Safety pins never looked so good.
This is the final post of three on CIA head William Egan Colby and his dealings with the KGB. The first post, which deals with Colby’s KGB-connected media ‘leak’ team, is here. The second post, about why Colby leaked the ‘Jewels’ and My Lai, is here.
New readers should also know that Colby became involved in the SE Asian heroin trade during the 1960s, and continued to be involved (as general counsel to the drug-affiliated Nugan Hand Bank) until 1980, when a founder of Nugan Hand, Francis ‘Frank’ Nugan, was found dead next to Colby’s “calling card”. It’s not certain that Colby ever left the drug trade, but he did leave the CIA in 1976.
Today I’m not going to talk about creepy media types or bureaucratic CIA politics. I’m not going to say anything more about Colby’s KGB dealings. Today I’m going to offer a partial explanation for why Colby made the unfortunate choices that he did: why Colby thought he could get away with cooperating with the KGB; why he thought it was okay to hide from his crimes at the expense of the CIA or the Army; why he continued the drug-dealing… Colby thought he could get away with these things because the high-level Washington operators he hung out with were just as morally bankrupt and hypocritical as he was. ‘Depraved’ was Colby’s ‘normal'; his betrayals are exceptional, but not unusual amongst the type of people Colby ran with. What are the people Colby ran with like?
Sally Shelton-Colby will serve as a.nolen’s ‘Ambassador to William Colby’s High-Level Washington D.C. Cronies and Surrounding Personalities’.
Carl Colby has called his stepmother a “coda” in his father’s life and Carl is right. Sally Shelton-Colby is a coda in William Colby’s life, but she’s an important coda. Sally was Bill’s choice of companion once he didn’t have to wear the mask of morality anymore: when his public career was done, when he didn’t need the image of a loving family, when the only thing left to him were lonely canoe trips and business meetings with criminals. You can tell a lot about people by who they choose to hang out with.
What type of person is our Ambassadress? Sally is a trusted servant of the American Empire, which means she’s a globally-minded capitalist who has *a lot* of socialist friends; friends who she uses in whatever way will increase her power and prestige. Nothing is more important to Sally Shelton-Colby than Sally Shelton-Colby.
Bill Colby decided to risk working with his KGB media crew because he knew that many powerful people in Washington did such things and got away with it, people like Sally Shelton, who were willing to cooperate with (or marry!) Soviet-affiliated power-brokers as long as there was something in it for them. There was no social opprobrium against such behavior amongst his set; the only problems came if the little people found out.
As I describe Sally’s connections, it’s worth bearing in mind that socialism has always been supported by America’s business elite because socialism promises vast, government-controlled riches. From Wall Street’s perspective, socialism in Washington D.C. makes the US one big, juicy Aunt Millie. If you think Wall Street is wrong, consider what has happened to the first socialist country, Mexico.
Mexico brings us neatly back to Sally. It’s hard to find out much about her, but if you persist, you’ll be hit with this one piece of information again and again: “Sally Shelton-Colby used to be married to a Mexican Ambassador!” She tells this to everyone, every chance she gets. (I’m not kidding, google her and see for yourself!)
Although Sally tells everybody about her first hubby, she’s very, very careful to never give his name. (Don’t worry, I’ll fix that later! :) ) In 2011, she calls him “a Mexican ambassador“; in 2006, he’s just “a Mexican“; but her biggest bean-spill of all was in her 1991 interview with Charles Stuart Kennedy, where she relates the sordid story of their short relationship.
By the way, this is how Shelton-Colby starts that interview with Kennedy:
“I was born in San Antonio, Texas. My Mexican friends say I’m really Mexican, because I was born in tierra robada, stolen territory.”
So says the second wife of the man at the heart of US national security, 1973-76! That’s our problem in a nutshell, America.
But back to our main narrative– tell us more about the Mexican friend you married, Sally:
SHELTON-COLBY: During the period that I lived in Mexico, I had a very interesting experience, which really has, I would have to say, shaped the rest of my life and perhaps contributed in large part to my being named ambassador at a fairly young age. I married a Mexican politician,whom I had met at SAIS. My husband was very much involved in politics. He had worked for President Lopez Mateos.
KENNEDY: He was part of the PRI.
SHELTON-COLBY: Yes. His entire family was in politics. His father was a general in the Mexican Army. The marriage was unsuccessful, but from a professional point of view it was absolutely fascinating, because I had an experience which most foreigners don’t ever get to have, and that is, I had a bird’s eye view into the inner workings of the Mexican political system. Coming in and out of my parents-in-law’s house were many of the politicians who are in office today, as very young people at the time. We constantly had Mexican military officers in and out of the house, because of my father-in-law. And my husband’s family was a supernationalistic, anti-American family. Now this was very hard for me as a young woman who went there without speaking Spanish, although I had French and Italian, and I began to pick Spanish up very quickly. But it was very difficult.
It was really, really, really rough and perhaps contributed to the breakdown of the very brief marriage. But I learned Spanish quickly. I learned to understand the way Mexicans think about themselves and about the United States. Mexico has a very unique culture. Perhaps that could be said about most cultures, but Mexico is very special in many, many ways. And they have their hangups about the United States.
Background: PRI, the ‘Institutional Revolution Party‘, is a member of the Socialist International; PRI has been Mexico’s ruling party for 71 years since 1929. They’re a party Wall Street can work with though, because they don’t have any trouble making room for crony capitalists. US-Mexican relations suffered under President Lopez Mateos (1958-64), who was Castro-aligned.
So what did a “supernationalistic, anti-American”, socialist Mexican princeling see in little blond Sally from Texas? I mean, it wasn’t just the hair, because he brought her home to live with his parents… This is where the story gets interesting, readers.
You see, Sally met Mr. Mexico at SAIS, that’s Johns Hopkins’ Washington D.C.-based international affairs school. However, at the time of their first meeting, their love wasn’t strong enough to do anything about. In fact, after meeting Mr. Mexico, Sally got on with her life. Shelton-Colby says she earned an “MA in international relations. And then I was offered a Fulbright to the Institut de Science, Politique, in Paris, and went off to Paris to do a project on Vietnam; as matter of fact, French-Vietnam relations since Dien Bien Phu.”
But suddenly, in the middle of her French studies, Shelton-Colby “cut short” her Fulbright plans and left for Mexico because she *just had* to go cover for a professor there, even though she didn’t speak a lick of Spanish. In 1969 Sally left France to teach ‘Vietnam Right-Think’ to unappreciative students in Mexico City, where she *just happened* to reconnect with Mr. Mexico from SAIS and married him– a relationship that didn’t even last twelve months, but gave her inside intelligence on a *difficult* Mexican political family.
What brought these two lovebirds together? It couldn’t have been Sally’s American-ness; it couldn’t have been name-recognition; it couldn’t have been money. The one thing left that may have united our Texan and her princeling is socialism, even if only the cocktail variety. Frankly, at SAIS in the mid-Sixties, I wouldn’t be surprised if fashionable political views were what united them. Fashionable socialism was *probably* the hook, readers, but look to Shelton-Colby’s later career for the reason for her marriage.
After her fling with the princeling, Shelton-Colby says: “I left and came back to the United States, and was very fortunate to get a job, almost sight- unseen, with Senator Lloyd Bentsen.” Lloyd Bentsen is a Texas-based Clinton crony who helped push through the NAFTA trade agreement: a globalist’s dream-come-true, which has aggravated wealth disparities in the US and Mexico.
Sally quit teaching Mexicans about US Vietnam policy and returned to the US in 1971, the same year William Colby got outta Vietnam. I speculate, readers, that 1971 was the year Washington intelligentsia decided they’d gotten everything they could out of that ugly war.
I’ve canvassed some Mexican politics experts and it seems that Sally’s Mr. Mexico is probably Eduardo Jimenez Gonzalez, who was Mexico’s ambassador to Norway from 1975-77. From what I can find, he doesn’t seem like such a bad guy: he’s currently using his power and celebrity to protect his people from massive warrant-free government surveillance, thus working against his ex-wife’s masters’ desire for ‘total information awareness’. I wish more American princelings would have Mr. Gonzalez’s wisdom and bravery regarding personal privacy.
Ex-Mrs.-Gonzalez’s loyalty to Washington was repaid with the Ambassadorship of Barbados in 1979, a post Shelton-Colby held for two whole years under Carter. She was then made Vice President of Bankers Trust Co., where she was responsible for managing the bank’s political risk in developing countries during the third world debt crisis of the 1980s.
Shelton-Colby was so good at ‘managing third world debt’ that she pops up next at USAID, representing a collaborative effort with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC):
USAID & SEC TO ADVISE EMERGING SECURITIES MARKETS ACROSS GLOBE UNDER NEW AGREEMENT SIGNED TODAY (Sept 2nd, 1997)
The U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission have teamed-up to provide expert assistance to securities regulators in USAID countries through out the world. The program is USAID-funded and jointly administered under a five-year, $4 million inter-agency agreement signed today.Technical assistance will be provided by SEC employees, principally to a country’s regulatory agency and its stock exchanges. USAID missions’ requests for SEC assistance will be coordinated through USAID’s Global Bureau, Office of Emerging Markets. (Press Rel. 97-71)
“Who better than the SEC and USAID to team up to export u.s. expertise in this area and protect the interests of the U.S. investor?” commented USAID Associate Administrator, Sally Shelton-Colby.
“The agreement is part of a continuing effort to use ‘in-house’ resources to support USAID’s economic growth agenda and foreign assistance objectives,” explained Russell Anderson, Director of USAID’s Office of Emerging Markets. Robert D. Strahota, Assistant Director in the SEC’s Office of International Affairs said, “This program reflects the SEC’s commitment to strengthening global securities markets and making them safer for both American and foreign investors.”
The agreement is modeled after a similar program with USAID in the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe. Under this program, the SEC has provided U.S. and overseas training to several hundred senior capital markets officials from this region.
Regular readers know what contempt I have for USAID and their fortune-hunting around the globe; my contempt doesn’t just stem for clumsy psy-ops like ZunZuneo, but from the crime they perpetrated against Russia and the other countries of the former USSR in the 1990s, when they assisted the Harvard Institute for International Developments’ creation of the oligarch class by cheating millions of regular people out of their shares in previously nationalized companies, leaving most of Russia starving and freezing in the 1990s. The SEC should be ashamed to be involved with Shelton-Colby and her USAID team, especially since the press statement invokes USAID’s travesty in Russia. The press release doesn’t say which other emerging markets were to be ‘helped’ by the Shelton-Colby crew.
(USAID skeptics: James Jesus Angleton’s memo from Colby’s ‘Family Jewels’ leaks includes a document about how the CIA was training USAID workers, as well as James Schlesinger’s paper on how to use aid for political ends. Here’s the full documentation. Angleton included these documents because he thought they had “flap potential”.)
It appears as though Sally was working on the aforementioned SEC/USAID swindle when William Colby died in 1996 under mysterious circumstances– which isn’t unusual for a drug lord. But don’t think Mrs. Colby II is just about the dollars and cents!
Throughout her career, Shelton- Colby has supported benevolent organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the Atlantic Council of the U.S and the Center for International Environmental Law. She’s also left her mark on academia…
What does Shelton-Colby’s scholarly contribution look like? Take, for instance, her paper The Volcano Down Below (June 1986 edition of Armed Forces Journal), which she co-authored with Marshall Lee Miller. A Spanish-speaking scholar summarizes Shelton-Colby/Miller’s conclusions this way: “the threat to Mexico’s stability lies less in the prospect of a revolution of the kind that happened in Nicaragua and Iran, than the probability of a populist demagog rising to power within the system structure dominated by the PRI, as a result of years of deteriorating economic conditions.”
You’ll remember PRI as the Gonzalez Family party.
Shelton-Colby also participated in a sensitive ‘Track Two Diplomacy” mission to Cuba during the Reagan administration: the hope was that academics would succeed where real diplomats had failed. After leaving sensitive USAID documents in her suitcase for Cuban intelligence to pilfer, Shelton-Colby and a feminist colleague were treated to an infamous Tropicana Club floor show by their communist hosts, which flapped American sensibilities. As author Howard Wiarda describes it:
The showgirls bump and grind, kick up their legs like the Rockettes and wear bananas and pineapples on their heads as if they were in some 1930s Bing Crosby- Carmen Miranda movie (“Flying Down to Rio”). The show was so old-fashioned, so corny, so counterrevolutionary that I thought it was hysterical in a campy sort of way. But our colleague, the radical feminist Helen Safa, was so offended by the performance that she could not restrain herself, and raised her voice to express her objections. In this case, the Cuban hosts behaved far better than the visiting American.
It seems every aspect of this ‘track two’ mission was planned with great competence. I find it incredible that Shelton-Colby would bring sensitive information with her to Cuba: could someone with her employment history really be so naive? She certainly wasn’t naive about intelligence matters when she made her career in the Gonzalez household. I believe, readers, that like her second husband, Shelton-Colby was willing to make deals with the enemy if she thought she could get something out of it.
I think I’ve given readers a taste of what kind of person Sally Shelton-Colby is, and by extension, what type of person William Egan Colby was. I do not believe careers like Shelton-Colby’s are uncommon in Washington, in fact, if you’re ‘in the loop’, I believe such careers are the norm. Therefore, I’m not surprised Colby felt reasonably secure working with the KGB against his agency enemies or continuing his Golden Triangle drug trade. I mean, he did get away with it, didn’t he?
Carl Colby interviewed Sally Shelton-Colby for The Man Nobody Knew, but he edited out all her footage: “She wasn’t forthcoming about any insights into his character,” Carl said. “The narrative ended. She’s just a coda.”
Shelton-Colby’s career shows her to be an unprincipled, disingenuous, ugly person, but she is the person who William Colby chose to spend the rest of his life with. Shelton-Colby is an important coda to the Bill Colby story, and nobody’s going to understand Colby without accepting that a woman like Sally Shelton appealed to him.
Perhaps one of the hardest parts of gaining wisdom is accepting that, sometimes, people who we really want to be noble and good just aren’t.
