Flawed Patriot Read online

  What lingers in my mind from these sessions is how much Harvey revealed of himself, even more so when I was no longer in the official loop. Then, Harvey showed me a warmth and humanity I barely suspected. He knew the most intimate details of his officers’ lives, their marital problems, their fears for their children. He talked about his people with what can only be described as love. They were family, even though he didn’t dare show his affection, most especially not to those for whom he was most concerned. This vulnerable side of Harvey, which many of us only sensed, made him the leader he was. And this side came out most poignantly when he was able to relax with a trusted confidant over a bucket of martinis.

  Stan Gaines, the senior officer who anchored BOB in Frankfurt and whom we regarded as a Berliner by adoption, unlike most of the Frankfurt headquarters people, says that he went to Bill’s one lunchtime when he was in Berlin. “As I recall, we had about five drinks in large glasses and then ate something! Then he drove me to the airport, where I clumsily boarded the plane and went to sleep. And he went back to the shop to work!”23

  Clarence Berry: “I don’t remember much about the furniture except he had a very comfortable, Archie Bunker type, easy chair. The coffee table adjacent to the chair had an 8 x 10, black and white picture of Bill on it [which showed] the inevitable wreath of smoke curling from a cigarette in his hand. CG commented to us that it was her favorite photo of him.”24 The photo is Wally Driver’s character study of Bill, taken about 1957, which appears, in part, on the dust jacket of this book.

  Dave Murphy brings the story to Bill’s later years: “When we lived near the Harveys in Chevy Chase Village, I … would often drop by to participate in the Irving Street version of the ritual. It was held in his den, which was dominated by a huge German Schrank converted to a gun cabinet, and two overstuffed chairs. The ritual had not changed from Berlin; the equipment was the same. The only difference I can remember is that I would refrain from a third monster glass.”25

  Two Washington lunch companions recall a session with Bill at the renowned Harveys Restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue. The waiter by appointment had a water pitcher of martinis at the ready and kept Bill’s glass topped up without even a flick of an eyelid from Harvey.

  AND THE GUNS …

  Once Harvey fell into the pond in the garden of his house in Milinowksi Strasse in broad daylight. He changed clothes and then sat in front of the fireplace, cleaning and oiling the guns he had been carrying. Finished cleaning, he twirled one of the revolvers, and according to CG, accidentally fired a round into the wall. A terrified maid appeared instantly, followed almost immediately by the Black Watch, the caped policemen assigned to guard areas where Americans lived. Harvey was apologetic but unrepentant.

  Neill Prew was so discreet he at times seemed taciturn. Because of this quality, if for no other reason, he had Bill’s complete trust. On one occasion, Bill caught a very early plane to Frankfurt, then called Prew back in Berlin, woke him up, and told him to go to Milinowski Strasse to remove two pistols from under Bill’s pillow, so the maid would not have a heart attack discovering them. The guns, Neill says, “were his safety blanket.”

  Once Bill lowered his facade and allowed you into his inner sanctum, you began to realize that guns were part of his persona. Stan Gaines agrees: “The guns and all that…. It was all part of Bill’s facade. Something he used to impress people—maybe to intimidate, or test them, too.”26

  EXPANDING THE BASE

  By spring 1954, BOB was fast outgrowing Field Marshall Beck’s mansion. Bill’s liaison with America’s top dog in Berlin, USCOB, traditionally a major general, was always sticky, but Harvey was tact personified. So, with the weight of General Truscott behind him, Harvey negotiated for one of the large buildings within the High Commission, Germany (HICOG), compound, perfect for BOB purposes because it had its own entrance and did not front on Clay Allee, the main and ceremonial entrance to Field Marshall Goering’s old fiefdom.

  The move was accomplished in August 1954 by GIs in grinding six-by-six trucks, lifting the very, very heavy safes into the new premises. Neill Prew rode shotgun on what the base finance officer “thought was far more important than any state secrets we might have”—the sizable amount of cash (in a variety of currencies) that the base maintained.

  Dave Murphy recalls, “Think of all that stuff! We’d been in the same place since September 1945!” The half-mile move was symbolic as well as practical. When the CIA pulled out of the villa, a chapter of Agency history closed, to Bill’s complete satisfaction.

  At the same time, sixteen carefully selected and trained U.S. Army engineering sergeants started to dig the Berlin Tunnel. “During those summer days, Bill was running the base and supervising the move. And nights, he was overseeing the beginning of the very, very tricky excavation of the tunnel! No one else could have done that!” writes Murphy.27

  But Bill was nowhere to be seen during the actual move. Neill Prew thought “he was probably at the Maison de France drinking martinis with the Dutch chief of base, who was a buddy of his.”

  THE HARVEY SCHOOL

  All the posturing and the drinking and the guns were incidental to business. Sure, Harvey was gruff and irretrievably profane. And, sure, when he was truly (as opposed to theatrically) angry, he spoke through clenched teeth. Yet despite the facade, and within a year of his arrival, Harvey had the loyalty of all but the few on the base. In our eyes, his positive traits, most especially his loyalty to us, bulldozed the negatives.

  First, he knew what he was doing, what he wanted done, and in general, where he was going. His vision was clear; his directions precise. He gave his subordinates a lead, a standard to follow and match, if they could. Second, he bent or fractured regulations and took risks that a garden-variety civil servant would never contemplate, in both operations and administration, a trait that appealed to us on the front line. Third, Harvey listened to his subordinates. If he agreed with an operational plan one of the case officers submitted, he supported it, even if it blew back on him. He won many, many more fights than he lost because his judgment was, then, very sound. Fourth, it dawned on us that we were being offered on-the-job training at its best—an exquisite postgrad course in intelligence gathering from a master. The corollary was, of course, that Harvey graduates were in demand at CIA stations all over the world. Thus, the clandestine services were seeded with Harvey loyalists, as Bill intended. Last, we quickly realized that Harvey consistently backed his people, recognized and lauded honesty, hard work, daring, and devotion.

  Once Bill had taken your measure, and if his judgment of you was favorable, he pushed you for promotion (sometimes over opposition), and he did everything he could to ensure that you had a good assignment when you left Berlin.

  THE BRANDENBURG SCHOOL FOR BOYS

  Once settled in the new HICOG compound office, with a lot more space, Bill set about making the final moves to make Berlin the CIA’s largest base and grander than most country stations. He established sections for East German, satellite, Soviet, and of course, counterespionage (CE) operations, each with its head and deputy head—all of whom, to the elders’ way of thinking, knew far too much about each other’s business.

  By 1955 Harvey had in place the four men who would succeed him sequentially as chief of base. Tom Polgar comments, “They were an impressive bunch. One of them liked to call it the Brandenburg School for Boys.” They were, and remained for the rest of their lives, Harvey loyalists.

  Dave Murphy arrived in 1954 as Bill’s deputy and head of Soviet operations. Murphy took over BOB when Harvey left in September 1959 and was followed by Bill Graver, who had run the East German operations group under Harvey. In 1966 Graver yielded to Ted Shackley, who had been chief of the Soviet satellite operations section and then had run the anti-Cuban base in Miami, JMWAVE. Shackley became famous in his own right. Herb Natzke, Shackley’s deputy, was the last Harvey-trained BOB chief. He left Berlin in 1971, ending the Harvey era. Natzke was the last of what he refers
to as “the Berlin Brotherhood.”

  DAVE MURPHY

  David E. Murphy had been in the Army, had switched to what became the CIA, and was a Russian linguist. When he returned to Washington in 1953 from Munich, the grapevine told him the slot of deputy chief, Berlin, was open.

  The reason for this vacancy, I learned, was the personality of the chief, William King Harvey, who devoured candidates while waiting for his second double martini. Harvey would be in Washington in July 1954 (I later learned it was on tunnel business), and I could then press my case. Bill made his own appointments, regardless of what the secretaries in the front office told him….

  Even though it was out of line for a brown bagger from the temporary buildings, we agreed to meet for lunch at a restaurant out on Connecticut Avenue. I had met Harvey briefly in 1948, after my return from Korea, so I was not unprepared for the physical appearance. Since I still thought martinis were great fun, I joined in the first two.

  Introductory pleasantries were, however, minimal. Bill subjected me to a very searching review…. When I said I wanted to have a crack at the largest concentration of Soviets abroad, those in East Berlin and East Germany, I sensed a positive response.

  Once in Berlin, and contrary to my hopes and expectations, it soon became clear that the last thing Bill Harvey ever needed was a deputy in the classical sense of someone who waits for the boss to go on home leave.

  Murphy suggested that he be assigned to review all ongoing cases, concentrating on Soviet ops. “Since Bill was absent on tunnel business a good bit of the time as the spring of 1955 wore on, this seemed to him a sensible arrangement.”28

  As Harvey prepared to go home in July 1959, Murphy thought he might be superseded by John Dimmer or Bill Hood, sometimes called “the Vienna choirboys.” The ripples subsided when high authority spiked the Austria desk’s takeover of Berlin. Murphy became chief of BOB in September 1959 and stayed until June 1961. The Berlin Wall went up in the August after Murphy’s departure, an event he feels was not necessarily coincidental.

  TED SHACKLEY

  Ted Shackley is the prime example of a Harvey boy. A controversial figure who was never, ever known as “Shack,” Ted arrived in Berlin in June 1954, after a tour of duty at Nuremberg. Harvey, replacing Adam Horton, put Ted in charge of BOB’s expanded satellite operations. Shackley and Horton could not have been more different or, in their ways, typical of the old and the new Berlin Operations Base.

  At first, Harvey held me at arm’s length. He was developing his team … his boys…. He was their mentor, their tutor. They were disparate characters, each with a different story.

  I’ll give you a vignette: We had made a pitch to a Pole who was in East Berlin in December 1954. I was the reception committee, to meet the guy at the Zehlendorf West subway station. Typical Berlin weather. Maybe six inches of snow. The wind blowing like hell. There I was, waiting outside the station … some of our cars off in the distance, just in case.

  Then I noticed a car cruising the area. ‘Shit!’ I thought, ‘The Poles may be surveilling … or maybe the UB [Polish intelligence service] has come over to snatch the reception committee—me!’

  I looked at the cruising car more closely when it came around again, and I said to myself, ‘That’s Harvey! The son of a bitch! He’s checking to see I’m where I should be!’

  I waited. Stomped around to keep warm, walked around, but didn’t go away. That car came back again a couple of hours later to meet the next train. Of course the guy didn’t show.

  Next morning we had a postmortem in the office. Harvey only says to me, ‘Pretty cold out there, wasn’t it?’ That’s all. Nothing more. But from then on, I was accepted. I was one of Harvey’s boys.

  Shackley says he at first did not want to be head of the newly combined satellite section. “When he hit me with it, I was kind of opposed. I told him, ‘I’ll end up spending more of my time with paper and managing other people, and less time doing what I want to do, which is run agents.’ By then he was no longer holding me at arm’s length.

  “Bill said, ‘The way the Agency is expanding, if you want to get ahead, you have to be an admin type as well as have ops experience.’”29

  Herb Natzke adds, “Shackley and I together ran one illegal crossing operation from Berlin to Poland, and he was meticulous in training, briefing, and providing guidance to the agent, who was a volunteer, as they all were. We were, in fact, pioneers in this type of operation….

  “Several times, when Shackley met an agent at the border, I backed him up with my hand on a .38-caliber revolver in my trench coat pocket. He did the same for me, and I never doubted he would pull the trigger to support me, if he had to.”

  Natzke gets aroused about a charge, in David Corn’s Blond Ghost, that Shackley fabricated intelligence from a Polish source. “My desk was within fifteen feet of Shackley’s…. Ted did recruit some agents in Poland, which was an accomplishment in itself … [but] I cannot imagine Shackley jeopardizing his reputation and his career for the momentary gratification of seeing his name on a few additional intelligence reports…. [We all] regularly had to pass very tough lie detector tests on which questions about fabricating were always present.

  “Don’t forget, either, that Bill Harvey was a tough professional task-master who would let no one play around with the truth.”30

  Shackley sums up the Berlin of the mid- to late 1950s: “There were so many leads coming out of the East, so many opportunities, a case officer in Berlin learned in two years about the same as in eight or ten years of experience in the 1990s. It was a unique treasure trove of experience, and we developed a lot of management experience. That’s one thing I give Harvey credit for.

  “He saw himself as somebody who had a mission to not only run successful operations, but to try to develop a core of officers for future advancement in the organization and disposition to other posts.”

  Did Bill make it obvious that he was grooming his inner circle for higher things? “Only in the amount of time he spent with some of the guys. I didn’t have the sense then to know that was what he was doing.

  “In my early days in Berlin, Murphy and Woodburn were in on the tunnel. I wasn’t. But I had been in CIC [the Army’s Counterintelligence Corps] in Berlin and still had contacts, so sometimes he’d make strange requests. ‘Hey, can you get me a special kind of something or other?’ or, ‘Hey, I need this in a hurry!’”

  Was Bill shooting for DCI? Shackley pauses for a split second before answering, “I think he wanted to be deputy director, operations, but it was a nonattainable goal. During the Berlin period, he was always the guy who was bashing away at headquarters … not necessarily a great recommendation for high appointment. After Berlin, sure, they’d give him Staff D, maybe even the CI Staff, but they’d never have given him a shot at the top! It wasn’t a realistic possibility.”

  Who were “they”? “Bissell, Tracy Barnes … that bunch. Helms was pro-Harvey.

  “Bill had the capability of being a damn good DDO, even though he was not a bureaucrat in the conventional sense, and had little patience with paper pushing. He was a workaholic, no doubt about it. His intelligence-collecting operations were imaginative. He was always ready to go for the big enchilada. He had a high CI/CE [counterintelligence/counter-espionage] quotient…. You could even call it his higher calling … more than any other quality. He had a higher intellect than was generally recognized. He could quote the German philosophers, for instance … Kant, Hegel …”

  The negative side? “He was opinionated. If you were on his shit list, it was very hard to get off it.

  “Personally, a very honest guy. Loyal to his friends. He was very interested in seeing the service develop, so he nurtured people.”31

  APPRAISALS OF HARVEY IN BERLIN

  Bill was chronically underestimated by almost everyone who did not work directly with him, partially because of the physical and psychological barriers he erected to confuse and deter those not in his trust. Those whom he admitte
d to his confidence learned to read him correctly, but only at a level he stipulated.

  John Barron: “Bill had a basic trait of being able to admirably and accurately define and illuminate … talent or character in an individual, and then he would stick with that person forever.”

  The down side? Bill’s drinking? Barron answers elliptically, “I’m aware of the stories about his excessive drinking, of course. In Berlin, it was like a twenty-four-hour-a-day fraternity party, but I never saw Bill intoxicated.

  “I didn’t see anything wrong with him later, in Washington. I’ve known alcoholics. Bill didn’t have to have a drink….

  “I can’t remember whether he smoked a lot. But I was smoking at the time, too.”32 Barron’s memory was kind to his old friend.

  Henry Woodburn was one of the case officers on the tunnel, and he went on to serve the CIA in a clutch of senior capacities, including, years later, as Harvey’s deputy in Rome.

  In the early days, Harvey had a clear hand and carte blanche to do what he wanted. That must have been heady stuff for an officer still relatively new to the foreign intelligence business, and also aware that he was not popular with the OPC/PP crowd.

  It was he who selected his Berlin people. He interviewed them and tagged them for BOB. They weren’t the choices of personnel in Washington.

  His routine, which would have brought lesser men down, appeared to phase him not at all. His stamina was incredible for someone who got no exercise, existed on a few hours of sleep, smoked three, perhaps five packs of cigarettes each day, paid no attention to diet, and drank copious quantities of booze. I can’t remember him ever once missing a day’s work, or being sick … in Berlin or elsewhere…. He simply never showed the strain.33