The Man Nobody Knew
Documentary film offers insights into life of legendary CIA officer
In 1953, six years after its founding, the Central Intelligence Agency comprised 15,000 officers and staff.1
Very few of their true identities have ever been revealed publicly. And for those that have been identified, anything of substance is known about even fewer still.
Considering the odds, it was a stroke of luck that one of the CIA’s most consequential figures, one who managed multiple officers who played major roles in the Jay Reid case, would raise a son who grew up to be a filmmaker.
In 2011, Carl Colby produced and directed a film called The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father CIA Spymaster William Colby.
William Colby, like many other high-ranking Agency officers of his day, was an Ivy League trained veteran of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime predecessor to the CIA.
Colby served in the CIA for thirty years, the last three as its Director during the Agency’s low point in the mid-1970s.
His story offers insights on numerous levels, the most important of which is the human level.
All of the men who figured directly in the Jay Reid case are deceased, and many have been for decades. They led secret lives, and in many cases, their children were kept completely in the dark as to what their careers actually entailed.
That was case for Carl Colby, who discovered much of the human toll his father’s work took during the course of making the film.
Major themes
The film, which is feature-length and extremely well done, includes interviews with many major figures from the fields of government, intelligence, journalism, and the military.
You will even see Catalina Island trainee and fellow Bethesda, Maryland resident B. Hugh Tovar, who reported directly to Colby in the mid-1960s.
The parts of the film that make the biggest impact are those that shed light on who Colby was as a person, how he understood the work he did, and the lasting impact on the countries in which he worked.
The Catholic Church
The CIA’s first major covert action effort was aimed at preventing the communists from coming to power in Italy in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Unlike in Eastern Europe, where communists took over countries through brute force, in Italy the concern was that they would win legitimate victories at the ballot box.
Bill Colby was the station chief in Italy under whom Stephen Munger worked in the 1950s. The film notes that Agency officers in the country at that time were split between state department and other forms of cover, which presented managerial challenges for Colby.
I have confirmed that Munger was one of those who did not have government cover. Most likely, he had a still unidentified commercial cover of some sort.
The film details how the CIA managed to gain such outsized influence over Italian politics during this period - payments to the Catholic Church, which were then dispensed in the form of bribes.
Stephen Munger was not Catholic. Neither was Jay Reid, but his wife Virginia was a very devout Catholic.
Their connections to the Church are an area of ongoing interest. As the film makes clear, it would have been virtually impossible for Stephen Munger to have been stationed in Rome and not established a working relationship with the Catholic Church.
Why all of this focus on Catholicism?
In early 2024, a few months after I received the CIA’s response to my initial freedom of information act (FOIA) request asking for all documents the Agency had on Jay Reid, I filed an experimental FOIA request with the National Security Agency (NSA).
The NSA denied the request, but the denial came back quick, within a few weeks of filing. The quick turnaround motivated me to file other requests about aspects of this case that theoretically could infringe on the signals intelligence space that is the purview of the NSA.
At this point, I knew only about Jay Reid and Steven Munger’s ties to the Agency.
I wondered if, as a means of keeping an eye on these two individuals, whether or not the NSA had planted listening devices in any of the homes on the block.
As a control, I also submitted a request for St. Bartholomew’s Catholic Church, at the end of Blacklock Rd., a two-minute walk from Jay’s front door.
To increase my odds of getting an actual response, I asked only for a count of documents on each of Blacklock Road’s eight houses, plus the church, from June 1970.
The request was, of course, denied, but the denial was both interesting and useful. It cited national security concerns for all addresses as the reason for denial.
That may have been done merely out of convenience, but it put St. Bart’s on my radar. The film raised my interest further.
Following Colby
Although almost nothing is known about Steven Munger’s CIA career, one thing that has been confirmed is that his career arc within the Agency aligned with Bill Colby’s.
After Italy, my understanding is that Munger returned stateside to work at headquarters, while Colby had one more stop, in Vietnam, before returning to the D.C. area.
Colby went back to Vietnam in the late-1960s, and the film does an excellent job of detailing the disaster that ensued during those years in which Colby was running Operation Phoenix.
As I have been told, Munger went to Vietnam in the early 1970s, soon after Colby left. It is unknown what Munger did in Vietnam, but as the film demonstrates, he arrived as the whole U.S. effort was spiraling out of control.
The human toll of that assignment on Steven Munger must have been immense. He had played a role in one of the CIA’s greatest achievements, keeping Italy in the Western camp long enough for La Dolce Vita to take hold.
To be on the ground for one of the CIA’s greatest failures, and to experience the ramifications firsthand, must have been jarring.
Like an overwhelming majority of his CIA colleagues, Steven Munger returned from Vietnam and kept his memories and experiences to himself.
Jay did the same regarding whatever work he did on behalf of the CIA. It is no wonder their relationship seldom extended beyond small talk during the 30 years they lived across the street from one another.
Screening the film
The Man Nobody Knew is available to watch for free on YouTube, and I have embedded it below.
I highly recommend watching the entire film. For regular readers of this newsletter, it brings to life the characters, spy craft, and consequences of the CIA’s activities during the time in which Jay was active.
It also humanizes the officers caught up in what Bill Colby called “a dirty business”.
Finally, the film provides insights into what the families of these officers experienced during extended stays abroad as well as the time at home when their husband/father was away.
Kinzer, Stephen. The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and their Secret World War. Times Books, New York. 2013. Pg. 132.