Flawed Patriot Page 6

  OUTPOST BERLIN

  West Berlin in 1952 was truly an island, ringed by more than twenty divisions of the Red Army. Not only was BOB well behind enemy lines, it was less than fifty miles from Soviet-dominated Poland, through which the rest of the Red Army could sweep at a moment’s notice. In this isolation, our horizons shrank. But all was not gloom and despondency. We were the occupiers, and we were spoiled. A case of Beck’s Best Bremen Bier cost $1.20. A bottle of Cutty Sark was $1.35 at the Army’s Class VI liquor emporium. Chesterfields cost $1.00 a carton. We lived in requisitioned housing—the Army had taken care to seize the best, especially if it belonged to Nazis—and we were fattened by stocky housekeepers.

  Going to an excellent restaurant run by the French military in the northern borough of Frohnau entailed weeks of excited advance planning, even though it was only forty-five minutes away by car, zigzagging to avoid crossing Russian-controlled territory. One could drive east to west within the Western sectors in about half an hour. Every once in a while, the Russians dourly shut down the city’s lifeline, the Autobahn, from the west on the excuse that vital repairs had to be made. Each time they did so, the U.S. Army got very tense.

  The Western sector’s most popular political cabaret performed in a black-painted, bare-bones nightclub called Die Insulaner (The Islanders). The troupe was made up of ribald, sharp-tongued young iconoclasts, whose show was broadcast into East Germany by the official American radio station, Radio in the American Sector (RIAS). Die Insulaner was heavily patronized by off-duty BOBers, one of whom the players insouciantly named Der Gami (the Germanized American). Maybe we helped to inspire the troupe’s irreverence, or maybe it gave us attitude. We shared with them a comradely bond of bawdy skepticism. Subsequent writers cottoned to Berlin and its frontline aura; some, notably Norman Mailer and Robert Littell, even co-opted Bill Harvey as a central character in their fiction.

  Berlin’s only rival at the time was Bill Hood’s Vienna. In Vienna, things were always earnest but never serious, and there was always that mellow soupçon of “Schlampigkeit,” one of those German words that is impossible to translate but, very roughly, means “easy come, easy go.” Vienna was the soft underbelly of Cold War confrontation, which only occasionally constricted and rumbled.

  There was unspoken rivalry between the two cities and their base chiefs. But when Austria’s occupation was lifted and the Four Power status of Vienna disappeared, Berlin became even more where the action was. In no other place was the Cold War fought as deviously and as intensely, nor did the CIA have a better training ground for its comers. All this, of course, was in the days when intelligence was primarily gathered by humans rather than by electrons.

  A SHORT HISTORY OF BOB

  When I arrived in November 1951, West Berlin was still gaunt and haggard, yet with the airlift in 1948 and 1949 it had begun to flourish a gutsy, near-tangible spirit as a taunt to the much drabber, even-worse-battered East. Peter M. F. Sichel, one of the outstanding intelligence officers of his time, tweedy but debonair, impatient, demanding but kind, was chief of base. He recalls, “Right after the war, Allen Dulles went home and Dick Helms left before Christmas 1945,” after only two months as chief, leaving the base in the temporary charge of Sichel, who yielded to Dana Durant only to become chief in his own right in 1948. Sichel was twenty-seven years old at the time; this says a lot about the fledgling, brash CIA. Sichel was sniped at for his youth, and he also rankled Army Intelligence, which still considered OSS/CIA an upstart, amateur bunch of East Coast effete. In mid-1952, Peter Sichel was transferred back to headquarters.2

  It was quietly decided that, pending Harvey’s arrival, Lester Houck, PhD, GS-15 (a ranking rare in those days), should go to Berlin to hold the fort. Contrary to gossip at the time, Houck was not pushed out after only six months; Harvey’s assignment to Berlin was decided before Houck arrived in Berlin.

  When Bill got to BOB in December 1952, he walked into Sichel’s exotic gentlemen’s club of hardworking, hard-playing, experienced free-booters and at-times-untethered intellects. In early postwar BOB, compartmentalization was very, very tight; there were no overlapping operations, no admin sections, and no section chiefs. Everyone talked directly to the chief, if, that is, you could get through his primary guardian, his devoted secretary, Maggie Crane.

  Harvey was clear in his own mind that the old order had to change, but making the changes was no easy task. The restructuring of BOB for the enduring Cold War was not congenial to the seniors who had produced solid intelligence for years, yet one never heard a derogatory word about Harvey from any of the veterans. They may have smiled privately at some of Harvey’s quirks, but as they came to know him, they liked and respected him, even if they came from different worlds.

  The men at the medium operating level were another story. They were younger, had been recruited by Peter Sichel, and they shared a particular emotional bond: they had been through the Berlin Airlift of 1948–49 together. During the blockade, when every piece of coal counted, the CIA’s adventurous officers learned much about survival, courage, and humor in adversity from the city’s people. The Berliners looked upon the Americans as saviors. That emotional link could never be broken.

  When Sichel left, his crew stayed on, but the esprit that kept them going in the thin years dissipated. They were not sorry when their tours ended. Times had changed.

  In 1954 Harvey told his new Soviet ops chief (and deputy chief of base), Dave Murphy, that the “wartime aura of OSS clung to BOB” and that Peter Sichel still kept “an eye on his old domain.” Harvey had to cleanse BOB of its past. He recognized that the esprit de corps encouraged by Sichel was effective, and so, at first, he did not seek to destroy it but rather to co-opt it and remold it in his own image—at least at first. As he seeded BOB with his own choices, the days of the Cold War follies dwindled, then disappeared.

  One important aspect of Berlin never changed: BOB was cutting edge, the Learning School. Beginning in May 1945, intelligence became target-of-opportunity work. Then, slowly, what is today called the intelligence community began to put together lists—called essential elements of information by the Army—of what the U.S. government had to know to assess the threat of hostile action or war. Deciding how to cover the assigned targets was BOB’s job, although the base’s work was, of course, always under the gaze of Washington. At that time junior case officers did not learn their trade from a manual or Farm in Virginia. The streets of Berlin were our campus. With Harvey’s hard-charging innovations and improvisations, BOB became by far the most productive CIA establishment in the world.

  THE BOBERS

  No one has tried, in any of the books I have seen, to re-create the flavor of the Berlin Operations Base that Harvey took over. The case officers there at the time made up a remarkable gaggle of people.

  One of my favorites was a marvelous, kind, funny guy who had gone to Northwestern University on a football scholarship, but whose passion was Shakespeare. It became apparent he was not suited for the clandestine life when he failed to grasp that he could not send an attachment—I think it was a Polish Air Force uniform—to a cable. His boss was another kind, gentle man who had been born in the old country and whose heart was constantly wrenched. He dispatched agents who could, literally, walk past members of his own family, but he could do nothing to bring his kin out from behind the iron curtain.

  We had a former Royal Air Force pilot, an American who had adopted British ways and often seemed to be cruising at an ominously low altitude. When communications across the border between East Germany and Czechoslovakia shut down at one stage, he quite seriously suggested sending messages by crossbow. He also wanted the CIA to establish its own speedboat navy to zoom through Berlin’s lakes and canals and thus infiltrate the East. He was the case officer who crashed his car against a stout tree and woke up in the hospital to see Harvey peering at him. Harvey asked his wounded officer what he wanted. “A promotion,” quoth the Royal Air Force man. He got it.

  W
e had a lawyer, a married senior case officer whose roving eye landed too often on female agents, dalliance with whom was strictly forbidden. Then there was the former FBI special agent, also a lawyer, who, after a night’s carousing, took a wrong turn and found himself in East Berlin. Crossing the border was strictly against BOB rules. Sitting in his Volkswagen, he tried to eat his false identification, found it inedible, made a run for the sector border, and arrived safely back in the West. He confessed his erratic ways to Harvey, was read the A Team riot act, and was grounded for some considerable time. That guy was also part of a movable poker game that was rumored to shift cities and countries as its members circulated through the Agency.

  There was a former lieutenant colonel in the Women’s Army Corps of World War II who acted as informal den mother to the young ladies sent up to serve our secretarial needs, a tough-but-sweet, no-nonsense custodian of much touchy information. She was married to one of our best senior case officers, who affected an FDR-style cigarette holder and produced priceless intelligence on the East German railway system. The ex-lieutenant colonel outranked CG Follick when she later appeared on the scene; CG had made only major. We noticed a certain chill between them.

  Another of our seniors was quiet, unassuming, even shy. He had been an OSS Jedburgh, part of a special program of officers trained to drop into France ahead of the D-Day forces. But you never would have known it by looking at him. Another was a prewar member of the leadership of the German Socialist Party youth movement and a double PhD in chemistry and mathematics.

  Taken together, the Old Guard at BOB was a remarkable collection of intrepid, colorful people, not all of whom fit into Harvey’s scheme of things.

  THAT NICKNAME

  Practically everyone who has written about Harvey notes that he was called “the Pear,” and most think the nickname was intentionally derogatory. It wasn’t. Rather, it was coined in the almost-boyish, skeptically scoffing vein with which we discussed almost everything in those days.

  One afternoon, BOB’s two exuberant young reports officers returned from a bistro in central Berlin where the soupe a l’ognion was justifiably renowned and the Beaujolais flowed gently. As we regained BOB’s terra firma, we glanced down the long hall and zeroed in on an unforgettable silhouette. One of us whispered, “Ohmigod, he looks like a pear!” We both tried to stifle our laughter as we slunk to our desks. From that modest beginning, “the Pear” became part of CIA legend.

  Sam Papich swears that when Harvey left the Bureau for CIA in 1947, he was a mere hundred and fifty pounds. But by the time he hit Berlin, Bill must have weighed over two hundred, most of it distributed amidships. Why he was never dubbed “the Penguin” defies explanation, except that Harvey did not waddle; he tacked, especially around corners, and even more so after the requisite intake of martinis.

  It’s probable also that Harvey’s habit of laying nicknames on everyone he met or dealt with stems from the BOB penchant, which was part fun, part doubletalk to conceal true identities.

  THE BASE, JUNE 16–17, 1953

  The three-story Berlin base that Harvey took over was hidden, well back from a main avenue, in the very upscale residential suburb of Dahlem. The Berliners had changed the boulevard’s name from Kronprinzen Allee to Clay Allee in gratitude for American steadfastness during the Berlin Airlift. In many ways, the villa, once the property of the legendary Gen. Ludwig von Beck, who was executed for his leading role in the plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944, was an islet unto itself within the surround of West Berlin.

  Since midday on June 16, 1953, the building on the obscure dead-end street had been at a high state of alert, while we tried to track what was happening in East Berlin and East Germany as unexpected, and, at first, inestimable, forces let loose their long-throttled rage against their Communist overlords. By that evening we were aware that something major was brewing across the sector and zonal borders. BOB surged into Wednesday, June 17, not knowing what the day might bring. By nightfall there could have been open rebellion against the communists, a tricky matter because, although the workers aimed their wrath at the East German government, its guarantor was the Red Army. We, indeed all of Western intelligence, were caught flat-footed. Tom Polgar remembers that day “vividly. General Truscott [CIA chief of mission], Assistant Chief Mike Burke, and I were in Nuremberg to discuss cross-border operations. [We] traveled back to Frankfurt late PM by train which stopped in Wuerzburg. There I heard loud shouting and noticed commotion on platform. They were selling extra editions of the local paper, already reporting on Berlin events. That is how Truscott first heard about it.”3

  During the night and on into June 17, BOB’s case officers were out in the streets in full force, questioning people, listening to conversations, sending agents over to observe, and then racing back to base to add their snippets to the picture we were building. One case officer, David Chavchavadze recalls, “I went up to Potsdamer Platz and was actually under fire by several tanks. I think they were blanks. I remember hitting the dirt and ruining my sports coat.”4

  Those agents who could come over from the East called in, in varying degrees of excitement. They were told not to reestablish contact with BOB until the dust settled. The Goon Squad—the base’s footpads, drop servicers, hustlers, and odd jobbers—were over in the East, picking up whatever they could by mingling with the angry crowds.

  Harvey sent Bob Kilroy off to spend the day at the Army war room. I hunkered in the office, churning out hourly “sitreps,” bulletins with the latest information on the situation, which, because they had to be encoded and decoded, probably did not beat the wire services.

  We had been sternly advised that the director of central intelligence (DCI), Allen Dulles, was at the White House passing our material directly to President Dwight Eisenhower. We were further advised that General Eisenhower would not read anything longer than one page; the advice brought knowing smirks to our faces.

  Kilroy returned from the American Mission headquarters on Clay Allee at midnight on June 17 to a find a base meeting in full swing; the meeting went on until nearly three in the morning.

  Chavchavadze: “The counter-intelligence guys had hatched a theory that the whole show was a provocation by the Soviets—‘a plot to show how democratic they are.’ I replied, ‘I don’t think any communist anywhere would ever stage a labor strike against himself!’ I still remember Bill’s deep bass voice saying, ‘I’ll buy that, Dave.’ Bill never addressed a sentence to anybody without putting the person’s name at the end of it.”5

  The question at that late-night conference was, what advice do we give Washington? The decision, after three hours, was that we could do little except follow the counsel we had given to our agents: lie low, stay watchful, and hope for the best.

  HARVEY STEPS OUT OF LINE

  By now, the Soviets had rolled their tanks into East Berlin. It was years before Budapest in 1956 or Prague in 1968. This was the first time ever, anywhere, that a Communist regime was boldly challenged by unarmed civilians. There was no question that the Soviets would defend their fiefdom against rebellion by the workers whose cause they so vocally trumpeted.

  At about four o’clock on the morning of June 17, Harvey dictated to me, off the top of his head, a dramatic recommendation. I recall looking at him and asking, “You sure you want to say that?” He nodded emphatically. “Put it in words and let me look at it!” I banged out a draft, which he revised considerably.

  In a lengthy cable (four pages, if I remember correctly), which bore the highest classification indicators, Harvey urged Allen Dulles, and through him, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and, indeed, President Eisenhower, to make some plausible military gesture that would give the Soviets pause to think before the Red Army clanked further over the hapless East Germans. Bill suggested symbolic mobilization of the Sixth Infantry Regiment, the token garrison force in Berlin, on sector and zonal borders. He urged that American forces in West Germany, particularly the Eighty-second Airborne Division, be dem
onstratively put on combat alert and moved up to the iron curtain.

  Harvey also bluntly told Washington something the policymakers did not want to hear: the East Germans would not have risen against their oppressors without open and covert U.S. support—specifically, the cries for liberation periodically issued by John Foster Dulles and transmitted over RIAS and the activities of our own “cousins”—the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC; later, PP), the psychological warriors who stirred up dissent in the East. The United States should, Harvey said, stand up to its responsibilities, even if it meant risking a showdown with the Russians.

  In his fascinating biography of Allen Dulles, Peter Grose reports a garbled version of Harvey’s bellicose initiative: “Reports of the rampage poured into the CIA base in West Berlin, headed by the OSS veteran Henry Hecksher, a man of imagination and aggressiveness in the kind of ‘monkey business’ that attracted Allen…. Hecksher drafted a cable to Washington reporting the mounting unrest and predicting a prompt and bloody Soviet reaction. He proposed that his networks start smuggling firearms to the East Berlin insurgents. Hecksher’s cable arrived late Tuesday evening, June 16.” The suggestion was knocked down by various lords of headquarters, backed up by Frank Wisner in Allen Dulles’s temporary absence.

  Dulles was back in his office the morning of June 17. “‘It was the only time that I saw Allen angry and disappointed in me,’ a senior officer remembered. A flash point for paramilitary covert action had come—and gone. The CIA has held back.”6

  Henry Hecksher, who gained notoriety as a case officer in Guatemala, had left BOB by June 1953. The chief of base, and very much in charge, was Bill Harvey. I suspect Grose’s account is a garble of the cable I drafted for Harvey.