Deadly Deceits

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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 in 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.”