Flawed Patriot

"This is a biography of another covert CIA operations man, Bill Harvey. He was a great character, one of those very old-fashioned people – he always carried a gun and he believed that the operation was worth everything, no matter what the cost. He is rumoured to have taken his gun with him into the Oval Office at one stage and couldn’t utter a sentence without profanities. He was head of Berlin operations in the early 1950s, charged with setting up the operation to tap Soviet communications in Berlin. He put taps in tunnels under Berlin and it worked but unfortunately one of those involved, George Blake, was secretly spying for the Russians and told them about it. So the Russians knew they were being tapped but couldn’t show that they knew so they had to try and carry on as normal. The CIA did, I think, get some useful information out of it. There were rumours that Harvey would go down into the tunnels himself with a big gun to make sure there were no Russians snooping about. He was fond of a drink, Harvey, and when he was posted to Rome they had to bring him back – he was a bit of a loose cannon. But he did feel that there was no limit to the operations you could plan. He was nicknamed ‘The Pear’ because he looked like a pear from the side. There is a great picture of him by a pool in a pair of very small swimming trunks. Harvey, and the characters in the first book I chose, would probably never get through the recruitment process nowadays."