The couple bonded over their backgrounds in foreign policy. Shelton-Colby was in Houston, visiting her ailing mother. Paul said the Vietnamese prisoner's killing was not part of Phoenix, that his dad wasn't even in Vietnam at the time of the shooting and that the footage is a "total smear of my father. Why Was Former CIA Director William Colby Assassinated? Mr. Schlesinger ordered all agency employees and veterans who knew about such activities to report them -- and then departed to become Defense Secretary. Because you don't know 10 years out what you're going to face. Thousands of targets were killed, leading the media and much of America to call Phoenix an assassination program. 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.. Among those interviewed in the film are former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, the journalists Seymour Hersh (who broke the My Lai story) and Bob Woodward, and former Defense Secretaries Robert Gates and Donald Rumsfeld. Colby recounted that he took from his parents a desire to serve and a commitment to liberal politics, Catholicism, and independence, exemplified by his father's career-damaging protest in The Nation magazine regarding the lenient treatment of a white Georgian who had murdered a black U.S. soldier also based at Ft. This is a digitized version of an article from The Timess print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. The apparent cause was a heart attack, her son Paul said. On May 6, Colby's body was found in a marshy riverbank lying face down not far from where his canoe was found. Early on the morning of Feb. 19, William G. (Bill) Armstrong, 89, passed away surrounded by his loving family at this Tamarack Lane home. Trivia (1) Daughter of Former CIA Director William Colby, who played a significant role in U.S. Vietnam War policy-making, was founded dead in 1996, eight days after going missing on a solo canoe trip near his Maryland home. Carl says in the movie that two weeks before the canoe trip his dad called him seeking absolution for his not doing enough when Catherine was so ill. When Bills body was found, his wallet contained a photo of Catherine, Carl says. Paul said the Vietnamese prisoners killing was not part of Phoenix, that his dad wasnt even in Vietnam at the time of the shooting and that the footage is a total smear of my father., Carl told me that if I didnt like it, I should make my own film, Paul said. Robert M. Gates, the Director of Central Intelligence from 1991 to 1993, recalled that 1975 was the worst year in the agency's history. The Cosby Family thanks many people for their This item is part of a JSTOR Collection. Enterprise reporter covering the Washington region and beyond. In 1975, after many years of involvement, South Vietnam fell to Communist forces in April 1975, a particularly difficult blow for Colby, who had dedicated so much of his life and career to the American effort there. The narrative ended. At headquarters, he took on desk jobs that led two years later to the directorship. But as the nation's chief spy, he helped reveal the Central Intelligence Agency's hidden history and confessed to its sins. He was given the Outstanding Achievement Award (Young Male Filmmaker) for his six-min Building trust: Jason Wallaces Strange Brew Pub welcomes all kinds. 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. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. The apparent cause was a heart attack, said her son Paul Colby. 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. Carl paints his father as a mysterious family man more occupied with the agency's mission against communism and less concerned about his wife Barbara and their five kids. Through her sons, Barbara, 90, who lives in a Washington retirement community, also declined to be interviewed. My dads shoes were off when they found his body, usually a sign of a drowning victim fighting to live, he said. Sally Shelton-Colby, William Colby's second wife and a foreign policy professor at American University, is unhappy with the way her late husband is portrayed in her stepson's film. When you are distraught, you do unreasonable, illogical things.". Colby was a vocal advocate within the CIA and the United States government for engaging the non-Communist left wing parties in order to create broader non-Communist coalitions capable of governing fractious Italy; this position first brought him into conflict with James J. Angleton. [6] In 1984, he divorced Barbara and married Democratic diplomat Sally Shelton-Colby. He loved music and could play piano, accordion and guitar. This interview is from August 8th 2004. 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. WhyWasFormerCiaDirectorWilliamColbyAssassinated, Advanced embedding details, examples, and help, StevenGreerTellsArtBellAboutWilliamColbysDeath2008-08-08.ogg, Steven Greer tells Art Bell about William Colby's Death 2008-08-08, Terms of Service (last updated 12/31/2014). Mr. Colby "had no choice in 1975 but to cooperate," but the agency's pride, "however based on a fiction, took a blow from which we never recovered," Mr. Gates recounts in his just-published memoir, "From the Shadows," (Simon and Schuster). 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. During World War II Colby served with the Office of Strategic Services. Diplomatic History is the official journal of Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). His canoe was found the following day on a sandbar in the Wicomico River, a tributary of the Potomac, about 0.25 miles (0.40 km) from his home. The day after he returned, he went to his Southern Maryland home. He showed unusual candour while testifying before Congress in 1975 in the wake of In his 1989 book, Lost Victory: A First-Hand Account of Americas Sixteen-Year Involvement in the Vietnam War , Colby argued that the way to defeat the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese in Vietnam was not to send in large numbers of U.S. troops, but to help make the government of South Vietnam responsive to the needs of its people, thereby making the government an attractive alternative to the communists. In 1992, she received a masters degree in humanities from Georgetown University. [21][22] In his 2011 documentary The Man Nobody Knew, Colby's son Carl suggested that his father suffered from guilt over his failings as a father to one of his daughters and committed suicide. They turned on the radio and danced the jitterbug or waltzed. Barbara H. Colby once recalled turning on the washing machine to muffle her husbands conversations. Both Colby and Kalugin played themselves in the game. ), Paul, who lives in Alexandria, also hates how the movie splices images of their dad with violent archival footage rows of Vietnamese corpses and a notorious clip of a Vietnamese prisoner being shot in the head. Only when contacted by a Post reporter did family members vent their frustrations about the film. In an interview, Jonathan Colby, who lives in Chevy Chase, Md., said he does not understand why Carl implies that his dad committed suicide. The film: "The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby." And, most recently, a Salem teens film wins L.A. Indie Short Fest honors. He cheated on an eye examination to become a paratrooper, unwittingly taking a path that would lead him into the clandestine world. And she, too, had been in a tired marriage to a Mexican ambassador that fell apart. Carl paints his father as a mysterious family man more occupied with the agencys mission against communism and less concerned about his wife Barbara and their five kids. He felt it crucial to educate Congress, the press and the public about the agency. Earlier this year, when Paul was shown the film, he told Carl that it would be "unethical" to keep it as is. The CIAs 10th director was best known for revealing the family jewels a compilation of the agencys assassination attempts, drug testing on unwitting humans and eavesdropping on war protesters. He attempted to modernize what he believed to be some out-of-date structures and practices by disbanding the Board of National Estimates and replacing it with the National Intelligence Council. There, he oversaw Operation Phoenix, a program designed to root out Communist Viet Cong agents in South Vietnam and that ultimately killed more than 20,000 Vietnamese. She admits to feeling jealous of another CIA wife whose husband talked more about his job. TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. Colby was divorced in 1984 from the former Barbara Heinzen and married Sally Shelton. In an interview, Jonathan Colby, who lives in Chevy Chase, said he does not understand why Carl implies that his dad committed suicide. More than one interlocutor noted that when asked a question he did not care to answer, he would tilt back his head so light reflected off the lenses of his glasses, turning his eyes into blank white disks. Web william colby daughter death. WebCatherine Colby died in April 1973. 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. In 1944, he parachuted behind German lines to link up with a French resistance group. A state official said there was no sign of foul play. I have come to a hard spent realization: Costco has my number. COLBY--Barbara Heinzen, died peacefully Thursday, July 16 at the age of 94. There is considerable debate about the merits of the program, which was subject to allegations that it relied on or was complicit in assassination and torture. The contradictions followed him to the end. When it trampled people, the blame was on the elephant rider: the President of the United States. PRICE William Edger Colby (AKA) Gummer, 74, passed away unexpectedly at his home in Price on December 31, 2020. The new dad . One of the five children from his first marriage, Catherine, died in 1974. Those hints grew darker in January 1975, after Mr. Colby dismissed James J. Angleton, for 20 years the agency's chief of counterintelligence. ", This page was last edited on 20 January 2023, at 14:13. was a tool of Presidential power, not a rogue elephant. When Bill's body was found, his wallet contained a photo of Catherine, Carl says. During this period he also wrote two books, both of which were memoirs of his professional life combined with discussions of history and policy. [21][22] Carl's step-mother and siblings, as well as Colby's biographer Randall Woods, criticized Carl's portrayal of Colby and rejected the allegation that the former CIA director killed himself, saying it was inconsistent with his character. Colby died in a boating This transformation began on April 27, 1973, 12 days before Mr. Colby learned that President Richard M. Nixon, then deeply enmeshed in the Watergate scandal, was about to nominate him as Director of Central Intelligence. In a short e-mail to The Post, she said her recollections of her dad differ from Carls. Following his first year at Columbia, in 1941 Colby volunteered for active duty with the United States Army and served with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) as a "Jedburgh", or special operator, trained to work with resistance forces in occupied Europe to harass German and Axis forces. She was 44. With heavy hearts, we announce the death of William Colby of Price, Utah, born in Huntington, Utah, who passed away on December 31, 2020 at the age of 74. Elbridge's father, Charles Colby, had been a professor of chemistry at Columbia University but had died prematurely, leaving his family largely without money. That day, the Federal judge at the trial of Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department official charged with espionage after the Pentagon Papers, a secret history of the Vietnam War, were provided to The New York Times, disclosed that the office of Mr. Ellsberg's psychiatrist had been burglarized by White House operatives -- with technical assistance from the C.I.A. ``Its time to cut our military budget by 50 percent and to invest that money in our schools, our health care and our economy. . Anyone can read what you share. (Courtesy of the Colby family). Ultimately, the movie reveals Carl's ambivalence about his dad. Since then, he had promoted a nuclear freeze and big cuts in the military budget. Some hinted that he was a Soviet agent. But the law, frankly, bored him, and he joined the fledgling C.I.A. 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 agency had violated its charter by spying on Americans, tapping their telephones, reading their tax returns and opening their mail. Search the history of over 797 billion John, Michael Collins Piper has some interesting things to say about Colby. One was titled Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA; the other, on Vietnam and his long involvement with American policy there, was called Lost Victory. [21][22], Colby was the subject of a biography, Lost Crusader, by John Prados, published in 2003. For the Colby family, the movie is yet one more turbulent moment stemming from the career of their patriarch, whose CIA directorship in the 1970s is one of the agencys most controversial. Carl seemed less intrigued by his dad after he left the CIA in 1976. Keep supporting great journalism by turning off your ad blocker. She served with her husband and their family during his long CIA career in Sweden, Italy, Its director and narrator: his second-oldest son, Carl Colby. Colby was dismissed as CIA director 20 years ago, after 3 1/2 years, by President Ford. The secrets did not keep. The old dad taught me how to sacrifice. Earlier this year, when Paul was shown the film, he told Carl that it would be unethical to keep it as is. The CIA women worked behind the scenes, as not to out the spouses still employed there. When you are distraught, you do unreasonable, illogical things.. [7][23] In May 2013, Randall B. Senior agency officers called him a traitor. The film concerned a dead man shes still in love with. The disclosures in 1975, historians believe, saved the CIA from destruction when members of Congress were eager for its death, but they made Colby a pariah to CIA officers who believed such transparency imperiled the agency's mission and national security. ``He fought fascism and communism and lived to see democracy take hold in the world., President Clinton said in a statement, ``Through a quarter of a century at the CIA, William Colby played a pivotal role in shaping our nations intelligence community. Though a career officer, Elbridge Colby's professional pursuits focused less on strictly military activities and more on intellectual and scholarly contributions to military and literary subjects. They thought she was dead, but called an ambulance anyway. 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. Far from where his canoe was found, his wallet contained a photo of,. 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