Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby, and: Cloak and Dollar: The History of American Secret Intelligence (review)

John Prados's biography of William Colby is aptly titled. Colby comes across, especially in the years before he became the director of central intelligence (DCI), as a crusader or, perhaps more aptly, a true believer. Colby, in Prados's view, not only believed deeply in the causes for which he fought in both World War II (when he worked for the Office of Strategic Services) and the Cold War, but also believed that, whatever the odds or the setbacks, he could set things right by determination and hard work. At times, Colby seems more a Boy Scout than a crusader.

For those interested in the annals of the Cold War and especially the Vietnam War, Prados's book will be useful. Colby became involved in Vietnam early on and remained so through almost the whole of the American involvement in the conflict, at increasingly senior levels. Here, more than anywhere else, Colby's belief in his own ability to succeed is most pronounced, although he was not alone in his views about Southeast Asia. The shortcoming of the book is that it is overly detailed, especially regarding Vietnam, to the point of sometimes reading like a quotidian retelling of the war. No new character can be introduced without a full biography; no reference to even tangential issues can be made without a long digression about their complete history. Some judicious editing would have produced a sharper volume without losing the main thrust.

Few of the eighteen men who have been DCI have left that office without some controversy attached to their tenure. Colby's two-and-a-half years in the job were stormier than most. For Colby, however, the controversies preceded his becoming DCI, starting perhaps with the Phoenix program in Vietnam. Phoenix was widely viewed as an assassination program aimed at eliminating the Viet Cong infrastructure. Colby insisted it was largely a pacification program, a point that Prados finds difficult to support.

Colby became DCI in 1973 because of the politics of Watergate, which shifted Defense Secretary Elliott Richardson to attorney general and DCI James Schlesinger to defense secretary after only six months as DCI. Most of Colby's tenure was taken up with revelations of the "Family Jewels," instances in which the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had exceeded or violated its legal charter, and the ensuing investigations, primarily those of the Church and Pike committees in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. Colby came to believe that the only way the intelligence community—and especially the CIA—could survive this political firestorm was to come clean and cooperate with the investigations. Many of his colleagues in the CIA and certainly his political masters in the Ford administration disagreed. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger both chided Colby for his approach, which remains controversial to this day. Prados is successful in capturing the pressures Colby faced, although Prados probably overstates Colby's goals. Prados believes that Colby had a vision of a more open CIA. In reality, there is little to suggest that Colby's decisions went beyond a desire to save the institutions to which he had devoted his entire postwar career and that he sought a new legal basis for U.S. intelligence that would garner it more public support.

Two other major controversies of Colby's tenure come across a little less successfully, largely because these chapters tend to be highly bureaucratic in nature. One is Colby's difficult relationship with James Angleton, the CIA's long-time head of counterintelligence. Colby and Angleton had clashed with one another for years, and Colby had sought Angleton's removal when Schlesinger was DCI and Colby was the CIA's executive director. Angleton survived until Colby became DCI...