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William Colby has been missing since April 27th.

On the evening of that day, he went for a canoe ride

near his vacation home on Cobb Island.

His canoe was found washed up on the banks

of the Wicomico River April 28th.

In other news, the search continues today in Maryland

for former CIA Director William Colby.

He is missing and presumed drowned

after an apparent boating accident.

A boating accident in strong currents or foul play?

In addition to being a master spy,

William Colby was an accomplished sailor.

When the former Director of the CIA is missing

not much is ruled out.

My father would always have the same dark wooden dresser.

It had some socks in one drawer, and underwear in some drawer,

and his shirts.

But on the top drawer, you'd pull it out

and it was full of ribbons...

...bullets, passport...

...gun.

Hmm.

What does he do?

There have been allegations

that this was an assassination program.

I am against assassination.

I think it's counterproductive.

Uh, and I've issued directives against it.

But I confess in the dark, back reaches of my mind

I would have very cheerfully helped carry the bomb

into Hitler's bunker in, uh,

out in Poland in, uh, 1944.

My father, he was good at a lot of things,

but he was very good at making war.

December 7th was a beautiful Sunday.

I was up bright and early making breakfast.

I did happen to look out over Koko Head

where I was living, these planes were coming by.

And they were not planes that I recognized.

The radio was on: Mormon tabernacle choir,

and all of a sudden, a man's voice comes over.

"The islands are under attack."

When I got to Pearl the next day,

the birds in the streets,

they were all dead from the concussion.

Corpses all over the place.

When Pearl Harbor happened,

everything changed in Hawaii and the whole world.

I met your dad on a blind date.

He was in law school at Columbia.

He went into the field artillery originally,

but really wanted the parachute infantry.

So, he said that during a physical exam,

he mentioned that his eyesight wasn't all that good,

and the doctor said, "as long as you can see the ground

for jumping, uh, we'll take you."

And that's what he did.

Your dad joined us, Area B-1.

He was artillery, I was infantry.

Bill was out of those New England schools and...

I was a westerner.

One day, a major from O.S.S.

Asked us a simple question:

"Those of you who are interested in hazardous duty

behind enemy lines, remain here.

Those who are not interested are excused."

Well, most everybody left.

But I thought that that sounded interesting.

That's why I was in a parachute regiment,

I thought.

Somewhere in America, the United States

is developing hundreds of recruits

for this specialized service.

Hand picked for the aid

of Army and Navy intelligence facilities,

the men are taken under guard to the secret training camp,

which is to be their home for the weeks to follow.

This isolated, heavily wooded terrain

offers an excellent proving ground

for the student of guerilla tactics.

From the moment of their induction,

the identities of the recruits

remain a carefully guarded secret,

which explains the use of masks in this film.

From whence they came, or for what perilous mission

they're being prepared is the concern of nobody at camp.

But all of them have this in common:

They burn with a desire for vengeance

and they mean to deal it out as it was given...

at close quarters

with no holds barred.

We had hand-to-hand combat training...

...instinctive firing...

...a limited amount of knife fighting...

...demolitions.

We had many courses in surreptitious entry,

and we were all oriented on getting ourselves trained

for this mission, doing things

that would increase our survivability.

Those days were filled

with a sense of urgency.

Everybody wanted to go

and serve in that war.

The men and the women had conviction

that they were doing what was right

to preserve precious values of humanity

that were being violated,

and off they went.

We went together on a ship

from Fort Hamilton, New York,

to one of the ports of, uh, Glasgow.

We learned from T.E. Lawrence's books.

They would emphasize how important it is

to know the local people:

What their idiosyncrasies are,

likes and dislikes,

and above all, what are their taboos,

the things that you don't want to get involved in,

so that you wouldn't give away the fact

that you were an American

so deep in enemy territory.

O.S.S. Did send in people

to do underground work and sabotage.

Break up communications.

Bill Colby was one of the most, uh,

renowned one of these in his operations in Norway.

Your dad was wiry, small,

but he could ski.

He had taken charge

of the underground group,

mostly all of Norwegian background, Americans,

many of them, but great peril.

Norway was occupied,

and Germans were...

pressing from all sides.

And the mission, well the mission is,

was very exciting.

The mission was to blow up bridges and trains

to prevent the movement of German troops

through Norway.

We were apprised of what was going on.

We used v-mails.

They were quick letters, some censored, I suppose.

The mission was successful.

Bill was Silver Star.

The whole concept of Special Forces

came out of these operations.

That was the beginning

of the ideal way of building,

uh, a... a force inside

an occupied, uh, country.

My father was always the coolest character

I ever knew.

After the war, we used to go take picnics in France,

and he'd say, "This is where we jumped in,

and this is the ditch where I lay in for two days

while the Germans marched by."

I remember asking him, "Well, why didn't you

just shoot at the Germans?"

And he goes, "There were only like four or five of us,

six to eight hundred of them.

They'd kill us all."

He'd talk about the Charge of the Light Brigade,

six hundred people racing into this valley.

And I'd say it was a suicide mission.

He said yeah, but the glory of it all.

When he volunteered,

he was looking for action.

In my family, everybody gave my father

a wide berth.

He thought about coming to Washington,

and working for the government,

NLRB as it turned out,

"National Labor Relations Board."

To tell you the truth, Carl,

I don't know exactly when your father moved over

from NLRB to, uh, to the CIA,

but I can tell you this,

We lived in southeast Washington.

And your dad used to get a ride in to NLRB

with our neighbors George and Phyllis.

I can't remember their last name.

One weekend, Phyllis asked me,

"Barbara, we've always dropped Bill off at..."

Uh, whatever the address was,

"Last time we dropped him, we looked back,

and he was hotfooting it across a couple of blocks,

and, uh, going in another direction."

And that is truly how I really learned

that your dad was in another line of work.

The United States was the only power in the world.

Time Magazine came out with

"This is the American century."

Japan, which had been such a ferocious enemy,

all of a sudden a non-sulking,

dependable colony,

or whatever you want to call it in those days.

It was a different world.

The CIA was considered a pretty good thing.

When you came into a place as an American,

you were regarded with considerable respect.

You know, you're representing a big power,

and the biggest power anybody ever knew.

From Stettin in the Baltic

to Trieste in the Adriatic,

an "Iron Curtain" has descended across the continent.

And so an Iron Curtain fell across Europe,

an Iron Curtain dividing the free world

from the slave world.

In the 1950s, we had a contest going on:

Who will dominate western Europe?

World War Two ended with the United States

planted firmly in half of Europe,

with Europe divided at the Elbe,

but with what was west of the Elbe,

politically and socially very vulnerable.

Nineteen fifties was a time

of really serious political contest

over the future of that portion of Europe.

At the end of the war,

Italy was almost destroyed.

The industrial potential was down.

And political situation was very bad.

The Communist Party was huge and well organized.

The largest Communist Party in Europe.

The American government was concerned how things

they were going in Italy.

And, uh, your father was sent there

to be responsible maybe of the largest operation

that CIA has ever done before.

They have to verify

that the operation

to restore Europe

was going smoothly.

And of course the Communist Party

and of course U.S.S.R.

Was working to destroy this operation.

In Italy, we had a huge Communist Party.

And I myself watched closely

the Italian political developments,

because as a dedicated Communist

I believed that Italy will go one day Communist.

Okay, no Soviet invasion,

but the strength of the left movement

was so high that Italian Communists

will win the elections, form a coalition government,

and lead to Pro-Communist Italy.

Every election was a cliffhanger.

Whether the Communists would win the elections,

or failing that,

they would launch an uprising.

Well, I worked for your father.

He was the boss.

Communists pretty much controlled the north of Italy.

They had control of the trade unions,

control of the cooperatives.

The Communist newspapers that had been underground

were now out in the open.

And they were able to portray themselves

as not toadies of the Soviet Union,

in spite of the fact that we estimated at the time

that they were getting forty million dollars a year,

at a time when we were putting four, or five, or six million

into the Italian politics.

The threat was certainly there,

that Italy might go Communist.

We had State Department cover.

Your father was a political officer,

and we were on the diplomatic list.

In reality, um, he worked for CIA,

but that was never stated overtly.

There were also CIA personnel

who were undercover.

So your dad had to blend

the diplomatic side

with the political action that CIA

was tasked with.

Colby in Rome is keeping up the morale

of the Italian security people

who are keeping track of what is still

a very dangerous armed Communist Party,

giving them firm leadership and encouragement

and by coming from a serious,

professional background...

the background of espionage,

where the first thing you learn

is most people lie most of the time,

and things like that.

Colby was able to be well-informed

about Italian politics,

and inject a much more realistic view of Italy

than the one that was generated

by Ambassador Luce, and by,

most of the ambassadors, uh, were,

were simply not up to the job.

The United States policy

was to support

the Christian Democratic Party in any means possible.

And we certainly assisted financially,

but also guidance in organizing their rallies,

their propaganda.

Political advice... how do you do it,

how do you win an election?

And we had a very large covert action program

in Italy.

It was not by chance, that in the name of the party

they put Partito Democratico Cristiano.

Christian Party was very linked to the Church.

We lived next door to the daughter

of Premier de Gasperi.

You and the boys were friends.

We'd get together for dinner,

play charades in Italian.

We had a breeze, really,

with our State Department cover.

There were marvelous opportunities for learning.

I studied Italian at the Instituto per Stranieri

over by the Pantheon.

Imagine walking through these marvelous places in Rome

that every tourist wants to see.

And here we were living this life.

It was a wonderful experience for a family like ours,

who was already Roman Catholic.

We had one child born in Rome,

baptized at St. Peter's,

under the cupola.

Two others making their first communions.

The oldest child was serving mass,

Italian-style, his Latin was very good.

We were very fortunate.

This was a superb experience.

Oh, those happy days.

Italy was wonderful.

My mother was vivacious,

fun, always youthful.

She was the world to me.

They met on a blind date.

She supported him in law school,

working at Abraham and Strauss.

They were very optimistic.

They seemed to appreciate what they had.

He was very Catholic, and she was very Catholic.

In Rome, I thought he worked for the embassy.

I went to a Catholic school, it was up on the Via Cassia.

I was an altar boy.

And the Church was just everywhere in Rome,

very powerful.

So magnificent.

You're in this embrace.

All the world is well,

just follow the dictates of the Father.

Monks would come to the house...

Franciscans with their brown robes,

sandals and the big rope.

And I'd see him

talking to a priest,

with his head slightly bowed,

genuinely interested in what they say.

If you want to collect information,

you go in the church.

And your father distributed

a tremendous amount of money.

Most of the money, um, which was, um,

not the money of the intelligence,

was even distributed by the Vatican.

They are very well connected.

In each little village there are more than one church

to distribute this monies.

The cardinal American who was, uh,

behind this operation,

he was pretty deeply involved with your father,

and, um, with, uh, this,

um, uh, movement of money,

used it to contrast

the really overwhelming power

of the Communist Party.

I didn't know very much

at all about the operations,

the techniques.

Sometimes it was difficult to, um,

to ascertain just who we were

and where we were going

at a certain point, and so on.

One evening, we went to, um,

we went to the theater,

and, uh, I saw...

I recognized a couple

whom we had dined with the night before.

And I started to go over and say,

"Oh, buona sera, how are you,

wasn't that pleasant last evening?"

And my husband took me aside and said,

"Shh, quiet, quiet.

We don't... before you... we don't know these people."

We don't know these people?

Well, we did know these people.

There were times when really,

I didn't know what role we were playing.

Who are we tonight?

We'd go somewhere... family trip on the weekend,

picnic basket in the back,

and he'd meet somebody,

have a conversation,

deliver something.

He and my mother and the family left town,

drove up north,

and went and passed a radio to somebody.

So we'd have a picnic.

That wasn't a lie.

Sometime later, one of my dad's friends said,

"You know, your mother has a lot to do

with your father's success."

They were a great team.

The family wasn't always let in...

let in to this world of his.

Um, beginning, of course,

with this CIA code

of "need to know."

He never had to really tell me anything.

Um... I suppose that's...

that's the CIA modus operandi,

but even so, I remember hearing

one CIA wife of a rather high ranking officer say,

"Oh, my husband tells me everything."

Well, I was a little jealous, but I thought,

no, it couldn't be.

They don't tell us everything.

They tell us very little, if anything.

The provision of large sums of money

led to the success of the Christian Democratic Party,

somewhat to the surprise of many people in Italy

and certainly to the rest of the world.

Your father left Rome

before the really beautiful time starts,

which was the sixties.

We call it la dolce vita, the sweet life,

which was immortalized by Fellini.

The government was well settled,

the economy starts to improve rapidly.

We call it the Italian Miracle.

As much the economy grew,

as less the Communist Party become.

All the effort they have done to destroy Italian economy

was mitigated by your intervention,

I mean, American.

Being in a world of concealment and deception,

puts a person in a different space psychologically,

morally, and socially.

Being an intelligence officer,

you're in an adversarial contest;

in a way something like a war,

and if it's morally justifiable

to take people's lives in war, um,

it seems that it may be morally justifiable

to mislead them in conflict situations.

Deception in a certain limited range of cases

is really necessary for the protection of people

who work in the agency, the people

whom they're dealing with,

and the national security.

Deception, um, in this situation

is unavoidable.

But that one doesn't want to offer

a kind of blanket endorsement so that people,

you know, forget the point about the...

the necessity of telling the truth.

My dad used to say, "I already know

what I think.

My job is to listen.

It's not about me, it's about

who someone else is and what they may be

able to offer me."

My mother always tried to find things

to do that were fun and free and relaxed.

My father would participate, but there was always

this ever tightening tension that you're going

to be called to action, that there will be war,

violence always pervaded everything.

Happy was not what his life was about.

His life was about doing the right thing,

being at the pointy edge of the spear.

He was in pretty good shape.

Six o'clock in the morning,

Canadian Air Force exercises,

push-ups, jumping jacks, legs going up and down.

He'd call me sport when he kind of liked me.

When he was annoyed at you, you were friend.

"Listen, friend."

If you'd really done something badly, he'd get the belt out.

He didn't like lying.

He certainly believed in corporal punishment.

Among friends he could be relaxed.

Well, frankly he didn't have any friends.

He had people he worked with.

He didn't have a lot of romantic ideas

about spying.

He saw it for what it was, a dirty business.

In 1959, we arrived in Vietnam.

This was barely five years after

the fall of the French forces.

I remember that one of the first places

we visited was the French military cemetery.

Your dad found a friend buried there,

a friend from the mission in France in World War Two.

It's incredible.

Saigon was amazing in those years.

Saigon was still very French.

French was the language in which our embassy officers

and their Vietnamese counterparts spoke

at meetings, the language of the departed power,

French.

Our social contacts were officials

in the Diem government.

Our oldest daughter attended school

with French nuns.

The niece of the President attended that school.

You boys went to the American Community School,

which was a center of real Pro-Americanism.

I mean, there were Sunday ballgames,

and picnics, and Cub Scouts,

and Girl Scouts.

It's strange to think that the threat

from North Vietnam wasn't easily seen.

Your dad came in to take over the station

from a guy who wasn't suited for dealing with

the Vietnamese at all.

The Vietnamese were completely disorganized and disheartened

because the Geneva Accords and the cease fire agreement

had been signed without their participation.

They had no say in it whatsoever, and all

of a sudden, their country

was being divided in half.

The Communists took over in the north.

You had the refugees coming out of the north,

you had the Vietnamese army deserting in the north.

Some of them were coming south.

The French were terribly bitter

and downhearted.

They were losing Vietnam.

When the Diem government was established,

you didn't have much of a civil service,

and you certainly had very little

administrative capability out in the provinces.

This left a security vacuum in the countryside.

And the Viet Minh Communists

started to come in and fill it.

The Kennedy Administration comes in.

They've got a huge problem in Vietnam.

And that was the beginning of the effort

to help the Diem government resist the insurgency

and the beginning of counter-insurgency.

The Kennedy Administration came in with very high hopes

and a rather golden environment,

both of public support, and of self-esteem.

Certainly the President and his brother,

uh, were many-sided, uh, individuals,

but they had an interest in covert activity,

uh, they had an interest in, uh, James Bond-type activity.

They saw it as a third way,

this side of military involvement,

and this side of diplomatic

exclusiveness.

They romanticized a great deal about

doing things secretly that couldn't be done openly,

including some very strenuous covert activity,

but also, uh, that, uh, that they were

personally interested in it.

One of the first things that Bill Colby had to do

was to orchestrate and oversee

a mission called 'Project Tiger'

in which some 250 pilots,

South Vietnamese pilots and paratroopers participated,

to drop spies behind the lines

in North Vietnam.

The C.I.A. Believed they could operate

behind enemy lines in the same way

that the O.S.S. Did in World War Two.

Of roughly 250 of these missions,

217 men were killed, captured,

or turned into double agents.

I was part of the first group

to be trained in counter-insurgency.

When we graduated from the training,

we all got taken to the White House,

and we shook JFK's hand.

He was very impressive.

Walt Rostow was around, and he coined the phrase

'infrastructure' and we have to build

up the infrastructure in South Vietnam, and,

so we all sort of saw it as a,

as a new crusade.

We had to defend South Vietnam against the North Vietnamese.

Otherwise, the entire region was going to fall

to the Soviets and the Chinese.

We were convinced that, uh, really the hope

of southeast Asia was, was Ngo Dinh Diem.

We were sent to support the Diem government.

We went up to Dalat, to the lovely

mountain station where they had a house.

We got to know that family quite well.

Your father was assigned to be in conversations

with President Diem's brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu,

with whom he became really quite close.

I met Madame Nhu, who was a very dynamic person.

We had a very pleasant time.

The President himself was a bachelor,

an old rather Mandarin type in his way of speaking

and dressing.

Not aloof but rather detached really.

I... I wonder if he really sensed the difficulties

that his country faced.

After all, this was the government

of South Vietnam.

Nhu had a concept of himself in which

he was the reigning intellectual.

Your father taught him a lot about insurgency,

and gave him a lot of books to read,

uh, which was good.

The bad part of it was that he then

thought himself to be the unique expert

on counter-insurgency in Vietnam.

We are building strategic hamlets

to bring peace throughout the country.

The Strategic Hamlet Program was essentially an idea

of arming villagers to defend themselves.

Nhu considered himself the father

of the Strategic Hamlet Program.

But in the initial phases of the program,

villagers weren't paid for relocation.

They were forcibly relocated,

and a lot of them were very unhappy with this.

The principle is a good one.

Protect the people in their own little hamlets

where they defend themselves

and be defended against encroachments

from the outside.

The problem was North Vietnamese,

at some point... because remember,

they're building up... are going to overrun those.

There was a real sense that we needed

a unconventional approach to stem an increased

flow of support from North Vietnam

to the south.

The decision in 1961 is to not introduce

U.S. Combat forces into South Vietnam

but to dramatically increase the advisory effort

to the South Vietnamese armed forces.

So between 1961 and 1963, the advisory effort

grows from 800 to over 16,500.

Kennedy always had a soft spot

for the cavalier side of the military.

After all, he's a P.T. Boat captain.

Uh, small unit, dashing, individual officers,

they could live inside enemy territory,

could live with the natives.

They could fight in the jungle.

Lawrence of Arabia was a model.

They were imaginative, free-willing.

To the Kennedys, they were the answer.

And the Kennedys foster this whole program

of Special Forces.

In Saigon, we lived near the palace,

and I started to see my father with,

uh, generals, military people,

with police, the military and the police.

And at night, I remember early evening you hear

this rumble, this distant rumble, and I said

to my dad, "What is that?

Is it thunder?"

And he said, "No. They're shelling,

30 miles outside of town."

Hmm, 30 miles.

And I remember my father saying

all this is going to change.

A war is coming.

He said it in a very sort of caring way,

like he had a stake in it.

We left, as you know, in 1962, just as

the military buildup was starting.

Your father received a promotion to be

head of all the C.I.A. Operations in the Far East.

We returned to Washington, and President Diem asked us

to come and have a visit before we left.

This was when we were getting ready to depart.

And we did, we visited at the palace.

We sat there with the President.

It was a memorable time.

There was really not much political talk.

But yet, there was a feeling that things

were not going well in that country.

But the idea that we were visiting with the President

and having his gratitude for what Americans

were doing is a memory that I won't forget.

Here we had created a government.

That government lived in the person

of President Diem.

We had helped install him in 1954,

we had tried to create a political culture

around him.

It had the appearance of democracy.

Diem was a Catholic in a Buddhist country.

He was more French than he'd probably admit.

The civil war in Vietnam, and that's what it was,

was a political war, and Diem was not

a great politician.

Tanks manned by troops of the Special Forces

ring Buddhist temples in Vietnam

as the crisis in that embattled southeast Asian nation

mounts to a climax.

These troops are under the command of Ngo Dinh Nhu,

the President's brother.

The Buddhists, demanding more religious freedom,

find themselves the objects

of a terror campaign that has had

international repercussions.

Diem's military violently suppressed the Buddhists;

murdered a political group of them.

A Buddhist monk in protest set himself on fire.

This image went around the world.

It was seared into the minds

of every American.

I was with your father, and he was really shocked

by that.

He had felt that things were moving

a little bit better, but here was just

a tremendous protest erupting against

the rule of Ngo Dinh Diem.

What have the Buddhist leaders done comparatively?

The only thing they have done,

they have barbecued one of their monks

whom they have intoxicated, whom they have

abused the confidence.

Uh, even that barbecuing was done, um,

not even with self-sufficient means

because they, they used imported,

uh, gasoline.

The regime was beginning to disintegrate.

The circle of people that Diem would listen to

got narrower and narrower.

Nhu gradually became the single most

influential advisor to Diem,

and all of the, or, most of the intelligence

that Diem was getting was funneled through Nhu.

Something had to be done about the fact

that Nhu was taking over the regime,

and Nhu was going bonkers.

Buddhist monks and nuns are joined by thousands

of sympathizers in Saigon to protest

the government's restrictions on the practice

of their religion in South Vietnam.

By 1963, the weakness of the Diem government

was becoming painfully apparent to members

of the Kennedy Administration.

But the story took a turn for the worse,

dramatically worse, after a new

American Ambassador showed up in Saigon.

Henry Cabot Lodge comes out to Saigon as Ambassador.

He thought of himself as kind of a pro-consul.

He thought of the Vietnamese as kind of strange

little people, subject to all these superstitions.

He didn't pretend to need to understand them.

It was a very, very simplistic mindset.

Lodge decided that he alone was going

to make the judgment that Diem had to go.

And he helped ginned up a coup.

Lodge's cable came in first, and Lodge wanted it said

that he'd been approached indirectly

by the generals, uh, inquiring what

the American role, or attitude would be

toward a move by the generals,

uh, if it came to... if it came to that.

The return said that we were deeply worried

about the disintegrating situation in Saigon...

the apparently disintegrating situation in Saigon.

Uh, we thought that the Nhus were bad news,

and that they had to go.

Both Madame Nhu and brother Nhu,

and that Lodge should therefore go to Diem

and tell him that he had to separate

himself from his brother.

If that proves impossible, we may have to face

the possibility that Diem himself will have to go.

That's the extent of the American statement

about Diem.

Diem understood that Nhu was a liability,

but his, his kind of nature was such that

he would not be dictated to by the Americans

on this subject.

Right before the coup occurs, Diem has a meeting

in the palace, uh, with, uh, CINCPAC

who came out, and then he pulls

Lodge aside and he says,

"Please tell President Kennedy

that I will do anything he wants,

that we really need to get over this."

Well, that same afternoon, the coup starts.

We thought that the President himself

had ordered up a coup.

Who are we to question the decision

the President had made at this point?

It was only later that we started to find out

it really was cranked up by Lodge

and by a clique in the State Department.

Lodge had the bit in his teeth,

and he was running this thing.

The White House thought they were running it,

or they had any brakes on him... they didn't.

It was really something.

It was a holy day,

All Saints' Day, November '63.

I was at mass that morning,

and your father came into the church,

Little Flower, in Bethesda,

and said, "pray for the Diem brothers.

Pray for the souls of the Diem brothers.

They've been found murdered."

Which was a shock.

A terrible shock.

Bill stayed for that mass

and we prayed, oh, fervently

for President Diem and his brother.

What was so difficult about it was that

in hindsight, in immediate hindsight,

we have to...

we Americans have to realize

that we bore some share in this tragedy.

I'd... not personally, but somehow,

things went wrong somehow.

My mother believed in what he was doing,

but she wanted it to be right.

She saw his missionary zealotry,

this force of good in the world.

I think they competed for the high ground,

moral high ground.

Who's doing the good work?

Fighting the good fight?

He doing his job,

and she, the loyal wife,

religious and Catholic.

My mother believed in what he was doing,

but it had to be moral,

and it had to be right.

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