Flawed Patriot Page 9

  Stan Gaines, who scrutinized practically all of Berlin’s plans in Frankfurt, says flatly, “Nobody was Bill’s equal. Bill Harvey was the best operations executive I’ve ever seen. Everything that BOB did cleared through Bill, which was quite a feat in itself … just the amount of paper he dealt with.

  “He was essentially a trainer of young officers. He told them what to do, and how to do it.”

  The climate in Frankfurt vis-à-vis the unruly element in Berlin? “Johnny Bross, who replaced Truscott, had personal differences with Bill…. Johnny was a very proud feller. He didn’t … couldn’t … respect Harvey the way I did.”34

  Tom Polgar adds, “I do not know the motives for Bross’s dislike of Harvey. Maybe Harvey tried to go around Bross once too often. Certainly they were as different as could be, even though both were lawyers. Bross personified upper-class elegance, connections, and old money…. [He was] a negotiator not a dishbreaker.”35

  Years later, when I was an itinerant correspondent in the eastern Mediterranean and elsewhere, I sometimes ran into still-serving CIA officers. To establish my bona fides, I none too casually let drop that I had worked under Harvey in the halcyon days of Cold War Berlin. “You were one of Bill Harvey’s Boys?” A long beat, followed by a marked increase in respect. Wherever the Agency had people, the legend of Bill Harvey was well known.

  POWER PLAYER

  Here and elsewhere the question arises: Did Harvey lust for power? Ted Shackley touched on it. I have raised the question with several other people who knew him well. No one who worked closely with Bill thinks he was interested in power for the sake of power.

  A host of Bill’s detractors—both in the 1960s and when they really piled on in the 1970s and thereafter—think that Harvey was a single-minded megalomaniac, that having surveyed the Clandestine Services, he was driven to try for the top rung and heaven help anyone who stood in the way.

  Harvey went to enormous lengths to do his job as he saw it and to do it well. That job was to provide the U.S. government with the best possible intelligence. He was ambitious and his ambition was a consistent, all-out effort to serve his country. Big Bill was first and foremost an operator. If his operations specifically excluded many whom he screened but found wanting, well, that’s the way it crumbled.

  Was, for instance, personal loyalty the price of admission to the Berlin Brotherhood? The answer is yes. But not for the reason his gainsayers would advance. He was as loyal to his subordinates, once they were proven, as they were to him.

  Yet Harvey could be a disciplinarian, with humor. One of his case officers spent some considerable time bicycling around Berlin in penance for a major traffic violation, not because of the malfeasance, but because he had drawn attention to himself and the cover unit for which he worked.

  Harvey was not an empire builder in the sense that the conventional bureaucrat seeks to bolster his own inadequacies and self-importance. Bill Harvey didn’t need that kind of flatulence on command. He wanted strong, courageous, iconoclastic leaders in his own mold, not sycophants. Those who were tapped knew they were graced; they knew there was no better way to become professional foreign intelligence officers.

  OBSTACLES

  But obstacles littered Harvey’s path. The mandarins of the CIA, among them John Bross, were not about to let Bill, the rough upstart from Indiana, into the tightest of tight inner circles, no matter what he had accomplished in the Bureau or in Berlin.

  With his own rough exterior and his way of doing business—perhaps even because of the potent network that he had trained and that was poised in 1960 to disperse throughout the Agency—Harvey was a threat to the inner core, i.e, the CIA establishment that circled around Dick Helms.

  In retrospect, Harvey never had a chance to make deputy director, plans, even before the trouble that was looming. He had simply made too many enemies as he fought and maneuvered to get his way—even if that way was eventually acknowledged to be the most brilliant and most accomplished available.

  Dave Murphy cited an instance, in his long, retrospective 1993 conversation with CG Harvey, that underlines Bill’s surging ambition to do the best job possible.

  Murphy: OK, the time is February 1956. The tunnel is going full blast…. We had made contact with Popov through the British Military Liaison Mission…. So Bill sent a cable to Helms and Angleton saying, in view of the large amount of daily input to our counterespionage effort, Berlin should become a major player in the development of CE [counterespionage] activity against the Soviet Union. Helms and Angleton almost died.

  CG: Nothing ever came of it. Angleton would not have any [administrative] input from anybody.36

  Back to Tom Polgar:

  The Harvey I knew was overweight and drank quite a bit, but I never saw him under the influence of liquor and I never saw him fall asleep during a discussion. He never displayed or fingered guns in my presence…. He impressed one from day one with his fantastic memory, his ability to marshal facts to support his argument, his goal orientation and his ability to work with his subordinates.

  He had handicaps. He spoke no German and had a deaf ear for language. He had limited “feel” for local political situations and knew no German history. He was stubborn and tried to escape conventional staffing and supervision by putting normal operational and personnel matters into the [highly restricted, tightly held] Staff D cable channel. This led to controversies and at least two verbal reprimands by the then–deputy chief of mission, Gordon Stewart, and by General Truscott himself.

  There were other indications that his superiors had concerns about Harvey’s personality. (1) In February 1954 Secretary of State John Foster Dulles invited General Truscott to meet with him in Berlin. Truscott asked me to accompany him. He did not ask Harvey, even though we were in Harvey’s territory. (2) When John Bross, chief EE Division [in Washington], left that position to become chief, Germany, I asked him what made him accept that assignment? He said that taking the job himself was the surest way to block Harvey.37

  Harvey’s fiery descent less than a decade later is also foreshadowed in the following excerpt from a personal letter from Lt. Gen. Lucian K. Truscott III, USA (Ret.), to Frank G. Wisner, head of the Clandestine Services. It is dated April 20, 1954. The photocopy bears no secrecy indicator. It came to me from a former CIA officer, another retired foreign intelligence man, who bears Harvey no goodwill. The two pages discuss general matters regarding the future of the German mission, its senior personnel, Truscott’s own replacement in Frankfurt, and war planning.

  So long as I am commenting on personnel, I might make one or two remarks concerning Harvey. I think I told you last Summer that I believed Harvey was doing an outstanding job in Berlin. So far as his relationship with other agencies and his own specialized knowledge are concerned, I think that estimate holds true today. Harvey has found it difficult, however, to delegate authority and to utilize subordinates. In consequence, he has been something of a bottleneck that has prevented administration and operational reporting from being as effective as might be desirable. Another characteristic is that Harvey does not always respond easily to direction. He is sure that Berlin views are superior and almost any suggestion from Washington or Frankfurt invariably calls for extensive argument, even though he accepts the decision in the long run.38

  Truscott was not prepared to cut Harvey any slack. Nor did the general make allowance for the tremendous working burden Harvey was carrying in Berlin.

  If Harvey had known of the letter, he would have shrugged and said something like, “So, what else is new?” And then he would have gone back to work, but his private sense of outrage might have been the more poignant because CG Follick Harvey had been pushed in his direction by the same Truscott.

  BURNING THE FILES

  In the Berlin base chief’s office was a special safe that held all of Bill’s notes going back to 1952, including dispatches and cables of the most sensitive classification between Harvey and the higher-ups, personnel notes, and stuff Bill
had kept out of the ordinary filing system for one reason or another. Years later rumors started to fly around Washington that major secrets affecting American policy had been lodged there and that someone had burned the files to protect Harvey.

  In 1967, years after Bill had left, Herb Natzke arrived to take over as the new chief of BOB. “I drove into the compound and parked in the slot right by the office door. Someone said, ‘You can’t do that! That’s Mr. Harvey’s spot!’ … Eight years after Bill had left!” While Harvey’s BOB had soared to a complement of 250 people, by the start of Natzke’s tenure, it was on its way back down to a mere 70.

  Ted Shackley, who was on his way to Southeast Asia, succinctly briefed Natzke. The safe in the chief of base’s office, Shackley said, “contains all the secrets…. They’re all there, anytime you want to see them.”

  Natzke started to read the files at night. “It probably took me the better part of a year…. All the files pertaining to the tunnel … Bill’s conversations with Allen Dulles … everything…. That’s when I saw that Harvey was not a fraud. He had a good, crisp, taut style of writing. Wasted no words on emotion. His analysis of the Berlin situation, and possible Russian actions … was masterly.

  “But after a couple of months, I started to tear the papers out of their folders and send them down for destruction.” Why?

  Berlin was always a dangerous place. In those days, in the late 1960s, there were mobs gathered at the Oskar Helene Heim subway station near the American headquarters compound…. [They were] anti-American … against our engagement in Vietnam. I wasn’t afraid that they would attack and get into the offices, but I didn’t want to leave the possibility open to chance….

  I just didn’t believe those files were necessary for me … for the work I was doing….Unnecessary paper, just lying around….

  Then there was the protective motive. Up till then, the slot of chief, BOB, had been in the Brotherhood … from Peter Sichel, through Houck, to Harvey, Murphy, Graver, Shackley, and then on to me. One of those days, someone who was not a Berlin guy, not one of the Brothers, would come in … and that stuff was almost holy … almost sacred. I didn’t want anyone else poring through those papers.

  As it happened, my successor was a guy from Staff D, not a Berlin ops man at all.

  Natzke concludes emphatically, “I did not burn the papers to cover anyone’s tracks. I never felt sorry…. Until about 1963–64, CIA was the good guys. Then it began to change, to go the other way.”39

  Dave Murphy heard a somewhat different version during his lengthy conversations with CG Harvey in Indianapolis in November 1993. CG was aging and had spent the past thirteen years trying to defend Bill’s reputation against the assault started by Wilderness of Mirrors.

  CG: Let me tell you what happened to a lot of records … stuff that he put into his cryptic notes … the kind he took down constantly. He kept a pad and pencil with him at all times, and he’d write things down, but nothing anyone could ever interpret … so cryptically that I’d look at it, and it didn’t make any sense….

  When Herb Natzke got to Berlin, they were doing a lot of reviewing of records. Herb decided he would purge the files. He took everything of [Bill’s] period and burned it….

  Murphy: He didn’t burn everything!? Bill must have had a chief of base file.

  CG: He did. Bill burned a lot of his own stuff before he left. Nobody could have read it anyway. But there were still things that Herb felt the Church Committee would be very interested in getting hold of, and he said to me, “CG, I wasn’t about to let that gang get hold of anything. I spent two days doing nothing but burning Bill’s files.”40

  NORMAN MAILER’S BERLIN

  Two books have appeared over the years that really irritated Harvey’s Boys. One was David Martin’s Wilderness of Mirrors and the other was Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost. Tom Polgar ripped into Mailer’s novel for Welt am Sonntag, which is, roughly, Germany’s equivalent of the Sunday New York Times.

  “Bill Harvey was an important figure in the CIA for nearly twenty years and he is a central figure in Mailer’s notional CIA, in which the real Harvey is maligned, ridiculed, and distorted.” Harvey, Polgar noted, was “used by Mailer as a vehicle for opinions which … sound remarkably like those that Mailer has expressed over the years.”

  Polgar pointed out that no one ever defected from BOB, nor did anyone spill sensitive operational detail to the media. “Thus Mailer, having no sources, had to invent things. His Berlin chapters are weak, as anyone familiar with the scene would have recognized…. When he claims to write about historic events and real people, he should, however, have his facts right.”

  For example, the novelist assigned Harvey a Cadillac, which in 1950s Berlin would have drawn astonished attention from Americans as well as Germans. Then, Mailer “has Harvey talking about the tunnel on the car radio—the same Harvey Mailer describes as an expert on communications security.” And incidentally, Harlot’s Ghost places Bill’s main office on the Kurfuerstendamm in the heart of downtown Berlin, far from the near-pastoral quiet of Dahlem.41

  THE BERLIN EXPERIENCE

  A summation of Bill Harvey as chief, BOB, comes from the woman he married in February 1954, when the tunnel op was at fever pitch. “One of the good things about Bill was his ability to bring out the best in people.” Berlin officers told CG, “The thing we really like about working for Bill is … he asks what you want to do…. You always feel like you’re working directly with Bill, that he’s backing you up all the way…. He brings out the best in you. He knows just how to ask the questions and pass out the responsibility to make you feel like you were doing your job.”

  “The young guys! … They idolized Bill. That was one of the reasons I talked to Bill about the heavy drinking. I said, ‘You’re setting a terrible example for those young guys!’42

  There is, in CG’s summation, a hint of ruthlessness. Harvey could and did weed out people whom he felt were vulnerable to recruitment by the opposition, even if they had done nothing wrong themselves. Likewise, all of us realized early on that we had to prove ourselves to him, even as we were mutely challenging him to prove himself to us. In the end, he won us over with his sheer mental capacity, his ferocious ability to work, and the loyalty to us that he showed as time went by.

  Because our work kept us in the office, we two reports officers saw more of Harvey than the street officers, and we came to appreciate what a friendly and decent a man he was, behind the forbidding facade. We were genuinely fond of him, as were almost all who served under him. Sure, he had a gruff, often bitingly sarcastic exterior, but we learned that it was a facade, just as we intuited that some areas of his life and his work were not, under any circumstances, open to discussion. In some ways, we modeled ourselves after him. And, yes, I would say that we loved him in the gruff, macho way of frontline males. We Harvey Boys were devoted to him, not just because he was good, but because he had those very public warts.

  Dave Murphy draws a picture of Big Bill at his peak: “He was a master of the art of cable combat, and whereas most of us drafted our messages on typewriters, he dictated, squinting through a haze of cigarette smoke, pausing every now and then, not so much to collect his own thoughts as to invite contributions from the circle of branch chiefs and case officers who watched and listened.

  “We all had a sense of participation, heightened by the fact that in most situations, Bill was taking the side of his troops.”

  This was Harvey fully in charge, knowing he had the devotion of the close circle of men around him and of their subordinates. When Harvey finished his seven years in Berlin and headed home for reassignment, he was on a roll.43

  By the end of 1954, Bill had cemented in nearly half of the Harvey legend. He had nailed Philby, and he had revamped BOB so that it was the CIA’s most aggressive probe of the Soviet Empire, constantly searching for weak points in the iron curtain, for crumbling in Communism’s monolithic structure. The other part of the legend’s first half came
to light in 1955, with the exposure of the Berlin Tunnel.44

  Harvey gained confidence in his ability to lead others. He had been a chief before, but of a staff, limited by the confines and the atmospherics of Washington’s temporary buildings. In Berlin, he was on his own, and he deftly exploited his exposed position, way out there on the limb, face-to-face with the enemy, playing ultimate poker. He showed his mettle to other government agencies, most particularly the military, and to the CIA hierarchy, most specifically, Dick Helms, and he was recognized for his excellence.

  5

  HARVEY’S HOLE: THE BERLIN TUNNEL OPERATION

  Everything Bill Harvey did while at the helm of Berlin Operations Base (BOB) from 1952 to 1955, and even beyond, has to be measured in light of the Berlin Tunnel. Harvey’s day job as chief of BOB was prodigious and prestigious in itself. His night job was supervising the building, equipping, and operating of a clandestine engineering project, unknown to all but a few. Perhaps Harvey’s dual roles were most comparable to those of the resident vice president of an imaginary American bank’s vital Moscow branch during the Cold War. The American would have been charged with tunneling undetected into the Russian Central Bank’s vault, and all the while, he would have had to act perfectly normally under unrelenting observation from all sides, without showing that he was operating on about four hours of sleep a night, over a protracted period of time.

  The forthright reason for the effort and the, for-the-times, huge expense of the Berlin Tunnel was that communications are the most vulnerable link of any enterprise. Governments, military services, businesses, even sports teams have to convey their secrets to other recipients. Other governments or competitors try to tap communication links to gain advantage; conversely, organizations spend large sums to try to ensure the privacy of their messages. The U.S. government maintains the National Security Agency (NSA, established in 1952), which strives to keep official secrets secret and to learn what other governments, political movements, terrorist organizations, even businesses and individuals are up to.