Honorable Men: My Life In The CIA

by William E. Colby, Peter Forbath

Vintage hardcover

Genres: History, Biography, Military Fiction, Nonfiction, Politics, Memoir, Espionage

493 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1978

Reviews

[Ronald Wise · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was written thirty years ago and I wish I had read it long before now - it seems like a necessary component to an understanding of what really happened during the Vietnam War and Watergate.

Colby began his covert career with the OSS in Nazi-occupied France. He was one of early recruits to the CIA and eventually became its director under President Gerald Ford. His experiences make a compelling story in themselves. The greatest value of this book, however, comes from his frank assessments of the role an agency of espionage and covert action did and should play in a democratic society.

I felt uneasy with the fact that Colby never seemed to question the rightness of American interference in other democracies. but then those were questions that were not often asked during the Cold War where most Ameircans assumed that anything not favorable to America was pro-communist.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dad's generation of the Agency, and the people we grew up with, described by one of his contemporaries (and I have Dad's marked up copy as commentary). Colby's experiences are in so many ways parallel to Dad's (except of course that Colby's career was much centered on Vietnam from the late 1950s through 1975), but Colby's focus on covert operations versus intelligence gathering, and Colby's conclusions (written in 1978) about the future conduct of the Agency, were quite different from Dad's. A good piece of Agency history, from a rather biased source.

[Djdj803 · Rating 5 out of 5]

William Colby's book both informs and entertains as it fills in the gaps for many of us who, like myself lived during those particular times and were not told the whole story. He links the past (OSS) days with the present (CIA) and gives us a glimpse of what really took place behind closed door. AGreat Read!

[Dvick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great! Incredible man during incredible times. From WWII - Cold War, and played major roles in all of them.

[Caryatid · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit too wordy, but worth reading, especially for those who lived through the same era, as I did. Laughed to read him distancing his agency from Watergate 'dirty tricks' when it was mired in much worse dirty tricks of its own with regard to altering/interfering in the politics of other countries.

Gathering information, analyzing and advising the heads of the home government was the original ambit but sadly perverted over time, one of those slippery slopes, and yet with few regrets or admitted culpability.

And does it ever change the world or just sully the hands that meddle?

And seeing the date, 1978, of this publication by this devout, uxorious man, Wiki informs me he divorced her and married another by 1984 - an inappropriate book title on several levels...

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that forever shaped my life.