During the Vietnam War, Bill Colby of the Central Intelligence Agency ran the Phoenix programme, which set out to "neutralise" the Viet Cong by capturing or killing them. In 1972, when Colby came home to a nation that had turned against the war, his face began appearing around Washington on "Wanted" posters. He was jeered on the street and peppered with death threats. Every day at 5 a m, he was awakened at home by the same crank caller, accosting him as a murderer and a war criminal. Colby did not bother to get his home number changed. Instead, he began to use the predawn call as an alarm clock.
Old agency hands marvelled at Colby's cool. "I could not imagine Colby sweating," one said. During his time in Saigon, while other CIA officers holed up in a five-story hotel a block from the presidential palace (the rooftop pool was called the "Bay of Pigs") and were ferried about in armoured limos with escorts, Colby lived alone and drove around by himself, day and night. He seemed to tempt fate, but in an understated way.
The director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1973 to 1975, Colby was one of the Ivy League gallants who jumped behind enemy lines in World War II and came back to fight the cold war as covert operators. But he was never really of this crowd, which tended to be sociable and flamboyant. He avoided the Georgetown cocktail circuit; at Princeton he had been a middle-class Catholic boy who did not join an eating club. In intelligence, there is an ideal type of spy known as "the traditional gray man", who can blend in anywhere, who is "so inconspicuous that he can never catch the waiter's eye in a restaurant," as Colby put it. Colby "prided himself that he was just such a man," Randall B Woods says in this well-written, thoroughly researched and disarming biography.
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In Shadow Warrior, we get the occasional glimpse of emotion. When one of his young sons began arguing with him about the morality of the Vietnam War, Colby became "red-faced," the son recalled, and "shouted that war was brutal - it brutalised everyone who came into contact with it - but sometimes there was no alternative. He himself, he admitted, had killed men in war, even with his bare hands". But such moments of self-revelation are fleeting. Mostly Colby presented himself as Galahad in a fallen world, a modest knight to be sure, but bent on finding the grail amid sin and corruption.
In 1954, President Eisenhower commissioned General James Doolittle to write a secret report on the state of American intelligence. Faced with an "implacable enemy", the report found, the West would have to fight fire with fire. Fair play was out: dirty tricks were in.
The realpolitik of the cold war raised an ancient philosophical question: if you adopt the underhanded tactics of the enemy, if you stoop to his level, do you become like him? Colby does not seem to have been troubled by the problem.
He was a romantic idealist, a liberal internationalist who wanted to replace fascist or Communist tyranny with freedom and democracy. He was hardly blind to the dark side or unwilling to deal with the Devil. In 1944, while training to parachute behind enemy lines, he discovered T E Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and the book was "never far from his reach for the rest of his professional life". Like Lawrence of Arabia, he was willing to kill and betray for romantic cause.
When, during the Watergate era, Congressional investigators demanded to know the agency's dirty secrets, Colby, then the CIA head, turned them over without remorse. The 693-page document, known as the "family jewels", detailed assassination plots, drug experiments, domestic spying and the like. It all seemed sensational at the time, but Colby observed that for an intelligence agency operating for 25 years at the height of the cold war, the list of misdeeds was "surprisingly mild". Partly because he had been a bit too forthcoming, Colby was pushed out of the CIA by President Ford. Colby drove away from Langley headquarters on his last day in January 1976, in his wife's dilapidated Buick Skylark, "an unassuming man making an unassuming exit", as Mr Woods artfully describes him.
In 1983, Colby left his wife for a younger woman and stopped attending Mass. In 1989, after the Berlin Wall came down, Colby took a walk, alone, through Red Square in Moscow. He noticed that no one was following him. "That was my victory parade," he told his son John.
On a warm night in April 1996, Colby went off in his canoe on a tributary of the Potomac River and never came back. The local coroner determined that he suffered a heart attack and drowned, but there were rumours of foul play or suicide. It is tempting to think that Colby somehow got lost in what T S Eliot called the "wilderness of mirrors". Or perhaps he always knew what he was doing.
©2013 The New York Times News Service
SHADOW WARRIOR
William Egan Colby and the CIA
Randall B Woods
Basic Books; 546 pages; $29.99
