‘the Moscow Signal’ … where the Russians were bombarding the U.S. embassy in Moscow with sound waves…. I understand his report for the National Foreign Intelligence Board was excellent.”1 Other than that, nothing remains to indicate how Bill occupied his time.

  Tom Parrott had an office just down the corridor from Harvey in 1966, the year Harvey returned from Rome. “I felt very sorry for him. There he was, sitting in the office, with nothing to do at all. It was pathetic.

  “Once he came back from lunch and he was pretty worried, maybe even ashamed. He asked another guy if it was OK that he had had a third martini for lunch. It was very sad.” The Harvey who had presided over the Martini Ritual, almost as a test of manhood, now appeared to cringe in despair or remorse over his inability to stop drinking and seemed afraid his lack of control would be noted.2

  Bill’s other problem, apart from hard liquor, was his continuing contact with Johnny Rosselli, by whom the CIA felt threatened. The Bureau badly wanted to nail Rosselli because he was an irritant, a challenge to Hoover’s precise, neat worldview, and even worse, a chum of the excommunicated Harvey. But Rosselli was everything Harvey responded to: he knew how to keep a secret, he was used to guns, he drank without fear. Rosselli was an underdog who had made it to the top in a rough world and with whom Bill had shared some of the glory moments of the crusade against Castro, whose accident of birth was not what Georgetown deemed appropriate. He was a guy after Harvey’s own heart.

  When the CIA’s quarterdeck learned that Harvey was once again in touch with Rosselli, after Bill’s return from Rome, its attitude toward Bill shifted from compassion to dismay to increasing suspicion. Harvey was warned to break the connection, but he flatly refused to dump his beleaguered friend. The CIA, from Helms, the director, down, was sorry because it respected what Bill had been. But Harvey’s stubbornness made the Agency, officially, begin to wonder where his loyalties truly lay.

  INTO PURGATORY

  As Harvey faced his second purgatory, he was almost a husk of a man, but I have come across no sign of repentance. He struggled to get off booze, probably at the insistence of Dr. Tietjen, but was only partially successful. At a lunch with one of the Agency seniors in late 1967, he indicated he was not enamored of the counseling he had been forced to accept; somehow, too, I find it difficult to imagine Bill Harvey being very forthcoming in an AA meeting.

  He was still smoking, perhaps as many as three packs a day. He was still vastly overweight. He had problems with high blood pressure and with the clots in his legs. He almost undoubtedly had some intimations of his own mortality. And he was not going down commanding a clandestine battalion surging into secret battle, but succumbing to the consequences of his own tastes.

  Harvey’s fall from icon to object of suspicion is not a pretty story. Few of his old comrades knew, or wanted to know, his circumstances, nor did they want to hear the drumbeat of disapproval that Bill had to endure.

  In the mid-1960s CIA officers went home and looked after their kids and watched TV; there weren’t as many parties as there had been in the old days. A few of Bill’s old friends stuck with him—came out to suburban Maryland for a meal or a chat when they could—but the Berlin Brotherhood, which might have offered him moral succor, was dispersed around the globe, and those in Washington were involved in the broad aspects of Indochina and the Cold War. Sally Harvey remembered that Cicely Angleton came over to the Harveys’ Chevy Chase house to spend time with CG after she and Bill had returned from Rome, despite the fact that the two women came from vastly different social milieus.

  CIA foreign intelligence (FI) people were rattled. The Agency had suffered severe shocks in the past few years. There was the shameful case of Jim Angleton’s mole hunt and Peter Karlow. Philip Agee went loudly public with revelations that blew the cover, and endangered the lives, of a number of officers. Drew Pearson was listening to Rosselli talk about the Kennedys’ plans to assassinate Fidel Castro. In 1967 Lyndon Johnson demanded that Dick Helms provide proof that radical American protesters were being funded from abroad. To get answers, the CIA operated for the first time inside the United States on American targets. The country was lurching into upheaval over Vietnam. It was a very difficult time at Langley.

  ON THE SKIDS

  By early 1967 Harvey’s situation vis-à-vis the U.S. government was anything but pleasant. He had been ordered to use up his accumulated sick leave. Hoover had never forgiven Harvey for not being a team player. The Bureau thought he was meddling in its righteous case against Rosselli, whose life they were determined to make miserable. Bill would be listened to if he wanted to report something to Sam Papich, who was still the FBI’s CIA liaison officer, or one of the other seniors in the FBI, but he would be cut no slack.

  Harvey became aware that Helms no longer trusted h
im and that he was being handled by Agency administrators—not his former operational colleagues—with asbestos gloves. The cast that ruled on Bill’s fate was Helms’s innermost cabinet: Howard J. Osborn, who had succeeded Col. Sheffield Edwards as CIA’s director of security; Lawrence K. “Red” White, the executive director of the CIA; Jack Earman, the inspector general (IG); and Lawrence Houston, the CIA’s general counsel. These very senior officers warily compiled a formidable file of very touchy memoranda on every aspect of Harvey’s contact with the CIA’s uppermost level in the months following his return from Rome. The Agency’s quarterdeck was covering its collective ass; in so doing, they gave us insight into the final decline of the Tunneler. If Harvey made any notes on his waning days with the Agency, they were summarily destroyed by CG immediately after his death, or later.

  On numerous occasions the CIA tried to get Bill to sever contact with Rosselli, but he would not. In March 1967 the situation became acute. Word leaked that Drew Pearson had the Bobby Kennedy–Castro assassination story. The Agency IG team raced to investigate. Howard Osborn wrote a memorandum for the record on March 29, 1967.

  1. Jack Earman, Inspector General, has been trying to locate Bill Harvey…. He told me that the Director had instructed him to investigate any and all aspects of the “Johnny” case … pointed out that before they expanded the circle of interviewees, they should have available to them all of the documentation held by me, plus the cooperation of the one individual now with the Agency that knows more about this case than anyone else, i.e. [name blacked out, but most probably Jim O’Connell].

  2…. It seems that the White House, Congress and Drew Pearson are digging into the allegation … and [Helms] wants to be in a position to say that his Inspector General has investigated the matter thoroughly.3

  Next, on May 3, 1967, Earman warily recorded that he and Papich had compared notes, probably because he knew there would be unrelenting Bureau surveillance of developments. Harvey had phoned both the Bureau and the Agency to ensure that they knew of Rosselli’s impending arrival in Washington. Earman: “I told Sam that our official position was that there should be no contact between Harvey and Rosselli, but we are not in a position to dictate to Harvey on this…. I told Sam that Harvey is no longer an employee of this Agency. He has, in effect, retired, although he is presently being carried on sick leave.”

  Papich, who had known Bill since both were young FBI officers in the 1940s, told Earman,

  Rosselli … almost certainly will be kept under surveillance.

  CIA is in an extremely vulnerable position. Rosselli and … Sam Giancana continue to be in a position to publicly embarrass CIA … [and] have CIA over a barrel because of “that operation.” He [Papich] said that the Bureau would like to get its hands on Rosselli and get him to talk, but he doubts that they will be able to do anything about either Rosselli or Giancana, because of “their previous activities with your people….”

  Sam says that it would be nice if Harvey would agree to recording the meeting, but he doubted that Harvey would consent…. He was not much concerned if Harvey were sober during the meeting, but that he was worried about what Harvey might say if he got drunk.

  Earman added an interesting note: “I told Papich to the best of my knowledge, Harvey had not met with Rosselli since their meeting in Washington in June 1963, just before Harvey left for Rome”; in other words, the CIA apparently had no record of telephone or cable contact between the pair while Bill was in Italy.

  TROUBLED TIMES

  Sam Papich had a “pleasant” lunch with Bill on Friday, May 5, 1967, and reported it to Osborn on May 8. “Harvey had had only one double Martini and, in response to a query by the waitress, refused a second one.” Bill said he had not seen Rosselli since 1963 but had had several “general chitchat” phone conversations with him, dates and circumstances unspecified.

  Harvey explained to Sam that his relationship with Rosselli was a personal one, stemming from his earlier use of Rosselli in an operational capacity. He told Sam that if one left the criminal aspect of Rosselli’s activities out of the picture, the mafioso was a charming and personable man who could talk on a variety of subjects articulately and knowledgeably. This was not exactly what Papich wanted to hear. He warned Harvey against “continuing contact with an individual of Rosselli’s ilk. He told him that the Bureau would be in no position to ‘bail him out’ if this association came to light.” Harvey offered to report to Papich on his meeting with Johnny; Papich said, icily, that that was up to Bill. “He wanted to make it very clear that The Bureau was not requesting his cooperation.”

  After the Papich lunch, Harvey understood in no uncertain terms that he was on his own and that he had to bear the consequences for whatever he might do or not do with Rosselli. Osborn summed up: “Sam … got the impression that Harvey was bitter about the manner in which he had been ‘forced out’ of The Agency and seemed to focus his attention on The Director as the point of his resentment. Sam did not mention [Dick Helms’s] name in this context and indicated that this part of our conversation was ‘off the record’”—and then promptly put the details on paper.

  “[Sam] did not intend to pass along the information to anyone else in The Agency and I have made no copies of this memorandum. I … request only that you not compromise my relationship with Mr. Papich by indicating that I have made it available to you.”

  Bill also bent over backward to keep the Agency informed. On May 11 he told Earman that Rosselli had arrived in Washington. Helms told the IG to tell Bill that the director “had no ‘special instructions’ for him.” Also on May 11 Bill suggested lunch to Howard Osborn and Sheffield Edwards. Both put him off until the following week. When informed of the lunch invitation, Helms told his subordinates to “merely sit and listen to what Harvey has to say and not try to trade points with him.”

  Harvey told Papich that the meeting with Rosselli was to be at his house, i.e., not at the familiar rendezvous, the Madison Hotel, which was easier to cover. Papich told the CIA that the FBI did not “intend to try to cover it.”

  On May 18 Osborn noted for the record that he had made an effort to give Helms plausible deniability on the ramifications of the Rosselli case but that Helms had said he was fully aware of the affair. He told Osborn to “work closely with The Bureau on this matter…. He further directed that I handle this personally and not involve any other Agency personnel unless it became absolutely necessary.

  “I also informed Mr. Helms of the actions of Mr. William K. Harvey in writing letters from [ ] to ‘Johnny’ suggesting that ‘Johnny’ assist him in some unspecified manner. Further I informed him that I had strongly suggested to Mr. Harvey that he have nothing further to do with Johnny.” Whether Harvey wrote the letters to Rosselli from Rome remains an open question; what kind of help Harvey wanted from Rosselli remains a matter for speculation, as does the matter of how the letters got into the CIA’s hands.

  PUTTING ON THE HEAT

  On July 21, 1967, Papich told Osborn “in the strictest confidence” that, according to a telephone intercept, Rosselli was coming to Washington on about September 20, 1967. “Apparently Rosselli has some sort of a problem.” Papich added that the FBI was “really putting the heat on Rosselli. Several new things have come up, nature unspecified.” Papich asked that the information be passed only to Helms and that the Agency inform the Bureau if Rosselli tried to get help from Harvey or “any of Rosselli’s other CIA contacts. Papich specifically asked that Harvey not be told of The Bureau’s intensified interest in Rosselli…. There was no doubt in [Osborn’s] mind that Rosselli would call on The Agency to bail him out.” The news of the trip so concerned Dick Helms that he called Papich in for a personal briefing.

  The same day Harvey tried to reach both the IG and the head of security. That afternoon he dropped by Earman’s office to report on the impending Rosselli visit and said that Johnny

  sounded more agitated than he had ever heard him before…. He was being harassed by the
FBI…. The case The Bureau and the Justice Department has against Rosselli is hotter now than ever before … primarily on the probability that Rosselli is in the country under an assumed name…. In short, said Bill, “is Johnny Rosselli the Johnny Rosselli that was born in Chicago in 1907, or is he somebody else who was born in Italy in 1907?” Harvey added, “his concern was that Rosselli might turn to someone else and tell him the whole story [of the CIA’s attempts to assassinate Castro]….

  Bill said he thinks it is obvious that the Bureau is trying to get Sam Giancana and others of the Mob through Rosselli. Bill said he was quite sure that Rosselli would not rat on Giancana. The Mob just doesn’t do things like that, and Rosselli knows better than to try it…. Bill mentioned that he knew of the possibility that Rosselli was in the country illegally.

  Then the record is blank until Harvey checked back with Earman on September 26 to say that Johnny had been told by his Los Angeles lawyer that it might be a good idea “not to leave the jurisdiction, hence he had decided not to come to Washington. “Rosselli seemed much calmer than he had when he called earlier…. Harvey remains convinced that Rosselli will never be pushed to the point where he will try to use us to pull him out of a hole.”

  The next episode was a lunch Harvey and Osborn had on October 4, 1967, after Osborn had received approval from Helms and the IG “to evaluate [Harvey’s] current physical and mental state of being.” Osborn was careful to notify the FBI that he would be meeting Bill. Harvey obviously trusted Osborn, who, Bill said, was one of his few remaining friends in the CIA.

  Osborn: “I met with Harvey who was about a half hour late and who entered the restaurant in dark glasses. I ordered a Martini and he ordered a beer, and we spent the first fifteen minutes or so in an exchange of information relating to our families, the tragic and untimely death of Desmond FitzGerald, the burglary of his household, and the current status of his application for admission to the District Bar.” (Emphasis added.)