Colby’s son John recalled that his father’s favorite period in history was the world of the Middle Ages with its fictional stories of chivalrous knights and King Arthur’s roundtable. Chivalry was a code of honor enforced by an elite class with swords; King Arthur acted in the name of the people, beholden to them but above them, paternalistic—but liberal. In Asia, Colby would have been the idealized mandarin. Like his father, Bill was a romantic in the tradition of Kipling, Baden-Powell, and Lawrence, an agent of good in a dangerous world. But he never let his romanticism eclipse his realism: like the Jesuits, Colby was well aware of the moral pitfalls of his calling. Carl Colby recalled his father repeating Harry Lime’s famous speech in The Third Man. The Italians, Lime declared, have had five hundred years of torture, war, the Borgias, the Medicis; they had also had Michelangelo, Da Vinci, and Botticelli; the Swiss, on the other hand, could boast of five hundred years of the cuckoo clock.2
Colby avoided fanaticism not only in religion but also in politics. In the war against communism, Colby was a soldier, not an ideologue. “My father wasn’t a vehement anticommunist,” son Carl recalled. “He wasn’t always talking about getting rid of the communists. He did not talk about them as if he were a football announcer.” Bill remembered with pride that when he was with the NLRB, he had helped write a brief for the American Civil Liberties Union in a Supreme Court case involving the harassment of a left-wing California group that had protested the Marshall Plan. In his memoir, he recalled, also with pride, that he and the young activists who constituted the Office of Policy Coordination (the division devoted to secret political and paramilitary operations) were anticommunist but rejected “the right-wing hysterical demagogy of the likes of Joseph McCarthy.”3
Bill Colby was opposed to communism because it placed the welfare of the state above the welfare of the individual, because it was undemocratic, and because it was determined to extend itself through coercion. “My dislike of Soviet Communism dated back to my college days, to my studies of the Spanish Civil War, to my reading of Lenin, to my awareness of the Stalinist purge trials, to my disgust with the Hitler-Stalin Pact,” he wrote in Honorable Men. He had heard from fellow Jedburghs about the French communists’ efforts to seize control of southern France by force as the Allied armies were advancing. World War II and the Cold War, communism and National Socialism, Sino-Soviet imperialism and Axis aggression were all part of the same seamless threat. It was his duty as an American, a Christian, and a liberal to answer the call to duty. He would later compare the CIA to “an order of Knights Templars [established] to save Western freedom from Communist darkness—and from war.” But as the Judge in Blood Meridian observed, war and religion are a dangerous mix.4
In 1950, the year Bill Colby joined the CIA, the nation was in thrall to the Agency. In the popular mind, America faced a mortal danger both from within—in the form of a communist fifth column—and without—in the form of the five hundred Red Army divisions in Eastern Europe and the hordes of Chinese in Mao’s People’s Liberation Army. For the most part, the country had shed its fears about an American Gestapo and embraced the Agency as its first line of defense against the clandestine communist menace. The Office of Foreign Intelligence would conduct espionage abroad, while its counterintelligence division would act as a barrier to block communist spying and sabotage in the United States. The research and analysis division would collate and summarize intelligence for decision-makers in the foreign policy establishment. Frank Wisner and his troops in the Office of Policy Coordination would conduct spoiling operations—in effect, try to beat the enemy at his own game. New York publishing houses and Hollywood studios teemed with scripts featuring heroic American agents and counteragents battling an insidious and merciless enemy. Intellectuals were drawn to British writer George Orwell’s antitotalitarian novels Animal Farm, published in 1945, and 1984, published in 1949. Despite the extremes of McCarthyism, the vast majority of Americans looked to a coalition of liberal anticommunists and conservative interventionists to lead them in this new crusade.
Colby reveled in his new fraternity, his “band of brothers.” The Agency, he wrote, “attracted what nowadays we would call the best and the brightest, the politically liberal young men and women from the finest Ivy League campuses and with the most impeccable social and establishment backgrounds, young people with ‘vigor’ and adventuresome spirits who believed fervently that the Communist threat had to be met aggressively, innovatively and courageously.”5 Colby’s description of the CIA at its inception not only mirrored popular enthusiasms but also highlighted a significant personality trait: he may have been a liberal, but he was also an elitist—there are no more elitist institutions in America than academia and the military. He did not necessarily think of himself as better than other people—and like his mother, he did possess true compassion—but he believed he had been born to and trained for responsibility.
In those early days, Colby’s cover was thin. He would carpool with non-Agency people into downtown Washington from the housing development in the Southeast District where he, Barbara, Catherine, and John lived. The carpool driver would drop him off at Fourth and Independence in front of the Labor Department building, just as he had when he worked for the National Labor Relations Board. But as soon as the car was out of sight, Colby would hop a bus to the Reflecting Pool and the collection of huts that served as CIA headquarters. Soon, he was advised by his superiors at the Agency to inform those who inquired that he had left the NLRB to take a new job in government having to do with defense and foreign policy. None of his acquaintances believed him. Washington was a small town, and it was assumed that his vague responses meant that he was now an intelligence operative fighting the good fight. His friends not only did not press Colby, they sought at social gatherings to protect him from more aggressive questioners. They were proud to be the friend of a secret agent.6
Barbara, Colby recalled, acted the good soldier, too. Bill was as vague with his wife as he was with his non-Agency friends about what he did. She knew that he was in intelligence and defense and that he was a cold warrior, but little more. She must have extrapolated from his OSS past that there would be some danger involved, but the war against communist totalitarianism appealed to her as much as it did to him. She, too, was a liberal Catholic with a strong social conscience. A future “Dame of the Order of Malta”—that is, a member of a lay religious order of the Catholic Church dedicated to humanitarian work—Barbara would become far more involved with the social and fraternal side of Catholicism than her husband. Catholicism and anticommunism were part of her makeup. She insisted on only one thing—that her husband have a life outside of his work.
Bill recalled that life in the CIA was different from his experience in the OSS. As a Jedburgh and NORSO, he had associated exclusively with fellow operatives; they were a close-knit band of men who laughed and drank together, lived and died together, an exclusive fraternity that existed within its own world. But as a CIA agent with a wife and children, Colby was forced to live a double life. He was both secret agent and school parent, the husband of an outgoing, socially active woman. He reveled in the double existence, drawing strength and balance from his non-Agency acquaintances. Some, Colby recalled, did not make the transition successfully. They associated only with fellow officers and their families so their defenses would not always have to be up. They dined together, worshipped together, and married and divorced each other. They became insular, sometimes withdrawn even from others in the Agency beyond their immediate circle, and eventually formed societies within a society, perceiving themselves as elites within an elite. It was such operatives, Colby recalled, who would give rise to the term “cult of intelligence.” For them, the art of intelligence was “above the normal processes of society, with its own rationale and justification, beyond the restraints of the Constitution,” he wrote.7
The three divisions of the CIA were tightly compartmentalized and, dating from the time of the OSS, those who served in them were
often jealous—at times even suspicious—of one another. Colby recalled that in the days immediately following the war, when the OSS was broken up—with the research and analysis scholars sent to the State Department, and the clandestine operatives (spies) to the War Department—the split had worsened, with the two groups “often hostile or contemptuous of each other.” But neither had any use for the paramilitary types, the “knuckle-draggers” like Colby, who had been sent home. When the latter group was resurrected under Frank Wisner as the OPC, that antagonism became even sharper, especially for the espionage and counterespionage people who had to rub elbows with the covert operatives in the field. As Colby put it, “the spymasters and counterspies feared that the high-risk, flamboyant operations of the ‘cowboys’ jeopardized the security and cover of their carefully constructed clandestine networks.”8
In November 1950, when he became a full-fledged employee of the CIA, Colby was aware of these schisms, but he was part of the A-team, part of the “Mighty Wurlitzer,” as Wisner (one of the few non–Ivy Leaguers at the top rungs of the Agency) referred to the OPC. To Colby’s and Wisner’s generation, the term “Wurlitzer” (from the Rudolph Wurlitzer Company, maker of musical instruments) conjured up images not only of jukeboxes but also of giant theater organs, such as the one at Radio City Music Hall. It was, as its designers intended, a “one-man orchestra.” It seemed as if there were as many keys in Wisner’s instrument as there were in a Wurlitzer organ. The OPC’s mandate was to duplicate what the Soviets were doing and beat them at their own game. This meant boosting anti-communist propaganda in countries at risk, with the CIA subsidizing pro-Western newspapers and exploiting sympathetic American correspondents. It meant Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, CIA-funded broadcast networks whose messages were designed to sow the seeds of unrest behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains. It meant paramilitary actions intended to block communist ascents to power in Third World countries and, occasionally, to subvert communist governments already established there. It meant, especially in the 1950s, the creation of “front” organizations that would fight communist activists for control of women’s and veterans’ organizations, labor unions, youth groups, lawyers’ associations, and cultural organizations. In 1949, the OPC employed some three hundred officers with a budget of $4.7 million. By 1952, those numbers had grown to 2,812 and $82 million, respectively. This was Wisner’s “Mighty Wurlitzer.”9
Colby had assumed that he would be assigned to the “Far East,” as East Asia was then called, because of his Chinese-language skills, but Gerry Miller had hired him, and Miller headed the Western European Division of the OPC. Soon after Colby began reporting to the Reflecting Pool huts, Miller told his newest recruit that he was being assigned to the Scandinavian Division. The NORSO experience had trumped Tientsin.
Among its myriad tasks, the CIA in 1950 was planning for a possible Soviet invasion and occupation of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. Those who had run Jedburgh and NORSO during World War II concluded that it would be far easier and more efficient to recruit, fund, equip, and train an underground resistance force before a particular country was overrun than afterward. Parachuting in men, money, and equipment after the fact was not the ideal way to raise a partisan resistance. The Agency wanted trained, equipped, and well-led anticommunist guerrilla forces at the ready even before the Red Army arrived. Colby’s assignment was to use his knowledge of the area and its people to set up these “stay-behind nets,” as they were called. To prepare for his new post, he was given a desk in the middle of one of the busiest corridors in the OPC building.
While he mulled over the current intelligence from Scandinavia, Colby had to learn to become a spy. His duties with the OPC would only slightly resemble those he had performed for the OSS. The first order of business was to sign a secrecy agreement, a lifetime pledge not to reveal any classified information relating to the activities of the CIA. Because of his background, Colby was spared “fluttering,” the Agency term for a lie-detector test. Neither did he have to undergo parachute training—which the new DCI, General Walter Bedell Smith, had ordered for all new recruits so there would be no macho pecking order. Colby was also spared paramilitary training at “The Farm,” the special CIA training facility that had been set up at Camp Peary, about 100 miles south of Washington. But he did have to learn “tradecraft,” as the skills of intelligence were referred to in the West. The Russians called these skills the “rules of conspiracy,” but the basic concepts were the same.10
Colby received instruction on how to pass messages by way of dead-letter drops (where the message is left by one spy in a secret location, and picked up later by another) and cut-out agents (intermediaries), how to set up clandestine meetings, and how to handle safe houses, manipulate the chemicals used in invisible writing, shake tails, and use miniature cameras and other James Bond–type equipment. Then there was tutelage on the complicated and extremely important process of recruiting agents in an assigned country. The CIA officer, operating undercover as a diplomatic or military official attached to the American embassy, would scour the population for potential agents, usually beginning with government officials of the host country encountered at cocktail parties and receptions. Anticommunist sympathies were the best indicators of a prospective informant, but personal peccadilloes or a simple lust for money would do in a pinch. The CIA recruiter would then have the Agency run an extensive background check on the mark. If he or she passed, a third party would be brought in to make the pitch; if something went wrong, the CIA officer stationed in-country would be protected. Once an agent had been recruited, his case officer would test him by assigning him to collect information on something the Agency had already investigated. If the information checked out, the recruit was in. He was then asked to sign a document connecting him to the CIA so he could be blackmailed if he got cold feet. If the information did not check out, however, the recruit was assumed to be either a con man or an agent of the Soviet or East European security services. According to Victor Marchetti, a former CIA operative who wrote the classic exposé The Cult of Intelligence, a good case officer had to “combine the qualities of a master spy, a psychiatrist, and a father confessor.”11
Of the relationship between handler and recruit, there were two prevailing philosophies within the Agency. In the “buddy” system, the handler developed a close personal relationship with his mark, convincing him that they were working together on a common goal and invoking personal loyalty as the risks and doubts mounted. Critics of this approach argued that it made the handler emotionally vulnerable. In their view, the best relationship was a purely detached one in which the handler treated the recruit as a commodity to be used, getting the most out of him as possible, and then discarding him. Colby claimed to have preferred the former and to have been “distressed” by the latter: “[T]rust and friendship . . . were the keys to successful secret collaboration,” he wrote. Yet trust and friendship were not always in the offing, and success was relative. He would recruit and use men and women throughout his career, relying on friendship and appeals to altruism, and then send some to their deaths in Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe and communist North Vietnam. If the enemy was to be defeated, the heroes would have to adopt some of the methods of the antiheroes. In his novel Harlot’s Ghost, in which he explored the world of espionage, Norman Mailer has one character remark, “If a good man is not ready to imperil his conscience, then the battlefield will belong to those who manipulate history for base ends.” There were certainly limits on how far the CIA would go in using the methods of its adversary, however; if an agent backed out on the NKVD [the Soviet intelligence apparatus], it might very well kill his family.12
What Colby would find most challenging was leading a double life in the field. There was his existence as a spy, an agent provocateur, a clandestine operative. He was engaged in work vital to America and the entire free world, battling an enemy without scruple and in command of vast human, industrial, and natural resources. The world of officer and
agent was a shadowy one where things were often not what they seemed. And yet, he was also a family man, a churchgoing Catholic trying to lead a normal life with normal relationships. He was a man of integrity, and yet his job was rife with deception and manipulation. In the tumult, it was sometimes easy to become disoriented. As reality is to dream, so one life was to the other, but which was which? Bill Colby did not despair; he was confident of his own internal moral compass, and he trusted his self-discipline and sense of duty. He was a man who could distinguish between illusion and reality. Or so he convinced himself.
Early in 1951, Gerry Miller called Colby in and told him that he was being sent to Stockholm, Sweden, to build an OPC presence. The first order of business was to establish a cover, a particularly difficult part of the job for American intelligence officers. In totalitarian societies, where the state controlled all bureaucracies, public and private, the left hand was used to not knowing what the right was up to. The NKVD, for example, could order any Soviet government agency or corporation to provide cover and support for its operatives. In a sense, the entire governmental apparatus and society were extensions of Soviet intelligence. In Western democracies, establishing cover was a bit more difficult. The United States, in particular, was a remarkably open society with no history of institutionalized peacetime intelligence. CIA personnel attached to embassies as cultural attachés or assigned to work for corporations overseas were bound to stick out if they underperformed or performed in an unusual manner. Their peers were bound to talk. It was decided that Colby’s public job would be the Foreign Service; he was to be attached to the American embassy in Stockholm as a junior political officer in the Foreign Service reserve, a category established for bureaucrats from agencies other than State who were temporarily working abroad. In April, Bill, Barbara, John, Catherine, and baby Carl deplaned for Sweden.13
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