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  Once aboard Harvey did not go about establishing his presence meekly. He probably laughed off his disgrace in Rock Creek Park, but that and earlier scrapes with Hoover foreshadowed later upheavals in Harvey’s career, a series of confrontations with authority in which Bill was usually bested because he argued from an operational point of view and too often ignored the practicalities that drove other players in the bureaucratic amphitheater.

  IMPOLITIC LIAISON: THE BUREAU AND THE AGENCY

  Many CIA people could not stand Hoover’s posturing. Coincidentally, or perhaps by design, Harvey got to ruffle the Bureau’s feathers right away, as a liaison channel to the FBI for the Agency’s counterintelligence desk, Staff C.

  July 10, 1950

  COOPERATION WITH CIA

  (Report of a meeting between Cartha (Deke) De Loach and Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, then Director of Central Intelligence) Adm. Hillenkoetter replied that he sincerely regretted allowing the initial letter [about lack of cooperation] … to go out of his agency. He stated that the former SA William K. Harvey prepared the letter in question and it was now evident to him that Harvey had no proof or background upon which to base his charges…. [Hillenkoetter] intended to censure Harvey.

  Mr. De Loach advised Admiral Hillenkoetter that we had no interest in his employees being censured, however the FBI would appreciate factual statements, of some background, before ‘trumped-up’ charges were hurled erroneously…. The Admiral requested that Mr. Hoover be advised that he would carefully examine all mail … addressed to the FBI.

  Ladd’s handwritten endorsement: “Place a copy in personnel file of Former Agent Harvey.” Hoover appended: “Yes, by all means.”

  In retrospect, it sounds like a hissy fit. But tensions were high in Washington. American troops were barely hanging on in South Korea. Reinforcements were being rushed to them as quickly as possible. On August 2, 1950, Hillenkoetter caved. Ladd to Hoover:

  [ ] advised … that former Special Agent William K. Harvey, now employed by the CIA, was unfriendly and hostile towards the FBI and that we would prefer to have Liaison relations with another individual.

  Admiral Hillenkoetter … advised that it was unfortunate that Harvey possessed a most ambitious and forceful personality which at times made letters written by Harvey quite pointed and sarcastic. He stated that on occasions he had found it necessary to “tone down” letters that Harvey had written to the Bureau….

  Admiral Hillenkoetter advised that he would appoint anyone suggested by the Bureau for liaison…. If [the director] wished to take any administrative action against Harvey, he would be glad to do so.

  The next day, Harvey crawled, and it must have been painful. “[Harvey] stated that Admiral Hillenkoetter had informed him of the Bureau’s displeasure … and that he desired to call and rectify what he feels sure is an honest mistake…. He has highest regard for the Bureau…. He would like to see The Director sometime and express his regrets in this regard. I advised him you were out of the city at the present time….

  “The Director indicated that the liaison arrangements with Mr. Harvey could continue for the present to determine whether his attitude was as he has indicated.”

  At a small working lunch given by Gen. Bedell Smith for J. Edgar Hoover, shortly after Smith took over the Agency in 1951, the general asked the director to explain the animosity between the two agencies. “Well, General, the first thing wrong is all these ex-Bureau people over here sniping and proselytizing, and particularly Bill Harvey.”

  Then came the Philby affair, dealt with more extensively in the next chapter, which undoubtedly rankled in the Bureau. Hoover’s revenge was to heap petulantly furious blame on Harvey, even for years afterward. One example: A memo on December 20, 1951, from the director to the special agent in charge of the Washington field office, ordered agents to keep close tabs on former FBI men, specifically Harvey. This correspondence was followed by an undated memo in Hoover’s handwriting, which reads, “It is regretted that not one of these ex-agents with whom we come into contact in our dealings with CIA had a clean record either while in FBI or an attitude of good will toward FBI after leaving it. I cannot help but conclude that much of the difficulty with CIA has been engineered by this group.” At the end of September 1952 Harvey’s unpopularity down Pennsylvania Avenue was reinforced in a memo written by Mickey Ladd and endorsed by Hoover.

  CIA PROSELYTING OF BUREAU PERSONNEL.

  … I have heard that there are two individuals within the CIA who are particularly anxious to recruit key Bureau personnel. One … is former Special Agent William K. Harvey…. [He] would use any device to proselyte former Bureau personnel and will even go so far as to approach former Bureau personnel presently with CIA to go out and make contact … to entice them with offers of higher grades to go to CIA….

  [ ]

  … It has also been reported, however, that they have the dream of one day taking over Communist and counter-espionage activities in the United States.

  When Bill went to Rome in 1963, the FBI’s legal attaché was made fully aware of the derogatory matters in Bill’s personnel file. And years later the Bureau made its suspicions of Bill Harvey’s association with Johnny Rosselli, the infamous mafioso, very apparent.

  Bill had played in Hoover’s china shop. In courting Buddha’s wrath, Harvey established a pattern of disdain for high bureaucracy that took him to the peaks and plunged him into the valleys of his later career.

  3

  THE HEARTLANDER: BUILDING THE LEGEND

  When Bill Harvey defected from the unbending FBI to the looser CIA, he set about distinguishing himself, a guy from the boondocks, from the run of his new colleagues. He was not Back Bay or Park Avenue or Lake Forest or Marin; he didn’t own a trench coat; and he would never have been described as elegant. Where some other transfers from the Bureau melded fairly easily with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) players who populated the early CIA, Harvey consciously emphasized his rough edges.

  Bill wasn’t about to let false modesty stand in the way of his ambition. He knew that his perspicacity and his ability to sketch the broad picture set him apart. He linked his future inseparably with the aggressive protection of American security. His horizons were limited not by a lack of daring but by rivalries, the practicalities of government, the lack of trained personnel, and to some extent, the limits of espionage technology.

  Weaknesses? Bill is often reputed to have boasted that he had a woman every day of his adult life. Adam Horton, who served briefly and unhappily under Harvey in Berlin, relays a secondhand tale from Washington days: “One evening, well after hours, my friend had just finished the security check for his section and turned out the lights when what should appear across the way, but Bill Harvey having it off on his desk with one of the secretaries.

  “My friend rang the number which Bill, never one to miss the call of duty, answered. My friend suggested that Harvey’s activity was improper. Bill lost his cool, demanding to know the identity of the caller. My friend, sensing Harvey’s rage, decided humor was better than valor. In his most sepulchral voice, he announced himself, ‘God calling!’ and hung up. He got out of the building undetected before Bill could collect himself.”1

  In the dank halls of L Building, Harvey was looked at askance. He presented a larger-than-life target for those who, for whatever reason, wanted to snipe. In the 1940s, if any of the wellborn got tiddly at a Georgetown soiree, it was funny. If Harvey had a few too many, it was a sign that the midwestern underclass couldn’t drink like gentlemen. Besides, Bill Harvey was always flipping the lid of his Zippo lighter, spinning the cylinder of his pistol, and paring his nails with a hunting knife, and he used uncouth language in mixed company.

  From the beginning, Harvey, the quintessential red-blooded Eagle Scout American, emphasized his differences, indeed waved them under the Ivy Leaguers’ noses.

  EARLY DAYS

  Allen W. Dulles, the CIA’s godfather, has often been quoted as having commented that
Bill Harvey was great at what he did, “but the trouble is I don’t know if he’s more conspiratorial or more cop.” The original source and circumstances of the quote are lost in time.

  Tom Polgar, a meticulous observer of the CIA scene, who was in at the beginning, knew Bill early in his career. “Harvey came in with high prestige as an expert on Soviet espionage. This was what CIA at that time required…. No one cared that Harvey had run afoul of J. Edgar Hoover’s chickenshit regulations.

  “As chief of Staff C, Harvey outranked Jim Angleton, but the Black Prince had more money and better personal and social connections. Controlling the Israeli account, Angleton was able to charm General Smith and Dulles, and the relative influence of Harvey declined.”2

  Bill Hood is a distinguished writer whose clandestine career goes back to OSS. One afternoon in the late 1940s Hood and Harvey were lunching in Georgetown when they noticed a CIA Ivy Leaguer at a nearby table. Harvey growled, “Fucking namby-pamby. Not worth shit.” Hood said: “Listen, Bill, that man was a radio operator who dropped into France with less protection on him than you’re wearing right now!”3

  Once, Frank Wisner, then head of Clandestine Services, was chairing a meeting. Wisner asked a couple of questions that touched off a Harvey monologue, the kind of bureaucratic drone for which Bill became famous. As he listened to Bill, the red crept up the back of Wisner’s neck and thence to his ears. “He’s standing behind the chair at the end of the table, and all of a sudden, he leans forward, and grabs the top of his chair with both hands, glares at Harvey and explodes: ‘Goddammit, Harvey, will you let me finish what I came here to do?!’ There was a long, measured beat, then Bill says, ‘Sure, Frank.’”4

  Harvey was a more-than-fair actor. Some called it ego, but his ambition to soar to the top of CIA, which became more evident in later years, was not a quest for power per se; rather it was based on his conviction that he was a better intelligence officer than anyone else he knew.

  None of the calumny that was later dumped on Harvey hit the bookstores until after Bill was long dead. Many on the foreign intelligence side of the Agency to this day believe Harvey at his peak—and despite his manifest personal failings—epitomized all that was sound and solid in the intelligence business during the depths of the Cold War. Harvey was a determined, inspired and inspiring, persevering, sleep-deprived taskmaster. There were none like him.

  One of the originals, Alex MacMillan recollects, “Bill was much maligned; very intelligent, although he didn’t appear to be. That was part of his pattern…. He wanted to get up there to the top and fix everybody. I’m sure he had no heroes [in the higher echelons]. I never figured out what he thought about Allen Dulles.”5

  DICK HELMS

  If the CIA and Office of Special Operations/Foreign Intelligence (OSO/FI) human intelligence gatherers ever had a saint, it was Richard M. Helms. Helms was an Ivy Leaguer, a cautious career officer who disdained political and psychological warfare and who rose from OSO eventually to be the director of central intelligence (DCI).

  Harvey and Helms could hardly have been more disparate. Helms was cool, elegant, suave, socially adept, and quiet, and he kept his relationships with his colleagues purely professional. This was fine by Harvey. To Bill Harvey, Helms was “the Boy Diplomat,” and though Helms was the one man senior to him who consistently stood by him and with whom he shared chunks of very touchy knowledge, Harvey consciously irked Helms in later years. By 1968 Helms felt compelled to turn against Harvey.

  Years later, in the measured mellowness of retirement, the ever-graceful Helms urged me to embark on this study. He had this to say about the man he came to view with suspicion and whom he forced to retire from the Agency: “Bill was rarely seen without a pistol stuffed in his belt. The professional persona he seemed to favor was that of a senior police officer, a master of the terrain assigned to him, wily, informed, perceptive, and deeply patriotic. He was also deliberately blunt and loudly outspoken…. Bill was not, and never pretended to be, a man for all seasons. But what he did best, he did very well.”6 Bill Hood, who coauthored Helms’s autobiography, says he never knew Helms to be so outspokenly in favor of a man, “even though they had nothing in common.”7

  INTO OPS

  Once in CIA harness, Harvey was logically assigned to head what had been OSS’s counterespionage branch, soon to be called “Staff C.”

  Even then, there were rivalries between CIA’s Clandestine Services staffs. Clarence Berry: “When I first entered on duty in August 1948, Staff C was just in its early stages, while Staff D [communications intelligence procurement] seemed to be a more going concern. Even during the short time I was around headquarters … there was a bit of antagonism between the two staffs, but even then, staffers almost invariably referred to Harvey as ‘Big Bill.’”8

  Harvey did what he could to launch operations against the Soviet intelligence services. Alex MacMillan: “About all we did was go to cocktail parties and look the Russians over, trying to pick up stuff. I don’t think we accomplished a hell of a lot. Bill was at first employed well below his capabilities. He complained about it privately. A bit later, Bill and I worked together planning counterespionage activities…. Bill was responsible for most of it. We’d pore over documents late at night, changing words, even single letters in the master plan we were putting together.”9

  It was that kind of cocktail party contact that led Harvey to his next major coup in the world of counterespionage: the unmasking of Kim Philby.

  THE PHILBY AFFAIR

  The Brits had proven during World War II that they were masters of the double game. OSS learned from them that the true intelligence prize was to know the enemy intimately, perhaps even to lead him astray with disinformation—goals and tactics that were far more valuable than the detention and trial of enemy agents.

  From October 1949 on, the British Secret Intelligence Service’s (MI-6’s) chief representative to the American security and intelligence apparatus in Washington was H. A. R. (Kim) Philby, a Cambridge graduate and wartime boss of British writer Graham Greene. Philby forged firm friendships with some of the men who were integral to the young Central Intelligence Agency, Frank Wisner, Tracy Barnes, and James Jesus Angleton, the former OSS officer who had lived in wartime London and later worked in Italy.

  The problem was that Philby, who could drink and party with the best of them, had for years been a deeply covered KGB agent, one of the later-notorious Cambridge Five, a handful of bright young undergraduates who had been recruited in the mid-1930s by an NKVD illegal (Arnold Deutsch) in London. Each of the five rose to appreciable professional standing and provided the Russians with extremely valuable information over a skein of years.

  In Washington after the war, Philby set about eliciting information from his new chums, while other Americans were monitoring and deciphering a stream of radio messages from a KGB resident in New York, known as the Venona intercepts. Philby saw some of the intercepts, and so, as has often been noted, he must have become worried that the Bureau would catch on to him.

  Then came an incident which practically everyone who has written about the CIA’s early days mentions: a dinner party in January 1951 at Kim Philby’s house on Nebraska Avenue that went disastrously wrong and had consequences that shook both the British and the American governments. The story made its public debut in David Martin’s Wilderness of Mirrors, but all versions are substantially the same, even to the one in Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost.10 Kim had invited “twenty-five to thirty” of his closest American associates, including Bob Lamphere and his wife, and “Mickey and Catherine Ladd, Emory and Molly Gregg,” all of the FBI. The CIA contingent included the top brass from Clandestine Services; Jim Angleton and his wife, Cicely; and the Harveys.11

  The party was a disaster, far worse than any host’s worst nightmare. First, there was the obvious social split between Bureau and Agency people. Harvey was somewhere in the middle: not, socially, CIA, but no longer FBI. Then, into this tense-but-bibulous group of
guests waltzed Guy Burgess, a second secretary at the British embassy, who was bunking with Philby. Burgess had already come to the attention of the American civil authorities because of a flagrant traffic incident in Virginia. He had been spared a driving under the influence citation only because of his diplomatic immunity.

  Bob Lamphere:

  Libby Harvey joined us [at the party]. She’d already had a lot to drink and wanted to share her disgust at the entire array of dinner guests and the party itself with anyone who’d listen. Somehow she became my dinner partner, and I spent most of the meal attempting to quiet her. She hated the typically British cold roast beef and loudly said, “Isn’t this God-awful!” about every detail of food and service. The end of the dinner came none too quickly for me, and as soon thereafter as we could politely manage, the Greggs and my wife and I left the party. We should have stayed….

  Burgess got into an insulting debate with Mickey Ladd, which Ladd probably enjoyed…. But then Burgess turned to Libby Harvey. He said to her, “How extraordinary to see the face I’ve been doodling all my life!” She invited him to sketch her portrait. Burgess executed a caricature so lewd and savage that Libby demanded to be taken home immediately.12

  Burgess’s sketch was a vividly obscene cartoon of Libby, dress hiked above her waist, crotch bared. Burgess, very drunk, showed the sketch around. Enraged, Harvey swung at Burgess and missed. The party lurched close to mayhem. Winston MacKinlay Scott, former FBI station chief in Mexico City, now CIA, described the dinner to John Barron, the well-known chronicler of the secret world: “Harvey jumped on Burgess and was choking him with both hands. It took Scott and Philby and one other guest to pull him off.”13 Angleton quickly steered Harvey out the door and walked him around the block. Others took care of the now-hysterical Libby.