Colby’s confirmation hearings got underway in late July 1973. As soon as the Senate began hearing witnesses, the old “Wanted” posters featuring a photo of the DCI-designate imposed on the ace of spades began popping up around Washington, especially at construction sites for the new metro. The phone calls to the Colby household also recommenced. One caller told his daughter Christine, who was then thirteen, “We’ll get your daddy.” Colby, who prided himself on being able to take a punch, ordered his lieutenants at the Agency not to try to find out who was behind the posters and calls; if word got out, it would only make matters worse. Colby consoled himself in part with the knowledge that Catherine did not have to endure this latest round of vilification. Eventually, a particular caller got to the DCI-designate, an individual who would call at all hours and then stay on the line saying nothing. Colby asked his clandestine people to track the call. The next time the phone rang, and Colby realized it was the phantom, he called him by name. There was a gasp, and the line went dead.6
Meanwhile, in the Senate, Stuart Symington (D-MO) led the nominee through a series of public questions that provided him with the opportunity to assure the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Agency’s estimates would remain free of policy and political considerations. Colby promised that under his direction, the Agency would collect only “foreign intelligence,” and that he would resign if asked to undertake any illegal activity. The going got tougher when the committee went into executive session. A number of hostile witnesses associated with Phoenix had testified against Colby’s confirmation. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) took up where they had left off. Mirroring the about-face on Vietnam that his brother Bobby had made before his assassination, Ted was now a relentless dove. For nearly four hours he questioned Colby about assassination squads and American-supported terror in Vietnam. He then turned to Watergate, accusing the Agency, Colby included, of being part of the cover-up. Colby denied it. When the dust had settled, Kennedy was one of only thirteen senators voting nay; 83 approved.7
The confirmation vote on August 1 should have eased Colby’s mind, but it didn’t; the White House seemed to have forgotten that he needed to be sworn in. Walters, who was still acting director, had to remind the president, and Colby was finally called to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on September 4. Nixon praised his professionalism and emphasized Colby’s role as director of counterinsurgency and pacification in Vietnam.8
Press reactions to Colby’s appointment had been mixed. Which Bill Colby would he prove to be? David Wise asked in a July 1973 article. Was America’s new super-spook the mild-mannered suburban dweller, the devout Roman Catholic who regularly attended Mass at the Little Flower Roman Catholic Church in Bethesda, the father of four, and a former Boy Scout troop leader? Or was he the ultimate product of the “super-secret Directorate of Operations, sometimes known as the ‘Department of Dirty Tricks?’“ Deliberately uncharismatic and self-effacing Colby may have been, but he was a product of the culture that had overthrown Mohammed Mossadeq in Iran and Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala. It had conducted the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion. Colby himself had run the secret war in Laos and the infamous Phoenix program. The new director may not have talked like the proverbial duck, but he certainly walked like one. Neil Sheehan also suggested a Jekyll and Hyde personality. “Colby’s office is a light-filled and airy one,” the journalist observed after an interview with the soon-to-be DCI. “There is a picture window that runs along the entire right side of the office as you come in. . . . Through it you can see other buildings of the CIA complex and the trees surrounding it. Looking out on the scene from this pleasant office, you would never think that such dark things have been discussed and ordered from such a light and airy place.” Sheehan found Colby to be an enlightened observer of contemporary and historical events and a good listener. But there was something behind the eyes, something of the fanatic. Could this be America’s Felix Dzerzhinsky, the brutal head of the Soviet Union’s first intelligence and internal security apparatus?9
Within the Agency, Colby’s ascension met with mixed reviews. “Colby never became a member of CIA’s inner club of mandarins,” Agency historian Harold Ford later wrote. CIA officers Richard Helms, Tracy Barnes, John Bross, Kermit Roosevelt, James Angleton, and Bronson Tweedy were of the elite, comfortable on the Georgetown cocktail circuit, connected socially and politically. Bill Colby was a middle-class Ivy Leaguer and a loner. Spying and counterspying—those were the coins of the realm in the Agency—but Colby was a doer, impatient with the caution and painstaking procedures of intelligence collection. In addition, his experience was in East Asia, while the primary preoccupation of the CIA was the Soviet Union and the East European bloc. To some, his colorlessness and lack of charisma were off-putting. “Slight of build, with pale, dull eyes, Colby appeared to be almost anything rather than soldier or intelligence chief,” David Phillips later wrote. Although most junior officers loved him, some of his senior colleagues found him rigid and closed-minded. “I just have a feeling about Bill Colby that he is quite lacking in the qualities that enable most of us to be introspective about our behavior,” one critic stated. “He had a total incapacity to compromise.”10
In 1977, Phillips, then a Directorate of Operations officer, took a poll of some eleven senior CIA alumni who had worked closely with one or more of five DCIs. He found that when asked which director one would want as an effective companion in a perilous situation on a desert island, all either chose Colby, Richard Helms, or John McCone, with no votes for Red Raborn or Allen Dulles. Given a comfortable, nonthreatening situation, however, where one would want an easy, stimulating companion on a desert island, six chose Dulles, five Helms, and one McCone—with no votes for Raborn or Colby. Phillips expanded on why he had selected Colby for the first category. “He would get us both off that island,” he wrote. “Certainly he would never entertain the notion of building a boat for one or, if he did reach that point, he would later stand in the surf and wave goodbye—a faint smile on his thin lips—after pushing me out to sea.”11
It fell to Colby—after his nomination but before his swearing-in—to preside over the final battle in the Nixon administration’s war with Salvador Allende. The Chilean Constitution limited its presidents to one six-year term. If Allende was to implement La via chilena al socialismo, Chile’s Path to Socialism, he was going to have to hurry. The government issued decrees nationalizing large-scale industries, including the American-owned Anaconda Copper and ITT, and confiscating all landholdings larger than 80 hectares. The vote was extended to eighteen-year-olds and illiterates. Massive public works projects provided employment for hundreds of thousands of poor Chileans. Spending on housing, public health, and education skyrocketed. In 1971, Chile, along with Mexico and Canada, extended diplomatic recognition to Castro’s Cuba. Fidel himself declared his enduring friendship for both Chile and Allende and made a highly publicized tour of the country. Unfortunately for the socialists, the bottom fell out of the copper market; this, together with a massive increase in government spending, led to runaway inflation. By 1972, in part as the result of economic boycotts imposed by the United States and strikes in the copper and service industries, Chile was experiencing a severe shortage of consumer goods. Opposition to Allende’s rule grew apace in Chile’s National Congress, which was controlled by the Christian Democrats and the military. There was no doubt that Allende had received support from the KGB during the 1970 electoral campaign—some $400,000—and continued to do so thereafter. He promised to provide whatever information Soviet intelligence might require, and in 1972, Moscow awarded him the Lenin Peace Prize.
Nixon and Kissinger watched these developments with growing alarm. The Track I and, to an extent, Track II campaigns to destabilize Chile politically and economically continued. In August 1972, the 40 Committee approved another $i million for Chile’s opposition parties, bringing the total for the Allende period to $6.5 million.12
New coup plots began to materialize by the end of 1972
. The CIA station in Santiago kept in close touch with all anti-Allende factions, including the military, but there was no effort to provide aid or even promises of US support. The consensus within the 40 Committee was that the Chilean military would launch a coup sometime in the near future and that it did not need help from the CIA to succeed. On September 10, 1973, an emissary from a group of high-ranking military officers appeared at CIA offices in Santiago. He informed the station chief that an assault on the Presidential Palace would take place the next day and asked for US support. After checking with headquarters, the chief of station informed the coup emissary that the United States would not interfere in what was a purely internal Chilean matter. With Agency personnel limiting themselves to reporting events, the attack on the palace got underway, as predicted, on the 11th. Presidential guards, who, incidentally, had been trained by the Cubans, fought fiercely, but they were quickly overwhelmed. Allende refused offers of safe passage and, following an eleventh-hour radio broadcast from the palace, allegedly placed a rifle under his chin and blew off the top of his head.13
Chilean leftists claimed that the military fabricated this account, and that Allende had actually been assassinated with the assistance of the CIA. But the coup plotters who were present stuck to their story. Allende’s death has been a subject of controversy ever since. The Nixon administration and the CIA insisted the United States had nothing to do with Allende’s demise. In any case, democracy would not return to Chile for more than twenty years. The military regime that took control following the coup, under General Augusto Pinochet, would become one of the most notorious rightwing dictatorships in a region where rightwing dictatorships were standard fare. The new government suspended the National Congress, outlawed labor unions and political parties, and established one of the most feared secret police organizations in the world—the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, or DINA. Thousands of leftists were imprisoned indefinitely, interrogated, and tortured. “Methods employed,” according to an International Commission of Jurists report in 1974, “included electric shock, blows, beatings, burning with acid or cigarettes, prolonged standing, prolonged hooding and isolation in solitary confinement, extraction of nails, crushing of testicles, sexual assaults, immersion in water, hanging, simulated executions . . . and compelling attendance at the torture of others.” Those considered most subversive disappeared entirely.14
Colby would have preferred a different outcome—the election of someone like Frei, for example. But he believed that anything was better than Allende. “If you support some authoritarian leader against a Communist threat,” he later remarked to an interviewer, “you leave the option that the authoritarian state could become democratic in the future. With the Communists, the future offers no hope. . . . Pinochet is not going to conquer the world. Nobody is worried about Pinochet.” Colby’s experiences with the “closed societies” he had encountered following the outbreak of the Cold War had led him to believe that communism was the worst of all totalitarian systems. For the most part, his fellow Americans shared that view. But they were less and less willing for the United States to intervene in a Third World country to stop communism’s spread. An October 29, 1973, Harris Poll reported that fully 60 percent of the American people believed that the CIA should not have tried to destabilize the Chilean government; only 18 percent approved.15
Bill Colby may never have expected to be named DCI, but, like every other senior officer in the CIA, he had thought extensively about the role of the office of director—its mission, methods, and responsibilities. The philosophy that Colby brought to the fourth floor at Langley was an extension of the philosophy he had embraced as a Jedburgh, political officer in Italy, chief of station in Saigon, Far East Division chief, and DEPCORDS. He was still a true believer. People joined the CIA, he observed in a 1976 oral history, because they were patriots. The Agency, like the armed services and the US Foreign Service, was dedicated to the safety and welfare of the country.16
It was fitting that as Colby took the reins at Langley, preparations were being made to raise a statue of Nathan Hale in the courtyard. Although he was American intelligence’s first martyr, Hale was certainly not a role model for future spooks, Colby observed in his maiden speech to Agency personnel. He had volunteered for espionage duty at the last minute; he had a very weak cover story; he had little training and no secret writing or other gimmicks; and when he was captured, his reports were in his shoe. Not only was he apprehended by the British, but the information he sought—where on Manhattan Island General Howe planned to land—had already reached his superiors by another route. But Hale was to be valued not for his expertise or his success, the new DCI declared, but for his motives, his courage, and his willingness to sacrifice for his country. “We may not, God willing, need to demonstrate physical courage,” Colby told his comrades, “but in the intelligence profession we will be required to show moral and intellectual courage.”17
But patriotism was a hard thing to define in an era that featured the Sino-Soviet split, Washington’s openings to Moscow and Beijing, and spreading American disillusionment with its government in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. Colby, like George Kennan, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Jack Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, wanted to contain communism until it either collapsed from its own internal contradictions or evolved into something nonthreatening to the rest of the world. He continued to believe that the best way to fight Sino-Soviet imperialism was to subsidize the anticommunist left. He would dispatch John F. Devlin, deputy director of political research at the CIA, to the 1974 American Historical Association Conference to recruit. In his pitch, Devlin made it clear that all were welcome, including Marxists. Of course, Colby still believed that the best defense was a good offense. He may have abandoned the notion that the Western democracies could train and equip freedom fighters within communist hard targets to overthrow their respective governments, but he was still committed to covert action, both military and political, in disputed areas. In terms of the Soviet Union, Colby viewed intelligence gathering in much the same way the advocates of mutually assured destruction viewed the arms race. There was his telling comment to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev during his June 1973 visit to Washington: “The more we know of each other the safer we both can be.”18
As it had in the past, Colby’s approach put him on a collision course with the men who kept the secrets—Helms, Angleton, and the whole counterintelligence culture. The extreme compartmentalization that had characterized the CIA under his predecessors, Colby believed, had visited a number of evils on the Agency. It had crippled the CIA’s ability to fight the Cold War. It had kept Langley from producing the best, most informed, most integrated intelligence products for the nation’s policymakers. There was only one component of the CIA charged with an unconditional need-to-know, and that was CI. This had given primacy to the mole hunters, defining the Cold War as the CIA vs. the KGB rather than the United States and its allies versus Moscow, Beijing, and their allies. The obsession had been with protecting against penetration rather than with penetrating. Ideologically, this meant that the Agency had sometimes been dominated by anticommunist hardliners, conservatives who preferred monarchists and fascists not only to communists, but to socialists as well. Compartmentalization had also led to the abuses, mild though they were in Colby’s eyes, that were in the process of destroying what was left of Congress’s and the American public’s confidence in the CIA.
Colby longed for an Official Secrets Act similar to the one in Britain that made it a crime to reveal classified information and that protected MI-6. He continued to battle Victor Marchetti and Philip Agee—the former CIA officers who were attempting to out the Agency in print—working through the courts to censor their publications in order to protect sources and methods as well as publicly denouncing their disloyalty. If Agee were a member of a foreign service, there was no doubt what would happen to him, Colby told an interviewer; “He’d be shot.” But he was not going to have a US Official Secrets
Act, and he knew it. The CIA was an American intelligence agency, Colby told a college audience, not MI-6, not the KGB, not the Chinese communist apparatus. But what did that mean? It was no small question. Upon how he answered it might hinge the very existence of the Agency and the security of the country.19
Colby soon came to recognize that the National Security Act of 1947 and constitutional requirements aside, the world of 1974 was very different from the world of 1947. From the time of his return from Vietnam to become executive director, he had cultivated close ties with rising young officers in the Agency. That trend would continue when he became DCI. “We make no effort to get out in front of Congress,” one of his protégés wrote him in a memo during the spring of 1974. “We concentrate on trying to preserve what we have, and as a consequence look what we are becoming. Twenty-five years have been devoted to immunizing and insulating CIA as an institution, and its population as individuals, from the evolutionary and riotous changes that have engulfed the society at large. . . . We don’t look for ways to make change, we search exhaustively for ways to prevent it. . . . Maybe intelligence shouldn’t serve the Executive Branch exclusively. . . . Maybe the principle of separation of powers shouldn’t apply to intelligence.” Colby agreed—with the first part, at least. If the CIA was to weather the gathering storm, there would have to be sweeping reforms.20
What the new DCI envisioned was an integrated team that would turn out the best possible intelligence product and report frankly to Congress on its activities, excluding sources and methods. Indeed, he promised as much in his confirmation hearings: if the Agency were to survive, “it has to conform with [sic] the laws, the standards, and the customs of our country,” he proclaimed. “It has to retain the confidence of the American government and the American people.”The family jewels were missteps of the past; under Schlesinger, and then on his own, he had issued edicts prohibiting any and all Watergate-type actions, assassinations, and other wrongdoing. Perhaps most important, the CIA would no longer keep secrets from itself. “The way to solve the problem of the baronies and the separate lives of the different elements of the Agency,” he told an interviewer, “is more and more to pull the experts in their different fields into direct contact with each other. Don’t scare them by having them feel that he [sic] can’t possibly talk to somebody in another Directorate because it is a little bit worse than talking to the KGB.”21
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