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John Prados

Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby Hardcover – March 6, 2003

by John Prados (Author)

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From his years as America's point man in Vietnam to his mysterious death in 1996, William E. Colby was one of the most enigmatic figures of the Cold War. Whether it was in CIA operations against Russia, anti-Communism in Western Europe, covert action in Southeast Asia, or its involvement in
the Watergate affair, Colby stood at the center of the agency's secret activities.
Lost Crusader for the first time uncovers the real story of this master spy, from his beginnings in the OSS to his tumultuous years as Director of Central Intelligence in the 1970s. Reviled by many outside the CIA for his role in Vietnam, he was later cast as a scapegoat by the Nixon White House
during the Church and Pike congressional investigations of CIA activities.
Based on extensive research and interviews with key participants, John Prados offers new revelations on the CIA in Western Europe and elsewhere: a fresh analysis of the notorious Phoenix program in Vietnam, and the most authoritative account of agency involvement in the bloody Indonesian coup
of 1965 that overthrew Sukarno and brought General Suharto to power. Moreover, Prados has uncovered new evidence on the CIA's role in the 1963 assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam and also furnishes the first account of the action at the top level of the CIA during the final
demise of South Vietnam in 1975.
A masterful study of a master spy, Lost Crusader offers vital insight into the Cold War, Vietnam, and the inner workings of the CIA.

Print length

416 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Oxford University Press
Publication date

March 6, 2003
Dimensions

9.63 x 1.25 x 6.38 inches
ISBN-10

0195128478
ISBN-13

978-0195128475
Lexile measure

1360L
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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

Review

"By portraying William Colby's life in all its nuances, Lost Crusader makes an important contribution to intelligence literature."--Washington Post Book World

"Conspiracy buffs will find that his account of Colby's suspicious death in 1996 offers plenty of intiguing possibilities."--Kirkus Reviews

"A deeply researched and well-written account of Colby's career.... This first book-length study of Colby's career should stand the test of time as a high-quality contribution."--Library Journal

"Well-researched.... His life of Colby 'is a parable for today, when the CIA and U.S. intelligence in general again stand in need of visionary leadership.'"--Steve Weinberg, Denver Post

"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."--Booklist

"This highly detailed look at one of the major spymasters of the post-WWII era is another intriguing work by the prolific Prados.... 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."--Publishers Weekly

"John Prados's biography of legendary Cold War spymaster William Colby is a formidable achievement by a wonderfully accessible historian. Through the prism of Colby's controversial CIA career, Prados has written a gripping and revealing new history of our intelligence Establishment. In the wake of
the 9/11 tragedy, as Congress begins to investigate yet another intelligence failure, Lost Crusader is a timely reminder of the importance of knowing our hidden history."--Kai Bird, author of The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy & William Bundy, Brothers in Arms and The Chairman: John J. McCloy & The
Making of the American Establishment

"John Prados, in a meticulously researched biography of William Colby, has also produced an insightful history of the CIA--in Vietnam and in Washington corridors of power. This is a book that delivers far more than the life of a secret man."--Thomas B. Allen, co-author of Spy Book: The Encyclopedia
of Espionage

"John Prados does a better job of explaining and defending William Colby than the controversial director of the CIA did for himself in his own memoirs. Colby was a classic old boy--schooled in secret intelligence during the Second World War, quick to rejoin the CIA when it was gearing up to fight
the Cold War, a true believer during America's disastrous adventure in Vietnam. But Colby also became the CIA's first champion of openness and he helped save the agency from itself during the scandals of the 1970s. Nobody knows this history better than Prados; in Lost Crusader he has written a
lively narrative that is a fine one-volume introduction to the history of American intelligence." --Thomas Powers, author of The Man Who Kept the Secrets

About the Author

John Prados is a senior researcher at the National Security Archive in Washington. He is one of America's leading historians of intelligence and espionage, and the author of ten other books, including Presidents' Secret Wars and Combined Fleet Decoded. He holds a Ph.D. in international relations
from Columbia University.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press (March 6, 2003)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0195128478
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0195128475
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1360L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.68 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.63 x 1.25 x 6.38 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,142,904 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #991 in Vietnam War Biographies (Books)
- #2,249 in Political Intelligence
- #2,301 in Vietnam War History (Books)

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jim

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 2015

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Merle L. Pribbenow

Polemic in the Guise of Biography

Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2003

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.

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pulling cheek swirl better shake up

History now, not current events

Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2003

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!

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Richard J. Gibson

Details Overwhelm Synthesis

Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2010

In a notably detailed book, so detailed that the average reader will probably skip 1/5 of the pages, it is disturbing that Prados was so bent over by balance, or imbalance, that he was unable to recognize in this presentation that Colby got nearly every important thing he did wrong, that tens of thousand of people died because of his devotional stupidity, that he cost the American people billions of dollars of treasure in failed adventures, and he was so un-self-conscious, so unaware of the world unraveling around him, he never knew what was up or how he might have actually dealt with it.

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Top reviews from other countries

William Podmore

Useful study of CIA crimes

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 15, 2014

Verified Purchase

In this fascinating book, author John Prados exposes many of the crimes committed by the CIA in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The CIA gave the Indonesian army lists of names, just as it had given lists of names to the Guatemalan army for its 1954 coup – list A, those to be killed, list B, those to be imprisoned. Again, in Vietnam, it created lists of civilian members of the liberation movement who were to be killed under the Phoenix programme.

He mentions ‘the early 1950s paramilitary project in Albania’, which was secret, but unfortunately gives us no more information.

He notes the CIA-MI6 ‘abortive attempt that same year [1970] to assassinate Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi.’ The CIA colluded with gangsters to kill Castro. Henry Kissinger admitted, “Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro.”

The CIA tried to quash the publication of books on the CIA. For example, “The CIA apparently made plans to buy up the entire print run of the McCoy book [The politics of heroin in Southeast Asia, which exposed the CIA role in drug trafficking].”

It was illegal for the CIA to act in the USA, yet the CIA’s own list of its illegal activities included its “mail-opening program, surveillance of Americans within the United States, CIA infiltrations of political groups opposed to the Vietnam war, telephone wiretaps of American journalists, drug experiments on Americans, connections with organized crime (in particular during efforts to plan for the assassination of Cuban leader Fidel Castro), break-ins in American homes and offices, participation in the Nixon administration planning for an integrated approach by police and intelligence agencies and the Internal Revenue Service to combat antiwar opposition (the ‘Huston’ plan, named after a White House aide), and other questionable projects.”

As Seymour Hersh revealed in the New York Times of 22 December 1974, “the CIA had carried out ‘dozens’ of illegal activities; among these were wiretapping, break-ins, surreptitious inspection of mail, maintaining ‘at least’ 10,000 files on Americans, photographing and following participants at demonstrations, and creation of a network to penetrate the antiwar movement.”

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