"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.

No wonder you can't get Atlee's novel new. It's irrelevant now and you can't read it without smirking at the horrible plotting and the choice of baddies (yes, Nazis, of course). The characters are flat and lifeless. It's really a bad novel in many respects.

Yet it is a fun read! The action moves swiftly once you get used to Atlee's haphazard style of writing where you are made to understand something only a few pages later. Smile at the unadulterated (pardon the pun) chauvinism and the fact that the hero is wounded about every twenty pages or so but isn't deterred by this in the least. This makes you appreciate the mastery of Ian Fleming all the more...