Shadow Warrior (63 page)

On one level, Nixon respected Colby. Bill had conducted himself as a professional in Vietnam, showing no hint of partisanship. Nixon had not only sent a letter of condolence to Colby following Catherine's death but had also written him a personal note on February 20, 1973, on the occasion of the return of American prisoners of war from North Vietnam. “As I saw our POWs come off the plane at Clark Field,” the president wrote, “I was never so proud to be an American. This would not have been possible had it not been for those—like you—who served America with such dedication.” Most important, perhaps, the White House needed an apolitical
figure who could pass muster with Congress without causing a major partisan flap. Finally, Schlesinger and others had assured the White House that Colby would be a good fit.
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But at bottom, Nixon and Kissinger considered Colby a bureaucrat, a political nonentity who could be easily controlled and from whom they had nothing to fear. Colby had absolutely no constituency outside of the CIA, an entity on which the White House had declared war. They must have known that selecting the former Jedburgh would be controversial within the Agency, given his relative lack of experience with the intelligence side and the fact that he had acted as hatchet man for Schlesinger and the White House, but they did not care. Nixon and Kissinger wanted someone who would carry out orders even when they went against his principles. Colby would be to Nixon what Colin Powell would be to George W. Bush, Suffolk to Henry VIII. As for Kissinger, his mentors, Klemens von Metternich and Otto von Bismarck, had been their own spymasters. He would never trust someone he could not control. “In retrospect, I must admit, there was something disconcertingly casual in the process of elevating me to the top CIA job,” Colby wrote in
Honorable Men
.

Colby, along with Schlesinger and Richardson, attended the next scheduled cabinet meeting, where their nominations were to be announced. Just before the names were read, the president leaned over and spoke to Haig. The chief of staff scribbled on a piece of paper and passed it to Colby. “Did you have any connections with Watergate that might raise problems?” it read. Colby looked at Haig and shook his head no. What the hell was that about? Colby thought. If the president had doubts, he should have raised them earlier. What if Colby had said yes? Was there some kind of implied threat in the query? Perhaps Nixon still went through periods of actually believing that Watergate was some sort of CIA plot to get him. Shortly thereafter, a group of Bill's friends sent him a telegram: “Congratulations, one of ours finally made it. [Signed] Nell Gwyn.” Nell Gwyn had been an illiterate prostitute, the mistress of Charles II—a sordid commoner who had made good.
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The four-month interregnum between Colby's nomination and his swearing-in was awkward, to say the least. As DCI-designate, Colby was recognized as the decisionmaker, but he did not yet hold the title of director. In Washington, titles were everything, Colby later observed. Fortunately, the acting director was Vernon Walters, who had an easygoing personality and no further ambitions in the intelligence field.

There was unfinished business to attend to. Colby and Schlesinger had decided that the family jewels had best be kept locked in a safe. But they did feel compelled to consult with the Agency's congressional watchdogs. Led by Senators J. William Fulbright and Mike Mansfield (D-MT), a group in Congress had since the mid-1960s been trying to wrest control of CIA oversight from the southern hawks who had traditionally dominated the process. In the Senate, Richard Russell and John Stennis and in the House, F. Edward Hebert (D-LA) and L. Mendel Rivers (D-SC) had fought them tooth and nail. But with the coming of the Second Reconstruction and the tidal wave of disillusionment that swept the country in the course of Vietnam and Watergate, protectors of the national security state had been placed on the defensive. Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee were admitted to the CIA oversight body, while in the House, Hebert had appointed Lucien Nedzi, a liberal Democrat from Michigan, to chair the intelligence subcommittee. The DCI-designate duly made the rounds.

Unlike the other solons Colby visited, Nedzi was not so sure that skeletons should be kept in the closet. Wouldn't most of the secrets come out eventually, he asked Colby? Wouldn't it be better for the Agency to come clean voluntarily sooner than to be forced to fess up later? Colby was not unsympathetic. He recognized that the days when Langley could go about its business without any outside accountability were over. The mood of the country had changed. Many in the media and Congress saw the CIA more as a potential threat to civil liberties than a protector. Colby recalled that he was more than just resigned to a new era of accountability. “I considered it correct in our Constitutional democracy,” he wrote. But he pleaded with Nedzi to let the past bury the past and the future deal with the future. “The shock effect of an exposure of the ‘family jewels,' I urged, could, in the climate of 1973, inflict mortal wounds on the CIA and deprive the nation of all the good the Agency could do in the future.” Nedzi agreed, and Colby, breathing a sigh of relief, hoped that the matter had been closed.
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The problem was that the Watergate scandal was just beginning to gather steam in 1973, and as long as the break-in continued to be the subject of daily headlines and televised hearings, the CIA was going to be dragged through the mud. The trial of the Watergate Seven got underway in January 1973. Five of the defendants pleaded guilty; two underwent a jury trial and were convicted. On March 23, the day scheduled for sentencing,
presiding judge John J. Sirica read a letter from James McCord admitting that he had been acting on orders from the White House and that he and the others had been pressured to keep quiet. During the months that followed, federal prosecutors, Judge Sirica, and the Senate Watergate Committee worked in tacit alliance. Meanwhile, journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, fed information by FBI official W. Mark Felt—known to the public at that time only by the moniker “Deep Throat”—kept the public abreast of events in the pages of the
Washington Post
. All the while, Nixon continued to approve the payment of hush money to Hunt and the other Plumbers.

Then on the advice of his lawyer, White House counsel John Dean came clean before the Watergate Committee, admitting to and describing the cover-up. On April 30, the president went on national television to announce that there had indeed been a conspiracy to conceal the facts about Watergate, but that he was in no way involved. Then followed Nixon's firing of Ehrlichman, Haldeman, and Dean. As a condition of his confirmation, Attorney General–designate Elliott Richardson was forced to name a special prosecutor to investigate Watergate. When Dean revealed the existence of a secret taping system in the Oval Office, a yearlong battle ensued between the White House and the Watergate Committee over control of the potentially incriminating recordings.

Colby's confirmation hearings got underway in late July 1973. As soon as the Senate began hearing witnesses, the old “Wanted” posters featuring a photo of the DCI-designate imposed on the ace of spades began popping up around Washington, especially at construction sites for the new metro. The phone calls to the Colby household also recommenced. One caller told his daughter Christine, who was then thirteen, “We'll get your daddy.” Colby, who prided himself on being able to take a punch, ordered his lieutenants at the Agency not to try to find out who was behind the posters and calls; if word got out, it would only make matters worse. Colby consoled himself in part with the knowledge that Catherine did not have to endure this latest round of vilification. Eventually, a particular caller got to the DCI-designate, an individual who would call at all hours and then stay on the line saying nothing. Colby asked his clandestine people to track the call. The next time the phone rang, and Colby realized it was the phantom, he called him by name. There was a gasp, and the line went dead.
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Meanwhile, in the Senate, Stuart Symington (D-MO) led the nominee through a series of public questions that provided him with the opportunity to assure the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Agency's estimates would remain free of policy and political considerations. Colby promised that under his direction, the Agency would collect only “foreign intelligence,” and that he would resign if asked to undertake any illegal activity. The going got tougher when the committee went into executive session. A number of hostile witnesses associated with Phoenix had testified against Colby's confirmation. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) took up where they had left off. Mirroring the about-face on Vietnam that his brother Bobby had made before his assassination, Ted was now a relentless dove. For nearly four hours he questioned Colby about assassination squads and American-supported terror in Vietnam. He then turned to Watergate, accusing the Agency, Colby included, of being part of the cover-up. Colby denied it. When the dust had settled, Kennedy was one of only thirteen senators voting nay; 83 approved.
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The confirmation vote on August 1 should have eased Colby's mind, but it didn't; the White House seemed to have forgotten that he needed to be sworn in. Walters, who was still acting director, had to remind the president, and Colby was finally called to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on September 4. Nixon praised his professionalism and emphasized Colby's role as director of counterinsurgency and pacification in Vietnam.
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Press reactions to Colby's appointment had been mixed. Which Bill Colby would he prove to be? David Wise asked in a July 1973 article. Was America's new super-spook the mild-mannered suburban dweller, the devout Roman Catholic who regularly attended Mass at the Little Flower Roman Catholic Church in Bethesda, the father of four, and a former Boy Scout troop leader? Or was he the ultimate product of the “super-secret Directorate of Operations, sometimes known as the ‘Department of Dirty Tricks?'“ Deliberately uncharismatic and self-effacing Colby may have been, but he was a product of the culture that had overthrown Mohammed Mossadeq in Iran and Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala. It had conducted the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion. Colby himself had run the secret war in Laos and the infamous Phoenix program. The new director may not have talked like the proverbial duck, but he certainly walked like one. Neil Sheehan also suggested a Jekyll and Hyde personality. “Colby's office is a light-filled and airy one,” the journalist observed after an interview
with the soon-to-be DCI. “There is a picture window that runs along the entire right side of the office as you come in. . . . Through it you can see other buildings of the CIA complex and the trees surrounding it. Looking out on the scene from this pleasant office, you would never think that such dark things have been discussed and ordered from such a light and airy place.” Sheehan found Colby to be an enlightened observer of contemporary and historical events and a good listener. But there was something behind the eyes, something of the fanatic. Could this be America's Felix Dzerzhinsky, the brutal head of the Soviet Union's first intelligence and internal security apparatus?
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Within the Agency, Colby's ascension met with mixed reviews. “Colby never became a member of CIA's inner club of mandarins,” Agency historian Harold Ford later wrote. CIA officers Richard Helms, Tracy Barnes, John Bross, Kermit Roosevelt, James Angleton, and Bronson Tweedy were of the elite, comfortable on the Georgetown cocktail circuit, connected socially and politically. Bill Colby was a middle-class Ivy Leaguer and a loner. Spying and counterspying—those were the coins of the realm in the Agency—but Colby was a doer, impatient with the caution and painstaking procedures of intelligence collection. In addition, his experience was in East Asia, while the primary preoccupation of the CIA was the Soviet Union and the East European bloc. To some, his colorlessness and lack of charisma were off-putting. “Slight of build, with pale, dull eyes, Colby appeared to be almost anything rather than soldier or intelligence chief,” David Phillips later wrote. Although most junior officers loved him, some of his senior colleagues found him rigid and closed-minded. “I just have a feeling about Bill Colby that he is quite lacking in the qualities that enable most of us to be introspective about our behavior,” one critic stated. “He had a total incapacity to compromise.”
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In 1977, Phillips, then a Directorate of Operations officer, took a poll of some eleven senior CIA alumni who had worked closely with one or more of five DCIs. He found that when asked which director one would want as an effective companion in a perilous situation on a desert island, all either chose Colby, Richard Helms, or John McCone, with no votes for Red Raborn or Allen Dulles. Given a comfortable, nonthreatening situation, however, where one would want an easy, stimulating companion on a desert island, six chose Dulles, five Helms, and one McCone—with no votes for Raborn or Colby. Phillips expanded on why he had selected
Colby for the first category. “He would get us both off that island,” he wrote. “Certainly he would never entertain the notion of building a boat for one or, if he did reach that point, he would later stand in the surf and wave goodbye—a faint smile on his thin lips—after pushing me out to sea.”
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It fell to Colby—after his nomination but before his swearing-in—to preside over the final battle in the Nixon administration's war with Salvador Allende. The Chilean Constitution limited its presidents to one six-year term. If Allende was to implement
La via chilena al socialismo
, Chile's Path to Socialism, he was going to have to hurry. The government issued decrees nationalizing large-scale industries, including the American-owned Anaconda Copper and ITT, and confiscating all landholdings larger than 80 hectares. The vote was extended to eighteen-year-olds and illiterates. Massive public works projects provided employment for hundreds of thousands of poor Chileans. Spending on housing, public health, and education skyrocketed. In 1971, Chile, along with Mexico and Canada, extended diplomatic recognition to Castro's Cuba. Fidel himself declared his enduring friendship for both Chile and Allende and made a highly publicized tour of the country. Unfortunately for the socialists, the bottom fell out of the copper market; this, together with a massive increase in government spending, led to runaway inflation. By 1972, in part as the result of economic boycotts imposed by the United States and strikes in the copper and service industries, Chile was experiencing a severe shortage of consumer goods. Opposition to Allende's rule grew apace in Chile's National Congress, which was controlled by the Christian Democrats and the military. There was no doubt that Allende had received support from the KGB during the 1970 electoral campaign—some $400,000—and continued to do so thereafter. He promised to provide whatever information Soviet intelligence might require, and in 1972, Moscow awarded him the Lenin Peace Prize.