INTELLIGENCE: The CIA: Time to Come In From the Cold

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does try to subvert or overthrow unfriendly governments—as in the Congo (now Zaire) in 1963 and Ghana in 1966. In Mexico, authorities uncovered a KGB-sponsored guerrilla group in 1971. Just last week officials in Belgrade disclosed an unsuccessful Soviet attempt to set up a pro-Moscow underground party in Yugoslavia. Moreover, the KGB's Disinformation Department tries to sow suspicion abroad by circulating false rumors and forged documents. A case in point: the KGB campaign now going on to convince Indians that American exchange scholars and Peace Corps volunteers are actually CIA agents.

Communist China's equivalent of the CIA and KGB is so secret that the Chinese are believed not to even have a name for it. Among Western Sinologists, it is known as the Chinese Intelligence Service and is believed to be part of the foreign ministry's information department. The service's primary job is to sift intelligence data from members of Chinese embassies and overseas news correspondents, who act as secret agents. The Chinese Communist Party, however, does funnel funds to revolutionary groups abroad, particularly in Asia and Africa. From time to time, Chinese covert operations also have failed spectacularly. In 1965, Indonesia reacted to China's attempt to sponsor a revolution in the archipelago by butchering tens of thousands of Communists.

Phoenix Program. Few men understand better these clashes of anonymous armies on darkling plains or are more practiced in the covert arts than the CIA's William Colby, who has spent most of his adult years in the world of spies. Son of a career Army colonel, he is a Princeton graduate who worked for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. In 1943 he parachuted into France to join a Resistance outfit. Later, he headed a unit that was dropped into Norway to sabotage a railway line.

Mustered out as a major, Colby earned a law degree from Columbia. He practiced law in New York until the Korean War, when he joined the successor organization to the OSS, the CIA. After serving in Stockholm and Rome, he was named CIA station chief in Saigon in 1959. Three years later he became chief of the CIA's Far East division in Washington. He returned to Saigon in 1968 to take charge of the pacification effort, which included the notorious Phoenix program. By 1971, Phoenix had caused the deaths of 20,587 Viet Cong members and sympathizers, according to Colby's own count. He explains, however, that when he took over, a year after the program began, he "laid stress on capturing rather than killing." In discussing the victims, he claims that "87% were killed by regular military in skirmishes."

To all outward appearances, Colby is unsuited for dirty tricks. "I'd call him an enlightened cold warrior," says a CIA officer. "But remember that this business is cold." In 1971, Colby went back to the CIA labyrinth in Langley, Va.

His private life-style matches his professional modesty. Father of four (a fifth child died last year), he lives inconspicuously in an unpretentious house in suburban Maryland. He does not smoke, drinks only an occasional gin-and-tonic or glass of wine, and is a devout Catholic. His favorite recreations are sailing and bicycling.

Since taking over as director, Colby has tried to reform the CIA's operations and rehabilitate its