Deadly Deceits

by Ralph W. McGehee

  With a confession from a member of the FLA, the interviewer would prepare a report of all names, aliases, and other information and pass the report on to Lieutenant Somboon. He in turn would read the reports to look for leads and contradictions and then pass them on to the translators, who put them into English for me. I also looked for leads and contradictions that could help break down the resistance of some of the subjects. For instance, one person claimed that he and his friend Chalong had gone fishing one night, but Chalong had said that he had stayed home. The team members used this disparity and finally wrung confessions from the two friends. In fact, both had gone together to a Communist indoctrination session at a nearby guerrilla camp.

  The team approached various confessed members of the FLA to serve as agents for the government. Our purpose in doing this was twofold. First, we needed agents in the organization, and second, we anticipated that some of them would inform their Communist superiors about the recruitment. We did not try to recruit others because we hoped that when they talked with their Communist superiors about their interviews and did not mention a recruitment attempt, they would come under suspicion. By this tactic we hoped to sow dissension in the heretofore solid ranks of the Communists.

  In this first village one of the leading Communists refused to admit his role. Never one to be thwarted, Lieutenant Somboon told the man if he did not confess by a certain time his father would be shot. Two-way radio walkie-talkies were set up between Somboon and the “executioners.” When the time passed with no confession, Somboon ordered the “execution” to be carried out. Over the radio the suspect could hear the orders to shoot, the shots, and a loud moaning. A man shouted over the radio that the father was only wounded, but quick medical attention could save his life. Somboon said, “No, let him die.” Finally the suspect relented and admitted that he was a leading member of the village’s Farmers’ Liberation Association. Somboon yelled over the radio to rush the injured man to the doctor. After the suspect made a full confession, Somboon explained the ruse was necessary for the man’s own good.

  Shortly thereafter, the wife of a leading Communist refused to admit her husband’s membership in the FLA. She said her husband was out of town looking for work. Somboon accused her of lying and said he was going to have her child killed if she did not cooperate. Somboon later told me that he believed she herself was a hard-line Communist because she never budged or showed a flicker of emotion.

  In that same village a young man in his late teens, after being confronted with evidence of his membership in the FLA, finally confessed. He broke down and cried that he was terribly ashamed, that he was a good Buddhist, but the Communists had tricked him. He did not know what his parents would think. He apparently could not live with the guilt. That night he hanged himself.

  I was not particularly disturbed by those violations of human rights, as I felt we were fighting the hated communists and that the ends justified the means.

  During the questioning phase of the operation the two Thai police colonels, the four translators, and I moved into the local police commander’s rural Thai house. The two colonels and the male translator bunked in a large dormitory-like room. The three female translators had the main bedroom, while I slept in an enclosed lean-to adjacent to the open eating area. My “room” was just big enough for a cot and my suitcase. There were no fans, but gaps between the wooden slats let in any slight breeze. Our bathing facilities consisted of a tin-enclosed area containing a large, water-filled, earthen urn. To shower, you had to dip into the urn with a small pan and pour that water over yourself.

  The management team—the two colonels, the translators, and I—set up an office in a large, wooden, barn-like structure that served as the village’s central meeting place. We worked there on wooden folding chairs and benches seven days a week for three months. The constant eating, working, and living together created predictable tensions. Two of the males paired off with two of the females, creating another set of problems. To add to these strains, Colonel Chat Chai occasionally brought his typewriter back to the house, where he would type until dawn, each strike of a key sending shock waves up my spine.

  To escape the pressure, including the constant strain of trying to cope with the idiomatic Thai being spoken, each evening I would take a long walk. These strolls down the dusty paths helped me to relax and gave me a chance to appreciate the beauty of rural Thailand. Occasionally my route took me by the small river where the Thais bathed and did their laundry, evoking in me yearnings for a more peaceful way of life.

  The work in the village had an unexpected result, exploding the insurgency as a needle explodes a balloon. For once the secrecy and security behind which the Communists had organized were destroyed, the movement in that village died, at least for the time being. In that village the leader of one of the 40-man cell structures of the Farmers’ Liberation Association was confronted with knowledge of his guilt. Subjected to three days of questioning and discussions of the government’s “good work,” he became convinced that the Communists had duped him. He then helped the team get confessions from his subordinates in the FLA and joined the government’s Volunteer Defense Corps.

  The U.S. government at the time was sponsoring in Northeast Thailand two programs it had adopted from similar efforts in Vietnam—Census Aspiration Cadre and People’s Action Teams. The census cadres were trained in census taking and supposedly could determine the political leanings of villagers by saying they were there to listen to problems and grievances against the government. Census cadres sent frequent reports to their headquarters naming villagers as either pro-government or pro-communist. This American-supported program in both Vietnam and Thailand proved to be at best worthless and at worst a way for Communists to get on an American payroll and feed us a mass of contrived information. For example, Lieutenant Somboon discovered that the census cadre in the first village we surveyed was a long-standing member of the Communist Party of Thailand and the leader of an extensive FLA structure. The man was arrested and jailed.

  People’s Action Teams were small groups of locally recruited villagers who were trained and armed to assist the village and protect it from the Communists. At this early stage the teams did seem to restrict the movement of the Communists. For instance, in this village and several others later on, the farmers who confessed to being members of the FLA refused to remain in their homes because they claimed the Communists would kill anyone who had cooperated with our survey team. Although the interviews had been conducted out of hearing range, other villagers had observed the farmers demonstrating the weapons firing positions taught by the Communists. As a result, Lieutenant Somboon was informed that 70 people had left the village when our survey team departed. I arranged to have a People’s Action Team unit stationed in the village, and the people returned. Later we received reports that all active cooperation with the Communists in that village had ceased.

  Our survey team had come to this district just after a unit from the CPM-1 base had conducted a month-long military sweep, looking for armed bands of insurgents. The military patrols had raced through the rice paddies in half-track personnel carriers and tanks, tearing up the fields, and angry, untrained military interrogators with no knowledge of the area had beaten the local farmers. The little information they got had not been collated or analyzed. It had been a typical beat-’em-down-with-hardware type of operation which had succeeded in nothing but earning the enmity of the villagers and swelling the number of volunteers into the Communist ranks. In comparison, our survey team obtained confessions from more than 500 village-based FLA members. We also learned the location of various guerrilla campsites, and one time—although this was not part of our mission—the team tried to oust the guerrillas from their camp. The team was not well-armed, and guerrillas out-fought them, killing one member of the team.

  Upon completion of the three-month survey operation in 10 villages, I had all the interview statements translated and copies filed by village and subject paragraphs. All
cell members and guerrillas were entered on 3x5 index cards that gave a brief synopsis of the information and the date and file location of the complete interview form. In one case we had more than 20 multiple-entry cards on a political organizing cadre. Security forces using this information, including his group’s recognition signals, ambushed the group and killed the cadre.

  Using all the index cards and files, I wrote a final report. I prepared name lists of cell members, including their aliases, by village. In this district the list contained the names of more than 500 persons. Those 500 cell members did not appear anywhere in Agency reporting at that time. The CIA estimated there were 2,500 to 4,000 Communists in all of Thailand. But our surveys showed the Communists probably had that many adherents in Sakorn Nakorn Province alone.

  We disseminated the final report to American and Thai intelligence organizations. Praise came back immediately. The Agency’s Directorate for Intelligence gave the report the highest rating in all six of its grading categories. The State Department rated it the same. The Far East division noted its unique contribution. The Bangkok counterinsurgency command rated police collection efforts tops in intelligence for that month and for every month in which a survey report was produced. Thai Deputy Prime Minister Praphat Charusathien issued a unit award to the team. General Saiyut Kerdpol, the day-today commander of the Communist Suppression Operations Command, issued official praise and traveled to the province to learn about the surveys.

  Bo Daeng, the governor of the province, was ecstatic. Even though he was a native of the province and had lived there all his life, he said he had no idea what the communists were doing until he read our reports. The American consul in Udorn, Al Francis (who later served as Ambassador Graham Martin’s top aide in Vietnam), began spending days at my office avidly reading the reports. Lastly, my own assessment. I had worked in intelligence for 15 years. In all that time I had dealt in vague, partial, shifting, incomplete, fragmentary intelligence that was part of an unknown total picture. The survey reports, I felt, changed all that. They were complete, accurate, detailed, and of excellent quality.

  After the survey operation the chief of station, Rod Johnson, called me to Bangkok for a meeting. When I entered his office, he had with him several other of the top station officers, including my branch chief. “Hello, Ralph,” said Johnson. This was the first time he had ever used my correct name. For years he had called me Bob. “You old rascal, you. You really did a job up there. How in the hell is everything going?”

  He continued, “I want you to know just how pleased everyone is with the results you’ve accomplished. Yesterday Saiyut [General Saiyut Kerdpol, the operating head of the Communist Suppression Operations Command] told me he had been up there to see you. He said you and Colonel Chat Chai have really turned things around and that Governor Bo Daeng is extremely pleased with your work.”

  Rod went on in this vein for some time, and the other officials chimed in with their praise. He then said, “You’ve done such a good job that I plan to assign you PCS [permanent change of station] to that province. If you accept, you’ll be the new officer-in-charge of other CIA officers stationed in the province.” [One 27-word sentence deleted.]

  He need not have bothered with the snow job. I had never in my career seen such dramatic results as we had achieved. The chief would have had a hard time talking me out of continuing the program. I accepted his offer at once.

  I worried that the permanent transfer to the Northeast would disrupt my family life, as Norma and the children would have to stay in Bangkok near the international school. I felt, however, the momentum, the career potential, the job satisfaction, the destruction of the hated communist movement, and the benefits to my country all outweighed the problem of family separation.

  As it turned out, my older daughter and older son were able to spend several months with me in the province during the school vacation. By that time I had rented an American-style house and had a maid-cook. I felt they would benefit from having the opportunity to see a different aspect of life in a foreign country as well as a chance to see their father at work.

  When I returned to the Northeast, we immediately began a second survey with about 50 percent new team members replacing the others, who had to return to their established jobs. The governor had appointed Lieutenant Somboon as his aide, and in that capacity he was to lead this and three more district surveys over the next year. The second survey culminated in a massive phone book-sized final report. This time the management team stayed away from the villages. The first village of the first survey had taught us that it was extremely bad public relations for an American to be seen associated with the operation. The Communists constantly harped on the theme that the Praphat-Thanom clique were running dogs of the American imperialists. My presence with the team lent credence to that story and from that point on, the two colonels, the translators, and I moved to the district seat or stayed in the provincial capital while couriers brought the interrogation reports to us and carried back my follow-up suggestions to Lieutenant Somboon.

  Unfortunately, not all American-sponsored programs took this unobtrusive approach, and the impression left on the Thai peasants was not always good. For example, one day a case officer for the People’s Action Teams and the Census Aspiration Teams took the monthly payroll directly to the nai amphur, who was then to disburse the funds to the individual team members. The bad roads and the lack of security caused by Communist incidents forced the case officer to travel via a station helicopter. The nai amphur was holding a combined meeting and festival attended by hundreds of villagers. Our men in the helicopter landed and in front of all those people handed the nai amphur stacks of the bright red Thai baht—money. The Communists could not have asked for more graphic proof of what they had been saying.

  In mid-summer 1967 I received a cable from the acting chief of station. He noted that my tour was scheduled to end in October 1967 but that he and Thai counterinsurgency officials wanted me to sign up for a new two-year tour to head the survey program on a nationwide scale. The new tour would have to be approved by Headquarters, the cable said, but that would be absolutely no problem.

  His request was a great thrill. It was just what I had hoped and prayed for. I immediately sat down and composed a cable accepting the offer.

  A few weeks later, in about August 1967, William Colby, then chief of the Far East division, came to the province for a day of briefings. I picked him up at the airport. Dressed in khaki, Colby was his usual calm, concerned self. We drove to the CPM-1 base, where he received a short briefing. We then went to another location for a briefing by American and Thai personnel associated with the People’s Action Team and Census Aspiration programs. Since I felt so strongly about our work, I reserved the rest of Colby’s day for briefings on the district surveys.

  I first led him on a tour of the office and showed him the several file cabinets full of reports and interrogation statements. I explained the procedures of the survey and then outlined my general conclusions, including my doubts about previous Agency reporting which said that the Communists did not have the support of the local people and that they forced people to support them with threats and terrorism.

  “Such a picture is inaccurate,” I told Colby, who just sat there and didn’t bat an eye. “We have found that the Communists concentrate the majority, almost the entirety, of their time winning the cooperation of the peasants. Take this village,” I said, pointing to the map. “The MMU [Masses Mobilization Unit] of the Thai Communist Party sent two members into the village. They said they were looking for work. For three months they just hung around helping people and making friends. Quietly, however, they were assessing the class structure of the villagers and finding out who had grievances against the government. After three months they reported to their parent MMU unit that the village was ripe for revolution and received approval to proceed to the next phase.

  “These two then began to criticize the government, saying the Praphat-Thanom clique wer
e nothing but running dogs of the Americans who support the rich people and landowners against the poor peasants who are the vast majority of the Thai people. The two MMU cadre identified as their first recruit a poor young man who was married and had a child and was angry at the government. He was recruited into the Farmers’ Liberation Association.”

  Colby was listening, but still said nothing. I told him about numerous documents we had found that outlined the goals and beliefs of the FLA. These called for the Thai Communist Party to expel the imperialists, to overthrow the fascist dictatorship, to achieve national independence through armed struggle. Their plan was first to build base areas in the rural parts of the country (some 80 percent of the population were farmers), then to encircle and capture the cities step by step.

  Colby still did not respond at all.

  “Once they had the first recruit in the village,” I continued, “they went after two more and then formed the three into the first cell of the FLA. These three were led out to concealed sites where members of the MMU attached to local guerrilla units indoctrinated them and slowly began to introduce them to a simplified version of the Marxist class struggle. They told the three recruits that the Communists represented the poor people and would lead them in overthrowing the oppressors and setting up a real people’s government. Each of the three was then asked to recruit three more people, and the effort spread like a cancer until virtually every man, woman, and child was recruited into some sort of organized revolutionary structure. The local guerrilla units also carried out minor terrorist incidents that were announced in the indoctrination sessions to show the ability of the Communists to fight the government.”