No Success like Failure

Now let us praise an infamous man, the pale-eyed William Egan Colby, our number-one spy.

Colby, more than any other celebrated public official, even Richard Nixon, has perfected the alchemy of turning program failures into personal successes.

Every major spy operation that he is known to have been part of has been a disaster. Especially in South Vietnam. And yet recently he was made director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

It was during the 1959--1962 period, when Colby was the CIA's top man in Saigon, that the spy agency began locking the United States into the Indochina war via a number of ingenious maneuvers, including the assassination of President Diem.

Colby again took up residence in South Vietnam in 1968 (continued on page 180)No Success Like Failure(continued from page 149) and during the next three years headed an outfit called Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS). By building a road here, an outdoor privy there, CORDS was supposed to "pacify" the angry South Vietnamese civilians who somehow had got the impression that Americans were there to destroy their country.

CORDS officials tried to starve the Viet Cong out of the back country by depleting the rice supply. Also, they uprooted entire villages and packed the inhabitants off to safer areas--safer, that is, from the U. S. soldiers and airmen who were devastating the countryside in their usually futile search for the hidden Viet Cong infiltrators. The result did not discourage the Viet Cong in the slightest, but it created a permanent flow of hungry refugees who still aimlessly wander the back roads of South Vietnam or crowd into towns that do not want them.

A special program created and directed by Colby was Operation Phoenix. Nothing rose from its ashes but more ashes. Theoretically, the objective was to ferret out Viet Cong sympathizers from among the South Vietnamese civilian population by undercover policework; but, in fact, Phoenix turned into a program of petty feuding, blackmail and perversion. Suspects who did not quickly pay off their captors, or confess to crimes of which they may not have been guilty, were often tortured (holes drilled in their heads, genitals mutilated, etc.) and just as often killed. Between 1968 and early 1971, agents operating directly or indirectly under Colby killed 20,587 civilians, including, of course, many innocent folks, without putting a dent in the Viet Cong operation.

With the bloody farce of CORDS and Phoenix to assist him up the bureaucratic ladder, Colby returned to Washington in 1971 and was given the job which included guiding the CIA's cover-up of its role in the Watergate scandal. He also helped White House aide John Ehrlichman cover up his part in the mess (by Colby's own admission, he "danced around" to avoid telling the Watergate prosecutors that it was Ehrlichman who had asked the CIA to suppress information about the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office).

As a reward for his many mistakes of judgment and commission, Colby in 1973 was finally elevated to the highest CIA chair.

There was, however, contrary to surface evidence, a very powerful logic to his success. He represents, in a premier fashion, what have been the dominant forces of U. S. foreign policy during the past decade, at least--the forces of action, as opposed to the forces of thought.

The CIA itself has been divided traditionally along the action vs. thought lines. Its action arm is the clandestine service. This covert, 007-style division is nicknamed, correctly, the "department of dirty tricks." Colby, a courageous devotee of action--as he has proved ever since World War Two, when he made two jumps (most wartime spies were content with one) behind enemy lines to disrupt Nazi operations--has spent his CIA career in the clandestine service. It was this department that he directed after returning from his last tour in Vietnam and before becoming head of the entire agency.

It is very much to the point to note that the department of dirty tricks' record--or at least the record known to the public--is incredibly poor, an ill-kept graveyard full of open graves and of bones scattered over a quarter century: an airdrop of CIA agents into Albania to overthrow the government (failure), support of invasion forces against Sukarno (failure), attempted bribe of Singapore premier (failure), Gary Powers' U-2 flight over Russia (horrible failure), the Bay of Pigs (disaster), two attempts to rig Chilean elections against Allende (first time a successful embarrassment, second time an embarrassing failure), training and support of secret army in Laos (a $300,000,000-per-year failure), support of right-wing George Papadopoulos in military overthrow of Greek government (a grotesque and pitiful success).

On the other hand, there is the CIA's intelligence division. These are the spies who pull in some solid and some wispy bits of information from all over the world, sit and ponder them, contemplate them, sift them and toss them in the wind to see which way they will fly--and whether or not our foreign policy should fly after them.

These are the thinkers, and they have had great success from time to time. If the CIA has in any generally known fashion been a blessing to this country since World War Two, it is because of this intelligence analysis. The key has been a reasonable objectivity. With no arms program to inflate and sell to Congress, the CIA, unlike the Pentagon, has felt no need to find crises where no crises existed. With no policy errors to cover up publicly (since its policy errors are seldom publicized), the CIA, unlike the State Department, need not concoct make-believe relationships with other countries in order to protect its bureaucratic ego.

When the Pentagon, a couple of years ago, disclosed that its spies had uncovered evidence that Russia was preparing a first-strike capability with its SS-9 missiles, the CIA's intelligence analysts said that this was not true--and they were right. When the Pentagon insisted that the Cambodian invasion would halt the infiltration of North Vietnamese, the CIA's analysts said no, no; they also disputed Pentagon spies by arguing--again correctly--that the Lon Nol government in Cambodia would fail to hold the countryside and that the South Vietnamese army would perform wretchedly in Laos.

These correct advisories infuriated Pentagon officials and the White House, for the CIA information gatherers and appraisers were, in effect, often arguing against an expansion of the military budget and the military adventure. They were giving "bad" advice because it was accurate.

Colby, the action man, was just as unhappy with his own department's thinkers. One of his first official acts on becoming CIA director was to abolish the ten-man board that had been responsible for the intelligence analysis since 1950.

This was an act of religion. Colby has always been a Cold War zealot. To him the frenzied clash between East and West is as fresh and sanguine--and necessary--today as it was in the crimson dawn of the Cold War in the late Forties. For him this is a matter of faith. Which is to say, the intelligence-gathering forces of the CIA are of secondary importance to Colby--and they are an outright detriment to him when these agents bring together information that indicates the Cold War is on the wane and that it is no longer sensible, if it ever was, to slaughter people of other countries in order to save their ideological souls.

Colby is brave, and loyal to his commander in chief (proved when he carried out illegal orders to conduct war in Laos), and patriotic in the extreme, and a selfless bureaucrat. But somewhere, something about him went sour. Congressman Paul McCloskey recently laid his hand delicately on the soft spot. McCloskey had visited Colby in Saigon and had cross-examined him in Congressional hearings, and he was puzzled. On the one hand he was impressed by Colby as a "sincere, dedicated public servant," and on the other he deplored him as the one who "is also the architect of the most vicious and shameful program [Phoenix] that the American Government has ever sponsored." How did it come about? asked McCloskey. "What happens to a guy when he falls within this institutional policy of evil?" The answer is, if he falls in the right way, he rises to the top.