Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby (Hardcover)

by John Prados (Author) "NO ONE PAID ATTENTION until Sunday night..." (more)
Key Phrases: pacification czar, spy chieftain, village defense program, Bill Colby, White House, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
This highly detailed look at one of the major spymasters of the post-WWII era is another intriguing work by the prolific Prados (Keepers of the Keys: A History of the National Security Council from Truman to Bush). The book focuses on key moments in Colby's career, which spanned from his early days in the office of the OSS in the 1940s to his replacement as head of the CIA by George Bush in 1975. Prados carefully charts Colby's involvement in this attempt to defeat North Vietnam through "arrests, precisely targeted raids or ambushes" as well as conventional assaults that degenerated into a de facto assassination program. Colby is presented as a "lost crusader" who "never lived down [his] second Vietnam tour and his Phoenix stewardship," both of which haunted him as he took over the CIA during the Watergate era. Prados takes a remarkably sympathetic view of Colby's late career, when he was the subject of Senate investigations into illegal espionage: he calls Colby "the man in the middle, required to respond to Congress but inevitably the focus of Ford administration and CIA resentments." Prados's most controversial argument is that Colby's willingness to work with Congress to reform the CIA "saved the agency" by allowing it additional freedom. This is an essential and provocative addition to works on the CIA.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Less a biography than a comprehensive dossier on the espionage career of William Colby, this copiously detailed work comes from an author highly regarded as an intelligence historian. Careful and judicious, Prados never grandstands; instead, he seeks to understand the myriad controversies about CIA activity exposed by congressional investigations in 1975. Then the CIA director, Colby had a hand in unsavory skulduggery such as the so-called Phoenix program in Vietnam, which probably involved assassinations. Because he was a specialist in covert political action (having cut his espionage teeth influencing Italian politics), Colby also had a sense, argues Prados, of the serious political danger posed by the 1975 revelations to the CIA's existence. In the author's view, Colby, by cooperating with the investigations rather than defying them as Henry Kissinger preferred, likely preserved the organization from dismantlement. As a vehicle to larger issues (like CIA involvement in sundry coups), Prados' dispassionate appraisals of Colby's postings and activity will best attract readers with a natural interest in the nitty-gritty details rather than the sensational aspects of intelligence work. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; illustrated edition edition (March 6, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195128478
• ISBN-13: 978-0195128475
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,009,218 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Polemic in the Guise of Biography, November 3, 2003

By	Merle L. Pribbenow (Falls Church, VA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is less than the sum of its parts. It provides a workmanlike review of the career of William Colby (if one discounts the constant political carping), but it offers no new insights and precious little new information. This deficiency is compounded by the book's lack of adequate sourcing and documentation. As an example, on page 283, discussing the post-1973 Paris Peace Agreement period in South Vietnam, the author writes, "Not even Saigon could hide the fact that a government outpost in the Central Highlands, well-armed, defended by 600 troops with several months' supply of food and ammunition, had surrendered the moment it came under serious threat." There is no footnote to support this claim, no mention of the name of the outpost or the date of the "surrender," etc. I was in Vietnam at that time and have studied that period extensively, and I have never heard of such an incident. It is possible that the author might have been referring to the April 1974 abandonment of Tong Le Chan, but Tong Le Chan was not in the Central Highlands, its defenders had been under constant communist siege for two years without relief or replacements, and there was no surrender - the defenders all made it safely back to South Vietnamese lines. The only major surrender of a South Vietnamese Army unit during the entire war involved elements of the ARVN 56th Regiment, but that was during the spring 1972 communist offensive, before the cease-fire, and it happened on South Vietnam's northern border, not in the Central Highlands. I am at a loss as to what the author was talking about in this quotation.
In many respects, the author seemed more interested in pushing his own political line, which is considerably left of center, than in telling Colby's story. His effort to claim that Colby and CIA provided the Indonesian government with "target lists" for use in Suharto's brutal repression of Indonesian communists (pages 155-156) in spite of the lack of any hard evidence that such lists existed became so convoluted that it gave me a headache.
This book contains an especially egregious allegation that I would be remiss not to point out. On page 245, in his effort to support the discredited claims made in Alfred McCoy's book "The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia" of CIA collusion in narcotics trafficking, the author writes:
"...McCoy received further support from Tran Van Khiem, a former Saigon security chief who had investigated corruption charges for Diem and had kept up his contacts with Saigon intelligence services: 'My security agents...firmly confirm that a few CIA agents in Indochina are involved in opium trafficking.'"
A footnote (fortunately, one is present for this citation) notes that this quotation was from a letter Khiem wrote that was printed in the Washington Star in 1972.
Even the most basic research by the author would have revealed that the letter writer, Tran Van Khiem, was in fact the criminally insane brother of Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu. Khiem was NOT a "former Saigon security chief" (although there were some allegations, principally by Khiem himself, that during the last days of the Diem regiment Madame Nhu appointed Khiem the head of a pro-Diem assassination squad). In the early 1990s Khiem brutally murdered his father and mother in Washington D.C. in a lurid crime that made national headlines and of which the author surely should have been aware. Court-appointed psychiatrists found Khiem to be so deranged that even forcible administration of anti-psychotic drugs failed to render him sufficiently mentally competent to stand trial. If the author wishes to use this quote to support an allegation of such a serious nature as involvement in opium smuggling, he owes it to his readers to let them know that the source of the quote is a mentally incompetent paranoid schizophrenic.

6 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars History now, not current events, July 11, 2003

By	Bruce P. Barten (Saint Paul, MN United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Anyone who thinks of Saint Paul, Minnesota as an Irish Catholic stronghold ought to be able to imagine Margaret Egan Colby giving birth to William Egan Colby here on January 4, 1920, (p. 20), only one day after my own mother was born someplace else. LOST CRUSADER/ THE SECRET WARS OF CIA DIRECTOR WILLIAM COLBY by John Prados (Oxford University Press, 2003) is full of such close associations. Prados does not approve of everything that was done, however much Colby might. For example, after Hugh Tovar's service in Jakarta, "What Colby did can only be interpreted to show that he thought highly of the Indonesian affair: Colby dispatched the CIA's man on the scene of the bloodbath to Laos to run the agency's secret war there, probably the Far East Division's most sensitive covert operation." (p. 157). A number of issues are pursued throughout the book, over many chapters and in many settings. References to crusaders (what would Osama say?) might be considered a geopolitical red flag in 2003. Is CIA policy in the Middle East like certain popes who considered the rulers of the Holy Land (long ago) as of the wrong religion to control Jerusalem? This is still a dicey question today.

As an undergraduate at Princeton, starting in the fall of 1936, "Religious Catholic that he was, Bill had a problem with the Princeton rule that first- and second-year students had to attend at least half of Sunday chapel services, as the school was strongly Presbyterian. Colby fulfilled this requirement by becoming an altar boy at the Catholic Chapel." (p. 25). I'm not sure why this would be a problem, unless Presbyterians automatically take attendance, but the priest doesn't look to see who is at mass, wouldn't remember anyway, and only keeps a schedule of who is serving as altar boy. Later, while Colby was working for the CIA in Rome under Ambassador Clare Booth Luce, it is reported that Pope Pius XII had excommunicated all Italian communists in 1949, (p. 55) a sure sign that he didn't want to see them around anymore.

The early part of LOST CRUSADER fills in a lot of information on his OSS activities in France and Norway, where Colby wanted to capture the town of Lierne in Operation "Rype," but was delayed until after the German capitulation in May, 1945, when the Germans "gave up on May 11 without difficulty. Major William E. Colby corralled 10,000 German soldiers." (p. 33). He was not so lucky on his first day in Saigon, where he was assigned as CIA deputy chief of station in February, 1959. Cambodian troops had arrested Cambodian General Dap Chhuon just days after he had been visited by Ed Lansdale and senior U.S. Pacific Theater Commanders who "were traveling on a survey of United States military assistance programs and stopped in Cambodia." (p. 67). Among the items captured by the Cambodian troops on February 21, 1959 was "a CIA radio and its agency operator, Victor M. Matsui." (p. 68). Colby had to explain to the Cambodians what Matsui had been doing there. Richard M. Bissell had ordered some communication with the plotters because "Bissell had wanted to know about Cambodian events as the plot unfolded, perhaps to see how these things worked" (p. 68) purely as a means of gathering intelligence, but Norodom Sihanouk (with Wilfred Burchett) published a book in 1974, MY WAR WITH THE CIA, that bitterly complained, "The CIA was in the forefront (except, when it suited their purposes, to remain concealed) of every plot directed against my life and my country's integrity." (p. 68, see Chapter 6, n. 1, p. 350).

In Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, the links that tied CIA activities in those countries to Bill Colby were so similar in nature that one of the few jokes in the book tying them all together came from Army Colonel Charles Wilson, at Pleiku in 1964, who `described the Ho Chi Minh Trail as the "Averell Harriman Memorial Highway," which must have tickled Colby, who had to deal with Harriman during the Laotian negotiations at Geneva.' (p. 133). Considering that Woodrow Wilson and Bill Colby both attended Princeton, an amazing coincidence is how often each of them disagreed with a Henry Cabot Lodge. The Lodge who became an ambassador to South Vietnam in 1962 was the Junior of the two, but he still had a mind of his own.

Buddhists were expected to be the kind of people who would cause little trouble for either side, but just having demonstrations created a weird scene in which `Madame Nhu spoke sarcastically about bonze "barbeques," while Nhu himself demanded a hard line, resisting concessions.' (p. 110). In Vietnam, the French "had created an indigenous elite using Catholicism as a means of ascription." (p. 111). 70 percent of Vietnamese generals were raised as Catholics and "an additional 16 percent of Vietnamese generals converted to Catholicism after Diem's rise to power. Nguyen Van Thieu stood among them. Most telling of all, only four Vietnamese generals would admit to being Buddhists, out of a cohort of almost a hundred." (p. 110). By early 1965 the CIA was seeking "extension of covert support to key Buddhist leaders." (p. 145). Nguyen Khanh, "himself a Buddhist" (p. 142), who had been a Viet Minh in the August Revolution of 1945, (p. 177) became the South Vietnamese leader in 1964, while Henry Cabot Lodge was Ambassador, but Maxwell Taylor took over as Ambassador in the summer of 1964. (p. 142). On August 25, 1964, a CIA cable to Colby complained that Khanh "has in effect put his government entirely in the hands of Tri Quang." (p. 142). In January, 1965, Colby went to Vietnam with McGeorge Bundy on a trip that included an incident in Pleiku "that killed many Americans in their barracks." (p. 145). "Another feature of Mac's Vietnam trip would be a meeting with the Buddhist Tri Quang. He emerged bewildered." (p. 145). Great!