The American James Bond: A True Story

Overthrow of Castro is possible," Bobby Kennedy told Richard Helms amid the controlled chaos of his fifth-floor office at the Justice Department. An aide to the CIA clandestine services' Helms wrote rapidly to keep up with the Attorney General's staccato cadence. "A solution to the Cuban problem today carried top priority in U. S. Government. No time, money, effort--or manpower--is to be spared. Yesterday ... the President had indicated to him that the final chapter had not been written--it's got to be done and will be done."

President John F. Kennedy was still smarting from the Bay of Pigs fiasco and, as his brother had told Helms, was determined to settle the score. Helms's response was to place William King Harvey in charge of what would be known within the agency as Task Force W. Two-gun Bill Harvey, foil of Soviet spy Kim Philby, foreman of the Berlin tunnel, was the CIA's heaviest hitter. Harvey's appointment, more than anything else Helms could do, would convince the Kennedy Administration that the CIA meant business.

Brigadier General Edward Lansdale, Kennedy's "Cuba Commander," was suitably impressed. He introduced Harvey to the President as the American James Bond.

The President's enthusiasm for Ian Fleming and the improbable escapades of his British superagent, 007, was well publicized, so Lansdale must have been more than a little flattered when John Kennedy remarked to him one day that he was America's answer to Bond. Lansdale, with all due modesty, demurred, suggesting that the real American 007 was this fellow Harvey, whom Helms had just put on the Cuba case. Naturally, the President wanted to meet the man, and before long, Harvey and Lansdale were sitting outside the Oval Office, waiting to be ushered in.

As Lansdale told the story, he turned to Harvey and said, "You're not carrying your gun, are you?" Of course he was, Harvey replied, starting to pull a revolver from his pants pocket. Aghast at what the Secret Service might do if this strange-looking man were suddenly to draw a gun, Lansdale quickly told Harvey to keep the damn thing in his pants until he could explain to the agents that the gentleman would like to check his firearm. Harvey turned over the gun and was about to enter the Oval Office when suddenly he remembered something. Reaching behind him, he whipped out a .38 Detective Special from a holster snapped to his belt in the small of his back and handed it to the startled Secret Service agents.

The President left no record of his reaction to the sight of his American Bond--this red-faced, popeyed, bullet-headed, pear-shaped man advancing on him with a ducklike strut that was part waddle and part swagger. Harvey's deep, gruff voice must have restored the President's faith in 007 somewhat, but Ian Fleming would never read the same again.

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William Harvey's father was the most prominent attorney in Danville, Indiana, a small town 20 miles west of Indianapolis, and his grandfather was the founder of the local newspaper. In 1936, on the strength of his father's name and the endorsement of his grandfather's newspaper, Harvey himself ran for prosecuting attorney in Hendricks County while still a student at Indiana University law school. Despite The Danville Gazette's promise that "Billy is a keen student and his election would be a great benefit to the people of Hendricks County," Harvey was a Democrat in a staunchly Republican county, and he lost by 880 votes out of 12,000 cast.

Staying in Indiana only long enough to collect his law degree, Harvey and his young wife, the former Elizabeth McIntire--called Libby by her friends--moved to the small Ohio River town of Maysville, Kentucky, where he opened a one-man practice. Harvey went through the motions, joining the Rotary Club and working with the boy scouts, but he never really made a go of it in Maysville. "In a small town, you have to be nice to people and smile," said a local insurance broker, one of Harvey's friends. "He didn't meet people well... . He didn't indulge in small talk. He could walk down the street and not speak to anybody." Harvey did little more than "sit around in the office and fiddle with his collection of guns and knives."

No one was very surprised in December of 1940 when Harvey left Maysville and joined the FBI, starting in the Pittsburgh field office. By 1945, he had made his way to FBI headquarters in Washington as part of a small vanguard of three agents--himself, (continued on page 198)American James Bond(continued from page 132) Robert Collier and Lish Whitsun--targeted against America's ostensible ally, the Soviet Union. "We were the first ones to be fighting the Soviet side of it," Collier recalled.

It wasn't long before Harvey found himself sitting in a small room in New York City, listening intently as a plump, dowdy, brown-haired woman named Elizabeth Bentley confessed that she had been a courier for a Soviet spy ring. If she was telling the truth, Bentley represented the bureau's first big break in combating Soviet espionage. Harvey left the interrogation to other FBI agents while he sat quietly and simply tried to get a feel for this woman who would consume the next two years of his life. During 14 days of questioning, Bentley reeled off the names of more than 100 people linked to the Soviet underground in the United States and Canada. "Fifty-one of these persons were deemed of sufficient importance to warrant investigative attention by the bureau," an FBI memo stated. "Of those 51 individuals, 27 were employed in agencies of the U. S. Government." One of those 27 was named Alger Hiss.

In a few years, the name Hiss would be on every tongue, but to Bill Harvey in 1945, Hiss was only one of several senior Government officials suspected of treason. Bentley had mentioned him--calling him Eugene Hiss--almost as an afterthought at the end of her 107-page statement. Within 24 hours of her appearance and before he had verified any of her information, J. Edgar Hoover sent a top-secret message to the White House. "As a result of the bureau's investigative operations," he puffed, "information has been recently developed from a highly confidential source indicating that a number of persons employed by the Government of the United States have been furnishing data and information to persons outside the Federal Government, who are in turn transmitting this information to espionage agents of the Soviet government." Hoover named 12 officials as being either witting or unwitting "participants in this operation," no doubt taking private satisfaction in the fact that five of them had served with his archrival, the Office of Strategic Services.

There was one problem, however. Despite intensive surveillance of the suspects identified by Bentley, the FBI could uncover no evidence of an ongoing espionage operation. One year after the surveillance had begun, Hoover was forced to report that his agents had turned up nothing but "repeated inconsequential contacts" among suspected members of the spy ring.

An unbroken string of 18- and 24-hour days spent tracking down Bentley's leads had not produced a single prosecutable case of espionage. The FBI--and Harvey--could proceed no further. Eventually, a very crude and uneven sort of retribution would be exacted. Harry Dexter White, Assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury, would die of a heart attack in 1948, after Bentley publicly named him as a member of her network, and Hiss would be convicted of perjury in 1950. But Harvey could foresee none of that, and in the summer of 1947, his exhaustion and frustration boiled over in an incident that resulted in his being dealt with more harshly than any of Bentley's suspects.

Thundershowers, heavy at times, had fallen throughout the evening of July 11. It was past midnight and another downpour washed over the city as Harvey headed his car across the Potomac River into Washington. A second car splashed along in Harvey's wake, following him home from an FBI stag party in a Virginia suburb. Once across the Potomac, the two cars went their separate ways. Harvey drove toward the west, passing the Jefferson Memorial, the Washington Monument and the World War Two temporary buildings that lay scattered across the Mall like so much litter. At the Lincoln Memorial, he turned northwest and headed into Rock Creek Park, his taillights disappearing into the dark and the rain.

When he had not reached home by nine o'clock the next morning, Libby Harvey could wait no longer. She phoned FBI headquarters to report her husband missing. Bill "had recently been despondent and discouraged about his work at the bureau and had been moody," she said. Pat Coyne, the agent who had followed Harvey back to town, was dispatched to cover the route from the Potomac to Harvey's home in Georgetown. Other agents began a discreet check of accident and amnesia reports with the local police. The search ended in less than an hour, when Harvey called in to report that he was home.

According to a summary of the incident prepared for Hoover, "Mr. Harvey indicated that after he left Mr. Coyne, he ... was proceeding toward his residence in a heavy downpour of rain. He drove his car through a large puddle of water just as another car going in the opposite direction hit the puddle, and the engine in his car stopped. He coasted to the curb but was unable to get his car started again and accordingly he went to sleep in his car and slept until approximately ten a.m., when he awakened and proceeded to his home." Harvey insisted that his drowsiness was not alcohol induced, and his colleagues backed him up. "Mr. Harvey stated that he had about two cans of beer, and from the recollection of others at the party, there was no indication that Harvey was drinking any more or any less than anyone else," the summary said.

Nevertheless, FBI regulations required an agent to be on two-hour call at all times, either leaving a number where he could be reached or phoning in every two hours. Harvey had violated regulations. The Draconian Hoover directed that a memo be written: "It is recommended that Special Agent Supervisor William K. Harvey of the Security Division be transferred to Indianapolis on general assignment." Hoover scribbled "OK" at the bottom.

Rather than accept the transfer, Harvey submitted his resignation "with the deepest regret," citing "personal and family considerations" and speaking of the "pride and personal satisfaction" of having been an FBI agent--remarkably restrained, considering the circumstances, but wisely circumspect given Hoover's appetite for revenge.

Cast out from the inner sanctum of espionage, Harvey found himself in a world that had not yet heard of Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, that did not yet doubt the loyalty of Alger Hiss, that did not yet realize that while the shooting war against Germany had ended, the secret war against Russia was just beginning. As if blinded by the bright light of this naïve and unsuspecting world, Harvey quickly ducked into the shadows of the Office of Special Operations, a small and highly secret cadre within the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency.

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The CIA was a tonier set than Harvey had known at the FBI--he was stepping from the world of ex-cops and small-town lawyers into an organization of Ivy League bluebloods and Wall Street attorneys. Many of the men he met were heirs to considerable family fortunes. Harvey was crossing the tracks, joining the establishment. Compared with his better-bred colleagues, this lumpen spy from the Big Ten who collected firearms and delighted in the simplest duty, honor and empire themes of Rudyard Kipling, fairly reeked of gaucherie and naïveté. His spreading girth quickly (continued on page 250) American James Bond (continued from page 198) earned him the decidedly inelegant nickname The Pear. Svelter men of greater sophistication and charm than he--men like Allen Dulles, Richard Helms and James Angleton--would dominate the CIA for the next quarter century; but it took Harvey, the FBI reject, to spot the Soviet spy in their midst.

Harvey had a fund of knowledge about Soviet espionage that was unmatched anywhere in the United States Government, and he was soon placed in charge of a tiny counterintelligence unit known as Staff C. "We'd all just gotten into the business," a member of Staff C said. "Harvey had experience in the bureau and had seen more than we had."

He "exuded missionary zeal," said a CIA officer named Peter Sichel. The impression was heightened by a lifelong thyroid condition that made his eyes bulge--"stand out on stems, practically," one member of Staff C said--as if he were a man possessed. Harvey's briefings, punctuated by the ritualistic clicking of his cigarette lighter, would last for hours as he disgorged almost verbatim the files of cases he had worked on. "He had an incredible memory for things in which he was involved," a senior officer in the agency said.

"He had everybody sitting on the edge of their chairs," a female staff member recalled, not because he was a spellbinding speaker but because "he spoke in a froglike voice that was at times so low that it was very difficult to hear."

As the CIA's leading expert on Soviet espionage, Harvey should have been in close contact with the bureau, but FBI agents dealt with him at their own peril. "We liked Bill and he was one of us," said a member of the bureau's Security Division, "but as far as Hoover was concerned, he was the enemy."

Such bureaucratic jealousies seemed particularly petty at a time when the United States had come upon new and startling evidence of Soviet espionage. Through a combination of good luck, hard work and Russian carelessness, the Armed Forces Security Agency had succeeded in breaking the theoretically unbreakable Soviet cipher. Among other things, the break disclosed the existence of a Soviet spy so well placed he could obtain the word-for-word text of a private telegram from Winston Churchill to Harry Truman.

Midway through World War Two, a gifted team of American cryptanalysts had mounted an attack against the Russian cipher system, using as their basic weapon the charred remnants of a Soviet code book that had been salvaged from a battlefield in Finland. The book contained a list of 999 five-digit code groups, each one representing a different letter, word or phrase. A large portion of the list had been destroyed by fire and what remained seemed of little value, since the Soviets employed a system of super-encipherment in which random numerical values were added to the original five-digit code groups. Since each code group used a different additive, the effect was an infinity of codes.

To the American cryptanalysts, who had already mastered the intricacies of Japan's top diplomatic code, mere super-encipherment did not pose an insurmountable obstacle. Through collateral intelligence, they could sometimes hazard an educated guess about the subject matter. But without a key to the constantly changing additive, the over-all system was still unbreakable--and would have remained so had not the Russians committed a colossal blunder.

Amid the confusion of war, Moscow had sent out duplicate sets of additives to various Soviet installations around the world. When the cryptanalysts discovered that the same series of additives had been used more than once, they had all the leverage they needed to break the Soviet cipher system. Having used guesswork to deduce the additives for a Soviet message intercepted in one part of the world, they could test those same additives against the massive backlog of messages intercepted in other parts of the world. Sooner or later, the same ones would appear and another message could be deciphered. It was an excruciatingly tedious task with less than perfect results.

One of the first Soviet spies to be undone by the code break was the German-born physicist Klaus Fuchs. On February 1, 1950, Hoover informed the White House that "we have just gotten word from England that we have gotten a full confession from one of the top scientists, who worked over here, that he gave the complete know-how of the atom bomb to the Russians."

In his confession, Fuchs said his American contact had been a chemist named "Raymond." Asked to pick out Raymond from a series of mug shots, Fuchs pointed to a picture of Harry Gold, a naturalized American citizen of Russian parentage. Gold gave a complete confession that led ultimately to the arrest, conviction and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

The trial of the Rosenbergs would become one of the most disputed court cases of the century, in part because the Government, hoping to protect its most secret source, never introduced one of the most damaging pieces of evidence against them: the decoded traffic from the New York-to-Moscow channel. The Rosenbergs were identified in the traffic only by cryptonyms, but the picture that emerged of a husband-and-wife team of agents matched them precisely, even down to the fact that the woman's brother was a part of the plot. At the trial, Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, who had worked on the bomb at Los Alamos, was the chief prosecution witness, having admitted his role in return for leniency.

If made public, the evidence contained in the intercepts would have stilled much of the controversy surrounding not only the Rosenberg trial but several other espionage cases as well. Sometimes the evidence fell short of convincing; other times, however, it was convincing beyond doubt, as when Moscow changed its agents' cryptonyms by transmitting a message listing both their true identities and their new cryptonyms.

The breaking of the Soviet cipher could have tipped the scales of the secret war in favor of the West as surely as had the cracking of the German Enigma code in World War Two. In 1948, however, the Soviets suddenly modified their cipher system in a way that made it once again unbreakable. Two years later, investigators discovered that the Soviets had been alerted to the code break by William Weisband, a disloyal employee of the Armed Forces Security Agency. The man who betrayed America's ultra-secret was never prosecuted for his crime, since a public trial would have required revelation of the code break. Instead, Weisband was sentenced to one year in jail for failing to answer a summons to appear before a grand jury.

Astoundingly, the British officer assigned to work with the FBI in tracking down the Soviet spies whose cryptonyms appeared in the traffic was Kim Philby, a top agent of MI6, the British counterpart to the CIA. He was also a Soviet spy.

His assignment was a logical one, since he had once been in charge of British counterintelligence operations against the Soviet Union. In retrospect, it seemed possible that Philby's Soviet handlers had instructed him to engineer his assignment to Washington after they learned about the code break from Weisband. Whether by accident or by design, Russian intelligence was able to monitor the FBI's efforts to unravel the Soviet spy nets.

The FBI's search for the Soviet agent who had stolen the Churchill-to-Truman telegram had dragged on for the better part of two years with no break in sight. "We had received some dozen reports referring to the source, who appeared in the documents under the code name Homer, but little progress had been made toward identifying him," Philby later wrote in his memoirs. Philby knew who Homer was and could gauge exactly how close the investigators were coming. All the while, cryptanalysts continued to pore over the intercepts, searching for some clue that might give Homer's identity away. Philby received drop copies of the messages as they were decoded by the Armed Forces Security Agency, and it must have been chilling for him to see his own Soviet cryptonym appear in the decoded material. How long would it be until some reference in the traffic gave his own identity away? As it turned out, a dinner party Philby gave in the spring of 1951 would do as much harm to his cause as the intercepts.

Libby Harvey, as was increasingly her habit, had had too much to drink. "This is god-awful," she proclaimed in a loud voice, jabbing at the roast beef on her plate. Her dinner partner, Robert Lamphere of the FBI, tried without success to shush her. She was right about the roast beef, though. It was cold. Philby had let the cocktail hour go too long, and that had done neither the roast beef nor Libby any good.

Libby was poised at the top of a long slide into alcoholism. Her sister back in Kentucky blamed it on the "highfalutin society in Washington."

One of Harvey's CIA colleagues said the same thing from a different perspective. "Libby was an awfully nice girl who came from humble origins. He started to move up in the world. He moved too fast for Libby. She couldn't keep up." That statement had an unintended double-entendre, for Harvey had acquired a considerable reputation as a skirt chaser.

One of Libby's friends in Kentucky claimed that Harvey plied his wife with liquor in order to keep her submissive while he went about his extramarital activities. "He fed it to her," Libby's friend said with undisguised venom. Another friend said that Libby drank only to keep pace with her husband, who had his own drinking problem. According to Philby, "The first time [Harvey] dined at my house ... he fell asleep over the coffee and sat snoring gently until midnight, when his wife took him away, saying, 'Come, now, Daddy, it's time you were in bed.'" The second time the Harveys dined at Philby's, it would have been a merciful blessing had Libby fallen asleep over her roast beef.

Dinner over, Philby and his guests adjourned to the living room for more drinking. Sensing that the evening was getting out of hand, Lamphere said his goodbyes as soon as decency permitted, departing before the arrival of Philby's old friend and house guest, the outrageous Guy Burgess. In 1950, Burgess had been assigned to the British embassy in Washington as a second secretary, and Philby had taken him into his house. Now, after barely a year in Washington, Burgess was on the verge of being recalled to London for abusing his diplomatic privileges.

Outrageous though he was, Burgess was too irrepressible and too witty to be ignored. He had a reputation as a caricaturist and was fond of telling how he had drawn a sketch of a wartime meeting of the British admiralty that had to be classified top secret. The besotted Libby fulfilled Lamphere's premonition of disaster by begging Burgess to sketch her. He obliged with an obscene cartoon of Libby, legs spread, dress hiked above her waist and crotch bared. Harvey swung at Burgess and missed. The party was about to degenerate into a drunken brawl. A friend quickly steered Harvey to the door and walked him around the block to cool off while Libby regained her composure. Burgess continued as though nothing had happened. The evening ended without further violence and the guests staggered off into the night. The entire incident might have been blessedly forgotten, had it not crossed paths with the search for source Homer.

The cryptanalysts had at last succeeded in breaking out a solid lead from the intercepts: Homer had met with his Soviet contact twice a week in New York. The pattern of activity corresponded precisely with that of Donald Maclean, the former second secretary in the British embassy. During his stay in Washington, Maclean had traveled to New York twice a week to visit his pregnant wife, Melinda, who was staying with her American mother.

When he first fell under suspicion in the spring of 1951, Maclean was head of the Foreign Office's American Department in London. He was placed under surveillance and denied further access to sensitive documents. Meanwhile, Burgess had arrived in London to face a disciplinary board for his indiscretions in the United States. The two were seen lunching together on several occasions.

On Friday morning, May 25, 1951, the Foreign Office authorized MI5, the British equivalent of the FBI, to interrogate Maclean the following Monday. At almost precisely the same moment, Burgess was telling a young companion he had picked up during his transatlantic crossing that they might have to scrap their plans for a weekend in France. "A young friend of mine in the Foreign Office is in serious trouble," he said. "I am the only one who can help him." That afternoon, Burgess rented an Austin and drove to Maclean's home in the outlying suburb of Tatsfield. MI5 sleuths tailed Maclean as he left his offices in Whitehall and walked to the Charing Cross station to catch the 5:19 train, but they dropped their surveillance there. At 11:45 that night, Burgess and Maclean pulled up to the slip at Southampton and boarded the cross-Channel night boat for Saint-Malo. A sailor shouted after them, asking what they planned to do about the Austin left on the pier. "Back on Monday," they called. Later, a taxicab driver testified that he had driven two men resembling Burgess and Maclean from Saint-Malo to Rennes, where he thought they had caught a train for Paris. They were not seen again until 1956, when they appeared at a press conference in Moscow.

Philby later wrote in his memoirs that it was from Geoffrey Paterson, the MI5 representative in Washington, that he first learned that Burgess and Maclean were missing. "The bird has flown," he quoted Paterson as saying.

"What bird?" Philby asked, knowing full well. "Not Maclean?" he said with appropriate consternation.

"Yes," Paterson replied, "but there's worse than that ... Guy Burgess has gone with him."

"At that," Philby subsequently recounted, "my consternation was no pretense." His last words to Burgess when seeing him off for London had been, "Don't you go, too." But Burgess had gone anyway and, in doing so, had linked Philby to the case as one of the handful of people who both knew Burgess and were aware of the suspicions against Maclean.

The CIA's dilemma was only slightly less perplexing than Philby's. The agency could not comfortably share its secrets with someone so indiscreet as to open his house to the egregious Burgess. Yet the mere fact that Philby had befriended Burgess hardly seemed sufficient ground upon which to repudiate the official representative of MI6, embittering relations with the British and, in the bargain, damaging a man's career--a brilliant one, at that. But Bedell Smith, the new director of the CIA, confronted the problem head on. He began by directing every agent who had known Burgess to write down everything he knew about the missing diplomat.

Harvey would later tell friends that it had come to him as he sat stalled in traffic one morning on his way to work. That moment in which the anomalies in Philby's career resolved into a pattern of betrayal where others could see only untoward coincidence had been hard earned. It had come from years of working with the files, so that an isolated incident could lodge somewhere in the back of his mind to be recalled when new developments suddenly gave it meaning. It had come from the Bentley and Hiss cases, which had convinced him that good breeding was not a bar to treason--and, in fact, was a positive incentive. It had come from the social snubs, real or imagined, that fed his distrust of the establishment. And, finally, it had come from the obscene insult to his wife, which had fixed the relationship of Philby and Burgess with outraged clarity in his mind.

Smith forwarded Harvey's memo to MI6 in London with a cover letter stating that Philby was no longer welcome as the British liaison officer in Washington. Working from Harvey's premise, MI5 compiled a dossier against Philby, listing his left-wing youth, his sudden conversion to fascism, the flight of Burgess and Maclean and much more. "I have toted up the ledger and the debits outnumber the assets," the head of MI5 informed the CIA.

In July of 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower directed Lieutenant General James Doolittle to undertake "a comprehensive study of the covert activities of the Central Intelligence Agency" and to "make any recommendations calculated to improve the conduct of these operations." Two months later, Doolittle handed Eisenhower a 69-page top-secret report that confirmed what everybody then realized: The CIA was losing the secret war against the K.G.B.

Doolittle recommended a number of specific remedies; more fundamentally, he urged the CIA to become "more ruthless" than the K.G.B. "If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of 'fair play' must be reconsidered," he said. The Doolittle report foreshadowed much of what the CIA, and Harvey in particular, would undertake in the ensuing years. Harvey had already been named chief of the CIA's base in Berlin and was hard at work on a "technical avenue of approach to the intelligence problem."

Harvey's first overseas assignment marked a merciful end to his increasingly unhappy life with Libby. Their marriage was breaking under the strain of his infidelity and her drinking, and on more than one occasion had degenerated into physical violence. He would fly into a rage, "throw glasses, card table, anything he could pick up," Libby testified during the divorce proceedings. She went home to Kentucky and Harvey escaped with their five-year-old adopted son to Berlin.

Soon after the divorce became final, Harvey married a WAC major named Clara Grace Follich, whom he had met at the CIA station in Frankfurt. The newlyweds adopted a daughter, an infant who had been left on the doorstep of another CIA officer's home by an East German woman who wanted her child to grow up free. Harvey's friends kidded him that his daughter was the ultimate Soviet penetration agent. "Is this kid wired?" they cracked.

"Knock it off," he grumbled.

If Harvey's reputation preceded him to Berlin, he did not disappoint. His drinking would become legend during his years there, and his capacity, like his growing bulk, was enormous. On a trip to Copenhagen, he checked in at the Hotel D'Angleterre in midafternoon and waited at the bar to meet the local station chief for dinner. The station chief arrived to find the bartender staring in wonder as Harvey downed his seventh double martini. They adjourned to the dining room, where Harvey ordered another round and wine with dinner. At home, he served his guests martinis in water goblets.

The action in Berlin was wide open and rough. The walls of Harvey's office were lined with racks of firearms, and a thermite bomb perched atop each safe, ready for the emergency destruction of files in the event of a Russian invasion. When Harvey arrived in that wild West of espionage, he ordered all CIA officers to carry sidearms when conducting operations. He himself "kept three or four in his desk and never fewer than two on him." At a square-dancing party one warm summer evening in Berlin, Harvey was perspiring profusely under a heavy tweed sports jacket but rejected all suggestions that he take it off. "Can't," he growled, flipping open the jacket to reveal a pearl-handled revolver strapped under each sweaty armpit. Why not check the guns at the door? one of the gaping onlookers asked. "Can't," Harvey growled again. "When you need 'em, you need 'em in a hurry."

To most of his colleagues, Harvey's guns seemed like so much braggadocio or window dressing, a melodramatic exaggeration of the dangers he faced. Others saw them as a hangover from his FBI days that did not belong in the subtler and more sophisticated world of espionage. Shortly after he arrived in Berlin, Harvey was visited by Frank Wisner, head of the CIA's clandestine services, who asked to be taken to meet the mayor. Wisner squeezed into the back seat of Harvey's car with Mike Burke and Tracy Barnes of the Frankfurt station. Harvey got behind the wheel with a gun jammed in his belt, turned to an aide sitting next to him and barked, "Finger the turns"--FBI lingo meaning point the way. "It was like a grade-C movie," Burke related.

Later, when Wisner was preparing to return to Washington aboard an ocean liner, he received a bon voyage telegram from Barnes saying, "Don't forget to finger the terns"--meaning gulls.

The same men who enjoyed their bons mots at Harvey's expense had put him where he was, and Berlin during the Fifties was the front line of the secret war between the CIA and the K.G.B.--and the site of the most daring foray in the secret war. Carl Nelson of the CIA's Office of Communications had recently made a discovery that promised to yield the biggest intelligence bonanza since the wartime code break that had uncovered source Homer. Nelson had invented a way to tap into Soviet telephone and telegraph lines and monitor the traffic, not in its encoded form but in plain text. Very simply, he had discovered that as the Soviet cipher machine electrically encrypted a message from the clear text to a meaningless jumble of letters, it gave off faint echoes--Nelson called them transients or artifacts--of the clear text, which traveled along the wire with the enciphered message.

The CIA moved rapidly to exploit Nelson's discovery in Berlin that, second only to Moscow, was the hub of the Soviet communications system. The only way to reach the Soviet land lines in East Berlin was via a tunnel that would have to originate in the western sector and burrow hundreds of yards across a heavily patrolled border into the eastern half of the city. No one had ever attempted anything like it. British intelligence had some experience in the highly specialized art of vertical tunneling and had developed a method for digging upward through soft soil without having the roof collapse. For this operation, the Americans and the British would have to pool their resources. The project was code-named GOLD and Harvey was placed in over-all command.

The cables made their closest approach to Western territory at the city's extreme southern edge, a sparsely settled expanse of farm land and refugee shacks known as Altglienecke. Still 1000 feet from the border, they lay just 18 inches beneath a drainage ditch on the far side of Schönefelder Chaussee, a heavily traveled highway linking the main Soviet air base in Germany with East Berlin.

Harvey flew back to Washington to brief Dulles, Wisner, Helms and other senior agency officials on the plan. "There were those who manifested reservations," a CIA document noted dryly, but those reservations paled in the face of Harvey's fervor. "Without Harvey there would have been no tunnel," one officer said. "The easy thing was to say no and be on the safe side and not take a chance, but Harvey would keep badgering the chiefs, stripping away their objections."

Early in 1954, two teams of Army engineers began work on the tunnel at sites 6000 miles apart. In Berlin, a Corps of Engineers unit started construction of a warehouse directly over the spot chosen for the mouth of the tunnel. In New Mexico, at the White Sands Missile Proving Ground, 16 hand-picked Army sergeants sank a test tunnel in the desert.

The commander of the engineers in Berlin could not understand why a warehouse had to have a basement with a 12-foot ceiling. In the strictest of confidence, Washington explained that he was not really building a warehouse but a radar-intercept station designed to look like one. Washington did not explain that no sooner would the basement be finished than another crew of engineers would start to fill it in with the 3100 tons of dirt that would be produced by a tunnel 1476 feet long and six and a half feet in diameter.

In New Mexico, the crew of 16 sergeants successfully completed a 450-foot test tunnel through soil of approximately the same composition as in Berlin. Abandoning the New Mexico tunnel, they flew to Richmond, Virginia, where the material needed for Operation GOLD was being assembled in a real Army warehouse. The 125 tons of steel liner plates that would be bolted together to form the tunnel walls were sprayed with a rubberized coating to prevent them from clanging during construction. All the equipment was packed in crates labeled spare parts and office supplies, shipped by sea to the German port of Bremerhaven, placed aboard the regularly scheduled supply train for Berlin and, finally, trucked to the new warehouse in Altglienecke.

By August of 1954, the warehouse was ready. The ground floor was stocked to capacity with crates of "spare parts" and "office supplies." Below, the cavernous basement stood empty, waiting to be filled with dirt.

Starting from a point in the easternmost corner of the warehouse basement, the soldiers sank a vertical shaft 18 feet in diameter to a depth of 20 feet, then drove pilings halfway into the floor of the shaft. Next, a steel ring six and a half feet in diameter and fitted with hydraulic jacks around its circumference was lowered into place. Braced against the exposed section of the pilings, the ring, or "shield," was fitted flush against the tunnel's face. Everything was then ready for the long subterranean journey eastward toward Schönefelder Chaussee.

Three men attacked the tunnel face with pick and shovel. After excavating to a depth of two inches, they shoved the shield forward by jacking it against the pilings. Over and over again, the process was repeated: Excavate, jack forward, excavate, jack forward. After advancing a foot, the diggers were able to bolt the first ring of steel liner plate into place. After another foot of progress, a second ring of liner plate. Plugs in the face of each plate were uncapped and mortar was pumped under pressure to fill any voids between the tunnel walls and the surrounding earth, leaving no room for "slump."

The sergeants worked in eight-hour shifts round the clock--three men at the face with pick and shovel, two loading the spoil into a box that was picked up by a forklift and hauled back to the mouth of the tunnel, where a winch raised it to the basement. Some was packed in sandbags and stacked along the sides of the tunnel. Ventilation ducts were placed on top of the sandbags, bringing a stream of chilled air to the sweating men at the tunnel face.

The tunnel was completed on February 25, 1955, a long, thin catheter ready to draw off the secrets of the Soviet military command in Berlin. Harvey walked along its length until he stood directly beneath the Schönefelder Chaussee. The final 50 feet were separated from the rest of the tunnel by a heavy door of steel and concrete designated against the inevitable day the operation would be blown and the Vopos would come storming through. At Harvey's instruction, the door bore a neatly lettered inscription that warned in both German and Russian: entry is forbidden by order of the commanding general.

Now it was up to the British to install the taps. A second shield was brought in to dig the vertical shaft up to the cables. The technique was the same as before, except that the face of the shield was fitted with slats to keep the ceiling of the shaft from crashing down on the workmen. Finally, three black rubber-sheathed cables, each one as thick as a man's arm, emerged from the ceiling. With the help of a hydraulic jack, they were pulled downward into the tap chamber, so that the technicians could have some headroom in which to work. The British technicians painstakingly clipped wires to the rainbow of color-coded circuits at their finger tips. The wires carried the signal down to banks of amplifiers in the tunnel and back up to rejoin the circuit.

Processing the take was a task of staggering proportions. The three cables contained a total of 172 circuits carrying a minimum of 18 channels each. Recordings of the telegraph circuits were flown to Washington, where Nelson's invention could sort out the plain-text artifacts from the encoded signals. Tapes of phone conversations went to London, where a team of White Russian émigrés waited to translate them. In Washington, the tapes were delivered to building T-32, one of the World War Two "tempos" that disfigured the Mall. The floors of T-32, known as "the Hosiery Mill" because of the many strands of communications intelligence that came together there, sagged under the weight of the machinery assembled to process the tapes.

The heart of the system was "the bumblebee," so called because, like the real bumblebee, all the laws of physics decreed that it would never get off the ground. The bumblebee played the tapes at 60 inches per second, four times the speed at which the captured signals had originally been transmitted, breaking down the 18 channels of each circuit into separate recordings--"demuxing," in the communicators' jargon. The 18 separate recordings were then placed on slow-speed recorders linked to teletype machines that printed out the message in clear text at 100 words per minute. The printed messages, still in their original Russian or German, were ripped from the teletypes and hand-carried to translators and analysts on the floors above.

On April 21, 1956, the microphone in the tap chamber picked up an alarming sound--voices exclaiming at what had been found. A CIA document attributed the discovery to "unfortunate circumstances beyond our control--a combination of the fact that one of the cables was in very poor physical condition ... and a long period of unusually heavy rainfall. It appeared that water entered the cable in sufficient quantity to make it inoperative, thus necessitating digging up sections of the cable and causing discovery of the tap."

But for 11 months and 11 days, the tunnel had kept on the Soviet pulse. The Russian army could not have made a military move anywhere in Europe without tipping its hand via the tunnel. When the CIA was set up in 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall was reported to have said, "I don't care what the CIA does. All I want from them is 24 hours' notice of a Soviet attack." Harvey's Hole, as the tunnel became known, had put the CIA in a position to do just that, and had done it at a time when the agency had virtually no other assets behind the Iron Curtain.

At a secret ceremony, Dulles singled out Harvey for special praise and awarded him the Distinguished Intelligence Medal. It was a moment to savor as Dulles heartily slapped him on the back for a job well done. In the years since Harvey had been cashiered from the FBI, he had earned a reputation as America's top spy, the man who had both uncovered Kim Philby, the K.G.B.'s most valued penetration of the West, and overseen Operation GOLD, the CIA's most valued penetration of the Iron Curtain. But for William Harvey, life would never again be so sweet.

Over Christmas of 1960, a Polish intelligence officer named Michael Goleniewski crossed into West Berlin and into the waiting arms of the CIA. Goleniewski had planned his defection well. In the months before his flight from Warsaw, he had stashed hundreds of pages of photographed documents in a hollow tree trunk. By defecting at the start of the long Christmas holiday, he had given himself and the CIA a few extra days before his absence would be noted and the alarm sounded--time enough to signal the lone CIA man in Warsaw to empty the hollow tree.

Spirited away to a CIA safe house in a suburb of Washington, Goleniewski told his interrogators about a Soviet spy inside the M16 (British Intelligence) in Berlin, a lead that aroused suspicion against one George Blake.

Over Easter of 1961, Blake was recalled to London for questioning. "Blake broke at a time when there was hardly another question left to ask him," one CIA officer said. "If Blake had held out, they would not have had a case." After a brief trial, conducted almost entirely in secret, Blake was sentenced to 42 years in prison, one of the longest sentences ever handed down by a British court. The information that Blake had passed on to the Russians "has rendered much of this country's efforts completely useless," the judge said.

William Harvey didn't need a British judge to tell him that. In December 1953, he had sat at a conference table in London and discussed plans for the Berlin tunnel with his British counterparts while Blake kept the official minutes of the meeting. "He knew every detail of what we were doing," said Carl Nelson, mastermind of the tunnel.

•

By 1961, Harvey had been reassigned to CIA headquarters as head of Staff D, a small agency component responsible for communications intercepts. There, at the direction of Richard Bissell, then head of the CIA's clandestine services, Harvey had begun work on the "application of ZR/RIFLE program to Cuba."

Bissell called it "executive action." Harvey called it "the magic button" and the "last resort beyond last resort and confession of weakness." He made a note to himself never to call it by its true name. "Never mention word assassination," he scribbled.

The CIA had tried to kill Fidel Castro at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion, but the attempt had disintegrated into what one of the plotters called "a Keystone comedy act." Much more stringent requirements were laid down for Harvey's operation. "Maximum security" and "nonattributability" were the primary guidelines specified in the executive-action file. "KUBARK only," the file commanded, employing the cryptonym used internally to identify the CIA.

The first step would be the "search"--to find and recruit the assassin. KUTUBE/D, the agency's cryptonym for Staff D, was already conducting a search for agents who could be recruited to steal the code books of other nations. That would be used as the cover for the search for a killer. The KUTUBE/D search had been given the code name RIFLE, which, now that it served the ends of executive action, was an appropriate description of what was involved.

To conduct the search, Harvey already had the perfect asset. According to one of his CIA handlers, the man code-named QJ/WIN was capable of anything. A CIA memo said that he was recruited in Frankfurt November 1, 1960, to undertake a one-shot mission to the Belgian Congo, a mission that "potentially involved great risk." The memo was characteristically vague about what exactly the mission had been, though the author must have chuckled over his reference to "one-shot," since other documents left no doubt that WIN had been dispatched to arrange "the assassination of Patrice Lumumba." Lumumba had died exactly as the CIA planned, but the agency for all its scheming was not responsible. It had not had such good luck with Castro, and Bissell hoped Harvey could change that.

ZR/RIFLE was only a small portion of what the Kennedy Administration proposed to throw against Castro. A major new covert-action program would build a revolution inside Cuba. Agents assigned to Task Force W would be infiltrated to make contact with what few pockets of political resistance remained after the Bay of Pigs and to build an insurgent movement gradually that would gather support from a population increasingly disgruntled with Castro's mismanagement of the economy, a mismanagement aided and abetted by economic warfare waged overtly with a trade embargo and covertly with sabotage. The program would require a Government-wide effort, for which the President's brother, according to a White House memo, "would be the most effective commander."

Instead, Kennedy chose as his Cuba commander Brigadier General Edward Lansdale, a CIA operative who had fought against Communist insurgents in the Philippines and Vietnam. Lansdale was a romantic figure of considerable proportions--the stuff of which two novels, Graham Greene's The Quiet American and William Lederer's The Ugly American, were made.

To oversee Lansdale, a special panel was formed, chaired by the President's military representative, General Maxwell Taylor, and including national-security advisor McGeorge Bundy and CIA director John McCone, among others. The panel was augmented by one other member, the President's brother. Bobby Kennedy would give the panel both its official title--Special Group (Augmented)--and its sense of urgency.

Code-named MONGOOSE, the operation--with Harvey once again the CIA's point man--was doomed to fail from the start. The CIA's Board of National Estimates had already concluded that "it is highly improbable that an extensive popular uprising could be fomented" against Castro. Even Castro's death "would almost certainly not prove fatal to the regime." But the Administration's obsession with overthrowing Castro was beyond the reach of reason. "We were hysterical about Castro," Defense Secretary Robert McNamara acknowledged. The CIA's pessimism was viewed as one more indication that the agency had not regained its nerve since the Bay of Pigs.

Harvey moved Task Force W into the basement of the CIA's new headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and set up the command bunker for operations against Cuba. Lansdale had already drawn up a basic action plan for MONGOOSE designed to culminate in the "open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime"--"the touchdown play," as he liked to call it--by the end of October of 1962. The timetable was preposterous, and members of Task Force W decided that Lansdale's October deadline had more to do with the November elections than with the realities of insurgency. Even the Special Group (Augmented) found Lansdale's basic action plan excessive and issued guidelines stating that simple intelligence collection would be the "immediate priority objective of U. S. efforts in the coming months." Covert actions should be kept on a scale "short of those reasonably calculated to inspire a revolt."

A total of 400 CIA officers was assigned to Task Force W. "We were running a ferry service back and forth to the island with agents," a member of the task force recalled. Teams of Cuban exiles were dispatched in the dark of the moon for the 90-mile run from Florida to Cuba. Once ashore, they headed inland toward their native provinces, where they could seek out relatives who might give them food and shelter while they went about the tedious task of building an underground network. The exiles sent out radio reports on the condition of the transportation and food-distribution systems, the status of power and water supplies, the schedules of police patrols and all the other measures of Castro's grip on the island. They urged their compatriots to commit minor sabotage such as leaving the lights on and the water running. They carried condoms filled with graphite to dump into an engine's oil system.

But minor sabotage "didn't appeal to the Cubans," Maxwell Taylor said. "They wanted to go in there and throw a bomb at somebody." The official records of Operation MONGOOSE contained only the slightest hint of the ferocity with which that secret war was waged. Sabotage missions were launched against bridges, power transformers, microwave towers, tank farms and railroad lines within reach of the beach. The commandos set their mortars in the sand, lobbed a few shells inland and retreated to the sea. "Sometimes mortar rounds go long and they land in a village," the chief of Task Force W's paramilitary operations said philosophically.

"People died," Harvey's executive assistant said, "no question of that."

The rationale behind the sabotage was that it would result in economic dislocations that would sow discontent among the people and provide fertile ground for nurturing a resistance network. But the Special Group (Augmented) repeatedly balked at approving the kind of assault that would work any real economic hardship.

Exasperated, Harvey complained to McCone. "To permit requisite flexibility and professionalism for a maximum operation effort against Cuba, the tight controls exercised by the Special Group (Augmented) and the present time-consuming coordination and briefing procedures should, if at all possible, be made less restrictive and less stultifying," he wrote in his long-winded fashion.

"You could see trouble coming," Helms's assistant said.

Bobby Kennedy browbeat Harvey and his aides so relentlessly that after one session, Taylor turned to him and said, "You could sack a town and enjoy it." The Attorney General would call a junior officer in the Task Force W bunker at Langley, bark out an order and hang up, leaving the CIA man wondering whether he had just talked with the President's brother or a prankster. He gave one officer the name of "a man who was in contact with a small group of Cubans who had a plan for creating an insurrection." When the officer reported back that the Cubans did not seem to have a concrete plan, Kennedy ordered him to fly to Guantánamo and "start working developing this particular group." The officer protested, saying that the CIA had promised the Defense Department not to work out of Guantánamo. "We will see about that," Kennedy snapped. Sometimes the Attorney General would take things into his own hands and the CIA would not find out about it until after the fact. He sent Lansdale down to Miami in a futile effort to form a cohesive government in exile and kept the trip a secret from the CIA. It was vintage Bobby Kennedy, turning the bureaucracy upside down and shaking it by the heels. Such tactics served him well in most endeavors, but not when it came to the business of spying, with all its reverence for "tradecraft."

To Harvey, it was all so much amateurish meddling. Soon he started referring to Kennedy in private as "that fucker" and began suggesting that some of the Attorney General's actions bordered on the traitorous. It usually happened after he had been drinking, and it made his friends wince. "He said some things about Bobby Kennedy that were unwise, which he couldn't support but which were part of his dislike for the man," a friend said. "Bobby was wielding so much power and Bill distorted this into intent to do harm." In short, the friend said, "he hated Bobby Kennedy's guts with a purple passion."

For his part, Kennedy thought that Harvey was "not very good." The Berlin tunnel "was a hell of a project," Kennedy conceded, "but he did that better than he did this... . [Harvey had] this great achievement and then he ended in disaster by working out this program." Stories began to circulate. One had it that Harvey had flatly refused a direct order from Kennedy, then slapped his gun down on the conference table and spun it around so the barrel pointed at the Attorney General. The story was almost certainly apocryphal, but its very existence signaled that something was drastically wrong.

Relations with Lansdale were no better. To Harvey, Lansdale was a security risk. "Harvey seldom really talked to me," Lansdale said. "He would never initiate conversations. It was very hard to get information from him." Harvey displayed his contempt in other ways as well. At meetings, he would "lift his ass and fart and pare his nails with a sheath knife," Helms's aide said. One day at the Pentagon, Harvey took his gun from his pocket, emptied all the ammunition on the table and began playing with the bullets in an elaborate show of boredom. The incident caused such a ruckus that the CIA issued new regulations regarding the carrying of firearms by employees.

The final break with Lansdale came on August 13, 1962, after he sent a memo to State, Defense, the CIA and the USIA, laying out plans for the next phase of operations against Cuba. There, in black and white, Lansdale wrote, "Mr. Harvey: Intelligence, Political (including liquidation of leaders), Economic (sabotage, limited deception) and Paramilitary."

Harvey scratched out the offending words from the memo and called Lansdale, raging against "the inadmissibility and stupidity of putting this type of comment in such a document." Lansdale didn't know it, but he had stuck his big foot right in the middle of ZR/RIFLE.

Lansdale was the least of that operation's problems. Harvey had abandoned the intricate stratagem of using QJ/WIN in the KUTUBE/D search for a suitable assassin as the original executive-action file had specified. Instead, he had reverted to a more tightly controlled version of the Keystone comedy act that had been concocted for the Bay of Pigs. On April 21, 1962, Harvey met with a dapper Mobster named Johnny Roselli in the cocktail lounge at the Miami airport. The bulbous Harvey gulped his double martini while the sleek Roselli, wearing a custom-tailored suit, alligator shoes and a $2000 watch, sipped vodka on the rocks. Harvey handed him four poison capsules and assured him that they would "work anywhere and at any time with anything." Although Roselli soon reported to Harvey that the pills had arrived in Cuba, nothing happened.

Still Castro flourished. It had been a full eight months since Bissell had first mentioned to Harvey the "application of ZR/RIFLE program to Cuba" and since the President had recorded his decision to "use our available assets ... to help Cuba overthrow the Communist regime." During that time, the only result that could be discerned was that the Russians had begun shipping vast quantities of military supplies to Cuba.

Early on the morning of October 14, a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft picked out a total of 14 73-foot MRBMs lying in various stages of readiness in a heavily wooded area near San Cristóbal. The presence of nuclear missiles in Cuba signaled the final futility of MONGOOSE.

In the heat of the moment, Harvey ordered ten more teams to Cuba, not for sabotage but to be in place with beacons and flares that could light the way if the President ordered a military invasion. The Attorney General learned of the order by accident when "one of the fellows who was going to go got in touch with me and said ... we don't mind going, but we want to make sure we're going because you think it's worth while."

Kennedy ordered the mission scrubbed, but Harvey said that three of the teams were beyond recall. "I was furious," Kennedy later related. "I said, 'You were dealing with people's lives ... and then you're going to go off with a half-assed operation such as this.'" On whose authority had Harvey dispatched no fewer than 60 of those brave men into Cuba at a time when the slightest provocation might unleash a nuclear holocaust? Kennedy demanded to know. "[Harvey] said we planned it because the military wanted it done, and I asked the military and they never heard of it." Kennedy demanded a better explanation and said, "I've got two minutes to hear your answer." Two minutes later, Harvey was still talking. Kennedy got up and walked out of the room.

That evening, when McCone returned to CIA headquarters in Langley, he told Ray Cline, his deputy director of Intelligence, "Harvey has destroyed himself today. His usefulness has ended."

McCone removed Harvey as head of Task Force W. Harvey would never again be allowed near an operation in which the White House was likely to take an active interest. Rome was the first available slot for an officer of his rank, and the irony cannot have escaped Harvey that it was he, the loyal Government servant, and not Roselli, the mafioso, who was being deported to Italy.

•

"He was an utter disaster in Rome," the head of the CIA's Western Europe Division said.

"Italians are highly sophisticated, smooth and slowgoing," a member of the Rome station said, describing attributes guaranteed to clash with the blunt, hard-charging new station chief.

"This was just not the kind of milieu Bill Harvey prospered in," a sympathetic friend said. "He preferred the dark alleys of Berlin."

Still, said an aide to McCone, "he would have been able to carry out his assignment had he not impaired his effectiveness with drink."

"When he first came to Rome, he tried to be very careful about his drinking," a member of the station staff said. "At cocktail parties, he would drink iced tea."

But soon "he was hitting the bottle very hard early in the morning," another colleague reported. "By noon, Bill was no longer Bill." When a colonel in the local carabinieri took him on a tour of check points along the Yugoslav border, Harvey slumbered drunkenly through the entire trip. When the American ambassador, Frederick Reinhardt, called an emergency meeting one Saturday, Harvey arrived "blotto" and fell asleep slumped over the arm of his chair. His gun fell out of its holster and onto the floor. "For Christ's sake," Reinhardt snapped, "who sent him to this town?"

Helms and Angleton had sent Harvey to Rome for a number of reasons. After his run-in with Bobby Kennedy, Harvey had to be got out of the country fast. But he was not to be demoted. The failure of MONGOOSE had not been his fault and there was a feeling that he had been "unfairly treated" by the White House. Rome was "the assignment Helms could find at the time that was high-level enough to accommodate him," one participant in the decision said.

The station relied on the Italian services for its intelligence on Soviet agents, but "there was no help from the liaison services, who were afraid of antagonizing the Soviets," an Italian hand said. The situation cried out for a hard-nosed operative like Harvey, who would install some "plumbing" of his own--surveillance teams, wire taps, bugs and all the other paraphernalia of espionage. Whatever else had happened to him, Harvey certainly had not gone soft. When a longtime friend in the Rome station wrote him a warm letter of congratulations on his appointment, Harvey reported the man to the Office of Security for discussing classified material in the open mails.

This new man was a queer bird, indeed. "Harvey tried to turn the station around from a largely overt mission to an increased clandestine effort against the Soviets," one officer said. No longer relying on the timid efforts of the Italian services, Harvey formed his own surveillance teams to track the Russian operatives. Officers who had made their living over dinner with Italian politicians found themselves pounding the pavement at all hours of the night. "People had to work a hell of a lot harder," one officer said, but "I don't think we succeeded in recruiting any Russians."

Relations with the Italian services grew steadily worse under Harvey's heavy hand. "He pushed too hard," a veteran officer said. "If only he'd had a little more tact... . Harvey forgot that we were dealing with the owners of the country."

Soon the "horror stories" began to filter back to Washington, stories of Harvey's walking into a glass door or running over a roadside kiosk. "You heard about the time the gun went off in his office, didn't you?" said an officer. "The girls in the outer office were afraid to open the door. They were afraid he'd blown his damn brains out. When they finally opened the door, there was Harvey, sitting there as if nothing had happened."

At first the reports were discounted as the petty spite of a small clique of officers who had grown too accustomed to the good life. "The gentlemen who were trying to pull him down in Italy were gnats buzzing about a bull," Harvey's immediate superior in Washington said. The K.G.B. added its menacing buzz to the swarm. Harvey would find the air let out of his tires or be awakened in the middle of the night by anonymous phone calls. One morning, two sewer rats were found hanging from his front door with their heads chopped off.

Harvey suffered a heart attack. After the crisis had passed, the chief of the Western Europe Division said, "Things looked up for a while."

But the drinking resumed. Then came a cable saying Harvey wanted a number of officers recalled. Headquarters temporized by asking for more information. Harvey's wrath focused on one officer in particular, Mark Wyatt, who was in charge of liaison with the Italian services. Urbane, sophisticated, bilingual, independently wealthy, Wyatt was everything Harvey was not. Harvey submitted a special fitness report which tore Wyatt limb from limb.

Desmond FitzGerald, the new head of the clandestine services, arrived in Rome for a firsthand look. He supported Harvey against Wyatt, but at the same time, he concluded, in the words of a senior officer who accompanied him, that "Harvey was not in a condition to continue as chief of the station... . He was sick and coming apart at the seams." FitzGerald cabled a lengthy report to Helms, and Helms ordered Harvey relieved of command. "I got the job of going back to Rome and relieving Bill Harvey," FitzGerald's companion said. "It was a night I shall not soon forget." For seven hours, he sat across from Harvey, explaining that he was through. "Harvey was drinking brandy with a loaded gun in his lap ... paring his nails with a sheath knife." Harvey never threatened him, but the barrel of the gun was always pointing directly at him.

At CIA headquarters in Washington, Harvey was placed in charge of something called the Special Services Unit, where his job was to study countermeasures against electronic surveillance. FitzGerald told Harvey he hoped that would be only a brief interlude until he could regain his health and return to the front lines. Lawrence "Red" White, the agency's executive director, was assigned to watch over him.

"I'm sorry if I've embarrassed the agency in any way," Harvey said to White. "If I ever embarrass you or the agency again, I will resign."

Before long, "we began finding gin bottles in his desk drawer," one of the CIA's most senior officers said. White called in Harvey, who reminded him of what he had said about resigning the next time he embarrassed the agency.

"That would probably be the best thing to do," White said.

"At your pleasure," Harvey replied.

He was finished.

•

After a brief try at practicing law in Washington, Harvey went home to Indiana as the Midwest representative of a small investigative outfit known as Bishop's Service.

People who had not seen him for many years were shocked at how obese he had become. In 1973, he returned to Maysville, Kentucky, for the first time in nearly 20 years, for the funeral of his first wife, Libby. "I was really horrified when he came here," Libby's sister said. "The change in him was unbelievable. He was a very thin young man when he married Libby." Like Harvey, Libby had never been able to free herself from alcohol. She had died by her own hand.

Such private tragedies attracted no public interest, and Harvey remained a man of indeterminate past and no future. When he applied to Bobbs-Merrill for a $9000-a-year job as a law editor, "Bill said nothing at all about his CIA employment," said Dave Cox, head of the firm's law division. "He used phrases like 'having worked for the Government,' as if I was supposed to know something independently."

Cox did not know any more until the spring of 1975, when Harvey was publicly identified as the man who had directed Johnny Roselli in a plot to poison Castro. Harvey was called to testify before the newly created Senate Select Committee on intelligence activities. He surprised the committee with his willingness to talk. After all the stories they had heard, the Senators could not resist asking Harvey whether or not he still carried a gun. No, he said, he was not carrying a gun, but he did have a tiny device that would erase the tape recording that was to be the official transcript of his testimony. He withdrew a small object from his pocket and slapped it down onto the table in front of him. The stunned silence in the room was broken by Harvey's chuckle as he removed his hand to reveal a cigarette case.

Nowhere did Harvey cause a greater sensation than at the Bobbs-Merrill offices in Indianapolis where he worked. Executives at International Telephone and Telegraph, the parent company of Bobbs-Merrill, were aghast at the prospect of being linked to yet another CIA scandal. I.T.T. collaboration with the CIA in attempting to block the 1970 election of Chilean Marxist Salvador Allende was already the subject of one Congressional investigation.

Harvey was about to be fired. "The fact that Bobbs-Merrill is a subsidiary of I.T.T. had some bearing on it," Cox acknowledged, but the main reason was that "his drinking started to get out of control."

Cox called Harvey in for a talk. "I've drunk heavily all my life," Harvey told him, "I just can't handle it anymore. It's out of control. I just have to realize I'm an alcoholic."

Harvey began seeing a doctor regularly and, according to Cox, "got squared away on the booze problem." Cox said that "after Harvey got back ... he came over to thank me for giving him a second chance. He said he couldn't guarantee the treatment would work. If it didn't, he said, he could forget about leading a meaningful life."

Harvey awoke with chest pains at 5:45, Tuesday morning, June 8, 1976. By seven o'clock, he was in the intensive-care unit at Methodist Hospital. On Wednesday, he underwent open-heart surgery. For four hours, surgeons worked to implant an artificial valve that might somehow overcome the toll taken by obesity, cigarettes and alcohol. He died, holding his wife's hand, at ten minutes past two in the afternoon of June ninth.

"Bill was 60, too young to go," his wife wrote in a letter to his colleagues at Bobbs-Merrill. "He had many plans ahead. He had lived a very full and satisfying life by his own estimation. He said few men were blessed with the opportunity he had to serve his country." At the funeral home, she proudly announced that he would be buried wearing his favorite boots and silver belt buckle. Then the bitterness broke through. Standing over the casket, she launched into a tearful tirade against "that awful Frank Church," chairman of the Senate Select Committee on intelligence activities. She was entitled to her venom. It was unfair to leave Harvey stranded in the public record as the CIA's hit man. He had been that, but so much more--the nemesis of Philby; the foreman of the Berlin tunnel. He had been the CIA's point man in the secret war and, although he had never heard a shot fired in anger, he was a combat casualty, a burnt-out case who, as one officer put it, "was asked to do things that nobody should have been asked to do."

"Harvey resigned 'with deepest regret,' wisely circumspect given Hoover's appetite for revenge."

"Compared with his better-bred colleagues, this lumpen spy fairly reeked of gaucherie and naïveté."