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  Deadly Deceits

  My 25 Years in the CIA

  Ralph W. McGehee

  This book is dedicated to all those hurt by CIA covert operations. It is especially dedicated to the Vietnamese and the Americans who served in Vietnam.

  CONTENTS

  Series Introduction

  Foreword

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  1. Gung Ho!

  2. Japan and the Philippines: Innocents Abroad.

  3. Washington: Fun in the Files

  4. A Company Man in China

  5. Life at Langley

  6. North Thailand: Saving the Hill Tribes

  7. Headquarters: Duping Congress

  8. In Search of Reds

  9. Headquarters: Ghosts in the Halls

  10. The CIA in Vietnam: Transforming Reality

  11. Coming Home

  12. Down and Out in Thailand

  13. Light at the End of the Tunnel

  14. Conclusion

  Appendix: This Book and the Secrecy Agreement

  Sources

  Glossary

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Introduction

  I

  We the people seem to have the freest book trade in the world. Certainly we have the biggest. Cruise the mighty Amazon, and you will see so many books for sale in the United States today as would require more than four hundred miles of shelving to display them—a bookshelf that would stretch from Boston’s Old North Church to Fort McHenry in South Baltimore.

  Surely that huge catalog is proof of our extraordinary freedom of expression: The US government does not ban books, because the First Amendment won’t allow it. While books are widely banned in states like China and Iran, no book may be forbidden by the US government at any level (although the CIA censors books by former officers). Where books are banned in the United States, the censors tend to be private organizations—church groups, school boards, and other local (busy) bodies roused to purify the public schools or libraries nearby.

  Despite such local prohibitions, we can surely find any book we want. After all, it’s easy to locate those hot works that once were banned by the government as too “obscene” to sell, or mail, until the courts ruled otherwise on First Amendment grounds—Fanny Hill, Howl, Naked Lunch. We also have no trouble finding books banned here and there as “antifamily,” “Satanic,” “racist,” and/or “filthy,” from Huckleberry Finn to Heather Has Two Mommies to the Harry Potter series, just to name a few.

  II

  And yet, the fact that those bold books are all in print, and widely read, does not mean that we have the freest book trade in the world. On the contrary: For over half a century, America’s vast literary culture has been disparately policed, and imperceptibly contained, by state and corporate entities well placed and perfectly equipped to wipe out wayward writings. Their ad hoc suppressions through the years have been far more effectual than those quixotic bans imposed on classics like The Catcher in the Rye and Fahrenheit 451. For every one of those bestsellers scandalously purged from some provincial school curriculum, there are many others (we can’t know how many) that have been so thoroughly erased that few of us, if any, can remember them, or have ever heard of them.

  How have all those books (to quote George Orwell) “dropped into the memory hole” in these United States? As America does not ban books, other means—less evident, and so less controversial—have been deployed to vaporize them. Some almost never made it into print, as publishers were privately warned off them from on high, either on the grounds of “national security” or with blunt threats of endless corporate litigation. Other books were signed enthusiastically—then “dumped,” as their own publishers mysteriously failed to market them, or even properly distribute them. But it has mainly been the press that stamps out inconvenient books, either by ignoring them, or—most often—laughing them off as “conspiracy theory,” despite their soundness (or because of it).

  Once out of print, those books are gone. Even if some few of us have not forgotten them, and one might find used copies here and there, these books have disappeared. Missing from the shelves and never mentioned in the press (and seldom mentioned even in our schools), each book thus neutralized might just as well have been destroyed en masse—or never written in the first place, for all their contribution to the public good.

  III

  The purpose of this series is to bring such vanished books to life—first life for those that never saw the light of day, or barely did, and second life for those that got some notice, or even made a splash, then slipped too quickly out of print, and out of mind.

  These books, by and large, were made to disappear, or were hastily forgotten, not because they were too lewd, heretical, or unpatriotic for some touchy group of citizens. These books sank without a trace, or faded fast, because they tell the sort of truths that Madison and Jefferson believed our Constitution should protect—truths that the people have the right to know, and needs to know, about our government and other powers that keep us in the dark.

  Thus the works on our Forbidden Bookshelf shed new light—for most of us, it’s still new light—on the most troubling trends and episodes in US history, especially since World War II: America’s broad use of former Nazis and ex-Fascists in the Cold War; the Kennedy assassinations, and the murders of Martin Luther King Jr., Orlando Letelier, George Polk, and Paul Wellstone; Ronald Reagan’s Mafia connections, Richard Nixon’s close relationship with Jimmy Hoffa, and the mob’s grip on the NFL; America’s terroristic Phoenix Program in Vietnam, US support for South America’s most brutal tyrannies, and CIA involvement in the Middle East; the secret histories of DuPont, ITT, and other giant US corporations; and the long war waged by Wall Street and its allies in real estate on New York City’s poor and middle class.

  The many vanished books on these forbidden subjects (among others) altogether constitute a shadow history of America—a history that We the People need to know at last, our country having now become a land with billionaires in charge, and millions not allowed to vote, and everybody under full surveillance. Through this series, we intend to pull that necessary history from the shadows at long last—to shed some light on how America got here, and how we might now take it somewhere else.

  Mark Crispin Miller

  Foreword

  It was just over thirty years ago when, in the aftermath of America’s defeat in Vietnam, Sheridan Square Press published Ralph W. McGehee’s memoir, Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA. The book, one of a number of exposés by former US intelligence officers during the Vietnam War era of CIA, Pentagon, and White House manipulation of the intelligence system, the conduct of covert operations, and deception of the American public, is also a gripping personal story of the life of an American who spent most of his adult years as an undercover participant in the Cold War.

  Deadly Deceits tells how McGehee, an all-American football player and a fervent patriot who graduated from Notre Dame in 1950, joined the CIA determined to defend the United States against the menace of godless communism. In the early chapters he describes training and indoctrination that intensified these feelings and made him eager to join the battle.

  The majority of the book’s pages are devoted to his assignments in Southeast Asia—Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos—where, as a directorate of plans and trainer of counterrevolutionary (“anticommunist”) forces (a “knuckle dragger,” in CIA parlance), McGehee increasingly found himself acting on strategies drawn up by superiors i
n Saigon, Bangkok, or Vientiane that did not reflect the realities on the ground as he had come to know them. A true believer in agency leadership, he persisted in reporting the facts to headquarters, confident that changes would be made. To his surprise he found that the higher-ups did not respond favorably to his suggestions. Indeed, to his chagrin and growing anger, he came to realize that those in positions of authority were reluctant, to say the least, to consider anything that criticized or even questioned the assumptions on which US tactics were based. To do so, he was told, made suspect his loyalty to the organization and commitment to the success of the mission. Indeed, he was warned that if he persisted, his chances of promotion, even his career, would be jeopardized.

  While his frustration increased, McGehee, still the fervent anticommunist warrior, was becoming more and more disturbed as he learned from his work in the field that the insurgents he was trying to defeat were not, contrary to the official line, ignorant people terrorized or deceived by communist cadres into taking up arms but mostly peasants rebelling against oppressive conditions and foreign occupation.

  The anger and disillusionment he was experiencing in his work were having adverse effects on his family life. Deadly Deceits is a very frank personal life story. McGehee is candid about how his workplace frustrations affected his relations with his wife, Norma, and their children.

  It is a tribute to the character of both husband and wife that their marriage survived the strains of his quarter-century career in an organization that, as he came to understand, had deception and untruth at its core. Indeed, when describing his retirement ceremony at CIA headquarters in 1976, at which he was awarded the CIA career intelligence medal, McGehee writes: “I was deeply moved by my family’s presence there with me. I had lived through 25 years of illusion, the last decade of which had been filled with anger, bitterness, self-doubts, mistrust, disbelief, disgust and struggle. That I had survived with my sanity intact was a testimonial to their belief and loyalty.”

  As one final irony, he comments on his award citation that “as with nearly everything else touched by the Agency, its intelligence was flawed. It said that the Agency gave me the medal, in part, for my excellent work in Malaysia—a country which I had never even visited.”

  There ends his personal story, save for an appendix in which he details the bureaucratic and legalistic maze he had to navigate in order to get the manuscript for Deadly Deceits through the CIA’s publication-review process. This, too, is instructive, showing how high-ranking ex-officials who praise the agency and its practices have their memoirs passed through almost without question. On the other hand, critical former officers like McGehee are subjected to an inquisition in which their every reference to agency operations and practices or personnel are declared to be classified national-security information that cannot be revealed.

  In this, McGehee again demonstrates what an extraordinarily thorough researcher he is. To every agency objection, he was able to present evidence showing that what he had written was already in the public domain, often placed there by the agency itself. It did not hurt his presentation that he had already established and was providing to subscribers on a computer site called CIABASE references to everything published about US intelligence agencies and their practices.

  He also adds one final chapter—“Conclusion.” Here he declares that the CIA is not an intelligence agency and never has been. In truth, he goes on, it is essentially “the covert action arm of the President and his foreign policy advisors. … It shapes its intelligence … to support presidential policy.” He goes on: “Disinformation is a large part of its covert action responsibility, and the American people are the primary target of its lies.” Over the next few pages he gives example after example from Vietnam, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Indonesia, and elsewhere. He is appalled by the steps taken by the Reagan administration, particularly the issuance of the notorious Executive Order 12333, which gives the CIA, banned from conducting operations in the United States—a ban frequently ignored (DCM)— authorization to do so. He is similarly troubled by Executive Order 12356, further limiting public access to government documents.

  But what to do? First, he calls for the abolition of the CIA, which, he says, “cannot be salvaged.” Next, since he accepts that they are sometimes necessary, he suggests that covert operations responsibility be given to a separate body not involved in intelligence gathering or analysis.

  His last suggestion is intriguing. He calls for identifying people of “ability, integrity, and flexibility and giving [them] lifetime or long-term non-renewable appointments to a board controlling intelligence requirements and production.” The board would be assisted by high-rated university political science graduates who would serve one-year clerkships.

  Interestingly, a move toward something like this was made in the last year of the Carter administration. A group of people from outside the agency were hired to work in the National Intelligence Council (NIC) as the primary drafters of national intelligence estimates independent of the various analytic offices within the CIA.

  A highly respected senior CIA officer, who had been the head of the agency’s first congressional-liaison office, was in charge. (Here the writer of this foreword must tell the readers that he was among the first of the outsiders hired.) Intentions were good, but the opening of this new NIC office coincided with the Reagan administration’s appointment of William Casey as agency director. Good-bye to meaningful change, let alone an end to covert operations and misinformation. We were off and running on Iran-Contra.

  (Again, for reasons of full disclosure, I have to inform readers that my refusal, on the basis of lack of credible evidence of Nicaraguan or Cuban government supply of arms to the insurgents in El Salvador, to write estimates justifying the support of the Nicaraguan contras led to my dismissal from Langley in late 1983.

  After on-the-ground work in Nicaragua confirmed my conclusions I returned to the United States, where the New York Times and other major papers gave my charges against the CIA and the Reagan administration front-page coverage. Eventually, I became one of the principal witnesses against the United States in the 1985 UN World Court trial, in which the United States was convicted of violating international law in its covert contra war against Nicaragua.)

  At about this time I became part of a just-organized group of former US intelligence officers, the Association of National Security Alumni, running its Washington office and editing its publication Unclassified. Ralph, then living in nearby Herndon, Virginia, while never an official member, was of great assistance to the association, and we became close acquaintances. Through this acquaintanceship I learned of the constant petty harassment, apparently conducted or instigated by the CIA, to which he and his family were subjected during his residence in Herndon.

  This new edition of Deadly Deceits comes at a time when the faults and failures of the CIA and the rest of the US national security system that McGehee exposed thirty years ago have been shown by a new generation of insider whistle-blowers (as the McGehees of today are now called) to have survived all efforts at reform. Indeed, the never-ending War on Terror, employing weaponry, means of electronic espionage, and levels of government funding, unknown in the decades in which he worked, appear, if anything, to have magnified the problem.

  Deadly Deceits is more timely than ever. It deserves reading and Ralph McGehee once again deserves the thanks of all Americans.

  David MacMichael

  Author’s Note

  My thanks to Open Road Media for including Deadly Deceits in its Forbidden Bookshelf ebook series.

  My purpose in writing Deadly Deceits a generation ago was to inform the public about how the CIA distorted intelligence reports, including mine, on the Vietnam War to support White House political goals. I had to obtain a court order against the agency to get the book published in its original form. I felt it was vital, however, to alert the public that many intelligence reports from the CIA could not be trusted.

  It remains as i
mportant today as it was in the Vietnam era for the public to hold the CIA accountable when its reporting reflects political purposes instead of accurate intelligence.

  My hope is that this ebook publication of Deadly Deceits will serve as a reminder that watching the watchers—the CIA and other intelligence agencies—may be the best way to keep them from straying from their legitimate intelligence-gathering mission.

  INTRODUCTION

  IT was late one night in December 1968 in Gia Dinh province near Saigon. Angered and miserable, I was sitting alone in the living room of a villa sparsely furnished with standard government-issue rattan tables and kapok-cushioned sofa and chairs. A bare coffee table and empty bookshelves signaled the recent transition from one CIA occupant to another. A framed picture of artificial-looking flowers broke up only slightly the monotony of the harsh yellow walls. The lone tape left by my predecessor played on the stereo and Nancy Sinatra sang for the hundredth time “Such a Pretty World Today,” soon to be followed by “End of the World.” Outside, helicopter gunships circled and off in the distance B-52s dropped another string of bombs on South Vietnamese men, women, and children.

  I sat there in agony thinking about all that had led me to this private hell. My idealism, my patriotism, my ambition, my plans to be a good intelligence officer to help my country fight the Communist scourge—what in hell had happened? Why did we have to bomb the people we were trying to save? Why were we napalming young children? Why did the CIA, my employer for 16 years, report lies instead of the truth?

  I hated my part in this charade of murder and horror. My efforts were contributing to the deaths, to the burning alive of children—especially the children. The photographs of young Vietnamese children burned by napalm destroyed me. I wanted out of this massacre. Angrily I thought back to the year before in Thailand when I had worked in the rural villages and learned some painful truths about the nature of an Asian revolution. I had faced the undeniable evidence that the Communists had infiltrated much deeper into Asian society than we had ever imagined or reported, and I had devised what I thought was a humane way to beat them. Why had the Agency first accepted that information and then, in spite of countless proofs of its accuracy, denied it? When presented with a viable alternative, why was it following the same old methods that resulted only in more killing and more futility?