Skimming the Surface

In early 1976, William E. Colby, recently ousted U. S. Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), agreed to sit for an interview with the journalist Oriana Fallaci. “What could shake your icy imperturbability?” the flamboyant Italian demanded of her subject. “You never do show your emotions, do you?”

“Oh, don’t watch me like that,” the veteran spymaster replied. “You’re looking for something underneath which isn’t there. It’s all here on the surface, believe me” (p. 443).

To a very considerable extent, Randall B. Woods has taken Colby at his word. As rendered by the professor of history at the University of Arkansas, Colby is devoid of depth. Shadow Warrior’s protagonist is the inverse of the colorful Fallaci—drab, dull, and, according to Woods himself, “someone who could not easily attract the attention of a waiter in a restaurant” (p. 5). If per chance Amazon ships to the netherworld, one imagines that Colby himself judges his biographer’s achievement with satisfaction. The spook remains a cipher. His cover survives intact.

Yet, by any measure, the bare facts of Colby’s life provide more than ample material for what ought to have been a rousing story. Fresh out of Princeton in 1940, the young Colby joined the army and soon thereafter volunteered for duty with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Missions behind enemy lines, first in France and then in Norway, introduced him to the cloak-and-dagger world. Resembling in appearance Wally Cox’s innocuous Mr. Peepers (readers too young to draw social security will want to consult Wikipedia), Colby demonstrated admirable coolness, bravery, and resourcefulness. He was—or imagined himself to be—an American T. E. Lawrence, albeit shorn of the panache and the penchant for self-promotion.

After the war came marriage, law school, a growing family, and then early recruitment by the newly created Central Intelligence Agency. Soon Colby was off to Western Europe, earning his spurs as a Cold Warrior by organizing covert stay-behind forces intended to oppose Soviet occupation much as the French and Norwegian resistance had fought against Nazi occupation. In Italy, Colby served under (and probably slept with) Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce, while disagreeing with her insistence on excluding Italy’s socialists from the list of those receiving secret CIA funding. Colby, writes Woods, was a “liberal” who wanted to undercut communist influence by “growing center-left political coalitions that pursued social and economic reforms” (pp. 110, 372). He was anticommunist, but pro–working stiff.

In 1959, the agency assigned Colby to Saigon, rapidly becoming a focus of Washington’s attention and CIA activity. For the next decade-and-a-half, South Vietnam defined the axis of Colby’s professional life. In June 1960, he was promoted to station chief. Recalled to Washington in 1962, he became head of the CIA’s Far East Division, overseeing agency programs throughout Southeast Asia, but with Vietnam (along with Laos) absorbing the lion’s share of his attention. By 1968, Colby was once again back in Saigon. Now detached from the CIA, he served in succession as deputy director and then director of the U. S. rural pacification program, formally known as Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS). Still, in his own eyes, the reform-minded liberal, Colby liked to think of CORDS as “a Peace Corps with guns” (p. 273). In 1971, he returned home to Langley, ascending to the post of DCI just in time to witness from afar the final collapse of South Vietnam and of U. S. policy there.

Colby’s tenure as DCI turned out to be brief. By the 1970s, popular unhappiness with the Vietnam War (to include the notorious Phoenix program over which Colby had presided while with CORDS) along with the events of Watergate and a pervasive atmosphere of suspicion were bringing unwonted attention to the national security apparatus. In the good old days of the early Cold War, the CIA had done pretty much whatever it wanted to do...