Military Review English Edition May-June 2016 | Page 129

REVIEW ESSAY

intelligence (DCI). Each pursued far-ranging covert
action and clandestine human intelligence operations throughout the Cold War.
What lessons can today’s CIA leadership learn
from their examples? What lessons did the author
draw from their World War II OSS careers to help
explain their challenging director tenures–Dulles
and the Bay of Pigs, Helms convicted of lying to the
Congress, Casey and Iran-Contra? While Waller
leaves many of these questions for readers to figure
out on their own, in a separate article based on the
book, he suggests an answer of sorts, highlighting how
the OSS’s failings “permeated the new agency,” and
attributing those failings to “the delusions that covert
operations, like magic bullets, could produce spectacular results” and the feeling that “legal or ethical
corners could be cut for a higher cause.”1
Disciples is at its best when the author takes some
time to consider these ethical a nd moral ambiguities. Why, for example, diverging so sharply from
the views of his contemporaries, did Colby choose to
release to Congress the “Family Jewels,” an internal
report on questionable CIA covert action? In 1975,
following media reports of domestic intelligence collection and foreign assassination plots, the Senate established a Select Committee to Study Governmental
Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities,
better known as the Church Committee. DCI Colby
made the arguably bold and precedent-setting decision to cooperate with this congressional oversight.
But, while Colby soberly called the final report of
the committee “a comprehensive and serious review
of the history and present status of American intelligence,” Helms felt betrayed and had a “special
loathing” for Colby; Casey “watched in horror” and,
responding to a friend who suggested Colby was
forced to answer congressional questions, replied that
“[h]e didn’t have to understand the question.”2
Waller offers several theories for Colby’s decision
to cooperate with Congress. He notes, for example,
that some OSS veterans believed Colby’s service as
a commando might have made him less attuned to
keeping secrets, than, say, Helms, and more “oriented to noisy action.” However, this suggestion seems
simplistic. Colby was involved in significant covert action and managed large espionage programs

MILITARY REVIEW  May-June 2016

throughout the Cold War, and his ability to keep a
secret was never in doubt.
Closer to the mark perhaps, Waller offers that the
“real reason” for Colby’s openness was his legal reasoning that being less than forthcoming would result
in Congress seizing the information anyway, without
the ability for Colby to provide “proper context.”
Given the hostility at the time of a Congress reeling
from the presidential malfeasance wrought by Nixon,
this explanation resonates.
Colby’s actions as DCI may have been tied more
explicitly to his background and activities in war.
Unlike Dulles, Helms, and Casey, Colby began his
career as a true street operator. The others spent their
OSS careers running the operations of others and
planning larger scale espionage campaigns. Vital work
of course, but one’s perspective from the perch of
management is different from one’s perspective at the
pointy tip of the spear. Dulles, for example, displayed
perhaps a less than well-honed knack for espionage
early in his own diplomatic career when he declined a
request to meet with Lenin in 1918; how this meeting might have changed history is unknowable.
As Waller relates in some of the more entertaining segments of his book, Colby was a member of the
original “Jedburgh” OSS paramilitary officer cadre.
He parachuted into France after the D-Day invasion,
and later in the war he lost a toe and part of a finger
to frostbite while conducting direct action behind
enemy lines in Norway. Unlike the others, Colby
came face-to-face, in perhaps a more personal way,
with the sometimes-ugly realities of covert action,
first in Norway dealing with the investigation of the
possible assassination of German prisoners of war
under his control, and later in Vietnam, when he was
involved with the controversial Phoenix Program.
Perhaps it was more his close contact with these
activities that later affected his decision to “open the
books” to Congress.
In the end, Dulles, Helms, Colby, and Casey felt
a call to duty they answered with devotion, though
perhaps at times misplaced. They were complex individuals and certainly not infallible. As the U.S. military and the CIA engage in overt and covert action
in hot spots around the world today (some newly lit,
others smoldering, while others have notably rekindled), Waller’s Disciples offers the reader a thoroughly
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