Movie Review: The Man Nobody Knew
Spying is dirty but necessary work, and legendary American spymaster William Colby was arguably the best in the business during the Cold War. Although his professional career culminated with a tumultuous stint as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1973-76, Colby made a name for himself thirty-plus years earlier as a decorated World War II soldier who led espionage activities behind enemy lines for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA. William Colby’s career between those two events was equally impressive, making him an excellent subject for the new documentary – The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby.
What makes The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby so unique and riveting, however, is award-winning filmmaker Carl Colby’s examination into how his father’s close involvement with some of America’s most secret intelligence activities impacted the Colby family. What unfolds on screen is an engaging history lesson on American Cold War espionage, combined with a compelling family drama featuring William Colby himself, a cold and secretive patriarch who, according to Carl, might have been incapable of loving anybody, including his own family.
Using an effective combination of archival footage and revealing interviews with high-profile journalists and Washington power players, Carl Colby objectively traces his father’s post-WWII CIA career, while at the same time telling the story of a withdrawn father living in a world of secrets. William Colby joined the CIA shortly after the war and played an instrumental role in working with the Vatican to install democracy in Italy amidst a strong Communist presence. Carl’s conversational-style voiceover narration explains how his father would take the family on weekend trips to the Italian countryside during this time only to end up meeting one of his intelligence contacts to exchange information. Did William Colby truly love his family, or was family merely a front for him as a career spy? The question lingers throughout the film, and Carl seems to side with the latter opinion as the story progresses.
William Colby is perhaps best known as the architect of the Vietnam War’s controversial Phoenix Program, a U.S. counterinsurgency squad that became forever linked with violent interrogation techniques and a thirst for assassinations that helped turn American public opinion against the war. Colby was a battle-tested soldier at heart, and his determination to win in Vietnam ultimately worked against him. Again, Carl’s narration talks of a largely absent father more dedicated to work than family, leaving his mother to care for a seriously ill daughter in desperate need of her dad.
Surprisingly, Carl’s mother Barbara emerges as the most impressive person in the documentary. Early in the film Carl recalls a family friend once saying that his mother had a lot to do with his father’s success. Watching and listening to Barbara Colby makes it easy to understand why. She’s eloquent and honest about what it was like being married to such a secretive and controversial man for nearly forty years (William divorced her in 1984). Although Barbara always played the role of dutiful wife, you can sense her underlying frustration when she discusses William’s long absences and private nature. She seems to still be coming to terms with the fact that she never really knew the man she married.
Viewers wanting any detailed theories about the mysteriousness surrounding William Colby’s 1996 death in a boating accident won’t find them here. Carl Colby says nothing about foul play factoring into his father’s death. Rather, he feels that his father simply had had enough of this life. And so, more than twenty years after defying the President and revealing some of the CIA’s darkest secrets to Congress, William Colby died alone in his own boat, which might just be a fitting metaphor for the way he chose to live most of his adult life – alone in his own boat.
The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby will fascinate history and spy buffs, but you don’t need a history degree to get something out of the story. Although a basic understanding of the Cold War and Vietnam era might make parts of the film more understandable, anybody can relate to Carl Colby’s personal memoir about a family living in the shadows of an espionage legend.
