It is likewise inconceivable that Castro and/or his security services would have troubled themselves to defy obvious risks in order to liquidate Bill, as an act of revenge, or for any other reason.
WHO ELSE?
Who else could have wanted Harvey out of the way when he was, truly, a burnt-out case? The European underworld, specifically the Sicilian Mafia, Camorra, Union Corse, and/or the Marseilles drug underground? The only plausible explanation I can come up with for the murder of Harvey by foreign criminals on American soil is revenge for the murder of Michael Chinigo, who may have been one of theirs. But that reasoning is pretty far-fetched.
Any suggestion that the CIA’s latter-day incarnation of assassins grouped under ZRRIFLE, whatever it may have been called in 1976, would have rubbed Harvey out is equally inconceivable, despite what many would like to believe. By the mid-1970s Harvey was far out of the loop; his operational knowledge was dated and useless. The threat he once posed to the CIA was no longer effective.
The KGB? The Soviets might have fantasized about kidnapping Harvey in, say, 1956, or 1964, even in 1967, when they might have thought they could squeeze some useful operational information out of him. But kidnapping has never been used by one service against another’s staff personnel. Even intelligence agencies operate under certain unwritten rules.
WHO THEN?
There remains the puzzling question of Harvey’s wariness during his waning Indianapolis days. He covered it with the useful-but-misleading remark to Pastor Kahlenberg that he was on the KGB hit list.
Of course Bill was careful. He carried guns, continuing the habits of a lifetime in the shadow world, and he stashed that armory all over the house. He was superprotective of Sally. Did he think something threatened him? Ghosts from the Kennedy era?
I requestioned F. A. O. Schwarz, the Church Committee’s counsel who interviewed Bill prior to his appearances, only months before Bill died. “No. I can’t remember that he showed any fear or apprehension. And we didn’t only talk business. Our conversations were relatively natural, given the circumstance.”1
Yet Harvey took those extraordinary precautions to ensure that the swarm of cameras did not snap him when he came out of the Church Committee sessions, and he stayed in Washington only with the most trusted and obscure of his subordinates from Berlin days. Sam Halpern and Ted Shackley, for instance, did not see him. They would have been easier for the media to trace.
What else could have made him so secretive? Habits of a lifetime? Did he simply know too much? About what? Who tried to burgle the Harveys’ house in Chevy Chase, and years later who was in Bill’s study in the Indianapolis house shortly after his death and why? Why, too, did the CIA quickly send security experts to install special equipment in the house and then remove most of it before the house was sold? Why did the CIA tell CG that papers relating to Bill would not be declassified until 2063, an interesting date in itself?
CG once told Sally and others a story about CIA officers having “unexpected heart attacks on tennis courts.” At the time, Sally guessed her mother might have been ruminating on the stressful lives they had led. But was that all that was in her mind?
What was the “sensitive” case on which Bill commented to Jim Angleton in the last letter he wrote?
Though these questions loom, Dr. Jack Hall is courteously adamant that Bill died a natural death—natural, that is, for one who had led the life Harvey had—and that he had not been the victim of any murderous attack.
ANOTHER DEATH
Jack Anderson, by now partnered by Les Whitten, went into some gruesome details about Johnny Rosselli’s death in a column dated August 27, 1976. “The autopsy indicated [Rosselli’s killer] may have shot him and then dug out the bullet with a knife. Then they brutally hacked off his legs. It is possible that he was still alive when they stuffed his body into a 55-gallon oil drum.
“They wrapped chains around the drum to weight it down and tossed it into Biscayne Bay. The autopsy suggests that he may have died of asphyxiation inside the drum before it hit the water. The gases from the decomposing body floated the heavy container to the surface.”
The columnists then review their history with Rosselli.
We first encountered Johnny Rosselli more than five years ago when we were investigating his role in the Central Intelligence Agency’s plot to assassinate Cuban Premier Fidel Castro.
The CIA case officer, William Harvey, told us that Rosselli had been the hero of the abortive venture. Harvey broke his oath of secrecy because he thought it might help Rosselli who was in trouble with the law. The CIA agent had nothing but praise for Rosselli’s daring.
In the strictest of confidence, Rosselli himself confirmed that he had directed six assassination attempts against Castro. We protected his confidence, so he came to trust us.
So when he vanished last month, his associates came to us for help….
We have learned that Rosselli was not the amiable, retired old duffer he pretended to be…. He became a specialist in white-collar crimes. It’s a profession, apparently, he never gave up…. Competent sources say … Rosselli was involved in stolen securities and financial swindles…. He handled millions in illegal gambling money, which he forwarded to the Chicago underworld….
He dressed in the latest styles, dined at the best restaurants and dated beautiful women. The thought of going back to prison horrified him….
He began to talk to the government as early as 1970. He gave information … which resulted in grand jury confrontation for Tony Accardo … [who] grumbled to associates that he would pay back Rosselli some time….
Perhaps the last straw was Rosselli’s testimony in the Castro case. He identified two mobsters, Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante, as being involved in the assassination attempts. It’s no secret in the underworld that Trafficante detests publicity.
BILL AND BOOZE
Booze led to the unraveling of Harvey’s career. His drinking got worse after his withdrawal from the White House firing line, in the face of Kennedy ire, but the roots of his problem lie in his early days. My interpretation is that Bill was, from day one, a misfit. He felt, even before Pearl Harbor, that the good and true fight was in the trenches or on the beaches. Remember that CG said he had wanted to be a Marine Corps general. His teenage marriage to Libby was a rebellion against his mother. He tried politics and failed. Small-town law didn’t interest him. The FBI gave him a springboard, and he quickly discerned enemies against whom he could joust, first the Germans, then the Soviets.
He had found his purpose, but he writhed at the toils of bureaucracy and at the superciliousness of routine- and rote-driven people, and he kicked at J. Edgar Hoover’s traces, an early indication of the rebelliousness that marked his later career. Harvey’s dream had been to be out there, countering the country’s enemies, not inside, among bureaucrats whose behavior disillusioned and dismayed him.
Part of the cause of his alcoholism was undoubtedly, too, the feeling of inadequacy or not meeting a recognizable standard brought on by his lack of public recognition, in the form of military and, especially, of combat service. Some of his sense of inferiority was his ungainly appearance, and part of it, the unease he felt in the early CIA years, when he was surrounded by Ivy Leaguers. He emphasized that differentness by demonstrating openly his passion for guns, by cultivating the reputation as a ladies’ man, and by drinking at his wellborn antagonists. It tickled him to portray himself as a superstud.
Harvey broke the mold of the CIA’s Ivy League leadership. He turned his apparent drawbacks into assets in Berlin, where he was out from under the incessant, incestuous scrutiny of CIA headquarters and where he was the unchallenged leader of a formidable band of iconoclasts.
In Berlin, too, Harvey came to term as the preeminent American espionage operations expert. He had learned the ways of the KGB in the atomic spy cases, back in his Bureau days. In Berlin, with Dave Murphy’s and Ted Shackley’s probes into the East and the tunnel operation, Bill absorbed
much more about the enemy, and he, perhaps partially unconsciously, adapted some of the KGB’s modus operandi for himself: long-term approach, dedication, deviousness, tight security, a degree of fanaticism, and subtlety, not flag-waving, on the barricades.
Berlin was Harvey’s power base and his springboard. It was his front-line glory moment. But after a while, Bill began to realize he couldn’t save the world.
By the end of his tour of duty in Berlin, Harvey had become overconfident; he felt he had become invaluable, irreplaceable. He was sure that he was on the fast track to a very senior slot in the Agency. Task Force W could have been a way station on his ascent of Everest; he had always been a sort of Edmund Hillary, a John Wayne, or a William Walker. The two Cuba assignments, Task Force W and ZRRIFLE, hurtled him from the upward slopes of the pinnacle to his dungeon.
When Bobby Kennedy entered the game plan, Bill, at age forty-six, threw his life’s work and his future away, in uncontrollable, irrevocable disgust. The idealist, the canny street fighter, the brilliant, innovative operator, the patriot just couldn’t stomach the perversion of the true cause by his political masters. Until then he had been able to handle the booze; then, it then began to handle him. The deciding factor was his, as opposed to Bobby’s, view of the national interest. Inevitably the Kennedy muscle won. Bill’s was a lose-lose situation. He may have objected to assassination, but he went along with the president and the attorney general, then he overplayed his role, and as a true alcoholic, he drank at his antagonists and thought he could get away with it.
How could Harvey, who was so intelligent, so canny, not have realized he was sabotaging himself in the eyes of others—even the Berliners of the brotherhood—with his addiction to the bottle? Why didn’t he realize he was giving his detractors all they needed to denigrate, even destroy, him?
Bill had been comfortable in his own skin, at least as long as he was in charge of his world, and that world was clear-cut, black and white. Rome was gaudy, not his scene. There, he was surrounded by people who were not of the Bogart mold, so he escaped to the Via Veneto and drank at them, then continued in his office and at home, drowning in martinis or whatever happened to be handy.
Perhaps Bill had what today would be called an identity crisis. In Rome, he was no longer a cutting-edge operator; rather he was forced to play at diplomatic niceties, several steps removed from whatever espionage action Italy may have offered. He sought occasional, at-times-embarrassing refuge in the country he far better understood, Germany. He could find no middle ground that offered him stability.
Then, back in America, it all caught up with him. But he had a buddy with whom he could drink and commiserate, whenever they got together. Johnny Rosselli played skillfully and compassionately to Bill’s needs.
And finally, Harvey felt he had reason to be deeply concerned about his and his family’s safety in Indianapolis. What was it that made the flawed patriot supercautious in his last years? We will probably never know. Harvey died an enigma, and that probably pleased him enormously.
“A SPECIAL CODE OF HONOR”
The CIA showed on two occasions that it will not, either gracefully or grudgingly, give Harvey his deserved place in the history of American intelligence. First, it denied him mention in the 1992 colloquium on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and second, it omitted him, despite his nomination, from the list of fifty “trailblazers” published to commemorate the Agency’s fifty years of existence. Yet Harvey lives on, long after his death, in the memories of those who served with him—almost all men, a few women—who openly said they owed their professional careers to Bill.
Sally Harvey opened the file of more than three hundred letters of condolence sent to CG as people, in some cases very belatedly, heard that Bill had gone. These are a few.
“I know what a blow this is to you. Life has not been easy for the two of you these last years…. My hand of friendship reaches out to you in this most difficult time.” Richard M. Helms, U.S. ambassador, Tehran.
“He was a good friend, both personally and professionally and contributed enormously to the relationship between our two services. I worked with him off and on from 1949, but, of course, particularly whilst I was at the Embassy in 1960–64. It is a great and sad loss.” Sir Maurice Oldfield, former chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6).
“In his time in Germany, your husband became a very esteemed friend of all of us, and I may assure you that all my former co-workers who heard of his death were very touched by this bad news. I liked him very much, not only as a really reliable friend, but also as an experienced professional in his field.” Retired Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, first director of the Federal German Intelligence Service.
“The years [my wife and I] spent in Berlin were among the most pleasant and rewarding we have enjoyed and one of the greatest factors in this was having you and Bill as friends and, for me, having Bill as my most important colleague. I loved his absolutely straight view of life, his loyalty to friends and causes, regardless of consequences, and his dry and ever-ready humour. And your house was a glowing hearth of kindness and companionship.” Robert, a former head of the British SIS station in Berlin.
“I remember how Bill, many times, late at night, got a message from his office and disappeared, only to come back a beaten man. Again, one of his Berlin volunteers had not come back from his mission to the other side. Bill, as you know, had a great admiration for the Berliners, for their dedication to our common cause…. We all, his foreign brothers-in-arms, felt his intellectual and technical superiority.” A Dutch intelligence officer.
“It is difficult to believe that one so rich in human qualities is gone…. In the years ahead, you will have happy memories and feelings of just pride.” Gordon Stewart, former chief of mission, Germany, and chief of personnel, CIA.
“I worked long enough with Bill to learn of many of his significant contributions to the security of our country. Because of their very nature, he could never receive full recognition for them. But that was the way he wanted it. He was a dedicated patriot, and I am proud that he chose me as a friend.” Frank B. Rowlett.
“I don’t have to tell you how much Bill meant to me during our relationship, the depth of our friendship or the fact that I know of no one in my lifetime for whom I had greater personal admiration or professional respect…. He made a great contribution to our country and its security…. He will always be a legend in the annals of the country he served so well. This is, of course, true also of the Agency. The number of people he has taught, inspired and directed is legion. None of us will ever forget him or the lessons he taught us. He was a unique combination of toughness, kindness and sympathetic human understanding.” Howard J. Osborn, former director of security, CIA.
“Bill and I had a special relationship … a deep friendship … dating back to the Spring of 1941, when he joined me on the German and Minorities Desk at the FBI. We probably worked across the desk from each other 70–80 hours a week for more than two years. We ended up the best of friends, which says something personal besides the working relationship…. Bill had a special code of honor, of integrity, of comradeship and decency that endeared him to many. Add to this a certain flair of showmanship and a brusqueness in tolerating stupidity, and excellent intellect and a great capacity for work, and you have the man we all loved and respected.” Dennis Flinn, former FBI special agent.
WATERSHED
Harvey’s removal from Task Force W at Bobby Kennedy’s behest was a watershed event for the CIA, even though it may not have been recognized as such at the time.
From October 1962 on—after Helms and McCone replaced Harvey with Desmond FitzGerald, who was far more acceptable to the Kennedys as a person—the CIA was vulnerable to political manipulation. This became evident again in 1967, when Helms hastily called for the inspector general’s report, in anticipation of fallout from Drew Pearson’s revelations, and then again from 1971 on.
Helms himself became a victim to Richard Nixon’s political
whims. George H. W. Bush, Bill Colby, Adm. Stansfield Turner, Bill Casey, Jim Woolsey, Bill Gates, George Tenet, and most recently, Porter Goss—all have been political figures and players. The 1950s were the heyday of the CIA. Since then, one way and another, the Agency has gone downhill, even to today’s realignment of the entire U.S. intelligence structure.
Harvey’s story sounds incongruous when stacked against the political figures who are identified with the latter-day CIA and also incongruous when America’s enemies today are elusive members of cultures far different from the northern Europeans we faced in Bill’s day. But even back then, Harvey was not the kind of guy who was easily limned by a stereopticon. He was always a nonconformist to the max, and he paid for his nonconformity, but not until he had taught a lot of people a lot of things, some of which, it is alleged, are still being taught in obscure places.
The causes for the CIA’s decline in popular and political esteem go back, really, to the Bay of Pigs in 1961, which opened the Agency to the prolonged and recurring scrutiny under which it withered. Harvey, the flawed patriot, unfortunately was one of the senior officers who aroused media and political curiosity and thereby rendered the CIA vulnerable. In 2005 and 2006 the decline that started in 1962 became an avalanche, as the CIA was picked over for political purpose, lost its preeminence in American intelligence, and became just another agency in the bureaucratic web.
Some professional intelligence officers wish we had a few irreverent Harveys in the clandestine establishment today, even while facing enemies of totally different stripe.
As Dave Murphy said, after he had read a proof copy of this book, “Sad. Sad. It was so sad.” But the saddest comment of all was, “You know, there were only two of us from the Agency at Bill’s funeral—Alex MacMillan and me! Just two!”
Flawed Patriot Page 39