Product Description

William K. Harvey was the CIA’s most daring and successful field operator during the tense, early days of the Cold War. Extremely intelligent, a dedicated martini drinker, coarse in manner and appearance, both loved and hated, he was larger than life. But just as Harvey reached his zenith, fate and personal flaws caused his swift, dramatic downfall. Bayard Stockton provides a rich portrait of the man, including accounts from Harvey’s family, friends, and former CIA colleagues who have never spoken publicly before.

Harvey’s intelligence career began at the FBI, where he hunted Nazi spies. After running afoul of J. Edgar Hoover, Harvey went to the fledgling CIA in 1947. Harvey’s CIA successes included the unmasking of Soviet spy Kim Philby and masterminding the famous Berlin Tunnel that tapped Russian communications. The pinnacle of Harvey’s career came as chief of both ZR/RIFLE, the agency’s political assassination operation, and Task Force W, the group targeted on Cuba. But Harvey was in constant conflict with Bobby Kennedy, who micromanaged operations against Fidel Castro. Harvey profanely insulted the president’s brother during a tense meeting, which led to Harvey’s reassignment to Rome. His alcoholism worsened in Italian exile, and he was forced to retire. He became a nonperson.

However, Harvey resurfaced during Senate hearings in the 1970s. When his supervision of the plots to assassinate Castro was revealed, many labeled Harvey the epitome of CIA excess. Harvey’s continuing friendship with Johnny Rosselli, a Mafia figure who had helped the CIA with Cuban operations, opened further questions as some—most notably Robert Blakey, former chief counsel to the House Subcommittee on Assassinations—linked Rosselli to JFK’s assassination.

Flawed Patriot cuts through the rumors and inaccuracies surrounding Harvey to show a brilliant but flawed man who was undoubtedly one of the most talented and imaginative officers in the agency’s storied history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #566778 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 376 pages

From the Publisher
Offers new insight into an important and controversial CIA career

Written by a former CIA officer who served under Harvey

About the Author
Bayard Stockton was recruited by the CIA in the early 1950s and was posted to Berlin, where he served under Bill Harvey for two years. He left the CIA to become Newsweek’s bureau chief in Bonn and later London. He was also a freelance foreign correspondent in Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean. He passed away in 2006.

Customer Reviews

A Worthy Expose of An American Traitor
This book should be read by every citizen seeking to understand where American government has gone wrong over the past 60 years. Flawed, yes, but critically important to our understanding of misguided actions and indeed meglomania in power centers too far removed from public scrutiny and democratic control.

The problem with so-called "patriots" like William Harvey is that their arrogance and self-absorption - so evident in his acute alcoholism - tends to prevent basic comprehension that they quite rightly serve at the request of others, in particular those individuals entrusted through elective office with preserving those principles and practices that define our democratic form of government.

William Harvey was a misfit granted far too much power by a rogue system of covert power that had grown exponentially under a corrupt and complicit Eisenhower-Nixon administration that had knowingly condoned repeated violation of laws and human rights at home and abroad through programs of assassination, coups, private wars, invasions, government destabilizations, media infiltration, propaganda, domestic spying, illegal surveillance, complicity with war criminals and organized crime figures, manipulation of or otherwise destruction of evidence, and lying to congress and executive branch superiors, including even the president.

Harvey was, ultimately, the exact opposite of a patriot. He was in fact, an assassin and traitor.

Robert Kennedy, as chief law enforcement officer for the United States and a key government official entrusted by the president with overseeing sensitive foreign operations, had every right to micro-manage affairs in order to prevent the insubordination of Harvey and others who sought to control events in violation of superiors' orders and U.S. government objectives. If anything, Kennedy was far too lenient in merely reassigning this arrogant, reckless, and insubordinate loose cannon, especially after Harvey's reckless unilateral actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis came close to causing a nuclear World War III.

Most egregiously, Harvey and others within the CIA like David Atlee Phillips, after participating in the assassinations of their superiors, then went before Congress and lied to the American people, having destroyed or buried documents to the contrary, and retained or even manufactured others that would tend to portray them in a favorable light, while falsely incriminating those now unable to defend themselves and correct the public record.

As for the author's difficulty in composing and arranging such a major work as this, it is to his credit that this book could even be published considering the CIA's suppression of facts, disinformation, and gross manipulation of media in this and other countries around the world.

Kudos to the author for creating an important work that contributes to greater public awareness and understanding of the forces that have undermined democracy in America.

A tough read
There's a lot of great info in this book, but unless you're REALLY into FBI/CIA/Bill Harvey, it's very dry reading. It jumps around a bit, but if you persevere, you'll find some interesting tidbits here and there.

A Brilliant Title
This book has a brilliant title. Bill Harvey was indeed a Patriot. And he certainly had flaws. His drinking was a problem from early in his life and combined with smoking was at least partly responsible for the heart attacks that killed him at the relatively early age of 61.

He was also not exactly what you would call a team player. He was fired by J. Edgar Hoover for breaking regulations. His relationship with Robert Kennedy might best be called hatred. While he did some brilliant work, like identifying Kim Philby as a KGB agent and the famous tunnel into East Berlin, his relationship with the Mafia and rumors about being involved in the JFK assassination are not the sort of things that help get promotions within an organization like the CIA.

This is both an interesting biography of a full fledged master spy, and a history of the early days of the CIA and the Cold War. The author worked for Harvey in Berlin for two years before becomming a journalist and now a biographer.