"THE WARRIOR PRIEST" APRIL 30, 1996 TRANSCRIPT

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Three days of searching has yet to provide an answer to the mysterious disappearance of William Colby, the former director of Central Intelligence. He is now presumed dead from a boating accident. Elizabeth Farnsworth reviews his career in covert operations with two men who have written extensively about the CIA.

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ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: William Colby was last seen at this retreat about 40 miles South of Washington on Saturday. Before bad weather set in this afternoon divers searched for new signs of what might have happened. His canoe was found swamped on a sand bar on Sunday. William Colby's career was as dramatic and controversial as the spy agency he headed from 1973 to '76. He parachuted behind Nazi lines as an intelligence officer during World War II. He headed the CIA station in Rome early in the Cold War, working to prevent the election of a Communist government. In Saigon during the Vietnam War, he ran the Phoenix program, which included the assassination of thousands of people alleged, sometimes wrongly, to be Vietnamese Communists. He became CIA director in its most tumultuous area in the mid 1970's when congressional committees investigated and revealed scores of clandestine operations and labeled the agency "a rogue elephant."

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: For more on the Colby story, we are joined by Burton Hersh, author of The 'Ol Boys: A History of U.S. Intelligence Gathering, and by Walter Pincus, who covers national security issues for the "Washington Post." Thank you both for being with us. Mr. Hersh, you interviewed William Colby several times for your articles in your book. What stands out about him in your mind?

BURTON HERSH, Author: (Manchester, NH) Well, I think maybe the most important thing about Colby was the he was not only an intelligence officer and a committed one, but he was also a very serious Catholic, Roman Catholic, and a lawyer who took his pledge to the law and the court seriously, and those things in combination really caused a lot of trouble in the course of his years, and, and made him a controversial figure within the intelligence community and, of course, especially the CIA.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What do you mean, the two things together, contradictory things?

MR. HERSH: Yeah, I mean the ethos, the mentality of the CIA at the time, especially when Colby was making his way up, up the rungs of the ladder, was such that you did what you wanted. Much of the money you spent was on the voucher. You regarded yourself as a kind of crusader who lived above and beyond the laws of the country. You, you didn't feel responsible really for, for what you did to the larger government, you pretty much were responsible to your peers, your seniors in the CIA, itself. Colby basically didn't agree with that. He regarded the CIA as another bureaucracy within the government. He had great respect for the work that he was doing, other people were doing, but he also felt that finally the agency had to be accountable, and when the pressure was on, he released enough information to the Church committee and other such groups--

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: The Church--the committee of Sen. Frank Church.

MR. HERSH: Yes. So that the overall operation of the CIA came into question. People like Kissinger would take him aside and say to Colby, you know, when you go before these committees, you go to confession, that isn't really what we have in mind, and, and, uh, that caused increasing problems for Colby and ultimately led to his, uh, loss of the directorship, but it was an important step, and it also led the way to the creation of the select committees in both the House and in the Senate.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Okay. Let me--I'll come--

MR. HERSH: The Oversight Committee.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: I'll come back to that in a minute.

MR. HERSH: Yeah.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: I just--I want to get a general impression now from you, Walter Pincus. What stands out in your mind when you think about it?

WALTER PINCUS, Washington Post: He was, he's essentially a transitional figure. He was the person who was there when I think for the first time the agency came under public fire with allegations that they had been doing things that the public itself didn't know about, assassination plots, different kind of activities, spending money bribing people. It all went on, but it was all secret before then for the most part, and he became the figure who was there in the midst of Watergate, it blended into the Watergate period and led to a lot of criticism.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: We think about him. We both remember him in this context, and yet, he spent much, most of his life in covert operations and cloak and dagger activities. What do we know about him from that period, anything?

MR. PINCUS: Well, he was very successful, he was very careful. He, he was a quiet figure. If there's one thing you remember about him, if you spend time with a lot of particularly operations people in the agency, a lot of them--

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Those are the people that do the cloak and dagger--

MR. PINCUS: --are flamboyant people, uh, they did have a lot of money to spend. They really were operating on their own, and he, he was in contrast to that, and I think it, it, it hurt him because he wasn't considered one of the 'ol boys, and when he decided in a way in which Mr. Hersh pointed out that he had to deliver this information, so-called crown jewels of the agency's secrets, and a lot of the failures to Congress, uh, there was a lot of resentment initially, and it took years for it to fade away.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And he was very involved in Vietnam for many years, wasn't he, Mr. Hersh? He, he oversaw the--the program that was aimed at "neutralizing" the Vietcong, was the word I think they used, which included both overt and covert--overt community building operations and also covert operations, including assassination, right?

MR. HERSH: That's right, but I think that situation tends to be oversimplified. At the time that the Phoenix program was going on and Colby was running it, he technically wasn't working for the CIA. He was working for a branch of the State Department. And he claimed--I talked to him at great length about this a couple of times--that there was no such thing as an assassination program. This was basically a Vietnamese program which a handful of State department professionals oversaw. And the aim was to discover and wherever possible turnaround or recruit people who were in the Vietcong infrastructure. Nevertheless, about 20,000 Vietcong people who where so identified were killed. As he himself would admit. And, uh, uh, from his point of view he used to be called the warrior priest--in those days in Vietnam--this was simply one of the costs of doing business, of being part of that world.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: He did not express regret to you about that. I had read in some articles that he was somewhat haunted by that.

MR. HERSH: I wouldn't be surprised, but I think at the same time, he regarded that as part of life, as, as what a soldier did, and he regarded the CIA as a clandestine army engaged in stopping and sealing off incursions of the Communists around the world. He was very serious about his Cold War mentality, despite the fact on the, on the practical side, on the political side, he was a kind of a late New Dealer. He'd worked for the National--he worked for the Labor Relations Board. He had done volunteer work for the American Civil Liberties Union. His politics were quite different from that of many people in the agency. And besides that, as Mr. Pincus suggests, he, he was rather a prim personality, almost mousy at times, and yet that was very misleading because he had tremendous force of personality and, and would stand behind what he felt was right.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And you said, Mr. Pincus, that he changed things in the CIA forever when he did reveal what were called the family jewels in these various committee hearings in '74. What do you mean? What changed after that?

MR. PINCUS: Well, he started the series of exposures that really has not stopped. Every, every day even in the past year, you had a brief flurry of what did the CIA do in Guatemala, what did the CIA do in El Salvador? Uh, that didn't happen before. They could keep those problems bottled up, and, uh, I think he began what became this exposure system, which has then characterized the agency since then, but he--I think it's worth pointing out that he has been out of the agency for 21 years and created a place for himself in Washington practicing law. He actually went back to the Donovan-Leisure Law Firm, Bill Donovan's law firm, the man who originally started OSS, and brought Colby into it in the beginning, he then goes back to the same law firm, and he made a living as a lawyer and a consultant and very briefly in various times would come forward and speak on national issues but lived a very private life.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Thank you both very much for being with us.

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