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WILLIAM COLBY
was a lifelong spook who started in the OSS, working with ANGLETON in Italy (including the Rat Lines). In Southeast Asia, he ran the Phoenix Project, and laundered countless millions in Laotian heroin profits through the Nugan-Hand Bank.

Replacing RICHARD HELMS as DCI in 1973, he plotted the Australian coup, ran the bloody Angola ops, and ran damage control during the Church & Pike hearings. Later involved in BCCI and many other CIA banking scandals.

Died suprisingly, under peculiar circumstances, in 1996. It was ruled he'd gone on a midnight canoe ride, had "a stroke or a heart attack" and then fell in the water and drowned. This was possible because he was uncharacteristically without his lifejacket, which never was found. His body was fished from the river after a nearly weeklong search only some 100 yards from where his canoe had been found.

He was widely known first as the "Grey Man", then as he aged the "Old Grey Man". In 1998, the matter of his death remains officially closed.