William Colby
For the first secretary of the Sierra Club, see William Edward ColbyWilliam Egan Colby (
January 4,
1920 â€"
April 27,
1996) became
Director of Central Intelligence on
September 4,
1973, after
James R. Schlesinger. It was Colby who launched the
Accelerated Pacification Campaign during the
Vietnam War. He later would reveal a large amount of information to Congress, such as CIA attempts to assassinate
Fidel Castro and the Assassination of
President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He was fired by
President Gerald Ford and replaced with
George H.W. Bush on
January 30,
1976.
Colby was born in
St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1920. His father, Elbridge Colby, was a professor of English and Army officer who raised his son in a peripatetic manner, including a stint in
Tientsin, China. William attended
Princeton University, graduating in 1940 and entering
Columbia Law School the following year.
Office of Strategic Services
Colby volunteered for the Army in 1941 and served with the
Office of Strategic Services during the war, parachuting behind enemy lines twice. First he deployed to
France as a Jedburgh commanding Team BRUCE in mid-August of 1944 until overrun by Allied conventional forces later that Fall. His second clandestine mission was leading the NORSO Group into Norway on a sabotage mission. After the war Colby graduated from Columbia Law School, and then briefly practiced law in
William Joseph Donovan's New York firm. Inspired by his liberal beliefs, he moved to Washington to work for the
National Labor Relations Board.
Central Intelligence Agency
Shortly thereafter, an OSS friend offered him a job at CIA, and Colby accepted. Colby spent the next twelve years in the field, first in
Stockholm,
Sweden. There, he helped set up the
stay-behind networks of
Gladio, a covert paramilitary organization organized by the CIA to make any Soviet occupation more difficult, as he later described in his memoirs [
1]. According to a
November 25,
1990 article by the Danish daily newspaper
Berlingske Tidende, quoted by Daniele Ganser in his 2005 book on Gladio, a source named "Q" confirmed William Colby's revelations in his memoirs about the setting-up of stay-behind armies in
Scandinavia:
Colby's story is absolutely correct. Absalon was created in the early 1950s. Colby was a member of the world spanning laymen catholic organisation Opus Dei, which, using a modern term, could be called right-wing. Opus Dei played a central role in the setting up of Gladio in the whole of Europe and also in Denmark... The leader of Gladio was Harder who was probably not a Catholic. But there are not many Catholics in Denmark and the basic elements making up the Danish Gladio were former [WW II] resistance people - former prisoners of Tysk Vestre Faengsel, Froslevlejren, Neuengamme and also of the Danish Brigade.
William Colby then spent much of the 1950s based in
Rome, where he led the Agency's covert political operations campaign to support moderate anti-Communist parties. After World War II, Italia was the first ground for the CIA covert operations to stop the Communist from legally taking power, in a strategy later dubbed
strategy of tension by the Italian press.
Vietnam
In 1959 Colby became the CIA's Chief of Station in
Saigon,
Vietnam, where he served until 1962, when he returned to Washington to become the Chief of CIA's Far East Division. In 1968 he returned to Vietnam as Deputy to Robert Komer, and shortly thereafter succeeded him as head of the U.S./South Vietnamese rural pacification effort. This was an attempt to quell the Communist insurgency in South Vietnam. Part of the effort was the controversial
Phoenix Program - an initiative designed to identify and attack the "
Viet Cong Infrastructure". There is considerable debate about the merit of the program, which included
assassination and
torture. However it does appear to have had some effect in reducing the level of insurgent strengthin South Vietnam.
CIA Director
Colby returned to Washington in 1971 and became Executive Director of CIA. After long-time DCI
Richard Helms was dismissed by President Nixon in 1973, James Schlesinger assumed the helm at the Agency. A strong believer in reform of the CIA and the Intelligence Community more broadly, Schlesinger had written a 1971 Bureau of the Budget report outlining his views on the subject. Colby, despite a career spent in the DDP, agreed with Schlesinger's reformist approach and Schlesinger appointed him head of the clandestine branch in early 1973. When Nixon reshuffled his agency heads and made Schlesinger Secretary of Defense, Colby emerged as a natural candidate for DCI--apparently based on the recommendation that he was a professional who would not make waves.
Colby's tenure as DCI, which lasted two and a half tumultuous years, was characterized chiefly by the Church and Pike congressional investigations into alleged U.S. intelligence malfeasance over the preceding twenty-five years. Colby's view was that revealing such misdeedswas both advisable and right. Colby believed that the actual scope of such misdeeds was not actually that great, and that Congress and the American people would recognize that fact, do what was necessary to ensure such things did not happen again, and move on. Supporters of Colby's method argue that he saved the Agency from destruction by showing that it was accountable and an instrument of the Constitution rather than a "rogue elephant." Detractors say Colby gave away too much or did not understand that he was only feeding the fire of politicized congressional witch hunts.
Colby's time as DCI was also eventful on the world stage. Shortly after he assumed leadership, the Yom Kippur War broke out, an event that surprised not only American intelligence agencies, but Israelis as well. Meanwhile, after many years of involvement, South Vietnam fell to Communist forces in April 1975, a particularly difficult blow for Colby, who had dedicated so much of his life and career to the American effort there.
President Ford, advised by
Henry Kissinger, dismissed Colby in late 1975 because he had become too politically damaging to the Administration. He was replaced by George H. W. Bush.
Post-CIA career
In later life, and in consonance with his long-held liberal views, Colby became a supporter of the nuclear freeze and of reductions in military spending. He practiced law and advised various bodies on intelligence matters.
Colby also lent his expertise and knowledge, along with
Oleg Kalugin, to the Activision game "Spycraft: The Great Game", which was released shortly before his death. Both Colby and Kalugin played themselves in the game.
According to him,
Gladio "stay-behind" secret NATO paramilitary organizations in Western Europe were "a major program".
He was contributing editor of Strategic Investments Newsletter at the time of his death.
On
April 27,
1996, Colby died in a supposed boating accident near his home in
Rock Point, Maryland. He reportedly did not mention any canoeing plans to his wife, nor was it normal for him to go boating at night. Colby had left his home unlocked, his computer on, and a partly eaten dinner on the table. [
2]. Colby's body was eventually found, underwater, on
May 6,
1996. The life jacket his friends said he usually wore was missing. The body was found 20 yards from the canoe, after the area had been thoroughly searched multiple times. The subsequent inquest found that he died from drowning and hypothermia after collapsing from a heart attack or stroke and falling out of his canoe. There is no evidence that Colby went canoeing. There is no evidence that Colby died on
April 27,
1996. Colby disappeared
April 27,
1996. His body was recovered on
May 6,
1996. Hence, the date of Colby's death is somewhere between these two dates. The
Internet Movie Database states Colby died on
May 6,
1996. [
3]. Colby was laid to rest at
Arlington National Cemetery on
May 13,
1996.
Theories about Death
Conservative news reportor
Christopher Ruddy (as part of the
Arkansas Project) has claimed
President Clinton had Colby murdered because Colby was going to write about a conspiracy between Clinton and
Vincent Foster.[
4].
The former CIA director acknowledged to
Nebraska State Senator John DeCamp that the scenario described in the documentary,
Conspiracy of Silence, is real, which tells of a sex ring that had links to political conservatives in Washington D.C. Not long thereafter Colby turned up dead under suspicious circumstances. John DeCamp has since authored The Franklin Coverup. This all came to public view on the morning of
June 29,
1989, when the
Washington Times headline was "Call Boys Took Midnight Tour of White House."
Dr.Dekov states that the former
FBI Director
Louis Freeh killed Colby. Dr.Dekov states that he is a witness. Dr.Dekov has alarmed
President Bush, US
Senators and the
Supreme Court of the
USA for the murder. In
2005, Dr.Dekov presented to the
International Criminal Court at
The Hague a set of documents concerning the killing of Colby by the
FBI Director
Louis Freeh. See *
The Ames-Colby story.
*"South Vietnam faces total defeat, and soon."
*"We disbanded our intelligence [after both world wars] and then found we needed it. Let's not go through that again. Redirect it, reduce the amount of money spent, but let's not destroy it. Because you don't know 10 years out what you're going to face." —
Newsweek interview,
December 2,
1991*http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/usa/william-colby/
*William Colby and Peter Forbath,
Honourable Men: My Life in the CIA, London: Hutchinson & Co., 1978
extract concerning Gladio stay-behind operations in Scandinavia available here*William Colby and James McCargar, "Lost Victory: A Firsthand Account of Americas Sixteen-Year Involvement in Vietnam", Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989
*John Prados , "Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby", Oxford University Press, 2003
*
Find-A-Grave profile for William Colby
