Wilderness of Mirrors

by David C. Martin

  At one point Harvey slipped and revealed his bias by referring in writing to Bentley’s suspects as “Soviet espionage agents.” Clyde Tolson, Hoover’s alter ego, quickly called him to account for his “loose phraseology,” since “the only proof that we have that they are Soviet espionage agents is the statement of the GREGORY woman.” Hoover was more adept at straddling the gap between his convictions and the evidence. “It is not, of course, the province of the FBI to make prosecutive recommendations,” he waffled in a memo to Justice Department officials who were pressing him for a resolution of the matter.

  Without further proof, the harshest action the government could take against the suspected spies in its midst was to ease them out. Hoover balked at outright dismissal, since that would require a Civil Service hearing in which the Bureau might be forced to reveal its sources. Hiss lingered on at the State Department until the end of 1946, when, aware that he was under suspicion and that his prospects for further promotion were nil, he voluntarily resigned for a better-paying job with the Carnegie Endowment. Other Bentley suspects also left government as their wartime agencies were gradually disbanded. Harvey found particularly galling the fact that two suspects had taken all of their accrued sick leave before resigning. “Careful consideration will be given to the possibility of developing Fraud Against the Government cases against them in regard to their apparently fraudulent use of their sick leave,” he vowed, but no such charges were ever brought.

  An unbroken string of eighteen- and twenty-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 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 a stag party in the Virginia suburbs. Once across the Potomac, the two cars went their separate ways. Harvey drove west, passing the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial, and the World War II temporary buildings that lay scattered across the Mall like so much litter. At the Lincoln Memorial he turned north and headed into Rock Creek Park, his taillights disappearing into the dark and 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 told Mickey Ladd, head of the Bureau’s Security Division. Ladd, who had been at the party the night before, recalled that “Harvey had been very quiet while some of the other men had been quite exuberant.”

  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 after 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 towards 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 and accordingly he went to sleep in his car and slept until approximately 10 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 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. He was described as “very much upset about the matter,” but Hoover was not so easily appeased.

  “Pursuant to your instructions,” an aide reported, “I talked to Mr. Harvey this morning about this situation, pointing out to him that we were particularly concerned about the potential embarrassment to the Bureau in a situation of this kind since a squad car might very logically have stopped and questioned Harvey, asleep in his car, and that if he had been taken to a police station and publicity ensued, it would have caused embarrassment to the Bureau. I pointed out that while we had no question as to his sobriety on this occasion, we were concerned about the possibility of his being completely exhausted from overwork or worry … and that I was particularly anxious to talk to him about the situation to determine whether it would be better for him if he were transferred to another assignment, particularly in the light of his wife’s statement that he had been despondent and discouraged about his work.”

  Harvey acknowledged “that he did periodically become discouraged about the ineffectiveness of the overall Government program in dealing with Communists and Communist espionage,” but he insisted that “there was no question of his morale or attitude towards his work in this situation…. His worry was the natural worry that would come to anyone who dealt as intimately with the Communist problem as he had been doing for several years.” Harvey rejected the idea of a transfer to a less taxing job and “stated that he preferred his present desk to any assignment that could be given to him in the Bureau.”

  A review of Harvey’s file showed that his “record during his assignment at the Seat of Government had been a very good one. … He has been consistently rated Excellent on the basis of his work in the Security Division.” Hoover’s aide vouched that “I personally have seen Harvey at his desk late at night on many occasions” and concluded, “I do not believe in the light of all the circumstances in this case that there is any administrative action which should be taken.”

  The Draconian Hoover thought otherwise and directed that a second memo be written. “It is recommended that Special Agent William K. Harvey of the Security Division be transferred to Indianapolis on general assignment.” Hoover scribbled “O.K.” at the bottom. Rather than accept the transfer, Harvey submitted his resignation “with the deepest regret,” citing “personal and family consideration” 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 naive 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.

  There, in the command bunker for the secret war, Harvey first met Angleton, the boy wonder of the SSU, who had transferred to the CIA with the disbanding of his unit in Rome. Inevitably they clashed. “Angleton and Harvey were direct competitors—I mean direct competitors—from the word go,” one CIA officer said. “We had a real fight going between Angleton and Harvey.” The two were a study in contrasts—physically, culturally, intellectually, and professionally. Harvey was a stocky man whose spreading girth would earn him the nickname of “the Pear.” Angleton, “the Cadaver,” remained consumptively thin. Harvey walked with a stiff-backed milita
ry gait. Angleton shambled along in a slumped and contemplative fashion. Harvey had grown up in the same small Midwestern town as his father and his father’s father. Angleton was an expatriate’s son. Harvey was Big Ten. Angleton was Ivy League. Harvey read Rudyard Kipling, the storyteller who glorified the “Great Game” of espionage and beat the drum of duty, honor, and empire. Angleton read Ezra Pound, the mad poet who stood accused of betraying his country. Harvey had learned the game of espionage in the regimented FBI; Angleton in the free-wheeling OSS. Harvey collected firearms. Angleton crafted fishing lures. Harvey was a cop; Angleton a spy. Each was a prototype of the two strains—FBI refugees and OSS veterans—coming together to form the postwar espionage establishment at the CIA. The OSS veterans— Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Angleton, and others—would dominate the CIA for the next quarter century, but it took Harvey, the FBI reject, to spot the Soviet spy in their midst.

  Philby Undone

  3

  An element of farce had attended the CIA’s birth. Admiral William Leahy, chief of staff to President Harry S. Truman, recorded the occasion in his diary. “At lunch today in the White House … Rear Admiral Souers and I were presented with black cloaks, black hats and wooden daggers.”

  “To My Brethren and Fellow Dog House Denizens,” the President proclaimed. “By virtue of the authority vested in me as Top Dog, I require and charge that Front Admiral William D. Leahy and Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers receive and accept the vestments and appurtenances of their respective positions, namely as Personal Snooper and as Director of Centralized Snooping.”

  Hoover did not think the creation of a rival intelligence operation so amusing. He had grudgingly suffered the OSS in time of war but was inclined to be less accommodating in time of peace. His plan for a postwar intelligence organization was simple enough: expand the Bureau’s South American operations to cover the globe. When Truman opted instead for “Wild Bill” Donovan’s proposal to create a “central intelligence service” that would report directly to the President, Hoover resorted to sabotage, ordering his agents in South America to burn their files rather than turn them over to the CIA.

  Hoover was not motivated solely by spite, as Angleton pointed out. “There was a very grave problem of the security standards of the Agency coming from World War II,” he said. Bentley had identified no fewer than five employees of the OSS as members of her spy ring. What other Soviet agents had escaped detection and made the transition from the OSS to the CIA?

  If Hoover needed any further reason to distrust the CIA, there was the fact that it harbored Bureau fugitives such as Bill Harvey. Unemployed and with a paycheck for ninety-seven days of unused leave as his sole means of support, Harvey had leaped at the chance to join the CIA. Utterly ignorant of Soviet espionage operations, the CIA had needed Harvey as badly as he needed it. Harvey, who possessed near-photographic recall, was the next best thing to Bureau files. Hoover could order the files burned, but he could not erase Harvey’s memory banks. Yet memory, or even experience, was not all that mattered at the CIA. The Agency 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 academics and Wall Street attorneys. Many of the men he met were heirs to considerable family fortunes. Harvey was crossing the tracks, joining the establishment. It was not an altogether harmonious union.

  “I felt Harvey had a love-hate relationship to the establishment,” said Carlton Swift, a relative of the meat-packing tycoon and one of Harvey’s new colleagues. “He had an emotional distrust of the establishment, yet he had a desire to be part of it.” When Swift met Harvey’s wife, Libby, a small-town girl and college dropout, “she reinforced my idea that he was envious of the establishment, socially self-conscious at not being a part of the elite that ran the Agency…. She was proof that he wasn’t part of it…. He solved his ego problem by saying, ‘They’re no good.’ … I became a fair friend of his and used to listen to him recount his cases—Bentley, Hiss and the rest. He would give me a long lecture on the prevalence of treason in the upper classes…. Those brought up in the 30s and given a good education with money and a social conscience felt the burden of producing more for their society. [They] liked to see in Communism [their] great contribution to society…. [They] weren’t consciously committing treason. They rationalized … that they were being far-sighted patriots by supporting international Communism…. I remember [Harvey’s words] perhaps because I was young and impressionable…. Harvey really had deep emotional feelings about it.”

  Feelings aside, 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.” Harvey “exuded missionary zeal,” said a CIA officer named Peter Sichel. The impression was heightened by a lifelong thyroid condition that made his eyes bulge from his head—“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 Robert Lamphere, a member of the Bureau’s Security Division, “but as far as Hoover was concerned, he was the enemy.” Harvey responded in kind. “I would be in Harvey’s office,” one agent recounted, “and he would get a phone call and say, ‘I can’t talk much now because there’s an FBI man here.’ ”

  Such bureaucratic jealousies seemed particularly petty in the context of the rapid and alarming succession of world events. In July of 1949 the State Department issued a White Paper conceding that China had fallen to the Communists, and in August Russia exploded her first atomic device, ending the American monopoly. Meanwhile, 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 who was so well placed that he could obtain the verbatim text of a private telegram from Winston Churchill to Harry Truman.

  Midway through World War II 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. The code book might reveal, for instance, that the five-digit group for the word agent was 17056, but it would not reveal that the “additive,” as it was called, was 05555. With the additive the word agent would appear in the enciphered message as 22611 (17056 plus 05555), which the code book would list as the five-digit group for a word or phrase with an entirely different meaning. Only someone in possession of both the code book and the additive would know to subtract 05555 from 22611 and arrive at 17056 and the word agent. 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 c
ode, mere super-encipherment did not pose an insurmountable obstacle. Through collateral intelligence—the exact date and time of the message, the particular unit to which it was sent, the movement of the unit upon receipt— they could sometimes hazard an educated guess about the subject matter. Testing five-letter code groups representing words that the Russians might logically have used to refer to that subject would occasionally yield a solution. But without a key to the constantly changing additive, the overall 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 additives would appear and another message could be deciphered. It was an excruciatingly tedious task with less than perfect results. Since only a portion of the code book had been salvaged, many of the 999 five-digit groups used by the Soviets were missing. Knowing the additive might yield the proper five-digit group, but if that group could not be found in the code book, the word remained indecipherable. Whole passages were blanks, and the meaning of other phrases could be only vaguely grasped.