Had it been Bill Harvey who confronted me at the edge of sleep? I had a curious experience that night, and it was far from wholly unpleasant. I felt West Berlin coming nearer to my life. My first foreign tour awaited me. Even this grim safe house with its olfactory echo of old cigarettes and wet cigar butts, its memories of men waiting for other men to arrive, was a harbinger of the years to come. My loneliness could serve much purpose. The mean appurtenances of our gray apartment, spectral by the streetlight that came through the window shades, as brown by now as old newspapers, gave me a sense of why my father chose to stay here rather than at a hotel. A safe house was the emblem of our profession, our monk’s cell. Perhaps that was why my father had produced the transparent fiction that this was a friend’s apartment. In the act of penetrating his cover story, I would see a safe house with eyes of discovery. Many a rendezvous in West Berlin would look like this, I supposed, and I was to prove right.
Let me describe the bizarre vanity of the meditation that followed. Lying in this habitat, I felt equipped to travel through dark spaces and engage in deeds not free of the odor of burning sulphur. A few feet away was my father’s troubled body, and I, sensitive to the specters that would bring a man as strong as himself to cry out in barking sounds as though to warn off nocturnal enemies, thought of my old taste for caverns, including that underground city of excavated rooms whose plans I had drawn as a boy. That brought me to contemplate once more the cavern in my own head. It had been left in place of whatever half-formed monsters of harsh tissue or imperfect flesh had been uprooted from my brain. Did that unfilled volume now draw me toward many a strange situation I would yet encounter?
At that moment I thought of Harlot with whole admiration. He believed that our work could shift the massive weight of historical drift by the only lever our heavens had given us, the readiness to dare damnation in our soul. We were here to challenge evil, negotiate its snares, and voyage out into devious activities so far removed from the clear field of all we had been taught that one could never see the light at the end of such a crooked tunnel. Not when one was in the middle.
On just this thought, I fell asleep. I did not know that my reverie had produced a kind of revelation. The larger-than-life secret of West Berlin alluded to on this night was nothing less than a fifteen-hundred-foot tunnel dug in holy secrecy, under Harvey’s supervision, into East Berlin for the purpose of tapping Soviet military headquarters’ long telephone lines out to Moscow.
14
I WAS TO HEAR MORE ABOUT BILL HARVEY BEFORE I LEFT. HARLOT NOT only provided me with a full account of the fateful party in Washington that Kim Philby threw for Guy Burgess, but entrusted me—even as my father had predicted—with all the fathoms-deep hush-hush about William King Harvey’s tunnel. That, I thought, was a true farewell gift: Harlot was taking me into the inner house of the Company.
I flew from Andrews Air Force Base to Tempelhof in West Berlin on a Douglas C-124. A fat, four-motor Globemaster called “Old Shakey,” it shook like an old radiator. You mounted this plane from a ramp in the rear, and those twenty of us who were on our way to Europe, Air Force personnel for the most part, were sent up into the cargo well, forward of the vehicles and crates that would be loaded on after. Strapped into our seats, we faced to the stern and looked down on cargo whose neatly packed contents took up considerably more room than ourselves, and seemed, by comparison, more respected in treatment.
The flight took nine hours to Mildenhall, in England, where we stopped for another nine hours before moving on to Mannheim and Berlin. I was on that plane, or waiting for it to go up again, a total of twenty-four hours, and the interior was unheated, and had no view. I stared at electrical cables on the cabin walls. It was the longest trip.
After attempts to read in the poor cabin light had failed, and conversation with men on either side of me had ground down (for I was discovering again how circumscribed was conversation with people who were not in the Agency), I reached at last, somewhere in the middle of the night, an island of contemplation sufficiently removed from the grinding of the airplane’s motors and the vibration of the cabin to allow me to dwell on my last memory of Washington, a farewell dinner with Harlot, again at Sans Souci.
He told anecdotes all night, filling me in on what he obviously considered the true flavor of the Company. Yes, Herrick, went his presentation, you have discovered after all that training with motley instructors, and demoralizing days on the files that, yes, we plod, we mess up, we go in circles, we expand too quickly here, and are out of it there, but it’s the people who count, the one hundred, two hundred, at most five hundred people, who are the active, lively nerve of the Company. All those thousands of others are but the insulation we need, our own corps of bureaucrats there to keep the other Washington bureaucracies away from us. At the center, however, it can be splendid.
“The only real problem,” he said, looking into his brandy, “is to spot the Devil when you see him. One must always be on the lookout for someone like Kim Philby. What a devil! Have I ever given you the go on Harvey’s night at Philby’s party?”
He knew he hadn’t. He was launching another anecdote. It may have been the Hennessey, but a vein in Harlot’s forehead began to throb prominently. “I don’t know,” he said, “if any Englishman who came over here from MI6 or the British Foreign Office was ever more popular than Kim Philby. A good many of us got to know him around London during the war, and we took up the friendship again when he arrived in 1949. We used to have the best lunches. He was shy with strangers because of that frightful stammer, but such an agreeable man. Something sandy about him, the hair, the jacket, the old speckled pipe. He drank like a loon, never showed it. You have to respect that. It suggests an intensity of purpose when you can handle all that drink. Harry, I forswear sentimental exaggeration, but Kim Philby had a quality the English do produce in many of their best people. It’s as if their own person embodies everything that’s first rate about their country. And, of course, we had the word. Kim Philby was bound to head up MI6 one of these days.
“Now, it wasn’t altogether as good-fellow as that. During the war, MI6 used to treat us as if we OSS were good-natured oafs who did well to kneel at the feet of British savvy. They gave us a hard, snobby time. ‘You chaps may be the plutocrats, but, don’t you know, we still have this.’ And they would lay a finger to their temple. We were awfully in awe of them. We were so young at Intelligence. When Philby came to Washington in ’49, it was still like that. We were expanding the Company every day, and it was obvious the British were going to end up in our shadow, but, oh, that little nod of the head, that paper-thin smile. They had it. I used to study Kim Philby. Such filigree. There was his poor country to our wealthy one, and him stammering half the time, yet even the best of us felt a competitive minus when we had to go face to face.
“The thing about Kim—my God, just in saying his name I discover I’m still egregiously fond of Philby—is that he was audacious. True wit resides in audacity. You have to know when to break away from the book move. After the British Foreign Office sent Guy Burgess to Washington as First Secretary, Philby invited Guy to move in with him. Now, looking back on it, I still don’t comprehend how the Russians dared to work with Burgess. He had to be the most improbable KGB asset. He was, as you may have heard, a holy, roaring mess, a homosexual of the worst sort, a bully on the prowl for slender fellows ready to turn queer. ‘I’m going to plunder you,’ is the kind of look that came off Guy Burgess. You did not measure his drinking by glasses, but by bottles. He also smoked like a Rube Goldberg filthy-nicotine machine. Besides which, he wore white clothes considerably clotted with his last half-dozen meals. He was half as grand as Randolph Churchill, and had manners absolutely as bad. One has to expect Englishmen from good families to be awful with waiters. I think they are seeking to pay back all those Scotch nannies who used to shovel porridge into their mouths. But Burgess was the worst. ‘See here, you bloody fucking fool,’ he would bellow at the nearest waiter, ‘are
you a cretin, or merely presenting yourself as hopelessly inadequate?’” Hugh, imitating Burgess, spoke loudly enough to have embarrassed us if Sans Souci had been empty, but dinner clamor was our security.
“Philby would always reassure us, ‘Guy has been suffering through the most frightful aftereffects of his car accident, poor Guy.’ Philby would say, ‘Guy is talented, but his head is b-b-b-banged-up, you see.’ Philby made it sound like a war wound. The loyalty of one Brit for another!
“Well, enter Bill Harvey. He had the curious luck to be invited to Philby’s one night in Spring 1951 for a large dinner. Everybody was there, Harvey, Burgess, hordes of us and our ladies. J. Edgar Buddha almost came, but then he heard about Harvey’s being invited and did not show. Bill Harvey, to bring you a little more into the picture, was at that time very much en route to becoming our in-house pet. Since then, he’s become considerably more than a toy. But at that time, we loved him. We’d taken him up. His handshake was even clammier than his pistol butt, but he was our FBI man. To get started in business, we had, of course, done our best to raid the Bureau, and signed on a few of their agents, among whom Harvey was the cream. You know, he’d helped snag the Rosenbergs. J. Edgar Buddha never forgave him for quitting the marble halls of Justice to come over to us. Then to make matters worse: Harvey, what with old contacts at FBI, was obtaining a lot of back-drawer information from the Bureau that we could use. FBI deserved no less. They had been poaching on CIA jurisdictions in six or seven countries along about then. In fact, they were hoping to kill us in our infancy. It was inhumane! Why, Allen Dulles could hardly get through to Buddha on the phone. ‘Tell me,’ he once asked Hoover, ‘what is CIA doing to offend you so?’
“‘Mr. Dulles,’ J. Edgar replies, ‘tell Bill Harvey to quit pinching our stuff.’
“Well, that puts Harvey into our graces. Naturally, Philby invites Bill and his wife, Libby, to dinner. Bill Harvey was married to Libby then. I could have warned Philby not to give such an invitation. I was not sanguine about the social prospects. When you put a plain like Bill Harvey alongside a fancy like Guy Burgess, Heaven may not be able to help.
“Well, we all start drinking. Harvey can go round for round with Burgess. So can Libby. Harvey’s wife is out of Indiana or Kentucky, some agricultural seat, a sexy-mousy girl with no presence at all, I fear, except for a huge horse-laugh that’s so bad it could only belong to a duchess. No scullery maid would ever be allowed to guffaw in such fashion. Whoopee! We all get five yards under. It’s a revel. Harvey has been boasting up and down Foggy Bottom that he has had sexual intercourse every day of his life since some such tender age as twelve. So help me. If it can’t be his wife, he implies, it might be yours. And Libby is not only kissing everyone at the party—‘Here’s mud in your eye,’ she keeps yelling—but is also carrying on with, of all people, Guy Burgess. Guy even takes his hands off the boy he’s towed along to play bumper-cars with her rump. Under it all, is this desperate, pervasive wash of what I call social sorrow. It’s insufficiently recognized as one of the major passions. Harvey and Libby are full of social sorrow because in relation to the rest, they know damned well that no amount of rump-bumping is going to lower the real barriers.
“Burgess starts to brag about his powers as a caricaturist. ‘Draw me,’ asks Libby. ‘Oh, I’ll do that, darling,’ says Burgess. He makes a sketch of Libby. Shows it to me first. I pride myself on keeping a few wits together—but I tell you, Harry, I wasn’t able to say a word. Burgess drew Libby too well. There she is in an armchair with her legs apart, skirts up, her fingers right where they’ll be—he’s even drawn her pubic hair with detail. An expression on her face you can’t mistake. It’s how she must look at avalanche time. Burgess is a percipient devil!
“Now, just as I take this drawing in, Burgess whips it from my hand, and passes it around. Most people are decent enough to pop no more than a quick peek, but no one, by now, really wants to bury it. We’ve put up with a lot from Bill Harvey. We are, in fact, surprisingly ready to witness his woe. He walks across the room, intercepts the drawing, and—I thought his heart would burst. I also passed through an instant when I expected him to draw his gun. I could feel the impulse clear across the room. Holding on to himself with an effort of will worthy of a boa constrictor’s embrace, he seizes Libby’s hand—by now, she’s seen the drawing, too, and is wailing—and walks out with her. I have never witnessed any look of hatred equal to the bolt Bill Harvey threw at Burgess. ‘I wish,’ says Bill, ‘I wish . . .’ He can’t get it out. Then he does. ‘Choke on a nigger’s cock,’ says Bill Harvey, and is out the door.
“‘The man has just given his blessing,’ says Burgess.
“A month later Burgess is called back to London. From there he quickly decamps with Sir Donald Maclean for parts unknown, but, of course, it can be no place but Moscow. Maclean, also stationed in America, has had the most god-awful high clearance at Los Alamos. So, the question now was Philby. Could he possibly be working for the Soviets? We can’t believe that. I tell you, he’s too nice. I am hardly prepared, I’ll confess to you. I even got out a three-page memo more or less to exonerate Philby. Noblesse oblige. I was less witting then. My memo also spoke of Burgess: I related that Guy joined us at lunch one day in a soiled white British naval officer’s uniform, wholly unshaven, and proceeded to carry on about ‘the damned exaggerations and over-claims in the technical data on American Oldsmobile’s blood-sucking new Dynaflow transmission!’ Burgess knows a lot about automobiles; he tells me as much. Also, Burgess brags of having been to bed on countless occasions with Philby’s male secretary. It’s virtually an FBI memo, those three pages. Gossip, no grit. But Philby, on balance, comes through my audit with more credits than debits.
“At this point, if not for Wild Bill Harvey, Kim might have weathered the storm. Possibly, given a few years, he could have worked back into MI6’s good graces. Who, after all, ever heard of the KGB allowing two of their agents to live in the same house? Kim must be innocent of everything but bad judgment.
“Harvey, however, had his own memo to write. He had been putting together fifteen- and twenty-hour stretches on the files. That’s always the other side of Harvey. Hard work. He was also pulling in whatever he could obtain from the best FBI counterintelligence. FBI had cracked a few Russian codes they were not about to share with us, but, old FBI buddies being what they are, Harvey did obtain one Soviet intercept that J. Edgar had been keeping under his monumental seat, and it made reference to a high British mole. The specifications fit Kim Philby well enough for the powers to accept Harvey’s version rather than mine. ‘Take back your Philby and try him,’ CIA tells MI6. Which they now had to do, much as they hated the prospect. Philby got a draw at his MI6 hearing. No incarceration, but was obliged to resign. Poor Kim. I say ‘poor Kim,’ and yet, if he’s guilty, he’s the worst of all. In fact, I’ve come to the most reluctant conviction that he was KGB all the while.”
Harlot took bitter savor of the Churchill before adding, “I’m afraid it was generally accepted that Harvey had proved superior to me on this case. Do you know, it wasn’t long before he accused your honorable godfather of being a Soviet agent. It’s Alger Hiss time, don’t forget. Joe McCarthy is getting his good start in life. The nicer your family antecedents, the worse, I must say, you now look. So I was asked to take a lie-detector test, and am fluttered all over the place, but pass. No incurable heart disease. And Harvey becomes one of our larger people. Why do I tell you this story?”
“I’m not sure I know.”
“Because I wish to remind you one more time: The Devil is the most beautiful creature God ever made. Drink to Kim Philby, a consummate swine. Drink to your new Chief, God’s own wild boar, King William, I do mean, William King Harvey. He’s no Devil if beauty is the criterion.”
PART TWO
BERLIN
1
DIX BUTLER CAME BY IN A JEEP TO PICK ME UP AT TEMPELHOF AIRPORT. Once again I would share accommodations with four Junior Officers, and Dix
was one of them. A few blocks off the Kurfürstendamm, in what must have been a substantial neighborhood before the war, our apartment was on the fourth floor of a six-story edifice, the only habitation still standing on its side of the street. In the stairwell, elaborate moldings full of cracked plaster gave way to plasterboard walls at the higher landings. Parquet floors showed swatches of linoleum. It was in accord with my first impression of Berlin—dusty, heavy, half-patched, gray, depressed, yet surprisingly libidinous. I felt depravity on every street corner, as real to me as vermin and neon lights.
I do not know if I can afford even one more reference to my sex life (which was still an empty ledger) but these days I was reacting to the presence of sex like a devil’s imp in a sealed cylinder. As I came off the landing ramp from “Old Shakey,” I had a unique experience. My first sight of the close-packed working-class streets surrounding Tempelhof produced an erection in me. Either the air or the architecture was an aphrodisiac, and panoramas of West Berlin went flying by the window like wartime newsreels of bombed cities. I saw buildings in every stage of restoration or demolition, half-destroyed, or going up in rubble-cleared lots that revealed the sheared-off backs of buildings from the next street. Billboards, bulldozers, cranes, trucks, military vehicles, were everywhere. It seemed one year after the war, not ten.
As we drove along, Dix was discursive. “I like it,” he said. “West Berliners have the quickest minds I ever ran into. New Yorkers are nothing compared to these people. I was trying to read a German newspaper on a park bench the other day, and this small neat dude in a pinstripe suit, professional type, is sitting across from me. He speaks up in perfect English, ‘See that policeman over there?’ I look. It’s a cop, one more hefty Kraut. ‘I see him,’ I say. ‘What’s it to you, pal?’ ‘I bet,’ says the stranger, ‘that cop shits like an elephant.’ Then he goes back to his newspaper. Berlin, Hubbard. They can tell you how the cop squats. Compared to them, we are sparrows picking seeds out of the horse-balls, and the horse manure is everywhere. It’s all ex-Nazis. General Gehlen who runs BND for the West Germans is one. He used to be financed by us.”