The Nightwatch

by David Atlee Phillips

Book Overview

For 25 years David Atlee Phillips stood "the night watch" for the CIA. He directed Western Hemisphere Operations when the Chilean government was overthrown (with CIA help) in 1973. Phillips details... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345302257
• ISBN13: 9780345302250
• Release Date: September 1982
• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The Rosetta Book?

First, great job by the first reviewer. He/she really gets across the sinister strangeness of this work of bio-fiction. The book is hard to come by. It is worth the search, for David Atlee Phillips was truly one of the most important men in U.S. Cold War history. (Probably more important than Presidents such as Carter, Ford & Bush I.) He had a major hand in the creation/implementation of genocidal U.S. policy toward Central & South America, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands. He organized the overthrow and murder of Salvador Allende in Chile. He failed to do the same with Fidel Castro. He exterminated the socialist democracy of mid-1950s Guatemala. He most probably had a hand in the national security state entrapment of Richard Nixon. (AKA "Watergate".) And -- certainly his crowning achievment -- he managed the 1963 Dallas coup d'etat which took the life of John F. Kennedy. Of course, this book masks all that. Or does it? Worms are eating him now. It's too bad a man can die but once.

5 Stars for Forensic Historical Value

"For 25 years David Atlee Phillips stood "the night watch" for the CIA."But according to Donald Freed and the simple facts, Phillips was an active spook after he retired and founded the AFIO or ARIO -- Association of Retired Intel Officers -- putting Claire Booth Luce on the board of directors, and acting through the association to manage the South Florida cuban-exiles at arms length, since they were becoming a liability to the company."Phillips details his experiences in 18 countries. Along the way, we learn much about the 'Company' . . ." Phillips writes about his "experience" in certain countries, when he was actually in other countries. You don't learn anything about the "Company" until you realize the level of censorship to which CIA authors subjected their work; you won't learn much about Phillips' role in the "Company" until you realize the full implications of his efforts to be a playwright and an author, and his ongoing activity as a community theater actor during his CIA career.But if you accept the possibility that Phillips was somewhat narcissistic, and that he had a real itch to cleverly reveal yet conceal his participation in the greatest crime of the twentieth century, then "The Night Watch" becomes a real treasure. One might actually conclude that it is a Rosetta Stone to Dealey Plaza and the sheep-dipping of Lee Harvey Oswald. And when you turn over in your mind the implications of Phillips' "specialty" for the "company" -- that of "propaganda specialist" -- it raises to new, quantum levels the insidious nature of the Dealey Plaza assassination and the coverup that continues into 2001.This book should become a collector's item, and probably is a collector's item, to people who understand something about it. None of the symbols and images and strange anecdotes included in the book would ever be admitted as evidence in court if Phillips were still alive, but that observation is a moot one, since he has been dead since 1987.Parodying the title "Tibetan Book of the Dead", I like to call it the "Texan Book of Lies". I am not a really superstitious person, but Phillips was born on Halloween; he often joked that he was "born to be a spook"; he printed the book with a black-on-orange jacket; and he had worked his way through college selling cemetery plots to little old ladies in Fort Worth, Texas.You could let your kids read it, and they would never suspect anything, nor would it do any harm. But when I see it, sitting on my coffee table, I imagine I hear a swarm of flies buzzing around it. And he was a good writer, although I think he betrayed his personality, so it makes for pretty darn good reading.