Shadow Warrior
“This is a superbly crafted biography-cum-history. The evidential standards are exemplary. The interviews, especially the interviews with Colby family members, combine with the author’s fluent literacy to make the book a readable account of the life of an official whose career summed up the best and the worst of CIA history.”
—Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, author of
In Spies We Trust: The Story of Western Intelligence
“Randall Woods has written the biography that William Colby deserves. Colby, whose 30-year career in US intelligence began as a Jedburgh in the OSS, ended as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and featured the Phoenix program and the Family Jewels, lived and died a mystery. Woods’s prodigious research and engaging exposition provide a textured portrait of a means-justify-the-ends patriot whose beliefs and behavior complicate the narrative of America from the origins to the height of the Cold War.”
—Richard H. Immerman,
Professor and Edward J. Buthusiem Family
Distinguished Faculty Fellow in History,
Temple University
“Randall Woods’s biography of Bill Colby takes us deep into the secretive world of US intelligence. As a historical figure Colby’s importance is clear, but readers will also be drawn to Colby by the mysteries of his personality: one part romantic, one part bureaucratic warrior, one part covert operations fighter, one part unlikely crusader for a candid relationship between the US public, Congress, and the CIA. Randall Woods, a distinguished American diplomatic historian and biographer, tells both the public and private story of Colby with aplomb and great skill. Shadow Warrior deserves to be read by anyone interested in the history of the CIA and its involvement in the key moments of US policy in the crucial years between World War Two and the 1970s.”
—Wesley Wark, author of Secret Intelligence: A Reader,
Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto