The Gray Man
‘Shadow Warrior,’ by Randall B. WoodsBy EVAN THOMAS
Published: May 3, 2013 
William E. Colby, right, with another former director of central intelligence, George H. W. Bush, in 1978. During the Vietnam War, Bill Colby of the Central Intelligence Agency ran the Phoenix program, which set out to “neutralize” 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...
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 brutalized 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. “He was a man who could distinguish between illusion and reality,” Woods, a professor of history at the University of Arkansas, writes. “Or so he convinced himself.”
In 1954, President Eisenhower commissioned Gen. 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, in effect, 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 did not become a drunk or turn half-mad like so many spies and spy chasers of that tortured time, most notably James Jesus Angleton, the head of counterintelligence, who was Colby’s antagonist at the C.I.A. Colby was always rather a Boy Scout (indeed, he led a Boy Scout troop when he was at home on the weekends, and worshiped at the Church of the Little Flower). ...
In Vietnam, Colby, like many agency men, rejected a purely military solution, preferring to win “hearts and minds” by nation building. But, as always, he faced moral compromises. The Phoenix program was used by local chieftains to carry out vendettas. Colby objected to the word “assassination” and insisted that the killing was justified. He believed that the C.I.A.’s pacification programs were working in Vietnam, and that the American effort just ran out of time.
When, during the Watergate era, Congressional investigators demanded to know the agency’s dirty secrets, Colby, then the C.I.A. 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 C.I.A. 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 Woods artfully describes him. ...
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 rumors 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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/books ... share&_r=0 
Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2012 12:30 pm
