CONVERSATION with a COLD WARRIOR

CONVERSATION with a COLD WARRIOR

["AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," program introduction.]

IRA SHORR: When it comes to challenging the military, it's always more powerful when the critique comes from those whose careers were shaped by the national security state. In the early 1900s, Major General Smedley Butler, reflecting on his 33 years in the Marines, said he regretted fighting in Central America because it was "for the benefit of Wall Street."

Perhaps no military leader was more eloquent in dissent than President Dwight Eisenhower. Elected to office as a military hero, Eisenhower took the occasion of his farewell address to warn the nation about its own military bureaucracy. Today, Robert McNamara, secretary of defense in the 1960s and an architect of the Vietnam War, has written a book on Vietnam condemning his own actions and America's political establishment for not avoiding the war in the first place.

And William Colby, a former director of the CIA in the 1970s, now criticizes the US military establishment for continuing to fight the Cold War and wasting billions of dollars on unneeded weapons and excessive forces. Bill Colby's military career was forged in the fire of World War II as a paratrooper for the OSS, the secret intelligence agency that later evolved into the CIA.

He went on to fight on the front lines of the Cold War as a top CIA operative in Vietnam. And from 1973 through 1975, William Colby headed the CIA. But in the early 1980s, his stand on military issues put him at odds with the status quo. Colby became, as he said, "an unabashed supporter of the nuclear weapons freeze," an attempt to halt the nuclear arms race between the United States and Soviet Union at a time when nuclear weapons were being amassed at unprecedented levels.

Today, when the political debate centers on how much to raise the military budget, William Colby favors a significant reduction in US military spending. To learn more about the experiences of this cold warrior and what they can teach us about future security challenges facing our nation and the world, we spoke to William Colby at his home in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C.

Mr. SHORR: While you were director of the CIA between 1973 and 1976, your intelligence career really started during World War II. You were a member of the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services. And as such, you participated in commando missions behind enemy lines. My understanding is you parachuted into Norway and France when it was occupied by the Germans.

Was there a particular mission that stands out for you where you thought maybe I won't make it home because of this or was that kind of danger the norm?

Mr. COLBY: Well, my drop into France proved to be a disaster because it was about 25, 30 miles away from where I was supposed to be. I managed to escape the place there with my two friends, two French officers with me. And we eventually made our contact with our resistance groups that we were supposed to go to work with.

When I went into Norway, we first sent eight planes to drop our 30-odd people. It was a long ride up into the north of Norway from Scotland and only four of them dropped on point. Luckily, I was one of them, and so I was there. But we lost two planes later, had two crashes, unfortunately. So, there a few chances you take.

Mr. SHORR: And what was the kind of missions that you were involved in? What were you --

Mr. COLBY: Well, the first mission was to organize, arm, lead, be a liaison, be a reporter on resistance forces out to harass the Germans as much as possible as the armies moved forward, as our armies moved forward to give the Germans as much trouble in the back as they could. And that meant ambushes on the road, blowing up bridges, that sort of thing. That you'd bring in the equipment for them in more parachutings, stuff like that.

Then in Norway, my mission was to lead a group of Norwegian Americans, mostly, to go up there and attack a rail line which ran from north Norway to -- on down to the south. The Germans were moving a large number of troops that had been stuck in northern Finland down through that rail line. And the idea was to delay that movement as long as possible to keep those troops from reaching Germany in time to fight our forces in Germany. So, we blew the railroad a couple of times. I don't think we changed the course of the war very much.

Mr. SHORR: How did your experiences in World War II shape your beliefs about national security issues?

Mr. COLBY: Well, of course, we were engaged in a great crusade then against a terrible enemy, Mr. Hitler and all he represented, the Nazism. And you saw it very clearly in the spirit of the Norwegians and the spirit of the Frenchmen with which I worked, the frustration of being under a hostile command and the brutality of the Nazi regime. So, it was very satisfying to fight against that kind of brutality and have it come out alright. And, of course, when the Cold War came along, Stalin represented the same kind of a threat to the world in his totalitarian approach to the world.

One of the more interesting chores I had was to engage in the political fight in Italy in the 1950s, when we were concerned that Italy might turn into a communist country by the votes of its people, because the communists developed a very substantial political apparatus there, supporting trade unions --communist trade unions, communist farmers groups, communist party, communist publications. And we had to help the democratic forces -- not the right wing, but the democratic forces -- to have that kind of capability to meet that political challenge. So, that was a fascinating problem in how you do that and how you strengthen people to fight for freedom. Maybe not physically fight, as it was during the war, but fight politically.

Mr. SHORR: But if the Italians had chosen by vote to become communist, isn't that what democracy is about?

Mr. COLBY: Oh, yes, and that was the threat. But the question was would they have done it on their own or would they have done it because of the enormous amount of subvention came from the Soviet Union.

Mr. SHORR: Your earlier experience with the CIA, many of those experiences were in Vietnam. You ran an operation, "Operation Phoenix," in Vietnam that was designed to neutralize the Viet Cong presence in South Vietnam. And it's been reported that some 20,000 Vietnamese were killed during the course of that operation. And I have read that when you became director of the CIA in 1973, you talked about the excesses that were carried out as part of Operation Phoenix and you said that many innocent people were killed during the course of that operation because of excesses.

And it reminded me of a quote that Reverend William Sloane Coffin made on this program. Reverend Coffin perhaps is best known as -- in opposition to the Vietnam War, but he also served in the CIA in the early 1950s. And he said that he left the CIA because, and I quote, "that he was worried that the United States was arrogating to itself a right it would never accord to any other nation; namely, the right to decide who lives, who dies, and who rules in Third World countries."

Do you think that the United States, in its excesses, was doing that in Vietnam?

Mr. COLBY: With all due respect, that is utter nonsense. Let's face it. What was the struggle in Vietnam about? It was a struggle as to whether North Vietnam would take over South Vietnam. That's what it was all about. I got there on Tet of February 1959 on -- just when the communists now admit that they were afraid that South Vietnam was taking off, and they then started the second Indochina War against South Vietnam and its American friends.

Now that was what the war was about: The attempt -- And we saw how it ended. They did take South Vietnam. And they suppressed it and over a million people took off in leaky boats to get away from their regime. I'm the guy who advocated giving the people in the villages weapons to defend themselves against whoever, because I was confident they would use the weapons against the communists, and they did. And we gave out a half-a-million weapons. Not to the army, not to the police, but to the villagers and they would stand guard at night to protect their community.

Mr. SHORR: Robert McNamara recently has written a book, "The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam." And his reflections, he says that he thinks -- two basic points I think he made: That the war would have been avoided and it should have been halted much earlier than it was. And he references a CIA analysis in 1967 that had two basic points. One was that no amount of bombing would deter North Vietnam from its objective of winning the South. And two, a US withdrawal from Vietnam would not undermine the nation's overall security interests. In a sense, saying that the "domino theory" was not correct.

Were you aware of that CIA analysis at that time?

Mr. COLBY: I knew there was that thinking. I didn't know of that particular analysis. I was working at that time as the chief of the Far East Operations Division, not the analytical work, and I think that particular memorandum Mr. McNamara says went to the president alone. I don't know, but I know that was our line. Read the "Pentagon Papers." They very clearly indicate that CIA was doubtful about it.

At that time, I just disassociated myself from the bombing because I didn't -- couldn't contribute to it and I thought it was feckless, that it really didn't accomplish much. I was thrust -- My thrust was that the way to win a people's war is to get the people on your side. And that's why all the programs I was associated with were directed at getting the people to participate in the struggle, and not soldiers.

And I think if we made a serious mistake in Vietnam, first, we overthrew the president of South Vietnam in a fit of impatience with him because he wasn't sufficiently democratic or something. And that was -- that decision of our assistance to his overthrow was made in the White House, no question about it. And I was in the arguments and I was arguing against it at the time.

Mr. SHORR: Controversies about the CIA continue to this day. There are recent reports that have come out in 1995 now about CIA involvement in Guatemala, that a CIA-paid informer in the Guatemalan military was involved in the murder of an American citizen and a Guatemalan citizen who was married to an American. And Representative Robert Torricelli, who's on the House Intelligence Committee, was quoted as saying, "The direct involvement of the CIA in the murder of these individuals leads me to the extraordinary conclusion that the agency is simply out of control."

Do you think that that's true?

Mr. COLBY: Again, that's nonsense. The agency is not out of control. We had a year-long investigation into the agency in 1975 when I was there. Senator Church wondered whether it was a rogue elephant out of control. He signed the final report of that committee, which said the CIA was not out of control, it was too much under the control of our presidents and the Congress hadn't done its proper job of supervising it.

And that's when we started the whole procedure of having congressional committees to supervise, to perform the constitutional role of the Congress in the separation of powers concept, applying it to intelligence. It'd never been done anywhere in the world before, but we Americans led that process and now it's being copied in many other countries, the same technique of parliamentary review.

When you're trying to find out what's happening among a bunch of hoods, you better get a hood to tell you. And that's the way you penetrate into a terrorist group, you deal with a terrorist. Into the Mafia, you deal with mafias -- mafiosi. With other kinds of very slovenly people, you have to deal with them in order to learn what they're doing and what they're planning. And if you want to think that you can send James Bond in to do it, it won't work, I guarantee you.

Mr. SHORR: So, a question has arisen though what is the CIA doing spending millions of dollars, paying Guatemalan military officers? What is it doing in Guatemala, a country that has no discernible national security concern for the United States now in 1995?

Mr. COLBY: Well, it certainly had a discernible security concern for the United States when the war in El Salvador was going on and the struggles in Nicaragua, and all the rest of it. But we were concerned about Castro's effort to spread the communist doctrine throughout Latin America. We fought him for years and all over Latin America.

Mr. SHORR: And sometimes supporting military dictatorships to do it.

Mr. COLBY: And sometimes supporting people who weren't very attractive, but it was whether Castro would take over Latin America. That was the strategic problem we faced, and he missed. And so, he then went off to Africa for awhile and he thought he could run that continent, and he missed there, too.

Mr. SHORR: But the CIA --

Mr. COLBY: Some of that was with CIA help.

Mr. SHORR: And still in Guatemala now, some say the CIA is still fighting the Cold War, for example.

Mr. COLBY: I have no idea what it's doing now, of course. I just am not privy to that sort of thing. But there's no question about it, that during the Cold War, which didn't end too long ago, there was a clear concern about communist penetration and in Guatemala, there was a concern about the character of the military, of the Guatemalan military.

Again, how are you going to find out what they're about unless you're going to deal with them? Because our country was concerned at the over-military -- the over-role of the Guatemalan military. Well, you have to learn about them, what they're doing.

Mr. SHORR: The concern with some is that not only are we learning what they're doing, but we're helping them do what they're doing. If we train them at the School of the Americas and we help them --

Mr. COLBY: Well, whatever the military did, that was all done openly, everybody knew about that. And if you didn't like it, well, you could object to it, and some people did, no question about it. On the CIA, if it did anything beyond hiring an informant, which is what this guy was -- if it did anything political, it had go through the business of getting the president's personal approval and it had to be briefed to the two committees of the Congress. Now all the active operations have been so done, there's no question about it, ever since that requirement was put in in 1974.

Mr. SHORR: Let me move to the issue of nuclear weapons. You were an unabashed supporter of the nuclear weapons freeze in the early 1980s. That was a time when the arms race was being propelled quite extensively by the Reagan administration and by the Soviet Union. There is a different environment, of course, now. Current US and Russian plans call for reducing nuclear stockpiles to about 3500 on each side, down from between 12- and 15,000, I believe.

Mr. COLBY: Well, that's the strategic intercontinental ones.

Mr. SHORR: Right.

Mr. COLBY: There were another 12- or 13,000 so-called little ones, the tactical.

Mr. SHORR: But the big strategic weapons down to 3500, do you think that's an adequate reduction or can we go further?

Mr. COLBY: It's totally inadequate. Three-thousand nuclear weapons? This is madness. Now I understand the need for deterrence, but how much will deter the use of the nuclear weapon? Maybe a hundred? That's plenty. A hundred, 200. Responsible people like General Goodpaster, others really think that this is possible, to get it down to that level.

Whether we'll ever eliminate them all, I'm not sure, because you do have to worry abut the rogue states and the secret efforts of the North Koreans, or the Iraqi, or something.

Mr. SHORR: Why do you think the United States and Russia are only talking about getting down to 3500 then and not --

Mr. COLBY: Because politically you have problems. There are people now that are questioning the reduction to 3500. The Congress hasn't ratified that particular agreement yet and there's some doubt in the present situation that they really will. And there's some doubt on the Russian side as to whether the Russians want to really ratify, whether the Duma wants to ratify that agreement.

Now here's a reduction that brought us from 12,000, roughly, to 8000, to 3000, and there's question about going down to 3000? Come on, let's be serious. These things are serious weapons. They're dangerous.

Mr. SHORR: Do you think the United States should make a unilateral move to go down lower and not --

Mr. COLBY: Well, obviously, you try to do it with them. I mean, there are reasons against it unilaterally. But President Carter when he was in office wrote a note to the Joint Chiefs of Staff saying if our purpose is deterrence -- which is the only purpose we have ever expressed as the reason for nuclear weapons -- then why do we need more than a few hundred?

And I've read the answer and it was all full of, 'well, it's a perception of power instead of real power,' and all that sort of thing, 'and we can't negotiate if we go down that far because they won't reply,' and so forth. But his question was very well taken. Why do we need more than a couple of hundred?

Mr. SHORR: There's also an effort now to revive a ballistic missile defense system, a national ballistic missile defense system, what was called "Star Wars" in the 1980s.

Mr. COLBY: Well, wisely, several Republican congressmen took that one out because of the absurdity. The thing never made any sense. I've debated it with various people, including General Abramson, the head of the SDI program, at one point, in front of the Air Force cadets at Colorado Springs.

It won't work because suppose you get 95 percent efficiency and there are a thousand? Only 50 bombs get through it? Come on, let's be serious.

It's outrageously expensive. The money can be spent much better on other kinds of problems, no doubt about it, and it adds to this bankrupt thing that we did during the 1980s. And it's as dangerous as anything and it takes us in the wrong direction. It's building forces rather than getting agreement to reduce them, which is what the real challenge of today's world is.

Mr. SHORR: Your background in the military and in the CIA is clearly not the resume of a dove and --

Mr. COLBY: I'm not a dove.

Mr. SHORR: And you're not a dove. It's interesting though that you have publicly called for now reducing the US military budget by as much as 50 percent over a five-year period. What gives you the belief that there can be those kinds of reductions?

Mr. COLBY: Because if you look at the Gulf War as probably the largest kind of problem we're going to be faced with for the near future, how many -- how much force did it take us to run that? How many carriers do we have, carrier task forces? At that point, we had 14; now we have 12. How many did we use in the Gulf? Six. How many do we need? Eight, seven, something like that.

Army divisions: How many did we have then? Sixteen. How many did we use in the Gulf? Seven. How many do we need? Eight or ten, something like that.

Mr. SHORR: And how many are being called for?

Mr. COLBY: In the present budget? About 12, I think, at the present. And, you know, you can go through that and the whole -- Then why in the world are we building more attack submarines? I know why: To give people jobs in Groton, Connecticut. But in a time when we have 50 of these attack submarines? Against what fleet? There isn't a fleet in the world to challenge us.

Mr. SHORR: You call them "Cold War relics," I think.

Mr. COLBY: Yes. The B-2 bomber is one of the most outrageous weapons developed. Why was it developed? The chief of staff of the Air Force testified it was to penetrate Soviet airspace after a nuclear exchange in order to clean up any more targets that might be there. After a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union, we're going to send a bomber in there to bomb something?

Now Secretary Aspin did the so-called "Bottom-Up Review," but you ask for a bureaucracy to review itself and it's going to come out with roughly what it's got. And that's what you saw happen in that situation, because they said, 'well, the conditions are we have to fight two regional wars simultaneously, no buildup period and no allies.' Well, you know, you frame the reference that way and I guarantee you you'll come up with a big force. But are any of those requirements really valid? No, I don't think so.

Mr. SHORR: The sense that we would have allies, we could work with allies.

Mr. COLBY: We, yes.

Mr. SHORR: That we wouldn't have to fight two wars at the same time.

Mr. COLBY: Yes. And that we can have a buildup period and all the rest of it.

Mr. SHORR: So that there are tremendous savings to be secured from the military budget.

Mr. COLBY: There are a lot of savings. Politically, you can't touch it nowadays, I understand it. The new Republicans don't want to touch it, except for some of them that are concerned about the budget, thank goodness, such as stopped the SDI from developing.

Mr. SHORR: Well, that's interesting, talking about the current debate. You have said that the US military is essentially a Cold War-level force; it's only been reduced marginally. And yet the current debate about military spending seems to be about how much the military budget has been cut.

Mr. COLBY: It has been cut. I think it's been cut roughly a third from the Cold War period.

Mr. SHORR: From the height of the Reagan buildup.

Mr. COLBY: Yes. Yes, it has been cut to that degree. But it's going to go up in the next five years; not down, up.

Mr. SHORR: It's ironic in the current budget debate, the military budget -- which is half of the discretionary budget, that amount of money that Congress has a say over what to spend

-- the military budget has been off the table in talks about budget reductions. And a lot of the talk in Congress, when you talk about domestic programs, a lot of the domestic programs are labeled as pork.

But I saw a recent Washington Post headline that says, "Porkbarrel Hitches Ride on the Pentagon Train." That is, a lot of those congressional representatives and senators, when it comes to job programs that are Pentagon-related, they feel fine about spending that money. But if it's high-speed rail or other domestic programs, they don't like those, they call those "pork." Why do you think there is a double standard? Like if we said let's build a high-speed rail system like European industrial countries have, you couldn't find many supporters in Congress to say, 'Oh, yes, we can get a lot of jobs, plus we can move people up and down the coast faster.'

Mr. COLBY: Well, those very people in Connecticut that are building that new submarine I think would probably produce a very good high-speed rail system. I think it's absurd that we're the only advanced country in the world that does not have one. The Japanese have one, the Italians have one, the Spanish have one, the French, the Germans, the Swedes; everybody has one but us.

Mr. SHORR: What do you think keeps the public out of this debate? Here you have a former director of the CIA that's saying, look, we can reduce military spending very significantly below --

Mr. COLBY: Politically, at this point, you would think the Democrats would be taking this position, and they can't because of the particular background of the president. And I understand that, that's the politics.

Mr. SHORR: Being seen as weak on defense, you mean?

Mr. COLBY: Well, yes, and the whole Vietnam -- ducking out of Vietnam, and several others of this generation did. I mean, he's not the only one, by a long shot. But the fact is that that inhibits a free, real look because the other side can immediately say, 'Oh, you're being too weak, you're soft, you're no good,' and that ends the discussion right there.

Mr. SHORR: And, in a sense, that's what happened during much of the Cold War, isn't it?

Mr. COLBY: Well, the Cold War, there was a real enemy. That wasn't false, that was real. I don't hold any apologies for the Cold War. I think we did it very well. And remember, we did it essentially without fighting. We had fights, minor fights around -- Korea, Vietnam, various others around the world, but we didn't ever get to the nuclear level, and we're very fortunate that we didn't.

I think we're lucky to have gotten through the last half-century without destroying half the world. We weren't talking about death and destruction. With the 25,000 nuclear warheads on each side, we were talking about the end of life on earth. And we've gotten through that successfully. Now that's the model.

Yes, you need some force as a potential backup. But, yes, you need to negotiate and you need to solve these problems ahead of us in some better way than by slaughtering each other.

Mr. SHORR: You've spent such a large part of your life fighting the Cold War, opposing the Soviet Union.

Mr. COLBY: And Hitler before that.

Mr. SHORR: And Hitler before that. Somebody said that when you were in Moscow in 1990 that you had your own way of sort of coming to terms with the end of the Cold War. Is that true, that you took a walk around Red Square at night?

Mr. COLBY: Yes. Yes.

Mr. SHORR: Can you describe that?

Mr. COLBY: One evening I finished dinner and I decided to take a walk. And there was still enough totalitarian control that it was safe to walk alone. Today, I don't think you could, but that -- that's what freedom has brought. But at that time, I took a walk all by myself.

I went up to Red Square, which is one of the most dramatic places in the world, with the big floodlights on the Kremlin, the big red flag at that point on the Council of Ministers building, Lenin's tomb, the St. Basil's at the far end, all this glorious sight around you. And to make it even better, a light snow was falling, so it was just as dramatic as you could. And I walked around for about 15, 20 minutes, and then I went over to the subway and worked my way through the Cyrillic and went back to my hotel.

And then it struck me. I had just engaged in my own personal victory parade. At that holy of holies of the communist empire, a former head of the CIA was able to walk around totally alone. I wasn't concerned for my safety. I don't think that anybody paid any attention to me. I'm professional enough to know they could have watched me from a distance, but I really don't think so. And if that ain't victory, I don't know what is.

Mr. SHORR: Mr. Colby, thank you very much.

Mr. COLBY: Thank you.

[End of broadcast.]

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