Today I’m going to offer some thoughts building on ideas from Addiction and Control, where I speculated on how addiction may be used by exploitative organizations such as the ‘intelligence community’ to control its members.
When William Egan Colby decided to publish his autobiography in 1978, he made this rather extraordinary claim:
…I remembered a talk I had with Donovan [William Donovan, OSS head] several years before. I had asked him how you get young paratroopers to behave like choir boys on Saturday night after spending six days learning to be aggressive, devious and heroic. He answered that he didn’t know, but nevertheless it just had to be done. It would be many years before I would have to develop a better answer than Donovan’s.
Colby claims something remarkable in this quote, he claims he developed a system of control for his subordinates that involves them leading a double life: six days doing “devious” work, one evening acting like a “choir boy”. I believe Colby was saying that he found a way to make his subordinates reliably present an ethical face to the outside world, while in reality they spent most of their time being unethical. (more...)
William Colby's System of Control
Related:
"When the CIA goes to church, it doesn't go to pray."
The CIA’s “Phoenix Program” in Vietnam and the “War on Terror”
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