At the time of his appointment as DCI in 1973, Colby was under
pressure to make major changes in the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA). Consequently, on 7 September 1973, Colby sent President
Richard M. Nixonan ambitious set of proposed DCI objectives to
improve the intelligence product. Colby’s most significant innova-
tions were to abolish the Office of National Estimates (ONE) and to
establish the national intelligence officer(NIO) system under the
National Intelligence Council (NIC). In his first three months as
DCI, Colby also established an Office of Political Research (OPR) in
the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence (DI) to provide in-depth intel-
ligence support to top-level decision makers, revitalized strategic
warning capabilities, created “Alert Memorandums” for key policy-
makers, and ordered postmortems prepared on the intelligence com-
munity’s (IC’s) performance in various crises.
DCI Colby also faced a series of unexpected crises as soon as he
took office. His tenure began with the CIA’s failure to warn U.S. poli-
cymakers of the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973. The
CIAand intelligence community also failed to warn of the ensuing oil
crisis brought on by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting States
(OPEC).
Colby spent much of his tenure as DCI trying to deflect criticism
of U.S. intelligence with regard to alleged illegal activities, especially
the overthrow and death of Chilean president Salvador Allende. As
a way of thwarting efforts to dismantle the CIA, Colby completed a
study of CIAwrongdoing since its inception and shared these “Fam-
ily Jewels” with the Congress, thus earning him the enmity of Amer-
ican intelligence professionals. Colby died under mysterious circum-
stances in 1996.COLDFEET (OPERATION). Initiated in May 1961 on a trial basis,
the operation sought to drop agents onto an abandoned Sovietice
drift station, designated NP8, in order to explore it and exploit intel-
ligence information about Soviet intentions. The U.S. Navy dropped
two Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) contract employees by para-
chute on the station and retrieved them later by using the Skyhook
system. Assessments of the operation later confirmed the practicality
of parachute-drop and aerial-retrieval techniques to investigate oth-
erwise inaccessible areas.32 • COLDFEET (OPERATION)05-398 (2) Dictionary.qxd 10/20/05 6:27 AM Page 32