Flawed Patriot Page 5

  It was not just that an international soiree got out of hand. The dinner took place at a time when the CIA started putting agents into denied areas to establish contacts with resistance groups. Agents dropped into the Soviet Union were rolled up or never heard from again. Airborne operations out of Germany and Italy into Albania had gone bad. The parachutists involved were summarily arrested and shot, and a counterintelligence-security investigation, albeit mild by today’s standards, was already under way. The quiet suspicion began to arise that perhaps the knowledgeable Philby had been the source of a leak to the Soviets who had then jointly rolled the operations up with their Albanian subordinates. Frank Wisner, at the time the Office of Policy Coordination, or black warfare, chief, continued to send people in, and they continued to be apprehended. Wisner was chummy with Philby.

  The Venona intercepts had indicated that a very highly placed British source was working for the Soviets. Gradually, it became apparent that the source was Donald MacLean, the third of the Cambridge Five, a comer in the British Foreign Office who had served in Washington and been privy to high-level policy discussions during and after World War II.

  Shortly after the disastrous party, Philby sent Burgess back to London to warn MacLean that the Americans strongly suspected him of treachery. Burgess and MacLean took a night ferry across the English Channel on May 25, 1951. Philby and the MI-5 man in Washington briefed the FBI’s Lamphere about the defections. Philby immediately buried his KGB espionage equipment in woods along the Potomac River. Burgess and MacLean did not appear again until they surfaced at a Moscow press conference in 1956.

  With a head of steam behind him, Harvey made it is his business to go over Philby’s files in the CIA with a thoroughness that, to others, was remarkable, but to the workaholic Harvey, was merely good, solid counterintelligence tradecraft. He pulled together details of Philby’s career in prewar Franco Spain and in Turkey during World War II. Harvey pinpointed Philby’s dual role using the same analytical techniques he had perfected at the FBI, first in analyzing German intelligence operations, later in the Rote Drei/Rote Kapelle study, then in his backstopping work on the Elizabeth Bentley case.

  In June 1951, six months after the dinner party, on the specific order of Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, now DCI, Harvey and, a few days later, Jim Angleton submitted memoranda about their knowledge of Kim Philby. Harvey’s memorandum became an indictment. He had no proof, aside from a series of suspicious coincidences that Philby had been here or there at times when things just seemed to go in the Soviets’ favor to the detriment of British, and Western, intelligence.14

  General Smith paraphrased Harvey’s memo in a formal letter to his opposite number at MI-6 in London, which all but demanded that King George VI’s government not return Philby to his liaison post in Washington. Philby was quietly fired from the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), but he was never arrested. In 1955 Philby’s name became public in the consternation over the Burgess-MacLean-and-the-”Third-Man” affair. In January 1963 Philby got a tip and defected to the Soviet Union from his post in Beirut as a correspondent for the London Observer. He was accorded high honor in Moscow and died in exile, still advising the Soviet service on its dealings with the West.

  PHILBY: OTHER ACCOUNTS

  John Barron thinks Harvey got the last bit of information for his memo of accusation in London. If so, it was Bill’s first venture overseas and would have required clearance from General Smith. According to Barron, Harvey established a personal relationship with at least one SIS/MI-6 officer. MI-6 did not have or could not present evidence of Philby’s treachery in a court of law. Perhaps, by telling Harvey, the Brits reckoned they might be able to flush Philby out and get enough to prosecute.

  Barron:

  Bill was drinking with an MI-6 officer in London. The Brit said, “I know what you’re after, and I’ll tell you now.” The British officer gave Harvey “the final bit of evidence he needed.” Bill flew back to Washington the next day. On a Sunday morning, he met with General Smith, who sent a cable to the head of MI-6 indicating Philby was no longer welcome in the United States….

  The epilogue to that story came a bit later during a party the MI-6 station chief in Berlin gave. Everyone had a lot to drink. The MI-6 man turned to Bill during a speech and said, “I respect you as a professional intelligence officer, but as a man, I hate your guts.”

  The next day, the Brit called Harvey to apologize. Bill gracefully accepted the apology: “That’s quite all right. We both had too much to drink…. I stake my reputation on a prophecy that you will come to me one day and say Kim Philby was one of them.”15

  The Brit was Peter Lunn, Harvey’s opposite number in Berlin, who worked closely with him on the Berlin Tunnel, as we shall see. Harvey and Lunn became close friends, as later attested by Lunn himself. Barron: “Years later, when Bill was stationed in Rome, he was invited to a Swiss Alpine village ski resort where the Brit’s daughter was being married…. When Bill alighted from the train, Peter Lunn said to Bill, ‘You were right. Philby was one of them.’”

  Philby’s KGB-authorized book, My Silent War, dealt thus with Harvey:

  Apart from Angleton, my chief OSO contact was a man I shall refer to here as William J. Howard. He was a former FBI man whom Hoover had sacked for drunkenness on duty. The first time he dined at my house, he showed that his habits had remained unchanged. He fell asleep over the coffee and sat snoring gently until midnight when his wife took him away, saying: “Come, now, Daddy, it’s time you were in bed.” I may be accused here of introducing a cheap note. Admitted. But, as will be seen later, Howard was to play a very cheap trick on me, and I do not like letting provocation go unpunished. Having admitted the charge of strong anti-Howard prejudice, it is only fair that I should add that he cooperated well with SIS in the construction of the famous Berlin Tunnel….

  I learnt later that the letter [from General Smith, indicating the CIA’s suspicions of Philby] had been drafted in great part by William J. Howard, whose wife Burgess had bitterly insulted during a convivial party at my house. I had apologized handsomely for [Burgess’s] behavior, and the apology had apparently been accepted. It was therefore difficult to understand Howard’s retrospective exercise in spite. From Howard, of all people!16

  Philby seems to have still been smarting at having been undone by a flatfoot from the American Midwest. Why he chose to use a thinly veiled pseudonym for Harvey is a riddle, though he may have been worried about a libel suit.

  The Philby affair had shattering repercussions within the CIA. It is highly probable that Angleton’s overriding future preoccupation with “the Mole” inside CIA—a preoccupation that disrupted the Agency for years and that led to the unconscionable persecution of one officer, S. Peter Karlow,17 and the horrible, long-term confinement of a KGB defector—stemmed from Angleton’s own abiding guilt about the amount of information he had passed to Philby during their frequent drinking sessions.

  Adam Horton, who worked under Harvey in Berlin and later served under Angleton for many years, says: “Kim played Jim like an organ. JJA got Philby a pass which meant Philby could move freely through the buildings. JJA gave Philby everything, including the Albanian agents.

  “Harvey? He had strong personal feelings about Philby. The dinner was only the tip of the iceberg. Harvey moved heaven and earth to get Philby.”18

  Dennis Flinn also adds some detail: “I had met Philby in London in January 1945, and I had some suspicions as early as 1947. Bill and I had some talk about our ‘good friend.’ … Philby was a troubled personality. It was very difficult to carry on a conversation with him because he stammered so badly. I told Bill at that time that I would be very careful if I were dealing with Philby.

  “During that period, after I left the FBI, I used to stop into Mickey Ladd’s house. Ladd led a peculiar life: he’d work at the office till 9:00, come home; his wife would give him dinner, then friends would drop by till around 2:00 AM … ex-FBI friends, including Bill Harvey. Mickey exi
sted on three, maybe four hours of sleep a night.” At these bull sessions, working-level Bureau and Agency officers exchanged information—as well as juicy gossip—informally.

  Flinn continues:

  Philby didn’t live very far away … on Nebraska Avenue … and sometimes he came and joined in the open discussions. And Harvey was there.

  I went to Ladd privately, and said, ‘Mickey, it’s not right. You’re all talking about FBI internal affairs here, with Philby present. I’d like you to consider desisting.’ Mickey answered that Philby was ‘a friend of ours.’ … I have some suspicions. Others also raised the issue with Mickey Ladd.

  At that time, Burgess and MacLean were in the British embassy in Washington. I had met Burgess in Portugal once, when he was passing through on his way to or from the United States. I didn’t think much of him, either.

  In 1952, when I was in Washington again, before being transferred to Australia, Bill told me he had been influential in getting Philby kicked out. I didn’t ask the details, but I knew he had dealt with Bedell Smith. I guess that Bedell—with whom I also had some dealings, and I knew how he worked—that Bedell took something in writing from Bill, or maybe a personal presentation, and said that Philby had to go.

  I always understood Bill Harvey was the first to blow the horn on Philby. It was not part of a broad program of investigation. Bill Harvey, whatever else he may have been…. He was the one on Philby.19

  More than his work on the Bentley case, Bill’s dogged sifting of active and dormant files to produce a convincing pattern of betrayal made a considerable impact on his colleagues. The Philby case marked Bill Harvey as a comer, a tough player to be reckoned with in the future, and it gave him ready access to the top level of CIA—then General Smith, soon to be Allen Dulles. Perhaps he also refined his nocturnal habits, his ability to work on limited sleep, from Mickey Ladd’s example.

  HARVEY AND ANGLETON

  When Harvey moved from Staff C to Berlin, he left a vacuum in the counterintelligence element of CIA. Soon after Harvey’s departure, Jim Angleton was appointed head of the counterintelligence staff. Angleton wielded far more power than the job called for over many years. According to Sam Papich, the FBI liaison officer, Angleton enjoyed Dick Helms’s complete confidence and, as a result, was the one Helms turned to for special assignments.20 Angleton also held a special, watching brief over Italian operations, and Italy also plays a subsequent role in the Harvey legend.

  David Martin in Wilderness of Mirrors makes much of the rivalry between Angleton and Harvey and underlines the contrasts between the two: heartlander vs. gentle expatriate birth, cop vs. intelligence careerist, gun collector vs. fisherman who made his own lures. Most telling, Angleton was a Yalie who fitted into the OSS mold, whereas, of course, Harvey was from a state-run university out there beyond the Hudson River.

  Certainly the two clashed at times, but each was an emperor in his own bailiwick. They saw to it that they seldom encroached on each other’s turf. And, at the end, just before Bill Harvey died, they shared knowledge of a matter that to this day remains a mystery.

  John Barron sums up: “There was no real animosity between the two of them, Harvey and Angleton. It all just goes back to Philby. Angleton was crazy in a sinister way. He never recovered from the Philby affair.”

  4

  BAPTISM IN BERLIN

  My first recollection of Bill Harvey is of an evening cocktail-cum-dinner buffet at the end of 1952 given by the outgoing chief of the Berlin Operations Base (BOB), Lester Houck, a transmuted Office of Strategic Services (OSS) type who had served in Italy during World War II and was later in charge of Agency operations in Africa. The evening was surprisingly balmy, and BOB officers bunched around the swimming pool of the chief’s luxurious villa at Lepsius Strasse 16 in the posh suburb of Zehlendorf, scrutinizing a radically mismatched pair. Houck, perhaps six feet four inches tall, cadaverous, sallow, a gaunt, recovering academic, shuffled along in his gangling way, pushing forward a man who needed no propulsion, a guy who looked totally out of place, Bill Harvey. Harvey was conventionally dressed, perhaps even still in FBI gabardine. He had thinning, silvery-blond hair and a pencil-line mustache. He looked somewhat shorter than his six feet because of his shape—which made us gasp under our accustomed nonchalance—round in the middle, but really round, like the halves of two avocados glued together. About the only thing that united the two bosses was their addiction to nicotine, but Houck’s habit was more advanced.

  Harvey did not fit the BOB swashbuckler mold in which many of us felt we were cast. He was dowdy where we were dashing. He was solid midwestern, with what today might be called old-fashioned values. We were sophisticates who relished being part of Berlin, which had been in the 1920s, and was now once again, far naughtier than Paris.

  We downed our generously poured drinks and nibbled Army-issue canapés. We eyed Harvey’s ungainly figure skeptically as he circled the eerily lit pool, grasped each of us firmly by the hand, and took our measure in an instant of deep eye contact. In those first moments, we, as so many others, vastly underestimated Bill Harvey. We had no inkling of the surging quality of the man, nor how he would affect our lives, let alone the impact he would have on CIA. Nor did we have a clue about the plans Harvey had for the base, much less that he was in Berlin to mastermind a huge and most-delicate operation, the Berlin Tunnel.

  The nuts and bolts of BOB’s late 1940s, early 1950s operations were reams and reams of railway documents, clandestinely photographed in the East, which we passed on to economic and military analysts. The case officers who concentrated on political matters were more often frustrated than not: it was extraordinarily difficult to suborn anyone in the East German government or Community Party offices, let alone in Warsaw or Prague. But occasionally our people were able to recruit someone who had access to political information, which was, of course, the most prized intelligence of all.

  We routinely gathered clothing, all sorts of documents, and other very ordinary materials from refugees, for shipment to the CIA’s techies who refitted them for use by agents going back into various denied areas. We also had a standing requirement to gather cans and boxes (with their contents) from the East, to be made into concealment devices. Everyone knew there was a $25,000 reward (later increased to $50,000) for any pilot who brought over one of the new MiG 17 (later, MiG 19) fighters.

  But we felt that a surge of incoming, nit-picking administrative types was corrupting the trust the CIA had previously placed in us. While we once had casually endowed agents with bottles of Rémy Martin, brown paper bags of bean coffee (a very highly prized item in both East and West Germany in those days), and very occasionally, a carton of American cigarettes (too incriminating to be handed out often), now we had to force our border crossers to sign receipts.

  Harvey’s arrival in Berlin was symptomatic, too, of a sea change in personnel within the CIA itself. With the Korean War in June 1950, the administration’s demand for intelligence (and political warfare) increased exponentially. The CIA broadened its base of recruitment. People with degrees from Illinois and Tennessee, even California, began to appear in Berlin. The glamour-draped Main Line–New York–New England figures who had made their reputations with feats of derring-do during World War II knew they would soon be outnumbered.

  Symbolically, Harvey, the ex-Bureau midwesterner, had maneuvered himself into the CIA’s choicest overseas assignment. Berlin, though isolated, was tested, tough, and proud. Berlin and Harvey were made for each other. Neither was subtle nor smarmy. That Harvey got BOB at all is a comment on the expansion of the Agency. Once he had it, he needed to reshape the base in his image.

  Harvey was canny enough to know that he had to win the core officers of BOB pretty much on their terms, at least until they disappeared by attrition. Despite the force of his personality, Harvey could not easily revamp BOB. His supply of time was not inexhaustible, and he was already working twenty-hour days. Still, he succeeded. And over time Berlin gave Harvey stat
ure as an innovative and daring intelligence operator and as an executive, albeit an unconventional one out on the cutting edge. Berlin was the place to be.

  Tom Polgar, who during the early 1950s, was Gen. Lucian K. Truscott’s personal assistant in Frankfurt, recalls how Bill got to the outpost: “From November 1947 through January 1948, Harvey and I shared a office in Temp L Building along the Reflecting Pool [perhaps the same office Adam Horton’s friend claimed to have observed that dusky evening]…. I saw Harvey again, when I was back in headquarters on a couple of occasions…. After one memorable cocktail reception, Harvey offered to drive me back to the Hay Adams hotel.” He wanted to pick Polgar’s nimble brain. “It was clear to him that he was at a disadvantage. The leaders of the Clandestine Service … had all been abroad. They had different social backgrounds from his…. He had to seek an overseas assignment.” But where?

  “There were two concrete opportunities: chief of base, Berlin, and chief, Austria. Which would I recommend? I said Berlin was the greater managerial challenge, and he would be dealing with the U.S. military, where his FBI background would carry great prestige…. Furthermore, I explained, in Vienna, the chief was physically separated from the bulk of the operational personnel, who were under Bill Hood.

  “Hood was Allen Dulles’s favorite, Helms’s favorite, and he had continuity and control of the base. Bill Hood wouldn’t give you the time of day. And you probably wouldn’t get along very well with the ambassador, either!”1

  Tom’s advice was sound, but it’s also probable that Harvey was mining the well-clued-in Polgar for information, while in no way revealing that he was already knee-deep in tunnel planning. It would have been a very typical Harvey ploy.