Deadly Deceits

by Ralph W. McGehee

  “Well, I still think our democracy can respond to the challenge,” I said, but Allen wasn’t convinced. He seemed to have lapsed into apathy.

  “International communism is a different kind of threat,” he grumbled. “It’s like a cancer; it grows slowly until it destroys you. They can direct anyone to do anything. They can order their people to move, to study certain topics, to concentrate on weapons development. We have our freedom of choice, our effort is voluntary. It seems like there is no way for us to keep up.”

  Allen wasn’t alone in his pessimism. The Agency seemed permeated by it. We all feared that our way of life, our freedom, our religions were directly exposed to the cancer. But this pessimism ultimately turned to rededication. Our national leaders moved to launch our own satellite. After a few misfires and a lot more teeth gnashing, despite Nikita Khrushchev’s disparaging remarks about our orbiting “grapefruit,” we knew we were on the road to success. We in the Agency felt that the battle for the freedom of the world was now, to a large extent, in our hands.

  Both Allen and I hoped to play a large role in that fight. We felt our talents were under-utilized in our present paper-shuffling jobs and wanted to get directly involved in operations against the communist menace. After numerous appeals, one day in the summer of 1958, we were called into the office of our crusty boss. He gruffly announced that we were getting our chance—we had been chosen to go to the career training course for case officers.

  In a daze I went back to my desk. I reached down and opened the bottom drawer of my safe that for several years had held the accumulated backlog of dreaded clearance and trace requests. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The drawer was nearly empty. My days of dull paperwork were over. Finally I was to become a case officer—the cream of the Agency’s manpower. Finally I would be out on the front lines gathering intelligence and conducting covert operations against the communists.

  Following three months training back at the “farm,” Allen and I both got the same assignment: Taipei, Taiwan.

  4. A COMPANY MAN IN CHINA

  NORMA, the children, and I landed at Taipei’s airport in early February 1959. We were greeted by a cold drenching rain and by Tom, a bubbly extrovert who had worked with Allen and me in China activities back at Headquarters. Tom drove us to the house that we had been assigned on the outskirts of Taipei and then announced that we were expected to attend a party my new boss was throwing that night for Chinese intelligence liaison. A car and driver and a baby-sitter would arrive at about seven to pick us up. Norma objected vehemently to leaving the children with a stranger, in a strange house, in a strange land. However, this appeared to be not so much an invitation as a command.

  After Tom left, we took a quick tour of the house and surrounding area. The neighborhood—rice paddies and pounded-out tin shacks—seemed to offer little potential for the children. There were obviously few Americans living in the area and the isolation from other children would not be good for them. The house was no better. Water was seeping in around the edges, most of the appliances were broken, and a high concrete fence that surrounded the small lot blocked the light from the windows. At this point, our eight-year-old, Jean, asked, “Daddy, is that cow ours?” We all looked out the window and there in the small front yard was a huge water buffalo. The children found this quite exciting, but Norma didn’t. I grabbed a broom and a bit hesitantly went out and shooed the beast away.

  That night a baby-sitter arrived with the chauffeur-driven car. Although extremely uneasy about the children, we dutifully went off to the liaison party. My new co-workers, both American and Chinese, seemed pleasant. My boss, whom I shall call Al Barton, a former Naval officer and a dyed-in-the-wool cold warrior, took it upon himself to tell Norma about the new assignment.

  “Ralph will be required to work long, hard hours,” he said. “He’ll have to be gone weekends and on occasion he may be gone for periods of several days or weeks. His work is extremely important, but it must remain secret. You must not ask him where he goes or what he does. You must just understand and accept it. There’s some danger associated with his work, but we all recognized this when we joined the company.”

  Al’s timing was poor. Norma was unhappy enough about the move. For three years we had lived on Cherry Street in Vienna, Virginia, where we had many close friends, young couples like us with small children. We had partied together and visited back and forth. The children had played together, gone to school together, and become good friends. For the children and Norma it had been an idyllic time, and they were reluctant to leave. But we had talked over the decision and as happened so many times, Norma had put aside her doubts to accommodate my plans and visions of career advancement. Now she was being told that she’d come all this way to a leaky house in a rice paddy, and she wouldn’t even be allowed to know where her husband was. She said nothing to Al, but when we got home, she hit the ceiling.

  “What in hell does he mean I won’t know where you’ll be? You could be fooling around or dead for that matter.”

  “It’s the rules, Norma.”

  “Yes, but you’re the only one who follows them. Everybody learns everything at cocktail parties.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “This damn Agency is hell on families,” she sputtered. “First it separates us, then it doesn’t let me know what you’ll do or where you’ll be. We can’t even talk honestly to each other.”

  We had been through it a hundred times. I said nothing and figured she’d calm down once she was adjusted. But I decided right then that we had to find a better place to live.

  Soon we moved to the housing compound on Yan Ming mountain just outside of Taipei. We found a good maid and baby-sitter, and our lifestyle began to resemble that of America’s sybaritic rich. We fell in with a socially active crowd. The kids entered the Taipei American School, which was well-run by its competent, primarily American, teaching staff. There were many playmates in the compound, and it also had playgrounds, tennis courts, traffic-free roads, and occasional free movies at the club.

  Shortly after we arrived in Taipei, Norma found out that she was pregnant. We had not anticipated this, but she had plenty of company. There was a baby boom in the compound. In September 1959 Norma delivered a cute, healthy, red-haired son, whom we named Dan. Tom’s wife delivered Tom, Jr. in October, and a whole succession of family additions among our circle followed.

  I felt a real thrill beginning my job as a case officer in Taipei. Mostly I worked in liaison with the various Chinese Nationalist intelligence services. My assignment was to send agents to the mainland to gather intelligence about developments in Communist China. Others in our office worked with the Chinese Nationalists to train and drop teams of Chinese on the mainland to develop resistance movements and gather intelligence.

  As the junior man in the office I was given the least exciting, non-demanding assignments. Even so, working with foreign nationals against the Soviet/Chinese monolith in the atmosphere of those days was exciting. On several occasions I went to Chinmen (Quemoy) Island to debrief mainland Chinese fishermen who had strayed too close to the island’s shores and had been captured by the Chinese Nationalist troops there. To get out to the island, we flew on Chinese Nationalist Air Force C-47s. To avoid Communist radar, the pilots would fly out just above the water, rise up quickly as they approached the island to get above its high peaks, and land immediately. At that time the Chinese Communists had announced that they would shell Chinmen on alternate days, which they did, I spent my first night on the island in a tin-roofed shack while the shells fell outside. At first this seemed terribly dangerous. But later I came to realize that the Nationalists and the Communists seemed to have a gentlemen’s agreement. Both sides shelled at specific hours and aimed their shells at barren areas. Neither side wished to risk the escalation of shooting at the numerous out-in-the-open targets.

  When I made these trips out to the island, I never got any significant information from the detainees, but they did provide
background information on developments on the mainland. And after the debriefings, the Chinese Nationalist generals always took the opportunity to impress their American friends by inviting us to dine with them. The food was great and the atmosphere pleasant. The one thing I couldn’t bear was the toasting between courses. The Chinese toasted with the fierce Gao Liang liquor, which smelled and tasted like turpentine. The various toasts ended with either sui bian (drink as much as you please) or gan bei (bottoms up). My first drink was a gan bei, and I was unprepared for that strong, heavy fluid. It went down the wrong pipe and to all of the diners’ embarrassment, especially mine, I couldn’t stop coughing for some minutes.

  Two recently arrived American case officers worked in the same office with me. One was Jimmy Moe, whom I had known as a paramilitary trainee. Jimmy seemed uptight in the office routine, and you had the feeling that he was going to burst if he did not get out. Shortly after Jimmy moved to Taipei, he was transferred to work with the Thais and the hill tribesmen in the beginning of the secret war in Laos. (The tribe called itself the Hmong. The Agency, however, usually used the derogatory Chinese term, Meo.) Jimmy was thrilled at the prospect and quickly packed up and moved to his new job.

  About half-way through my tour, I was assigned to manage an operation that seemed to have considerable potential. One of the Chinese Nationalist intelligence services offered to share its best agent with us. They said they would give him all of their training and requirements, after which we could do the same. The agent then would go to the mainland and try to satisfy all of the requirements of both services. The Chinese said that this agent had gone on trips before to the mainland and had returned with good intelligence. Since we had yet to place one solid reporting agent on the mainland, we eagerly agreed to their proposal.

  The agent—I will call him L/1—was a Chinese James Bond. There seemed nothing he could not do. Our training officers taught him our system of secret writing, radio communication, photography, observation and reporting, and numerous other subjects. Our intelligence reporting staff briefed him on major intelligence requirements. I gave him his travel documents and briefed him on the cover story. No matter what the topic or instructions, all the training officers said L/1 was the best agent they had ever trained. He grasped broad concepts as easily as he mastered demanding technical points. We all were a little awed by L/1, but a few were put off by his condescending manner.

  Our plan was to send L/1 to the mainland, where he would contact and recruit a friend to serve as our spy. He was also to set up a clandestine radio in the friend’s house. We gave him a detailed daily time schedule for radio contact, at which time our people would monitor his radio’s frequency. After he recruited his friend (L/2), he was to travel around China for several months while occasionally sending out radio reports and encoded letters.

  After two months of training and briefing, we launched him into China.

  L/1 lived up to all of his potential, except for radio contact. He began sending back a series of encoded letters, which decoded perfectly, and described his travails along the way. After nearly four months he reappeared in Taiwan. This was the first successful operation of this type that the station had ever had, and we were all elated. I planned to get the best mileage out of the operation and set forth a debriefing schedule for every day, both morning and afternoon. As it turned out, the debriefing went on for a full month. I had to rely on an interpreter, but that seemed only a minor problem since L/1’s answers to my questions were crisp, short, and straight to the point.

  During the debriefing L/1 gave us details of L/2’s house and life in a commune in China. Food and clothing were rationed, he said, apportioned according to one’s status and function. Everyone was required to participate in political meetings that continued sometimes until late in the evening. In the morning everyone was required to get up early and participate in group exercises. The government’s radio station would broadcast exercise instructions and music to exercise by.

  There was one thing about L/1’s story that disturbed me—the lack of radio contact while he was in China. L/1 claimed that he could not make contact because our schedule called for early-morning communication when, according to him, the electricity in the town was turned off. Yet the government’s exercise program came on early in the morning and was received by L/2’s commercial radio. How was one radio able to operate but not another? I began to wonder if L/1’s claim about no morning electricity might be contrived. But I did not want to confront him with the discrepancy until I had closed all avenues of possible retreat. I wanted desperately for him to allay my suspicions, but I just as avidly wanted to know the truth.

  One aspect of the operation complicated my attempts to resolve the problem. The intelligence service of the Chinese Nationalists might have substituted their crystals in our radio, thereby allowing L/1 to report only to them. I had to be careful not to expose any possible duplicity on the part of the liaison service, since the ongoing relationship was probably more important than determining the truth about this operation. Throughout the last two weeks of the debriefing, I casually asked L/1 about L/2’s radio—where he had purchased it, what its brand name was, what stations it could receive, and what kind of batteries he had to buy for it. L/1 responded that it did not have batteries and that it operated off the house current. That was the wrong answer.

  On the last day of the debriefing I asked why, if L/2’s radio operated off the house current in the early morning, was it impossible for him to make use of that same electricity for our radio? L/1’s look archly acknowledged that I had got the best of him. He jumped up, went into the next room, and brought out several gifts for me. He handed me a bottle of true mainland Gao Liang, a pack of mainland cigarettes, and a few trinkets that had originated in China. The debriefing was over.

  I could never prove that L/1 lied to conceal duplicity on the part of the Chinese Nationalist intelligence service or that he was working for the Chinese Communists. But these questions hung over that operation until it was terminated.

  We were never quite sure when the Chinese Nationalist intelligence services were playing games with us, and I am sure they felt the same way about the CIA. I had found out shortly after I arrived in Taipei that LFBOOKLET, the agent fabricator who had led us on such a merry chase with his Saigon clipping service, loading our files with pro-Chiang Kai-shek and anti-Mao Tse-tung misinformation, was actually an officer of Chiang’s intelligence service.

  On June 18, 1960, President Dwight Eisenhower visited Taipei. The Chinese Nationalists were ecstatic and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his men arranged a grand reception, featuring major speeches by both Chiang and the President in the Plaza in downtown Taipei. Tom and I were anxious to see President Eisenhower and went down to the Plaza. As the hour grew near for the Generalissimo and the President to appear, the Plaza became jammed with more than 200,000 Chinese, and possibly a few Taiwanese. The excitement mounted, and the orderly crowd changed into a pressing, pushing, shoving mass. Both Tom and I stood over six feet tall, but we worried about suffocating. I can’t imagine how the shorter Chinese were feeling. The speech by Chiang reiterated his annual “back-to-the-mainland” cry, while President Eisenhower vowed American support for the Generalissimo’s government.

  The crowd grew more out of control, and both Chiang and Eisenhower fled from the podium—out the back way—to avoid that swirling crush of humanity. An electric enthusiasm motivated the crowd, but I feared that it could quickly turn to violence. Tom and I moved to the edge of the crowd and hurried back to the safety of our office compound.

  While President Eisenhower was in Taipei, the Chinese Communists launched an unprecedented, vicious artillery barrage on Chinmen Island, their way of expressing disapproval at the visit. The great turnout at the Plaza and the unnecessary attack on the island reinforced the view within the station of the correctness of our policy toward the two Chinas. The demonstration led us to believe that Chiang, in fact, held the allegiance of the people,
while Mao’s bombardment revealed the true brutal nature of the international Communist movement.

  I did not know then how the Generalissimo’s government had come to power. Only later did I learn that in 1949, as the mainland fell, the Chinese Nationalist forces and camp followers had been evacuated to Taiwan by the American Navy. Once on the island, they had used their American-supplied weapons to dominate the more numerous Taiwanese—one Chinese to every seven or eight Taiwanese. In fact, the Generalissimo in the early days was able to maintain his authority only with extensive repressive measures. All of this at the time seemed to escape my attention and the attention of my colleagues at the station.

  Our life was almost totally divorced from that of the more unfortunate Taiwanese and Chinese. Living in a compound, we spent all of our time with Agency friends. The only local contact we had, other than liaison officers I worked with, came on shopping trips, traveling to and from work, or going to restaurants. If we had not been so removed, we might have noticed the true situation on Taiwan and reported back some decent intelligence about it.

  Despite my boss’s early warnings, the duties on Taiwan seemed more directed at having a good time than at productive work. When we were not throwing a party for our counterpart Chinese officials, they were having us to sumptuous multi-course banquets. In addition, the station personnel were inclined to party, and every week required attendance at one affair or another. We realized that we had isolated ourselves from the Taiwanese people, but the constant partying and the good company kept us from worrying much about the problem.

  Ray Cline was the chief of station. He had few pretenses and was gracious to the lowest- as well as the highest-ranking of his employees. He had an unusual way of accepting an Agency wife into the station family. When he felt a woman had earned a place in the loyal fellowship, he would deliver a pinch to the fanny. This was such a tradition that many women felt left out until he delivered his own version of official acceptance. It was all in rather good fun and no one seemed to object. Early in his tour Ray struck up a close friendship with the Generalissimo’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo. Chiang and his wife could frequently be seen in our club bar playing the slot machines.