Wilderness of Mirrors

by David C. Martin

  Sean Bourke stood in the pouring rain, clutching a pot of pink chrysanthemums. A passerby would have thought he was waiting for the start of visiting hours at London’s Hammersmith Hospital just across the street. Behind Bourke was a twenty-foot brick wall, which encircled Wormwood Scrubs Prison. Inside, the men in cell block D were in the midst of their evening’s entertainment, gathered about a television set, jeering a professional wrestling match. Remarking to a guard that the match was obviously fixed, George Blake, the most heavily sentenced prisoner in the British Isles, left the raucous crowd, ascended to the second tier of cells, and stood gazing out a large window that overlooked the main entrance to the cell block. The noise he made as he shattered the glass and kicked out a cast-iron bar was drowned in the hubbub from below. He wriggled through the opening, dropped to a canopy that covered the entrance, and from there to the ground. He sprinted twenty yards to the wall, climbed up a waiting rope ladder, and jumped to the ground next to Bourke. The two men sped away in a waiting car, leaving the rope ladder behind. An hour later the entertainment period ended, and the prisoners filed back to their cells. When Blake failed to answer the roll call, the grounds were searched and the ladder, its rungs reinforced with knitting needles, was discovered. By the time prison authorities notified police, Blake had an hour-and-a-half head start.

  According to the official inquiry that was later conducted, Blake had given “every appearance of being a cooperative prisoner who was showing remarkable resilience in accepting his unprecedentedly long sentence.” That resilience had no doubt been based on his confidence that the Soviets would quickly trade him for a captured British spy—a traditional practice between East and West. Within a year of Blake’s sentencing, for instance, the Americans had given up the notorious Soviet spy master Rudolf Abel for Francis Gary Powers, the downed U-2 pilot. But Blake’s confidence in an early exchange must have been badly shaken in April of 1964, when the Russians traded businessman Greville Wynne for Gordon Lonsdale, the bogus Canadian sentenced to twenty-five years for his theft of British naval secrets. Wynne, who had acted as the West’s chief courier to Penkovsky, was Moscow’s prize catch. The Russians had played their best card on Lonsdale instead of Blake. Their decision had nothing to do with the relative worth of the two spies. The simple fact was that Lonsdale was a native Russian and Blake was not.

  His best chance for an early exchange gone, Blake moved into action on his own, enlisting Bourke, a thirty-two-year-old Irishman who had spent nearly a third of his life in prison, as his chief accomplice. When Bourke met Blake at Wormwood Scrubs, he was nearing the end of a seven-year sentence for mailing a bomb to a policeman. Once released, Bourke laid the groundwork for Blake’s escape, maintaining communications first by letter and then by a two-way radio that he managed to smuggle in to Blake.

  The escape went off as planned, the only mishap being a broken wrist suffered by Blake in his leap to freedom. While Scotland Yard scrambled to cover all exits from Britain, Blake and Bourke watched television in a rented flat less than four minutes’ drive from Wormwood Scrubs. Seven weeks later, while police still had nothing more to go on than “the clue of the pink chrysanthemums,” Blake hid in the back of a van and was driven aboard the Dover-to-Ostende ferry by two of Bourke’s friends. Twenty-four hours later the van stopped on the autobahn leading through East Germany, and Blake alighted in friendly territory.

  In Moscow, Blake was awarded the Order of Lenin, Russia’s second highest decoration, an honor not even Philby had been accorded. The only other foreigner to have been so honored was the German Richard Sorge, the Soviet spy in Tokyo during World War II whose assurances that Japan would not attack Russia had enabled Stalin to transfer badly needed troops to the Western Front. Blake’s canonization was presented to the Russian people in the form of two lengthy interviews published in Izvestia. Having so thoroughly duped the British both before and after his capture, Blake could scarcely refrain from gloating. The sharpest taunts seemed aimed at Harvey and his tunnel. “Many people made a career for themselves in connection with this notorious tunnel,” Blake said with a bitter irony detectable only by those who knew the hard times on which Harvey had fallen.

  “He was an utter disaster in Rome,” a high-ranking CIA officer said of Harvey. “He was a fish out of water in Rome,” the head of the CIA’s Western Europe Division said. Harvey was as out of place in Rome as his Bavarian gun rack was in the elegant fawn-colored villa he inherited atop one of the Eternal City’s seven hills. There was no more implausible sight than Harvey being attended by his white-gloved manservant. “Italians are highly sophisticated, smooth, and slow-going,” a member of the Rome station said, describing attributes guaranteed to clash with the blunt, hard-charging Harvey. “I had the impression that he would be at a disadvantage in dealing with the Italians,” sniffed the officer Harvey relieved. “He could be very brusque with Italians,” another officer said. “He hated ‘the goddamn wops,’ as he called them,” still another reported. His command of the language was nil. “Harvey would not have taken the trouble to learn the language of people he despised,” said an officer who spoke the language fluently. Besides, “his sound in English could not possibly be converted into Italian.” Another officer said that “Harvey and his wife were very fond of Germany, and they didn’t like anything about Rome.” A sympathetic friend said that “this was just not the kind of milieu Bill Harvey prospered in. 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.” One officer said, “I never tried to do business with him in the afternoon when he was back on the sauce. You could not call him drunk. He was sleepy and not alert.” When a colonel in the local carabinieri took him on a tour of checkpoints along the border with Yugoslavia, Harvey slumbered drunkenly through the entire trip. When Harvey had an altercation with Italian police after one of several traffic accidents, the American ambassador, Frederick Reinhardt, cabled Washington that he hoped the station chief would be “less visible” in the future. When 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 his shoulder holster and onto the floor. “For Christ’s sake,” snapped Reinhardt, “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 Harvey 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. “I got him the job,” Angleton stated flatly.

  Although it had been more than fifteen years since he had been stationed in Rome, Angleton still exercised considerable control over Italian operations. He remained as well connected in Italy as the most seasoned Italian hand. Tom McCoy, a CIA officer who served in Rome during the 1950s, said that “Jim had a couple of people in Italy who did work for him and did not work for the station, including a source in the Vatican, although I could never prove it.” Another CIA officer said that Angleton dealt directly with three CIA agents inside the Italian government whom he and his assistant, Ray Rocca, had recruited in the postwar years. “They were all three in very high-level and very sensitive positions,” a CIA officer who knew their identities said. One was an official in the Ministry of Interior; another, code-named DELANDA, worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The third agent, code-named DETECTOR, was a major in the carabinieri who during the war had been chief of Italian counterintel
ligence in Switzerland. “He was very helpful in specific counterintelligence cases,” an American said of DETECTOR. “He knew where all the skeletons were buried.” Over the years, Angleton’s “three big kills” had furnished valuable intelligence on the inner workings of the Italian government, among other things “pinpointing the areas where money could best be funneled,” an Italian hand said. “Since Angleton and Rocca had recruited them, Angleton and Rocca were running the show. If anybody back there [in Washington] could speak about what was going on [in Italy] with any degree of confidence, it was Angleton and Rocca.”

  In Angleton’s eyes, the land of his youth was about to disappear down the Communist maw. During the 1950s William Colby, the CIA station chief in Rome, had annoyed him by his persistence in keeping lines open to the left. “We were supporting and engaged in operations with some left-wing elements that Angleton held highly suspect because his police [carabinieri] friends held them suspect,” said Tom McCoy, Colby’s deputy in Rome. Now the Kennedy administration was actively supporting an “opening to the left” that would bring the Socialist Party into the ruling coalition government. To Angleton, who viewed the Socialist Party as nothing more than a Communist front, the policy was tantamount to surrender. Most disturbing of all, he suspected that the chief administration proponent of this suicidal alliance with the left, White House aide Arthur Schlesinger, was a Soviet agent. A member of the Soviet Embassy in Caracas had been overheard saying that he had learned the date of the Bay of Pigs invasion from someone in the White House, and Angleton had settled on Schlesinger, a former member of the OSS and the only administration official to oppose the Cuban operation, as the likely culprit.

  Everywhere he turned, Angleton saw the hand of the KGB at work in Italy. Golitsin had described to him a KGB penetration of NATO offices in Paris in terms that fit a very senior official in the Italian Foreign Ministry. As far as Angleton was concerned, the CIA station in Rome wasn’t doing its job. It wasn’t able to ferret out low-level Communist agents within the Socialist Party, much less a well-placed mole within the government. 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. “This was a serious mistake from the very beginning. We put all our eggs in the liaison basket.” As a result the CIA was “getting nothing but what the Italian government wanted to give it,” the head of the CIA’s Western Europe Division said. The situation cried out for a hard-nosed operative like Harvey who would install some “plumbing” of his own—surveillance teams, wiretaps, 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.

  Harvey was a cold slap in the face. “There were members of the Rome station who had been in the area for a long time, enjoying life and not being heckled too much and this new man comes in and tries to rekindle fires,” one member of the station recalled. This new man was a queer bird indeed. When a veteran of twenty years in Italy went out to dinner with the new station chief, Harvey insisted on sitting in a corner with his back to the wall and his eye on the door. As Harvey seated himself, he cleared his coattails away from the revolver at his waist for a quicker draw. Thinking this was some kind of joke, the old hand asked if he could count on Harvey to cover him, but he suddenly realized that Harvey was dead serious.

  “Harvey tried to turn the station around from a largely overt mission to an increased clandestine effort against the Soviets,” one officer said. “Bill Harvey knew nothing about the Italian situation,” said a CIA man who had been there since the war. “He was after the Russians and the KGB.” Over drinks, Harvey told one old-timer, “I know you know a lot about Italy, but I know a lot about the Soviets. We’ll get along fine.” They didn’t. “It was a period of extreme confusion and bewilderment,” one officer said. “The station was turned upside down to recruit a Russian.” 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.” When the head of one of the Italian services—CIFAR—died, Harvey defied tradition by lobbying for the promotion of the chief of the counterintelligence division to the top job, which had long been considered the province of the military. The maneuver was successful, but it was not worth the wrenching of Italian sensibilities. Once in office the new chief of CIFAR turned out to be his own man. “We were trying to manipulate and run him,” a veteran of sixteen years in Italy said, “but it’s a myth, this idea that you recruit the chief of service.” By the time Harvey’s tour in Italy was over, the chief of CIFAR would inform the CIA that all eavesdropping operations against Eastern European embassies in Rome had been terminated.

  Harvey’s relations with his own Director were scarcely better. “McCone was never happy with that appointment,” an aide to the Director said. To begin with, McCone had not been pleased with Harvey’s previous performance on the Cuba task force. “When you take a plant supervisor and make him president of the company, it doesn’t always work out,” McCone said of Harvey’s tour as chief of Task Force W. Harvey’s assignment to Rome “had been approved in his absence and he didn’t like it,” McCone’s aide said. “McCone is something of a snob and a puritan, and Harvey just wasn’t his cup of tea.” Once a year McCone, a devout Catholic, would visit Rome for an audience with the Pope, and Harvey would have to entertain him. “When McCone would come to Rome, Harvey would go to pieces with his drinking,” a sympathetic officer remarked. “McCone was a difficult guest…. He demanded the best room in the best hotel…. He would insist on playing golf at a certain time…. His wife would want handworked leather bags picked up for her and shipped home.” When McCone came to dinner, Harvey, pistol jammed into his belt, kept nodding off at the table while McCone’s aide kicked desperately at his shins. When the aide called on Harvey at his office at ten-thirty in the morning, “Bill said, ‘I’m thirsty,’ and sent out for Campari and soda.” At lunch that day he had five martinis. “I’ve never seen anybody drink as much in my life,” the aide said. When he asked other members of the station how things were going, they cautiously responded, “I would not ask for another tour at this station under this man.”

  Soon the “horror stories” began to filter back to Washington, stories of his 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? 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 KGB seemed to add its own 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. Two Agency doctors were sent from Germany to minister to him. After the crisis had passed, they warned him that he would have to stop drinking and smoking and keep regular hours. “Things looked up for a w
hile,” the chief of the Western Europe Division said. “He developed a couple of not spectacular but useful operations. He began to gain a little confidence.” But the drinking resumed. “Then came a cable saying he wanted a number of officers recalled.” Headquarters temporized by asking for more information. “Harvey responded with stiff messages” alleging that “these guys were not on the team, not sympathetic to changes he was trying to make.” 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 really tore this guy limb from limb.”

  Desmond FitzGerald, who had become head of the Operations Directorate, arrived in Rome for a firsthand look. “I got an ultimatum from Wyatt that either Harvey went or he went,” a senior officer who accompanied FitzGerald said. “So I said, ‘In that case, I’m relieving you as of now.’ ” Wyatt asked to be allowed to stay through the spring so that his children could finish the school year, but “we shipped him right out of there.” After seeing Wyatt off on a ship to America, a member of the station recalled, “I said to a friend that Harvey wouldn’t last long after Wyatt got back to Washington…. I made a bet that ‘Before the Ides of March, Caesar will fall.’ ”