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  Shadow Warrior

  “This is a superbly crafted biography-cum-history. The evidential standards are exemplary. The interviews, especially the interviews with Colby family members, combine with the author’s fluent literacy to make the book a readable account of the life of an official whose career summed up the best and the worst of CIA history.”

  —Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, author of

  In Spies We Trust: The Story of Western Intelligence

  “Randall Woods has written the biography that William Colby deserves. Colby, whose 30-year career in US intelligence began as a Jedburgh in the OSS, ended as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and featured the Phoenix program and the Family Jewels, lived and died a mystery. Woods’s prodigious research and engaging exposition provide a textured portrait of a means-justify-the-ends patriot whose beliefs and behavior complicate the narrative of America from the origins to the height of the Cold War.”

  —Richard H. Immerman,

  Professor and Edward J. Buthusiem Family

  Distinguished Faculty Fellow in History,

  Temple University

  “Randall Woods’s biography of Bill Colby takes us deep into the secretive world of US intelligence. As a historical figure Colby’s importance is clear, but readers will also be drawn to Colby by the mysteries of his personality: one part romantic, one part bureaucratic warrior, one part covert operations fighter, one part unlikely crusader for a candid relationship between the US public, Congress, and the CIA. Randall Woods, a distinguished American diplomatic historian and biographer, tells both the public and private story of Colby with aplomb and great skill. Shadow Warrior deserves to be read by anyone interested in the history of the CIA and its involvement in the key moments of US policy in the crucial years between World War Two and the 1970s.”

  —Wesley Wark, author of Secret Intelligence: A Reader,

  Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto

  SHADOW

  WARRIOR

  ALSO BY RANDALL B. WOODS

  LBJ: Architect of American Ambition

  Quest for Identity: America Since 1945

  J. William Fulbright, Vietnam, and the

  Search for a Cold War Foreign Policy

  Fulbright: A Biography

  A Changing of the Guard: Anglo-American Relations, 1941–1946

  SHADOW

  WARRIOR

  WILLIAM EGAN COLBY

  AND THE CIA

  RANDALL B. WOODS

  BASIC BOOKS

  A MEMBER OF THE PERSEUS BOOKS GROUP

  New York

  Copyright © 2013 by Randall B. Woods

  Published by Basic Books,

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th St., 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107.

  Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].

  Designed by Timm Bryson

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Woods, Randall Bennett, 1944–

  William Egan Colby and the CIA / Randall B. Woods.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-465-03788-9 (e-book) 1. Colby, William Egan, 1920–1996. 2. United States. Central Intelligence Agency—Biography. 3. Intelligence officers—United States—Biography. 4. Vietnam War, 1961–1975—Secret service—United States. 5. World War, 1939–1945—Secret service—United States. I. Title.

  UB271.U52C657 2013

  327.12730092—dc23

  [B]

  2012040332

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my daughter, Nicole Woods Olmstead

  CONTENTS

  1THE DISAPPEARANCE

  2THE COLBYS AND THE EGANS

  3JEDBURGH

  4A BRIDGE TOO FAR

  5THE AGENCY

  6COVERT OPERATIONS ON THE PERIPHERY OF THE COLD WAR

  7POLITICAL ACTION AND LA DOLCE VITA

  8COLD WAR COCKPIT

  9FIGHTING A PEOPLE’S WAR

  10THE MILITARY ASCENDANT

  11SECRET ARMIES

  12LAUNCHING THE OTHER WAR

  13CORDS: A PEACE CORPS WITH GUNS

  14BIRDS OF PEACE AND BIRDS OF WAR

  15THE FAMILY JEWELS

  16ASCENSION

  17REVELATIONS

  18DANCING WITH HENRY

  19DEATH OF A DREAM

  20FIGHT FOR SURVIVAL

  21EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  1

  THE DISAPPEARANCE

  Saturday, April 27, 1996, dawned clear and warm; it was going to be a beautiful spring day on the Chesapeake Bay. Although his second wife, Sally, was away visiting her mother in Houston, Bill Colby was a happy man. William Egan Colby, former CIA director, Saigon station chief, and head of America’s counterinsurgency and pacification operation in Vietnam, as well as a veteran of World War II’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS), spent the day working on his 37-foot sloop, Eagle Wing II. The Colbys owned a vacation cottage on Neale Sound in Southern Maryland, about 60 miles south of Washington, DC, and the Eagle Wing was moored at the marina on Cobb Island, directly across the sound from the cottage. The seventy-six-year-old retired spy and covert operative had worked hard repairing the torn mainsail on his beloved vessel, scraping the hull, and scouring the hardware in preparation for the year’s maiden voyage.

  Sometime between 5:30 and 6:00 P.M., Colby knocked off and climbed into his red Fiat for the drive home. On the way, he stopped at Captain John’s, a popular seafood restaurant and market, and bought a dozen clams and some corn on the cob for his dinner. He arrived at the cottage around 7:00. The house was modest, a turn-of-the-century oysterman’s lodging with two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a glassed-in front porch. But the view of the sound—the white frame structure was situated on a spit of land, surrounded by water on three sides—was spectacular.

  Weary but content, Colby unloaded his groceries and called Sally. The two had married in 1984. Colby, theretofore a devoted Catholic, had left Barbara Colby, his equally Catholic wife of thirty-nine years and mother of their five children, for Sally—intelligent, attractive, a former US ambassador to Grenada. The two were besotted with each other. Other than for weddings or funerals, Colby never darkened the door of a Catholic church again. The two chatted warmly but briefly over the phone. Bill told Sally that he was happy but tired; he was going to feast on clams and corn—his favorites—and then turn in.

  Around 7:15, Joseph “Carroll” Wise, the cottage’s off-season caretaker, turned into the driveway. He had his sister in tow and wanted her to meet his famous client. They found Colby watering his willow trees down near the water. The trio chatted briefly, and then Wise and his sister drove away. It was the last time they would see Bill Colby alive.

  On Sunday afternoon, Colby’s next-door neighbor, Alice Stokes, noticed that the Fiat was still parked in the driveway. She checked the jetty they shared; the aluminum ladder Colby used to climb down into his canoe was in the water. A frayed rope hung from the iron rung he used to moor his canoe, but there was no sign of the craft. Meanwhile, Kevin Akers, a twenty-nine-year-old unemployed carpenter and handyman, had tak
en his wife and two kids out on the sound in his small motorboat. At the point where Neale Sound turned into the Wicomico River, Akers spotted a beached green canoe. There was nothing unusual about that. Akers, who had spent all his life around the Chesapeake, had in the past picked up small craft that had broken loose from their moorings and towed them to the marina. Akers later recalled that this canoe was nearly filled with sand; it had taken him and his wife the better part of an hour to empty it. He had been out on the water the day before and had not spotted the canoe. There was no way, he mused, that two cycles of the tide could put that much sand in a canoe.

  Around 7:00 Sunday evening, Alice Stokes called 911 to report a missing person. The local police arrived at half past eight. Both doors to the cottage were unlocked. Colby’s computer and radio were on. Unwashed dishes and the remnants of a half-eaten meal lay in the sink. A partially filled glass of white wine sat on the counter; the bottle, with very little missing, was on the table in the sunroom. Also on the table were Colby’s wallet, containing $296, and his keys. The canoe and its paddle and life jacket were missing from the nearby shed. Policewoman Sharon Walsh alerted the Coast Guard, and the search was on.

  Over the next few days, a dozen navy divers, two helicopters, and more than a hundred volunteers scoured the area. They found nothing. On the morning of May 6, nine days after Colby was last seen, his body was spotted on the shoreline of Neale Sound, approximately 40 meters from where Kevin Akers had discovered the green canoe. The police announced that there were no signs of foul play. Most likely the old man had suffered a heart attack and fallen into the water. The state medical examiner’s office issued a preliminary verdict of accidental death.

  When Akers learned who had owned the green canoe, alarm bells began going off in his head. There was the unexplained overabundance of sand in the canoe. More significant, the boat and the body were separated by a spit of land. Given the prevailing currents, there was no way the canoe could have wound up on one side of the spit and Colby on the other. The former spook had been murdered, he concluded. Akers gathered his family and went into hiding.

  The Neale Sound handyman was not the only doubter. Zalin Grant was in Paris when he heard the news of Colby’s death. The former director of central intelligence (DCI) had gone paddling in his canoe at night, fallen out, and drowned? Not a chance. Grant, a Vietnam veteran, war correspondent, and author, had known Colby in Vietnam. Colby had subsequently helped the journalist write his book on counterinsurgency and the CIA. Grant admired him, agreeing with US counterinsurgency expert Edward Lansdale’s observation that Colby was the most effective American—soldier or civilian—to serve in the Vietnam War. The man was fit, seasoned, and prudent, not some doddering septuagenarian. And he had enemies, some of them quite dangerous. Finally, Colby’s death reminded Grant of the demise of another CIA official some twenty years earlier under eerily similar circumstances. On the moonlit night of September 23, 1978, John Arthur Paisley had vanished in the waters of the Chesapeake Bay. Paisley was last seen alive that morning, crossing a narrow section of the bay aboard his sloop Brillig. A week later, on October 1, a bloated and badly decomposed body was found floating in the water, a 9-millimeter gunshot wound in the back of the head and weighted diver’s belts around the waist. The CIA suggested that Paisley had committed suicide, but the Maryland state coroner’s office ruled that he had died of indeterminate causes.1

  Upon his return to the States, Zalin Grant began investigating Colby’s death. Throughout the summer of 1996, Grant interviewed family members, neighbors, police and sheriff’s officers, the medical examiner—he even managed to locate Kevin Akers. What he got were unanswered questions. Why would Colby, after a hard day’s work, go canoeing in total darkness? Carroll Wise and his sister had left him between 7:15 and 7:30, still watering his willows. It still remained for Colby to go in the house, steam the clams, boil the corn, open the wine, and consume part of the meal. By the time he finished, it would have been at least 8:30—pitch black. Colby had said nothing to Sally about a water outing. Then there were Akers’s questions about the location of the sand-filled canoe in relation to the body.

  Grant was the first and only journalist to view the autopsy pictures. He had seen plenty of dead bodies in Vietnam, some of which had been dumped in the Mekong River or other waterways. Without exception, they had sunk to the bottom, begun to decompose, filled with gas, and surfaced, bloated and grossly disfigured. In the autopsy pictures, Colby’s body appeared almost normal, with no bloating whatsoever. The medical examiner—who had ruled that the former DCI had had a cardiovascular incident, fallen into the water, and died either of hypothermia or drowning—admitted that the body was amazingly well preserved. Based on an analysis of the contents of the corpse’s stomach, the medical examiner ruled that Colby had died between one and two hours after eating. That would have had him paddling around Neale Sound between 9:00 and 10:00 P.M. No, concluded the journalist, William Egan Colby had been killed.

  Grant imagined that sometime in the early evening of Saturday the 27th, two or three men had parked near Colby’s cottage, taken him by surprise, and abducted him. He would have gone quietly. Colby was the ultimate stoic, a fatalist who during his OSS days had come to view unreasoning fear as pointless and, from a practical perspective, dangerous. Some years earlier, Grant had visited Colby at his Georgetown row house. He had noticed that there were no locks on the doors, no deadbolts, nothing. When Grant had commented on the lack of security, his host had said that if anyone wanted to get him, they could do it; he wasn’t going to live in a constant state of fear. In Vietnam, he had been the only high-ranking official to move about at night without an armed escort.

  Grant surmised that another two or three men must have come by boat, tied on to Colby’s canoe, pulled it loose from its mooring, and towed it away. Subsequently, the killers had suffocated Colby and then put him on ice. The water-borne assassins meanwhile took the canoe to the spit of land where the sound turned into the Wicomico River, placed it on the shoreline, and filled it with sand to keep it from drifting away. Sometime on the evening of May 5, Colby’s killers had placed his body on the spit of land, but on the wrong side! They had selected the site because it was easily accessible both by water and by land via a branch off Rocky Point Road, which terminated just 40 meters from the water.2

  Others had suspicions as well. Sally conducted her own informal investigation. The Agency assured her that the death was accidental but refused to share details of its investigation. As usual, the CIA had had exclusive control of the death scene until its agents were satisfied. The coroner’s report, a copy of which the family obtained fifteen years later, seemed to go out of its way to reach conclusions. There was no evidence cited of a cardiovascular incident. Susan Colby, Bill’s daughter-in-law, later heard rumors that a group of Vietnam veterans who haunted a bar near the marina had targeted Colby for what they believed to be their betrayal during the war. Colby’s second son, Carl, would hint that he believed his father had committed suicide.

  One thing was certain: Colby had lived a controversial and at times dangerous life. The former director of central intelligence was a deceptively mild-mannered, innocuous-looking man. Five feet nine inches tall, 170 pounds, with slicked-back hair and tortoise-shell glasses, he boasted finely chiseled features but described himself as someone who could not easily attract the attention of a waiter in a restaurant. The façade concealed a different persona. Colby was courageous, a natural leader of men, a veteran of conventional and unconventional combat, a patriot committed to the defense of his country, a man drawn to the sound of battle.

  All wars produce casualties—killers and the killed. The conventional battlefield has its rules, but Bill Colby was an instrument of the CIA and as such participated in conflicts without rules or boundaries. During the 1960s, as Vietnam station chief and then head of the CIA’s Far East Division, he had supervised the “secret war” in Laos—the United States had organized and armed a guerrilla force
under the charismatic Vang Pao, unleashed it on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and then abandoned it when the North Vietnamese Army moved into Laos in force. In 1965, Colby’s Far East Division had supplied the new government in Indonesia with the names of thousands of suspected communists, who were then systematically “liquidated.” Between 1968 and 1972, Colby had presided over the infamous Phoenix program in Vietnam, which had led to the deaths of at least twenty thousand Vietcong cadres. Colby had been CIA director when in 1975 the United States abandoned Vietnam. The CIA was able to extract thousands of South Vietnamese who had worked and fought for the Americans but left many thousands more behind, a number of them wives, sweethearts, or intimate friends of CIA personnel who had worked in-country.

  Between 1974 and 1975, it was Colby as DCI who had made the decision to turn over the Agency’s “family jewels” to Congress. The jewels were long-kept secrets regarding CIA participation in domestic spying, assassination plots against foreign leaders, experiments with mind-altering drugs, and US participation in the coup that overthrew Salvador Allende in Chile. The revelations split the intelligence community, with half regarding Colby as a traitor, and half seeing him as a savior. Among the former were James Jesus Angleton, the famed mole-hunter and head of the Agency’s counterintelligence division. Angleton, brilliant, paranoid, and a political reactionary, had long viewed Colby as at best a communist dupe and at worst a Soviet mole. On the eve of the family jewels crisis, Colby had fired Angleton and the entire top brass of the counterintelligence division. Another victim of the family jewels crisis was former DCI Richard Helms, who pleaded no contest to charges that he had misled Congress concerning the CIA’s role in the Allende affair. Crucial evidence implicating Helms had been turned over to the Justice Department by Colby himself. Then there was Henry Kissinger, also implicated in the Chilean affair. Kissinger seemed satisfied with having Colby fired in November 1975, but Angleton and Helms embarked on a vendetta that extended through the 1980s.