Specially Trained Dogs Being Used in Colby Search

Dogs trained to find bodies in water were brought in Tuesday to help search for former CIA Director William E. Colby, presumed drowned in a canoeing accident three days earlier.

Colby’s swamped canoe was found Sunday on a sandbar about a quarter-mile from his vacation home in Maryland.

The dogs, which detect the scent of human skin oils that rise to the water’s surface, at one point alerted divers to a 100-yard area of water in front of Colby’s waterfront home.

Colby’s wife, Sally Shelton-Colby, watched anxiously from the porch as divers moved toward the site where one dog barked repeatedly. Two hours of searching that area proved fruitless.

The search wrapped up in the late afternoon and was to resume this morning.

Colby, 76, who headed the CIA from 1973 to 1976 under Presidents Nixon and Ford, was reported missing Sunday night by neighbors who realized he had not returned to Washington as usual.