| THE STRANGE CASE OF WILLIAM COLBY ? They found his canoe bobbing in the waters of the Wicomico River about 100 yards from his weekend home in Rock Point, Maryland, a small town in St. Mary's County.?It took only a few minutes longer to find the man's body face down on the river bank about twenty yards from the canoe.?The search teams were confused:?hadn't they been over this area thoroughly several times in the last nine days??? Twelve years ago today, the body of William Egan Cplby was found.?Seventy-six years old at the time of his death, Colby had the kind of career usually found only in novels.?A native of St. Paul, Minnesota and a graduate of Princeton University and Columbia University Law School, he accepted a position with the New York law firm of Donovan, Leisure, Newton and Irvine.?? World War II soon intervened with Colby's civilian plans.?He volunteered for the Army's new intelligence and covert operations unit called the Office of Strategic Services (OSS.)?The spy agency was headed by the senior partner of the law firm he left to join the Army, William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan.?During the war, Colby parachuted behind German lines twice, once in France and again in Norway.?He was awarded the Silver Star for gallantry as well as citations of commendation from Great Britain, France, and Norway.? A friend from the OSS offered Colby a job after the war with the newly-formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), where he served in Stockholm briefly before spending most of the Fifties in Rome.?His work involved influencing Italian elections and helping to keep the Communist Party from achieving an electoral victory there.? Subsequently, he became directly involved with U.S. intelligence efforts in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.?He was a dedicated believer in the rightness of the American intervention in the area.?One of his most significant contributions was the development of the Phoenix Program, a controversial operation dedicated to the destruction of the Viet Cong command and control structure in South Vietnam.?Although the program was successful (the Communists admitted after the war that Phoenix was the most damaging operation to them,) many criticized it for employing torture and assassination as regular tactics in achieving its objectives.? After his involvement in the Vietnam operations, he was assigned to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where he rapidly became its Executive Director, then Deputy Director of Operations (the clandestine branch of the Agency) before finally assuming the Director's position.?He held that job for two and a half years, a period of great upheaval in the Agency's history.?Chief among these problems was the so-called "Church Committee" report, the investigation conducted by the Senate committee charged with investigating operational abuse by the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation led by Senator Frank Church of Idaho. |
| Chief among these problems was the so-called "Church Committee" report, the investigation conducted by the Senate committee charged with investigating operational abuse by the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation led by Senator Frank Church of Idaho.? Colby decided that it was in the best interests of both the Agency and the country for the CIA fully to cooperate with the Church committee, feeling that the Agency's secrets, called "The Family Jewels" internally, were not that damning (an opinion largely confirmed when the Jewels were publicly released less than a year ago) and that it was important to show that CIA was willing to cooperate with Congress in the immediate post-Watergate era.? This decision was not a popular one with "old-school" officers and the entrenched hierarchy within CIA nor with the White House, and in October 1975 he was dismissed by President Gerald R. Ford and replaced by George H.W. Bush, the current President's father.?In retirement, he wrote two books and was a consultant on intelligence matters; he also assisted in the investigation of the so-called Franklin child abuse case.?This involved allegations of a child prostitution ring servicing high-level politicians in the Reagan and the elder Bush administrations.? On 27 April 1996, William Colby apparently went on his ill-fated canoe ride, culminating in the discovery of his body nine days later.?The ensuing inquest concluded that Colby had collapsed from either a stroke or heart attack and died from hypothermia and drowning; the investigation of his death ended there.? But it wasn't quite as cut-and-dried as that.?Colby rarely went canoeing at night.?He almost never got into a boat without a life vest, according to friends.?He did not mention his plans to take the canoe trip to his wife.?He left the house with a half-eaten meal still on the table, his computer and radio turned on, and, most telling, the doors unlocked.?Finally, as indicated in the opening paragraph of this essay, the area where his corpse and the abandoned canoe had been found, just 100 yards from the house, had been searched exhaustively in the week between his disappearance and subsequent discovery.? Could the former Director of CIA been murdered??Several people who were familiar with Colby have expressed their theories, some hare-brained (he was killed because of his knowledge of extra-terrestrial technology) to the more plausible.?The man he collaborated with on the Franklin child prostitution investigation, John de Camp, wrote in his book The Franklin Coverup that Colby simply possessed too much specific information about political corruption on the highest levels.? Twelve years have passed, and we're no closer to an answer.?Perhaps the Arlington National Cemetery's webpage on him says it best:?he was "a man whose manner of death seemed to conjure up the enigma of his life."? -- KMR |
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