Original subtitles

This was an extraordinary moment

of presidential carelessness,

and the result was a President,

and his brother,

with their hands tied behind their back,

and bullets in their head.

And a shattered illusion, which is

that we were building a democracy in Vietnam.

It was only three weeks later

that John Kennedy was killed.

Lyndon Johnson said when he found out

what the role of the United States was,

"We just got a bunch of thugs and killed them."

The U.S. Responsibility

for Diem's death was absolutely clear,

and once that was done, it became,

not the South Vietnamese war

against the North Vietnamese,

it was our war.

The albatross was around our neck,

and it was ours from then on.

Subtitles downloaded from www.OpenSubtitles.org

The Americans,

when they go into a country,

are trying to do something rather

different from European colonialists.

They're not going in there to seize assets

or to strip value out of a country.

Americans do genuinely feel

that when they gird themselves up

and go around the world,

that they're on a... a mission of... of

bringing, um, bringing providence,

um, to bear.

They're going in there for

what they perceive as the good

of the people they're trying to help.

They therefore feel that

the local people will think that

this is a gift that they're bringing,

and why on earth would local people

look a gift horse in the mouth?

Local cultures count.

Bombs, and that sort of thing,

are powerless against local cultures.

The early experiments

of civilian irregular defense groups

to provide security to the villages

started by William Colby

in conjunction with U.S. Special Forces,

showed great promise.

But the American Army was disappointed

that Special Forces were not being used

in an offensive role.

They were providing security to

the population, not going out

finding, fixing, and finishing the enemy.

And, and so we stepped away

from that very promising experiment,

and we moved to a very conventional war.

Here's the headline news, good morning.

President Johnson held a news conference

last night,

said, among other things,

that if more American troops

are needed in Vietnam, they'll be there.

We overwhelmed the country

with that large a force.

Imagine, what would it be like?

I'm sitting in Lincoln, Nebraska,

and all of a sudden comes in these people,

I don't even know who the hell they are.

They're taller than I am, uh...

they're noisier than I am,

they got a diff... a much different culture,

much different religion.

I mean, the, the...

the religious differences are huge.

You're violating cultural taboos

almost every step of the way.

It's shockingly disruptive

and offensive.

And the paradox of that is

we then provide the political ammunition

that the opposition needed,

provided them many opportunities

for saying, "See, this is why

you want to get the Americans out."

Your father was quite upset

by the disruption that occurred,

and the... and the difficulty that, that,

that attached to the effort as a consequence.

He certainly was not one who was

in favor of turning the thing

over to the military.

Never had been.

But when the decision was made,

he went along a hundred percent.

The Vietnam that I knew

was being destroyed.

This perfumed, gorgeous,

liquid country was being torn apart.

It was going to be gone.

He told me quite a lot

what he was doing.

"Organizing these villagers,

self-defense teams."

It all made a lot of sense.

But he would leave the room,

why I'd look over to the television,

and choppers are coming in,

and B-52s, napalm,

and guys firing into the jungle.

Towns and fishing villages that

I'd been to would pop up.

It was, like, out of a movie.

Like, "God, look what happened to Nga Trang.

I don't remember an airfield there.

Where are all those bases?"

It was like that that was a different war.

It wasn't the war

that my father was fighting.

He was fighting a completely

different war.

A problem that you have

is that you are in, in the habit

of fighting the last war.

World War One and World War Two

were set piece battles.

So we crashed around in the jungle

looking for the V.C.

Or the North Vietnamese forces,

while they engaged in insurgency.

Reality intrudes.

Sooner or later, one must recognize

the people who understand

the heart of an insurgency

are the people who are dedicated,

most dedicated to its defeat.

Well, you will well remember,

uh, going to the airport, to um,

when your dad went off to, uh,

to Saigon in, uh, '68.

At that time, it was more and more troops,

more and more troops.

His idea was to use the troops

in a different way.

He kept pushing for his methods.

What did we say?

"Guerilla war?"

He somehow couldn't give up on it.

It was a lengthy assignment.

He came back periodically.

We'd go to Vermont,

uh, try to carry on life

as we'd known it,

and it was, uh, he was doing...

he was called to serve,

and he did it.

He did it capably.

When it comes to long separations,

my mother was at loose ends.

She lost the center out of her life.

It was very hard for her.

A year or so into his being there,

my sister Catherine became ill.

She'd had epilepsy since she was a child.

Terrible seizures.

She developed anorexia nervosa.

It was awful.

My mother took on

the suffering of my sister.

She would make it go away

for my father.

It couldn't be any other way,

everything for the mission.

And I remember I looked over

at her one evening.

She was writing him a letter

I think, in Vietnam.

I saw that she was a woman,

not just my mother.

She was Ionely.

She hadn't signed up for this,

but she did it.

A warrior, what my dad was.

He liked being in the fight.

I thought he was the most

capable guy they could have.

If anybody's going to do that job,

he ought to do it.

He could do it.

And he wasn't going to complain about it.

Matter of fact, he wanted

to do that job.

Ignatius had a vision of his people

going anywhere in the world

for the good of souls,

as he put it.

In Jesuit culture,

there's a lot of respect for autonomy.

The autonomy of the person,

and for the way in which God works

on the person, uh, individually.

One can influence people, and persuade

them in certain directions,

not by what one says,

but just to observe what

Ignatius calls "The movement

of the spirits" in the person.

Letting them do the talking,

asking the occasional question,

and integrating what they're saying

into the overall story of their lives.

One does not need to have a heavy hand

telling people what to do.

It would be a presumptuous director

or priest who would simply say,

"God tells me what you ought to do."

Um, and uh, I think most Jesuits are,

are happy to stay away from that.

When you encounter an area that's

been taken over by the enemy,

you can tell right away,

I mean, the fear is palpable.

These are traumatized people.

The first thing to do is to conduct

effective reconnaissance,

and intelligence collection.

And so, you have to really

go into the town and stay there.

Get into an edge of the town.

Control some certain portion of the town

where people can come up to you safely

and talk to you.

It's immensely important

to begin working with

indigenous forces right away.

Because one of the things

the enemy will use is,

well, the occupier is here, you know,

the crusader is here, and so-forth.

And the best way for you

to clarify those intentions

is to work with the local populace,

and be seen in a supportive role.

Treat the population with respect,

and then people will recognize

the enemy propaganda for what it is.

They're desperate in a lot of cases

for an improved life,

so they'll come to you with information.

Then you can begin to understand

the dynamics in the area

through this effective reconnaissance.

You have to build the confidence back

in the people that you're going to leave,

but you're going to leave in place

a security structure that they can trust.

It was the kind of simple,

yet novel ideas that your father

put into place

and it came down to making life better

in a given village

so that you engendered trust

and ultimately gained intelligence

from a much more welcoming

local community.

Uh, at the same time,

when you found somebody that

the villagers identified as

a bad guy, kill him.

Quick.

The increasing influence

of the government resulted in a lot

of information coming in.

A major problem was how to decide

what was valid information

and what was actionable,

what we could do something about.

The Phoenix Program

was an effort to bring together

the various disparate elements

of the intelligence gathering organizations

from take action to neutralize the bad guys

as a consequence of that information.

This was a major effort

that your dad instigated.

The P.R.U. Were really

the offensive arm that

the irregular forces had.

Often they were former V.C.

Themselves who were reconfigured

to work for the government.

They had a very, very effective

ratio of losses to those that

they captured or killed.

For every P.R.U. That was lost,

why they, uh, neutralized, killed,

or captured sixty-seven V.C.

I remember once talking

to him about the P.R.U.'s

These were former Vietcong

who were hired

and paid by the Agency

to go out and, and go into

V.C. Areas and, and counterattack

and kill who was ever there.

And Colby's response was, 'cause there was a...

I mean this was a guy who understood

the hardness of life and war and what needed

to be done, uh, against an enemy,

um, there was no option.

He said, "Now Steve, the Indians were coming

in through the windows.

And, and you gotta shoot back."

Intelligence was very effective

during that couple of years.

We rounded up a large number

of people who gave up fighting

for the other side and came in.

We had enough presence by this time

in all the hamlets that,

that the Vietnamese knew

the South Vietnamese knew

pretty much what was going on,

and it was a matter of getting

some of them to tell you,

which the South Vietnamese became

increasingly effective at doing.

The Phoenix Program

was intended to root out

the infrastructure of the V.C.

North Vietnamese.

To gather intelligence

where the insurgents were located,

to cut them off,

to take their supplies away.

They never had too much

in the way of supplies.

And to destroy in effect

the infrastructure of the insurgency.

And it is essential in a counter-insurgency

to root out that infrastructure.

Unless one is able to root out

those who organize the insurgency,

and cripple their operations,

one is not going to defeat them.

Colby received a great deal of criticism

for the Phoenix Program

here in the United States,

but if you are engaged in conflict

of that sort,

you must make use of those tools

that are indispensable

in winning the conflict.

If you are afraid to make use of those tools,

then you should not be in that conflict.

Yes there were abuses;

there was no doubt about it.

The Agency had installed a program

to hold and to interrogate,

uh, people who were captured,

and that was very much a mixed bag

in the way these folks were treated.

There was nobody really looking

over the shoulder of the South Vietnamese

who were doing the interrogating and,

uh, they really got out of hand,

some, on, on, on certain occasions.

By the time I got there in 1969,

it felt much more like

an assassination program,

I mean, because it's very

difficult to control it.

We were supporting the Vietnamese units.

They were doing a lot of the intel work;

go out in the field with us.

There's no way to know whether

the person delivering

the intelligence was reliable.

It wasn't like you had

people that you trusted completely.

You tell me you've got

somebody out here that's a part of

the infrastructure,

and I've, I've got to make a decision

do I follow up and,

and do something about it?

So it felt like it had been corrupted

in a bad way when I saw it in '69.

This was a program in which the only

way to, sort of, bring things

under control were to...

let the Vietnamese people know

that if you're on the wrong side

we're going to kill you.

It was a basic belief,

as it is always when we go

in a country where we have

no real background,

that you can't trust anybody.

And therefore you have to

set a standard 'cause there was

so much killing going on,

that the only thing these people know,

the only thing they know and respect

is harsh treatment to bring people around.

We always presumed that

whatever he was doing was

always for the good, never anything wrong.

Here was those posters all over town

with the ace of spades,

comparing him to Heinrich Himmler.

Responsible for the deaths

of twenty-nine, thirty thousand people.

Thousands of demonstrators

opposed to the Vietnam War

assembled in the nation's capital

for a mass protest.

The crowd, estimated at

about fifty thousand persons,

included adults, students,

even children.

People would turn to me and say,

"You know, your dad was a murderer."

My immediate reaction used to be,

"You don't know what you're talking about."

And then I'd find myself thinking,

"Was he?

Well, who was he, really?"

It was tough on my mother.

She became more and more isolated.

A good part of her crowd in Washington,

some C.I.A. People were starting to

turn against the war.

And she's being the loyal wife.

She was a good woman.

I don't know if the truth

was really what we were after.

We were maybe afraid of the truth.

If he was morally corrupt,

to the detriment of thousands of

people, would be the worst.

It's a very difficult field, really.

Those who serve

have loyalty to the Agency itself,

but certainly must have inner loyalties

in their code of behavior,

which they would not violate,

and one has to take on faith

and trust that the right thing

is being done,

and perhaps the...

for the greater good.

It's very difficult, I find, to explain.

Colby's response to the potential

for abuse of Phoenix was,

was very legalistic, very American.

Whether it was all that effective

is something that I think

he may have even,

I, I think he knew that the tool he had

in his hands, uh, was an inadequate tool

given the human reality of what

was happening when a society falls apart

and people want to settle scores,

take revenge, or just abuse their power.

He always defended the effort as necessary,

but that he had,

he had reservations

as to do we have the right, uh,

programmatic set of, of guidelines,

behaviors, people to do this

in the right way?

The chair would emphasize that

today's hearings will not only be

an examination of

Mr. Colby's qualifications

and background, but will also

review a number of policies relating

to the Central Intelligence Agency itself.

My dad came back from Vietnam in 1971

and went back into the C.I.A.

He was appointed by Richard Nixon

to be Director of the C.I.A.

Now you are familiar with the controversy

over the Phoenix Program in Vietnam.

There have been allegations that,

in effect, this Phoenix Program was

an assassination program.

What are the facts?

Mr. Chairman, I've, uh, testified

in, in extenso on this subject,

uh, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

in February 1970, uh, before the...

He was the lawyer when he was testifying.

Calm, steady, professional

in telling you just enough of the truth.

No more, never anymore.

- Under oath.

I'm prepared to, uh, repeat it

if necessary.

That Phoenix Program was not

a program of assassination.

The Phoenix Program was

a part of the overall Pacification Program,

which was designed to strengthen the government

of South Vietnam and its people

against the assault led against them

by the North Vietnamese through a program...

You couldn't get too close to him.

He said, "Oh, they can

follow me around all day and all night,

all year long and they'll never

find anything on me.

I've got nothing to hide."

I thought, "How can there

be nothing that you want to hide?"

- In order to bring some order into the fight

between the subversion,

uh, by the North Vietnamese

and the Viet Cong and the government.

How many, roughly, would you estimate

were eliminated?

The word "eliminate"

referred to the entire,

uh, program against the apparatus.

Well, you can say, "kill 'em,"

if you wanted.

We, we said, "kill".

Uh, the figure...

the word we used was "kill"

for the people who were killed

and there was no euphemism

applied to it at all.

Colby suffered from a total

exaggeration of what Phoenix was about.

Fortunately it did not interfere

with his confirmation

as Director of Central Intelligence.

The first time I talked to your father,

it was on the phone.

It was in the middle of Watergate.

The Senate Watergate Committee

was focused on the C.I.A. Role.

The trail led to the C.I.A.,

but not as the sponsor of Watergate,

uh, as one of the enablers.

Watergate was a White House operation.

Nixon was at the center.

The C.I.A. Does what the president wants.

Nixon was criminal.

Nixon was poison.

The crimes and lies were too many.

The idea that a president

and a White House would use the C.I.A.

For overtly illegal, political activities

didn't really dawn on lots of people.

When Colby became the Director of

Central Intelligence in 1973,

he didn't know about the assassination plots

that had been ordered by the White House

against Fidel Castro, for example.

He didn't know about the existence

of secret prisons where suspected

double agents were tortured.

Spying on Americans, mind control experiments

with drugs on unwitting human guinea pigs.

As he is learning about these secrets,

Richard Nixon's existence is threatened.

There's been an obstruction of justice

at the White House.

Impeachable offenses have taken place,

and the question is,

"Is the president going to survive?"

In this atmosphere of deep mistrust

of government,

had these secrets been revealed,

it would have been the death of the C.I.A.,

and Bill Colby knew it.

Nixon had tried to get the C.I.A.

To take responsibility for Watergate

as a way of getting

himself off the hook.

After the resignation of Nixon,

it was almost as though

the next big story after Watergate was going

to be trouble in the intelligence community.

As Nixon falls,

as a new president is sworn in,

Colby keeps the 'Family Jewels'

as they were known, under wraps.

The danger of their disclosure is immense.

I did learn from people inside

the agency that there had been these documents

called the 'Family Jewels'.

And I had your father's phone 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 a hundred and twenty cases

of wire breaking, or wiretapping

of American citizens, uh, contrary to the law in,

in America, he said my number is only sixty three.

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.

Your father was essential to publishing

the story about domestic spying.

It was in the aftermath of that New York Times story

that Bill called me to ask to come over and speak

with me on a very sensitive matter.

That was the meeting in which Bill disclosed

the crown jewels... the CIA's activities during the Cold War.

There were some matters,

which clearly raised legal problems.

And he would have been delighted if I had said,

"Don't worry about it Bill,

we're not going to look into that."

Uh, but I don't think he expected that.

I think he knew that we would have had no alternative

but to carefully look into all

the allegations of illegality.

Colby feels compelled to let President Ford

know what's in the 'Family Jewels'.

Colby sends a six-page letter to Henry Kissinger,

the Secretary of State, outlining the worst

of what could be revealed when the Senate

and the House gin up their investigative committees,

post-Watergate.

Kissinger slows down when he gets to the passage

about assassination plots, and mutters,

"Oh, well, these are horrors."

Ford has a meeting with Kissinger

and Vice President Rockefeller, and Ford's Chief of Staff,

Donald Rumsfeld, in which he says,

"The C.I.A. Will be destroyed if this comes out."

Ford decided that he would appoint a commission

to investigate domestic surveillance

as revealed by Sy Hersh's story.

Vice President Rockefeller was the head of it;

Governor Reagan was on it.

A lot of people, most of them rather right wing.

At lunch the next day at the White House,

Abe Rosenthal, then the editor of the New York Times,

raised a point and said,

"Mr. President, I see that you've

appointed Rockefeller and a bunch

of right-wingers to investigate the C.I.A.

What credibility do you think that they will have

since they are obviously are supporters

of the C.I. A?"

Ford said, "Well, that's an interesting question

I had to be very careful about whom I appointed

to this commission,

because it's very likely that they're going

to come across things a lot more serious

than domestic surveillance."

Abe says, in his inimitable way,

Abe says, "Like what?"

President Ford, in his inimitable way says,

"Like assassinations."

A hush falls over the lunch.

After the lunch, the Times people

went to the Times office,

big question, what do we do

with what we heard?

They went back and forth.

Finally the publisher, Sulzberger, said,

"This was a social lunch,

the President obviously misspoke.

He should not have said that.

So we're not going to do this story."

And that was the end of it.

But it wasn't the end of it, of course.

President Ford has reportedly

warned associates that if current investigations

go too far, they could uncover

several assassinations of foreign officials,

in which the C.I.A. Was involved.

When this burst on the scene,

with some of the more colorful stories

that came out, it was really

a witch's cauldron that was brewing.

So I was all for the President

using all the executive authority

that he could to contain this,

this problem.

It isn't just assassinations.

It's the whole area of activity of government

covered by a cloak of excessive secrecy.

We didn't realize how this pent-up passion

in the Congress, feeling that they ought

to have been more entitled to a role

in shaping national policy toward the Vietnam War,

together with journalists who were competing

to be on the air every night

with something ever more sensational

would so work together to create just

this unstoppable tide of disregard

for the national interest.

This is a matter of such gravity

it goes right to the roots of our morality as a nation.

Therefore, it must be dealt with by the Congress,

and it must be dealt with as a matter of law.

None of us knew exactly what to do at that point.

It wasn't quite we were just trying to survive,

but it was a very, very hectic period.

President Ford was also weak.

An unelected president coming in after

a presidential catastrophe, he didn't have the authority

that a president usually has with the Congress.

It was a really desperate time.

This was a way to destroy

the whole intelligence system.

And then we had to try to prevent that.

Mr. Chairman, these last two months

have placed American intelligence in danger.

The almost hysterical excitement that surrounds

any new story

mentioning C.I.A., or referring even

to a perfectly legitimate activity

of C.I.A. Has raised the question

whether secret intelligence operations can be conducted

by the United States.

Your father's calendar was horrendous.

He did have an intelligence organization to run.

If General Scowcroft called, or if Kissinger called,

it didn't matter what was on the calendar,

the calendar had to be scrubbed

and everything re-juggled.

He had the whole future of the agency

on his shoulders.

April 1975, Colby sits before

the National Security Council and tries to tell them

that we are about to lose the war in Vietnam.

Saigon is falling.

They don't want to hear that.

He says, "we can try for redoubt here,

or we can negotiate a settlement.

We've got many, many thousands of people,

Americans and Vietnamese in Saigon

who are going to be trapped.

We owe it to those people to get them out.

We need to plan for this now."

"Not while I'm Secretary of State,"

says Henry Kissinger.

"We're not going to negotiate any kind of settlement."

Colby had been dedicated to Vietnam since 1959.

Sixteen years.

"We can save nothing," Kissinger says to Colby.

"Nothing but lives," says Bill Colby.

I don't know how your father

maintained any composure at all because not only did

he have to protect his agency

against this withering assault by dozens

of congressmen, senators, staffers,

in a public setting, with the cameras rolling,

but even among the friendlies,

that is, people in the executive branch

that he would have expected to count on

to be supported by were insisting

that he limit what he said,

even stay too far on the side

of maintaining secrecy simply

to refuse any larger role

by the Congress in the influencing foreign policy

that it was an enormously complex

and difficult atmosphere to function in.

I don't know how he could make it

from day to day under those pressures.

We have to abandon the old tradition

of total secrecy, but I think we do

have to agree that there are secrets in America,

in our ballot box and other areas of our life

that we do respect, and that intelligence

has a legitimate area in which it needs secrets,

and in which its secrets need

to be protected, for the benefits not

of intelligence, but for our nation.

Bill Colby believed that confession, up to a point,

was good for the soul.

That they could not stonewall the Senate, and the House,

or the American people, that they had to try

to be seen to be telling the truth about

what they had done.

It was an extraordinarily difficult moment

because the President of the United States

didn't want to do it, and neither did

his Chief of Staff, Don Rumsfeld.

Why did the agency prepare toxins

of this character in quantities sufficient

to kill many thousands of people?

I can not explain why that quantity was developed

except that this was a collaboration

that we were engaged in with the United States Army,

and we did develop this particular 'weapon'

you might say, as a possible, uh,

for possible use.

My husband testified in complete honesty.

He did what needed to be done.

To hide things from Congress could possibly

have been the end of the C.I.A.

It was a very challenging and painful

and trying time for him, for all of us

in the family.

The prime reason for C.I.A.

Is to keep America safe,

one still cannot do things that are illegal or immoral.

The officer has to have a moral compass

within himself.

I thought the moral compass was seeing us through,

really, seeing us through difficult times.

I think that the death of your sister

and the attitudes of, uh, the public sparked

a good deal of remorse is not quite the word,

but guilt feelings in your father.

And when the Church Committee got rolling,

he 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, uh, 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."

We did have discussions in the White House.

I remember Cheney saying, "Can't you control him?"

I told him the President wanted it done his way,

not Bill's way.

He disagreed, but he was not rebellious.

It is essential that we be able to assure our

foreign agents abroad, a number of whom

have already expressed their alarm and limited

what they tell us, that their names

will be totally protected, since their lives

or livelihoods are at peril.

The responsibility of someone who heads

an intelligence agency is to respect

the authority and responsibilities

of the legislature to a point,

but to stand up to them

when they are asking for something

that exceeds their authority or places

our national security in danger.

I will follow the Constitution and my oaths,

and I will respond.

There will be certain things

that I will ask you not to ask,

such as the name of an agent someplace.

You have just stated in open session

that you do not trust four hundred

and thirty five members of Congress.

And it would seem to me for you as one person

to make the determination that you do not trust

four hundred and thirty five members,

each of whom represent four hundred

and sixty four thousand people, each of whom won

an open election in ostensibly a democratic society,

I would say to you sir,

you don't have the right to play God.

Mr. Dellums, I am not playing God,

I am only enforcing the laws that

the& that the Congress passed and the directives

of our government to protect some of the necessary secrets

of the intelligence business, to protect

that very free society that both you

and I want to protect.

He may have naively believed,

or maybe had no choice in believing

that Church and Pike and those people

would handle it in a rational way

and understand the damage that could come out.

Um, and I think in that case, he was mistaken.

There was just too much public clamor,

and there was disbelief all over.

People were looking for ways to attack

and so, not only what he delivered

became a target, therefore, the Agency.

But then he became a target.

It's the way Washington works.

People don't like failure.

Would you just tell me why that letter

has to be top secret?

Because it includes with it, as attachments,

a number of top secret documents.

Why can't I show that letter

to anybody I want to?

I would be glad to review this

and if you want to release

this particular letter.

I don't want you to release

that letter, Mr. Colby.

I have lived with this for fourteen years.

I have drowned in pieces of papers stamped

top secret that had no right to be stamped

top secret whatsoever.

Bill Colby was a person who spent the major portion

of his post-college years in a clandestine activity

and it... that is not the best place in the world

to develop the social skills and the political skills

to deal with members of Congress.

I don't think that there should be

this kind of surveillance.

It interferes with First Amendment rights.

To impinge upon the rights

of American citizens where there

is clearly no reason to do so&

My Constitution didn't say anything

about assassination, wiretapping,

abusing private citizens' right to privacy,

I am trying to articulate the way

in which we Americans can gather together

to control this, to supervise this

intelligence business, but not to destroy it.

How many files of this character

do you maintain on other members of Congress?

What about those Army files?

Do you have any idea what volume

of records were destroyed?

I do not, no.

Do you know what documents

he destroyed?

Does this pistol fire the dart?

Yes, Mr. Chairman.

What disciplinary action has been taken?

No agency has the right to rise

above any other agency.

Don't you think that's an exceedingly loose way

to run an agency?

Um, particularly, um, the C.I. A?

Well, we're going to try to run it tighter.

My dad testified thirty two times

to Congressional committees in one year.

My father would come home, watch the news,

comment on it.

He wouldn't even really roll his eyes,

he'd be always positive.

It'll work out.

He really did believe actually in the wisdom

of the American people.

If he had lied to the Congress,

he would have been a broken man.

He couldn't lie to those people.

Bill really became a tortured soul

in this period.

He saw his life and his life's work crumbling.

I often wondered if Bill was not expiating his sins,

starting with the Phoenix Program, and whatever

had gone wrong in it that he felt responsible for.

Then the tragedy of his daughter,

that, that he was maybe like Job,

he had to atone.

I would never say he fell apart,

but it was a very traumatic period,

and I think he could be excused for,

uh, for getting overwhelmed at times.

Bill Colby was on the hot seat.

He was nominated by the President,

confirmed by the Senate to serve

as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Therefore he was the individual

who had the baton, he was the one

who had to deal with the oversight committees.

A person in that job does feel

that they're, report to two places.

It is this question of to whom do you owe

your ultimate loyalty?

Is your loyalty to the agency,

your fellow people, and to what

you have done, done not to make money,

not for personal glory,

done because you, the President,

or in, in, in some cases,

his brother, wanted it done,

or is the loyalty to the Congress and an oath?

To this day, there is a feeling

that people on the Hill

don't really care, don't understand.

And so when they ask you something,

you really have to make a choice.

When, in fact, once you take an oath,

you don't have a choice.

The C.I.A. And its Director was always caught

between doing the wish of the President

and the law.

And when the President said, do this, do that,

um, the law got set aside normally.

The Presidency in the person of Nixon had lost

its moral authority.

Ford was kind of the accidental President

in this post-Watergate atmosphere.

He didn't have the moral authority.

All of a sudden, you're in this political world

as C.I.A. Director and you have to establish

what's the authority?

Moral or otherwise.

And Congress, under Article One,

has this incredible authority, over even the C.I.A.

They had the authority.

Colby tried to walk a middle line, and finally,

really acquiesced to the law.

It was a call he made personally on the law.

Trust, as David Abshire has said so often,

is the coin of the realm.

And the most important ingredient...

the oil on the glue is truth.

Truth builds trust.

We are empowered to go out

and engage in activities, in which deception

is appropriate.

And we have to remind ourselves,

however, that we do not lie to each other.

And we do not lie to the officials

of our government who have a right to know.

Whatever you think about Bill Colby

and the way he handled it, he was tarnished

by his incessantly being called up before the Congress

over and over and over again.

He had lost any ability to manage either his agency

or his relations with the Hill.

He was a spent force,

and it was... almost an act of mercy

in a sense, to end... to end it.

Because he was, he was really

a tortured soul.

Did this come as a personal disappointment

to you that you are being requested to resign?

Oh no.

As I said, I've, uh, I anticipated a change,

and if that's better for their business,

well, that's fine.

Mr. Colby, looking back at it now,

do you wish maybe you'd taken a firmer stand

with some of the committees in Congress,

and perhaps not given them quite as much information

as you have?

Would you do it differently?

I don't think so, I think the best way

was to get rid of the past

and transition into a future

of intelligence under the Constitution

in the new structure.

What is your, uh, projection for the C.I. A?

Would you have any idea for a successor based

on your own experience?

Oh, I think the... as you know,

I've often said that an outsider

would be appropriate for the job,

and I think that makes sense still.

I think it shouldn't be a partisan political figure,

obviously.

I consider myself fortunate indeed,

to have been confirmed for this challenging job.

I want this job, I want to do it well,

and I'm proud to be a part of the C.I.A.

Thank you very much.

My wife and I went

to the swearing-in of George Bush senior

as Director of C.I.A., who replaced your father.

Your father had left along with a couple of other people

that Ford wanted to get rid of.

And, I remember as we left after the swearing-in,

and it was a great occasion for Bush, and everything,

we saw your father come out of the thing,

and walk down by himself, and get in his car

and drive off.

And, uh, my wife almost cried.

He looked Ionely, he was leaving,

no pretensions... just quietly gets in his car and leaves.

And that's, that's something we always

kind of remembered about him.

I remember talking to President Ford

about why George Bush senior

to replace your dad as C.I.A. Director.

Ford said, "I wanted a loyalist."

He didn't consider your father a loyalist.

I asked about who was loyal.

"George Bush," he said "Cheney, Rumsfeld,

Kissinger, and Greenspan."

When my father drove out of the gates of the C.I.A.

For the last time, he was not broken or tortured.

He left with the strength of his convictions,

his belief in the law and the Constitution,

certain that he had done the right thing.

Over the next several years, I came to understand

that my father lived in a world of secrets.

Always watching, listening, his eye on the door.

He was tougher, smarter, smoother,

and could be crueler than anybody I ever knew.

I'm not sure he ever loved anyone,

and I never heard him say anything heartfelt.

By the time I turned thirty,

I came to understand the man that nobody knew,

or at least I thought I did.

When he said, "I want a divorce,"

I was really knocked over,

really surprised, and shocked.

I said, "But we're Catholic,

we don't believe in divorce."

So there goes the Catholicism?

I mean, I don't know.

He was a dedicated public servant

who gave his best to, to his work.

And, um,

and I think, um,

we had a,

we had a good family life as long as it lasted.

And, um, he must say he was...

I guess I would say he was a complicated person

whom maybe I didn't know as well

as I would hope to think I do.

My father was a soldier.

He jumped out of airplanes.

He lived to serve.

Before he left on his last mission,

he wrote a couple of books and married again.

Ten years passed.

One night, he fixed his favorite meal

and had a few drinks.

Then he got in his canoe and disappeared.

His body washed ashore nine days later.

Foul play was suspected, but I knew otherwise.

He'd called me two weeks before he died,

asking for my absolution, for his not doing enough

for my sister Catherine when she was so ill.

When his body was found, he was carrying a picture

of my sister in his wallet.

The Coroner's report listed the cause of death as drowning,

brought on by a stroke or heart attack.

Call it whatever you like, I think he'd had enough

of this life.

My father lived in the shadows.

He liked being invisible.

He always wanted his ashes scattered

to the winds.

But it was we who needed the permanence

that he could never provide.

We wanted a hero.

It was for us, the family,

that he was buried at Arlington.

He never really needed us.

It was us who needed him.

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