FLAWED PATRIOT
WILLIAM K. HARVEY.
GARSTON WALLACE DRIVER
FLAWED PATRIOT
THE RISE AND FALL OF
CIA LEGEND BILL HARVEY
BAYARD STOCKTON
Copyright © 2006 by Bayard Stockton.
Published in the United States by Potomac Books, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
The CIA’s Publication Review Board has reviewed the manuscript for this book to assist the author in eliminating classified information. The Board poses no security objection to the book’s publication. This review, however, should not be construed as an official release of information, confirmation of its accuracy, or an endorsement of the author’s views.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stockton, Bayard.
Flawed patriot : the rise and fall of CIA legend Bill Harvey / Bayard Stockton.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-57488-990-7 (alk. paper)
1. Harvey, Bill, 1915–1976. 2. United States. Central Intelligence Agency—Biography.
3. Intelligence officers—United States—Biography. 4. Spies—United States—Biography.
5. Cold War. I. Title.
JK468.I6S75 2006
327.12730092—dc22
[B]
2006012651
ISBN 978-1-57488-991-8 (paperback)
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper that meets the American
National Standards Institute Z39-48 Standard.
Potomac Books, Inc.
22841 Quicksilver Drive
Dulles, Virginia 20166
First Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For the West Berliners during the Coldest War, 1947–1955;
for those who served at BOB under Bill Harvey;
and for Bettina, Jonah, and Cai; Tam and Helene; Annalisa;
and any yet to come.
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction: Berlin Vignette
1. Growing Up Midwestern
2. The Secret World: Tangling with Buddha
3. The Heartlander: Building the Legend
4. Baptism in Berlin
5. Harvey’s Hole: The Berlin Tunnel Operation
6. Harvey’s Support System: Married with Children
7. Into the Cauldron: MONGOOSE and Task Force W
8. Plotting Assassination: ZRRIFLE
9. Bill and Johnny
10. Bill Harvey and the Assassination of President Kennedy
11. Rome: Decline and Fall
12. The Doldrums
13. Back Home in Indiana
14. A Murky Passage: Bill Harvey and the Death of Michael Chinigo
15. The Conscience
16. Indianapolis and Death
17. Afterlife
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
PREFACE
Like many men of achievement, William K. Harvey was Winston Churchill’s “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Today’s term “multifaceted” doesn’t begin to describe him because it implies superficiality; Big Bill was anything but superficial. Indeed, the deeper I probed, the more dense yet clear the man’s character became. Bill Harvey was a man of the shadows, an obfuscator who was a true-born member of the inner world of espionage.
I saw Bill in several different lights over a decade in mid-twentieth century and was encouraged to delve into his life by his widow several decades later. There came delays, until I finally set out to pull together as many strands of his life as I could gather. I take full responsibility for what appears here and for the conclusions I have drawn, except for those clearly labeled as someone else’s thought.
Throughout the text, I quote various sources with whom I spoke or exchanged e-mails in the course of research for the book as if they were still alive. In fact, a number of them died while Flawed Patriot was in preparation.
I owe thanks to many people, particularly to Bob Kilroy and Clarence Berry, whose real names I have not used. It would be unjust to single out others. Suffice it to say that all whom I have asked, and all who knew him, responded fully. Many have never before talked for the record.
Those formerly of CIA who talked with me: Jim Critchfield, Dennis Flinn, Warren Frank, Stan and Dottie Gaines, Sam Halpern, Dick Helms, Bill Hood, Adam Horton, George Kirby, Walt Lomac, Alex Macmillan, Dave and Star Murphy, Herb Natzke, Tom Polgar, Anita Adolph Potocki, Neill Prew, Ted and Hazel Shackley, Peter Sichel, Henry Woodburn, and Mark Wyatt. Also, Sam Papich, formerly of the FBI.
By correspondence only: David Chavchavadze, Jack Corris, Ben Cushing, Paul Garbler, Norman and Lois Glasser, Mrs. Vyrl (Ernie) Leichliter, and Richard W. Montague. Also, George Bailey and Peter Lunn, formerly of the British SIS; Gen. Sergei Kondrashev, formerly of the KGB; and an anonymous member of the Dutch Intelligence Service.
Others from a variety of backgrounds with whom I spoke: Jack Anderson, Arthur, Ed Becker, Prof. G. Robert Blakey, Brenda Brady, Michael Dobbs, Doug Fleming, John Foreman, Michael Goldsmith, Dan Hardway, Sen. Gary Hart, Maureen Hughes, Jim Kelly, Jim Lesar, Fred Logevall, Robert Maheu, Scott Malone, Dave Mazzarella, Joe McMoneagle, Jefferson Morley, Andy (Lee) Nelson, Bill Nugent, Connie O’Donnell, Curtis G. (Bill) Pepper, Stephen J. Rivele, Gus Russo, Charles Rappleye, Ann Reynolds, F. A. O. Schwarz Jr., Toni Shimon, David Stafford, Larry Stewart, Anthony Summers, David Suter, Helmut Trotnow, Gore Vidal, Bob Weitershausen, Linda Williams, Robin Winks, and Mick Winter.
Those from Indiana who helped: Tom Cochrun, Dr. Chuck Coffin, Jack Hall, Sally Harvey, Hal Hyde, and David Kahlenberg.
Also, the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), the FBI’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Section, the CIA’s FOIA Section, and the CIA’s Publications Review Board (PRB).
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The changes that the CIA’s PRB required were primarily semantic in nature: names, cryptonyms, locations, and the like. Some of the deletions insisted on by the CIA were of names, designations, job titles, and locations that have appeared elsewhere in print, in some cases many times over. Thus I am not allowed to use a specific designation for the top CIA man in a specific location, even though, for instance, a book by a former CIA chieftain that appeared in 1976 openly used the term and the same designation appears, as a matter of course, in practically every book about the CIA. Some true names of former colleagues who had granted permission to use their names in the clear, and of officers now dead, were “redacted” by the PRB, in its wisdom. Even some fictitious names that I had dreamed up were blue-penciled by PRB.
When it came to crunch time, the board opted for ludicrous deletion rather than common sense. To back up its edict, the PRB reminded me of my obligations under the secrecy oath I took well over fifty years ago.
The PRB asked for no substantive changes or deletions in material dealing with CIA operations.
INTRODUCTION: BERLIN VIGNETTE
Tuesday, June 16, 1953. Lights blazed in the high-gabled redbrick building rising from a cleft in the wooded Berlin suburb of Dahlem, facing what was now called Clay Allee. The entrance to the building was on an obscure, parallel dead-end street called Foehrenweg. Berlin Operations Base (BOB) was awake but not yet on full alert. That wouldn’t come until the next night.
Word was the boss was on his way back in from a meeting outside the compound. Another young man and I slouched on the battered couch facing a desk buried in varicolored paper. Today we woul
d be described as “stressed,” enthralled by the drama a few miles away but tense as we reviewed what we would capsule for Bill Harvey, whenever he showed up. It wasn’t going to be a crisp, military-style briefing, but it would lack nothing in respect or, we hoped, in accuracy.
Decades later, writers fantasized that Harvey’s office at the CIA’s main Cold War outpost was an inner redoubt that no hostile could ever penetrate without a furious firefight, in which Harvey himself would go down, twin Magnums blazing. In fact, the room in which we waited contained no gun cabinet, glass-fronted or otherwise, no arsenal of any kind. It was functional, sparsely furnished, even shabby.
The level of tension at BOB was subtle and under control. But, just in case, the administration officer had opened the base’s gun cabinet, which played large in imaginations years later. The cabinet was, in fact, a simple plywood cupboard, near the duty officer’s niche and the base’s vital switchboard. It contained rifles, carbines, grenades, and a couple of World War II submachine guns, nothing more. It was not a full-service arsenal, by the stretch of anyone’s standards.
Now, Bill Harvey pushed through the front door, in a rush, as always. He grunted a couple of brusque-but-friendly words to the armed GI guard who sat behind a counter on a raised dais, rather like the booking sergeant in a police station. It was there, at the building’s entrance, that the only shot was ever fired in or near BOB—when a soldier shot himself in the leg while toying with his pistol.
The guard pushed the raucous, klaxon-like buzzer that signaled someone had entered the premises. The duty officer moved Bill’s card from the “out” slot to the “in” slot.
Harvey surged down a long, wide hallway, at the end of which was an office with a large bay window. A few other offices sprouted off the main corridor. Two stairwells led to other working areas in a honeycombed basement and an attic. It was a comfortable working space for about forty, maybe fifty, people.
About halfway down the corridor, Bill tacked left, into his secretary’s office. To his right was the registry, which contained all the heavy metal safes on the base, and yes, on top of each safe was an incendiary canister. This device was proved later, in Hong Kong, to be less than trustworthy in the destruction of documents. Registry also held an extremely noisy shredder, through which every scrap of waste paper passed before it was burned.
Latter-day writers could not imagine the Russians even considering an invasion of West Berlin. We who were there in the 1950s did not think it a likely possibility, but we were prepared to destroy files—not to protect ourselves but to shield sources, ongoing operations, and information about the inner workings of the CIA.
It was not unusual that Harvey had disappeared that tense evening. We knew he had meetings outside the office, about what and with whom was none of our business. Big Bill was not in the habit of accounting for his movements to anyone.
THE NEW BOYS
On that Tuesday evening, June 16, 1953, Bob Kilroy, my partner, was twenty-five years old. I was a few months short of twenty-three, making me the youngest officer assigned to Berlin. Why on earth would the chief of BOB call on two callow youths to brief him on matters of importance?
Bob and I were the base reports officers who channeled the positive intelligence—“the take” of BOB’s espionage operations—back to CIA’s German Mission Headquarters in Frankfurt, to Washington, and in some cases, to London. We were the nerve center, the editorial desk.
We had been extremely busy since about noon that day, when we began to get reports, out of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, of protests and uprisings over an impending increase in factory work and production quotas. We followed the day’s events with barely stifled excitement, which heightened when workers from the Communists’ showcase building project in Stalin Allee marched to the government quarter of East Berlin, three or four miles from where we sat and again when other workers came over to the West to beg for airtime on Radio in the American Sector (RIAS) so they could talk rebellion to their comrades in the Russian zone. After some agonizing, of which we were part, the American government, fearful of what it might spark, turned the workers’ request down.
We had reports that the workers were calling for a general strike at dawn on Wednesday. The key question was whether they would try to overthrow the East German government, and, if they did, what the Soviet response would be. The rebellion might not have happened had not the iron-fisted Stalin died in March. It was the first open show of restlessness, of resistance, by any peoples under Communist rule.
At some point during that first twenty-four hours of rebellion, Harvey sent me over to listen to the Army colonel in charge of military intelligence for Berlin Command. The colonel stifled the chagrin he felt when he realized a messenger boy had come to represent the CIA boss; then, almost in tears of frustration, he pleaded for help. “We’ve lost track of the twenty-two Soviet divisions in the zone, and we need anything you guys can give us.” I promised, on Bill’s behalf, that we would do our best, and we did.
THE BRIEFING
That night Harvey heaved into his office and swung around the desk. He stood, swaying slightly from fatigue, not, as others would have jumped to conclude, from booze. He stared at us out of his bulbous, bloodshot eyes. “Well?” The voice was rasping, deep, rumbling, well-tilled in the soil of Indiana. “Whatyagot?”
I gulped and started to fill Harvey in on the most recent developments in the streets across the sector border. Kilroy sat on the edge of the couch, ready to note whatever might be required, yet poised to jump in with his contributions.
As I talked, Bill casually reached under his arm, pulled a .38 revolver from his shoulder holster, and dropped it into his right-hand desk drawer. Then, he reached behind, under his gabardine jacket, and pulled out a snub-nosed .32. As he discarded it in the left-hand drawer, he absorbed our bug-eyed glances.
“I was meeting with the Brits. Don’t think I trust the bastards, do you, Bob?” At that point, no one else at the base carried a weapon.
There came a moment that has lived with both of us over the years.
Bill sagged into his chair. As I stumbled through my summary of recent events, I watched his eyelids droop. His head began to nod, and he breathed deep, almost rasping. Kilroy and I pantomimed a nudge nudge, wink wink.
Suddenly, Harvey’s eyes popped open. His phlegmatic rumble was loud, clear, authoritative yet courteous. “Please continue, Bay!” As I pulled myself together, his eyes closed again, and the chief of base appeared to fall into another snooze. But we were then and ever aware that he absorbed and remembered every detail, every nuance of what we said.
This was vintage Bill Harvey as he approached the peak years of his career. Within a decade, things were sadly different.
1
GROWING UP MIDWESTERN
Bill Harvey was never an open book, even to those he liked, but he was human and caring. Harvey’s professional life was secret, interwoven, contorted, and shadowed by alcoholism and his choice of friends. To those he disliked, Harvey was an enigma, often a baleful one.
In his early days in the FBI in Washington, around the time the United States was entering World War II, Bill felt at home among the few he later referred to as Landsmänner, that is, his kind of people. The FBI was very much a boys’ club; wives stayed at home in the kitchen. When Bill moved to the newly hatched CIA in 1947, he kept up the facade that he’d maintained in the FBI and that stayed with him for the rest of his life. He lowered it only rarely, for the few who proved themselves to him. He was a master at winning trusted henchmen. Friendships with his Landsmänner were based on shared experience and often, too, on an ability to partake liberally of booze. With Harvey, what you saw was what he let you see. One could only speculate what lay behind the facade; Harvey rarely allowed any to glimpse his deeply private side.
Harvey became one of the most outstanding intelligence officers this country has ever produced. He is perhaps the preeminent American master of what decades later came to be call
ed HUMINT (human intelligence). What mattered to Bill was his job, and at it, he worked remorselessly. His drive to succeed in the CIA’s stoutly buttressed, exclusive world carried him into Cold War meetings in the White House’s Oval Office and bitter confrontations with the U.S. attorney general. It was a long and fraught road that began in Danville, Indiana.
Bill’s widow told one of her husband’s closest associates that Bill “came from a really wonderful family. When you go all the way back, they are the people who settled Indiana. His ancestors fought in the War Between the States … on both sides. His father, grandfather, his great grandfather, and his great, great grandfather all graduated from Indiana University’s Law School. These were the Harvey Men.”1
FROM THE AMERICAN HEARTLAND
Nearly a century after his birth, Bill’s parentage remains as inscrutable as so many aspects of his later years. He may have been illegitimate, born in Cleveland to a woman who was socially and intellectually far in advance of her times. Bill’s mother brought him to the family seat in Danville, Indiana, and gave him a proper home and a father who “died of spinal meningitis when Bill was only ten months old.”
Among the Harvey family papers is this document:
Registered No. 14587, birth No. 134, Sept 13, 1915: William Walker born to Sara J. King of Danville Indiana, then aged 25 and Drenan R. Walker of Danville, then aged 27, a lawyer. Signed on Sept. 21, 1915 by attending physician R.H. Boatwright at Maternity Hospital, Cleveland. Mother’s usual residences listed as 757 East 90th Street, Cleveland. COPY OF BIRTH CERTIFICATE NO. 8928 ISSUED APRIL 29th, 1959.2
The document’s date of issue is shortly before Bill Harvey returned from seven years at the key outpost of the Cold War, Berlin. It seems plausible that at that time Sara J. King, who was known as Sara King Harvey, decided it was time to document the true circumstances of Bill’s birth, especially since he and his wife, CG, were returning with a newly adopted baby girl.
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