Tuesday
April 30
1996

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Office of the Director of Central Intelligence World Wide Web Site

THE CIA was on alert yesterday as helicopters equipped with infra-red detection equipment scoured the murky waters of Chesapeake Bay in Maryland for the missing William Colby, 76, the former US spymaster.

Before becoming Richard Nixon's CIA chief, Mr Colby's clandestine work included the direction of the Vietnam War's Phoenix programme to assassinate suspected Viet Cong members.

Police co-ordinating the search with the CIA said that they were working on the theory that he might have drowned in a boating accident. But Sheriff Fred Davis stressed this was pure speculation. "I will not rule out foul play. You never dismiss that until you finally locate the individual and get the autopsy done."

Mr Colby, now a lawyer, vanished on Sunday from his weekend retreat, a riverfront house in the isolated hamlet of Rock Point, on Cobb Island. He was there alone, and told his wife, Sally, who telephoned him from Texas, that he was not feeling well but still wanted to take his canoe out for an afternoon on the water.

All the evidence is that he was planning only a short trip. He left his computer switched on. The remains of his lunch were on the table. The neighbours became anxious when he failed to drop by in his customary fashion before returning home to Washington. They found his capsized green canoe adrift about 100 yards from his dock.

He has consistently denied claims that, in supervising Phoenix, he allowed systematic electric-shock torture and killing

If the soft-spoken Mr Colby lost his footing on a sunny day in a boat and went overboard, it is ironic. His career was spent surviving the most dangerous places, from Saigon as CIA station chief to the "wilderness of mirrors" days at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. There he spent much of his career in the Operations Directorate, the cloak-and-dagger side involved in the overthrow of foreign governments and sometimes the death of their leaders.

He dates back to the more amateurish pre-CIA days of the Office of Strategic Services of the Second World War, when he parachuted into Norway to sabotage Nazi trains.

After working as a CIA officer under State Department cover in Stockholm and Rome, he obtained a key job as political officer and then first secretary at the US embassy in Saigon. He spent the 1960s working for the covert side of the CIA's Far East Division, and re-surfaced in Saigon in 1968 as head of the "pacification" programme to "win hearts and minds" by stealth.

He has consistently denied claims that, in supervising Phoenix, he allowed systematic electric-shock torture and killing. But K Barton Osborn, a former military intelligence agent, testified that he saw prisoners being thrown from helicopters, and a 6in dowel being tapped into the ear of "one of my detainees . . . until he died".

He raised eyebrows in Washington's post-Watergate cleansing by delivering to a congressional committee dark secrets such as the CIA attempts to poison Fidel Castro and to infect Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese nationalist leader, with bacteria that would generate a fatal disease.

James Jesus Angleton, ousted by Mr Colby as head of intelligence, went so far as to suggest that he was a Soviet "mole". Mr Colby defended his actions, saying the CIA's past had to be buried. "There were just too many suspicions, mistrusts and screaming headlines."

Office of the Director of Central Intelligence World Wide Web Site

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