Burnt-out Case
10
“Do you know what you’ve done?” Angleton hissed at Seymour Hersh, the reporter who had unearthed the facts about the CIA’s illegal surveillance of domestic dissidents. “You’ve blown my cover. My wife, in thirty-one years of marriage, was never aware of my activity until your story.” Talking to other reporters, Angleton said he had always told his wife he worked for the Post office—which was not entirely untrue given his role in the CIA’s mail-opening program. But the story was preposterous. Cicely d’Autremont Angleton knew precisely what her husband did for a living. Post Office employees did not have autographed photographs of Richard Helms displayed on their mantels. The truth was that Angleton’s vocation was known to anyone who had taken the time to read Kim Philby’s book My Silent War, which was published in 1968 and which identified Angleton as his chief CIA contact and mocked him for having been so easily duped. For those who missed the book, an account of it in the Washington Post highlighted Philby’s description. Angleton was so incensed by the story that he terminated his friendship with Ben Bradlee, the Post’s executive editor, although he remained close to a number of other journalists: Joseph Alsop, James Truitt of Newsweek, Charles Murphy of Time, Benjamin Welles of The New York Times—none of whom was under any illusion that Angleton worked for the Post Office.
Even if Angleton was not the well-kept secret he claimed to be, he was the personification of everybody’s fantasy of a “spook.” “If John Le Carré and Graham Greene had collaborated on a superspy, the result might have been James Jesus Angleton,” a profile in Newsweek began. Overnight, he became a media cult figure— accessible enough to feed the public curiosity, remote enough to remain intriguing. He served as the model for the protagonist of a novel called Orchids for Mother and was the subject of a full-page portrait by the chic photographer Richard Avedon in Rolling Stone. He subscribed to a press-clipping service to stay abreast of all the stories about himself, and he installed an answering service on his telephone to keep track of all the calls he received from reporters. Each reporter thought Angleton was his own special source, when in fact he talked regularly with at least a dozen journalists, playing them off against each other. With no more spies to run, reporters may have seemed the next best thing.
A few months after his retirement, Angleton returned to the CIA to receive the Agency’s highest decoration, a ceremony conveniently scheduled on a day when Colby would be out of town. The award was recognition that however badly his career had ended, there had been better days. But Angleton was not satisfied with mere recognition. He sought vindication, proof that his conspiratorial vision was the true one and that Colby was a fool or worse.
Although the Times had been alerted to the domestic spying scandal by a source in the Justice Department, Colby, by his own acknowledgment, had confirmed the essential elements of the story for Hersh. Without that confirmation from the Director of the CIA, the Times probably never would have printed the story. It did not require a particularly conspiratorial mind to suspect that Colby had given Hersh his scoop as a means of ousting Angleton. Beyond that, the story had set off an orgy of White House, congressional, and media investigations that threatened an unprecedented revelation of CIA secrets. Had Colby intended that as well? Angleton and his aides had had their suspicions about Colby ever since the 1960s when he had failed to report to headquarters his contacts in Saigon with a Frenchman of uncertain loyalties. To suspect that Colby was a Soviet agent bent on destroying the Agency by getting rid of Angleton and spewing its secrets into the public domain required a breathtaking—but not unprecedented—leap of logic.
In his conversations with reporters, Angleton never intimated anything sinister about Colby. His complaint remained simply that Colby’s naiveté was playing into KGB hands. A case in point was that of Sanya Lipavsky, a Russian neurosurgeon and Jewish dissident who had volunteered his services to the CIA in 1975. With Angleton gone, there was no one to expose Lipavsky’s approach as a KGB provocation, so the CIA readily recruited him as an agent. Two years later, when he publicly revealed his CIA activities and denounced his roommate, Anatoly Shcharansky, and other dissidents, it became embarrassingly clear that Lipavsky was a KGB plant who had cleverly discredited, at least in Russian eyes, the human rights movement.
Angleton may have felt vindication on a grander scale in 1979 when Russia and China agreed to hold preliminary talks aimed at easing the bitter rivalry between them. Was the trap that Golitsin had warned about some sixteen years before finally swinging shut? To anyone not steeped in the Golitsin doctrine, these first tentative signs of reconciliation looked like nothing more than an oscillation on the fever chart of history, most likely brought about by the normalization of relations between the United States and China, an event that had radically altered the superpower equation. But for Angleton, history was conspiracy. In 1978, when Israel’s army occupied southern Lebanon in retaliation for a barbarous PLO attack on a busload of Israeli citizens, Angleton told a friend that the operation was being used as a cover to build an underground channel that would divert the waters of the Litani River into the parched Jewish state.
Very little of what Angleton told reporters ever found its way into print. Most of the plots and machinations he spied were simply too bizarre and too unsubstantiated to be presented as news. When it suited him, however, he could leak a tiny nugget of hard and valuable fact almost as if it was a reward for listening to his byzantine scenarios.
On a Saturday afternoon in 1978, a senior member of President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Council staff looked up from his lunch in a popular Washington restaurant to see the instantly recognizable form of Angleton walk in. The senior official and Angleton were not on speaking terms, so he simply watched as the deposed counterspy proceeded straight to the back of the restaurant and into the men’s room. “I wish he’d stay in there,” the senior official remarked to his luncheon partner. “He’s still blowing our sources.”
The biggest news story in the seemingly endless stream of revelations following Hersh’s original exposé was leaked not by Angleton but by President Gerald Ford, who during an off-the-record session with editors of the Times let slip the fact that investigation of the CIA could expose its involvement in assassination plots. With that lead to go on, it was not long before Bill Harvey was rousted from the obscurity into which he had slipped.
After a brief try at practicing law in Washington, Harvey had gone home to Indiana as the Midwest representative of a small investigative outfit known as Bishop Service, which counted several CIA alumni among its employees. “The reason I gave him a job was he needed one, and I’m the kind of guy who’s willing to go an extra mile for a guy who’s worked for his country,” the head of Bishop Service, himself a veteran of the OSS, explained. “I had not been told that the guy had a massive drinking problem…. The fact was that he was sort of incapacitated most of the time.”
People who had not seen Harvey for many years were shocked at how obese he had become. In 1973 he returned to Maysville, Kentucky, for the first time in nearly twenty 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 $9,000-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 got the message when a friend of Harvey’s called. “The friend said that Bill had really put in his time … that he had served his country well,” Cox related. He did not know any more until the spring of 1975, when Harvey was publicly identified as the man who
had directed Johnny Rosselli in a plot to poison Castro.
Harvey had known that reporters were onto the story ever since 1967, when syndicated muckraker Jack Anderson wrote that “President Johnson is sitting on a political H-bomb—an unconfirmed report that Senator Robert Kennedy (D-N.Y.) may have approved an assassination plot which then possibly backfired against his late brother.” Anderson’s column glossed over an enormous amount of complex and ambiguous detail, but there was no doubt that he had been given the essential ingredients. “Top officials queried by this column agreed that a plot to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro was ‘considered’ at the highest levels of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time Bobby was riding herd on the Agency…. One version claims that underworld figures actually were recruited to carry out the plot.” The story had been brought to Anderson by Washington attorney Edward Morgan, apparently as a signal to the government of what the consequences might be of prosecuting his client Rosselli for an alleged card-cheating scheme. Harvey urged the Agency to block prosecution, but the Justice Department went ahead with the case, and Rosselli was convicted of violating interstate gambling laws. In 1971 Rosselli himself started talking, first to Anderson and then to a California court in an effort to win a reduction in his sentence. When Anderson’s associate, Les Whitten, called Indianapolis to confirm Rosselli’s story, Harvey acknowledged knowing the gangster, but little more. “This is a long story,” he told Whitten. “I don’t think it ought to be printed.”
Harvey did not tell his long story until 1975, when he was called to testify before the newly created Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Harvey surprised the committee with his willingness to talk. “We’d heard so much about what a tough customer he was that we were afraid we wouldn’t be able to get anything out of him,” one staff member recalled. “As it turned out, we could hardly shut him up.” Some of the staff members thought they detected a subtle whispering campaign by the CIA designed to discredit their star witness. They heard so many stories about Harvey’s three-and four-martini lunches that they briefly considered discounting his testimony about events that took place in the afternoon. But Harvey’s ability to recall thirteen-year-old events in precise detail stood out in sharp contrast to some of the other witnesses, whose loss of memory sometimes strained credulity. “All these big shots from the Kennedy administration came slinking in, worried about their reputations,” one committee investigator said. “And then came Harvey—the assassin himself—saying, ‘Yeah, I did it, and I’d do it again if ordered.’ ”
Harvey’s only worry was about having his picture taken. His testimony was heard in closed session, but hordes of reporters, photographers, and television cameramen waited outside. Matching the name with the face would stir up too many operations still alive, Harvey warned the committee. That was probably an exaggeration, but it was certainly true that anybody who saw Bill Harvey once would recognize him a second time. “Harvey made the greatest impression on me of any man I ever met in my life,” one committee staff member said. Harvey was the only major witness to testify before the committee who managed to get in and out of Washington without having his picture taken. Rosselli went to great lengths to avoid photographers but saw his picture on page one the next morning. Fourteen months later his body was found with its legs sawed off, stuffed inside an oil drum floating in Miami’s Dumbfound-ling Bay.
Harvey and Rosselli, the CIA’s odd couple, were the only two witnesses to command the attendance of all eleven senators on the committee—a rarity for a secret session that offered no chance for public exposure. After all the stories they had heard, the senators could not resist asking Harvey whether he still carried a gun. No, Harvey 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 on 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. Everyone suddenly noticed the bulge under his jacket and decided that he had started carrying a gun for self-protection. Wisecracks such as “Don’t take any candy from that man” began to circulate. When Sam Giancana, the Chicago mobster who had participated in the early attempts to kill Castro, was found murdered in his home, one law editor quipped, “Where was Bill Harvey on the night Sam Giancana was killed?” 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. ITT collaboration with the CIA in attempting to block the 1970 election of Chilean Marxist Salvador Allende was already the subject of one congressional investigation, and the story of how ex-CIA officer E. Howard Hunt had donned a red wig and used a speech-alteration device to interrogate ITT lobbyist Dita Beard about her firm’s involvement in the funding of the 1972 Republican National Convention had provided one of the more ludicrous moments of the Watergate affair.
Harvey was about to be fired. “The fact that Bobbs-Merrill is a subsidiary of ITT had some bearing on it,” Dave Cox acknowledged, but the main reason was that “his drinking started to get out of control.” The termination form landed on Cox’s desk with a box labeled “Intemperance” checked off. Cox asked Harvey’s supervisor what it was all about and was told that Harvey “had been gone for days at a time and that his work was not at all satisfactory.” Cox called Harvey in for a talk. “I’ve drunk heavily all my life,” Harvey told Cox. “I just can’t handle it anymore. It’s out of control. I just have to realize I’m an alcoholic.” Convinced that Harvey intended to reform, Cox refused to sign the termination form, citing ITT’s policy about the rehabilitation of alcoholic employees. 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 five-forty-five, Tuesday morning, June 7, 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. When he regained consciousness the doctors told him the operation had failed. “I’ve never lost a battle in my life,” Harvey said with more bravado than accuracy, “but I’m prepared to lose this one.” He died, holding his wife’s hand, at ten minutes past two in the afternoon of June 8.
“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.” She had received more than three hundred letters of condolence from people all over the world, she said. She had also received some unexpected callers—two attempted break-ins at the Harvey home. “They’re after his papers,” she said, “but I burned everything.” At the funeral home she took people over to view the body and told them how he had “stemmed the tide in Berlin.” She said he had been station chief in Berlin at the time of the airlift, which was not true. She could not talk about the things he had really done. She proudly announced that he would be buried wearing his favorite boots and silver belt buckle. Then the bitterness broke through. Standing beside the casket, she launched into a tearful tirade against “that awful Frank Church,” chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. She was entitled to her rancor. 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.”
What had happened to Harvey was in part what had happened to the CIA. It, too, had been asked to do things nobody should have been asked to do, been given secret powers no one should have been given. The CIA had risen above its station in life. It belonged in the back alleys of espionage, not in the corridors of power, just as Harvey belonged in a tunnel beneath East Berlin, spying on the enemy, not across the table from the President’s brother, planning a coup. Nothing, of course, was clear cut. Even when the CIA stuck to its primary mission of espionage, the record remained ambiguous, as with Harvey’s Berlin tunnel, which had been blown to the Russians from the start. However badly abused and misused from without, the CIA always seemed to carry the seeds of destruction within.
For Angleton, the seed had been sown early and spread its roots wide. Whether or not the KGB ever succeeded in penetrating the CIA, it had at the very least infiltrated Angleton’s mind. Hadn’t two of his chief mentors been Kim Philby and Anatoli Golitsin? Angleton had created a world of deception and disinformation that for him became the only world. Even his severest critics acknowledged that he had not created this world from thin air. “It wasn’t just insanity,” a longtime Angleton observer said. “There were precedents one had to take into account,” precedents such as Philby, who had secretly served his Soviet masters for fifteen years before he was uncovered, and Golitsin, who for all his ravings had displayed an uncanny knowledge of secret NATO documents. With such precedents, it was certainly not madness for Angleton to suspect the existence of a mole. But he had taken suspicion and turned it into reality. For Angleton, every CIA misadventure was by KGB design; for that matter, so was every CIA success, since it was merely setting the stage for the disaster to come. Under Golitsin’s spell, he had even come to doubt the bona fides of the invaluable Oleg Penkovsky. Locked in this world, Angleton had become his own worst enemy. With every new KGB conspiracy that Angleton spied, Colby became more determined to get rid of him. Colby didn’t believe Petty’s analysis of Angleton’s career any more than he believed Angleton’s analysis of the KGB. Colby would have had to believe in Angleton to believe that he was the mole. Angleton would have appreciated the irony of that, but Colby never told him. The mirrors had played their final trick.
Wilderness of Mirrors Page 26
