William Colby

Vice President Nelson Rockefeller , Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and William Colby, Director of the CIA, discuss the situation in Vietnam during a break during a meeting of the United States National Security Council on April 24, 1975

William Colby (third from left) at a meeting of the Military Intelligence Board (MIB ) in 1973

William Egan Colby (born January 4, 1920 in St. Paul , Minnesota , † April 27, 1996 in Rock Point , Maryland ) was an American government official and from September 1973 to January 1976 director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Life

The first twelve years for the CIA spent Colby with construction work for the NATO - stay-behind network , as he later in his memoirs described. Colby, stressed that this was a "main program" of the CIA, designed by the Office of Policy Coordination (1948–1952) under Frank Gardiner Wisner to have clandestine and armed soldiers in Western Europe ready to be used as sabotage and espionage forces will be in case of a Soviet attack.

In the early 1950s in Stockholm he succeeded in building an underground organization from the right-wing extremist brotherhood in arms Sveaborg, which was founded in 1941 by Otto Hallberg and which was itself an offshoot of the fascist association Svensk Socialistisk Samling (SSS, "Swedish Socialist Collection") 1,200 contact persons, many of whom were members of the army, who in an "emergency" (e.g. Soviet invasion) could have led their paramilitary militias independently. The Scandia house in Stockholm - formerly Thule house - is said to have been the headquarters of the stay-behind networks.

In the fall of 1953 Colby was sent to Rome , where he worked under Gerry Miller, the CIA chief-of-station. The two men knew each other well, having been Colby's supervisor in OSS operations in Norway during World War II . With the secret Gladio armies in Italy , the CIA wanted to prevent the politically subversive political party PCI from receiving legislative power in the total absence of a "Soviet invasion". In his memoir, Colby revealed: "My job, quite simply, was to prevent Italy from being taken over by the communists in the next elections in 1958." When Colby was transferred from Italy to the CIA office in Vietnam , SIFAR director Giovanni De Lorenzo continued his covert operations against the PCI and the PSI .

Colby was accredited at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon from 1959 to 1962 . He directed rural development programs and the CIA's covert Operation Phoenix during the Vietnam War . Operation Phoenix served the purpose of killing Vietnamese guerrillas belonging to the FNL (Viet Cong) .

In September 1973 Colby became director of the CIA under President Nixon, until he was replaced in 1976 by the future President George Bush . During his time as Director of Central Intelligence , the opening of the CIA Memorial Wall in July 1974, which was built in honor of the employees killed in the service.

On April 27, 1996, Colby presumably drowned in a boating accident, shortly after his subpoena to the Olson affair became known . Contrary to his custom, he did not wear a life jacket and did not tell his wife about the planned excursion. His household was in a state that suggested a hurried departure. His canoe was found 400 yards from his weekend home in Rock Point, about 40 miles from Washington, DC at the confluence of the Wicomico and Potomac Rivers , and his body on May 6th.

His final resting place is Arlington National Cemetery . The Colby Award has been presented in his honor since 1999 .

background

In 2017 the NDR journalist Patrik Baab and the US political scientist Robert E. Harkavy made a connection between the murder of the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986 and the death of Uwe Barschel in 1987 on his unexplained death in their book " In the Spider's Web of the Secret Services " . These "political murders" are "part of a single story" - the Iran-Contra affair - and the result of a global cleanup aimed at removing unwanted witnesses and apostate helpers of a political conspiracy.

bibliography

• William Colby, Peter Forbath: Honorable Men - My Life in the CIA. Simon and Schuster, New York 1978.
• Philip Willan: Puppetmasters, the political use of terrorism in Italy. London: Constable, 1991.
• Patrik Baab, Robert E. Harkavy: In the spider web of the secret services: Why were Olof Palme, Uwe Barschel and William Colby murdered? Westend Verlag, 2017.

See also

• CIA family jewels

Individual evidence

1. ^ William Colby, Peter Forbath: Honorable Men - My Life in the CIA , Chapter Three: A Scandinavian Spy, pp. 78-107.
2. ^ William Colby, Peter Forbath, Honorable Men - My Life in the CIA , Chapter Three: A Scandinavian Spy, 81.
3. ↑ Patrik Baab, Robert E. Harkavy: In the spider web of the secret services: Why were Olof Palme, Uwe Barschel and William Colby murdered? Westend Verlag, 2017
4. ↑ Memorial Wall Publication ( Memento of November 24, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) CIA, online February 24, 2014, accessed January 19, 2015, PDF, (English)
5. ↑ Christopher Ruddy: The Body Count: Add One More. ( ( Page no longer available , search in web archives: newsmax.com ), March 24, 1999).
6. ↑ Kevin Dowling, Phillip Knightley: The Olson File - A secret that could destroy the CIA . In: Night and Day, supplement to the London Mail . August 23, 1998 ( online ( Memento of August 4, 2001 in the Internet Archive )). The Olson File - A secret that could destroy the CIA ( Memento of the original from August 4, 2001 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.