William Colby has been missing since April 27th.
On the evening of that day, he went for a canoe ride
near his vacation home on Cobb Island.
His canoe was found washed up on the banks
of the Wicomico River April 28th.
In other news, the search continues today in Maryland
for former CIA Director William Colby.
He is missing and presumed drowned
after an apparent boating accident.
A boating accident in strong currents or foul play?
In addition to being a master spy,
William Colby was an accomplished sailor.
When the former Director of the CIA is missing
not much is ruled out.
My father would always have the same dark wooden dresser.
It had some socks in one drawer, and underwear in some drawer,
and his shirts.
But on the top drawer, you'd pull it out
and it was full of ribbons...
...bullets, passport...
...gun.
Hmm.
What does he do?
There have been allegations
that this was an assassination program.
I am against assassination.
I think it's counterproductive.
Uh, and I've issued directives against it.
But I confess in the dark, back reaches of my mind
I would have very cheerfully helped carry the bomb
into Hitler's bunker in, uh,
out in Poland in, uh, 1944.
My father, he was good at a lot of things,
but he was very good at making war.
December 7th was a beautiful Sunday.
I was up bright and early making breakfast.
I did happen to look out over Koko Head
where I was living, these planes were coming by.
And they were not planes that I recognized.
The radio was on: Mormon tabernacle choir,
and all of a sudden, a man's voice comes over.
"The islands are under attack."
When I got to Pearl the next day,
the birds in the streets,
they were all dead from the concussion.
Corpses all over the place.
When Pearl Harbor happened,
everything changed in Hawaii and the whole world.
I met your dad on a blind date.
He was in law school at Columbia.
He went into the field artillery originally,
but really wanted the parachute infantry.
So, he said that during a physical exam,
he mentioned that his eyesight wasn't all that good,
and the doctor said, "as long as you can see the ground
for jumping, uh, we'll take you."
And that's what he did.
Your dad joined us, Area B-1.
He was artillery, I was infantry.
Bill was out of those New England schools and...
I was a westerner.
One day, a major from O.S.S.
Asked us a simple question:
"Those of you who are interested in hazardous duty
behind enemy lines, remain here.
Those who are not interested are excused."
Well, most everybody left.
But I thought that that sounded interesting.
That's why I was in a parachute regiment,
I thought.
Somewhere in America, the United States
is developing hundreds of recruits
for this specialized service.
Hand picked for the aid
of Army and Navy intelligence facilities,
the men are taken under guard to the secret training camp,
which is to be their home for the weeks to follow.
This isolated, heavily wooded terrain
offers an excellent proving ground
for the student of guerilla tactics.
From the moment of their induction,
the identities of the recruits
remain a carefully guarded secret,
which explains the use of masks in this film.
From whence they came, or for what perilous mission
they're being prepared is the concern of nobody at camp.
But all of them have this in common:
They burn with a desire for vengeance
and they mean to deal it out as it was given...
at close quarters
with no holds barred.
We had hand-to-hand combat training...
...instinctive firing...
...a limited amount of knife fighting...
...demolitions.
We had many courses in surreptitious entry,
and we were all oriented on getting ourselves trained
for this mission, doing things
that would increase our survivability.
Those days were filled
with a sense of urgency.
Everybody wanted to go
and serve in that war.
The men and the women had conviction
that they were doing what was right
to preserve precious values of humanity
that were being violated,
and off they went.
We went together on a ship
from Fort Hamilton, New York,
to one of the ports of, uh, Glasgow.
We learned from T.E. Lawrence's books.
They would emphasize how important it is
to know the local people:
What their idiosyncrasies are,
likes and dislikes,
and above all, what are their taboos,
the things that you don't want to get involved in,
so that you wouldn't give away the fact
that you were an American
so deep in enemy territory.
O.S.S. Did send in people
to do underground work and sabotage.
Break up communications.
Bill Colby was one of the most, uh,
renowned one of these in his operations in Norway.
Your dad was wiry, small,
but he could ski.
He had taken charge
of the underground group,
mostly all of Norwegian background, Americans,
many of them, but great peril.
Norway was occupied,
and Germans were...
pressing from all sides.
And the mission, well the mission is,
was very exciting.
The mission was to blow up bridges and trains
to prevent the movement of German troops
through Norway.
We were apprised of what was going on.
We used v-mails.
They were quick letters, some censored, I suppose.
The mission was successful.
Bill was Silver Star.
The whole concept of Special Forces
came out of these operations.
That was the beginning
of the ideal way of building,
uh, a... a force inside
an occupied, uh, country.
My father was always the coolest character
I ever knew.
After the war, we used to go take picnics in France,
and he'd say, "This is where we jumped in,
and this is the ditch where I lay in for two days
while the Germans marched by."
I remember asking him, "Well, why didn't you
just shoot at the Germans?"
And he goes, "There were only like four or five of us,
six to eight hundred of them.
They'd kill us all."
He'd talk about the Charge of the Light Brigade,
six hundred people racing into this valley.
And I'd say it was a suicide mission.
He said yeah, but the glory of it all.
When he volunteered,
he was looking for action.
In my family, everybody gave my father
a wide berth.
He thought about coming to Washington,
and working for the government,
NLRB as it turned out,
"National Labor Relations Board."
To tell you the truth, Carl,
I don't know exactly when your father moved over
from NLRB to, uh, to the CIA,
but I can tell you this,
We lived in southeast Washington.
And your dad used to get a ride in to NLRb
with our neighbors George and Phyllis.
I can't remember their last name.
One weekend, Phyllis asked me,
"Barbara, we've always dropped Bill off at..."
Uh, whatever the address was,
"Last time we dropped him, we looked back,
and he was hotfooting it across a couple of blocks,
and, uh, going in another direction."
And that is truly how I really learned
that your dad was in another line of work.
The United States was the only power in the world.
Time Magazine came out with
"This is the American century."
Japan, which had been such a ferocious enemy,
all of a sudden a non-sulking,
dependable colony,
or whatever you want to call it in those days.
It was a different world.
The CIA was considered a pretty good thing.
When you came into a place as an American,
you were regarded with considerable respect.
You know, you're representing a big power,
and the biggest power anybody ever knew.
From Stettin in the Baltic
to Trieste in the Adriatic,
an "Iron Curtain" has descended across the continent.
And so an Iron Curtain fell across Europe,
an Iron Curtain dividing the free world
from the slave world.
In the 1950s, we had a contest going on:
Who will dominate western Europe?
World War Two ended with the United States
planted firmly in half of Europe,
with Europe divided at the Elbe,
but with what was west of the Elbe,
politically and socially very vulnerable.
Nineteen fifties was a time
of really serious political contest
over the future of that portion of Europe.
At the end of the war,
Italy was almost destroyed.
The industrial potential was down.
And political situation was very bad.
The Communist Party was huge and well organized.
The largest Communist Party in Europe.
The American government was concerned how things
they were going in Italy.
And, uh, your father was sent there
to be responsible maybe of the largest operation
that CIA has ever done before.
They have to verify
that the operation
to restore Europe
was going smoothly.
And of course the Communist Party
and of course U.S.S.R.
Was working to destroy this operation.
In Italy, we had a huge Communist Party.
And I myself watched closely
the Italian political developments,
because as a dedicated Communist
I believed that Italy will go one day Communist.
Okay, no Soviet invasion,
but the strength of the left movement
was so high that Italian Communists
will win the elections, form a coalition government,
and lead to Pro-Communist Italy.
Every election was a cliffhanger.
Whether the Communists would win the elections,
or failing that,
they would launch an uprising.
Well, I worked for your father.
He was the boss.
Communists pretty much controlled the north of Italy.
They had control of the trade unions,
control of the cooperatives.
The Communist newspapers that had been underground
were now out in the open.
And they were able to portray themselves
as not toadies of the Soviet Union,
in spite of the fact that we estimated at the time
that they were getting forty million dollars a year,
at a time when we were putting four, or five, or six million
into the Italian politics.
The threat was certainly there,
that Italy might go Communist.
We had State Department cover.
Your father was a political officer,
and we were on the diplomatic list.
In reality, um, he worked for CIA,
but that was never stated overtly.
There were also CIA personnel
who were undercover.
So your dad had to blend
the diplomatic side
with the political action that CIa
was tasked with.
Colby in Rome is keeping up the morale
of the Italian security people
who are keeping track of what is still
a very dangerous armed Communist Party,
giving them firm leadership and encouragement
and by coming from a serious,
professional background...
the background of espionage,
where the first thing you learn
is most people lie most of the time,
and things like that.
Colby was able to be well-informed
about Italian politics,
and inject a much more realistic view of Italy
than the one that was generated
by Ambassador Luce, and by,
most of the ambassadors, uh, were,
were simply not up to the job.
The United States policy
was to support
the Christian Democratic Party in any means possible.
And we certainly assisted financially,
but also guidance in organizing their rallies,
their propaganda.
Political advice... how do you do it,
how do you win an election?
And we had a very large covert action program
in Italy.
It was not by chance, that in the name of the party
they put Partito Democratico Cristiano.
Christian Party was very linked to the Church.
We lived next door to the daughter
of Premier de Gasperi.
You and the boys were friends.
We'd get together for dinner,
play charades in Italian.
We had a breeze, really,
with our State Department cover.
There were marvelous opportunities for learning.
I studied Italian at the Instituto per Stranieri
over by the Pantheon.
Imagine walking through these marvelous places in Rome
that every tourist wants to see.
And here we were living this life.
It was a wonderful experience for a family like ours,
who was already Roman Catholic.
We had one child born in Rome,
baptized at St. Peter's,
under the cupola.
Two others making their first communions.
The oldest child was serving mass,
Italian-style, his Latin was very good.
We were very fortunate.
This was a superb experience.
Oh, those happy days.
Italy was wonderful.
My mother was vivacious,
fun, always youthful.
She was the world to me.
They met on a blind date.
She supported him in law school,
working at Abraham and Strauss.
They were very optimistic.
They seemed to appreciate what they had.
He was very Catholic, and she was very Catholic.
In Rome, I thought he worked for the embassy.
I went to a Catholic school, it was up on the Via Cassia.
I was an altar boy.
And the Church was just everywhere in Rome,
very powerful.
So magnificent.
You're in this embrace.
All the world is well,
just follow the dictates of the Father.
Monks would come to the house...
Franciscans with their brown robes,
sandals and the big rope.
And I'd see him
talking to a priest,
with his head slightly bowed,
genuinely interested in what they say.
If you want to collect information,
you go in the church.
And your father distributed
a tremendous amount of money.
Most of the money, um, which was, um,
not the money of the intelligence,
was even distributed by the Vatican.
They are very well connected.
In each little village there are more than one church
to distribute this monies.
The cardinal American who was, uh,
behind this operation,
he was pretty deeply involved with your father,
and, um, with, uh, this,
um, uh, movement of money,
used it to contrast
the really overwhelming power
of the Communist Party.
I didn't know very much
at all about the operations,
the techniques.
Sometimes it was difficult to, um,
to ascertain just who we were
and where we were going
at a certain point, and so on.
One evening, we went to, um,
we went to the theater,
and, uh, I saw...
I recognized a couple
whom we had dined with the night before.
And I started to go over and say,
"Oh, buona sera, how are you,
wasn't that pleasant last evening?"
And my husband took me aside and said,
"Shh, quiet, quiet.
We don't... before you... we don't know these people."
We don't know these people?
Well, we did know these people.
There were times when really,
I didn't know what role we were playing.
Who are we tonight?
We'd go somewhere... family trip on the weekend,
picnic basket in the back,
and he'd meet somebody,
have a conversation,
deliver something.
He and my mother and the family left town,
drove up north,
and went and passed a radio to somebody.
So we'd have a picnic.
That wasn't a lie.
Sometime later, one of my dad's friends said,
"You know, your mother has a lot to do
with your father's success."
They were a great team.
The family wasn't always let in...
let in to this world of his.
Um, beginning, of course,
with this CIA code
of "need to know."
He never had to really tell me anything.
Um... I suppose that's...
that's the CIa modus operandi,
but even so, I remember hearing
one CIA wife of a rather high ranking officer say,
"Oh, my husband tells me everything."
Well, I was a little jealous, but I thought,
no, it couldn't be.
They don't tell us everything.
They tell us very little, if anything.
The provision of large sums of money
led to the success of the Christian Democratic Party,
somewhat to the surprise of many people in Italy
and certainly to the rest of the world.
Your father left Rome
before the really beautiful time starts,
which was the sixties.
We call it la dolce vita, the sweet life,
which was immortalized by Fellini.
The government was well settled,
the economy starts to improve rapidly.
We call it the Italian Miracle.
As much the economy grew,
as less the Communist Party become.
All the effort they have done to destroy Italian economy
was mitigated by your intervention,
I mean, American.
Being in a world of concealment and deception,
puts a person in a different space psychologically,
morally, and socially.
Being an intelligence officer,
you're in an adversarial contest;
in a way something like a war,
and if it's morally justifiable
to take people's lives in war, um,
it seems that it may be morally justifiable
to mislead them in conflict situations.
Deception in a certain limited range of cases
is really necessary for the protection of people
who work in the agency, the people
whom they're dealing with,
and the national security.
Deception, um, in this situation
is unavoidable.
But that one doesn't want to offer
a kind of blanket endorsement so that people,
you know, forget the point about the...
the necessity of telling the truth.
My dad used to say, "I already know
what I think.
My job is to listen.
It's not about me, it's about
who someone else is and what they may be
able to offer me."
My mother always tried to find things
to do that were fun and free and relaxed.
My father would participate, but there was always
this ever tightening tension that you're going
to be called to action, that there will be war,
violence always pervaded everything.
Happy was not what his life was about.
His life was about doing the right thing,
being at the pointy edge of the spear.
He was in pretty good shape.
Six o'clock in the morning,
Canadian Air Force exercises,
push-ups, jumping jacks, legs going up and down.
He'd call me sport when he kind of liked me.
When he was annoyed at you, you were friend.
"Listen, friend."
If you'd really done something badly, he'd get the belt out.
He didn't like lying.
He certainly believed in corporal punishment.
Among friends he could be relaxed.
Well, frankly he didn't have any friends.
He had people he worked with.
He didn't have a lot of romantic ideas
about spying.
He saw it for what it was, a dirty business.
In 1959, we arrived in Vietnam.
This was barely five years after
the fall of the French forces.
I remember that one of the first places
we visited was the French military cemetery.
Your dad found a friend buried there,
a friend from the mission in France in World War Two.
It's incredible.
Saigon was amazing in those years.
Saigon was still very French.
French was the language in which our embassy officers
and their Vietnamese counterparts spoke
at meetings, the language of the departed power,
French.
Our social contacts were officials
in the Diem government.
Our oldest daughter attended school
with French nuns.
The niece of the President attended that school.
You boys went to the American Community School,
which was a center of real Pro-Americanism.
I mean, there were Sunday ballgames,
and picnics, and Cub Scouts,
and Girl Scouts.
It's strange to think that the threat
from North Vietnam wasn't easily seen.
Your dad came in to take over the station
from a guy who wasn't suited for dealing with
the Vietnamese at all.
The Vietnamese were completely disorganized and disheartened
because the Geneva Accords and the cease fire agreement
had been signed without their participation.
They had no say in it whatsoever, and all
of a sudden, their country
was being divided in half.
The Communists took over in the north.
You had the refugees coming out of the north,
you had the Vietnamese army deserting in the north.
Some of them were coming south.
The French were terribly bitter
and downhearted.
They were losing Vietnam.
When the Diem government was established,
you didn't have much of a civil service,
and you certainly had very little
administrative capability out in the provinces.
This left a security vacuum in the countryside.
And the Viet Minh Communists
started to come in and fill it.
The Kennedy Administration comes in.
They've got a huge problem in Vietnam.
And that was the beginning of the effort
to help the Diem government resist the insurgency
and the beginning of counter-insurgency.
The Kennedy Administration came in with very high hopes
and a rather golden environment,
both of public support, and of self-esteem.
Certainly the President and his brother,
uh, were many-sided, uh, individuals,
but they had an interest in covert activity,
uh, they had an interest in, uh, James Bond-type activity.
They saw it as a third way,
this side of military involvement,
and this side of diplomatic
exclusiveness.
They romanticized a great deal about
doing things secretly that couldn't be done openly,
including some very strenuous covert activity,
but also, uh, that, uh, that they were
personally interested in it.
One of the first things that Bill Colby had to do
was to orchestrate and oversee
a mission called 'Project Tiger'
in which some 250 pilots,
South Vietnamese pilots and paratroopers participated,
to drop spies behind the lines
in North Vietnam.
The C.I.A. Believed they could operate
behind enemy lines in the same way
that the O.S.S. Did in World War Two.
Of roughly 250 of these missions,
217 men were killed, captured,
or turned into double agents.
I was part of the first group
to be trained in counter-insurgency.
When we graduated from the training,
we all got taken to the White House,
and we shook JFK's hand.
He was very impressive.
Walt Rostow was around, and he coined the phrase
'infrastructure' and we have to build
up the infrastructure in South Vietnam, and,
so we all sort of saw it as a,
as a new crusade.
We had to defend South Vietnam against the North Vietnamese.
Otherwise, the entire region was going to fall
to the Soviets and the Chinese.
We were convinced that, uh, really the hope
of southeast Asia was, was Ngo Dinh Diem.
We were sent to support the Diem government.
We went up to Dalat, to the lovely
mountain station where they had a house.
We got to know that family quite well.
Your father was assigned to be in conversations
with President Diem's brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu,
with whom he became really quite close.
I met Madame Nhu, who was a very dynamic person.
We had a very pleasant time.
The President himself was a bachelor,
an old rather Mandarin type in his way of speaking
and dressing.
Not aloof but rather detached really.
I... I wonder if he really sensed the difficulties
that his country faced.
After all, this was the government
of South Vietnam.
Nhu had a concept of himself in which
he was the reigning intellectual.
Your father taught him a lot about insurgency,
and gave him a lot of books to read,
uh, which was good.
The bad part of it was that he then
thought himself to be the unique expert
on counter-insurgency in Vietnam.
We are building strategic hamlets
to bring peace throughout the country.
The Strategic Hamlet Program was essentially an idea
of arming villagers to defend themselves.
Nhu considered himself the father
of the Strategic Hamlet Program.
But in the initial phases of the program,
villagers weren't paid for relocation.
They were forcibly relocated,
and a lot of them were very unhappy with this.
The principle is a good one.
Protect the people in their own little hamlets
where they defend themselves
and be defended against encroachments
from the outside.
The problem was North Vietnamese,
at some point... because remember,
they're building up... are going to overrun those.
There was a real sense that we needed
a unconventional approach to stem an increased
flow of support from North Vietnam
to the south.
The decision in 1961 is to not introduce
U.S. Combat forces into South Vietnam
but to dramatically increase the advisory effort
to the South Vietnamese armed forces.
So between 1961 and 1963, the advisory effort
grows from 800 to over 16,500.
Kennedy always had a soft spot
for the cavalier side of the military.
After all, he's a P.T. Boat captain.
Uh, small unit, dashing, individual officers,
they could live inside enemy territory,
could live with the natives.
They could fight in the jungle.
Lawrence of Arabia was a model.
They were imaginative, free-willing.
To the Kennedys, they were the answer.
And the Kennedys foster this whole program
of Special Forces.
In Saigon, we lived near the palace,
and I started to see my father with,
uh, generals, military people,
with police, the military and the police.
And at night, I remember early evening you hear
this rumble, this distant rumble, and I said
to my dad, "What is that?
Is it thunder?"
And he said, "No. They're shelling,
30 miles outside of town."
Hmm, 30 miles.
And I remember my father saying
all this is going to change.
A war is coming.
He said it in a very sort of caring way,
like he had a stake in it.
We left, as you know, in 1962, just as
the military buildup was starting.
Your father received a promotion to be
head of all the C.I.A. Operations in the Far East.
We returned to Washington, and President Diem asked us
to come and have a visit before we left.
This was when we were getting ready to depart.
And we did, we visited at the palace.
We sat there with the President.
It was a memorable time.
There was really not much political talk.
But yet, there was a feeling that things
were not going well in that country.
But the idea that we were visiting with the President
and having his gratitude for what Americans
were doing is a memory that I won't forget.
Here we had created a government.
That government lived in the person
of President Diem.
We had helped install him in 1954,
we had tried to create a political culture
around him.
It had the appearance of democracy.
Diem was a Catholic in a Buddhist country.
He was more French than he'd probably admit.
The civil war in Vietnam, and that's what it was,
was a political war, and Diem was not
a great politician.
Tanks manned by troops of the Special Forces
ring Buddhist temples in Vietnam
as the crisis in that embattled southeast Asian nation
mounts to a climax.
These troops are under the command of Ngo Dinh Nhu,
the President's brother.
The Buddhists, demanding more religious freedom,
find themselves the objects
of a terror campaign that has had
international repercussions.
Diem's military violently suppressed the Buddhists;
murdered a political group of them.
A Buddhist monk in protest set himself on fire.
This image went around the world.
It was seared into the minds
of every American.
I was with your father, and he was really shocked
by that.
He had felt that things were moving
a little bit better, but here was just
a tremendous protest erupting against
the rule of Ngo Dinh Diem.
What have the Buddhist leaders done comparatively?
The only thing they have done,
they have barbecued one of their monks
whom they have intoxicated, whom they have
abused the confidence.
Uh, even that barbecuing was done, um,
not even with self-sufficient means
because they, they used imported,
uh, gasoline.
The regime was beginning to disintegrate.
The circle of people that Diem would listen to
got narrower and narrower.
Nhu gradually became the single most
influential advisor to Diem,
and all of the, or, most of the intelligence
that Diem was getting was funneled through Nhu.
Something had to be done about the fact
that Nhu was taking over the regime,
and Nhu was going bonkers.
Buddhist monks and nuns are joined by thousands
of sympathizers in Saigon to protest
the government's restrictions on the practice
of their religion in South Vietnam.
By 1963, the weakness of the Diem government
was becoming painfully apparent to members
of the Kennedy Administration.
But the story took a turn for the worse,
dramatically worse, after a new
American Ambassador showed up in Saigon.
Henry Cabot Lodge comes out to Saigon as Ambassador.
He thought of himself as kind of a pro-consul.
He thought of the Vietnamese as kind of strange
little people, subject to all these superstitions.
He didn't pretend to need to understand them.
It was a very, very simplistic mindset.
Lodge decided that he alone was going
to make the judgment that Diem had to go.
And he helped ginned up a coup.
Lodge's cable came in first, and Lodge wanted it said
that he'd been approached indirectly
by the generals, uh, inquiring what
the American role, or attitude would be
toward a move by the generals,
uh, if it came to... if it came to that.
The return said that we were deeply worried
about the disintegrating situation in Saigon...
the apparently disintegrating situation in Saigon.
Uh, we thought that the Nhus were bad news,
and that they had to go.
Both Madame Nhu and brother Nhu,
and that Lodge should therefore go to Diem
and tell him that he had to separate
himself from his brother.
If that proves impossible, we may have to face
the possibility that Diem himself will have to go.
That's the extent of the American statement
about Diem.
Diem understood that Nhu was a liability,
but his, his kind of nature was such that
he would not be dictated to by the Americans
on this subject.
Right before the coup occurs, Diem has a meeting
in the palace, uh, with, uh, CINCPAc
who came out, and then he pulls
Lodge aside and he says,
"Please tell President Kennedy
that I will do anything he wants,
that we really need to get over this."
Well, that same afternoon, the coup starts.
We thought that the President himself
had ordered up a coup.
Who are we to question the decision
the President had made at this point?
It was only later that we started to find out
it really was cranked up by Lodge
and by a clique in the State Department.
Lodge had the bit in his teeth,
and he was running this thing.
The White House thought they were running it,
or they had any brakes on him... they didn't.
It was really something.
It was a holy day,
All Saints' Day, November '63.
I was at mass that morning,
and your father came into the church,
Little Flower, in Bethesda,
and said, "pray for the Diem brothers.
Pray for the souls of the Diem brothers.
They've been found murdered."
Which was a shock.
A terrible shock.
Bill stayed for that mass
and we prayed, oh, fervently
for President Diem and his brother.
What was so difficult about it was that
in hindsight, in immediate hindsight,
we have to...
we Americans have to realize
that we bore some share in this tragedy.
I'd... not personally, but somehow,
things went wrong somehow.
My mother believed in what he was doing,
but she wanted it to be right.
She saw his missionary zealotry,
this force of good in the world.
I think they competed for the high ground,
moral high ground.
Who's doing the good work?
Fighting the good fight?
He doing his job,
and she, the loyal wife,
religious and Catholic.
My mother believed in what he was doing,
but it had to be moral,
and it had to be right.
This was an extraordinary moment
of presidential carelessness,
and the result was a President,
and his brother,
with their hands tied behind their back,
and bullets in their head.
And a shattered illusion, which is
that we were building a democracy in Vietnam.
It was only three weeks later
that John Kennedy was killed.
Lyndon Johnson said when he found out
what the role of the United States was,
"We just got a bunch of thugs and killed them."
The U.S. Responsibility
for Diem's death was absolutely clear,
and once that was done, it became,
not the South Vietnamese war
against the North Vietnamese,
it was our war.
The albatross was around our neck,
and it was ours from then on.
The Americans,
when they go into a country,
are trying to do something rather
different from European colonialists.
They're not going in there to seize assets
or to strip value out of a country.
Americans do genuinely feel
that when they gird themselves up
and go around the world,
that they're on a... a mission of... of
bringing, um, bringing providence,
um, to bear.
They're going in there for
what they perceive as the good
of the people they're trying to help.
They therefore feel that
the local people will think that
this is a gift that they're bringing,
and why on earth would local people
look a gift horse in the mouth?
Local cultures count.
Bombs, and that sort of thing,
are powerless against local cultures.
The early experiments
of civilian irregular defense groups
to provide security to the villages
started by William Colby
in conjunction with U.S. Special Forces,
showed great promise.
But the American Army was disappointed
that Special Forces were not being used
in an offensive role.
They were providing security to
the population, not going out
finding, fixing, and finishing the enemy.
And, and so we stepped away
from that very promising experiment,
and we moved to a very conventional war.
Here's the headline news, good morning.
President Johnson held a news conference
last night,
said, among other things,
that if more American troops
are needed in Vietnam, they'll be there.
We overwhelmed the country
with that large a force.
Imagine, what would it be like?
I'm sitting in Lincoln, Nebraska,
and all of a sudden comes in these people,
I don't even know who the hell they are.
They're taller than I am, uh...
they're noisier than I am,
they got a diff... a much different culture,
much different religion.
I mean, the, the...
the religious differences are huge.
You're violating cultural taboos
almost every step of the way.
It's shockingly disruptive
and offensive.
And the paradox of that is
we then provide the political ammunition
that the opposition needed,
provided them many opportunities
for saying, "See, this is why
you want to get the Americans out."
Your father was quite upset
by the disruption that occurred,
and the... and the difficulty that, that,
that attached to the effort as a consequence.
He certainly was not one who was
in favor of turning the thing
over to the military.
Never had been.
But when the decision was made,
he went along a hundred percent.
The Vietnam that I knew
was being destroyed.
This perfumed, gorgeous,
liquid country was being torn apart.
It was going to be gone.
He told me quite a lot
what he was doing.
"Organizing these villagers,
self-defense teams."
It all made a lot of sense.
But he would leave the room,
why I'd look over to the television,
and choppers are coming in,
and B-52s, napalm,
and guys firing into the jungle.
Towns and fishing villages that
I'd been to would pop up.
It was, like, out of a movie.
Like, "God, look what happened to Nga Trang.
I don't remember an airfield there.
Where are all those bases?"
It was like that that was a different war.
It wasn't the war
that my father was fighting.
He was fighting a completely
different war.
A problem that you have
is that you are in, in the habit
of fighting the last war.
World War One and World War Two
were set piece battles.
So we crashed around in the jungle
looking for the V.C.
Or the North Vietnamese forces,
while they engaged in insurgency.
Reality intrudes.
Sooner or later, one must recognize
the people who understand
the heart of an insurgency
are the people who are dedicated,
most dedicated to its defeat.
Well, you will well remember,
uh, going to the airport, to um,
when your dad went off to, uh,
to Saigon in, uh, '68.
At that time, it was more and more troops,
more and more troops.
His idea was to use the troops
in a different way.
He kept pushing for his methods.
What did we say?
"Guerilla war?"
He somehow couldn't give up on it.
It was a lengthy assignment.
He came back periodically.
We'd go to Vermont,
uh, try to carry on life
as we'd known it,
and it was, uh, he was doing...
he was called to serve,
and he did it.
He did it capably.
When it comes to long separations,
my mother was at loose ends.
She lost the center out of her life.
It was very hard for her.
A year or so into his being there,
my sister Catherine became ill.
She'd had epilepsy since she was a child.
Terrible seizures.
She developed anorexia nervosa.
It was awful.
My mother took on
the suffering of my sister.
She would make it go away
for my father.
It couldn't be any other way,
everything for the mission.
And I remember I looked over
at her one evening.
She was writing him a letter
I think, in Vietnam.
I saw that she was a woman,
not just my mother.
She was Ionely.
She hadn't signed up for this,
but she did it.
A warrior, what my dad was.
He liked being in the fight.
I thought he was the most
capable guy they could have.
If anybody's going to do that job,
he ought to do it.
He could do it.
And he wasn't going to complain about it.
Matter of fact, he wanted
to do that job.
Ignatius had a vision of his people
going anywhere in the world
for the good of souls,
as he put it.
In Jesuit culture,
there's a lot of respect for autonomy.
The autonomy of the person,
and for the way in which God works
on the person, uh, individually.
One can influence people, and persuade
them in certain directions,
not by what one says,
but just to observe what
Ignatius calls "The movement
of the spirits" in the person.
Letting them do the talking,
asking the occasional question,
and integrating what they're saying
into the overall story of their lives.
One does not need to have a heavy hand
telling people what to do.
It would be a presumptuous director
or priest who would simply say,
"God tells me what you ought to do."
Um, and uh, I think most Jesuits are,
are happy to stay away from that.
When you encounter an area that's
been taken over by the enemy,
you can tell right away,
I mean, the fear is palpable.
These are traumatized people.
The first thing to do is to conduct
effective reconnaissance,
and intelligence collection.
And so, you have to really
go into the town and stay there.
Get into an edge of the town.
Control some certain portion of the town
where people can come up to you safely
and talk to you.
It's immensely important
to begin working with
indigenous forces right away.
Because one of the things
the enemy will use is,
well, the occupier is here, you know,
the crusader is here, and so-forth.
And the best way for you
to clarify those intentions
is to work with the local populace,
and be seen in a supportive role.
Treat the population with respect,
and then people will recognize
the enemy propaganda for what it is.
They're desperate in a lot of cases
for an improved life,
so they'll come to you with information.
Then you can begin to understand
the dynamics in the area
through this effective reconnaissance.
You have to build the confidence back
in the people that you're going to leave,
but you're going to leave in place
a security structure that they can trust.
It was the kind of simple,
yet novel ideas that your father
put into place
and it came down to making life better
in a given village
so that you engendered trust
and ultimately gained intelligence
from a much more welcoming
local community.
Uh, at the same time,
when you found somebody that
the villagers identified as
a bad guy, kill him.
Quick.
The increasing influence
of the government resulted in a lot
of information coming in.
A major problem was how to decide
what was valid information
and what was actionable,
what we could do something about.
The Phoenix Program
was an effort to bring together
the various disparate elements
of the intelligence gathering organizations
from take action to neutralize the bad guys
as a consequence of that information.
This was a major effort
that your dad instigated.
The P.R.U. Were really
the offensive arm that
the irregular forces had.
Often they were former V.C.
Themselves who were reconfigured
to work for the government.
They had a very, very effective
ratio of losses to those that
they captured or killed.
For every P.R.U. That was lost,
why they, uh, neutralized, killed,
or captured sixty-seven V.C.
I remember once talking
to him about the P.R.U.'s
These were former Vietcong
who were hired
and paid by the Agency
to go out and, and go into
V.C. Areas and, and counterattack
and kill who was ever there.
And Colby's response was, 'cause there was a...
I mean this was a guy who understood
the hardness of life and war and what needed
to be done, uh, against an enemy,
um, there was no option.
He said, "Now Steve, the Indians were coming
in through the windows.
And, and you gotta shoot back."
Intelligence was very effective
during that couple of years.
We rounded up a large number
of people who gave up fighting
for the other side and came in.
We had enough presence by this time
in all the hamlets that,
that the Vietnamese knew
the South Vietnamese knew
pretty much what was going on,
and it was a matter of getting
some of them to tell you,
which the South Vietnamese became
increasingly effective at doing.
The Phoenix Program
was intended to root out
the infrastructure of the V.C.
North Vietnamese.
To gather intelligence
where the insurgents were located,
to cut them off,
to take their supplies away.
They never had too much
in the way of supplies.
And to destroy in effect
the infrastructure of the insurgency.
And it is essential in a counter-insurgency
to root out that infrastructure.
Unless one is able to root out
those who organize the insurgency,
and cripple their operations,
one is not going to defeat them.
Colby received a great deal of criticism
for the Phoenix Program
here in the United States,
but if you are engaged in conflict
of that sort,
you must make use of those tools
that are indispensable
in winning the conflict.
If you are afraid to make use of those tools,
then you should not be in that conflict.
Yes there were abuses;
there was no doubt about it.
The Agency had installed a program
to hold and to interrogate,
uh, people who were captured,
and that was very much a mixed bag
in the way these folks were treated.
There was nobody really looking
over the shoulder of the South Vietnamese
who were doing the interrogating and,
uh, they really got out of hand,
some, on, on, on certain occasions.
By the time I got there in 1969,
it felt much more like
an assassination program,
I mean, because it's very
difficult to control it.
We were supporting the Vietnamese units.
They were doing a lot of the intel work;
go out in the field with us.
There's no way to know whether
the person delivering
the intelligence was reliable.
It wasn't like you had
people that you trusted completely.
You tell me you've got
somebody out here that's a part of
the infrastructure,
and I've, I've got to make a decision
do I follow up and,
and do something about it?
So it felt like it had been corrupted
in a bad way when I saw it in '69.
This was a program in which the only
way to, sort of, bring things
under control were to...
let the Vietnamese people know
that if you're on the wrong side
we're going to kill you.
It was a basic belief,
as it is always when we go
in a country where we have
no real background,
that you can't trust anybody.
And therefore you have to
set a standard 'cause there was
so much killing going on,
that the only thing these people know,
the only thing they know and respect
is harsh treatment to bring people around.
We always presumed that
whatever he was doing was
always for the good, never anything wrong.
Here was those posters all over town
with the ace of spades,
comparing him to Heinrich Himmler.
Responsible for the deaths
of twenty-nine, thirty thousand people.
Thousands of demonstrators
opposed to the Vietnam War
assembled in the nation's capital
for a mass protest.
The crowd, estimated at
about fifty thousand persons,
included adults, students,
even children.
People would turn to me and say,
"You know, your dad was a murderer."
My immediate reaction used to be,
"You don't know what you're talking about."
And then I'd find myself thinking,
"Was he?
Well, who was he, really?"
It was tough on my mother.
She became more and more isolated.
A good part of her crowd in Washington,
some C.I.A. People were starting to
turn against the war.
And she's being the loyal wife.
She was a good woman.
I don't know if the truth
was really what we were after.
We were maybe afraid of the truth.
If he was morally corrupt,
to the detriment of thousands of
people, would be the worst.
It's a very difficult field, really.
Those who serve
have loyalty to the Agency itself,
but certainly must have inner loyalties
in their code of behavior,
which they would not violate,
and one has to take on faith
and trust that the right thing
is being done,
and perhaps the...
for the greater good.
It's very difficult, I find, to explain.
Colby's response to the potential
for abuse of Phoenix was,
was very legalistic, very American.
Whether it was all that effective
is something that I think
he may have even,
I, I think he knew that the tool he had
in his hands, uh, was an inadequate tool
given the human reality of what
was happening when a society falls apart
and people want to settle scores,
take revenge, or just abuse their power.
He always defended the effort as necessary,
but that he had,
he had reservations
as to do we have the right, uh,
programmatic set of, of guidelines,
behaviors, people to do this
in the right way?
The chair would emphasize that
today's hearings will not only be
an examination of
Mr. Colby's qualifications
and background, but will also
review a number of policies relating
to the Central Intelligence Agency itself.
My dad came back from Vietnam in 1971
and went back into the C.I.A.
He was appointed by Richard Nixon
to be Director of the C.I.A.
Now you are familiar with the controversy
over the Phoenix Program in Vietnam.
There have been allegations that,
in effect, this Phoenix Program was
an assassination program.
What are the facts?
Mr. Chairman, I've, uh, testified
in, in extenso on this subject,
uh, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
in February 1970, uh, before the...
He was the lawyer when he was testifying.
Calm, steady, professional
in telling you just enough of the truth.
No more, never anymore.
- Under oath.
I'm prepared to, uh, repeat it
if necessary.
That Phoenix Program was not
a program of assassination.
The Phoenix Program was
a part of the overall Pacification Program,
which was designed to strengthen the government
of South Vietnam and its people
against the assault led against them
by the North Vietnamese through a program...
You couldn't get too close to him.
He said, "Oh, they can
follow me around all day and all night,
all year long and they'll never
find anything on me.
I've got nothing to hide."
I thought, "How can there
be nothing that you want to hide?"
- In order to bring some order into the fight
between the subversion,
uh, by the North Vietnamese
and the Viet Cong and the government.
How many, roughly, would you estimate
were eliminated?
The word "eliminate"
referred to the entire,
uh, program against the apparatus.
Well, you can say, "kill 'em,"
if you wanted.
We, we said, "kill".
Uh, the figure...
the word we used was "kill"
for the people who were killed
and there was no euphemism
applied to it at all.
Colby suffered from a total
exaggeration of what Phoenix was about.
Fortunately it did not interfere
with his confirmation
as Director of Central Intelligence.
The first time i talked to your father,
it was on the phone.
It was in the middle of Watergate.
The Senate Watergate Committee
was focused on the C.I.A. Role.
The trail led to the C.I.A.,
but not as the sponsor of Watergate,
uh, as one of the enablers.
Watergate was a White House operation.
Nixon was at the center.
The C.I.A. Does what the president wants.
Nixon was criminal.
Nixon was poison.
The crimes and lies were too many.
The idea that a president
and a White House would use the C.I.A.
For overtly illegal, political activities
didn't really dawn on lots of people.
When Colby became the Director of
Central Intelligence in 1973,
he didn't know about the assassination plots
that had been ordered by the White House
against Fidel Castro, for example.
He didn't know about the existence
of secret prisons where suspected
double agents were tortured.
Spying on Americans, mind control experiments
with drugs on unwitting human guinea pigs.
As he is learning about these secrets,
Richard Nixon's existence is threatened.
There's been an obstruction of justice
at the White House.
Impeachable offenses have taken place,
and the question is,
"Is the president going to survive?"
In this atmosphere of deep mistrust
of government,
had these secrets been revealed,
it would have been the death of the C.I.A.,
and Bill Colby knew it.
Nixon had tried to get the C.I.A.
To take responsibility for Watergate
as a way of getting
himself off the hook.
After the resignation of Nixon,
it was almost as though
the next big story after Watergate was going
to be trouble in the intelligence community.
As Nixon falls,
as a new president is sworn in,
Colby keeps the 'Family Jewels'
as they were known, under wraps.
The danger of their disclosure is immense.
I did learn from people inside
the agency that there had been these documents
called the 'Family Jewels'.
And I had your father's phone number
and I called him.
He did see me, and he didn't lie to me.
What he did was if I said there was
at least a hundred and twenty cases
of wire breaking, or wiretapping
of American citizens, uh, contrary to the law in,
in America, he said my number is only sixty three.
It was a question of numbers.
He did not back away from the question of wrongdoing.
And so that's one hell of a story.
Your father was essential to publishing
the story about domestic spying.
It was in the aftermath of that New York Times story
that Bill called me to ask to come over and speak
with me on a very sensitive matter.
That was the meeting in which Bill disclosed
the crown jewels... the CIA's activities during the Cold War.
There were some matters,
which clearly raised legal problems.
And he would have been delighted if I had said,
"Don't worry about it Bill,
we're not going to look into that."
Uh, but I don't think he expected that.
I think he knew that we would have had no alternative
but to carefully look into all
the allegations of illegality.
Colby feels compelled to let President Ford
know what's in the 'Family Jewels'.
Colby sends a six-page letter to Henry Kissinger,
the Secretary of State, outlining the worst
of what could be revealed when the Senate
and the House gin up their investigative committees,
post-Watergate.
Kissinger slows down when he gets to the passage
about assassination plots, and mutters,
"Oh, well, these are horrors."
Ford has a meeting with Kissinger
and Vice President Rockefeller, and Ford's Chief of Staff,
Donald Rumsfeld, in which he says,
"The C.I.A. Will be destroyed if this comes out."
Ford decided that he would appoint a commission
to investigate domestic surveillance
as revealed by Sy Hersh's story.
Vice President Rockefeller was the head of it;
Governor Reagan was on it.
A lot of people, most of them rather right wing.
At lunch the next day at the White House,
Abe Rosenthal, then the editor of the New York Times,
raised a point and said,
"Mr. President, I see that you've
appointed Rockefeller and a bunch
of right-wingers to investigate the C.I.A.
What credibility do you think that they will have
since they are obviously are supporters
of the C.I. A?"
Ford said, "Well, that's an interesting question
I had to be very careful about whom I appointed
to this commission,
because it's very likely that they're going
to come across things a lot more serious
than domestic surveillance."
Abe says, in his inimitable way,
Abe says, "Like what?"
President Ford, in his inimitable way says,
"Like assassinations."
A hush falls over the lunch.
After the lunch, the Times people
went to the Times office,
big question, what do we do
with what we heard?
They went back and forth.
Finally the publisher, Sulzberger, said,
"This was a social lunch,
the President obviously misspoke.
He should not have said that.
So we're not going to do this story."
And that was the end of it.
But it wasn't the end of it, of course.
President Ford has reportedly
warned associates that if current investigations
go too far, they could uncover
several assassinations of foreign officials,
in which the C.I.A. Was involved.
When this burst on the scene,
with some of the more colorful stories
that came out, it was really
a witch's cauldron that was brewing.
So I was all for the President
using all the executive authority
that he could to contain this,
this problem.
It isn't just assassinations.
It's the whole area of activity of government
covered by a cloak of excessive secrecy.
We didn't realize how this pent-up passion
in the Congress, feeling that they ought
to have been more entitled to a role
in shaping national policy toward the Vietnam War,
together with journalists who were competing
to be on the air every night
with something ever more sensational
would so work together to create just
this unstoppable tide of disregard
for the national interest.
This is a matter of such gravity
it goes right to the roots of our morality as a nation.
Therefore, it must be dealt with by the Congress,
and it must be dealt with as a matter of law.
None of us knew exactly what to do at that point.
It wasn't quite we were just trying to survive,
but it was a very, very hectic period.
President Ford was also weak.
An unelected president coming in after
a presidential catastrophe, he didn't have the authority
that a president usually has with the Congress.
It was a really desperate time.
This was a way to destroy
the whole intelligence system.
And then we had to try to prevent that.
Mr. Chairman, these last two months
have placed American intelligence in danger.
The almost hysterical excitement that surrounds
any new story
mentioning C.I.A., or referring even
to a perfectly legitimate activity
of C.I.A. Has raised the question
whether secret intelligence operations can be conducted
by the United States.
Your father's calendar was horrendous.
He did have an intelligence organization to run.
If General Scowcroft called, or if Kissinger called,
it didn't matter what was on the calendar,
the calendar had to be scrubbed
and everything re-juggled.
He had the whole future of the agency
on his shoulders.
April 1975, Colby sits before
the National Security Council and tries to tell them
that we are about to lose the war in Vietnam.
Saigon is falling.
They don't want to hear that.
He says, "we can try for redoubt here,
or we can negotiate a settlement.
We've got many, many thousands of people,
Americans and Vietnamese in Saigon
who are going to be trapped.
We owe it to those people to get them out.
We need to plan for this now."
"Not while I'm Secretary of State,"
says Henry Kissinger.
"We're not going to negotiate any kind of settlement."
Colby had been dedicated to Vietnam since 1959.
Sixteen years.
"We can save nothing," Kissinger says to Colby.
"Nothing but lives," says Bill Colby.
I don't know how your father
maintained any composure at all because not only did
he have to protect his agency
against this withering assault by dozens
of congressmen, senators, staffers,
in a public setting, with the cameras rolling,
but even among the friendlies,
that is, people in the executive branch
that he would have expected to count on
to be supported by were insisting
that he limit what he said,
even stay too far on the side
of maintaining secrecy simply
to refuse any larger role
by the Congress in the influencing foreign policy
that it was an enormously complex
and difficult atmosphere to function in.
I don't know how he could make it
from day to day under those pressures.
We have to abandon the old tradition
of total secrecy, but I think we do
have to agree that there are secrets in America,
in our ballot box and other areas of our life
that we do respect, and that intelligence
has a legitimate area in which it needs secrets,
and in which its secrets need
to be protected, for the benefits not
of intelligence, but for our nation.
Bill Colby believed that confession, up to a point,
was good for the soul.
That they could not stonewall the Senate, and the House,
or the American people, that they had to try
to be seen to be telling the truth about
what they had done.
It was an extraordinarily difficult moment
because the President of the United States
didn't want to do it, and neither did
his Chief of Staff, Don Rumsfeld.
Why did the agency prepare toxins
of this character in quantities sufficient
to kill many thousands of people?
I can not explain why that quantity was developed
except that this was a collaboration
that we were engaged in with the United States Army,
and we did develop this particular 'weapon'
you might say, as a possible, uh,
for possible use.
My husband testified in complete honesty.
He did what needed to be done.
To hide things from Congress could possibly
have been the end of the C.I.A.
It was a very challenging and painful
and trying time for him, for all of us
in the family.
The prime reason for C.I.A.
Is to keep America safe,
one still cannot do things that are illegal or immoral.
The officer has to have a moral compass
within himself.
I thought the moral compass was seeing us through,
really, seeing us through difficult times.
I think that the death of your sister
and the attitudes of, uh, the public sparked
a good deal of remorse is not quite the word,
but guilt feelings in your father.
And when the Church Committee got rolling,
he began to reveal things about the history
of the Agency that did not have to be
revealed at that time.
And at one of the morning sessions,
General Walters, who was his deputy,
said to him, "Well Bill, I'm a Catholic, uh, too
and I believe that it is enough to go
to the confessional and to tell one's sins
in the confessional.
One doesn't have to do that
before Congressional committees."
We did have discussions in the White House.
I remember Cheney saying, "Can't you control him?"
I told him the President wanted it done his way,
not Bill's way.
He disagreed, but he was not rebellious.
It is essential that we be able to assure our
foreign agents abroad, a number of whom
have already expressed their alarm and limited
what they tell us, that their names
will be totally protected, since their lives
or livelihoods are at peril.
The responsibility of someone who heads
an intelligence agency is to respect
the authority and responsibilities
of the legislature to a point,
but to stand up to them
when they are asking for something
that exceeds their authority or places
our national security in danger.
I will follow the Constitution and my oaths,
and I will respond.
There will be certain things
that I will ask you not to ask,
such as the name of an agent someplace.
You have just stated in open session
that you do not trust four hundred
and thirty five members of Congress.
And it would seem to me for you as one person
to make the determination that you do not trust
four hundred and thirty five members,
each of whom represent four hundred
and sixty four thousand people, each of whom won
an open election in ostensibly a democratic society,
I would say to you sir,
you don't have the right to play God.
Mr. Dellums, I am not playing God,
I am only enforcing the laws that
the& that the Congress passed and the directives
of our government to protect some of the necessary secrets
of the intelligence business, to protect
that very free society that both you
and I want to protect.
He may have naively believed,
or maybe had no choice in believing
that Church and Pike and those people
would handle it in a rational way
and understand the damage that could come out.
Um, and I think in that case, he was mistaken.
There was just too much public clamor,
and there was disbelief all over.
People were looking for ways to attack
and so, not only what he delivered
became a target, therefore, the Agency.
But then he became a target.
It's the way Washington works.
People don't like failure.
Would you just tell me why that letter
has to be top secret?
Because it includes with it, as attachments,
a number of top secret documents.
Why can't I show that letter
to anybody I want to?
I would be glad to review this
and if you want to release
this particular letter.
I don't want you to release
that letter, Mr. Colby.
I have lived with this for fourteen years.
I have drowned in pieces of papers stamped
top secret that had no right to be stamped
top secret whatsoever.
Bill Colby was a person who spent the major portion
of his post-college years in a clandestine activity
and it... that is not the best place in the world
to develop the social skills and the political skills
to deal with members of Congress.
I don't think that there should be
this kind of surveillance.
It interferes with First Amendment rights.
To impinge upon the rights
of American citizens where there
is clearly no reason to do so&
My Constitution didn't say anything
about assassination, wiretapping,
abusing private citizens' right to privacy,
I am trying to articulate the way
in which we Americans can gather together
to control this, to supervise this
intelligence business, but not to destroy it.
How many files of this character
do you maintain on other members of Congress?
What about those Army files?
Do you have any idea what volume
of records were destroyed?
I do not, no.
Do you know what documents
he destroyed?
Does this pistol fire the dart?
Yes, Mr. Chairman.
What disciplinary action has been taken?
No agency has the right to rise
above any other agency.
Don't you think that's an exceedingly loose way
to run an agency?
Um, particularly, um, the C.I. A?
Well, we're going to try to run it tighter.
My dad testified thirty two times
to Congressional committees in one year.
My father would come home, watch the news,
comment on it.
He wouldn't even really roll his eyes,
he'd be always positive.
It'll work out.
He really did believe actually in the wisdom
of the American people.
If he had lied to the Congress,
he would have been a broken man.
He couldn't lie to those people.
Bill really became a tortured soul
in this period.
He saw his life and his life's work crumbling.
I often wondered if Bill was not expiating his sins,
starting with the Phoenix Program, and whatever
had gone wrong in it that he felt responsible for.
Then the tragedy of his daughter,
that, that he was maybe like Job,
he had to atone.
I would never say he fell apart,
but it was a very traumatic period,
and I think he could be excused for,
uh, for getting overwhelmed at times.
Bill Colby was on the hot seat.
He was nominated by the President,
confirmed by the Senate to serve
as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Therefore he was the individual
who had the baton, he was the one
who had to deal with the oversight committees.
A person in that job does feel
that they're, report to two places.
It is this question of to whom do you owe
your ultimate loyalty?
Is your loyalty to the agency,
your fellow people, and to what
you have done, done not to make money,
not for personal glory,
done because you, the President,
or in, in, in some cases,
his brother, wanted it done,
or is the loyalty to the Congress and an oath?
To this day, there is a feeling
that people on the Hill
don't really care, don't understand.
And so when they ask you something,
you really have to make a choice.
When, in fact, once you take an oath,
you don't have a choice.
The C.I.A. And its Director was always caught
between doing the wish of the President
and the law.
And when the President said, do this, do that,
um, the law got set aside normally.
The Presidency in the person of Nixon had lost
its moral authority.
Ford was kind of the accidental President
in this post-Watergate atmosphere.
He didn't have the moral authority.
All of a sudden, you're in this political world
as C.I.A. Director and you have to establish
what's the authority?
Moral or otherwise.
And Congress, under Article One,
has this incredible authority, over even the C.I.A.
They had the authority.
Colby tried to walk a middle line, and finally,
really acquiesced to the law.
It was a call he made personally on the law.
Trust, as David Abshire has said so often,
is the coin of the realm.
And the most important ingredient...
the oil on the glue is truth.
Truth builds trust.
We are empowered to go out
and engage in activities, in which deception
is appropriate.
And we have to remind ourselves,
however, that we do not lie to each other.
And we do not lie to the officials
of our government who have a right to know.
Whatever you think about Bill Colby
and the way he handled it, he was tarnished
by his incessantly being called up before the Congress
over and over and over again.
He had lost any ability to manage either his agency
or his relations with the Hill.
He was a spent force,
and it was... almost an act of mercy
in a sense, to end... to end it.
Because he was, he was really
a tortured soul.
Did this come as a personal disappointment
to you that you are being requested to resign?
Oh no.
As I said, I've, uh, I anticipated a change,
and if that's better for their business,
well, that's fine.
Mr. Colby, looking back at it now,
do you wish maybe you'd taken a firmer stand
with some of the committees in Congress,
and perhaps not given them quite as much information
as you have?
Would you do it differently?
I don't think so, I think the best way
was to get rid of the past
and transition into a future
of intelligence under the Constitution
in the new structure.
What is your, uh, projection for the C.I. A?
Would you have any idea for a successor based
on your own experience?
Oh, I think the... as you know,
I've often said that an outsider
would be appropriate for the job,
and I think that makes sense still.
I think it shouldn't be a partisan political figure,
obviously.
I consider myself fortunate indeed,
to have been confirmed for this challenging job.
I want this job, I want to do it well,
and I'm proud to be a part of the C.I.A.
Thank you very much.
My wife and I went
to the swearing-in of George Bush senior
as Director of C.I.A., who replaced your father.
Your father had left along with a couple of other people
that Ford wanted to get rid of.
And, I remember as we left after the swearing-in,
and it was a great occasion for Bush, and everything,
we saw your father come out of the thing,
and walk down by himself, and get in his car
and drive off.
And, uh, my wife almost cried.
He looked Ionely, he was leaving,
no pretensions... just quietly gets in his car and leaves.
And that's, that's something we always
kind of remembered about him.
I remember talking to President Ford
about why George Bush senior
to replace your dad as C.I.A. Director.
Ford said, "I wanted a loyalist."
He didn't consider your father a loyalist.
I asked about who was loyal.
"George Bush," he said "Cheney, Rumsfeld,
Kissinger, and Greenspan."
When my father drove out of the gates of the C.I.A.
For the last time, he was not broken or tortured.
He left with the strength of his convictions,
his belief in the law and the Constitution,
certain that he had done the right thing.
Over the next several years, I came to understand
that my father lived in a world of secrets.
Always watching, listening, his eye on the door.
He was tougher, smarter, smoother,
and could be crueler than anybody I ever knew.
I'm not sure he ever loved anyone,
and I never heard him say anything heartfelt.
By the time I turned thirty,
I came to understand the man that nobody knew,
or at least I thought I did.
When he said, "I want a divorce,"
I was really knocked over,
really surprised, and shocked.
I said, "But we're Catholic,
we don't believe in divorce."
So there goes the Catholicism?
I mean, I don't know.
He was a dedicated public servant
who gave his best to, to his work.
And, um,
and I think, um,
we had a,
we had a good family life as long as it lasted.
And, um, he must say he was...
I guess I would say he was a complicated person
whom maybe i didn't know as well
as I would hope to think I do.
My father was a soldier.
He jumped out of airplanes.
He lived to serve.
Before he left on his last mission,
he wrote a couple of books and married again.
Ten years passed.
One night, he fixed his favorite meal
and had a few drinks.
Then he got in his canoe and disappeared.
His body washed ashore nine days later.
Foul play was suspected, but I knew otherwise.
He'd called me two weeks before he died,
asking for my absolution, for his not doing enough
for my sister Catherine when she was so ill.
When his body was found, he was carrying a picture
of my sister in his wallet.
The Coroner's report listed the cause of death as drowning,
brought on by a stroke or heart attack.
Call it whatever you like, I think he'd had enough
of this life.
My father lived in the shadows.
He liked being invisible.
He always wanted his ashes scattered
to the winds.
But it was we who needed the permanence
that he could never provide.
We wanted a hero.
It was for us, the family,
that he was buried at Arlington.
He never really needed us.
It was us who needed him.