Intelligence in Recent Public Literature
Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby
By John Prados. New York: Oxofrd University Press, 2003. 380 pages.
Reviewed by David S. Robarge
Memoirs and biographies of Directors of Central Intelligence and senior operations officers comprise an increasingly prominent part of the growing bibliography of intelligence history. One of the latest in the genre, John Prados's Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby, exemplifies the challenge that confronts historians of intelligence activities and institutions who try their hand at writing biography: Not everyone who lives a professional life amid the excitement and danger of espionage, covert action, and counterintelligence is an interesting person.
That generalization poses a singular test for any biographer of Colby, the DCI during the CIA's so-called "time of troubles" from 1973 to 1976. Colby had spent a quarter century at the CIA, laboring in bureaucracies at home and abroad, devoted to carrying out programs that others devised to accomplish the Agency's Cold War mission. He had been a smart, brave, and dutiful operations officer, but also a quintessential intellocrat with a few fixed ideas and a quiet, at times aloof, personality. How can a biographer make the career of such a "gray flannel executive" seem interesting, let alone live up to the expectations that the title Lost Crusader suggests? That difficulty, more than a lack of declassified research material, may explain why Colby's CIA years have received so little attention. Until Prados's book, Colby had written more about himself than others had penned.1
Colby is most remembered for his beleaguered effort as DCI to rescue the Agency from the political tempests of the mid-1970s and to regain some of its lost prestige through his policy of controlled cooperation with congressional investigators and termination of illegal or unethical Agency undertakings. Earlier parts of his life in intelligence work deserve recounting, however, and Prados does so comprehensively: OSS commando in World War II; covert action operator with the Office of Policy Coordination; head of Agency activities in Italy and Vietnam; chief of the Far East Division; director of pacification programs in Vietnam (including the notorious PHOENIX program2); Executive Director/Comptroller; and Deputy Director for Operations.
Surviving contentious confirmation hearings that highlighted his association with PHOENIX, Colby replaced James Schlesinger in the Seventh Floor hotseat in September 1973. It was one of the worst times in the Agency's history to become DCI. The Democrat-controlled Congress was reasserting itself against weakened President Nixon, and the CIA--always a convenient whipping boy--was itself vulnerable because of its tenuous connection to Watergate. Colby started his tenure with a limited mandate: to use his experience at the CIA to reorganize the Agency's bureaucracy and redirect its activities. Colby's management was basically defensive and reactive: He sought to defuse and avoid controversy rather than risk creating or perpetuating it through dynamic leadership. He tinkered with some of the Agency's structure and processes, mostly to good effect, but he scarcely could be called an innovator or a visionary. And although the White House and the NSC encouraged him to be a more assertive chief of the Intelligence Community, they did not provide him with the authorities and political backing that he needed to accomplish much in that area.
More:
https://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/vol47no4/article07.htmlSee also:
William Colby
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
William Egan Colby (January 4, 1920 – 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 served under President Gerald Ford and was replaced by George H.W. Bush on January 30, 1976.
<snip>
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 (see <3>).
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.
More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Colby#Theories_about_Death
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