AN INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM COLBY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00418R000100110018-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 11
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 23, 2012
• Sequence Number: 18
• Publication Date: August 19, 1975
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
STAT
These sensational allegations certainly have hurt us.
OFFICES IN: NEW YORK ? LOS ANGELES ? CHICAGO ? DETROIT ? AND OTHER PRINCIPAL CITIES
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PROGRAM Evening Edition STATION WETA TV
PBS Network
DATE August 19, 1975 7:30 PM CITY Washington, D.C.
An Interview With William Colby
MARTIN AGRONSKY: The Director of the Central Intelligence
Agency says that American intelligence has been placed in danger by
exaggerated charges of improper conduct. Critics of CIA, of covert
operations at home and abroad are concerned that American intelli-
gence agencies have placed American constitutional guarantees in
danger through abuses of their mandate. And the question is whether
this kind of conflict can ever be reconciled in a democratic society.
Tonight on Evening Edition a discussion of the CIA with
its Director, William Colby, and with Nicholas U-a-r (?) of the
New York Times. f/clutoC_k
Mr. Colby, let's begin at the beginning in the sense of
your feeling that the operations of the agency have been damaged.
The Secretary of State said a few days ago, in fact, that if we're
to be vigilant against Communist encroachment, we must stop dis-
mantling or demoralizing our intelligence services. Do you share
that feeling?
WILLIAM COLBY: Well, I think it's very important to
the protection of the country and of the Constitution that we
have a good intelligence service. I think that the world we live
in demands it. And so, consequently, I think it behooves all of
us Americans to be concerned about keeping this capability.
I think we in America has developed the best intelli-
gence in the world, thanks to American inventiveness in the
technological field and American dedication and resourcefulness
in the operators and American intelligence analysts in the ways
of putting it together.
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They've spread our name around the world with various indications
of opprobrium. They've cast doubt upon our ability to keep secrets
as Americans. The sensational quality of them, I think, has misled
people into thinking that these various individual events are
characteristic of intelligence, when really they were very unchar-
acteristic of it.
I think the various investigations will show that certainly
some things happened that we Americans wish didn't happen. But in
a large institution over 28 years, I think you're going to find a
few things that you wish hadn't happened. We're resolved not to
have them happen again, and we're conducting ourselves so that they
won't.
NICHOLAS HARAK: Mr. Colby, you've said this several times
in testimony, taken that position, and it is a clear one. But can
you give us one example, can you tell us, let's say, the British
Secret Service has called you privately and said, "We don't want to
do business"? Can you give us one example of an American firm who's
said, "Sorry. You're embarrassing to us"?
COLBY: Well, I can give you examples of -- there are a
number of foreigners who've spoken to me personally, expressed
great concern as to whether we're going to be able to keep the
secrets they give us, or even the secrecy of the relationship between
us and their intelligence service. I obviously am not going to give
the name of those foreigners or the services. But we have had
individual foreigners abroad who have quite frankly told us that
they no longer dare to work for us, 'cause they're afraid that
they're going to be exposed.
HARAK: Isn't it more important, though, that for the
American people's purpose that they can sort out whether you're
doing a legitimate job or whether you're not doing a legitimate
job? Maybe we could afford to lose a few of these agents. Have
you calculated that risk yet?
COLBY: Well, I don't think you can afford to lose agents,
because if you develop a reputation for casting off agents of that
nature, you really won't be able to get very many new ones. The
relationship with an agent is a very personal and human relation-
ship which depends upon mutual confidence and trust. And if they
feel that you are just using them and not fulfill the obligation
you take for them -- toward them, why, they won't work for you
ever.
I think that the business of reassuring the American
people as to that the CIA is going to operate within the Consti-
tution and within the laws of our country -- yes, that has to be
done, and I've been trying to do that, and I think we can succeed
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AGRONSKY: Well, that's what I would really like to take
a look at. Harry Truman brought the CIA into being in 1947, I
think it was,...
COLBY: Right.
AGRONSKY: ...as succeeding to the Office of Strategic
Services, the OSS. And in 1962, Mr. Truman, in conversations
with Merrill Miller, made this observation about the CIA, which
I kind of think -- curiously, this was in '62, which was what
now? -- 13 years ago, and it reflects almost a prophetic quality
in Mr. Truman, looking at the agency then. And he said this:
"These fellows in the CIA don't just report on wars and the like.
They go out and make their own, and there is nobody to keep track
of what they're up to. They spend billions of dollars on stirring
up trouble so they'll have something to report on. They become
a government" -- and this is what is significant, Mr. Colby --
"they become a government all its own and all secret, and they
don't have to account to anybody. That's a very dangerous thing,"
Mr. Truman concluded," in a democratic society."
And really, that's what it's all about. Huh?
COLBY: Well, I have the greatest respect for President
Truman. In fact, I pushed doorbells for him in 1948.
Did you?
COLBY: He's a great man. He knew what CIA was about.
He knew that it had not only an intelligence mission, but also an
operational mission, while he was President. Why he said those
remarks in 1962, I just don't know. Quite frankly, the controls
may have improved since his time, in the terms -- there were
various steps taken during the '50s and during the '60s to increase
the degree of control over CIA's operational activity.
And so I think Mr. Truman, with all due respect, may have
been a bit out of date in that set of remarks. I think CIA does
not operate as a government to itself. It is responsive to the
Executive and it's been responsive to the Congress. To''the degree
the Congress has wanted to know about CIA, it's been informed.
AGRONSKY: But you know, Mr. Colby, the concern has been
that it is perhaps too responsive, for example, to the Executive,
both in terms of domestic and foreign operations. And that's where
the rub is.
COLBY: Well, I...
AGRONSKY: Granted you must operated secretly. I mean
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it's silly to talk about an intelligence agency that is not a
secret intelligence agency. But what is raised there is the con-
cern about accountability. And many of us feel still that that
accountability is inadequate.
COLBY: Well, of course, as I believe one of the editorials
said about CIA's role in the Watergate, it was the agency in town
that said no. The fact...
AGRONSKY: [Unintelligible] no.
COLBY: Well, it said no. It made a few missteps, very
minor, and then it said no...
HARAK: ...part of the record is destroyed is on Watergate.
We don't know Mr. Helms' conversations with the President; we don't
know if he said no, because he burned his tapes.
COLBY: Well, we do know what CIA did, though. It gave
Mr. Hunt the wig and a few of those devices. And then when it went
on further, the CIA employees themselves were the ones who said,
"This looks like this is getting into some domestic activity, and
it's not our business." And the relationship was turned off.
AGRONSKY: May I remind you of...
COLBY: We did also do...
AGRONSKY: ...the Huston Plan.
COLBY: Well, the Huston Plan: We participated in a
government-wide discussion in which CIA's contribution was to con-
tribute foreign intelligence to a government-wide concern about
what was going on. The FBI, the NSA, and the DIA were all part
of that plan.
AGRONSKY: And only J. Edgar Hoover, in the end, refused
to participate, to the extent that they had to drop the plan.
Otherwise, there would have come into being in this country a
secret police.
COLBY: No, I don't think so. CIA's contribution was
to provide foreign intelligence to a national problem, and we'do
that every day in the National Security Council and others.
HARAK: Well, we've -- in 1973, when you learned about
it, there's area in here -- when you talk about responsiveness
to the system and your worry -- or, your willingness to go for
an oversight -- in May you get a report which has all of the
factors in there that come out in the Rockefeller Commission
Report, all of the violations; yet you did not take them to the
Department of Justice, if my understanding is correct. Is that...
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COLBY: That's right.
HARAK: And they did not go to the President. You decided,
I take it, to try to correct them on your own, intenally. Do you
think other government officials would have done that, or wouldn't
they have gone and taken what may be an apparent crime and ask the
Department of Justice to rule as to whether there should be a
criminal prosecution?
COLBY: Well, there are two things to that. When we
gathered together these set of events in our past, over the past
20-odd years, we looked at them and we decided we would not repeat
them, and I issued various directives about not repeating them.
And some of those directives have been declassified and are in the
public domain. Some of them are still classified.
The question of informing someone: Yes, we did decide --
Mr. Schlesinger and I decided that we should inform the chairmen
of our oversight committees, and they were acting chairmen at part
of it, and so we informed those two chairmen.
HARAK: What did you expect them to do, though?
COLBY: We wanted them to know about this and we wanted
them to have our assurance that it would not happen again.
HARAK: But you had violations...
COLBY: And I was facing a confirmation hearing very
shortly, and I wanted that clearly in the past, in the past, and
not worry about it in the future.
Now, I frankly did not conceive that there were matters
in there for which people could be sent to jail. Now, there are
some questions in there which are improper; there's no question
about that. There are things that are outside of CIA's charter
and there are some things that are really on the far edge of the
law, unless you can figure out some justification.
But again, on that question, I did not see, and I still
do not see, anything in those that would lead to the actual con-
viction before a jury of one of our people.
HARAK:
the strong
of pieces of
criminally. And
Attorney General
wrong."
You had mail-opening in there. Now
that
,
suspicion that you've illegally opened thousand
s
mail, and the men who did it may very well be liable
it seems that you might want something from the
saying, "Yes, you're right," or, "No, you're
Well, the fact was...
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AGRONSKY: The Attorney General is examining that now
and has yet to make a determination on it, as you know,...
COLBY: That's right.
AGRONSKY: ...because there is no -- there is no certainty
at all that he will not find there were illegal acts committed and
will not call for prosecution. And I'd like to ask -- to follow
Nick up on that: There was an agreement up front that applied for
many, many years -- I don't know how many, and nobody's every deter-
mined -- that the Department of Justice would not prosecute any CIA
agent for illegal acts committed domestically in pursuit of intelli-
gence objectives, whatever it may have been.
COLBY: No, no, no.
AGRONSKY: Now, has that ended?
COLBY: That's not what it was. What it was was an under-
standing in 1954 that when CIA had a problem which involved a vio-
lation of law, but in order to prosecute he would have to reveal
some intelligence sources and methods and the details of operations,
that under that understanding in 1954, the arrangement was that CIA
could make the determination that it would not be in the national
interest to reveal those facts, and therefore no prosecution.
Now, that particular..
AGRONSKY: Will you be annoyed with me if I say that that
determination by the CIA would be incredible if the CIA would make
a determination against itself?
COLBY: Oh, that's not so, because we did, _and over the
20-odd years, we, I believe, sent something like 20 cases on to
the Department of Justice and withheld about 9.
And what happened?
COLBY: Some of those were either prosecuted or some
other arrangements was made about them.
Now, the other thing, however, is that we have in a number
of case.s.gone to the Department of Justice with cases and urged them
not to prosecute, because of the revelation of sources and methods.
Now, that's the case that occurred in Chicago, for example, where a
man was arrested there, and in order to prosecute it, he said he
would use the defense of CIA. And we said this i, not so. We
described the facts to the Department. But we asked them not to
prosecute because we didn't want to reveal all the activities in a
foreign country that this man was involved in.
AGRONSKY: And do you still want to retain that authority?
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COLBY: That is not -- no, I don't have that authority.
This came up in last December, and I was talking to the acting
Attorney General, and I referred to this 1954 arrangement and I
said that I just wanted to test out his feeling about it. And
the acting Attorney General said no, he couldn't recognize that.
And I agreed with him. I didn't think it was quite right either.
And there...
COLBY: And that's ended, and we are under the same rules
as any other department, with respect to our authority. In other
words, we have the obligation to bring to the Department of Justice
attention any violation of the law. However, we still will urge
that in the interests of the United States and our intelligence
efforts thta some of these cases not be prosecuted. But the deci-
sion on that is a matter for the Attorney General and the Department
of Justice, not for my decision.
HARAK: Let me refer for a second to Frank Olson's case.
As you recall, he's the Army officer who died as a result of an LSD
poisoning -- a civilian, actually. Was any determination made on
that case? If that had happened in the Department of Interior,
let's say, I think that they would have gone to the Attorney General
just to be sure their ground was good and it was an accident, and
have it looked over. But the agency, presumably, did nothing out-
side of its own internal inspection.
COLBY: Well, the agency was discussing that case and the
events of it with the Department of the Army at that time, because
he was a Department of the Army civilian. We were working with the
Department of the Army on the projects that this was involved with.
There's no excuse for that case. It's a terrible tragedy,
and I've apologized for it and the President's apologized for it,
which is more important.
HARAK: [Unintelligible]. But we're in a system of laws,
and at the time, there was a serious question of how he died...
COLBY: ...could not exist again. If I had a suspicion
that there was a violation of law involved, I am obliged to go to
the Department of Justice.
HARAK: Well, It isn't it true, then, that agreement may
have covered more? Because that's not one of the nine cases, as
I understand it, that came.
COLBY: No, no.
HARAK: So that agreement, in a sense, really buffered
you away from a commitment to go to the AG over the years.
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COLBY: Well, that's exactly what it said, yes.
HARAK: In a lot of other ways.
COLBY: Well, there was a clear understanding that we
didn't have to go, yes.
HARAK: So there may be more than nine cases that had
criminal nature or questions of criminal...
COLBY: Not that I know of.
HARAK: Not that you know of directly.
COLBY: No.
AGRONSKY: Mr. Colby, I wonder if we could turn it around
this way: Clark Clifford said recently, "I know of no important
domestic function the CIA need have." Does that go too far?
COLBY: Yes, I think that goes too far. It depends on
what you mean by "domestic function." I agree with him in the
sense of a function aimed at the United States, but there are a
number of things we do in the United States that are very useful.
A lot of American citizens who share information about foreign
situations with their government through us on condition that we
keep their involvement secret. And we don't pay for this. We
just ask them, and if they agree to give us the information, we
say we'll protect it. But we do get some valuable information...
AGRONSKY: I can be more specific...
COLBY: And there are foreigners in America that have
information. There are thousands of foreigners that live in this
country with information on foreign situations. It's be silly to
go abroad and engage in some very dangerous activity in order to
get what you can get right here at home.
AGRONSKY: I didn't really have that in mind. I don't
think that Clifford did either. The point was that the CIA, by
law, is not supposed to get involved in internal security func-
tions.
COLBY: Oh, absolutely.
AGRONSKY: You would accept that
COLBY: I accept it, both barrels.
AGRONSKY: Now, you do know how the Rockefeller Report
revealed the extent and, I think improper, involvement of the CIA
in internal security functions.
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COLBY: I know what the Rockefeller Commission found in
its conclusions, that the vast majority of CIA's activities were
proper, but that there were some cases that it should not have
done.
AGRONSKY: Let me read to you from the Rockefeller Report.
It termed a whole series of activities, as it put it, I quote,
unlawful, improper, and summed it up in these words: "Operation
Chaos," which was the one that they addressed themselves to, "in-
cluded somewhere in the area of 13,000 files on subjects and
individuals, including approximately 7200 personality, or 201,
files, over 11,000 memoranda, reports, and letters from the FBI,
over 3000 disseminations of the FBI, almost 3500 memoranda for
internal use by Operation Chaos. In addition, the Chaos group
had generated or caused the generation of over 12,000 cables of
various types, as well as a handful of memoranda, to high-level
goverment officials." And on top of this mountain of material
was a computer system that contained an index of over 300,000 names
and organizations which, with few exceptions, were of United States
citizens and organizations apparently unconnected in any way with
espionage.
Now, that seems a massive operation in the area of internal
security that the commission itself categories as unlawful and
improper.
COLBY: I think if you'll read the conclusions on page
149, which I believe is the next page, you will see that the com-
mission concluded about this activity that the great majority of
the material collected was within CIA's proper authority.
AGRONSKY: And you still feel that?
COLBY: That's what the commission found. It also found
that in some areas we collected more material than we properly
should have and that this was improper. It also said that there
were three agents who were active in the United States improperly.
Now, I really find it hard to find that CIA was engaged
in a massive operation with three agents. It just doesn't stand
up, to me.
AGRONSKY: Well, I -- the commission may have found three
agents; it certainly took more than three agents to amass this
monumental...
COLBY: Well, I'm saying look at the conclusions rather
than the specific statements in some piece of the report...
AGRONSKY: A lot of people feel the conclusions are not
entirely right.
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COLBY: Well, that...
HARAK: Aren't there also areas -- for instance...
COLBY: ...feckless discussion, you know, about massive
or non-massive, but I guess we have to do it.
HARAK: Well, it may be an adjective that will be proven
someday. But there is something about the way they handled the
report, which may be corrected on the Hill, which -- you mentioned
the three, agents and that is all they established. But you were
uncomfortable when you noticed -- learned the insidious way --
for instance, 18 separate police departments, as I understand it,
had a direct relationship with the CIA, where you did training and
equipping them.
Is your understanding, as a veteran intelligence officer,
is that the function of the CIA? Wouldn't it been better if the
FBI had the inroads in those departments?
COLBY: Certainly, certainly. And that's the current
position and that's the way we're running that sort of activity
now. We give any -- any particular experience we develop through
our operations abroad can be made available to our government, the
other appropriate elements of our government. But under the
Holtzman Amendment in 1973, it said that we would not provide aid
through the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. We have
extended that so that we no longer provide any support to any
police system in the United States.
I think you have to look at what kind of support was
provided. We provided lessons in how you open a letter bomb,
how you identify terrorists who come from abroad, things of this
nature. We provided a lot of things that -- sure, we can do it
through the FBI, but I don't think we were engaged...
HARAK: Incidentally, I've always wondered why you did
it at all...
COLBY: I don't think we were engaged in any great con-
spiracy to...
HARAK: Well, it's 18 of the largest police departments
in the country. You spread them from coast to coast.
COLBY: Well, the reason we gave it...
AGRONSKY: That seems outside the jurisdiction of your
charter and your goal.
COLBY: It's not necessarily outside the jurisdiction.
We are not untouchables just because we're in CIA. If we have
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something that's useful to our country, I think, in general, we
ought to be able to provide it to the proper authorities of our
country.
HARAK: Weren't you also able to get a police record on
an average American without going through the FBI? In other words,
if you wanted to check on me...
COLBY: Well, we do investigate people for -- with a good
reason where we should do it. We investigate our applicants. We
investigate our contractors. We investigate people of this nature.
And in the course of it, yes, we go around and ask for some know-
ledge that might be in some local authority.
AGRONSKY: Mr. Colby, you're a professional in this
business and you know what the agency is trying to do. Do you
think, from your own experience now in running this opeation and
knowing what your goals are, that all the criticism, the investi-
gation, the concern about trespass on your authority -- not just
you; I mean the agency -- that the agency has perhaps been so
flawed by the criticism, by the investigation, that perhaps it
should be replaced by something else, it should be run by a dif-
ferent group? Do you think that the damage has been that extensive?
COLBY: Well, I think that the American people and govern-
ment need a good intelligence service. I think they have one. They
have one that's made mistakes. I really don't think changing names
or engaging in cosmetics would convince one, and our friends in the
press would very rapidly penetrate that.
I really have -- I have no objection to the fact of our
accountability. I think government officials should be account-
able to our constitutional authorities. I believe government
officials should be accountable to our people. So, I can't object
to the accountability. I think it's gotten a little out of hand
from time to time in the sensational quality -- the business of
infiltrating the White House and so forth.
AGRONSKY: Well, I wish we could dig into it a bit further.
Thank you very much. Thank you, Nick. Good night for Evening
Edition.
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