Flawed Patriot Page 34

  TED AND BILL

  One of Harvey’s closest friends over the years was Ted Shackley, who died in December 2003. His widow, Hazel, who met Ted while working at Berlin Operations Base, reflected on that friendship some months after Shackley’s death. “We were really good friends, all four of us. He used to stay with us when he came down to Miami; CG came and stayed with us in Bethesda after Bill died.

  “It was a friendship based on mutual respect. But it took a while to develop. Neither of them gave their trust easily. Like a couple of boxers feeling each other out, at first. Then they became close, really close.”12 Harvey probably let Shackley as close as he’d let any man, save Rosselli. Yet Harvey and Shackley’s friendship was one that yielded little to inquirers or to history.

  13

  BACK HOME IN INDIANA

  CG Harvey undoubtedly campaigned strenuously to get out of metro Washington. Bill probably caved because he wasn’t getting anywhere in the law business in the capital and many of his friends were otherwise occupied. Part of the decision may also have been based on the toll his life had taken on his health. Maybe he felt the need to come back to his roots and to succor his mother at the end of her life, and then, the house next door came onto the market.

  Moving out of the seat of government was psychological resignation, a cop out; he was turning his back on what had been an absorbing way of life, even if, during the last few years, he hadn’t really been part of it. Indianapolis was obscurity, but not an entirely welcome change. And in Bill’s eyes, he was just as vulnerable in Indy as he had been in and around D.C.

  Were there reasons other than the tug of the Heartland, mother, and the availability of accommodation? Did the move also have something to do with Johnny Rosselli? With the geographical location of Indy, not all that far from Chicago? In light of what follows, perhaps some other factors played into Harvey’s decision to move.

  As Bill and CG established their new life in Indiana, Sally Harvey grew into her teenage years. Today she recalls, “Bill found the job editing law decisions for Bobbs-Merrill drudgery! He needed stimulation—a challenge. And he didn’t have that in Indianapolis…. There was no one here for him to connect with.”1 Bill scrawled little notes from humorous cases on scraps of paper so that the whole family could enjoy them around the dinner table. There were the horses and bridge and the church. Sally still called Rosselli “Uncle Johnny.”

  Bill did not let his guard down in Indiana, but seemed, rather, even to increase his readiness for trouble. His protectiveness of young Sally seemed almost to verge on paranoia. Did he have a premonition? Was his caution just the continuation of habits ingrained over years? Sally mentions that her father continued to make “trips” overseas. Why did he go abroad? At whose behest?

  To the minister of his church, Rev. David P. Kahlenberg, Harvey once said, “There’s a price on my head.”

  “From whom?” Kahlenberg asked.

  “The KGB.”

  “He was always on his guard. He felt he was being watched,” Sally says. After he left the CIA, Bill was “mostly sober, but CG was constantly after him to cut back or even stop his drinking.”

  THE GATEKEEPER

  In Indianapolis, Harvey had few people with whom he could discuss common interests, but CG, the gregarious heartlander, felt right at home.

  Maybe twice a year, the Harveys went down to Shelbyville, on the road to Cincinnati, for a weekend with Art and Sudsy Thurston. Art was one of Harvey’s old pals from FBI days, one of the triumvirate with Dennis Flinn. The trips to visit him were a sheer pleasure. The two men sat on a riverbank, downing a few, reminiscing about days in the Bureau and the Agency, and firing a toy cannon across the river, laughing like delighted kids. Bill may have opened up to Thurston. Thurston, suffering from late-stage Alzheimer’s disease, could not comment on the visits or the conversations, and Sudsy is long dead.

  After he retired, Flinn made it a point to stop off in Indiana to see Art. But they never managed a reunion of all three. There was something about the atmosphere in Indianapolis. Flinn felt as if a visit to the Harveys’ would not be welcome. He said, “CG was the gatekeeper.”2 “The gatekeeper” remark struck an odd, lingering note. It hurt Flinn that he had not been able to see his old pal.

  Dennis had known Libby Harvey, and it’s conceivable that, even decades later, CG wanted to keep the past sealed. Then, too, in Indianapolis, after he got sober, Bill was only a shadow of his former self. Perhaps CG wanted Harvey’s oldest friend to remember him as the robust iconoclast he had been. Or maybe it was that CG feared Bill would confide to Flinn matters so sensitive they shouldn’t be mentioned, even to one of the triumvirate, especially matters concerning Rosselli and the things that friendship had gotten him into.

  It was Flinn who queried Harvey after his Church Committee appearances about the shortcomings of Bill’s testimony. And it was to Flinn that Bill replied, memorably, if succinctly, “They didn’t ask the right questions!”

  A BUNCH OF RAGAMUFFINS

  In young middle age, Sally is a petite blonde of sinewy build. She used to do laps in a swimming pool but had to give the exercise up because of the turmoil attendant on CG’s death, which happened only a few months before we met. In a quiet moment, she hazards a querulous aside, as if the very thought was disloyal to the memory of Bill and CG. “Did you ever hear anything more about … Christa, my real mother? I think she married.” Then Sally quickly changes the subject.

  During her formative years, CG was the cop in the family. Bill, the softie, yielded, as do most fathers, to the blandishments of his daughter. “Dad always brought presents back from his trips. He never really disciplined me. Mom would ground me for the weekend, and then I’d tell Dad there was a party I just had to go to, he’d say, ‘Well, how about if we ground you until Friday noon?’

  “I really didn’t get to know Dad until Indianapolis. It was the first time we really were a family! Out here, we were always together. He loved baseball, and he’d take us to games. We were a bunch of ragamuffins. Dad thoroughly enjoyed being back in a family situation…. CG was the glue that held us together.”

  CG took Sally and Jim to Berlin for Sally’s tenth birthday. At one point, they were at Checkpoint Charlie, standing on one of the wooden viewing platforms that then looked over the wall into East Berlin. Nearby was a German, about thirty, talking guardedly to his wife, his mother, and his kids, all of whom were still in the East. Suddenly the East German sentry fired a single shot over their heads. The family scattered. The man broke into heaving, wrenching sobs. CG cried too and, through her tears, said to Sally, “See, that’s Communism.”

  HOMELIFE

  In Indianapolis, Bill used to sit in his favorite chair with his back to the front window, reading, always reading. He was fascinated by military history, and he took a reluctant Sally to Gettysburg more than once. “He knew where every damn bullet had been fired. I’d say, ‘Aw, c’mon, Dad!’ and he’d still continue, until he finished that particular story!”

  And still, all those years after Indiana University, with all that had happened in between, he could still recite poetry and Shakespeare; indeed he had poetry-quoting duels with his mother, recalling pieces he learned in school.

  Sally continues, “He didn’t exercise. He walked and groomed his mare, Bertha, but he didn’t ride her. She had been abused by her previous owner, but she really settled down after they bred her, and she produced the filly, Lady Meyers. Then he bridle broke the filly. Mom taught him because she grew up around horses….

  “Bill had a way with animals. He always wanted a dog, but Mom wouldn’t let him have one. She had Oriental rugs….

  “CG was the public face of the couple. She did the social life, but she was also tough as well as intelligent. CG was the only woman who was ever able to keep up with Dad intellectually.”

  Harvey and CG practiced and played bridge four or five times a week. CG really hoped to become a Life Master before she died.

  They went to t
he Riviera Club, an emphatically dry country club with “a really huge pool” and “good, solid buffet food!” And, “Mom gave fantastic dinner parties, even though that was not a primary way of entertainment in Indiana.”3

  Herb Natzke, the last of the brotherhood to be chief of base, Berlin, visited Harvey in about 1973 on his way back to Washington from a vacation in Wisconsin. “Bill had stopped drinking. He was still overweight, but looking good.” Bill showed Natzke Bertha, who nuzzled him.4

  COVER BLOWN

  Sally never told her school friends about her own or her family’s background. But their anonymity exploded when the Indianapolis Star ran a wire story that Bill would have to testify before the Church Committee.

  Sally says, “Dad was shocked!” She was a junior in high school at the time. “My government teacher made some half-assed comment about Dad. I just turned around and walked out.

  “There were lots of media calls. Dad became the most nervous I had ever seen him. He said to all of us, ‘You do not talk to anyone on the phone!’ He had a strong concern about being recorded on the phone. We just hung up on all of them.

  “Dad was always very cautious with me … checked on my plans…. Sometimes he came to pick me up, at the furniture store where I worked for a while, to escort me home in our two cars…. One day, there was a car in the parking lot” that followed Sally as she left in her own car. She pulled into a Steak & Shake and called Bill. “Dad came and got me. As soon as he got out of his car, they took off.

  “Dad drilled into my head, ‘You need to be aware of your surroundings, always!’”

  Harvey “always sat with his back against the wall.” Sally remembers circling an Indianapolis government building while Bill was inside, getting a gun permit. Suddenly she realized Bill might actually have to use his gun, and shortly thereafter the family had a discussion about what the jurisdictional problems might be if Harvey had to shoot someone.

  It’s possible, of course, that Bill’s precautions came or were stepped up as the Church Committee swung into gear and as Harvey realized that he might become a publicized figure in the Washington hearings. But the general tone of Sally’s remarks seems to indicate that Big Bill’s sense of security did not diminish once he settled in Indiana, rather, to the contrary. The question remains: Why?

  Oddly, says Sally, Bill had no safe in the house. “The feeling was that if there was a break-in, it would have been to kill Dad. We were always on hyper-alert status.”

  Was Bill paranoid at the time of the Church Committee hearings in 1975? Sally replies vigorously, “No! Not at all!”

  Yet after Bill’s death, the family discovered weapons stashed all over the house in sofa cushions, in air vents, crawl spaces, behind furniture. Jim, who was then living on the Pacific Coast, took two duffel bags full of guns to register them with the Los Angeles Police Department, “and the cops were flabbergasted.” CG gave other guns to Art Thurston, down in Shelbyville, to dispose of.

  PASTOR DAVID KAHLENBERG

  Sally’s birth mother made it a condition of her daughter’s adoption that she be raised Lutheran. As a result of the stipulation, the Rev. David P. Kahlenberg, pastor of the Pleasant View Lutheran Church in a northern Indianapolis outskirt became the most influential man in the last stages of Bill Harvey’s life.

  When the family returned from Rome in 1966, Kahlenberg was pastor at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church on Nebraska Avenue in Washington, D.C. Another minister had forewarned him that Harvey was not easy pickings. Sure enough, “almost at the outset, Bill said, ‘Don’t get any fancy ideas I’m going to join your church,’” just because he brought Sally into the church.

  Shortly thereafter, Kahlenberg was called to Indianapolis where he became pastor to former U.S. Senator Homer Capehart and where he also comforted a former governor’s wife when she was dying of cancer.5

  The Harveys renewed their connection with Kahlenberg when they moved to Indianapolis. Sally: “Pastor Kahlenberg’s sermons floated on an intellectual plane which appealed to Dad.” They were “relevant to current events: America is a divine experiment in democracy. A light to the world.” Bill at first mistrusted the concept of “a divine plan,” which was Kahlenberg’s theme on national holidays, but for the last years of Bill’s life, and for CG’s remaining quarter century, Kahlenberg was their source of strength.

  One early spring morning in 2002, sitting in the wintergarden of Sally’s house, Reverend Kahlenberg recalls, and it’s almost as if Harvey’s deep bass voice fills the room, “At first, Bill scared the heck out of me. That ring of authority! He had the strength of a Hannibal!” Kahlenberg is of an unassuming exterior, but his facade peels away gradually, as he allows his warmth and his love of humankind to show through.

  “Bobbs-Merrill was a safe environment for him. He found something where he could use his talents. He wasn’t always on his guard.

  “Through Sally, I got to see Bill’s soft side. She could do no wrong.” Sally is slightly teary during this conversation, which takes place only months after her mother’s death. “Then he began to show he cared for people … if he trusted you….

  “In time, he mentioned the pressures he had worked under.”

  Kahlenberg draws a deep breath. “One Sunday there was a small congregation at the 8:30 service, so I had the ushers rope off the last six rows. Bill came in, and he very abruptly pulled the ropes down, and proceeded to sit in the last row, with his back against the wall.

  “After the service, he stormed in my direction and said, ‘Don’t you know the KGB has a price on my head, and I have to sit with my back to the wall, in any building?’ Then he opened his coat, and revealed a gun in a shoulder holster, which he said he always had with him.

  “He knew he had gotten through to me…. I assured him the ropes in the rear row would never happen again.”

  “HE NEEDED TO HAVE HIS FAITH VALIDATED.”

  Reverend Kahlenberg continues, “One day, Bill called me. ‘I want you over here. Now!’ It was a command performance!”

  What followed was classic Harvey. The only thing missing was the .38 Police Special on the desk, pointing right at Kahlenberg.

  “Bill had between twelve and fifteen places marked in his Bible, from beginning to end. He was troubled by some of what he had read, both intellectually and emotionally. He asked, ‘How can a rational human being believe some of this stuff? Take Genesis. Do you really feel it’s actual history? Do you really believe the world was created in six days?’

  “I told him, being a geologist myself, from college, I did not and would not believe the Universe and the Planet Earth were created in six twenty-four-hour days.”

  Next Harvey asked, “Adam and Eve. Did a Creator start the human race with just two individuals?” Kahlenberg: “As concisely and honestly as I could, I told him that the word ‘Adam’ in Hebrew means ‘mankind,’ and the word ‘Eve’ means ‘womanhood.’ And, no, I didn’t believe that the human race began with just two persons.

  “Next, Bill went to the New Testament and asked several questions about Jesus, especially about His divinity and His miracles. I told him I had no problem believing Christ’s miracles because I had come to the point of accepting that his twelve disciples would not have died for a lie.

  “After many such questions, Bill closed the Bible, and, looking me squarely in the eye, said: ‘When can you baptize me?’”

  Kahlenberg says his reaction was, “You’re kidding?!”

  Harvey, says the minister, had by now recognized some questions could not be answered rationally. “I know spiritual transformation when I see it. We’re all skeptics, but we learn and we take a great leap of faith.”

  The actual baptism was done discreetly, on a weekday evening, with only family present. CG was “ecstatic when Bill decided to be baptized,” although she refused baptism for herself at the time. “In time, Bill became a member of the governing board of the congregation I served.”

  Some time later Pastor Kahlenberg, in the throes of an
unwanted divorce, was ordered to resign by the local bishop. Sally: “Pastor was almost dead with what he had gone through. He was a toxic color.”

  Kahlenberg recalls, “Harvey read my typed resignation … and tore it into pieces. So, thanks to Bill Harvey, I stayed in the ministry and at Pleasant View Lutheran Church for a while.” But the bishop insisted, and Kahlenberg had no option. He remained a minister but had to leave his parish.

  Bill wrote the clergyman, “My heart goes out to you. We support you. Let me know what we can do. You are in my prayers.”

  Kahlenberg: “The one reason I’m still in the ministry is Bill Harvey.”

  “Then, not long after Bill’s death, CG said she was ready to join…. She also became a member of the church council and served as a youth adviser for the teenagers as well.”

  HEALTH

  Sally Harvey, who was in her teens in the 1970s, cannot recall that her father ever had any medical problems. She says that when Bill left the Agency, the admin people asked him what he wanted to do with all his accumulated sick leave, apparently still a positive balance, even despite the leave he had used up pending his retirement. Except for the enforced indolence in 1967, Bill had never taken a day off sick in his entire career. “And that’s amazing when you consider the stress level at which he worked! And … and he smoked five packs of unfiltered Camels every day. Five packs!”

  Yet Ted Shackley and a few others remember Harvey having heart and leg problems in the 1960s. And Clarence Berry, the Berlin Tunnel support officer, saw Bill in Suburban Hospital, Bethesda, in the spring of 1973. “I can visualize him shuffling down the hall. I believe he was in a green robe when we first met. We both said, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Bill said, ‘I got a little problem,’ and I said the same thing.