COLBY MYSTERY DEEPENS : VANISHING RAISES TROUBLING QUESTIONS ABOUT FORMER CIA DIRECTOR.

Byline: Tim Weiner The New York Times

Jack Yates, the proprietor of Captain John's Crab House on Neale Sound, says hardly anybody knew that the gray-haired gentleman in the house at the end of Hill Road used to be a spy - the head of the CIA, no less.

Now the disappearance of William E. Colby in the murky waters at the confluence of the Potomac and Wicomico Rivers has people talking of little else, says Yates, who was Colby's neighbor and one of the last people to see him alive on Saturday, April 27. He sold him what may have been his last meal, a mess of clams.

People from the elegant Georgetown neighborhood in Washington where Colby mainly lived, on down to Rock Point, a tiny town of crabbers, oystermen, clammers and a few well-heeled weekenders, say it's the stuff of spy novels. It could be, if Colby's real life were not far more interesting than anything writers could invent.

While there is no hint of foul play in Colby's disappearance, there was a time, back in the mid-1970s, when lots of people, from spit-and-polish CIA men to shaggy-haired radicals, wanted to see Bill Colby disappear.

He was the man who, in the name of saving the CIA from itself, spilled more secrets than anyone else in the agency's history. He was also the man who, in the same cause, fired the agency's most famous counterspy, the legendary James Jesus Angleton.

The feelings against him ran so deep inside the agency that a few otherwise sane and sober people accused him of being a Soviet agent. Those on the left vilified him for running the deadly Phoenix program during the Vietnam War, an operation that rooted out suspected Vietcong agents in South Vietnam and killed more than 20,000 of them.

Time passed - nearly a quarter-century - and passions cooled. Colby in retirement was a man of mainstream views, mildly expressed, a healthy 76-year-old man happily married to an accomplished 51-year-old former ambassador.

Yet it is a hard fact that some of the old Cold Warriors from the CIA are very, very bitter about Bill Colby. One went so far as to say his disappearance came 35 years too late. There are equally hard feelings about him among certain governing circles in Vietnam.

So Colby's neighbors and even some of those who knew him say they have to wonder, if fleetingly, if any of those old enemies wanted to do him harm.

Among them is his wife of 12 years, Sally Shelton-Colby, a top administrator at the Agency for International Development, who has kept a vigil at Rock Point.

As the sun started going down Thursday, she stood at the edge of the crescent of sand, strewn with pearly oyster shells, where her husband's green canoe washed up.

Looking out over the water, she spoke of him in the present tense, about how he loves the wide green mouth of the Wicomico, where they swim on hot summer days that end with cool white wine and kisses. She talked about the yellow oysterman's cottage where they live, on the prettiest spit of land in the sound, where the grass is sprinkled with buttercups, and the canoe lies overturned by the dock. Someday they will build a new house right here at Rock Point, on this land.

She is sure he has survived, using the skills and the toughness he acquired parachuting behind German lines as a spy and saboteur in World War II, trekking for six days though blinding blizzards on cross-country skis, lugging a 50-pound pack and a 60-pound toboggan filled with explosives to blow up bridges.

She and the Charles County sheriff rule out suicide. She is certain he is lying in the scrubby underbrush limning the Wicomico, ill or injured, waiting to be rescued, attended only by herons, ospreys, cormorants and hope.

While her hope has not wavered, her sense of certainty has.

``The more we get into this, the more baffled I am,'' she said. ``The weather was gusty on Saturday'' - the winds peaked at about 25 miles an hour that afternoon, kicking up 2-foot whitecaps on the Potomac, and the tide was running fast - ``and I don't understand why Bill went out in it. He was a cautious man. And we're all baffled by the fact that no one saw Bill take the canoe out. This is a small community. People keep an eye on other people. They look out for each other.''

Out on Rock Point, she stopped to thank the Navy divers who had been searching the depths. The frogmen, the local volunteer firemen, the Coast Guard and Maryland state officers, and the men who make their living from these waters, have been looking for Colby, using everything from sonar to search dogs to their bare hands. They are less sure that he is alive, less and less each day.

But they have questions, too. Where are the canoe's paddles? Where is the life vest that lay in the canoe's bow?

Any missing person - which Colby is, officially, until he is found - is a mystery. But the answer to his whereabouts may be no more mysterious than the swirling waters surrounding Neale Sound, at the southernmost tip of Charles County, where fresh water flowing down from the Appalachians meets salt water flowing up from the Atlantic.

The water is tidal. The rivers don't run so much as they ebb and flow, in thrall to the moon and the ocean.

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Photo: William Colby

Shared many secrets