Shadow Warrior

by Randall B. Woods

  Kennan’s arguments carried the day, and the result was a new body, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC)—Cold War agency names and operation code-names were meant to conceal rather than reveal—which would be housed within the CIA. The OPC would in effect become the third leg of the intelligence stool, along with analysis and espionage. Kennan approached Allen Dulles about heading covert operations, but he declined, thinking that he would become director of central intelligence in the Republican administration that he believed would surely come to power in the fall. So Kennan turned to the hard-driving Frank Wisner, former OSS head of Eastern European operations. Wisner in turn set about bringing back into government service those men and women who had served the OSS as guerrillas, paratroopers, and covert operatives.9

  Meanwhile, Bill and Barbara Colby had settled into the rather drab but intense lives of law student and spouse. The couple rented “a rather dark and dingy” apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Bill’s $80 a month from the GI Bill paid the rent, while Barbara’s salary as editor of the New York State Department of Labor’s official publications took care of the rest of the couple’s expenses. Bill toiled away at his studies, making law review. He was aware of the burgeoning Cold War and had an inkling of Donovan’s struggles to see a free-standing intelligence authority established. The Jedburghs gathered periodically for merriment and nostalgia. Occasionally, the Colbys were guests of the Donovans for a Columbia football game or for dinner at the latter’s Sutton Place apartment. Then, when Bill graduated in February 1947, the Donovan law firm hired him.

  Donovan, Leisure, Newton, Lumbard, and Irvine occupied three floors of the office building at No. 2 Wall Street and “exuded the successful air of brilliant legal minds working on the great corporate problems of the day,” Colby wrote in his memoir. As a junior member of the firm, he took depositions, recorded minutes of the partners’ meetings, and ran errands; he quickly began learning the ins and outs of antitrust, corporate, and tax law. Donovan and most of his partners were Republicans, but they not only tolerated but encouraged political diversity. It was good business to have friends and contacts across the political spectrum. New Dealer to the core, Colby joined the hidebound New York Young Democratic Club and the more activist Robert B. Blaikie Regular Democratic Association of the 7th Assembly District. He rang doorbells for Harry Truman and celebrated his upset victory on election night, 1948.10

  American liberals were then in the process of choosing sides in the Cold War. During the 1930s, many progressive Americans had come to admire the Soviet experiment, Stalin’s horrendous purges notwithstanding. A few joined the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), but most, like former vice president Henry Wallace, contented themselves with warning the United States not to become the cat’s paw of British imperialism and calling for postwar foreign policy based on Soviet-American friendship. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Minneapolis mayor Hubert Humphrey, and other Cold War liberals set about distancing themselves from the Wallacites by forming the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a group committed equally to New Deal/Fair Deal reforms and to combating the menace of Soviet communism. Although he was not a member of the ADA, Colby was certainly of this ilk.

  In late 1946, Bill received a call from Mickey Boerner of the American Veterans Committee (AVC). The organization had been established as an alternative home for US service personnel who were too liberal for the American Legion. The CPUSA hoped to establish a presence in the veterans movement and, not surprisingly, concentrated on the AVC rather than the conservative Legion. Communist rank-and-file members were going to try to seize control of the group, and Boerner asked Colby, whose name had been given to him by a law-school friend, to come to the next meeting of Manhattan Chapter No. 1. Colby arrived, paid his dues, and immediately plunged into the ensuing debate regarding the Veteran Committee’s proper attitude toward the Greek revolution, which pitted communist insurgents against the pro-Western government. The communists touted a resolution endorsing the struggle of “democratic forces” against the “fascist-dominated” government. Colby and like-minded veterans appreciated the role that the communist insurgents in Greece had played in the resistance against the Nazis, but they did not want to see Greece become another Soviet satellite. The war of words stretched long into the night, with the liberals finally managing to block the communist resolution. It was his first taste, Colby remembered, of the focus and discipline of Marxist-Leninists. The debate over the Greek Civil War, as it turned out, was a foretaste of things to come.11

  On May 16, 1948, the body of George Polk Jr., overseas correspondent for CBS, washed ashore on Salonika Bay in Greece. His hands and legs were bound and the back of his skull had been blown away by a bullet fired at point-blank range. Polk, a protégé of Edward R. Murrow, the pioneering broadcast journalist, was a decorated World War II veteran, having served as a navy pilot during the battle for Guadalcanal. He had been assigned to Greece to cover the civil war.

  The thirty-four-year-old reporter was aggressive, ambitious, and dogged. His focus was the corrupt, graft-ridden government supported by the Royalists, the military, and the scions of the banking, shipping, and trading houses. On May 6, following the assassination of the minister of justice, the Greek government had summarily shot forty-four suspected communists. It seemed, Polk reported on CBS, that the rule of law was going by the boards in Athens. (At the same time, the American journalist was reporting on the pedomazoma, the campaign by the communist provisional government that controlled much of the mountainous countryside to collect every child between the ages of three and fifteen and send them to live in “people’s democracies” behind the Iron Curtain.) The Greek government and the American embassy, which in the wake of the Truman Doctrine was lending unquestioning support to the regime in Athens, viewed the young journalist’s broadcasts with increasing alarm. Indeed, Polk had written Ed Murrow that relations between certain foreign correspondents and Greek and American officials had reached the point that “somebody was likely to get hurt.” Polk had been scheduled to return to the United States to accept a Neiman Fellowship, but before leaving he wanted to make contact with the leaders of the Greek National Liberation Front (ELAS, using the Greek acronym, and EAM, its military wing) to get their take on the conflict. It was for that purpose that he had flown to Salonika.12

  As George Polk was being buried in Athens, the Overseas Writers Association was setting up a special committee, chaired by the renowned columnist Walter Lippmann, to investigate the murder. To lead the investigation, the committee chose Wild Bill Donovan. Lippmann believed that the founder of the OSS was perfect for the job: utilizing the OSS’s connections with the former Greek resistance, both communist and noncommunist, Donovan would be able to get to the bottom of the matter. Ever the adventurer, Donovan eagerly accepted. In the months that followed, he put together a small team of former Greek OSSers and made several trips to Athens and Salonika. In July, Donovan’s principal investigator, James Kellis, an OSS veteran who had worked closely with the Greek underground, made his report. Polk had tried to make contact with the Greek communists but failed; they would not have had access to his itinerary. In any event, Polk’s increasingly antigovernment reports would have attracted rather than alienated ELAS. It was the Greek security forces and their British advisers who had knowledge of his movements, had access to him, and had the motive to do away with him. After reading the report, Donovan removed Kellis from the case. Writing after his retirement from the CIA in 1977, Kellis recalled, “While I was in Greece, I often heard the statement that national interest had to be given a higher priority than discovering the real murderers of George Polk.”13

  In its search for a scapegoat, the Greek government focused on Polk’s twenty-year-old widow, Rhea, a Greek airline stewardess whom George had met and married some eight months earlier, and the couple’s closest friend. Authorities implied a love triangle or a paid assassination. What made Rhea Polk such a compelling target was that at the time, she
was telling anyone who would listen that it was the state security forces and not the communists who had murdered her husband. In June, Donovan spirited Rhea Polk out of Greece, either to protect her from the government or to keep her and her stories out of the public venue, or both. The person assigned to the feeding and care of the young widow was Bill Colby.14

  Bill and Barbara put up Polk’s widow in their apartment until she could find her own place to live. Eventually, Barbara would help Rhea enroll at Barnard, her alma mater. In the first few weeks of her sojourn in the United States, Rhea Polk was not often out of Bill Colby’s sight. He debriefed her and delivered written reports to Donovan. He counseled her on the realities of the Cold War, urging her to look to her own future and not tilt at windmills, no matter how great the injustice done to her and her husband. During their conversations, Rhea told the former Jedburgh that before George had departed for Salonika, he had had a stormy session with the Greek foreign minister, Constantine Tsaldaris. He had discovered, George told the Greek politician, a secret $25,000 bank account in a Chase branch in New York. It was American aid money, and it was traceable to Tsaldaris; news of it was sure to come out. Subsequently, Tsaldaris’s son, in New York City on United Nations business, physically and verbally assaulted Rhea, telling her to keep her mouth shut.15

  Colby dutifully reported all of this to his boss; none of that information was ever passed on to the Lippmann committee. On April 21, 1949, a Greek journalist with ties to ELAS was sentenced to life imprisonment for complicity in the murder of George Polk. Shortly thereafter, Bill Colby made the decision to leave the Donovan law firm.16

  In his memoirs, Colby recalled that the reasons for his departure were personal and political. Though Donovan and his partners were tolerant, even encouraging of his liberal activism, the fact remained that they were pillars of the Republican Party. Bill observed that he did not want to spend his time in the service of the corporate elite, and he and Barbara did not want to raise their children (John and Catherine by then) in Scarsdale or some other affluent suburb of New York. Years later, Bill told John that he had received a lucrative offer from American Can Company, but had decided that he did not want a future in the container business.

  Colby also may have been troubled by the Polk affair, believing, with James Kellis, that it was unacceptable for the United States to “support national interests by disregarding moral principles.”17 Bill Colby was a true believer, but he was not an automaton. Anticommunist though it may have been, the government in Athens was proto-fascist, much like the Franco regime that Major Colby had wanted America to fight in 1945. His heart had not been in the advice he had given Rhea Polk to turn the other cheek. Here was the classic Cold War conundrum. To what lengths could a country justifying itself in terms of natural rights philosophy and the Judeo-Christian ethic go in fighting perceived evil? Catholic though he was, Colby was enough of a Niebuhrian to be conflicted. The Polk case involved traps that were more than moral, however. Colby was familiar enough with spycraft to know that Donovan had in effect made him an accomplice to murder and could blackmail him if he tried to blow the whistle. There was an old rule in the trade: never trust patriotism; always have a backup to coerce loyalty should it become necessary.

  By the fall of 1949, the United States was in the grip of a mounting anticommunist hysteria. The Russians and East Germans had called off the Berlin Blockade, but that same year, Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese communists had driven Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalists off the mainland and onto the nearby island of Formosa. The world’s most populist nation was in the hands of the enemy. If that were not enough, word came that the Soviets had exploded their own atomic device, years ahead of predictions by American atomic experts. Those hundreds of divisions of Red Army troops were still stationed in Eastern Europe. Some Americans, unaware that Stalin could not properly feed and house this multitude, were convinced that they were there as a prelude to an armed invasion of Western Europe.

  In addition, it seemed as if the enemy was not only at the gate but within the walls. In 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), populated primarily by conservative super-patriots, had opened hearings on an alleged plot by domestic communists to take control of the motion picture industry. When HUAC subsequently turned its attention to the federal government, Truman issued an executive order mandating a loyalty investigation of all federal job applicants. In February 1950, Great Britain announced the arrest of noted scientist Klaus Fuchs for betraying atomic secrets to the Soviets. Shortly thereafter, in the United States, Harry Gold, David Greenglass, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested as atomic spies.

  The Cold War and its newly formed instrument, the CIA, were waiting for Bill Colby, but there would be a brief interregnum. Even before he officially parted company with the Donovan firm, Colby had applied for and accepted a job with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in Washington. Given his interests and liberal values, it was a natural—if temporarily impoverishing—move. In his memoir, Colby gave no other reason for his decision other than to expand his credentials as a New Deal/Fair Deal labor lawyer. During his yearlong stint with the NLRB, he helped represent Philadelphia garment workers who were trying to unionize, and wrote briefs in a case in which agribusinesses in California were illegally breaking strikes by their migrant grape pickers. But Colby was well aware of the evolution of the OSS into the CIA—in 1949, he had accompanied Donovan to Norway for a memorial service commemorating those who had died in Operation Rype—and he wanted to be at hand if an opportunity arose.

  Sure enough, just weeks after the Colbys moved to Washington, Bill got a call from Gerry Miller, his old London chief from OSS days. Would Colby meet him for lunch? Miller asked. During the meal, Miller told his former Jedburgh that he had left a promising banking career to join the CIA. He was appropriately vague about his duties, but he made it clear that in Soviet communism, the nation was facing a threat as dire as that posed by Nazism. He finished by asking Colby to come work for him.

  Bill was intrigued, but he put off his old boss. He wanted very much to come on board. “Given my OSS experience,” he later wrote, “given my special political interests, given my taste for adventure, the CIA was the answer.” But full-time employment would have to wait, he told Miller. For him to leave his new job so quickly would not be fair to those at the NLRB who had hired him. Moreover, two moves in such a short time would not look good on his résumé. But, Colby said, he was willing to consult for the Agency on matters in which he had some expertise. Why not go ahead and run the necessary security check and hire him as a consultant? Miller readily agreed.18

  There things stood until the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. Colby and many in the US foreign policy establishment assumed that the North Korean invasion marked the opening shot in a Sino-Soviet campaign to conquer the free world. The Truman administration authorized a massive expansion of the CIA, and Colby quit his job to go to work for Miller, who headed the Western European Division of the Office of Policy Coordination under Frank Wisner. Patriotism and a sense of duty were no doubt important factors in this decision, but, as Colby later commented to a friend, “I was just bored out of my mind.”19

  6

  COVERT OPERATIONS ON THE PERIPHERY OF THE COLD WAR

  Bill Colby’s attitudes toward the Cold War were shaped by his religion, by his education—formal and informal—by his and his father’s romanticism, and by his experiences in the “Good War.” From his birth until his second marriage in 1984, he was a practicing Catholic. For his father, the church was a discipline; for his mother, it was a comfort. Neither parent was a religious fanatic; Colby wasn’t, either. Instead, like his parents, he was a social and political liberal, prizing the faith for its values of compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, and good works, not for self-righteousness or exclusiveness.

  Catholicism was a moral and cultural frame of reference for Bill Colby. Faith and reason were mutually reinforcing, not mutually exclusive.1
Like the Jesuits, he valued a classical education. He had taken Latin in high school and college, and he studied Greek on his own as an adult. And, like the Jesuits, Colby was more concerned with action than with matters of doctrine. Princeton’s motto was “In the nation’s service,” and he would have wholeheartedly agreed with that sentiment. Unlike the Jesuits, Colby was not in thrall to Christianity, but dedicated to his country, and eventually to the CIA. But he was Jesuitical in the ways he served them: he loved a cause and reveled in taking action in behalf of that cause.