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William Colby | |
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| Born | January 4, 1920 Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States |
| Died | May 6, 1996 Rock Point, Maryland, United States |
| Nationality | Statesian |
| Political orientation | Imperialism |
William Egan Colby (January 4, 1920 – May 6, 1996) was the Director of the CIA from 1973 to 1976. He died mysteriously in 1996 after revealing many of the CIA's crimes to the public.[1]
Early life
Colby attended Princeton University and parachuted behind Nazi lines as part of the OSS during the Second World War.[1]
War crimes
In the late 1960s, Colby was the head of the Phoenix Program, which killed at least 40,000 Vietnamese civilians. He oversaw the secret CIA war in Laos.[1]
Confessions
In December 1974, Colby told the Justice Department that the three-year imprisonment of KGB defector Yuri Nosenko may have violated U.S. kidnapping laws. He also exposed illegal CIA spying on journalists and Victor Marchetti, a former CIA operative. He admitted that earlier CIA leader Richard Helms lied to Congress about the CIA's role in the 1973 Chilean coup d'état.[1]
At Church Committee hearings in 1975, Colby admitted that the CIA spied on U.S. citizens through their telephones and mail and that it experimented on humans with LSD.[1]
In July 1991, Colby co-wrote an article in The Washington Post that exposed President Bush's lies about Iraqi chemical weapons.[1]
Death
On April 27, 1996, Colby was working on his boat Eagle Wind II on the coast of Cobb Island. He returned home at 7:00 p.m and was seen in his garden at 7:15 p.m. but disappeared halfway through eating his dinner.[1]
Colby's body was found in the water nine days later, about 40 meters from his sand-filled canoe. Medical examiners determined that he died between 8:45 and 10:00 p.m. Searchers found many life jackets, but none matched Colby's.[1]