William Colby: Midnight Canoeist
"Believe me, if the CIA had anything to do with the murder of our president I would have discovered it in the early seventies and I would have revealed it — I revealed a lot of other things."
Timeline
| 4 Jan 1920 |
William Egan Colby born, St. Paul MN. |
| 1940 |
Graduates with a B.A. from Princeton, Phi Beta Kappa. |
| Aug 1944 |
Parachutes into France, links up with French Resistance. |
| 1945 |
Maj. Colby honorably discharged from U.S. Army. |
| c. 1945 |
Marries Barbara Heinzen. |
| 1947 |
LL.B., Columbia University. |
| 1959 |
CIA Station Chief, Saigon. |
| 1962 |
Directorate of Plans, CIA, until 1967. |
| Nov 1968 |
Launches Accelerated Pacification Campaign, part of which was the Phoenix Project, in which individuals were assigned "neutralization" quotas of up to 1,800 VCI per month. The jargon term "VCI" refers to Viet Cong Infrastructure, meaning anyone connected to the civil or military administration of any North Vietnamese activity, such as tax collecting, political officers, etc. Over its lifetime, Phoenix is responsible for 20,000 assassinations. |
| Aug 1970 |
Phoenix Project is the Pentagon's "#1 PSYOPS priority." |
| 10 Mar 1973 |
Becomes Director Central Intelligence Agency (becomes official, 4 Sep.) |
| 19 Jun 1975 |
Upon news of mobster Sam Giancana's killing: "We had nothing to do with it." |
| 1975 |
Reveals an uncomfortable amount of information to Congress, such as CIA attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, etc. |
| 2 Nov 1975 |
President Gerald Ford fires CIA Director William Colby and replaces him with George HW Bush. |
| 1984 |
Divorces wife Barbara. |
| 1984 |
Marries Sally Shelton. |
| 1994 |
Colby and former KGB counterintelligence chief Maj. Gen. Oleg Kalugin team up together to consult for Activision on a computer spy game called Spycraft, which is distributed on CDROM. |
| 1996 |
Begins work for small circulation magazine Strategic Investment, investigating the Vince Foster suicide. |
| 27 Apr 1996 |
William Colby dies of hypothermia and drowning, canoeing in the middle of the night, at his home in Rockpoint MD. He did not mention any canoeing plans to his wife, nor was it normal behavior for him to engage in nocturnal caneoing adventures. Colby's body is not immediately located. |
| 6 May 1996 |
William Colby's body actually found after the canoeing accident, lacking his usual lifevest. It was found 20 yards from the canoe, after the area had been thoroughly searched multiple times. |
| 13 May 1996 |
William Colby laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery. |
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