William Colby with this first wife, Barbara, and their children.
About a week ago, I wrote a post titled Managed Opposition which described how CIA director William Colby used Alfred McCoy and his book, The Politics of Heroin, to deflect attention away from Colby’s own heroin dealing. Colby worked with Seymour Hersh and a guy called David Obst to promote McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin in the media.
Since then, I’ve read Obst’s autobiography; watched Carl Colby’s documentary on his dad The Man Nobody Knew; re-read the 2007 declassified version of the CIA’s ‘Family Jewels‘; and done a little digging on Ambassador Sally Shelton-Colby.
I was ready to write a post with a screaming headline, such as: “If You Didn’t Believe Colby was KGB after Angleton , Wait ‘Till You Hear This…“
I was primed to write such a post, because I’ve hit on a few more things which *suggest* Colby was helping the Russians. These things are 1) David Obst’s KGB connection; 2) Colby’s gratuitous leaking during his CIA career; 3) Sally Shelton-Colby’s funny pink friends; and 4) the fact that Colby’s heroin business didn’t stop with the fall of Saigon or the end of his CIA career. (Who kept supplying Colby’s network, eh?)
I didn’t write a post screaming ‘KGB’, because I realized that there’s a little more going on here than ‘Colby is a Double Agent’. To call Colby a ‘double agent’ would imply that he had loyalty to the Russians. Colby had loyalty to no one: he regularly gave information which damaged the CIA to his KGB-assisted media team so that Colby could protect himself or take down his enemies inside the CIA. Colby was an unprincipled man who did anything for power, irrespective of the consequences to his family, the CIA or the USA.
So, as I explain David Obst’s KGB ties and how Obst and Seymour Hersh were (consciously) ran as Colby’s media-spinning operation, I ask readers to recognize that Colby *probably was* a Russian agent, but also that he would have worked with Mossad, the Cubans, the Chinese… anybody who was useful to him at the time. Colby was a much, much worse type of traitor than merely a ‘double agent’.
David Obst: William Colby’s Weakest Link
David Obst first came to my attention through Alfred McCoy. In McCoy’s preface to the 1991 edition of The Politics of Heroin, he says Obst offered to find him a publisher when ‘the CIA’ started to complain about McCoy’s work. When McCoy ended up not needing another publisher, Obst leaked McCoy’s story to Seymour Hersh, who wrote a very cautious article about how ‘The CIA doesn’t want you to read this book!’. You can imagine what that did for sales.
The point is, David Obst was the midwife who birthed the CIA heroin scandal into the public consciousness. In fact, David Obst spent most of the seventies birthing CIA scandals into the public consciousness. Seymour Hersh says it best:
“Whether it be My Lai, Watergate, The Pentagon Papers, or any of the other tumultuous events of that era, Obst seems to be in the middle of it.”
Obst was the ‘manager’ who helped these scandal-stories get placed in the right newspapers and on the right television shows. In addition to being an agent for Seymour Hersh (My Lai reporter); Daniel Ellsberg (The Pentagon Papers leaker); Brit Hume (targeted journalist in the CIA ‘Family Jewels’) and Carl Berstein/Bob Woodward (Watergate Scandal reporters); Obst *makes a strong suggestion* that he was roomies with John Marks, the guy who made the CIA’s MKUltra/ LSD program famous with books like The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. Obst really does have a connection with every CIA disclosure during the tumultuous seventies.
What Obst won’t tell you, is that the information for some of his big scoops came directly from the head of the CIA himself, Bill Colby. Carl Colby, in an interview with Q&A’s Brian Lamb , says this:
LAMB: Quick clip [From Carl's documentary on his father William Colby]. Only 30 seconds with Seymour Hersh, ask you why you talked to him . VIDEO BEGINS [Hersh] I did learn from people inside the agency that there had been these documents called the family jewels and I had your father’s one number and I called him. He did see me and he didn’t lie to me. What he did was, if I said there was at least 120 cases of wire breaking, or wire tapping of American citizens in our country to the law, in America, he said my number is only 63; it was a question of numbers. He did not back away from the question of wrongdoing and so that’s one hell of a story. VIDEO ENDS
LAMB: The fellow that broke the My Lai story.
COLBY: Seymour Hersh says a little bit more than what you might even imagine by what he just said. If you trace back to what he said, he said he was pivotal to the publishing of that story. So my father was the source in some ways for that story.
LAMB: The leaker.
COLBY: The leaker at the top. Now, you might say, my God, why would he do that? I think my father was doing what he said he was going to do. Is that he was going to keep the good secrets and let out the bad secrets.
The Colby Clan are a study in self-righteousness and denial; I’m sure Carl will insist papa’s work for Nugan Hand was motivated by the greater good too. What’s important about that quote is that it shows how much discretion Bill Colby had in what he chose to release through the ‘Family Jewels’. Many intelligence-types felt Colby gave out unnecessary information– General Walters, is one example. From Carl’s documentary:
When the Church Committee got rolling, he [Colby] began to reveal things about the history of the agency that did not have to be revealed at that time. And at one of the morning sessions, General Walters, who was his deputy, said to him, “Well Bill, I’m a Catholic too. And I believe that it is enough to go to the confessional, and to tell one’s sins in the confessional. One doesn’t have to do that before Congressional committees.” [Colby wore his Catholic faith on his sleeve. -- a.nolen]
I will come back to what and how much Colby leaked later, but for now I’d like to point out that Obst was the man who placed what Colby leaked through Hersh.
So Obst was a lucky man, wasn’t he? How does somebody get a sweet deal like Obst’s connection with William Colby?
David Obst’s book about himself, which he had Derek Shearer look over before publishing in 1998.
Obst’s career was nurtured by the Shearer family, who Obst describes as “not only a different class from everyone I’d ever known (they didn’t have milk cartons or ketchup bottles on the table at dinner), but they had a different mind-set as well”. Obst, the future-Revolutionary, was an unabashed social-climber in his teens! During his youthful trips to the Shearers’ Xanadu Obst absorbed their world-view.
The patriarch of the Shearer family, Lloyd, was a Hollywood gossip monger and influence peddler who, according to Obst, entertained “astronauts, movie stars, artists, and politicians. All tried to ingratiate themselves so they could get mentioned in the paper”. Lloyd’s son Derek became Obst’s friend, eventually introducing Obst to close pal Bill Clinton.
Lloyd Shearer’s gossip column, which he wrote under the name Walter Scott. Classy.
What help, exactly, did the Shearers provide David Obst? This is what Obst tells us:
1) Lloyd Shearer lead Obst to study in China, where he recorded testimonies from Christian missionaries who were in China during WWII. (Missionaries have always been a valuable third-party source of intel for Western powers, though Obst claims he was working for academic purposes only.)
2) Lloyd Shearer got Obst and his son Derek press passes so that Obst could cover the Yippie riots/ 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and jump-start his news career.
3) Derek Shearer provided Obst with a place to stay while Obst began his working relationship with Seymour Hersh in Washington D.C.
Whenever David Obst needed something, a Shearer was there to give it to him. Despite this, Obst never gives Derek’s last name in his autobiography, and never names Lloyd at all. Neither Shearer is listed in the autobiography’s index, even though they have their own chapter in Obst’s book! (I had to work Derek’s last name out from who his sister married.) Is Obst ashamed of his Shearer connection? If not, why obscure the men to whom he owes his career?
David Obst has one very good reason to be nervous about his connection to Derek Shearer. Derek Shearer brought a scandal to the Clinton Administration when it came out that Derek, Clinton’s Ambassador to Finland, has deep ties to the infamous Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).
Derek Shearer today.
IPS is not just a think tank which promotes socialist/Marxist viewpoints; it is an organization that actively cultivates KGB contacts and is used by the KGB to recruit spies. IPS hosted ex-CIA agent and Soviet tool Philip Agee’s publication Counterspy, which outed Athens’ CIA station chief Richard L. Welch who was subsequently murdered. This information on IPS’s KGB connections is provided by Dutch journalist Emerson Vermaat here, where he also lists his sources. Vermaat’s homepage is here.
David Obst’s silence about Derek Shearer adds weight to Vermaat’s claims; Obst’s silence about Lloyd Shearer suggests the KGB connection goes even further back. (Obst does mention in his autobiography that ‘some guy in his commune’ wanted to donate Obst’s money from the Ellsberg/’Pentagon Papers’ leaks to IPS, p.186.)
What did Derek do for IPS? It’s hard to say, because after the blow-up around his Ambassadorship, he tried to distance himself from the institute. (He doesn’t mention IPS in his Occidental College bio.) However, here’s one description of his work for IPS which I found on ProgressiveCities.org:
The Conference on Alternative State and Local Policies emerged in the 1970s when a few, then dozens and hundreds of activists who had come from the student, anti-war, civl rights and neighborhood movements began to seek office in state and local governments in the 1970s. The actual beginning came when Lee Webb, who had been national secretary of the Students for a Democratic Society, began working on legislation in Vermont and found others with similar interests in other parts of the nation. Webb found grant moneys, connected with Derek Shearer and others, worked within the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and by 1975 Webb and Shearer committed to traveling the nation to collect examples of legislation, policy papers and ideas, which they eventually published in “Readers,” for national conferences, while IPS volunteer staffer Barbara Bick produced a quarterly newsletter.
Gramscian enough for you? ;) The Conference in question featured luminaries like Barney Frank. IPS was founded by Wall Street banker and FDR crony John Jay McCloy using money from Sears heir Philip Stern, banker James Warburg and the Samuel Rubin Foundation. Where’s Wondergood!?
Recap: William Colby’s crack-team of CIA leakers, Seymour Hersh and Daniel Obst, had one foot in the CIA and one foot in the KGB, thanks to Obst’s patron the Shearers. Derek Shearer was a prominent employee of a KGB feeder-pool and by 1998, Obst knew he had to distance himself from Derek. Obst’s silence about Lloyd Shearer suggests Lloyd had unsavory connections as well. Could Colby, the head of the CIA, be unaware of whose company he was keeping? I don’t think so, I think Colby just didn’t care.
David Obst is a loud, self-important ass. Luckily for me, and for anyone interested on how Colby worked with the KGB, Obst is also fond of name-dropping: Derek’s sister– Brooke– married Strobe Talbott, who has a Wikipedia entry containing his wife’s maiden name. (Though I’m sure that wasn’t the case back when Obst published is autobiography in 1998!) Ever feel old, David?
Tune in next week when I ask “What are the CIA’s Family Jewels, and why is Lloyd Shearer one of them?” Also, “Was Colby the ultimate source of Hersh’s My Lai leak?”
In response to a reader request, I’ve drawn a flow chart of the relations between William Colby, Seymour Hersh, David Obst and the Shearer Duo.
