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		Saint Colby and the Fifth 
			Column

		   by J. Orlin Grabbe

	When I first heard of William Colby's capsized 
canoe and disappearance near his place on the Wicomico 
River,  I thought, "Well, maybe he won't be ragging on Jim 
Norman and me anymore."  It was of course absurd that 
Norman and I had ever registered on Colby's radar screen 
in the first place.  We were small fry:  Norman was an 
unemployed journalist recently fired from Forbes 
Magazine, while I was rumored to be an ex-academic 
suffering a bad case of sunstroke.

	Norman and I had met through the dead mediation 
of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster.  In my 
peregrinations as a banking consultant, I had come across 
the fact of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) 
spying on domestic banking transactions, had thought this 
a bit too Big Brotherly for my tastes, and had written an 
essay entitled The End of Ordinary Money about the uses 
of the monetary system for surveillance.  Jim Norman, a 
Senior editor at Forbes, had written about the same NSA 
covert project, pointing out that Vince Foster was one of 
its overseers on behalf of a Little Rock software firm.  
Norman's research pointed to another explosive issue, 
namely that at the time of Foster's death both Foster and 
Hillary Clinton were under counterintelligence 
investigation for selling U.S. secrets to the Israelis.  

	When Norman and I met in Reno, Nevada, I 
learned about one of his sources--the point man of a group 
called the Fifth Column.  This person, Chuck Hayes, had a 
nice computer and could do some neat tricks with it--
things in some specific areas in which I was looking to 
educate myself.  Hayes, meanwhile, had heard about my 
essay The End of Ordinary Money, which I had published 
on the Internet.  Hayes, ex-CIA, got a copy from the CIA 
library, and liked it.  Hayes and I hit it off right away, 
discovering an overlap of mutual interests.

	For several years the Fifth Column had searched 
computer data bases, including foreign bank accounts, 
looking for evidence of political bribery, kickbacks, and 
related subversion of the U.S. Constitution and political 
process.  They had uncovered the financial information 
concerning the Foster/Clinton espionage.  They had also 
transferred millions of dollars from politically-related 
illegal accounts at off-shore banks in the Cayman Islands, 
Switzerland, and elsewhere  to a holding account at the 
U.S. Federal Reserve.

	Jim Norman wrote an article Fostergate for Forbes 
magazine about all this, an article which was cleared by 
the magazine's fact-checkers and lawyers, but at the last 
minute killed by Steve Forbes, through the urging of 
Caspar Weinberger, former Defense Secretary and 
Chairman of the Board of Forbes, Inc.  I promised Norman 
that I would publicize his article through the Internet, and 
began a series on Vince Foster.  The series also allowed 
me to raise the issues I had discussed in The End of 
Ordinary Money in a different way.  The series generated 
a large Internet audience, including not only sympathizers 
to the cause of uncovering the cover-up, but also small 
coteries of  others with counteragendas--including White 
House disinformation specialists, NSA email and usegroup 
monitors, and a myriad of others bent on establishing 
territorial rights to pieces of the story.

	One example of the latter was Daniel Brandt, a 
researcher who made his living off the CIA by selling a 
database of undigested articles mostly critical of it.  Brandt 
had identified "information warfare" as a new ploy to 
justify old intelligence budgets, and hence reports of the 
Fifth Column by Norman and me had to be part of this 
campaign.  After all, Norman referred to Fifth Column 
members as "CIA hackers", and they were reported to be 
up to something good, so the story must be propaganda 
since everyone knew that organization never did anything 
worthwhile.  Brandt then identified the ultimate source of 
all this "Fifth Column" disinformation as probably the 
"well-connected" Jack Wheeler, "a right-wing adventurer" 
and contributor to Strategic Investment (SI), whom I 
apparently gullibly believed.  Neither my friend Wheeler 
nor I could think of any good reason why I would be 
getting information about computers or banking from 
Wheeler, but this theory apparently made sense to Brandt.  
(For the record, Wheeler is not "right-wing", whatever that 
is supposed to mean.  He is philosophically a libertarian, 
although he was once head of Youth for Reagan, a 
conservative organization.  Wheeler had come to admire 
Reagan when he heard a speech in which Reagan said, 
"There is no Left or Right.  There is only Up or Down: Up 
toward liberty or Down toward tyranny."  As far as 
connections, I assume Wheeler has a few, stemming from 
the time his grandfather was chief bodyguard to four 
successive U.S. Presidents--from Teddy Roosevelt to 
Warren Harding.)  

	But over at SI, Brandt's view was supported by 
William Colby, among others. I don't profess to know how 
much Colby was actually consulted with respect to SI 
editorial policy, but Colby was known to support the view 
that "Foster was killed but he wasn't a spy."  (In Colby's 
own case, this view would be simply inverted:  "Colby 
was a spy, but he wasn't killed.")  Moreover, there was no 
Fifth Column and no high-level source would admit to 
having ever heard of this Chuck Hayes--hence Hayes was 
just another liar and huckster with a hidden agenda of his 
own.  Colby, of course, knew very well who Hayes was, 
but had reasons to pretend otherwise.  The most obvious 
one may relate to the circumstances by which Colby was 
removed as CIA director in 1977, an action in which 
Hayes was involved.  But the more probable reason had to 
do with political turf, for it would become abundantly 
clear Colby was not in sympathy with the activities of the 
Fifth Column, as Colby himself had a little piece of the U. 
S. political process for sale.

	SI relentless pursued the notion that the death of 
Vince Foster was not a suicide.  It specialized in 
highlighting the ease by which the gaping holes in the 
official story could be exposed.  But ultimately it could 
provide its readers no explanation for the continuance of 
the cover-up, because it initially rejected the true 
explanation:  namely that at the time of his death Vince 
Foster was under counterintelligence investigation for 
selling U.S. secrets to Israel.  Thus SI was not in a position 
to explain to its readers why the Whitewater Committee 
under Alfonse D'Amato would supposedly accept the 
Foster suicide verdict at face value.  The simple 
explanation was that doing so allowed D'Amato to take on 
Bill Clinton through the Whitewater investigation without 
at the same time having to antagonize his constituents by 
pursuing a line of inquiry  destined to expose a can of 
worms relating to Israel.  

	Yes, the Foster murder cover-up was an easy sham 
to see through.  But no one wanted to bear the burden of 
doing so officially.

	There were other people, naturally, who had 
different reasons for going along with this scenario of 
events, unrelated to issues of national security.  British 
journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard would dump on the 
story by ludicrously claiming that a Swiss account number 
found on a paper from the trunk of Barry Seal's car  (an 
account that turned out to have Caspar Weinberger's name 
attached to it) was really an aircraft number--thus 
providing one more reason not to believe those Jim 
Norman articles about plundered Swiss accounts.  But then 
Evans-Pritchard had carried the information around for 
some time, in blissful ignorance of what he had.  After all, 
the record from Seal was a series of letters--so how it 
could be a Swiss "numbered" account?

	Meanwhile, William Colby told Washington 
journalist Sarah McClendon and others that Colin Powell 
would be the Republican nominee for President.  But 
Colby wasn't able to subsequently explain Powell's failure 
to stand for office.  After all, since the Fifth Column was a 
mythical entity, and the tales of political retirements 
inspired by financial disclosure was disinformation, then 
naturally the packets of financial information that were in 
fact delivered to Powell could have no bearing on Powell's 
political decisions.  (The packets were said to have 
detailed millions of dollars of undeclared jewelry received 
from Kuwait, a stash of gold bars representing payoffs 
from military deals, and involvement in an arms network 
that does not hesitate to deal in proscribed products such 
as plutonium or to plunder U.S. military bases for goods in 
hot demand on the world market.)

	But after Colby's death, how quickly he became 
Saint Colby. Rumors ran amuck.  Since his death followed 
shortly on the heels of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's, 
surely a common hand was involved in both.  Since Colby 
was the man who had revealed the CIA's family jewels in 
the 1977 congressional probe into intelligence activities, 
surely he was now dead for whistle-blowing of the same 
noble sort.  Since Colby was an SI editor, and SI was a 
publication that relentlessly investigated the Vince Foster 
murder, surely Colby was a martyr to the cause of truth.  
Publications that had not heretofore acknowledged the 
existence of the Fifth Column now breathlessly reported 
that it "cannot be ruled out" that Colby was the head of it.  
The rush to deification was all quite nauseating.
  
	Yes, there was definitely a Ron Brown connection, 
for at the time of Brown's death Colby was working  with 
Brown in representing the interests of Vietnam to the U.S.  
This hardly shores up the argument for sainthood.  Even 
those convinced a change in U.S. policy toward Vietnam is 
mandatory might wonder about the propriety of an ex-head 
of U.S. intelligence representing the interests of a foreign 
power.  This is reinforced by the Brown association, since 
Brown himself reportedly asked Vietnam to deposit 
$700,000 in a bank account for his personal use as the 
quid pro quo for considering their requests for 
reconciliation.

	Colby had made his reputation as head of the 
Vietnam-War era Phoenix project which had used 
computer data bases to track political "enemies" in 
Vietnam, many of whom were then targeted for 
assassination.  The ruthlessness he showed there was not 
all that different from the ruthlessness he later showed 
toward ex-colleagues when it came time to cover his ass 
before congressional investigators.  Colby's whistle-
blowing was dictated by necessity, not choice.  

	Colby may have simply fallen out of his canoe and 
drowned.  But if he was given a little nudge, one suspects 
he was out of line with respect to his foreign 
entanglements.  And one seriously doubts the hands 
involved were the same as those involved in the death of 
Ron Brown.  Ron Brown was after all (as I reported in 
"Ron Brown's Loose Lips Seal His Fate") a threat to his 
business colleagues, and he met his fate as a result of a 
bomb triggered by a descending detonator aboard his 
plane.  Information about the bomb on Brown's plane  has 
already been released to British papers  by MI6.  
Meanwhile, the damage control minions in the U.S. are 
desperately trying to see that the true story doesn't bleed 
back here overseas.  Fat chance.  

	Unlike the Fifth Column, which has used 
information to expose political corruption, Colby was 
seemingly indifferent to the corrupt uses of information 
itself.  In any event he wasn't around when the Fifth 
Column delivered a packet of information to Senator Bob 
Dole on Monday, May 13. On Wednesday, Dole then 
dramatically announced his resignation from the Senate to 
run full-time for President on a non-existent campaign 
budget, in the apparent presumption of a receiving a 
Republican nomination that will not come his way.

	But don't be surprised if equally dramatic and 
convoluted decisions are announced by the Clintons in the 
near future.




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