AN INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM COLBY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00418R000100110013-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 12
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 23, 2012
• Sequence Number: 13
• Publication Date: January 8, 1976
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

ILL Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-004188000100110013-6
- RAJiO ~,~V REPORTS, INC.
4435 WISCONSIN AVENUE, N.W., WASHINGTON, D.C. 20016 244-3540
The Today Show STATION WRC TV
NBC Network
DATE January 8, l9~ 7:00 AM
SUBJECT An Interview with William Colby
Washington, D. C.
JIM HARTZ: All of our interview time in this hour
this morning will be devoted to the CIA and its activities
and its reactions to the extraordinary number of public
disclosures made about it since the Watergate scandal. And
for this, CIA Director William Colby is in our Washington
News Center with Today Washington correspondent Douglas
Kiker and NBC News correspondent Ford Rowan, who covers the
CIA.
Doug?
body.
DOUGLAS KIRER: Thank you, Jim. Good morning, every-
Mr. Colby, the CIA has been under heavy fire from
one quarter or another for over a year now. Your defenders
say the attacks, the disclosures have served to undermine
the CIA's effectiveness. Has the agency's effectiveness been
diminished?
DIRECTOR WILLIAM COLBY: Of course, it's been hurt.
You can't possibly go through a year such~as this of denuncia-
tions all around the world, accusations of all sorts of things,
exposures of our operations, exposures of the names of our
people without causing foreigners who work with us and foreign
intelligence services to draw back and evidence fear of being
involved with us and being subject to the kind of exposure and
attack that has been going on.
On the other hand, I must say that we still produce
the best intelligence in the world.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-004188000100110013-6 ,,N,
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-004188000100110013-6
~ `~
KTKER: Thank you. As Jim told you, Mr. Colby will
be with us for the rest of this hour. But first the news, and
for that, here's Lou Wood in New York.
HARTZ: The Central Intelligence Agency has been
the subject of almost continuous investigation this past
year by both houses of Congress, investigations that have
led to charges that the CIA has, at times, violated both its
own charter and the law. Defenders of the CIA says the in-
vetigations, along with the various news stories and exposes,
have weakened the agency and endangered its agents. To talk
about this throughout this hour, CIA Director William Colby
is in our Washington News Center with Today Washington corres-
pondent Douglas Kiker and NBC News correspondent Ford Rowan,
who covers the CIA. And I should mention that Mr. Colby is
the outgoing Director of the CIA and is expected to be replaced
soon, possibly within this month, by George Bush. But he is
still the active Director, with long experience in the agency.
Doug?
BIKER: Thank you, Jim.
Mr. Colby, a few moments ago you said that the
effectiveness of the agency had been diminished because of
the exposures and the investigations. Just before Christmas,
Richard Welch, who was Station Chief of the CIA in Athens, was
gunned down by three masked men. Subsequently people have
said that because Mr. Welch was identified in magazines like
Counter-Spy, he was identified in the Athens News as a CIA
agent, that this endangered his life and it's endangering the
lives of other agents.
Do you agree with this?
DIRECTOR COLBY: Well, I think any of us in the in-
telligence business obviously run risks. I've run risks and
my associates have run risks over many years. And that's part
of the game. But at the same time, there's a question of how
much risk we are asked to run. And I particularly find it re-
prehensible to find a deliberate effort to identify our people
by fellow Americans. Those who are opposed to the activities
of CIA I think have every right to appeal to the Congress to
terminate it, to change its rules, whatever. But I find it
particularly startling that an American would deliberate finger
a fellow American serving his country in a dangerous post abroad.
BIKER: Would you like to see legislation of some sort
which would make it against the law for former CIA agents to
write exposes, let's say, or for magazines like Counter-Spy
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-004188000100110013-6
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-004188000100110013-6
to publish agents' names?
DIRECTOR COLBY: Well, I'm a great believer in the
First Amendment, Mr. Kiker. But the fact is that we do need
some better protection of our secrets. We have secrets in
American society. They're important to our democracy: the
secret ballot box, the secrecy of a grand jury proceeding, the
secrecy of our income tax returns. All these things are secrets
and are protected by law.
I think good intelligence is important to the protection
of our democracy and our country. And good intelligence does
need some secrets -- not all secrets. And that's perhaps part
of our trouble -- is that the old tradition of intelligence was
that everything was secret. We've brought that out now and
we've made public a great deal of what we can. But there are
limits if we are to maintain a good intelligence service.
FORD ROWAN: Mr. Colby, in asking for strengthened
laws to prohibit agents and former agents and employees from
divulging secrets or the identities of other employees of the
intelligence community, will you seek to expand -- will the CIA
seek to expand the government's power to obtain injunctions
and restrain the publication or broadcast of this information?
DIRECTOR COLBY: Well, I have long advocated a law
which would allow me to require an ex-employee to keep the
secrecy agreement he made when he came to work with us. We
did go to court in one case against one of our ex-employees.
We happened to hear that he was going to publish before he
actually published. And we got an injunction, and this was
reviewed in the courts and this was approved. At the same time,
if he had already published, I must say I would have been on
very weak grounds to do anything about it.
And I think that we do need a law that imposes the
discipline of secrecy on us who go into the intelligence pro-
fession. I do not believe it ought to apply to those outside
the intelligence profession.
KIKER: Have you urged President ~F'ord to introduce
such legislation?
DIRECTOR COLBY: I have urged. And just recently the
Department of Justice has joined with me and agreed that this
would be a good thing to do.
KIKER: Let's turn for a minute to Angola. First of
all quickly, what's going on there? There're reports of big
victories by the Popular Front -- that's the other side, of
course -- this past week. And we hear now that three Soviet
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-004188000100110013-6 ~ ?,
 ' Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-004188000100110013-6
v
.?
ships are heading in. Of course, the Soviets have been anchor-
ing in Conakry Harbor for sometime. Are they coming there as
a show of force? Is the Popular Front moving ahead? Can
you just -- and how will we respond to all this?
DIRECTOR COLBY: Well, I think what has happened in
Angola over the past year or so has been that the Portuguese
determined that they would give the country its independence.
And there were three contending groups for that succession
to the government. The various African nations on a number
of occasions got the three groups together and got them to
agree to collaborate. But the communist supported group has
insisted on a total domination of the situation. They began
receiving military aid from the Soviet Union in October, 1974.
They began to build up their strength. Starting last July, they
drove the other groups out of the capital by armed force and
were driving them into the countryside and, hopefully, to their
side, over the edge of the border.
Then the other groups got some help and they came back
to some extent. At that point, the Soviet Union substantially
escalated its aid in air supply, in tanks, artillery, all this
sort of thing. And in the last week or two, the Popular Move-
ment, the Soviet supported group, has made somewhat of an attack,
particularly in the north, not so much in the south.
ROWAN: Mr. Colby, the covert action of the United
States in Angola has come under criticism from Congress, ob-
viously. There're efforts to cut off American aid. I'd like
to ask you about the extent of American aid. I have heard
figures that our aid to Zaire will jump from three million
to nineteen million dollars next year. Is that money being
funneled into Angola?
? DIRECTOR COLBY: Well, I think there're several cate-
gories of aid to the neighboring countries. The military aid
program is one that is reported to Congress and done publicly.
There's no question about that. And there are certain proposals
for military aid to Zaire.
?
Any other aid I really am not at liberty to discuss
in detail or even to confirm officially. But the fact is that
any effort by the United States, by CIA, other than intelligence
gathering, is the subject of a finding by?the President that
it's important to the national security, and it`s been reported
to six committees of the Congress.
KIKER: Let me ask you this. Angola would seem to be
a perfect example of the dilemma I think we find ourselves in.
Congress wants more say-so in CIA covert operations. The Ameri-
can people, I believe, want to know what's going on -- no more
invisible governments. Yet you say, and let's say with accuracy,
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-004188000100110013-6
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-004188000100110013-6
that the CIA's effectiveness is being destroyed by all of
these demands and disclosures.
Let's take Angola. What's the answer?
DIRECTOR COLBY: Well, I think the answer is that
if you take, in this Bicentennial year, a quotation from the
Committee of Secret Correspondence of the Continental Congress
in 1776, their comment was that~~we find, by fatal experience,
that the Congress consists of too many members to keep secrets.
I think that's a little advice to us.
Now we have a new law passed last December which re-
quires us to report to six committees. Almost everything that's
been reported to those six committees has been exposed in the
press. I see in a quotation in the press yesterday that two
members of the Congress confirmed, by telephone, that I had
given them a briefing on some secret activity. Now this is
not a way to protect secrets, particularly when some of the
activities that we conduct we conduct with the knowing approval
and even, in one situation, the urging of one of the committees
of the Congress to conduct a particular activity.
KIKER: Mr. Colby, we're going to have to pause for
a feta moments. We'll be back with William Colby, Director
of the CIA. The Today Show will continue after we pause for
this station break.
KIKER: Good morning again. We are here with Ford
Rowan, NBC News correspondent who covers the CIA, and William
Colby, who is the Director of the CIA.
And Mr. Colby, we were talking about the dilemma of
an intelligence agency that feels it must operate in private,
a Congress that wants to know more about covert activities and
yet, as you were saying just now, seems not to be able to keep
the secrets that you confide in them with., That's good English.
Could you go on with that thought?
DIRECTOR COLBY: Well, I think the problem is that
we have to determine, we Americans, how to conduct a responsible
intelligence operation. I think we insist that we in the intel-
ligence profession be responsible and that we operate under the
law and under the Constitution. But I think we also have to
insist that our members of Congress act in the constitutional
frame that they're set up to be -- the representatives of the
people. That doesn't mean that they're a conduit for every
bit of information they get in secret to immediately display
it to the public. They are asked to be responsible, to stand
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-004188000100110013-6 ~ ~~
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-004188000100110013-6
up, to make judgments, and to assume responsibilities for
knowing things that they cannot pass on. Otherwise we"can-
not run an intelligence service.
I think we've had a very hard time this past
year. And it reminds me a little bit of the child's fable
about Chicken Little. You remember the acorn fell on Chickle
Little's head, and Chicken Little ran down the street saying
that the sky was falling. Well, I think that in a way this
past year, we have had an example of that kind of performance.
We did drop on our heads the fact that CIA did some wrong things
over the past twenty-eight years. I think those were few and
far between. We have corrected them. But I think we have a
situation in which we have dominated o.ur discussions with denun-
ciations of the evil deeds of CIA on a very limited base and
have totally lost our proportion, sense of proportion about
the importance of intelligence, the excellence of intelligence,
the few misdeeds that we did conduct, and the fact that we've
corrected them.
ROWAN: Mr. Colby, I'd like to ask you a question
about one of the. covert operations that the Congress has now
exposed, and that's the operation in Chile, which they said
consisted of propaganda, bribery, economic retaliation, fomenting
a coup, and support far right wing terror groups.
Now you're a lawyer, and I'm going to ask you in this
context. My reading of the U. N. Charter, Article II, Section
IV, the 1965 U. N. General Assembly Declaration o~n the Impermis-
sibility of Intervention in Domestic Affairs of States, the
1970 U. N. General Assembly Declaration on Friendly Relations
Among States, the Charter of the Organization of American
States, and one, two, three, four, five, six, seven international
treaties that the United States is a party to indicates that
that was a violation of international law.
Now I don't blame CIA, because you were doing what
President Ford [sic] and Henry Kissinger said. But in all of
those meetings about Chile, was there ever once a word, one
whisper from the back of the room -- "Maybe it's illegal?"
?
DIRECTOR COLBY: Well, I think, in the first place,
President Ford had nothing to do with Chile.
ROWAN: I'm sorry. President Nixon.
DIRECTOR COLBY: We had....
KIKER: You've got a minute, incidentally, to answer
DIRECTOR COLBY: We had a series of Presidents who told
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-004188000100110013-6
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-004188000100110013-6
us to do things in Chile: President Kennedy, President Johnson,
President Nixon. There's no question about it. Any activity
we did in Chile was also reported to the Congress at the
time in the manner in which it had set itself up at that
time.
Now the question of international law -- of course,
it's not a law in the same sense that the law that we have
in our country applies -- in sovereignty. And I think you
have to look for international custom, as well as international
law, to see what nations do and are expected to do.
KIKER: I'm sorry to interrupt you, but our time is
up for now. Mr. Colby will be spending the rest of this hour
with us, William Colby, Director of the CIA. But it's time
now for a station break.
HARTZ: We are devoting this entire hour to an inter-
view with the outgoing Director of the Central Intelligence
Agency, Mr. William Colby. He is in our Washington News Center
with Douglas Kiker and Ford Rowan. And I'd like to ask a ques-
tion, if I might, here.
Mr. Colby, the defenders of the CIA say that much
of the criticism that has been directed against it recently
has been unfair, because most of the activities that are
carried out by the CIA, those that have been criticized most
heavily, have been directives from the President and from the
National Security Council.
Could you enlighten us on how decisions are made and
how orders are given to the CIA?
DIRECTOR COLBY: Well, I think that it is clear that
CIA's activites are essentially directed by the President, the
National Security Council and follow congressional briefings and
operate on congressionally appropriated funds. There's no ques-
tion about. There are a few occasions over the past years in
which CIA did things that it should not have done. We have
corrected that and stopped that. But I believe that the strong
emphasis of the attackers of CIA in this past year have been on
a very small percentage of its total activities. The covert
operations that we hear criticized contain only about something
like five percent of so of our budget at the moment. And the
vast amount of our effort is devoted to pure intelligence
gathering and assessment.
KIKER: Let me continue along that Line, Mr. Colby.
According to State Department officials who testified before
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-004188000100110013-6 ,,?,
 ? Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-004188000100110013-6
Congress recently, nearly forty secret CIA operations were
-- between 1972 and 1974 were approved without a single meeting
of the White House group known as the Forty Committee that's
supposed to approve such things. The implication is that
Secretary of State Kissinger and Mr. Ford and Mr. Nixon said
ye s or no .
First of all, is this correct? And secondly, when
you are ordered to conduct such a covert operation is there
any way for you to know, short of going into the White House
and knocking on the door and asking directly, whether or not
the President was actually informed of the decision to go
ahead?
DIRECTOR COLBY: Well, I know that the President is
informed of these because we discuss them from time to time.
We know very well that he knows about different activities.
And under the present, if CIA does anything other than pure
intelligence gathering abroad, it must be the subject of a
specific finding by the President, with his signature on it.
KIRER: Well, these forty decisions, for example --
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, we are told, were conferred with by
telephone sometimes, sometimes not; sometimes this person, some-
times that person. It would seem that Mr. Kissinger and the
President were saying "Well, let's go ahead with it." Two men.
Is that correct?
DIRECTOR COLBY: Well, essentially, what that report
refers to is the fact that we had a procedure by which all of
our activities had to be reported each year. There weren't
necessarily forty new activities that were approved. But we
gave annual round-ups, periodic reports of things that were
happening, things that really didn't involve much policy discus-
sion and no particular problems.
During that. period, quite frankly, there was very
little going on in this field that required that kind of review.
ROWAN: Mr. Colby, let me ask you about another decision
of the President, Secretary of State and ypurself -- the one in
Angola. Was the decision, or is there now -- let me ask you
that way -- is there now any American personnel, either from
the CIA or from the Defense Department, operating in Angola?
Are you using any CIA aircraft or Defense?Department aircraft
to supply friendly forces in Angola?
DIRECTOR COLBY: Well, the basic answer is that there
are no Americans fighting in Angola, period. The early references
to Angola as being a new Vietnam really are totally absurd, be-
cause the point about CIA's covert operations is that we are able
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-004188000100110013-6
_.
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-004188000100110013-6
able to do things without large commitments of American
forces and instead of the commitment, as I've said before,
of the United States Marines in a situation which requires
some intervention, some activity by us. We have a situation
now where we have a Soviet destroyer, a Soviet cruiser, Soviet
LST, Soviet oilers in the neighborhood off West Africa. There's
no question about it: the Soviets are expressing their interest
in that area .
Now to say that CIA should not give some help to some
friends who are trying to struggle against a desire by the
Soviets and the Cubans and their group that they're manipulating
and supporting I think is the height of absurdity. Sure, Angola
is far away. But in the thirties, Abyssinia was far away. And
in 1931, Manchuria was far away. And we got into an awful lot
of trouble because we ignored those things that were far away.
BIKER: Let me ask you, to change the subject again --
ask you about Italy. The word is out that the CIA funneled
nearly six million dollars to noncommunist politicians in
Italy. Two questions. First of all, does it do any good?
Just yesterday the centrist, quote, "coalition" broke down.
Secondly, should we be doing it? What would be the reaction
in the United States if we .learned here that Italy had funneled
six million dollars to American politicians?
DIRECTOR COLBY: We have not spent a nickel in Italy
in the past few months, to be specific about it. We have not
done so. I cannot discuss what our plans, what our thoughts
might be for the future.
Should the United States help its friends in a
friendly country to keep that country from coming under com-
munist control and having the Communist Party be the majority
party in that country? I think the United States can help its
friends. We did help our friends in Western Europe after World
War II. We helped them through military force, through NATO.
We helped them through economic aid, through the Marshall Plan.
And we helped several of the democratic parties and forces
throughout Western Europe to sustain themselves against a sub-
versive effort by the communists and their Soviet masters.
ROWAN: You say you haven't spent any money yet. But
you do plan to, don't you?
DIRECTOR COLBY: I am not at liberty to discuss
the details of our activities. But I think I can say that
we have not spent any money, period.
BIKER: Let''s talk about the CIA's involvement here at
home. Your charter prohibits you from operating in any way in
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA_RDP99-004188000100110013-6 ?~,
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-004188000100110013-6
the United States. And yet there was disclosure after_dis-
closure from these hearings.
Let's not really rehash old things. How can we pre-
vent what happened from happening again? Is it possible for
the CIA to police itself? Are we going to have a situation
five years from now where we hear about other Americans' mail
being investigated and opened, and so forth and so forth?
DIRECTOR COLBY: Well, you're certainly aren't going
to hear about any that took place while I've been Director,
because in 1973, shortly after I became Director, I issued
a set of directives to insure that CIA stayed within its
proper legal charter and its proper legal authorities.
It is easy to keep CIA within its rules just by is-
suing the proper directives and making it clear that we're
expected to. I think, yes, in the past twenty-eight years,
CIA strayed toward the edge. But the exhaustive investigation
conducted by the Rockefeller Commission I think gives a fair
statement of what actually happened, that there were some few
cases in which we did step over the line, either at the direct
request of a President, because the line was somewhat fuzzy, or,
in a very few cases, because there was an excess of enthusiasm
or zeal to do the job of following the counterintelligence problem
in the United States.
KIRER: Did you get drawn into it gradually, or did you
think you'd never get caught? Were you just following orders?
I say "you." Not you personally, but the agency.
DIRECTOR COLBY: Yes. I think that the times that
various of these things were done, like intercepting mail
between the United States and the Soviet Union -- this began
in the early fifties. Now in the early fifties there was a
great deal of concern in this country about Soviet spies in
America. And we caught a number of them, and they existed,
and there was a great deal of concern that there were a lot of
other ones here. And in the effort to insure that we would not
be subject to this kind of activity by the Soviet Union, we
opened mail, which we should not have done and which we will
not do again.
But I think the framework in which that occurred
reflected a consensus of the American people and government
that something had to be done.
KIRER: Well, what's to stop you? Excuse me. But
what's to stop you? You did it before. What if the next
President of the United States tells the next Director of the
CIA "open mail"? What's to stop him from doing it?
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-004188000100110013-6
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-004188000100110013-6
DIRECTOR COLBY: Well, I think this year's in-vestigation
is the best answer to that. I think the thing that will really
stop it is clear guidelines, which I say we have issued. And
if anybody wants to issue it upon us, that's fine.
Secondly, better supervision, because, in the past,
there's no question about it: intelligence was told to go
and do the job and not to bother people with the details.
We have to have good supervision. We have to have, as I
said earlier, responsible supervision which doesn't expose
everything in the guise of supervising it. But nonetheless,
steady, regular, constant supervision by the Congress, by the
executive I think will insure that CIA stays within its proper
charter in the future.
RIRER: I interrupted you, Ford.
ROWAN: No, that's all right. I wanted to follow up
on another area of domestic activity that's frightened a lot
of people, and that's the drug testing, specifically about
MK ULTRA, the program of testing substances on people. An
Inspector-General's report from 1963 said the effectiveness
of these drugs on individuals of all social levels, high and
low, native American and foreign, is of great signficance, and
testing's been performed on a variety of individuals, including
some that didn't know they were being tested.
Now apparently, according to the Inspector-General's
report, the scope of NK [sic] ULTRA was not just drugs. It
included radiation, electroshock, various techniques of psy-
chology, psychiatry, graphology, harassment substances and
paramilitary devices and materials. Did you do those sort
of things on people here or abroad?
DIRECTOR COLBY: Again, let's refer to the time we're
talking about. In the early fifties, the mid fifties when
we saw Cardinal Mindszenty standing there with those haunting
eyes, when our troops were captured in North Rorea and brain-
washed, there was a great deal of concern about the possible
effects of drugs and other kinds of devices to affect human
behavior. And there was some experimentation that went on at
that time. And that Inspector-General's report in 1963 is what
terminated that kind of experimentation outside of the normal
rules of volunteer knowing subjects. .
ROWAN: Let me follow up by asking not about MK ULTRA,
but about MK DELTA, which was the operational side of the coin.
And I don't believe that very much attention's been given to that.
But it was reported in this report that the operational aspects
were in the hundreds, that these techniques, these substances
had been used overseas in the hundreds. Can you confirm that?
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-004188000100110013-6 ,,~,
 ., Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-004188000100110013-6
DIRECTOR COLBY: Well, when I was in Norway in World
War II and was skiing over the back mountains there, I got
up several hills thanks to some good benzedrine that somebody
in our chemical business had provided me before I went on that
operation.
Yes, there are uses for drugs in intelligence operations,
and they did use them on some occasions . But I think the only
death that we know of was the unfortunate death of Mr. Olsen,
which certainly we have done our best to make amends for.
KIKER: I think Jim Hartz has a question.
HARTZ: Yes, one final question, Mr. Colby, sort of
pointing in the direction of where the CIA is going. We've
seen some changes here. It seems as if you're trying to go
on the offensive. You're here on this broadcast. It's almost
unheard of in the past for the Director of the agency to appear
publicly. The other day I noticed that President Ford had gone
to a funeral for the agent who was killed in Athens. That's
almost unheard of. Usually presidential appearances at funerals
are reserved for heads of state, high elected officials, and so
on .
May I ask you about that? Why was he at that funeral?
Why are you here now? What are you trying to do?
DIRECTOR COLBY: Well, I think President Ford -- the
best answer to that is. what he told me when I thanked him for
coming to that funeral. He said he felt very strongly about
it, and so do we. Mr. Welch was a brave and effective intel-
ligence officer who died in the service of his country. I
think that he spent his life for our country, and also he
died for it .
KIKER: Well, you won't have a chance to tell us why
you came here. But we do want to thank you for coming, Mr.
Colby, and it's been very educational. Thank you again.
DIRECTOR COLBY: Thank you.
KIKER: tJilliam Colby, Director of the CIA. The
Today show will continue right after this message.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-004188000100110013-6