Colby Had His Share of Dirty Tricks

Liberals used to think of William Colby in his later years as one of their own. Had he not, as director of central intelligence, fired the crazed head of CIA counterintelligence, James Angleton, leaking Angleton’s letter intercepts, phone taps and dossier files on 10,000 Americans to the press as a way of bringing Angleton down?

Colby gave his Angleton disclosures to Seymour Hersh of the New York Times, whose stories ran just before Christmas, 1974. By the next year, Senate and House hearings into CIA conduct were in full spate, achieving maximum impact when senators flourished a firearm that might or might not have been used as a CIA assassination weapon. The late Mitch Rogovin, Colby’s CIA counsel, whispered to him that he should on no account be photographed holding the gun. On the House side, the hearings sputtered to a close after a secret draft of the final report on CIA misdeeds was given to Dan Schorr, then working for CBS, who handed it along to Clay Felker, who published it in the Village Voice. The CIA, which probably leaked the document, threw a fine display of indignation and used the episode as an object lesson in the folly of sharing state secrets with blabbermouths in Congress.

After President Ford dumped him, at Henry Kissinger’s instigation, on the ground that he was bringing the CIA into disrepute, Colby rose even higher in liberal esteem. He supported the nuclear freeze movement and said the defense budget could be cut in half without eroding national security. Angleton, brooding in his retirement, used to insinuate to sympathetic right-wing journalists that Colby might well have been the “super mole” inside the CIA that he hunted for years.

But if Colby is to be installed in the liberal pantheon, we should state clearly what liberalism in the Cold War period involved.

We find Colby at the dawn of his CIA career in Rome, doling out money to unions and political parties as part of the agency’s prime task of keeping Italian communists from power. (Not long before Colby disappeared from his canoe, the Italian communists finally made it into government.)

Colby was in on Vietnam from the start. In 1961, he egregiously misrepresented the results of the South Vietnamese election--rigged with CIA assistance--in which Ngo Dinh Diem was elected with some 70% of the votes. In a cheery secret dispatch from Saigon, Colby informed President Kennedy’s top advisers that the “psychological uplift [the election] supplied to the regime and to public morale in general was considerable.” Already seeing light at the end of the tunnel, Colby proclaimed that Diem’s triumph had “enhanced stability and encouraged hope for the national future.”

According to former agency officer Paul Sakwa, Colby’s rosy assessment--entirely divorced from reality--helped convince Kennedy’s people that Diem was worth backing. “His reports had a great deal to do with our expanded involvement in the war,” Sakwa says. “The end result was 50,000 Americans dead, 1 million Vietnamese dead and huge numbers wounded on both sides.”

By the end of the 1960s, Colby was busy administering nastier portions of the war he had helped unleash. He directed the Phoenix program, a secret “pacification” campaign for Vietnam in which more than 20,000 communist “suspects” were rounded up and executed. He was named director of the CIA in 1973, just in time to oversee the agency-backed coup that brought Gen. Pinochet to power in Chile.

What Colby engineered with his leaks to Hersh and subsequent testimony before Congress was a successful exercise in containment in the dangerous period following Richard Nixon’s resignation, when institutions like the CIA were under unwonted scrutiny. Colby and his strategists successfully laid emphasis on “rogue elements” in the CIA who had broken laws and suborned the CIA’s charter. The House Intelligence Committee’s attention was worrisome precisely because it stressed the CIA’s integral role, illegal and legal, in the administration of U.S. policy, in which there were not so much rogue officers as obedient officers diligently following government’s criminal orders.

Thus was the mid-1970s congressional assault on secret, illegal government side-tracked and contained. Colby had a lot to do with that. Today, the agency is as immune to effective oversight as it was before the 1974 hearings.

Never at any time did Colby seem to have been bothered by thoughts that in his career there were chapters of which he had reason to be deeply ashamed. This particular Quiet American endured no tortured Catholic conscience. He knew he was no rogue.