Shadow Warrior (2 page)

Upon his return to the States, Zalin Grant began investigating Colby's death. Throughout the summer of 1996, Grant interviewed family members, neighbors, police and sheriff's officers, the medical examiner—he even managed to locate Kevin Akers. What he got were unanswered questions.
Why would Colby, after a hard day's work, go canoeing in total darkness? Carroll Wise and his sister had left him between 7:15 and 7:30, still watering his willows. It still remained for Colby to go in the house, steam the clams, boil the corn, open the wine, and consume part of the meal. By the time he finished, it would have been at least 8:30—pitch black. Colby had said nothing to Sally about a water outing. Then there were Akers's questions about the location of the sand-filled canoe in relation to the body.

Grant was the first and only journalist to view the autopsy pictures. He had seen plenty of dead bodies in Vietnam, some of which had been dumped in the Mekong River or other waterways. Without exception, they had sunk to the bottom, begun to decompose, filled with gas, and surfaced, bloated and grossly disfigured. In the autopsy pictures, Colby's body appeared almost normal, with no bloating whatsoever. The medical examiner—who had ruled that the former DCI had had a cardiovascular incident, fallen into the water, and died either of hypothermia or drowning—admitted that the body was amazingly well preserved. Based on an analysis of the contents of the corpse's stomach, the medical examiner ruled that Colby had died between one and two hours after eating. That would have had him paddling around Neale Sound between 9:00 and 10:00
P.M
. No, concluded the journalist, William Egan Colby had been killed.

Grant imagined that sometime in the early evening of Saturday the 27th, two or three men had parked near Colby's cottage, taken him by surprise, and abducted him. He would have gone quietly. Colby was the ultimate stoic, a fatalist who during his OSS days had come to view unreasoning fear as pointless and, from a practical perspective, dangerous. Some years earlier, Grant had visited Colby at his Georgetown row house. He had noticed that there were no locks on the doors, no deadbolts, nothing. When Grant had commented on the lack of security, his host had said that if anyone wanted to get him, they could do it; he wasn't going to live in a constant state of fear. In Vietnam, he had been the only high-ranking official to move about at night without an armed escort.

Grant surmised that another two or three men must have come by boat, tied on to Colby's canoe, pulled it loose from its mooring, and towed it away. Subsequently, the killers had suffocated Colby and then put him on ice. The water-borne assassins meanwhile took the canoe to the spit of land where the sound turned into the Wicomico River, placed it on the shoreline, and filled it with sand to keep it from drifting away. Sometime on the
evening of May 5, Colby's killers had placed his body on the spit of land, but on the wrong side! They had selected the site because it was easily accessible both by water and by land via a branch off Rocky Point Road, which terminated just 40 meters from the water.
²

Others had suspicions as well. Sally conducted her own informal investigation. The Agency assured her that the death was accidental but refused to share details of its investigation. As usual, the CIA had had exclusive control of the death scene until its agents were satisfied. The coroner's report, a copy of which the family obtained fifteen years later, seemed to go out of its way to reach conclusions. There was no evidence cited of a cardiovascular incident. Susan Colby, Bill's daughter-in-law, later heard rumors that a group of Vietnam veterans who haunted a bar near the marina had targeted Colby for what they believed to be their betrayal during the war. Colby's second son, Carl, would hint that he believed his father had committed suicide.

One thing was certain: Colby had lived a controversial and at times dangerous life. The former director of central intelligence was a deceptively mild-mannered, innocuous-looking man. Five feet nine inches tall, 170 pounds, with slicked-back hair and tortoise-shell glasses, he boasted finely chiseled features but described himself as someone who could not easily attract the attention of a waiter in a restaurant. The façade concealed a different persona. Colby was courageous, a natural leader of men, a veteran of conventional and unconventional combat, a patriot committed to the defense of his country, a man drawn to the sound of battle.

All wars produce casualties—killers and the killed. The conventional battlefield has its rules, but Bill Colby was an instrument of the CIA and as such participated in conflicts without rules or boundaries. During the 1960s, as Vietnam station chief and then head of the CIA's Far East Division, he had supervised the “secret war” in Laos—the United States had organized and armed a guerrilla force under the charismatic Vang Pao, unleashed it on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and then abandoned it when the North Vietnamese Army moved into Laos in force. In 1965, Colby's Far East Division had supplied the new government in Indonesia with the names of thousands of suspected communists, who were then systematically “liquidated.” Between 1968 and 1972, Colby had presided over the infamous Phoenix program in Vietnam, which had led to the deaths of at least twenty thousand Vietcong cadres. Colby had been CIA director
when in 1975 the United States abandoned Vietnam. The CIA was able to extract thousands of South Vietnamese who had worked and fought for the Americans but left many thousands more behind, a number of them wives, sweethearts, or intimate friends of CIA personnel who had worked in-country.

Between 1974 and 1975, it was Colby as DCI who had made the decision to turn over the Agency's “family jewels” to Congress. The jewels were long-kept secrets regarding CIA participation in domestic spying, assassination plots against foreign leaders, experiments with mind-altering drugs, and US participation in the coup that overthrew Salvador Allende in Chile. The revelations split the intelligence community, with half regarding Colby as a traitor, and half seeing him as a savior. Among the former were James Jesus Angleton, the famed mole-hunter and head of the Agency's counterintelligence division. Angleton, brilliant, paranoid, and a political reactionary, had long viewed Colby as at best a communist dupe and at worst a Soviet mole. On the eve of the family jewels crisis, Colby had fired Angleton and the entire top brass of the counterintelligence division. Another victim of the family jewels crisis was former DCI Richard Helms, who pleaded no contest to charges that he had misled Congress concerning the CIA's role in the Allende affair. Crucial evidence implicating Helms had been turned over to the Justice Department by Colby himself. Then there was Henry Kissinger, also implicated in the Chilean affair. Kissinger seemed satisfied with having Colby fired in November 1975, but Angleton and Helms embarked on a vendetta that extended through the 1980s.

As director of central intelligence, Bill Colby had sought to change the very nature of intelligence gathering. Since the emergence of the nation-state system and the creation of the first security services, intelligence had been characterized by compartmentalization and absolute “need-to-know.” A nation's spies operated outside constitutional and legal boundaries; secrecy was paramount, information restricted to the absolutely smallest number of individuals possible. Colby was remembered by his friends—and his enemies—for cooperating with Congress when it demanded that the Agency own up to its past and accept a future characterized by oversight and disclosure. Some said that Colby acted under duress; others, that he was an authentic advocate of more openness and accountability.

What got less public attention—but was far more worrisome to Angleton, Helms, and other traditionalists—was the array of internal reforms
Colby brought to the CIA. He attacked the concept of compartmentalization, insisting on the broadest possible sharing of information among those who had expertise or a different perspective to offer. He was concerned with protection of sources and methods, but there were limits. Secrets could be dangerous things. As he once remarked to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, “the more we know about each other, the safer we are.” From the point of view of those who made their lives in the world of espionage and counterespionage, Bill Colby was the ultimate subversive.
³

But at heart, Colby was not a true spy. He came from that branch of the CIA that specialized in covert operations, political action, and nation-building. Like his father, he was a romantic of the Rudyard Kipling, Robert Baden-Powell, Theodore Roosevelt stripe. He could destroy the country's enemies, but he was much more interested in converting them, proving them wrong. As the Cold War developed in the 1950s and 1960s into a competition between two rival political and economic systems and moved from Europe to the developing world, Colby, the liberal activist, found himself in his element. He would train stay-behind networks in Scandinavia (to offer resistance in case the Soviets overran the area), wage political warfare in Italy, and then spend nearly a dozen years trying to build a viable noncommunist society in South Vietnam. Colby was a champion of covert action, secret armies, pacification, and counterterrorism. These alternatives, he argued, were far preferable to conventional combat by main-force units, which killed tens of thousands and usually destroyed the country in which the battles were fought. Again, as far as the traditional military was concerned, Colby was a heretic, but for advocates of unconventional warfare, he was a prophet.

B
ill Colby's father, Elbridge, was the quintessential Yankee, descended from eight generations of Massachusetts Puritans-cum-Congregationalists. A number of Colbys had been seafarers, ships' captains, and mates who were gone for years at a time as they traversed the world's oceans. Bill's grandfather, Charles Edward Colby, was the clan's first intellectual of note. Born in Massachusetts but educated in New York City's public schools, Charles had distinguished himself as an inventor and math whiz by age fourteen. He matriculated at Columbia College and subsequently rose to become professor of organic chemistry. He married Emily Lynn Carrington in 1882. Elbridge was born nine years later. Charles suffered from poor health throughout his adult life and died prematurely of Bright's disease.
¹
Elbridge was nine years old.

The New York that Elbridge Colby grew up in was one of the most vibrant communities in the world. It was a city of extreme wealth, high culture, an emerging middle class, and a degraded underclass composed of dirty, diseased, illiterate immigrants who toiled from dawn to dusk for a pittance. While the rich reveled in the “high life,” congregating at the Waldorf-Astoria and the opulent apartments of Fifth Avenue, and the doctors, lawyers, managers, and ministers sought refuge on Long Island or in the boroughs bordering Manhattan, the poor resided in crowded, filthy tenements in Five Points or the Lower East side—“Hell's Kitchen.” The city produced America's first Progressive-era president, Theodore Roosevelt. Buoyed by his exploits with the Rough Riders in the Spanish American War (or at least reports of those exploits), by his embrace of the new reform
movement known as Progressivism, and by his advocacy of overseas empire, Roosevelt had shot up through the ranks of the Republican Party. Even while he was president, TR continued to be an avid outdoorsman, hunting, hiking, and horseback riding whenever he could. He was the first conservationist to occupy the White House. From what he would call his “bully pulpit,” TR advocated “preparedness” to his fellow Americans—which meant, for men, the willingness to forbear ease and risk their lives for their country; for women, the willingness to bear children and sacrifice for family; and for the nation, a strong military and active, independent foreign policy, coupled with laws to restrain big business and provide a degree of protection to the laboring masses. Though not of his socioeconomic class, the Colbys were enthusiastic supporters of the Rough Rider.

After his father's death, Elbridge's mother took a position in the registrar's office of New York's Hunter College. As his family clung desperately to the lower rungs of the middle class, Elbridge worked his way first through high school and then Columbia College. He received a bachelor's degree in English literature, graduating magna cum laude in 1912—the same year he became a Phi Beta Kappa—and earned a master's degree in 1913. Elbridge converted to Catholicism while in college. At Columbia, he was deeply influenced by the distinguished European historian Carlton J. H. Hayes. In 1904, Hayes, drawn by the teachings and example of John Henry Cardinal Newman, had himself converted. Elbridge's family did not approve of his conversion. Protestants to the core, his two older sisters would not speak to him for more than twenty years.
²

In addition to Roosevelt, Hayes, and Newman, Elbridge was drawn to two other prominent figures of the post-Victorian era—the Englishmen Rudyard Kipling and Robert Baden-Powell. Kipling, one of the most popular writers of his time, was the ultimate apologist for British imperialism. Born in India, he and his parents considered themselves “Anglo-Indians.” In his
Jungle Book
tales,
Kim
, and the epic poem “Gunga Din,” Kipling reveled in the melding of native cultures and British civilization. His only son died in World War I. Robert Baden-Powell, first Baron Baden-Powell, was famed as the founder of modern scouting. “Lord B-P,” as he became known in the press, served in the British Army from 1876 to 1910. During the early 1880s in the Natal Province of South Africa, where his regiment had been posted, Baden-Powell honed his military scouting skills amid the Zulu. In 1896, during the Second Matabele War, the Englishman met and
befriended the American scout Frederick Burnham, who introduced Baden-Powell to “woodcraft,” that is, the scout craft of the American Old West. Learned primarily from Native Americans, this method of scouting included among other things tracking, stealth, and survival techniques. On his return from Africa in 1903, Lord B-P found that his military training manual,
Aids to Scouting
, had become a best seller.
Scouting for Boys
was published in 1908 and sold 150 million copies during the years that followed.
³
TR, Baden-Powell, and Kipling were role models for the fatherless boy.