APPENDIX
1. Bill Harvey’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal certificate. Bill fought with CIA security to allow him to take the medal and certificate home. Sally Harvey, Harvey Family Papers
2. A delicate letter from retired CIA director Allen Dulles, avoiding Harvey, about the same time Harvey was recalled from Rome. Sally Harvey, Harvey Family Papers
3. A letter from “the Boy Diplomat,” Richard Helms. Helms had defended Bill against his critics for many years, but Bill’s downward spiral shook Helms’s confidence. This letter suggests that Helms avoided seeing him before Bill’s retirement, and Helms began to regard Bill with deep suspicion because of his continued friendship with mob figure Johnny Rosselli. Sally Harvey, Harvey Family Papers
4. The 1997 nomination of Bill to be one of fifty CIA trailblazers. The nomination was rejected. Clarence Berry
NOTES
NOTE: The wealth of original material I accumulated for the book is available to qualified researchers in the special collections section of the Davidson Library at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Some references to original source materials in the book appear without attribution. I had kept the originals in e-mail folders that were destroyed when my computer hard drive was consumed by a worm.
CHAPTER 1: GROWING UP MIDWESTERN
1. CG Harvey, in conversation with David E. Murphy, November 15–16, 1993.
2. Photocopy from Harvey family papers.
3. Anita Potocki, in conversation with the author, March 19, 2001.
4. Sally Harvey provided a wealth of family information and some documentation in a series of e-mails to me in January 2001 and during a visit I made to Indianapolis in March 9–12, 2001.
5. B. F. Small, letter to Bill Harvey, June 29, 1933.
CHAPTER 2: THE SECRET WORLD
1. Unless otherwise sourced, quotations in this chapter are taken from the three-hundred-page FBI personnel file on William K. Harvey, which the Bureau provided under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). That file was not only redacted, but some very significant matters were deliberately omitted from it, apparently at the behest of J. Edgar Hoover, who wanted nothing creditable to be associated with Bill’s name.
2. The House on 92nd Street, directed by Henry Hathaway (Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1945). The film is a paean to the FBI and, of course, to J. Edgar Hoover, who gave the worshipful makers, Darryl Zanuck, Louis De Rochement, and Henry Hathaway, lavish support.
3. Ernest Volkman, Espionage: The Greatest Spy Operations of the Twentieth Century (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), 48.
4. CG Harvey, in conversation with David E. Murphy, November 15–16,1993. The operation was a tragicomedy from the start, as noted in some detail by Al Kamen in the Washington Post on March 29, 2004.
5. Dennis Flinn, phone conversation with the author, March 13, 2002. Dennis died in 2004. When Bob Woodward first acknowledged that Mark Felt was Deep Throat in the Washington Post on June 2, 2005, he wrote: “In Felt’s earliest days in the FBI, during World War II, he had been assigned to work on the general desk of the Espionage Section. Felt learned a great deal about German spying in the job, and after the war he spent time keeping suspected Soviet agents under surveillance.” Felt probably learned some tradecraft from Harvey. Felt was two years younger than Bill.
6. Sadly, Thurston was unable to contribute to this memoir because, in the latter stages of life, he was a victim of Alzheimer’s disease.
7. CG Harvey, conversation, November 15–16,1993.
8. G-Men, for “government men,” was a popular term for FBI special agents back when the Gangbusters caught big-name criminals like Al Capone and John Derringer. In the CIA, the equivalent of an FBI special agent is called a “case officer” or, today, an “operations officer.”
9. Here and throughout the book, I use KGB to stand for the Soviet foreign intelligence apparatus and its efforts. There is a direct line of succession from the Imperial Russian Cheka through the OGPU, NKVD, MVD, MGB to the KGB and today’s SVR.
10. To this day, there is still confusion, even controversy, about who handled the initial stages of the Bentley case, the cornerstone of the massive FBI investigation and conviction of a string of post–World War II Soviet espionage agents. The most authoritative source is Linda Williams, who is a walking compendium on the Bureau’s activities in the 1940s. Faced with the conflicting claims, Ms. Williams says, “Look, Harvey was in charge of Division Five, which was charged with investigating communism. He was the first one to take Bentley’s statement. He had three or four interviews with Bentley on which he wrote reports, before he got into the hassle with Hoover.” Linda Williams, phone conversations with the author, June, July, and October 7, 2002. Clarence Berry adds, in an e-mail to the author, July 13, 2002: “I really have a strong feeling that Bill handled Bentley pretty much exclusively. Perhaps she does not appear in the [personnel file] due to the sensitive nature of the case…. My guess is that he kept a lot close to the vest … and that may have been the reason they found the files so screwed up when he resigned, that he took a lot of important details away in his head. If so, one can understand why Hoover was so POed at him.” This is the first of many communications from Clarence (a pseudonym, at his request) that helped enormously in throwing light, on many matters, but especially on the background to the Berlin Tunnel.
The Bentley case is inextricably entwined with the Venona intercepts, an intelligence legend. Briefly, a very select group of people in Washington began to read KGB cable traffic late in World War II and thus to learn of Soviet perfidy. A comprehensive summary is in a CIA document, Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939–1957, which is available at http://www.cia.gov/csi/books/venona/venona.htm. There is no mention of Bill Harvey in the study. See also, John Early Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). Bob Lamphere, who became the case officer on Venona material, also discusses it in his book, Robert J. Lamphere and Tom Shachtman, The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent’s Story (New York: Random House, 1986).
11. Linda Williams (FBI FOIA Section), phone conversation with the author, October 7, 2002.
12. See also Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 342ff. There is a fairly full account of the Eisler case in Lamphere and Shachtman, FBI-KGB War, 42ff.
13. Peter M. F. Sichel, in conversation with the author, March 11, 2002.
14. Ibid.
15. Ronald Alexander MacMillan, in conversation with the author, February 10, 2001. Alex died not long thereafter.
16. Clarence Berry, e-mail to the author, 2002.
17. On the general subject of FBI transfers to the young CIA, Tom Polgar commented in e-mails to the author dated July 12 and 13, 2002: “When I got transferred to WH [Western Hemisphere] (later LA [Latin America]) Division I picked up folklore about Col. J. C. King and his merry band from the FBI. Until August 1947, when CIA emerged, FBI was responsible for clandestine HUMINT in Latin America. In 1947 CIA took over, but had no personnel. The easiest solution was to leave FBI people in place and some remained through the 1960s. Thus CIA’s new WH Division relied heavily on former FBI personnel. Bill Broe, ex-FBI was chief of WH Division later, during my days there, and often recalled his wartime experiences with the Bureau. Broe was later inspector general of CIA.
“Another group came to OSS/CIA via the military. Some FBI agents decided to go into the armed forces in World War II and during the Korean War and then came to intelligence from the service. Harvey was exception to above.
“When Des FitzGerald came into WH Division … he made a determined effort to move out leftover FBI types. The latter, in Fitzgerald’s opinion, were too much at home with disreputable liaison types and American business.
“In general, prominent ex-FBI included, but were certainly not limited to, Win Scott, ex-FBI, ex-Navy captain, later chief in London and Mexico City, the latter until
about 1968. Ned H., chief in Uruguay; John Flinn, deputy chief, Western Hemisphere Division for Cuba Operations; Bill Broe, chief, Japan, who later succeeded Des Fitzgerald as chief of WH Division; Justin O’Donnell, CI [Counterintelligence] Staff, later chief, Netherlands and Thailand. We had two officers named Bill D.; one was ex-FBI and was chief in Mexico City before Win Scott. A former FBI man was chief, Yugoslavia, in the 1950s, when Belgrade was considered a very important post. “I worked closely with FBI in Washington, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City. I found no problems and got good cooperation. I think problems reflected in the media, perhaps falsely, were and are caused by sheer weight of paper that has to be disseminated, analyzed, and digested, rather than an unwillingness to work together.”
18. Sichel, conversation, March 11, 2002.
CHAPTER 3: THE HEARTLANDER
1. Adam Horton, letter to the author, May 26, 2001.
2. Tom Polgar, e-mails to the author, July 12 and 13, 2002.
3. William Hood, phone conversation with the author, February 19, 2001.
4. Paul Haffner, interview by David E. Murphy, undated (c. 1991).
5. Ronald Alexander MacMillan, in conversation with the author, February 10, 2001.
6. Richard M. Helms, phone conversation with the author, January 2001; and Richard M. Helms, A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency, with William Hood (New York: Random House, 2003), 152.
7. Hood, phone conversation, February 19, 2001.
8. Clarence Berry, e-mail to the author, July 13, 2002.
9. MacMillan, conversation, February 10, 2001.
10. There is a considerable bibliography on Kim Philby. See the KGB’s officially sanctioned “autobiography”: Kim Philby, My Silent War (London: MacGibbon and Kee Ltd., 1968; reprint, New York, Ballantine Books, 1983). Then there are Peter Wright’s Spy Catcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987); Andrew Boyle’s The Climate of Treason (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1979), as well as fairly similar versions of the notorious dinner party at Philby’s Nebraska Avenue house in David Martin’s Wilderness of Mirrors (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), Burton Hersh’s The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA (New York: Scribners, 1992), Seymour M. Hersh’s The Dark Side of Camelot (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997), and Evan Thomas’s The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). The story of the party made its public debut in Wilderness of Mirrors, but all versions are substantially the same, even the one in Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost (New York: Random House, 1991).
11. Lamphere and Shachtman, The FBI-KGB War, 229.
12. Ibid.
13. John Barron, phone conversation with the author, July 13, 2003. Barron died in 2004.
14. As full an account of the Philby-Harvey-Angleton relationship as is publicly available is in Martin’s Wilderness of Mirrors, 36. The rivalry is well covered in Tom Mangold’s subsequent biography of Angleton, Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: The CIA’s Master Spy Hunter (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991). There is also a wealth of fascinating material, including recollections and biographical notes, plus discussion of Angleton by Robin Winks, Bill Hood, Sam Halpern, and others in a special edition of www.thefinalphase.com, brought to my attention by Peter M. F. Sichel.
15. Barron, phone conversation, July 13, 2003.
16. Philby, My Silent War. Originally published in Britain by MacGibbon and Kee in 1968. The American paperback edition quoted here, published by Ballantine Books in 1983, does not include even a pseudonym. See pages 158 and 189.
17. See Peter Karlow’s remarkably even-tempered autobiographical book, Targeted by the CIA: An Intelligence Professional Speaks Out on the Scandal That Turned the CIA Upside Down (Paducah, KY: Turner Publishing Company, 2002). Karlow died in 2005.
18. Horton, letter, May 26, 2001.
19. Dennis Flinn, phone conversation with the author, February 16, 2003.
20. Sam Papich, phone conversation with the author, February 14, 2003. Sam Papich died in 2004.
CHAPTER 4: BAPTISM IN BERLIN
1. Tom Polgar, e-mail to the author, July 10, 2003.
2. Peter M. F. Sichel, e-mails to the author, April 28, 2001 and May 8, 2001.
3. Polgar, e-mail, July 10, 2003.
4. David Chavchavadze, interview with David E. Murphy, undated (c. 1994). This interview is among miscellaneous papers most kindly provided to me by Murphy.
5. Ibid.
6. From Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 356.
7. Herb Natzke, interview with the author, February 11, 2001.
8. Bob Kilroy points out that “Horton was not exaggerating here. We met with agents at night mostly and usually got rid of them sometime before midnight. But then we either went back to the office or to our homes and sat down and made copious notes on the operational info and take they had presented us with…. I can still remember my wife muttering sleepily when I finally staggered into bed, ‘he must have talked an awful lot tonight!’” Bob Kilroy, e-mail to the author, August 9, 2001. Kilroy is a pseudonym for a late, close friend. He sent me many e-mails and letters that contributed enormously to the BOB and Berlin Tunnel chapters of this book. Bob Kilroy died after a lengthy joust with cancer in 2003.
9. Peter M. F. Sichel, e-mail to the author, February 18, 2001.
10. Adam Horton, letters to the author, June 20 and August 16, 2001.
11. See Clarence Ashley, CIA Spymaster (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 2004). Bill Hood also wrote a fascinating, detailed account of the case. See William Hood, Mole: The True Story of the First Russian Intelligence Officer Recruited by the CIA (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982). Also, Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: The CIA’s Master Spy Hunter (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991).
12. John Barron, phone conversation with the author, July 13, 2003.
13. CG Harvey, in conversation with David E. Murphy, November 15–16, 1993.
14. In his biography of Allen Dulles, Peter Grose quotes a report by two ultimate, patrician insiders, Robert Lovett and David Bruce, who looked into the CIA’s 1950s “covert action” ops. “We felt some alarm…. The idea of these young, enthusiastic fellows, possessed of great funds, being sent out in some country, getting themselves involved in local politics, and then backing some local man and from that, starting an operation, scared the hell out of us.” Grose, Gentleman Spy, 446, quoting a letter by Lovett dated May 11, 1961, in the Robert F. Kennedy Papers.
15. Tom Parrott, phone conversations with the author, December 20 and 23, 2005.
16. Stan Gaines, in conversation with the author, March 15, 2001. Stan died in 2004.
17. Barron, phone conversation, July 13, 2003.
18. Capt. John Corris, USN, in conversation with David E. Murphy, January 22, 1994.
19. Donald R. Morris, newsletter, August 15, 2001. This item was passed to me by a friend.
20. Corris, conversation, January 22, 1994.
21. M. Neill Prew, in conversation with the author, March 17, 2001. Neill Prew died in April 2006.
22. Corris, conversation, January 22, 1994.
23. Stan Gaines, e-mail to the author, February 6, 2003.
24. Clarence Berry, e-mail to the author, February 7, 2003.
25. David E. and Star Murphy, e-mail to the author, February 6, 2003.
26. Gaines, e-mail, February 6, 2003. There was the matter of Harvey’s gun collection. When Bill and CG packed their Berlin household to ship back to Washington in 1959, Bill included his private arsenal. Someone who didn’t feel charitable toward the chief of base thought the shipment was, at the very least, unusual, perhaps illegal, and wrote an anonymous denunciation of Harvey to the Agency’s inspector general. Harvey composed an exculpatory secret/eyes-only memorandum dated August 15, 1960, which remained in the Harvey family papers years after Bill’s death. The memo details the steps Harvey took to ensure that the
shipment did not run afoul of any regulations or embarrass CIA and ends, “Although the allegations of the anonymous letter are subject to fairly nasty interpretation, I believe the above account of this shipment demonstrates there was no real impropriety involved. I hope this will serve as a satisfactory answer to your request.”
27. David E. Murphy, “How I Got to Berlin,” (personal Memorandum for the record, May 25, 1994).
28. Ibid.
29. Ted Shackley, in conversation with the author, May 18, 2001. Despite a fatal illness, Shackley’s answers to my questions came like machine-gun bullets, interspersed with tracers. He died in 2003.
30. Natzke, conversation, February 11, 2001.
31. Shackley, conversation.
32. Barron, phone conversation, July 13, 2003.
33. Henry Woodburn, in conversation with the author, May 20, 2001. Woodburn is an alias requested by the officer.
34. Gaines, e-mail, February 6, 2003.
35. Polgar, e-mail, July 10, 2001.
36. CG Harvey, in conversation with David E. Murphy, 1989.
37. Polgar, e-mail, July 10, 2001.
38. While I cannot guarantee the letter’s authenticity, I am convinced it is genuine for a number of reasons from style to format to content.
39. Natzke, interview, February 11, 2001.
40. CG Harvey, conversation, 1989.
41. Tom Polgar, e-mail to the author, May 4, 2003.
42. CG Harvey, conversation, 1989.
43. Considering that at its peak BOB had over two hundred employees, living under tension in the boisterous city, the base’s disciplinary record under Harvey was surprisingly good—a tribute to morale under Bill. During the nearly ten years I knew much about BOB, one officer resigned from the Agency under a cloud. Another, whose dereliction had been misuse of safe houses, was merely reprimanded. A third case officer, caught driving under the influence by Danish police while on vacation, spent a considerable time bicycling around Berlin after his return.
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