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William Egan Colby (January 4, 1920 – May 6, 1996) was an American intelligence officer who served as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) from September 1973 to January 1976.
During World War II, Colby served with the Office of Strategic Services. After the war, he joined the newly created Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Before and during the Vietnam War, Colby served as chief of station in Saigon, chief of the CIA's Far East Division, and head of the Civil Operations and Rural Development effort and oversaw the Phoenix Program. After the war, Colby became Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) and during his tenure, under intense pressure from the Congress and the media, adopted a policy of relative openness about U.S. intelligence activities to the Senate Church Committee and the House Pike Committee. Colby served as DCI under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford until January 30, 1976, and was succeeded at the CIA by George H. W. Bush.
Colby's mother, Margaret Egan, was from an Irish family in St. Paul active in business and Democratic politics. With his Army father, William Colby had a peripatetic upbringing before attending public high school in Burlington, Vermont. He then attended Princeton University and graduated with an A.B. in politics in 1940 after completing a 196-page long senior thesis, "Surrender – French Policy toward the Spanish Civil War," in which he sharply criticized France for failing to support for Second Spanish Republic in the civil war. He then studied at Columbia Law School the following year. Colby recounted that he took from his parents a desire to serve and a commitment to liberal politics, Catholicism, and independence, exemplified by his father's career-damaging protest in The Nation magazine regarding the lenient treatment of a white Georgian who had murdered a black U.S. soldier who was also based at Fort Benning.
He married Barbara Heinzen (1920–2015) in 1945 and they had five children. His daughter, Christine, was presented as a debutante to high society in 1978 at the International Debutante Ball at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. In 1984, he divorced Barbara and married American diplomat Sally Shelton-Colby.
After the war, Colby graduated from Columbia Law School and then briefly practiced law in William J. Donovan's New York firm, Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine. Bored by the practice of law and inspired by his liberal beliefs, he moved to Washington to work for the National Labor Relations Board.
Colby then spent much of the 1950s based in Rome under the cover as a State Department officer, where he led the Agency's covert political operations campaign to support anti-communist parties in their electoral contests against left wing Soviet–associated parties. The Christian Democrats and allied parties won several key elections in the 1950s, preventing a takeover by the Communist Party. Colby was a vocal advocate within the CIA and the United States government for engaging the non-Communist left wing parties in order to create broader non-Communist coalitions capable of governing fractious Italy. That position first brought him into conflict with James J. Angleton.
In 1968, while Colby was preparing to take up the post of chief of the Soviet Bloc Division of the Agency, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson instead sent Colby back to Vietnam as deputy to Robert Komer, who had been charged with streamlining the civilian side of the American and South Vietnamese efforts against the Communists. Shortly after arriving Colby succeeded Komer as head of the U.S./South Vietnamese rural pacification effort named CORDS. Part of the effort was the controversial Phoenix Program, an initiative designed to identify and attack the "Viet Cong Infrastructure." There is considerable debate about the merits of the program, which was subject to allegations that it relied on or was complicit in assassination and torture. Colby, however, consistently insisted that such tactics were not authorized by or permitted in the program.
More broadly, along with Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker and Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) commander General Creighton Abrams, Colby was part of a leadership group that worked to apply a new approach to the war designed to focus more on pacification (winning hearts and minds) and securing the countryside, as opposed to the "search and destroy" approach that had characterized General William Westmoreland's tenure as MACV commander. Some, including Colby later in life, argue that approach succeeded in reducing the Communist insurgency in South Vietnam, but that South Vietnam, without air and ground support by the United States after the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, was ultimately overwhelmed by a conventional North Vietnamese assault in 1975. The CORDS model and its approach influenced U.S. strategy and thinking on counterinsurgency in the 2000s in Iraq War and Afghanistan.
Colby's time as DCI was also eventful on the world stage. Shortly after he assumed leadership, the Yom Kippur War broke out, an event that surprised the American intelligence agencies but also those of Israel. The intelligence surprise reportedly affected Colby's credibility with the Nixon administration. Colby participated in the National Security Council meetings that responded to apparent Soviet intentions to intervene in the war by raising the alert level of U.S. forces to DEFCON 3 and defusing the crisis. In 1975, after many years of involvement, South Vietnam fell to Communist forces in April 1975, a particularly difficult blow for Colby, who had dedicated so much of his life and career to the American effort there. Events in the arms-control field, Angola, Australia,Pilger, John, A Secret Country, Vintage Books, London, 1992, , pp. 185, 210–211, 219, 235. the Middle East, and elsewhere also demanded attention.
Colby also focused on internal reforms within the CIA and the intelligence community. He attempted to modernize what he believed to be some out-of-date structures and practices by disbanding the Board of National Estimates and replacing it with the National Intelligence Council.
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> For further information on Colby's leadership of the Intelligence Community, see cia.gov In a speech from 1973 addressed to NSA employees, he emphasized the role of free speech in the U.S. and
the moral role of CIA as a defender, not a preventer, of civil rights, an attempt to rebut the then emerging revelations of CIA and NSA domestic spying. He also mentioned a number of reforms intended to limit excessive classification of governmental information.
President Gerald Ford, advised by Henry Kissinger and others concerned by Colby's controversial openness to Congress and distance from the White House, replaced Colby late in 1975 with George H. W. Bush during the so-called Halloween Massacre in which Secretary of Defense Schlesinger was also replaced (by Donald Rumsfeld). Colby was offered the position of United States Permanent Representative to NATO but turned it down.
During that period, he also wrote two books, both of which were memoirs of his professional life, combined with discussions of history and policy. One was titled Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA; the other, on Vietnam War and his long involvement with American policy there, was called Lost Victory. In the latter book, Colby argued that the U.S.–South Vietnamese counterinsurgency campaign in Vietnam had succeeded by the early 1970s and that South Vietnam could have survived if the U.S. had continued to provide support after the Paris Accords. The topic remains open and controversial, but some recent scholarship, including by Lewis "Bob" Sorley, supports Colby's arguments.
Colby also lent his expertise and knowledge, along with Oleg Kalugin, to the Activision game , which was released shortly before his death. Both Colby and Kalugin played themselves in the game.
Colby was a member of the National Coalition to Ban Handguns. His name appears on a note to Senator John Heinz dated July 5, 1989, as a "National Sponsor."
At the time of the Senate hearings to confirm his appointment, Colby was relentlessly grilled about The Family Jewels, a secret 693-page report ordered by Schlesinger, directed by Colby, and compiled by CIA's own Inspector General's Office. It dealt with what Colby calls "some mistakes," specifically CIA abuses ranging from assassination plans to dosing people with mind-control drugs to domestic spying.
Colby's death triggered conspiracy theories that his death had been caused by .
In his 2011 documentary The Man Nobody Knew, Colby's son Carl suggested that his father suffered from guilt over his failings as a father to one of his daughters and so committed suicide. Carl's step-mother and siblings, as well as Colby's biographer Randall Woods, criticized Carl's portrayal of Colby and rejected the allegation that the former CIA director killed himself and said that it was inconsistent with his character.
His grandson,
title= Elbridge Colby|author= |access-date=June 24, 2022
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