One theory held that Colby had been the ultimate Soviet double agent, and had disappeared – or been snuffed – before the CIA’s mole hunters could expose him. Another fantasy suggested that he had been eliminated by Vietnamese gangs who never forgave his role in the Phoenix Program, the pacification effort that eliminated 20,000 Vietnamese in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Yet another revenge plot made him the victim of his fellow spies, still angry at Colby for his decision, as CIA director in 1975, to publicly reveal the “family jewels,” a 650-page list of the CIA’s dirtiest tricks.
To the spies who really knew Colby, however, the mystery was not his presumed death but why he ever became a spook in the first place. “He didn’t like spying at all,” said Sam Halpern, his former executive assistant. How, then, did Colby justify handing over millions to Italian politicians, priests and reporters, as he did while serving as an operative in Rome in the 1950s? He saw it as “nation building,” explained Halpern: the recipients of CIA largesse were social democrats combating Soviet subversion. For much of his life Colby described himself as a “rigid Catholic.” His hero, he told Playboy magazine in 1973, was Saint Francis, because he spread “one of the most inspiring messages in the world. It’s called love.”
Colby could be an overly credulous spymaster. He set up the Phoenix Program to expose and imprison communists in South Vietnamese villages. But the Vietnamese used the program as a cover to execute suspected collaborators, and Colby was deeply hurt when he was branded a war criminal.
After Colby handed the CIA’s most damaging secrets over to Hill investigators, old spooks vilified him as a traitor – and President Ford fired him. In the early ’80s, Colby lost his faith and his first marriage fell apart. Outwardly stern, every hair in place, he once described himself as “the traditional gray man, so inconspicuous that he can never catch the waiter’s eye in a restaurant.” Yet he was “misunderstood,” his second wife, Sally Shelton, told NEWSWEEK. He drove a bright red Fiat “very fast, with the top down,” and he liked to push back the dining-room table to practice the tango. When he disappeared, she said, he was happy and healthy (Mrs. Colby claimed reports her husband had a bad heart were wrong). “He’s out there somewhere. I just don’t know where.”
