[The Right Stuff]

Very interesting. Also, Colby's death was quite suspicious. It might be interesting to see where that investigation leads!

[Fedora]

Colby's departure was kind of "Paisley II", IIRC. Another thing about Colby that interests me is that he got rid of James Angleton with the help of a leak to Seymour Hersh. I tend to view Colby as contributing to the developments outlined in this article:

W. Raymond Wannall, "Undermining Counterintelligence Capability"

SNIP

The June 1972 burglary at the Democratic National Committee's headquarters in Washington's Watergate complex gave impetus to a series of policy changes instituted or supported by the anti-intelligence lobby. These changes resulted in the elimination of certain committees and initiatives established to contribute to the effective functioning of intelligence and counterintelligence missions.

SNIP

This drastic reduction in the caseload led to the abolition of the internal security branch of the FBI's intelligence division in 1976.

A comparable de-emphasis on Communist matters took place in the CIA. In 1977 President Jimmy Carter appointed Admiral Stansfield Turner as the new Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). He soon dismissed several hundred of the Agency's experts on Communism. Turner, in his memoirs, justified the reduction in staff by pointing to a previous study, conducted in mid-1976 under DCI, later President, George H. W. Bush, which recommended the abolition of 1,350 positions in the Agency's espionage branch. Turner claimed that, of the final total of 820 positions vacated largely by attrition, only 17 people were actually dismissed, while 147 took an early forced retirement.10 But the CIA has never fully recovered from the Turner-era reductions in this critical area.

SNIP