When Washington flatly rejected his plan, Harvey privately loosed limitless contempt for the pussy-footing cold warriors in Washington, who talked big but chilled when the chips were down, and for the brothers, Allen Welsh and John Foster Dulles.
With his June 17 cable, Harvey defied the CIA’s standing dictum to stay out of policymaking. He was the FBI rebel at a higher level, and his cable marked him as a crusader—in some minds, as a loose cannon.
I think that Bill received an unofficial reprimand from Allen Dulles or perhaps from his number two, Frank Wisner, the head of Clandestine Services. But Harvey was unrepentant. Herb Natzke, a future chief of BOB, commented years later: “Something like that wouldn’t bother him at all, even though he was way out of his own line of command and competence…. He was motivated. Very, very anti-Communist … and very patriotic.”7
MANAGEMENT STYLE
Harvey could, if so inclined, be one of the most charming, considerate, and compassionate men in the CIA. It’s a side of Harvey his critics never saw. Harvey unapologetically rode roughshod into what had been a gentlemen’s club. Initially, he lacked sensitivity to the throbbing organism that was West Berlin and with which the airlift-era BOBers so deeply identified. For them, Berlin itself was a cause. For Harvey, Berlin was at first—but not later—a chessboard.
Right from the start, at the end of 1952, Harvey needed to remodel BOB in his image, into a many-faceted series of lances into Soviet Communism’s engulfing empire. Upon arriving, he began questioning everyone, sketching the new, Harvey-look base in his mind. Then, he started to act.
Sichel had held staff meetings on Mondays at nine in the largest room in the building, the Reports Office, and had insisted everyone get out of bed to attend, regardless whether they had been working all night or carousing. He tolerated no excuses. Under Harvey, section chiefs crammed into his office early on Monday mornings. Once, three of the Old Guard showed up looking the worse for wear. In response to Harvey’s biting sarcasm, Adam Horton exploded, “For Chrissakes, Bill! We work from seven at night until two or three in the morning! How about having these meetings at eleven or twelve?”8 Neither Horton nor many of the others assembled then knew that Harvey consistently outdid their own hours. Bill had little sympathy for people who couldn’t grind for eighteen hours a day or more.
The reformation of BOB took all the considerable wiles and personal charm Harvey could muster. As boss, he made it clear that while he encouraged our breezy informality, he expected us to play by his rules. Then, being Harvey, he proceeded to show us how to evade as many regulations as we needed to break.
THE SICHEL FACTOR
The person who most symbolized the strain of opposition to Harvey was Peter Sichel, whose emotional roots in Berlin go back to July 1945. Today, Peter diplomatically denies that he and Bill tangled.
Sichel briefed Harvey in Washington before Bill went to Berlin to take up his post. “I fully agree that Bill deserves to get credit for what he contributed to the common weal, which was plenty. I was head of EE [Eastern European] ops in Washington before [Harvey] went to Berlin and worked with him to get approval for the Berlin Tunnel. Though I had my reservations about his love of guns and gin, I had great respect for his ability and single-minded devotion to the cause.
“His alcoholism or gun toting never influenced his performance, nor his ability to run a base, or to get loyal support from his people. He also invited me to visit him in Berlin, when I was chief in Hong Kong.”9
No Sichel loyalist is more outspoken than Adam Horton, the West Pointer who exploded at that staff meeting. Almost everything about Bill, starting with his appearance, rubbed Adam the wrong way.
Bill was very fond of people who fawned…. I suppose he didn’t like me because I was clearly—at least as far as he was concerned—akin to an East Coast Pinko. Also, he could not bear anyone who laughed at him.
I was duty officer one night when he came in after a trip to Frankfurt. He had a large, suitcase-shaped briefcase, which he unlocked, and he took out six or so pistols, all fully loaded. He unloaded them there in the office. That was bad enough, but when he dumped on the desk some six more from various pockets, shoulder holsters, and the like, I burst out laughing, which he took very ill indeed. I asked him if he had been expecting some special trouble on the trip, and he said, no, that what I saw were his usual precautions! …
Bill was not intellectually curious. I don’t recall ever having seen him read a book or mention one…. At staff meetings, I cannot recall him ever coming up with an original idea.
I was one of Peter’s boys: this led Bill to think, probably correctly, that none of the old crowd thought much of him…. As a control freak, this bothered him.10
Horton wrote these words nearly fifty years after the two CIA officers parted company. They are indicative of the kind of dislike Harvey could provoke in those who disagreed with him, whatever the cause.
When Horton became chief of Polish operations, he ran into immediate turbulence from new subordinates, one of whom, according to Adam, searched his desk drawer, looking for evidence to damn Adam in the eyes of the boss. “They were incensed that all our Polish operations had been compromised by the UB [the Polish intelligence service]. I spent the rest of my time starting all over again.”
The man who took over Polish ops was Ted Shackley.
POPOV
BOB under Harvey had its successes—many of them, in fact—in many fields of espionage, including scientific and technical intelligence, some political reporting, satellite operations, and economic information. But it also had a number of disappointments and some disasters, as is inevitable in the gathering of secret intelligence in hostile areas.
David E. Murphy, Bill Harvey’s deputy from 1954 until he took over BOB in his own right, was one of very few people who were cut in on the Popov case, one of the Agency’s most productive operations. Popov was a Red Army major—a Vienna walk-in penetration of the Soviet Army Intelligence Service (GRU)—who fascinated and absorbed an inner core of the CIA for several years in the early to mid-1950s. Popov required deft and agile handling by the senior case officer assigned, George Kisevalter.11 After reporting extremely useful intelligence in Vienna for a time, Major Popov was reassigned in the Soviet Union. Perhaps he had been discovered; the case seemed to have been closed. Suddenly, Popov made contact with a member of the British Military Mission in East Germany, and the case revived. There are several versions of how it ended.
John Barron, the noted author of two comprehensive books on the KGB, was a U.S. Navy lieutenant in Berlin at the time and came to know Bill Harvey well. Barron says, “Harvey blamed himself for the blowing and execution of Popov. Bill … foresaw and feared what actually happened.” He took the arrest and execution of Popov, a disarmingly gallant officer who had risen from peasant roots, as a personal failing on his part for trusting headquarters.12 It was the kind of episode that refueled Harvey’s already deep distrust of Washington, a distrust that influenced much that he did thereafter and, in the end, contributed to his downfall.
HARVEY AND THE PSYWARRIORS
In Berlin, as in Washington, there was in the 1950s a self-reinforcing barrier between the two sides of CIA’s Clandestine Services, which even shared field experience against a common opponent did not overcome.
Once in control of BOB, Harvey was absolutely determined to keep the cold warriors at arms length for several reasons. According to CG Follick Harvey, who had worked for the political and psychological (PP) chief in Frankfurt for a while, Bill had contempt for the political warfare people because, among other things, they bought Deutsche marks in Switzerland at a very favorable rate and sold them in Germany. The transactions were allegedly for operational use, but in fact, CG said, PP people “from the boss on down” had Swiss bank accounts and deposited proceeds of the black marketing to their own benefit. “Bill lived and breathed operations, and when these guys were stealing money from their operations, it really turned him off.”13
&
nbsp; Our psywar cousins were based out at Berlin’s main civilian-cum-military airport. When the PP/OPC section chief phoned, Harvey would glance up from his desk with a theatrical sigh, “OK, Gerry, what is it this time?” If he absolutely had to see the chief of base, Gerry made the crosstown pilgrimage to see Bill, not vice versa.
OPC ran psywar operations into East Germany; this seemed flamboyant and risky to us. The cousins’ agents were all-too-often rolled up, en masse, by the East German Staatssicherheitsdienst (later called the Stasi); they were even kidnapped from West Berlin. Our counterespionage (CE) officers and the footpads of the Goon Squad were regularly deployed to clean up the security flaps created by PP’s showy capers.14
The psywarriors’ thinking was exemplified for me during the Foreign Ministers Conference in Berlin in February 1954. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had in tow C. D. Jackson, a former Time-Life executive who was President Eisenhower’s political warfare adviser. At one high-powered briefing, when things did not seem to be going well for the Western Allies, Jackson turned to Harvey and said, “Hey, how about organizing a demonstration outside the Soviet embassy in East Berlin, to show them the people aren’t behind them?” Harvey was civil as he explained to the president’s emissary that it was impossible to whistle up a few thousand people who would be willing to protest in a snowy street under the gaze of the Red Army and East German military and security. Jackson was not in the slightest concerned that people would be arrested, imprisoned, perhaps even sentenced to death, if his scheme were implemented.
Harvey had few friends among the psywar people. Tom Parrott was chief of base in Frankfurt, and had aspired to Berlin; instead, he became deputy to General Truscott’s successor, John Bross. He gained a window into Harvey’s thinking by reading correspondence flowing among Harvey, Truscott/Bross, Wisner/Helms, and Dulles.
A few years later, in 1962, Parrott was secretary of the Special Group Augmented, the Kennedy brothers’ interagency board that sat on clandestine efforts to topple, even to assassinate, Fidel Castro. He was one of several sources for David Martin. More than forty years later Tom Parrott says, “Oh, I got along with Bill all right,” and indeed, he expresses compassion for what befell Bill at the crux of his CIA career in October 1962.15 But during the 1950s in Germany, Stan Gaines, a senior foreign intelligence operations officer in Frankfurt who was highly sympathetic to Harvey, comments succinctly, “Parrott was envious of Bill. He thought he was as big as Bill.”16
The case officers at BOB watched Harvey carefully, at first with snickering amusement, then with growing respect, especially during the taut days of the uprising. Bill, in turn, learned under pressure that he could trust people he still did not yet entirely understand. After June 1953 BOB was a cohesive, smoothly functioning unit, one that would have been called “professional” before that word became synonymous with “mediocre.” I know of no one in those years, with the exception of those who had deep personal reservations, who could seriously fault Bill on his performance.
BOB officers niggled that Harvey sat on dispatches too long; he was always in a hurry, brusque, and he seemed at times almost indifferent to our concerns. When one of us went in to see him, we were as brief as possible; Harvey rarely said so, but we knew we were poaching on time he needed for other matters. If Bill realized a message was important, he dealt with it as speedily as he could; any serious muttering in the ranks could lead to suspicions and perhaps even to subtle nosing around by subordinates who knew all the devious tricks, and Harvey wanted knowledge of his other major activity severely limited.
It may seem odd, but the intensity with which BOB worked was such that little thought was ever given to what might happen if the superpowers lurched toward hostilities. Two crises illustrate the mood of the base under pressure: In October 1956, at the time of the Hungarian uprising, John Barron offered the U.S. Navy’s C-47 to evacuate CIA wives from Berlin. None of them accepted the invitation.17 Later, as tension rose around Krushchev’s Berlin ultimatum, at Thanksgiving 1958, BOB had to give some thought to the possibility that the Soviets might push into the Western sectors of the city. Preparations were scant. Some members of BOB who had military backgrounds were issued uniforms. They also practiced firing machine guns on the range in the Grunewald. Jack Corris, a Navy captain and BOB administrative officer, recalls, “We weren’t sure what we would have done if they’d come in.”18
CAREER MOVES
June 16–20, 1953, was the first defining moment of Harvey’s Berlin career, his baptism in the font of foreign intelligence. From then on, Harvey was indisputably CIA Berlin. And the time was right for Harvey to make Berlin the most important and biggest single CIA installation in the world—devoted to aggressively penetrating the bailiwicks of Soviet Communism that were reasonably close at hand but nonetheless difficult to pierce.
The East German Uprising could have been a serious stumble in Harvey’s surge to the top, but it turned out to be a stepping stone. Once he was past the uprising, he could get on with the big job, the actual installation and activation of the Berlin Tunnel. By the time Bill left Berlin, his path was clearly headed upward, although some who watched him from the wings harbored doubts, even nurtured grudges, and were, perhaps even then, ready to dig traps along his path.
Harvey was nearly as high in civil service rank as he could go at the time, a GS-15, maybe a GS-16, roughly equivalent to a brigadier general in the Army. About this time, too, Harvey began to think about becoming deputy director of plans, the most equal among equal deputy directors of the CIA, i.e., the man in charge of the Clandestine Services. Perhaps he even contemplated the chair of DCI.
POLISHING THE BRASS
Donald R. Morris, a Navy officer attached to BOB in 1958, recalls, “Behind Bill’s desk was a poster of the statue of Greco-Roman wrestlers in the Uffizi Gallery, in which one brawny wrestler lifts the other off the ground and is about to hurl him over his shoulder, unaware the victim has a firm grip on the victor’s penis. Harvey had attached a large brass shield to the frame which read, ‘Headquarters Guidance.’”19 It adequately summed up Harvey’s attitude toward the establishment.
The DCI, Gen. Bedell Smith, had sent Gen. Lucian K. Truscott III to Germany to bring order into the CIA’s diverse activities in the still-occupied country. Because of his war record and his rank, Truscott could also gain cooperation from an otherwise-unenchanted military; such cooperation was vital because the military still ran the American zone of occupation and the American sector of Berlin. Truscott soon bristled at what he perceived to be a loose chain of command, even insubordination, in Agency ranks, which was especially evident in Berlin where his man didn’t show fitting deference to the brass.
After a while as chief, Harvey simply refused to attend meetings at the Office of the Commanding General, Berlin. He told Jack Corris, “You go. Just don’t make any promises, and don’t let those people know what the hell we’re doing. But you report back to me what they’re up to.” Outranked by several grades, but backed by the shadow of Truscott, Corris now ran courteous interference for Harvey with the commanding general. “Somehow, it worked. We could get just about anything we wanted out of the Army.”
There were other ripples.
Once, we had a group of Army brass come up from U.S. Army Europe headquarters. I said, “Bill, do me a favor. Please put your gun in the drawer instead of laying it on top of your desk.” He just laughed.
So while he was giving them his number one speech, my God, there was the revolver right out on the desk! I could see the generals staring at it. But after Bill had talked for about five minutes, he had them. They even apologized for asking questions. “You may not be able to answer this, but how many people do you have?” “Oh, I’d say we have around fifty. Right, Jack?” [It was more like two hundred.]
They were so grateful…. But they kept looking at that pistol! He never apologized.20
Neill Prew, who handled a number of tricky assignments for Harvey, recalls, “Bill developed a
routine. The frequent visitors from Washington and Frankfurt would invariably be plied with martinis during the long cocktail hour at Bill’s house and served copious amounts of wine with dinner. Dinner over, Bill would call me to take the guest[s] to the Harnack House [the official U.S. Army hotel and officers club in Berlin]. Guests out of the way, Harvey then departed for the tunnel. Bill even handled General Truscott the same way!”21
A final Corris lament: “I tried to stop him from carving his initials on his desk. Told him, ‘That belongs to the U.S. government!’ Bill Harvey answered, ‘You trying to tell me how to use my desk? I don’t give a shit who it belongs to, I’ll carve where I want to.’ End of discussion.”22
THE MARTINI RITUAL
Practically everything ever written about Bill Harvey mentions his devotion to old-style martinis—no frills, no color additive, no fruit salad—a man’s drink with gin and a whisper of vermouth, maybe a twist of lemon or an olive or a pearl onion. The Harvey Martini Ritual was part of the fitness-for-promotion testing for those whom Bill wanted to evaluate outside the normal course of work, a challenge to his subordinates to prove their manhood, and for others it was a rite of passage and a Bogartian symbol of virility.
In Berlin, the ritual took place in the spacious front living room of the Harveys’ Milinowksi Strasse villa, which seemed to have little furniture except for two roomy, comfortable armchairs, which faced each other in front of the fireplace. Behind the boss’s chair was a butler trolley, popular at the time, which held the essentials: a bottle or two of gin (Gilbey’s, if I recall), Noilly Prat vermouth, an ice bucket, and bird-bath martini glasses, the kind that came back into vogue with the new millennium.
Harvey’s style of mixing was rapid, businesslike, not show time. The first drink went down fast on both sides. It acted as lubrication for the synapses and vocal chords. The second drink was slower, reflective. It allowed the participants time for mellowing and for the layers to begin to peel away. The third brought on intimacy, at least on the part of the guest. After three, it was time to go back to work.
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