"It's a terrible thing to say, but sometimes I think I would have rather worked for him than be his son," Carl said. She previously worked for the Outlook and Local Living sections. Under diplomatic cover, he served at the U.S. embassies in Stockholm and Rome, and became the CIA station chief in Saigon in 1959. The couple bonded over their backgrounds in foreign policy. In the 1980s, Mrs. Colby helped lead a successful effort to win legislation guaranteeing shares of lifetime benefits, survivor benefits and health insurance for former spouses mainly wives of CIA employees. WebColby's daughter Catherine suffered from depression, was upset by Phoenix, and died from complications of anxiety in 1973. "And all she said to me was, 'We both loved him. Carl elaborated on his theory more in the interview, asserting that if his dad suffered a stroke or heart attack while canoeing, "he may not have had the will to live. Bored by the practice of law and inspired by his liberal beliefs, he moved to Washington to work for the National Labor Relations Board. Colby headed the CIAs Far East Division until he was named CIA director in 1973, a position he held until retiring in November of 1976. Colbys body was found washed up Monday on a sandbar of the Wicomico River not far from his southern Maryland vacation home, eight days after his empty canoe was found nearby. In consonance with his long-held liberal views, Colby became a supporter of the nuclear freeze and of reductions in military spending. To save the agency, Mr. Colby believed, he had to confess to its sins. VVA Launches Campaign Addressing Aging Veterans Healthcare. They are especially upset with the film's suggestion that the former spymaster spent his retirement in deep regret and killed himself on a canoeing trip in the mid-1990s. William Colby, Man of Contradictions, Found Dead at 76 HARRY F. ROSENTHAL May 6, 1996 WASHINGTON (AP) _ William E. Colby was a professional spy It was when Barbara came up to me, Shelton-Colby remembered. William Colby, a former directorof the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, was alone at his weekendhouse across from Cobb Island, Maryland, 60 miles south of Washington,D.C. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. William Egan Colby was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1920. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. In 1945, he commanded a squad of saboteurs who blew up German rail lines in the snows of northern Norway. Bill was initially reluctant, but he soon joined in the relationship. In April 1996, Bill set off on a worldwide consulting trip. "We all have our own relationships. Tasked by CIA with supporting the government of Ng nh Dim, Colby established a relationship with President Diem's family and with Ng nh Nhu, the president's brother, with whom Colby became close. During World War II Colby served with the Office of Strategic Services. There, he helped set up the stay-behind networks of Operation Gladio, a covert paramilitary organization organized by the CIA to make any Soviet occupation more difficult, as he later described in his memoirs.[8]. Christine Colby Giraudo of Northwest Washington declined to be interviewed. He answered a call for French-speaking volunteers and joined the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II American father of the CIA. Colby then spent much of the 1950s based in Rome, under cover as a State Department officer,[7] where he led the Agency's covert political operations campaign to support anti-Communist parties in their electoral contests against left wing, Soviet Unionassociated parties. Colby was divorced in 1984 from the former Barbara Heinzen and married Sally Shelton. Family and friends are welcome to send flowers or leave their condolences on this memorial page and share them with the family. We all have our own relationships. And she, too, had been in a tired marriage to a Mexican ambassador that fell apart. Emily Langer is a reporter on The Washington Posts obituaries desk. He perfected the look of an invisible man: gray suits, graying hair, glasses with translucent frames the color of pale white skin. He loved music and could play piano, accordion and guitar. The agency's clandestine officers called the list "the family jewels," or "the skeletons." "The agency's survival," he wrote in his memoirs, "could only come from understanding, not hostility, built on knowledge, not faith.". in 1950. He fit this published description: ``Mr. Colby never seems to have a hair or an emotion out of place., Even Colby said, in his 1978 memoir, that he was ``the traditional gray man, so inconspicuous that he can never catch the waiters eye in a restaurant.. [21][22], Colby was the subject of a biography, Lost Crusader, by John Prados, published in 2003. Mrs. Colby, 94, died July 16 in Washington. Robert M. Gates, the Director of Central Intelligence from 1991 to 1993, recalled that 1975 was the worst year in the agency's history. Funeral service will be celebrated at Hodges Family Funeral Home, 114412 US Hwy 301, Dade City on After the war, Colby graduated from Columbia Law School and then briefly practiced law in William J. Donovan's New York firm, Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine. He was 76 and lived in the Georgetown section of Washington. Seated in a Washington movie theater in October, she flipped open a notepad and, as the movie played, jotted down her thoughts. I preferred the old dad, not the new, he said. And even though Shelton-Colby, the spymasters second wife, has been kept at a distance by most of Colbys biological children, their grievances with the film have united them, at least in principle. Call it whatever you like. When Bill's body was found, his wallet contained a photo of Catherine, Carl says. President Ford, advised by Henry Kissinger and others concerned by Colby's controversial openness to Congress and distance from the White House, replaced Colby late in 1975 with George H. W. Bush during the so-called Halloween Massacre in which Secretary of Defense Schlesinger was also replaced (by Donald Rumsfeld). She was Ambassador of the United States to Barbados, Grenada and Dominica as well as Minister to St Lucia, and Special Representative to Antigua, St. Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla, and St. Vincent from 1979 to 1981, under Jimmy Carter. Colby to Leonid Brezhnev, On walking alone, unfollowed, through Red Square in 1989, after the end of the Cold War: "That was my victory parade. She accompanied him on a road trip in Scandinavia, purportedly to visit castles but in fact so that he could supply anti-communist operatives with radio devices hidden in the cars trunk. And all she said to me was, We both loved him., 11 arrested as Occupy D.C. supporters claim vacant downtown school, Va. parish decides to stop training girls as altar servers, D.C. man convicted in attack on transgender woman. Diem was deposed and killed in a U.S.-supported coup in 1963. The Colby family is bothered by the films suggestion that Bill killed himself because he felt guilty for not doing more to comfort his eldest daughter, Catherine Colby, before her death in 1973 from epilepsy and anorexia. Those cuts are slowly becoming a reality in the 1990's. Then he took the canoe out. geogaddi000 Before and during the Vietnam War, Colby served as chief of station in Saigon, chief of the CIA's Far East Division, and head of the Civil Operations and Rural Development effort, as well as overseeing the Phoenix Program. In "The Man Nobody Knew," Carl, the narrator, traces his father's career as an intelligence operative in World War II to his tenure as CIA director. [18] Smialek's report said that Colby was predisposed to having a heart attack or stroke due to "severe calcified atherosclerosis" and that Colby likely "suffered a complication of this atherosclerosis which precipitated him into the cold water in a debilitated state and he succumbed to the effects of hypothermia and drowned". The Cosby Family thanks many people for their killed himself on a canoeing trip in the mid-1990s. Mr. Colby left Saigon and returned to Washington in 1971, in part to care for his eldest daughter, Catherine, who was slowly dying of anorexia nervosa. On the other, Carl admired his dads public service and seems most proud of his disclosures to Congress about the CIAs past misdeeds. On the one hand, Carl comes off as bitter that his father was so immersed in his work. In a short e-mail to The Post, she said her recollections of her dad differ from Carls. She writes about extraordinary lives in national and international affairs, science and the arts, sports, culture, and beyond. Mrs. Colby served for many years on the CIAs Family Advisory Board, which represents the interests of agency family members, and in 2002 received the prestigious Directors Award from then-CIA Director George Tenet, recognizing her untiring efforts on the part of former Agency spouses and her constant concern for the welfare of Agency families., In a statement after Mrs. Colbys death, Tenet and his wife, Stephanie Glakas-Tenet, said that CIA Directors came and went, but Barbara was an indispensable foundation, serving the Agency for nearly 60 years.. She also came to realize, after her husband asked her for a divorce, that she didn't know him as well as she thought. Its director and narrator: his second-oldest son, Carl Colby. During this period he also wrote two books, both of which were memoirs of his professional life combined with discussions of history and policy. One of Colby's own daughters was rumored to be another casualty of his war. He was not the cold, insensitive, unfeeling person that Carl portrayed in that film.". web pages He moved from post to post, eventually graduating from Princeton University with a Phi Beta Kappa key in 1940. The film is about the oldest question: Who are your father and mother? She served with her husband and their family during his long CIA career in Sweden, Italy, Their dads legacy, they said, is something still worth defending. Mrs. Colby was born Barbara Ann Heinzen in Springfield, Ohio, on Dec. 25, 1920. In some ways, The Man Nobody Knew is a quintessential Washington spook story, Michael OSullivan said in his Washington Post review of the film, told by a globe-trotting CIA brat who thought, for the longest time, that his father worked for the State Department., One of the most tenacious "what-ifs" of the Vietnam War is what John F. Kennedy would have done, Back in the late seventies or early eighties when I was working as a journalist in Washington, D.C.,, The documentary film Lioness takes a look at a group of female Army support soldiers, Thefifth annual San Francisco Veterans Film Festival, which will take place at Koret Auditorium at the main branch, Stay informed about the latest veteran news, 2023 Vietnam Veterans of America | All Rights Reserved, 8719 Colesville Road, Suite 100, Silver Spring, MD 20910 | 301-585-4000, Media Kit In recent months, Mr. Colby became senior editor of Strategic Weekly Briefings, a faxed newsletter, and embarked on a quintessential post-cold-war endeavor: marketing a computer CD-ROM game about espionage and counter-terrorism he created with Oleg Kalugin, a former top Soviet intelligence officer. Colby, however, consistently insisted that such tactics were not authorized by or permitted in the program. Ive come to think that Colby gave me so much of his time because it gave him a chance to be back in the game, if only for a morning. In retirement, Mr. Colby lectured, practiced law and worked as a risk consultant to clients that included New York investment banks. After the hearings, conducted largely in private sessions, Mr. Colby was confirmed as the nation's 10th Director of Central Intelligence. Soon, she began courting him. His family moved constantly, living everywhere from Tientsin, China, to Burlington, Vt. In 1984, Bill and Barbara divorced. experience and a deep antipathy to Fascism and Communism. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. [16][18] After an autopsy, Maryland's Chief Medical Examiner John E. Smialek ruled his death to be accidental. Let me be very blunt, said Shelton-Colby, 67, a foreign policy professor at American University. This intelligence surprise reportedly affected Colby's credibility with the Nixon administration. The coroners report listed the cause of death as a drowning, brought on by a stroke or heart attack. Few outsiders understood them -- "possibly because Angleton's explanations were impossible to follow, or possibly because the evidence just didn't add up," Mr. Colby wrote in his memoir. Then an OSS friend offered him a job at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Colby accepted. I would have been closer to him.. Part of the effort was the controversial Phoenix Program, an initiative designed to identify and attack the "Viet Cong Infrastructure." Posing as a diplomat, Mr. Colby served in Stockholm from 1951 to 1953; in Rome from 1953 to 1958; and, fatefully, as the C.I.A. After long-time DCI Richard Helms was dismissed by President Nixon in 1973, James Schlesinger assumed the helm at the Agency. WebCatherine Colby died in April 1973. I asked my mother, What if [others in the family] all object? She said, They can make their own movie, Carl said in an interview. The Christian Democrats and allied parties won several key elections in the 1950s, preventing a takeover by the Communist Party. "It would have muddled the story.". His brothers and sister had their own relationship with him, he said. She recalled wondering, Who are we tonight?. In 1968, while Colby was preparing to take up the post of chief of the Soviet Bloc Division of the Agency, President Lyndon Johnson instead sent Colby back to Vietnam as deputy to Robert Komer, who had been charged with streamlining the civilian side of the American and South Vietnamese efforts against the Communists. Though the topic remains open and controversial, some recent scholarship, including by Lewis "Bob" Sorley, supports Colby's arguments. Foul play was suspected, but I knew otherwise, Carl narrates in the movie. In the film, Carl wonders whether his friends were right when they called his dad a "murderer" for running the notorious Phoenix Program - a CIA operation in the Vietnam War sought to ferret out Viet Cong agents in South Vietnam. In The Man Nobody Knew, Carl, the narrator, traces his fathers career as an intelligence operative in World War II to his tenure as CIA director. He thought spying for one's country an honorable task, he followed legitimate orders to the hilt and his public confessions took the form of atonement and redemption. . ", Carl kept the wrenching footage to bolster the film's credibility, he said. Norwich University hosts an annual writers symposium named in his honor. On her nightstand by her bed, a photo shows the couple in Venice, seated in a gondola draped in flowers, yellow and white. Her father, Karl, was president of the Bayer drug manufacturer in the mid-1930s. william colby daughter death. William Colby died in 1996 in an apparent accidental drowning in the Wicomico River in Maryland. He was given the Outstanding Achievement Award (Young Male Filmmaker) for his six-min Building trust: Jason Wallaces Strange Brew Pub welcomes all kinds. He made tough decisions when necessary _ and he was always guided by the core values of the country he loved., CIA Director John Deutch said, ``He faced up to severe challenges with openness and integrity., Colby was perfectly cast as a spy: colorless, soft-spoken, precise and thin. Those hints grew darker in January 1975, after Mr. Colby dismissed James J. Angleton, for 20 years the agency's chief of counterintelligence. For the Colby family, the movie is yet one more turbulent moment stemming from the career of their patriarch, The CIAs 10th director was best known for revealing the family jewels. Carl didnt know his father. She also came to realize, after her husband asked her for a divorce, that she didnt know him as well as she thought. He was born September 2, 1946 in Huntington, Utah to Eldwin R. Colby and Zina Loree Marshall. The film has drawn criticism from family members. Mr. Schlesinger ordered all agency employees and veterans who knew about such activities to report them -- and then departed to become Defense Secretary. It's been 15 years since Bill Colby vanished on a solo canoe trip near his vacation home in southern Maryland, only to be found dead days later, floating on the banks of the Wicomico River. He married Barbara Heinzen (19202015) in 1945 and they had five children. It has become familiar to millions through a diverse publishing program that includes scholarly works in all academic disciplines, bibles, music, school and college textbooks, business books, dictionaries and reference books, and academic journals. And, most recently, a Salem teens film wins L.A. Indie Short Fest honors. Please join us in Loving, Sharing and Memorializing Frederick William Colby Sr on this permanent online memorial. William E. Colby was a member of the National Coalition to Ban Handguns. In a short email to The Post, she said her recollections of her dad differ from Carl's. Colby also focused on internal reforms within the CIA and the intelligence community. Only when contacted by a Post reporter did family members vent their frustrations about the film. The new dad . "I asked my mother, 'What if (others in the family) all object?' The journal appeals to readers from a wide variety of disciplines, including American studies, international economics, American history, national security studies, and Latin-American, Asian, African, European, and Middle Eastern studies. Carl said he felt that the best person to explain his dad was his mother, who was extensively interviewed in the film. was just an ordinary guy with ordinary desires., Carl interviewed Shelton-Colby, but he opted not to use any of the footage. For nearly four decades, Mrs. Colby lived the life of a CIA wife, performing what another agency spouse once described as the traditional partnership role of two employees for the price of one. , From 1945 until their divorce in 1984, she was the wife of William E. Colby the spy and later spymaster who, as CIA director from 1973 to 1976, revealed the assassination attempts and other clandestine activities known as the agencys family jewels.. Colby also lent his expertise and knowledge, along with Oleg Kalugin, to the Activision game Spycraft: The Great Game, which was released shortly before his death. A state official said there was no sign of foul play. Even though the movie shows Bill testifying before Congress, saying that he issued an order against assassination, Paul, the youngest brother, said he still believes the film slams their father as a "mass assassin." During World War II, he parachuted behind enemy lines twice and earned the Silver Star as well as commendations from Norway, France, and Great Britain. Only when contacted by a Post reporter did family members vent their frustrations about the film. He then attended Princeton University and graduated with an A.B. A strong believer in reform of the CIA and the intelligence community more broadly, Schlesinger had written a 1971 Bureau of the Budget report outlining his views on the subject. This item is part of a JSTOR Collection. Because you don't know 10 years out what you're going to face. 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