ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, April 30, 1996 TAG: 9604300110
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
Former CIA Director William Colby, who believed a spy should be ``so inconspicuous that he can never catch the waiter's eye in a restaurant,'' vanished with only one trace: his capsized green canoe.
The Coast Guard gave up looking for Colby at 5:30 p.m. Monday, declaring that after an intensive two-day search, there was ``no reasonable chance'' the former spymaster had survived an apparent drowning. Divers from the local Sheriff's Office were continuing an underwater search.
The search began late Sunday after a neighbor noticed a foundering canoe just offshore from Colby's waterfront vacation house in Newburg, Md., overlooking the Potomac River.
It appeared that Colby, 76, an avid canoeist, went out for a weekend paddle and never returned.
``We feel we've covered it pretty well, and he's just not out there,'' said spokesman Joe Dye of the Coast Guard's Portsmouth, Va., station.
Neighbors said the water was rough Saturday and not good for canoeing.
``I don't see why a man his age would be out there,'' said neighbor Joseph Hervey. ``If I went out there, it would be in a 16-to 20-foot boat - not a canoe.''
The Coast Guard and the Charles County sheriff agreed there was no evidence of foul play. And two decades after leaving the CIA, Colby's Cold War connections seem to provide no motive for anyone to wish him an unhappy ending.
Indeed, Colby's past had become so tame that he and former KGB adversary Gen. Oleg Kalugin recently portrayed themselves in a new interactive CD-ROM game, ``Spycraft: the Great Game.''
``We've got lots of former enemies,'' Colby said in an interview to promote the game. ``We fought a lot of them, and now we are allies.''
A trim, neat Princeton man often caricatured by his trademark pink-framed glasses, Colby directed the CIA's activities in Vietnam from 1959 through 1971 and served as America's top spy from 1973 to 1976.
A career agent, he survived the worst of his profession's perils: parachuting behind enemy lines into France in 1944 to help partisans fight Hitler; organizing anti-communist resistance in Eastern Europe and Italy after the war; recouping from his ouster as CIA chief to start a business career.
Saturday, he spoke by phone to his wife, Sally Shelton-Colby, who was traveling in Texas. He said he planned a short trip on the narrow tidal inlet outside their back door. Sunday afternoon, a worried neighbor called police. They found the Colbys' door unlocked, a radio playing, dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, and work papers spread around a glowing computer screen.
Police divers searched unsuccessfully until around midnight Sunday, then resumed their search Monday. ``We've found no debris, no paddle, nothing but the canoe,'' Coast Guard spokesman Dye said.
Dye said Colby's wife told investigators her husband always wore a life preserver when he went to sea.
Colby earned respect from lawmakers and reporters - and contempt from much of the intelligence community - by ending a long tradition of keeping Congress in the dark when it came to the CIA's spying.
Instead, Colby, a Catholic born in St. Paul, Minn., readily confessed his own and his agency's sins to Congress. He admitted Nixon administration efforts to topple Chile's leftist leader, Salvador Allende. He admitted that there had been ``some illegal killing'' in a campaign he directed in South Vietnam that left 20,587 ``suspected'' Viet Cong infiltrators dead.
As CIA director, Colby ordered underlings to confess any wrongdoing from prior administrations. Their disclosures - including assassination plots against Cuba's Fidel Castro and other leftist leaders; illegal domestic wiretaps; hidden caches of poison to kill foes; possible past perjury by top officials; and an extensive illegal domestic spying operation against the antiwar movement - ended Congress' trusting attitude toward U.S. intelligence gathering.
Then-President Ford ousted Colby.
``Colby was handed more problems than anyone could handle, and he did as well as anyone could,'' John Prados, an intelligence historian, said Monday.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
LENGTH: Medium: 80 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshot) Colby/1973. color.by CNB