Deadly Deceits

by Ralph W. McGehee

  At this point I explained that the Thai government’s reaction to the terrorism—sending in brutal armed units to beat innocent people—only created an atmosphere of hate that the Communists were able to exploit. The big difference between our district surveys and past government counter-insurgency programs, I explained, was that instead of using brute force we had used our intelligence to penetrate the Communists’ crucial shield of secrecy and had thereby effectively crushed their movement. Our work and follow-up actions by the governor’s staff seemed to have completely reversed Communist organizational successes. Everything was going fine, the intelligence was flowing in, the insurgency was being destroyed, and the future was looking good.

  But I went on to say that what was happening in that village was happening in all 30 villages we had surveyed and was no doubt happening in every village in Thailand where the Communists were organizing. The pattern, which I was not yet aware of and therefore could not tell Colby, was that once a village was fully organized, the most active FLA members became candidates for membership in the Communist Party and a village militia was established along with a provisional government that replaced the authority of the national government. From the militia a few people were drawn off to become full-time guerrillas. The movement would then be expanded to include a regional force and finally a full-time regular army unit. When a number of villages in one area were organized and linked up, they would form what the Communists called a base area—a region where most all villages were united into one complete, active, dedicated revolutionary structure.

  Although I did not then know that the early stages of this plan were being followed, it seemed clear to me from our surveys that Communist organizing was well under way in Thailand and undoubtedly in South Vietnam as well. The most alarming part of it, I told Colby, was that previous Agency intelligence had failed to report any of this widespread Communist activity. It had instead reported that there were only a few thousand Communist guerrillas in the mountains who commanded no support from the people.

  Colby seemed puzzled by my presentation. I had never seen him at a loss for words before. He looked at the ground, he looked everywhere. Finally he looked at me and said quietly, “We always seem to be losing.”

  I expected congratulations and for him to rush out and push for immediate expansion of the survey operations into other provinces. What I didn’t expect was this non-response. I was shocked. I had presented my best case, and he could say nothing other than, “We always seem to be losing.” What in the hell did he mean by that? Thinking about it later, I realized that Colby was probably weighing the broader ramifications of my survey information.

  An entourage of jeeps and land rovers escorted Colby back to the airport. He rode with me, but I was too puzzled and concerned by his response to participate in any conversation. Another American, a junior officer, babbled on as we drove.

  Two months later, in October 1967, the chief of station summoned me. He was alone when I entered his office and not at all his usual back-slapping self. He read me a dispatch that the station had received from Headquarters giving my next assignment as branch chief of liaison operations in Taiwan, the same branch I had worked for on a prior tour. This assignment was a real plum. It would put me into the management channel, ensuring rapid promotions and even better future assignments. Taiwan was the Playboy Club of the Far East division, and if I wanted to go that route, it was open. Taiwan also had a good American school, good housing, excellent extra pay. Everything about the job was great—except that I did not want it.

  I told Rod Johnson about the recent work of the surveys, the cable I had received from the acting chief while Rod had been in Headquarters, and my positive response. I pulled out the Directorate for Intelligence rating sheet, told him that the State Department had rated the survey reports the same, and said, “We are beating the bastards. We break through then secrecy and they can’t survive without it.”

  Rod slowly turned the rating sheet over in his hand. He did not need to read it. He knew what it said. He looked up at me and asked, “How soon can you get out of here?”

  I was momentarily too stunned to reply. I finally began to calculate what had to be done to wind up my affairs and replied, “I’m just finishing another survey report, which will take a few more weeks to write. The team has just gone into another district and will be there three months, so someone will have to manage that aspect.”

  Rod said that after this survey was completed there would be no one to handle them, so the program would be ended. “Finish up as soon as possible,” he said, “but I want you out of here in three weeks. Goodbye.”

  I traveled back to the province in a fog of angry disbelief, trying to figure out what was happening. How could the Agency let such a program die? It produced the highest-rated intelligence, and I thought it destroyed the insurgency. It did all of this at virtually no cost. What in the hell was going on? Could it be that Colby and the chief did not want the surveys to confirm something they already knew?

  The American consul stationed in Udorn, who frequently had come to my office to read the survey reports, learned of the decision to reassign me and to cancel the surveys. He reacted angrily and traveled to Bangkok several times to try to change Johnson’s mind. The governor of the province said this was intolerable and sent several cables to Johnson asking that I be allowed to remain. In fact, when my replacement showed up, the governor refused to meet him. General Saiyut Kerdpol also made entreaties to Johnson—all to no avail.

  During those last confused weeks I continued to try to figure out what had happened. I paced back and forth, going over and over in my mind the events leading up to my dismissal. Had I offended someone? If so, I was not aware of it. But if I had, why not dismiss me and continue the surveys? Had Colby not understood all we had achieved? This seemed impossible. During the entire preceding year we had received glowing reports from Colby’s Far East division, so he must have known.

  I agonized day and night while enduring a series of very sad farewell parties thrown by the governor, the commander of the CPM-1, other Americans, and the Thai office staff. The office staff and I had developed an extremely good working relationship and they all believed in the work. Their tears at my departure burned me to the quick. Try as I might, I just could not understand what had happened. It was only years later that the truth slowly began to dawn on me: while the survey revelations demonstrated the strategy and composition of an Asian rural revolution and produced a method to contain it in Thailand, the opposite was true in Vietnam—the surveys would have shown there that the communists could not be defeated.

  9. HEADQUARTERS:

  GHOSTS IN THE HALLS

  WHEN I arrived back at Headquarters from Thailand in late 1967 to begin processing for my new assignment as branch chief on Taiwan, I found out that the assignment had been cancelled. [One 22-word sentence deleted.] I realized that I had been set up by Rod Johnson and Dave Abbott. The dispatch offering me the job of branch chief on Taiwan was a ruse to get me out of Thailand. When it didn’t work, Johnson had just told me to go. This deception was an added shock to my already confused state of mind, and I set out to “walk the halls” to look for another assignment. I was apathetic, and in light of all that had happened I was having a difficult time justifying my previously idealistic view of the Agency.

  One day the head of China activities offered me a desk job of no real import. I didn’t give a damn about the job. My prior tours with China activities indicated that everything there was more shadow than substance. But I was too demoralized to refuse.

  The essential personality characteristic necessary to survive the daily minutiae of China activities was patience. Things happened at a snail’s pace. You had to slowly digest, regurgitate, and re-digest unimportant information, while pretending to be enthralled by the process. You had to defend vehemently your position on trivia. You had to play the game.

  With another case officer I shared an office that had a view of the A
merican flag waving outside. I spent a lot of my time with my feet propped up on the desk looking out the window, ruminating about the Agency, the country, the flag, and what it all meant. I had plenty of time to kill, and so did a lot of others in the same boat. Frequent office bull sessions reminded me of my sophomore days at Notre Dame. Sometimes a few of us would continue the discussions on a coffee break in the cafeteria. This was good for killing about an hour. Lunch entailed a trip to the cafeteria or to nearby McLean, culminating with a long stroll around the Headquarters building that used up at least another hour and a half.

  The corridors in China activities gave you the feeling that time had stopped. Ghosts of case officers past roamed the halls, carrying pieces of paper that gave purpose to their eerie missions. The noon hour found the corridors totally empty except for a lone secretary or a true believer.

  But every day did bring a few cables and dispatches from China units scattered around the world. Most such documents noted the efforts of the case officers to spot and assess people with access to Chinese officials serving overseas.1 China activities had begun to realize the near impossibility of recruiting a Chinese official to be our spy. To keep busy and to show progress, the Agency had now developed programs to recruit contacts of these officials.

  At one point I was given the task of trying to plan how to recruit a member of the Chinese diplomatic installation. Here I was, thousands of miles away, sitting in my chair, gazing lazily out the window at the flag, planning the best way to contact and assess the target individual. I half-heartedly played the game and set forth my new plan in a dispatch to the field station. This plan born in my not-very-fertile imagination was full of flaws. However, the deputy desk chief carefully considered it for a week or so and then the desk chief did the same. Then I was called in. They were not quite sure the plan would work as outlined, so we held a series of discussions, modified the plan, and sent it forward in great solemnity for consideration by the deputy chief and chief of China activities. After appropriate consideration and delay, they held a series of discussions with my desk chief. He brought the dispatch back to me for incorporation of their ideas. I sent the reworked dispatch back through the same channels and the chief of China activities thankfully, after further thought, decided that the time was not right to attempt the recruitment.

  Some people, however, regarded operations against China as a great struggle to oppose the Communist madman Mao Tse-tung. We were the guys in the white hats chasing—to recruit as our agents—the guys in the black hats, the Chinese Communists. We tried to recruit them on planes, in toilets, in diplomatic talks, anywhere. But the bad guys never seemed to appreciate that they were the bad and we were the good. We lost, they won. Several hundred case officers scattered throughout the world backed up by a timeless Headquarters bureaucracy pondered and schemed how to recruit that one Chinese official.

  If you stayed long enough in China activities, you experienced a sense of déjà vu. The same things happened year after year. A top official of China activities would develop a brilliant new plan on how to recruit a Chinese Communist. This plan invigorated everyone, and dispatches were sent to all field installations ordering implementation of the idea. The field case officers, caught up in the excitement, urgently acted to put the plan into effect. After a year or so and with no discernible results, another bureaucrat would develop another brilliant plan. Ultimately the cycle repeated itself, and the new plan was merely a rerun of one that had failed several years earlier.

  My evaluation of the performance record of the China activities people is even more negative than that given by a former chief of station, Peer de Silva, in his book, Sub Rosa. He writes:

  I find it hard to write about our intelligence work based in Hong Kong against mainland China because there was very little successful intelligence work done, in fact. Much was attempted and much failed. We had two main intelligence targets: the uranium gaseous-diffusion plant under construction at Lanchow and the plutonium plant at Pao Tou, both in north-central China. We wanted to learn the state of construction of these two important scientific enterprises, to determine when they went into full production and the amount of purity of their nuclear products. We accomplished neither, nor had my predecessors, and, as I understand it, neither did my successors. The advent of photographic satellites later in the 1960’s, however, changed that bleak picture markedly, but that all took place after my tour in Hong Kong.

  It was small solace later to learn that this high-expectation, low-yield experience was not mine alone. Mainland China was simply a difficult target for intelligence penetration on the ground with human agents. We had some minor successes but “minor” was the word.2

  Some bureaucrats had built their careers around China activities and had a vested interest in continuing operations against China. There was an unrecognized danger in that game, for these people had to sustain the impression of China as an implacable foe of the United States. From at least the early 1970s the Chinese Communists supported a strong NATO and a unified Europe as a counter to what they called Soviet Socialist Imperialism. China’s position on NATO and Nixon’s trip to Peking caused problems in China operations. How could they continue to portray China as the main enemy when it had adopted our policy and hosted our President? The answer was simple: they ignored events and continued the game. Several examples illustrate the point.

  In the mid-1970s when I was working for the international communism branch, China desk asked me to brief the new chief of a European security service on the Marxist-Leninist movement’s splinter Communist parties in Europe and their relationship to the Chinese. It instructed me to portray the Chinese Communists as foes because it wanted his service to help us in operations against the Chinese. I was only one of a series of briefers. The chief of the service seemed bored and did not ask a single question. When my turn came, having little fear since I planned to retire at the first opportunity, I gave him my honest assessment of China’s foreign policy. He came to life and asked numerous questions and requested that I be made available for a second session. That was the last time China desk permitted me to brief its guests.

  At about the same time, the CIA acquired a document of approximately 40 pages covering a briefing by top Chinese officials to a trusted and highly regarded ally. The briefing covered China’s long-range policy toward two continents with separate sections on short-range actions in individual countries. Yet when it reached me, I noticed that comments on the internal routing sheet indicated the reports section of China desk had no interest in disseminating the document. Dumbfounded that the information had been rejected, I routed it back to China desk, suggesting it might want to reconsider. Several weeks later the document found its way back to me with a notation from the China desk that it had no plans to disseminate the information. A document that set forth China’s intentions—the most difficult and highly desired information on an important country’s policy—but we did not want it? Why? Because it showed that China planned to act in a responsible way and that its goals to a large extent paralleled our own. Our operational warriors realized that if they disseminated the report, it might stimulate some government leaders to question the CIA’s insistence that China deserved to be on the top of its operational target list.

  Case officers developed a very personal interest in keeping China as one of the primary enemies of the United States. Promotions, foreign travel, and assignments abroad all depended on maintaining that concept. Once, in the middle of one of Washington’s hottest summers, we learned that a Chinese Communist planned to attend a conference at a cool, expensive overseas summer resort. The chief of one desk of China activities decided to try to contact the official to assess his recruitment potential. She went on an extended temporary duty assignment to that resort area, where she spent her time relaxing by the hotel’s pool, dining in its best restaurants, and appearing at other swish spots where the Chinese official might surface and be prompted to speak to her. After several unsuccessful weeks of this
hardship duty, she returned to the torrid Washington weather.

  I had still not given up on my deepest concerns. I tried to explain the district surveys to the Far East division. William E. Nelson had replaced Colby as division chief, and I thought Nelson may not have had the opportunity to learn about the surveys. I prepared a memorandum covering the survey procedures and routed it to the plans people of the division. They returned it with the comment that I had no jurisdiction in matters concerning Thailand.

  I then contacted the suggestion and achievement awards committee, which I had learned of when I had checked back into Headquarters in late 1967. The check-in sheet noted that employees who had developed any unique ideas or procedures for improving performance that might have Agency-wide application should submit them for consideration by the committee. Any suggestion adopted for general use might earn the employee a monetary or honorary award. The check-in sheet also said that a special panel had been established to consider suggestions dealing with covert operations. I spoke with the chief of the committee, and he recommended that I prepare a formal suggestion under the provisions of the special panel.

  I did so, describing the survey process and noting the evaluation it had received from United States and Thai government agencies. The panel routed the suggestion to the Far East division to evaluate. The division rejected the proposal. Finding it impossible to believe that the division would knowingly reject a program that at little expense both stopped the insurgency and provided excellent intelligence, I rewrote the suggestion. I located copies of the intelligence reports produced by the survey and attached those old reports to the expanded suggestion and submitted it again to the special panel.