http://www.nytimes.com/1996/05/07/us/william-e-colby-76-head-of-cia-in-a-time-of-upheaval.html

William Egan Colby was born on Jan. 4, 1920, in St. Paul, the son of Elbridge and Margaret Egan Colby. His father, a sensitive nonconformist who wrote and taught literature, became a career Army officer. His family moved constantly, living everywhere from Tientsin, China, to Burlington, Vt.

He enrolled in Princeton University in 1937 and graduated in 1940 with a liberal education and outlook, a Phi Beta Kappa key, R.O.T.C. experience and a deep antipathy to Fascism and Communism. He entered Columbia Law School, but left to join the Army and serve in World War II. He cheated on an eye examination to become a paratrooper, unwittingly taking a path that would lead him into the clandestine world.

In 1943, answering a call for officers who could speak fluent French, he became a member of the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime American espionage agency.

In 1944, he parachuted behind German lines to link up with a French resistance group. In 1945, he commanded a squad of saboteurs who blew up German rail lines in the snows of northern Norway. For these missions, he earned the Silver Star and the French Croix de Guerre.

After the war, he returned to Columbia and received a law degree in 1947. He then joined the Manhattan law firm then known as Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Lombard, run by the founder of the Office of Strategic Services, William J. Donovan. But the law, frankly, bored him, and he joined the fledgling C.I.A. in 1950.

Posing as a diplomat, Mr. Colby served in Stockholm from 1951 to 1953; in Rome from 1953 to 1958; and, fatefully, as the C.I.A.'s station chief in Saigon from 1959 to 1962. He was responsible for all the agency's covert operations in Asia from 1962 to 1967, as the United States went to war in Vietnam. He returned for some of the worst years of the war there, in the doomed cause of winning the hearts and minds of the people.

William E Colby