This is the second in a series of (what will be) three posts on William E. Colby’s cooperation with the KGB. This post will assume knowledge of a few things:
1) Colby’s role in discrediting James Jesus Angleton, and removing him from the CIA through a number of means, one of which was leaking damaging information about Angleton to Seymour Hersh. Colby had almost all of Angleton’s counterintelligence files burned. If you are unfamiliar with this, please read my post Dirty Jobs.
2) Colby’s use of Alfred McCoy’s book The Politics of Heroin to deflect criticism from Colby’s involvement in the SE Asian heroin trade onto ‘the CIA in general’, and how Colby used Seymour Hersh and David Obst to promote McCoy’s book in the press. If you are unfamiliar with this, please read my post Managed Opposition.
3) David Obst’s connection with the KGB through Lloyd Shearer and his son, Derek. David Obst was the agent for most journalists who leaked CIA secrets in the 1970s, including Seymour Hersh, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Brit Hume and Rand employee Daniel Ellsberg. If you need more info: Did William Colby Help the KGB?
If you’ve read all that and are still with me, thank you.:) I will now look at what Colby leaked during his tenure as the CIA’s Executive Director and Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). (I’ll look at the information flow represented by the purple arrow on the diagram below.)
That purple arrow represents the second of four points which, I believe, point to Colby’s cooperation with the KGB: 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.
Here is a list, in chronological order, of the leaks I believe Colby made to Seymour Hersh and his manager David Obst.
1) Colby *PROBABLY* leaked details around the ‘My Lai Massacre’ in 1969.
2) Colby *PROBABLY* orchestrated the leaking of the CIA’s involvement with heroin smuggling in 1971, which ultimately resulted in Hersh’s scoop for the New York Times and McCoy’s landmark study The Politics of Heroin. (See my post Managed Opposition.)
3) Colby *DEFINITELY* confirmed (at least) Angleton’s HT LINGUAL and CHAOS programs on December 20, 1974. (Angleton thought Colby was the original leak too, see Tom Mangold’s Cold Warrior.) Colby *DEFINITELY* leaked information on “dozens” of other CIA ‘Family Jewels’ in 1974: Bill Colby was “the leaker at the top”, in the words of his son Carl. For an idea of what else Colby gave Hersh, read Hersh’s Dec. 22nd 1974 NYT story.
I believe, readers, that Colby was responsible for three major leaks from the CIA during the years 1969-74, all of which where leaked through the Hersh/Obst pairing. I will explain the first and last of these leaks in today’s post.
Why would Colby leak My Lai?
The 1969 My Lai scoop is what made Seymour Hersh’s name as a journalist, and according to David Obst, Hersh’s My Lai story was the first time the pair worked together. Colby’s crack media team was formed for the My Lai scoop.
How did Hersh hear about My Lai? From what I can find, Hersh is supposed to have got a ‘tip‘ in 1969 to interview U.S. Army Lieut. William L.Calley, which lead to the discovery of the ‘My Lai Massacre’. Who could have given this tip?** Consider that in 1969 Colby was the CIA’s top man in the Far East and he was just about to leave for an important D.C. post. He knew he’d have to white-wash his heroin dealings, but there was his ugly Phoenix Program too, where the CIA assisted in torture and assassinations which ended up killing something like 30,000 suspected Viet Cong. As head of Far Eastern intel, Colby would have known about My Lai, which was already being investigated and prosecuted by the US Army when Seymour Hersh leaked it. (See David Obst’s autobiography Too Good To Be Forgotten, p.164.) Perhaps Colby thought it would be better if nasty, violent stuff was *publicly* pinned on the Army first, rather than on his own CIA ops? Today, I’d say more Americans know about My Lai than the Phoenix program, even though Phoenix killed sixty times as many people.
The My Lai incident caused widespread revulsion in the USA; imagine what it would have done to William Colby’s Washington career if it got out that something sixty times worse was directly attributable to him. Colby would have gained a lot by leaking My Lai information to Hersh/Obst at the time that it was leaked, and looking backward, Colby’s modus operandi throughout his career was to leak through Hersh/Obst. If the shoe fits.
Not only did Colby have reason to hide the Phoenix Program, but he was acutely aware of his reasons. I can say that with certainty, because of the last, and most unusual, of William Colby’s ‘CIA Family Jewels’ leaks five years after the Mai Lai scoop in ’69. The last of Colby’s ‘jewels’ leakage is a series of letters between Colby and Derek’s dad, Lloyd Shearer, the gossip columnist.
Why are these letters part of the ‘Family Jewels’? In 1972, Shearer wrote in his Personality Parade column that the CIA used assassinations as a political tool as part of the Phoenix Program, which upset Colby terribly. Colby wrote Lloyd a letter in an attempt to white-wash Phoenix and pressure Lloyd into writing a retraction. An *astounding* correspondence ensued… which Colby entered into his famous ‘Family Jewels’ leaks!
Colby’s 1969 My Lai leak has a direct connection with his 1974 ‘jewel’ leaks via his letters to Lloyd Shearer. Colby had to protect Phoenix in 1969, then again in 1972. I’ll look at the ‘jewel’ leaks next.
Why is Lloyd Shearer a Family Jewel…
The ‘CIA Family Jewels’ are a series of reports that DCI James Schlesinger asked the other CIA directors to prepare for him in 1973. The Jewels stank of rear-guard from day one: Schlesinger held his post for about six months, and during that short time one of his priorities was to make sure nothing with “flap potential” could be pinned to him. If Schlesinger was concerned about the agency, he would have discretely asked each director for sensitive information during face-to-face meetings. Instead, he armed a paper bomb…
… which fell into the lap of his replacement, the KGB-connected William Egan Colby. What we know as the ‘Jewels’ are a selection of heavily redacted reports that Colby chose to leak from Schlesinger’s original collection, with some ‘updates’ that Colby requested. Colby’s ‘Family Jewels’ are a dishonest collection of documents designed to smear Colby’s CIA enemies, cover his own scandals and provide some useful information to Colby’s KGB partners. A redacted set of the ‘Jewels’ wasn’t declassified until 2007.
First the small fry: there is very little information on the juicy topics that the press continually harps on, such as spying on Black radicals or political conventions, John Lennon’s political donations, mind-control, etc. There’s only enough detail on who was targeted to make newsworthy soundbites, which I think was Colby’s intention. The majority of information that is given about these juicy topics centers around in-house aspects, like who got copies of the questionable program’s findings, or whose department was involved in the program.
What is notable about these juicy tidbits, is that they almost invariably show the CIA targeting liberals. As readers are aware, starting at the end of WWII the CIA battled with the KGB for the hearts of the political left, (read Francis Stonor Saunder’s The CIA and the Cultural Cold War.) Colby’s selected leaks played into the lie that the CIA is a conservative institution which tries to undermine the Left. Colby’s ‘jewel’ selection was a boon to his KGB buddies, because these ‘jewels’ sowed distrust between the agency and the Left, which in turned strengthened the Soviet/Communist appeal to liberals.
The CIA is not a conservative organization– far, far from it. As Carl Colby says in his interview with Q&A’s Brian Lamb:
LAMB: By the way, what was – from what you can remember, what were his [William Colby's] politics?
COLBY: You know it’s funny you say what were his politics. I would say he was an FDR liberal. He was JFK kind of incarnate. He was extremely active, obviously in World War II. He drank the milk of FDR. He believed in – he was a Democratic activist I would say, labor lawyer, truly. Conducting sort of activist rallies, and supporting down-trodden workers – seriously – and I think going into the CIA I think a lot of people were from Yale and especially all the Ivy Leaguers; they were pretty liberal. And they were liberal like JFK was liberal.
If you don’t believe Carl Colby about the CIA’s overarching political leanings, consider that the agency was set up by FDR and his cronies, or this rarely-quoted extract from the ‘jewels’ themselves:
Page 327/703 from the 2007 Family Jewels declassification, in a memo about Angleton’s CHAOS program, from Inspector General William V. Broe to William Colby. Operation CHAOS spied on student anti-war activists.
What about the documents which provide more than sound-bites? Colby’s in-depth ‘jewels’ focused on his CIA and political enemies. Many of these more in-depth documents were damaging to James Angleton; former DCI John McCone and the White House. Colby hated Angleton because Angleton investigated Colby’s KGB ties in Vietnam; I know that Colby was afraid of Richard Nixon; I do not know about Colby’s relationship to McCone. I suspect that Colby had a bone to pick with whoever was running the agency’s ‘aliases’ (fake ID’s) department and the program which equipped/trained domestic police too. It’s clear from some of the reports that various directors were clued into what Colby wanted them to say, and of course, *nobody* was worried that any drug trafficking connections might come out…
Interestingly, some of the ‘jewel’ reports are accompanied by special notes from Colby himself. For instance, this one about CIA cooperation with the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), code-named PROJECT TWO-FOLD:
Check out paragraphs two and three.
What does Colby deign to tell us?
“Let’s stop looking for corruption, but keep staffing our guys in foreign narc ops.” – William Egan Colby
So says the SE Asian drug kingpin!
I think I’ve given you a taste of what 97% of the 703 pages that make up the ‘CIA Family Jewels’ are about. The remaining few pages, those dealing with the weird correspondence between Colby and Hollywood gossip-monger Lloyd Shearer are what I’ll end with now.
The Colby/Lloyd Shearer letters are the only instance of extended non-government correspondence in the ‘jewels’ and they even contain hand-written notes from Colby, as he frantically planned his first letter to Shearer in a desperate attempt to white-wash the Phoenix Project. Note that Colby had *probably* first tried to hide Phoenix behind My Lai three years earlier, when he began working with Lloyd Shearer’s protégé Obst. So it’s likely Lloyd Shearer knew about Colby’s arrangement with Obst when he first published the Pheonix Program comment in his column.
I’ve arranged these Colby/Shearer letters in chronological order on their own page, so that you can read the originals as they appear in the 2007 release of the ‘Jewels’. I’m including the text of the letters below.
This is the news item that freaked Colby out:
From Lloyd Shearer’s Personality Parade column.
This clip prompted Colby to write Shearer a letter, which Colby asked Angus Thuermers, George Carver, General White, CIA General Counsel and a department called DD/P to review before sending to Lloyd Shearer.
Lloyd Shearer’s reply…
Colby fires back…
To which Shearer gives this *shocking* reply…
The ‘Angus’ Shearer mentions is likely Angus Thuermer, who reviewed Colby’s first letter.
After that, Colby sends out this internal CIA note:
Isn’t it incredible that a gossip columnist could treat the executive director of the CIA with such disrespect? I suggest the reason for Lloyd’s attitude was that he knew perfectly well what the relationship was between his protégé Obst and Colby, and therefore felt he had power over Colby. By Colby’s reaction to Lloyd, I’d say Lloyd’s feelings were well-founded.
It was very aggressive for Lloyd Shearer to bring up the names of Victor Marchetti (co-author with David Obst’s *probable* roomie John Marks of the book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence) and Jack Anderson (who first reported the Castro assassination attempts). Both Anderson and Marchetti were being secretly watched by the CIA at the time Shearer was writing because of their connection to leaked CIA information. Shearer is effectively saying to Colby: “Be careful, my contacts are better than you think and I’m onto you.”
What Colby inadvertently admitted by leaking his own correspondence is that after writing to Lloyd, Colby realized Lloyd Shearer could be dangerous to him, probably because of the Obst-Derek Shearer-KGB connection. The letters show Colby realized it was unwise to push Old Man Shearer further. I don’t think Colby intended to reveal this, I believe Colby thought that no one would give Lloyd’s letters context by talking like David Obst has, so Colby’s KGB media connection would remain secret. I think that when Colby included this *very odd* Jewel in the bunch, he thought he was giving himself the chance to white-wash the Phoenix Program more fully– to say all the little niceties his lawyers advised him not to say the first time. (That’s why he included his hand-written notes.)
When we practice to deceive… we reveal our KGB!
Tune in next week, when I talk about the witch Colby left his real family for!
P.S. To be absolutely clear, the Colby-Shearer correspondence I’ve documented above is a correspondence between the two men highlighted in purple on my flow chart:
** A kind reader just informed me that Seymour Hersh has stated that the My Lai ‘tip’ came from Geoffrey Cowan, the son of former CBS television network president Louis G. Cowan. This doesn’t change my opinion that Colby was the ultimate source of the My Lai leak, because there’s nothing in Cowan’s background which makes it natural for him to have knowledge about an on-going Army investigation… unless, of course, somebody called his dad asking for the best way to present certain information to the American public! Cowan’s involvement does provide an interesting insight into the mechanics of how, I believe, Colby covered himself on the Project Phoenix issue. Thank you!
