The CIA's Unlikely Insurgent

William Colby was a saboteur in World War II, worked undercover in Vietnam and went on to run the CIA.

It seems oddly fitting that the death of William Colby, a man once in charge of his country's shadowy spying activities, should have itself seemed mysterious. In April 1996, Colby's canoe was found near a sound on Chesapeake Bay, not far from his Maryland home. A few days later his body was discovered. Although the coroner ruled that he had died of either a stroke or a heart attack, his family was unpersuaded. One son suggested suicide. An old friend even thought that Colby had been murdered.

Shadow Warrior

By Randall B. Woods
Basic Books, 546 pages, $29.99

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William Colby in 1988.

Randall Woods begins "Shadow Warrior" with these events and speculations and ends his book, almost 500 pages later, with a brief reference to Colby's last day, when he was "alone at his weekend house." The effect is to leave open the possibility that Colby's death was not natural. But that is one of the few questions about Colby's life that Mr. Woods leaves unanswered. In this carefully researched biography, Mr. Woods provides a favorable but critical evaluation of a man whose undeniable talents did not prepare him to lead America's most prominent spy agency at its most perilous moment.

Somewhat improbably, Mr. Woods calls Colby a romantic, capable of destroying "his country's enemies, but he was much more interested in converting them." That phrase captures Colby's lifelong faith in unconventional warfare and may also offer a clue to Colby's fateful misreading of the Washington political scene in the mid-1970s. It was then that he attempted to reform the culture of the CIA and ended up tarnishing its image and breaking its spirit. Some former colleagues so loathed Colby that they hinted to journalists that he might be a Soviet mole. He was by far the most polarizing director ever to lead the Central Intelligence Agency.

Taking the helm of the CIA in 1973, just as an attack on the agency was gaining steam, Colby startled his colleagues and the White House by confirming a host of secret and sometimes illegal activities. Along the way, he exposed one of his predecessors, Richard Helms, to criminal charges and turned over confidential documents to congressional committees, whose members promptly leaked them to the press. Agency morale and effectiveness plummeted. Colby's defenders praised his honesty, insisting that, without owning up to its sordid episodes, the CIA could not survive in a democratic society. By 1975, Colby had been fired.

Mr. Woods shows that the dominant theme of Colby's pre-Washington career in the field had been his faith in unconventional warfare. It had been nurtured early on by his fascination with Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys and with the exploits of T.E. Lawrence. It was confirmed by his wartime experiences with the CIA's forerunner, the OSS (the Office of Strategic Services). Colby parachuted into occupied France after D-Day in 1944, assigned to work with Resistance units, and led a perilous sabotage mission in Norway in 1945. A committed liberal and anti-communist, he naturally gravitated to the CIA shortly after the Korean War began. Like Lawrence, he believed, Mr. Woods writes, that "he was acting to bring oppressed peoples freedom, self-determination, and, if possible, democracy."

Colby's CIA career began in the Office of Policy Coordination, the division involved in covert operations. Its agents were derisively labeled "knuckedraggers," or "cowboys," by those who did analysis or ran spies. For much of his agency life, Colby was involved in supervising paramilitary operations, creating front organizations, running propaganda campaigns or subverting communist regimes.

His first major assignment was to build "stay-behind networks" in Scandinavia designed to function in case of Soviet occupation. He moved on to a more important posting in Italy, where he directed a major effort to weaken the Italian Communist Party in the early 1950s. His next and most significant assignment was to South Vietnam in 1959, where for much of the next decade he would attempt to build a cohesive infrastructure, particularly in villages and rural hamlets, that might resist a communist insurgency.

In many of these operations, Colby struggled with his superiors over how best to combat communism. In Italy he clashed with U.S. Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce. Colby believed that the best way to weaken the Italian Communist Party was to encourage centrists to wean the socialists away from the communists; Luce advocated an opening to the political right. In Vietnam, he urged land reform and local self-government in the countryside as the best antidotes to the National Liberation Front, a position at odds with official policy.

Colby's long involvement in Vietnam exhibited the limits of his counter-insurgency strategy. Upon arriving in Saigon as the CIA's deputy station chief, he struggled to persuade President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother to adopt a different strategy toward the communist insurgency—by forming coalitions with dissident political groups, pursuing local economic-development projects and building self-defense forces in rural communities. He argued that such tactics would be more effective than conventional military operations.

But he faced resistance from South Vietnamese politicians and from military leaders uneasy about empowering potential rivals—and, not least, from an American military dismissive of "nation-building." As opposition to the Diems mounted and the insurgency grew to a critical intensity, Colby found himself back at CIA headquarters, in Langley, Va., as director of the Far Eastern Division. In that post, he opposed the American-backed plan to oust the Diems. Despite their shortcomings, he said, there were no better alternatives. Their assassination in November 1963 led to a series of weak South Vietnamese governments.

By far the most controversial pacification effort in Vietnam was the Phoenix Program. It was begun in late 1967 and designed to destroy the Viet Cong infrastructure by neutralizing—through arrests and interrogations—communists in rural areas. Torture and targeted killings also took place. Colby, who had arrived back in Saigon in 1968 as deputy to Robert Komer, LBJ's overseer of the pacification effort, always insisted that assassinations were not American policy. But he admitted that, out of revenge for the insurgents' own brutality, 20,000 Viet Cong were killed.

Such were the costs of bringing "oppressed peoples freedom." By Mr. Woods's account, Colby successfully navigated the path between his self-image as a man of integrity and a job requirnig "deception and manipulation." He was convinced that fighting tyranny by almost any means was justifiable "to create a civil, democratic society."

When Colby returned to an administrative position in the CIA in 1971, he had to deal with a drumbeat of exposés. The involvement of ex-CIA operatives in the Watergate burglary—not to mention the Nixon administration's futile efforts to get the CIA to assist in the cover-up—led to James Schlesinger replacing Richard Helms as the agency's director, in January 1973. Colby became Mr. Schlesinger's hatchet man, firing a number of operatives and demanding that CIA agents and retirees compile a list of "ticking time-bombs"—what came to be called the "family jewels." The list included the domestic surveillance of antiwar groups, a mail-intercept program, the surveillance of journalists to identify the leakers of government secrets, experiments with mind-altering drugs and a variety of assassination plots.

When, six months later, Nixon moved Mr. Schlesinger over to the position of defense secretary, Colby was appointed CIA director—in part, Mr. Woods says, because the administration regarded him as weak and controllable (though professional). Colby was unpopular in the CIA because of his budget ax and his background in special operations. But he was convinced that American intelligence had to be reformed. He believed that the compartmentalization that had created the "ticking time-bombs" had to end and that, to ensure its survival, the CIA had to cooperate with Congress. Not least, he believed that he had to purge the CIA of its most powerful baron.

James Jesus Angleton, the legendary head of the Counterintelligence Directorate, had long been convinced that the CIA had been penetrated by the KGB. His theory had largely paralyzed the Soviet and East European Division, casting suspicion on numerous agents. When New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh interviewed Colby about secret domestic surveillance, Colby confirmed the story and used it as an excuse to fire its overseer, Angleton. A House committee called Colby to testify about the CIA role in the overthrow of Salvador Allende of Chile. Despite a presidential directive to keep the matter secret, Colby admitted that the CIA had worked to prevent Allende's election. His testimony led Helms to plead guilty to misleading Congress.

The Chile story was only one in a series of embarrassments for Colby and the CIA. Within the next year he testified 35 times before various committees. Straightforward and moralistic, he admitted misdeeds and avoided dissembling. He never lost his temper, even in the face of stinging denunciations. He also opened the CIA to intrusive congressional scrutiny. Staffers asked for and received documents from sensitive operations and promptly leaked them. The White House was livid. Colby was fired, at last, in October 1975 and replaced by George H.W. Bush.

For the last 20 years of his life, Colby defended his reputation, writing an autobiography in which he insisted that only the U.S. abandonment of the South Vietnamese in the face of a North Vietnamese invasion had lost the war. He quarreled with Angleton, promoted détente and supported a nuclear freeze. He also divorced his wife, left the Catholic Church and married a much younger woman. When he attended a conference in Moscow after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mr. Woods tells us, he noticed on a stroll through the city that nobody was watching him. "That was my victory parade," he told his son.

The conflicts that defined William Colby's life—between intelligence gathering and covert operations, between unconventional warfare and traditional military operations, between secrecy and openness in a democratic society—still bedevil us. However wayward his path through this labyrinth, "Shadow Warrior" reminds us that there are no easy moral answers.

—Mr. Klehr is a professor of politics and history at Emory University.

Sunday, April 14, 2013