The Last Testament of William Colby:

The last testament of William Colby:
In April 1996, the body of former CIA chief William
Colby was fished from the water on the Eastern Shore of
Maryland near his vacation home, where he died under mysterious
circumstances. Colby had been deeply involved in the
Franklin case from the very outset, from well before the Nebraska
Senate committee hired him to investigate the explosion
of Gary Caradori’s plane, until his own sudden death.
In the second, 1996 edition of DeCamp’s best-selling
book, which he dedicated to Colby, his longtime friend and
formercommanding officer in Operation Phoenix in Vietnam,
DeCamp called Colby “the heart and soul of the Franklin
investigation.” DeCamp said that, in the numerous times
when he was discouraged at the overwhelming force arrayed
against him in the Franklin case, and when he wanted to give
up, Colby would urge him on, saying, “This case is so much
bigger than you think. It goes to the very highest levels; we
have to keep pulling the strings.”
As the CIA chief who blew the whistle on military-CIA
mind control programs before the U.S. Senate in 1975 (and
who was soon fired by President Ford and replaced with
George Bush), Colby knew exactly what he was talking
about. In a March 8 discussion with EIR about Colby’s
motivation in pursuing the Franklin affair, DeCamp said,
“We used to get together in Washington all the time at that
crazy Cosmos Club. I guess I didn’t fully appreciate at the
time, some of the significance of our discussions. I thought
he was being philosophical. He wasn’t. What he was trying
to do, was to tell me, exactly what he had finally come to the
realization of. That ‘the end apparently justifies the means, is
the approach we had taken,’ he said, ‘and so covert operations
and assassinations, and maybe even the use of children
in Monarch and all these other things, seemed reasonable
at the time, because we were saving the country. Everything
for saving the country. National security and the Cold War.
In war, all is fair.’ ”
But, DeCamp continued, Colby’s message was, “ ‘Maybe
now, if we’re going to have a country, we have to undo a
bunch of this stuff, because we have gone too far, where you
have a system which has allowed the secret, fifth echelon to
control things, really, rather than the democratically elected
representatives in a democratic republican form of government.
We now have to undo a bunch of these things.’ And I
think that’s what he was about. And, if anything, he was a
central piece of the creation of so many of these things. He
said this to me so many times: ‘It’ll never get done from the
inside. The FBI doesn’t correct itself, the CIA doesn’t correct
itself, Congress rarely corrects itself. It’s media and related
68 National EIR March 19, 1999
public pressure that forces the corrections.’ And that’s what
I think he was trying to do through me and some others, the
Pentagon Papers and other things. The correction of the very
system he had helped to create.”
Colby was highly informed, and keenly appreciative of
the role the LaRouche movement played in the Franklin case,
from the first day in mid-1990, when EIR sent an investigative
team into the state in response to an urgent appeal for help
from Nebraska citizens, until the day of his death. In addition
to regular expose´s in EIR and New Federalist, Schiller Institute
chairman Helga Zepp-LaRouche called for an international
fact-finding commission, which visited the state in October
1990 for a week and interviewed dozens of victimwitnesses,
parents, child welfare workers, Senate Franklin
committee members, and so on, and issued widely publicized
findings that concluded, among other things, that there was
a “torture and murder-in-progress being perpetrated against
Paul Bonacci,” then in the county jail. One of the commission’s
members, civil rights activist Rev. James Bevel, who
later became LaRouche’s Vice Presidential running mate in
1992, moved to Nebraska for a year to continue the fight
against the cover-up; the presence of Reverend Bevel, direct action
coordinator for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., provided
witnesses, officials, and parents with the courage to continue
a fight against awesome odds. In sum, without LaRouche’s
efforts, many more Franklin witnesses, including Paul
Bonacci, and attorney John DeCamp, would almost certainly
be dead—as John DeCamp is the first to acknowledge.
Colby was also highly appreciative of LaRouche’s more
general role in American politics, as he discussed that on
occasion with DeCamp. “Colby knew I was working with
LaRouche,” said DeCamp on March 8. “He knew it in detail.
He brought it up several times. As I have been reading
LaRouche’s writings recently, I have been thinking exactly
about that question. Colby said, ‘He’s a brilliant man, maybe
one of the most brilliant economists this country, or the world
has.’ But, Colby said, when LaRouche’s predictions of a
global financial crash don’t materialize, he has ‘credibility
problems.’ ‘However,’ Colby insisted, ‘it is not LaRouche’s
problem. Americans have become accustomed to instant pudding,
instant answers, and instant this-and-that. LaRouche’s
work is much more profound, not just a simple prediction of
what happens tomorrow morning.’ ”
“And,” concluded DeCamp, “in the light of the Asian
crisis, and everything else that has happened since Colby’s
death, it is finally clear to many people, what LaRouche has
been talking about—and that he is right. And maybe it really
is time, that Bill Clinton ask him into the White House as his
economic adviser. I think my old friend, who was a supporter
of Bill Clinton, would certainly have approved.”
Copies of DeCamp’s book, The Franklin Cover-Up, may
be obtained from AWT, Inc., Drawer B, P.O. Box 85461,
Lincoln, Nebraska, 68501. The cost is $9.95 per book, plus
$3 postage and handling.