Flawed Patriot

by Bayard Stockton

  Reverend Kahlenberg: “He unhesitatingly and unashamedly prayed in public … and even in those prayers there was not only eloquence, which was one of Bill’s trademarks, but there was deep sincerity … a deeply devout and devoted Christian, once he came to the conclusion that what we say about God is true.”

  And, “Bill was a brilliant, clear-thinking, quick, decisive, determined, detail-oriented person who could size up a situation in a flash and know what to do or how to handle a given circumstance.” This was the Harvey who had come through the disintegration of alcoholism, yet still, in public had that “razor-sharp tongue when needed. He had a commanding appearance and a deep, authoritative voice to go along with it.”2

  When Herb Natzke visited Harvey in 1974, however, he found him “lonely.” “He was very curious about the Agency. Wistful. Nostalgic. Lonely…. Subdued … but still way overweight.”3

  But Harvey being Harvey couldn’t leave this mortal coil like just anyone. He had to do it the hard and dramatic way. Whether by divine design or by accident, he created a mystery that lingered long after his death.

  THE END

  Sally Harvey says, “He had absolutely no premonition of death. He had to be down on the floor writhing before he would admit he was sick. He died the same week Sara’s will came out of probate. He was working on his own will, but he hadn’t finished it yet. That’s how little he thought of dying.”

  CG Harvey recalled, “He loved John Wayne movies.” But then, “he recited poetry to me. The way he delivered it was hypnotizing.” At the time, “Bill had been feeling very tired, so he had his physical exam moved up a month. The doctor gave him a clean bill of health and said he found nothing unusual.

  “That night, we had watched the baseball game on TV. The Reds hit seven home runs but still lost the game. Bill was a great Reds fan. He had enjoyed the evening. We planned to play in the duplicate bridge game at the club the following day, so he went up to bed.

  “At 5:00 AM, he awakened me and said, ‘CG, call the doctor. I’m very sick!’

  “Bill never admitted to being sick, so I knew it was serious and called the ambulance. They had him in the emergency room in twenty minutes. The doctors said it was a serious heart attack. If they could keep him alive for forty-eight hours, he might survive.”4

  JACK HALL, MD

  Because there had been so much suspicion, so many hints that Harvey’s death was not a natural one, Sally put me in touch with Dr. Jack Hall, the heart specialist who cared for Harvey and later for CG as well. Hall is a product of Harvard Medical School, via Indiana University, a nationally known cardiologist, yet still a hometown physician who has resisted calls to more prominence, while pioneering techniques that have today become almost ordinary—angioplasty, for instance.

  Sally: “At the end of twenty-four hours, Dr. Hall told Bill he wasn’t going to make it. He asked the doctors if there wasn’t something they could try. Dr. Hall said there was, but that it only worked once in five times, and he could not be moved to surgery or given an anesthetic.”

  Jack Hall: “Bill was in control of himself throughout. He didn’t want to give up; he wanted to know the odds. I told him, ‘With the surgery, maybe one in ten. Without it, two percent.’

  “He said, ‘I’ve beaten worse odds than that…. So what are you waiting on?’ Go ahead!’”5

  Sally: “Dr. Hall worked on him in his hospital room. There wasn’t time to get him to surgery.”

  Dr. Hall continues, “His pump was so poor, his heart couldn’t squeeze enough to circulate blood throughout his body…. He was not responding. I wanted to try a new technique, what in those days was called ‘an artificial heart’… inserting a balloon from the groin to above the heart. We had had the procedure at the hospital for just one week!

  “The odds with the pump were better than without. After, if the surgery had been successful, he would have had a fifty-fifty chance of survival.

  “I didn’t use anesthesia, except local. I wanted to be able to talk with him. After a few hours, it gets pretty uncomfortable, even painful. You can’t put someone to sleep doing this. And he was there for nine hours!”

  CG: “With no anesthetic and excruciating pain…. When they got there, that side of his heart was closed by scar tissue…. In Rome he had had a massive heart attack which closed off half his heart. It had been misdiagnosed as a potassium shortage in his blood and had never been treated.

  “The discovery was a horrible blow, but Bill asked them to try the other side. Six hours later—after a total of thirteen hours of surgery—they got into the other side of his heart, but there were not enough cells in the heart still alive to function with the machine, and they told Bill he was going to die.”

  Reverend Kahlenberg: “The doctors came to get me … to have a last prayer with Bill. He was in pretty bad shape.”

  Sally: “Pastor Kahlenberg came out and got Mom and me. That was the end. His last words were, ‘I’ll always love you.’”

  CG: “Twenty minutes later, he was dead. June 9, 1976.”6

  Bill died at about one in the afternoon. Sally: “Both surgeons cried, as did most of the people in the room. They said they had never encountered such a brave man in all their practice.

  “They asked CG if they could do an autopsy, and she agreed.” The autopsy showed it had been Bill’s third serious heart attack.

  Dr. Hall: “He never mentioned to me that he had been in the CIA. Just said, ‘I’ve had a full life!’”

  Hall was the recipient of many inquisitive phone calls in the years after Harvey died. “After Bill died, I got night and day calls, asking ‘Is he really dead?’ I figured it was the Agency just wanting to confirm his death.” He never asked the callers to identify themselves. Hall doesn’t go any further in his speculation.

  Reverend Kahlenberg: “When Bill died, a little bit of me died, too.” Kahlenberg echoed the words of St. Timothy. “I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith.”

  Bill is buried in Danville, Indiana, where it all began. Few attended the burial. Dave Murphy came up from Florida, and Alex MacMillan came from California. Many simply didn’t hear about Bill’s death until later.

  Kahlenberg, too, got calls, seeking to confirm Bill’s death. “Many people hoped it was a hoax…. They thought it might not really have happened.”

  On June 22, 1976, not quite two weeks after Harvey’s death, his old friend and former FBI colleague, Art Thurston, who was himself a gun connoisseur and collector, made an inventory of Harvey’s collection. Bill owned thirteen handguns and ten long guns. The total valuation of the collection at the time of Bill’s death was $5,025.

  A STRANGE INCIDENT: THE BREAK-IN

  In September or October 1976, about three months after Bill’s death and one month after Johnny Rosselli’s brutal demise, the Harveys’ Indianapolis house was broken into. CG had been outside, in front. When she entered the house, she heard noises in the basement, which opens onto a gently sloping rear lawn. She went down to investigate and interrupted what appeared to have been a burglary in progress, thieves going through the papers that remained in Bill’s office files.

  Is it possible that the Agency organized the burglary to see what documents Harvey had taken with him that should have remained secret? Was the break-in performed by latter-day Second-Story Men?

  WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS

  After Harvey’s death, two books appeared that raised considerable ire among Harvey loyalists. The first was David Martin’s Wilderness of Mirrors, which, in turn, at least partially inspired Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost.

  Martin had been tracking Harvey and Jim Angleton, as a reporter for the Washington Post, since the 1970s. Indeed, his lengthy postmortem on Bill inspired a nearly half-page charcoal drawing by David Suter of Harvey’s backside as Bill got ready to meet Jack Kennedy in the Oval Office. Wilderness came out in 1980. After I read the book I got in touch with CG about a riposte. When I picked up the traces years later, CG h
ad just died.

  CG waxed nearly profane about Wilderness in her letter to me. “I did not cooperate with Martin, nor did anyone who had worked successfully with Bill. When I heard from my friends, who called and told me the tenor of Martin’s questions and asked me if I wanted them to talk to him, I said, ‘No!’7

  “Bill had been contacted by Martin while he was still alive and didn’t want anything to do with him, so I knew I was following Bill’s desires.”

  CG was so incensed after Wilderness of Mirrors appeared, she cancelled plans to go to Australia, bought a Buick Riviera, and set out across the country. “She was gone four months, collecting memories of Dad.” Sally pointed to CG’s huge Rolodex. “She never spent one night in a hotel!” During the trip CG taped statements from people who had worked with Bill, which cast a completely different light on him from that in Wilderness. CG destroyed this material after the CIA told her that she could not publish anything and that Bill’s files would not be available until 2063.

  CG’s letter to me continues, “My exceptions [to the Martin book] make a book! You say I am in no position to comment on the rivalry between Bill and Jim Angleton, [but] I am! … I received a letter from Jim on 22 Apr 1980, after he saw [Wilderness].

  “[Jim] was so upset, he pulled out of his file and returned to me a letter which he received from Bill, written on 3 June 1976…. Bill died on 9 June.

  “Here, after four years, to open a letter in Bill’s handwriting gave me quite a shock.”

  The handwriting is a bit more sprawling than of old, though not noticeably wobblier. The expression of thought, especially the bitter condemnation of those he (and Angleton) felt had betrayed the Agency is pure, unadulterated Harvey, even to the mock German phrase at the end.

  Dear Jim,

  I was pleased to receive your letter…. As I think you know, I agree, basically, with your views as expressed. Personally, and I have so stated with little tact and much bluntness, among friends, I cannot view the posture and actions of [DCI Bill] Colby specifically and the [Ford] Administration [in caving in to the Church Committee] generally as other than an evil compound of arrant cowardice, crass abdication of responsibility and almost incredible stupidity.

  The actions of the concerned elements of The Congress, in my opinion, at least, fall four-square within the Cromwellian if not the Constitutional definition of treason.

  The utter disarray and the revolting sanctimonious holier-than-thou breast-beating of the past 18 months I find not only personally disgusting. But also gravely concerning, as a signet of national infantilism.

  Forgive the Hyde Park soap box approach. No reason I should carry coals to Newcastle by off-loading it on you, of all people.

  I just got back from the stable after working two horses for a couple of hours, which is a damned sight more satisfying than agonizing over the current state of the Republic.

  Please give my best to Cicely. CG sends her regards to you both.

  Keep in touch, als immer,

  WKH8

  In her 1983 handwritten memoir to me, CG said, “Jim’s covering letter said, ‘I cut out one page of Bill’s letter which had to do with a sensitive case.’ … We were all good friends right up to Bill’s death, and even though in 1980, Jim tried to counter the [Martin] lie, nothing he did or said was ever acknowledged.

  “It has become a very discouraging picture to me. But this letter six days before [Bill’s] death certainly proves the lie of the rivalry. They talked on the phone and discussed cases and visited back and forth, and each had tremendous respect for the other.”9 In the end, the two cold warriors had more than made peace.

  Angleton renewed contact with CG slightly less than two years after Bill’s death, on March 7, 1978. In a letter Angleton expresses deep thanks for a Victorian era Christmas card CG had sent, which so touched the mole hunter, he thought it worth framing. Then he reflects the deep anger and bitterness that he and others felt about congressional investigations.

  There is no need to describe the decompression of the past three-plus years. The agony of the Church Committee which destroyed some 30 years during which we all dedicated our lives to the country, never believing that we would have Director or president who could sell us out not as individuals, but the service and its traditions.

  … Many an evening—alone—I relive the days of the past when we were a well-knit group who knew where we were going and who was the enemy.

  I think of Bill often … and many others when I am alone late at night … and then I remember vividly the meetings we had, and my spirits are revived, knowing that if they were here, they would be in battle as it once was.

  These reveries have given me strength and renewed conviction in what our mission and contribution meant to the country. In the end it will come out—perhaps when it is too late, and the Churches and Mondales will be held accountable—along with Admiral Turner—[for] firing the old guard—what’s left of it.

  … We are losing badly in the world, as a country—and the service is in a shambles with indifferent esprit-de-corps which is a sad indication of the Administration’s lack of basic understanding of the enemy, and what to do about it … Italy, France, Angola, Ethiopia and so it goes.

  Enough of that! What can I do to help on Bill’s papers, or anything of concern to you? I am ready to give this time if you wish. I am always ready to preserve the true traditions which we all shared.

  Kindest personal regards to you, CG.

  Jim

  (Please write)

  The letter could almost have been written in 2006 from one recently retired CIA man to a colleague.

  CG had, almost voluntarily, gone into a retirement home in 1995. It was not an easy adjustment; she didn’t socialize with the others. By October 2000 she was obviously declining in health. The home’s administrator threatened to kick her out because, he said, his place was for the living, not the dying. Sally: “She was failing physically. She wanted to die so bad. It was very hard.” In late September she fell down twice in one week and was taken to the emergency room. “When she got to the hospital the last time, she argued with Dr. Hall about her meds, and Hall replied, ‘Clara, I’m the doctor!’

  “She knew she was going; Jack Hall made it easy for her and told her it was OK.” Sally said, “Mom, let go!” But, “she wouldn’t die in front of the boys.” Sally’s son and Jim left the room.

  Dick Cady, a reporter for the Indianapolis Star who had come to know CG well, delivered the eulogy at her funeral on October 7, 2000. “She was the whole package, and then some…. She would be well-pleased to be memorialized with the Greatest Generation.”10 CG was cremated and placed in the family plot in Danville.

  To persuade Sally to talk with me, I sent her a copy of CG’s 1983 letter. Sally replied, “I didn’t have to check any farther…. She gave you everything … Everything.” When we met, Sally added that she had had a sense of guidance from CG when she started looking for material for me. “CG told me where to look.”

  This, in part, is what CG said in that letter, dated April 10, 1983:

  The reason I cried was because I had tried to do exactly what you suggested to set the record straight and I failed to get permission from CIA after Bill’s death—naturally the cowards did nothing while he was alive.

  I visited at least a hundred people who had worked for Bill, like you. Their testimonials were filled with praise and respect. I took tape recordings, got groups together, and worked out specific operations which were very successful, then went to Washington to get permission to publish it. They rolled out the red carpet, treated me like a VIP, said they would let me know.

  Six months later, they sent the head of the Freedom of Information Section out here to Indianapolis to tell me positively NO!

  I was crushed but seem to have no recourse since my pension comes from CIA.

  I worked for them for 25 years and have signed the secrecy agreement.

  They told me that they do not officially acknowledge that Bill ev
er worked for CIA. All his operations have been classified for 50 years, and they said the best I could do was write into my will that his grandchildren can have the material.11

  None of this satisfactorily answers the question, why Bill Harvey went to extraordinary lengths—including preparations to ward off an invasion of his house—to protect his family in Indianapolis. Were all those guns merely the hangover of a decades-long habit? Or were they stashed because Bill was seriously concerned about a specific danger, and if so, what was that danger?

  17

  AFTERLIFE

  Despite Dr. Jack Hall’s protestations and because rumors persist to this day, it’s worthwhile looking briefly at the people who might have wanted Harvey prematurely dead—even years after he had left the CIA and months after he had completed his testimony in Washington.

  Heading the list of potential slayers is Santo Trafficante, the Miami Mafia chief and suspected double agent for Castro. Trafficante stood most to gain when and if Castro reopened Cuba for tourism and rackets as usual. He tops the list of potential organizers of the JFK assassination. He very probably issued the contract for Johnny Rosselli’s demise. What could Bill have known that might have been so dangerous to the Mob nearly thirteen years after November 22, 1963?

  Could a Mafia hit on Harvey have been designed to serve as a dire lesson to Rosselli about talking with senators? Could it serve any other exemplary or covert purpose? The speculation must remain just that—speculation—and fairly wild, at that.

  Could feral Miami Cubans have wanted to liquidate Harvey, for real or imagined cause, such as his “failure” to kill Castro, or even, conceivably, because of his run-in with Bobby Kennedy? Terminating a former CIA officer, in the heartland, fifteen-or-so years after his very indirect role in their lives? The logic is barely credible, even for the anti-Castro-ites.