I enjoyed the movie “The Man Nobody Knew,” about career intelligence officer William Colby. Colby was a CIA director appointed by Richard Nixon in 1971 after he served in Vietnam, with his term extending in the presidency of Gerald Ford. The movie was directed by Colby's son, Carl, and much material was gleaned from family photographs and interviews with his mother. The film describes Colby's career progressing not only within the OSS and CIA, but also the parallel developments within his family, and the role of his mother, with generous interview segments. We see footage of Colby in early in his CIA career in Italy, his later work in Vietnam, and the congressional hearings after Watergate when Colby was called to defend his Phoenix program in Vietnam, which eventually began to be called by detractors, probably unfairly, as the assassination program. The movie is free on Amazon Prime--amongst to many pricier movies not nearly so important.
The film starts with a still photo of boy William Colby, probably about 1920 or, playing in front of a simple spring bed amongst his well-placed toy soldiers, cannon artillery, gun positions, on a landscape of rugs rolled and folder to uncannily simulate landscape. “My father was very good at war,” narrates his son Carl--and much is implicit in that terse, initial statement about his Dad. The room is modest, almost Spartan, and without adornment and the face of the young Colby's is blurred.
Other terse comments occur throughout the narration. “The family gave Dad a wide berth.” Colby’s wife Barbara plays a significant role in describing junctures in Colby’s career, and the son points out the sacrifice she had. At the same time, it is hard not to suspect, given what is unusual abilities evinced by interviews, Barbara Colby was as much a co-strategist as a housewife.
Colby, a spare, stern-looking man, somewhat birdlike in appearance, attended Princeton, and then Columbia law school, where he met Barbara. He volunteered for the Army paratroopers and dropped behind Nazi lines in occupied Norway as part of a small team of saboteurs tasked with destroying transportation links. A very fine set of credentials and bragging rights he had, by any measure.
An appetite for risk and heroism and patriotism was evident--and possibly a mixture that would bring eventual mayhem. After the war, he continued in the military with the fledgling CIA stationed in Rome to facilitate the rebuilding of Europe. This was the Italy of Fellini, and the charm of that time and place. Italy was highly accommodating to Socialism and Marxism, and leftist groups received massive amounts of money from the Soviet Union despite their claim to independence. A Catholic, he mingled with the mammoth Catholic presence in Rome to his advantage.
After Rome, he went to Saigon, in 1959. Vietnam had expelled
the French but was still Gaulic in influence and style, with President Diem,
almost more French than Vietnamese, installed by the Americans a decade
earlier. Clips of that eras show the unspoiled Saigon. Colby developed the Phoenix program, an attempt to undermine the North
Vietnam insurgency via winning hearts and minds as well as turning ex-Viet-Minh
into South Vietnamese soldiers. But as the film sequences suggest, the program morphed into a malignant
harassment program. Clips show several brutal interrogations, and the role of advisors was ever more overtly
conventional warfare.
Former National Security Director Robert McFarlane and
Zbigniew Brezhinsks provided interviews
for the movie, and the lineup of strategists is excellent. The worsening situation
in Vietnam seemed beyond Colby’s control. He had an idea that the program was
going awry but didn’t have the breadth of understanding or personal techniques
to draw the program in, as excesses grew in a country falling apart. The
program fed antiwar protests at home, with depictions of the March on
Washington, and Colby was depicted by many as a murderer and fascist.
Ironically, the revered North Vietnamese General Giap years later said the
Phoenix program was the most effective program the Americans had.
Matters deteriorated as the self-assured and pompous, Henry
Cabot Lodge, Jr arrived as Ambassador, with a patrician view of his role and
having little interest in understanding the Vietnamese people. He orchestrated
the coup against Diem which fueled years of mayhem, and ultimately a lost war.
The movie suggests that Diem was going to make major concessions to Kennedy to
keep his presidency. Among those concessions might have been getting rid of his
brother Ngu, the Vice President pressing a war of oppression against the
Bhuddists. But this did not have time to happen before the coup. Colby had a cordial relationship with Diem and
his brother Ngu, as did his wife, and they were shocked to learn while they
were elsewhere of the coup. The movie provides the soundtrack of the discussion
amongst JFK, RFK, McNamara, and Averill Harriman as they discussed the
viability of the coup right before it
occurred. The soundtracks are evocative of the voices of our political ghosts. Of
all, RFK was most opposed to a coup. Once a fait accompli, the war was downhill
militarily and politically.
Colby returned to the US in 1971 as Nixon’s nominee for CIA Director. Hearings were ferocious, and Colby testified over 30 times. He appears brilliant but lawyerly, highly patriotic and dutiful, cagey, and with an amazing ability to endure the stress of week after week of testimony before a hostile congress. But also, he seems somewhat limited in his ability to imagine or acknowledge the excesses of the Phoenix program. The film clips include the stars of yesterday’s liberal establishment—Mondale, Ron Dellums, and Bella Abzug. These are interspersed with clips of Bob Woodward and other journalists of the day. At those hearings, which probably weakened our intelligence efforts, Colby was pressed to deliver information about the CIA “family jewels,” the record of illegal acts that had occurred in previous decades.
All these events were, as an aside, occurring during my high school years, and that I was most generally oblivious to them, a testament to the gap between what I thought I knew at the time and my actual registration of world events then. The bureaucratic mind—that understands society as opposing institutions or communities—is ever fascinating. To conceive, almost in an engineering way, the forces that move nations, cultures, or political parties against each other seem characteristic of this human type. They build the columns of our civilization but also are the dynamite that blows them up.
In the end, Colby died of drowning while out early morning
in a boat. In his seventies, he had divorced his wife once he left public life,
suggesting that her role may have indeed been keenly tied to his career. There
are suggestions his death may have been suicide, which is not entirely out of
keeping with his character. Hopefully, the movie was cathartic to his son, who succeeds in depicting his father as, indeed, a man nobody knew.
Damon LaBarbera, Phd
07/26/2022
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