Shadow Warrior (14 page)

In addition, it seemed as if the enemy was not only at the gate but within the walls. In 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), populated primarily by conservative super-patriots, had opened hearings on an alleged plot by domestic communists to take control of the motion picture industry. When HUAC subsequently turned its attention to the federal government, Truman issued an executive order mandating a loyalty investigation of all federal job applicants. In February 1950, Great Britain announced the arrest of noted scientist Klaus Fuchs for betraying atomic secrets to the Soviets. Shortly thereafter, in the United States, Harry Gold, David Greenglass, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested as atomic spies.

The Cold War and its newly formed instrument, the CIA, were waiting for Bill Colby, but there would be a brief interregnum. Even before he officially parted company with the Donovan firm, Colby had applied for and accepted a job with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in Washington. Given his interests and liberal values, it was a natural—if temporarily impoverishing—move. In his memoir, Colby gave no other reason for his decision other than to expand his credentials as a New Deal/Fair Deal labor lawyer. During his yearlong stint with the NLRB, he helped represent Philadelphia garment workers who were trying to unionize, and wrote
briefs in a case in which agribusinesses in California were illegally breaking strikes by their migrant grape pickers. But Colby was well aware of the evolution of the OSS into the CIA—in 1949, he had accompanied Donovan to Norway for a memorial service commemorating those who had died in Operation Rype—and he wanted to be at hand if an opportunity arose.

Sure enough, just weeks after the Colbys moved to Washington, Bill got a call from Gerry Miller, his old London chief from OSS days. Would Colby meet him for lunch? Miller asked. During the meal, Miller told his former Jedburgh that he had left a promising banking career to join the CIA. He was appropriately vague about his duties, but he made it clear that in Soviet communism, the nation was facing a threat as dire as that posed by Nazism. He finished by asking Colby to come work for him.

Bill was intrigued, but he put off his old boss. He wanted very much to come on board. “Given my OSS experience,” he later wrote, “given my special political interests, given my taste for adventure, the CIA was the answer.” But full-time employment would have to wait, he told Miller. For him to leave his new job so quickly would not be fair to those at the NLRB who had hired him. Moreover, two moves in such a short time would not look good on his résumé. But, Colby said, he was willing to consult for the Agency on matters in which he had some expertise. Why not go ahead and run the necessary security check and hire him as a consultant? Miller readily agreed.
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There things stood until the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. Colby and many in the US foreign policy establishment assumed that the North Korean invasion marked the opening shot in a Sino-Soviet campaign to conquer the free world. The Truman administration authorized a massive expansion of the CIA, and Colby quit his job to go to work for Miller, who headed the Western European Division of the Office of Policy Coordination under Frank Wisner. Patriotism and a sense of duty were no doubt important factors in this decision, but, as Colby later commented to a friend, “I was just bored out of my mind.”
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B
ill Colby's attitudes toward the Cold War were shaped by his religion, by his education—formal and informal—by his and his father's romanticism, and by his experiences in the “Good War.” From his birth until his second marriage in 1984, he was a practicing Catholic. For his father, the church was a discipline; for his mother, it was a comfort. Neither parent was a religious fanatic; Colby wasn't, either. Instead, like his parents, he was a social and political liberal, prizing the faith for its values of compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, and good works, not for self-righteousness or exclusiveness.

Catholicism was a moral and cultural frame of reference for Bill Colby. Faith and reason were mutually reinforcing, not mutually exclusive.
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Like the Jesuits, he valued a classical education. He had taken Latin in high school and college, and he studied Greek on his own as an adult. And, like the Jesuits, Colby was more concerned with action than with matters of doctrine. Princeton's motto was “In the nation's service,” and he would have wholeheartedly agreed with that sentiment. Unlike the Jesuits, Colby was not in thrall to Christianity, but dedicated to his country, and eventually to the CIA. But he was Jesuitical in the ways he served them: he loved a cause and reveled in taking action in behalf of that cause.

Colby's son John recalled that his father's favorite period in history was the world of the Middle Ages with its fictional stories of chivalrous knights and King Arthur's roundtable. Chivalry was a code of honor enforced by
an elite class with swords; King Arthur acted in the name of the people, beholden to them but above them, paternalistic—but liberal. In Asia, Colby would have been the idealized mandarin. Like his father, Bill was a romantic in the tradition of Kipling, Baden-Powell, and Lawrence, an agent of good in a dangerous world. But he never let his romanticism eclipse his realism: like the Jesuits, Colby was well aware of the moral pitfalls of his calling. Carl Colby recalled his father repeating Harry Lime's famous speech in
The Third Man
. The Italians, Lime declared, have had five hundred years of torture, war, the Borgias, the Medicis; they had also had Michelangelo, Da Vinci, and Botticelli; the Swiss, on the other hand, could boast of five hundred years of the cuckoo clock.
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Colby avoided fanaticism not only in religion but also in politics. In the war against communism, Colby was a soldier, not an ideologue. “My father wasn't a vehement anticommunist,” son Carl recalled. “He wasn't always talking about getting rid of the communists. He did not talk about them as if he were a football announcer.” Bill remembered with pride that when he was with the NLRB, he had helped write a brief for the American Civil Liberties Union in a Supreme Court case involving the harassment of a left-wing California group that had protested the Marshall Plan. In his memoir, he recalled, also with pride, that he and the young activists who constituted the Office of Policy Coordination (the division devoted to secret political and paramilitary operations) were anticommunist but rejected “the right-wing hysterical demagogy of the likes of Joseph McCarthy.”
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Bill Colby was opposed to communism because it placed the welfare of the state above the welfare of the individual, because it was undemocratic, and because it was determined to extend itself through coercion. “My dislike of Soviet Communism dated back to my college days, to my studies of the Spanish Civil War, to my reading of Lenin, to my awareness of the Stalinist purge trials, to my disgust with the Hitler-Stalin Pact,” he wrote in
Honorable Men
. He had heard from fellow Jedburghs about the French communists' efforts to seize control of southern France by force as the Allied armies were advancing. World War II and the Cold War, communism and National Socialism, Sino-Soviet imperialism and Axis aggression were all part of the same seamless threat. It was his duty as an American, a Christian, and a liberal to answer the call to duty. He would later compare the CIA to “an order of Knights Templars [established] to save Western freedom from Communist darkness—and from war.” But
as the Judge in
Blood Meridian
observed, war and religion are a dangerous mix.
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In 1950, the year Bill Colby joined the CIA, the nation was in thrall to the Agency. In the popular mind, America faced a mortal danger both from within—in the form of a communist fifth column—and without—in the form of the five hundred Red Army divisions in Eastern Europe and the hordes of Chinese in Mao's People's Liberation Army. For the most part, the country had shed its fears about an American Gestapo and embraced the Agency as its first line of defense against the clandestine communist menace. The Office of Foreign Intelligence would conduct espionage abroad, while its counterintelligence division would act as a barrier to block communist spying and sabotage in the United States. The research and analysis division would collate and summarize intelligence for decision-makers in the foreign policy establishment. Frank Wisner and his troops in the Office of Policy Coordination would conduct spoiling operations—in effect, try to beat the enemy at his own game. New York publishing houses and Hollywood studios teemed with scripts featuring heroic American agents and counteragents battling an insidious and merciless enemy. Intellectuals were drawn to British writer George Orwell's antitotalitarian novels
Animal Farm
, published in 1945, and
1984
, published in 1949. Despite the extremes of McCarthyism, the vast majority of Americans looked to a coalition of liberal anticommunists and conservative interventionists to lead them in this new crusade.

Colby reveled in his new fraternity, his “band of brothers.” The Agency, he wrote, “attracted what nowadays we would call the best and the brightest, the politically liberal young men and women from the finest Ivy League campuses and with the most impeccable social and establishment backgrounds, young people with ‘vigor' and adventuresome spirits who believed fervently that the Communist threat had to be met aggressively, innovatively and courageously.”
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Colby's description of the CIA at its inception not only mirrored popular enthusiasms but also highlighted a significant personality trait: he may have been a liberal, but he was also an elitist—there are no more elitist institutions in America than academia and the military. He did not necessarily think of himself as better than other people—and like his mother, he did possess true compassion—but he believed he had been born to and trained for responsibility.

In those early days, Colby's cover was thin. He would carpool with non-Agency people into downtown Washington from the housing development in the Southeast District where he, Barbara, Catherine, and John lived. The carpool driver would drop him off at Fourth and Independence in front of the Labor Department building, just as he had when he worked for the National Labor Relations Board. But as soon as the car was out of sight, Colby would hop a bus to the Reflecting Pool and the collection of huts that served as CIA headquarters. Soon, he was advised by his superiors at the Agency to inform those who inquired that he had left the NLRB to take a new job in government having to do with defense and foreign policy. None of his acquaintances believed him. Washington was a small town, and it was assumed that his vague responses meant that he was now an intelligence operative fighting the good fight. His friends not only did not press Colby, they sought at social gatherings to protect him from more aggressive questioners. They were proud to be the friend of a secret agent.
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Barbara, Colby recalled, acted the good soldier, too. Bill was as vague with his wife as he was with his non-Agency friends about what he did. She knew that he was in intelligence and defense and that he was a cold warrior, but little more. She must have extrapolated from his OSS past that there would be some danger involved, but the war against communist totalitarianism appealed to her as much as it did to him. She, too, was a liberal Catholic with a strong social conscience. A future “Dame of the Order of Malta”—that is, a member of a lay religious order of the Catholic Church dedicated to humanitarian work—Barbara would become far more involved with the social and fraternal side of Catholicism than her husband. Catholicism and anticommunism were part of her makeup. She insisted on only one thing—that her husband have a life outside of his work.

Bill recalled that life in the CIA was different from his experience in the OSS. As a Jedburgh and NORSO, he had associated exclusively with fellow operatives; they were a close-knit band of men who laughed and drank together, lived and died together, an exclusive fraternity that existed within its own world. But as a CIA agent with a wife and children, Colby was forced to live a double life. He was both secret agent and school parent, the husband of an outgoing, socially active woman. He reveled in the double existence, drawing strength and balance from his non-Agency acquaintances. Some, Colby recalled, did not make the transition successfully. They
associated only with fellow officers and their families so their defenses would not always have to be up. They dined together, worshipped together, and married and divorced each other. They became insular, sometimes withdrawn even from others in the Agency beyond their immediate circle, and eventually formed societies within a society, perceiving themselves as elites within an elite. It was such operatives, Colby recalled, who would give rise to the term “cult of intelligence.” For them, the art of intelligence was “above the normal processes of society, with its own rationale and justification, beyond the restraints of the Constitution,” he wrote.
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The three divisions of the CIA were tightly compartmentalized and, dating from the time of the OSS, those who served in them were often jealous—at times even suspicious—of one another. Colby recalled that in the days immediately following the war, when the OSS was broken up—with the research and analysis scholars sent to the State Department, and the clandestine operatives (spies) to the War Department—the split had worsened, with the two groups “often hostile or contemptuous of each other.” But neither had any use for the paramilitary types, the “knuckle-draggers” like Colby, who had been sent home. When the latter group was resurrected under Frank Wisner as the OPC, that antagonism became even sharper, especially for the espionage and counterespionage people who had to rub elbows with the covert operatives in the field. As Colby put it, “the spymasters and counterspies feared that the high-risk, flamboyant operations of the ‘cowboys' jeopardized the security and cover of their carefully constructed clandestine networks.”
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