Colby’s Body Discovered on Riverbank

WASHINGTON —  The body of former CIA Director William E. Colby was found Monday on a marshy riverbank in southern Maryland after an eight-day search that began when his overturned canoe was discovered not far from his vacation home.

Police said that, in the absence of any signs of foul play, they believe Colby, 76, drowned in a boating accident. But his body was sent to Baltimore, where an autopsy will be conducted to determine the exact cause of death, officials said.

Colby’s wife, Sally Shelton-Colby, identified the body, which was lying face down along the Wicomico River near the point where it empties into the Potomac, about 40 miles south of Washington. The site is only a few hundred yards south of where his empty green fiberglass canoe was discovered on April 28.

Colby spent 30 years in the U.S. intelligence service, capped by a stint as CIA director during two of its most turbulent years in the mid-1970s. Confronted by charges that the agency had overstepped its bounds during the previous two decades by spying on domestic political dissidents, plotting overseas assassinations and committing other illegal acts, Colby directed an inquiry documenting the misdeeds.

Testifying before congressional committees more than 50 times in 1974 and 1975, he incurred the wrath of agency hard-liners who resented his openness and disclosure of secret operations. Many others, however, praised his candor.

President Clinton extended condolences Monday to Colby’s family, calling him “a dedicated public servant” who had played “a pivotal role in shaping our nation’s intelligence community.”

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“He made tough decisions when necessary,” Clinton said, “and he was always guided by the core values of the country he loved.”

John M. Deutch, the current CIA director, said Colby had “demonstrated great courage, determination and devotion to his country . . . to guide the agency through a difficult time.”

The trim, urbane Colby, who had practiced law since leaving government service in 1975, had last been seen by neighbors about 7:15 p.m. April 27 outside his modest weekend retreat at Rock Point, Md. His capsized canoe was discovered offshore the next morning. Inside the home, his computer and a radio were still on and his automobile was in the driveway.

Shelton-Colby, who was visiting her mother in Texas, said that she had spoken to her husband by phone earlier that evening and that he told her he was going canoeing, a pastime they often shared.

As police conducted their intensive search, his wife expressed confidence that he was alive and in the area, perhaps with a broken leg or other disabling injury. She noted that he was an accomplished boater and strong swimmer.

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For more than a week, state agencies and the U.S. Coast Guard used helicopters, dogs, divers, boats and sonar equipment to search and drag the many inlets and waterways in the area.

Leonard Sciukas, a police officer with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, spotted the body about 8 a.m. Monday from his boat. The shoeless body, face down, was attired in khaki pants, a red Windbreaker and a blue-and-white shirt. No life jacket or other items from his canoe were found with the body.

Lt. Mark Sanders, a police spokesman, said the former spymaster was likely alive when he fell into the water, got hypothermia from the cold temperature and drowned. “There is nothing unusual about this case,” he told reporters.

Sanders said the body apparently had been submerged for days, and a natural buildup of gas had brought it to the surface.

Shelton-Colby, an assistant administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development and former U.S. ambassador to Grenada and Barbados, tearfully told reporters that her husband had had a “magnificent life.”

“There was not much that was left undone for him,” she said. “He fought the fascists and he fought the communists and he lived to see democracy taking hold around the world.”

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Colby began his intelligence career during World War II, parachuting into France and Norway to fight the Nazis as a member of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency that was established in 1947.

During the Vietnam conflict in the 1960s, he headed a bloody CIA covert project known as Operation Phoenix that was aimed at pacifying the countryside and rooting out the Viet Cong, the Communist apparatus within South Vietnam.

According to an official report to Congress, an estimated 20,000 Viet Cong leaders were killed as a result of the Phoenix program, many at the hands of U.S. assassins.

But Colby, a devout Catholic who was active in the Boy Scouts, denied in later congressional testimony that assassination was a centerpiece of the program. He acknowledged that abuses had occurred, however.

After his appointment as CIA director in 1973, Colby became best known for his disclosures, under pressure from Congress, of two decades of CIA abuses in the post-World War II years that involved spying on and maintaining dossiers on U.S. dissidents and extremist organizations, as well as other hidden but illegal activities.

A lawyer by training, he presided over a massive internal investigation at the agency that documented other abuses, including the interception of U.S. citizens’ mail, overseas bribery and assassination plots aimed at Cuba’s Fidel Castro and other leaders, and the experimental drugging of unknowing CIA and Army employees, at least one of whom died.

Disputing the view of hard-liners who charged that he had betrayed his agency, Colby insisted that the CIA must be accountable to Congress and the American public.

Fired by President Ford in November 1975, Colby devoted his remaining years to private law practice and the cause of world nuclear disarmament.

Besides his wife, he is survived by a daughter and three sons from a previous marriage, one of whom, Carl Colby, lives in the Los Angeles area.