Deadly Deceits

by Ralph W. McGehee

  After six months I qualified for home visitation leave. I arrived in Herndon, Virginia, exhausted and high-strung from the unrelenting pressures of the job and my own mental agony. After several days of my incessant monologue about Vietnam and the Agency, Norma could take it no longer and I lapsed into relative silence. I began looking for another job, writing letters and making phone calls. But I had nothing to note on a resumé because I could not reveal that I worked for the CIA. Thus, these attempts failed.

  I had been home a week when I received a telephone call from the secretary of William Nelson, the Far East division chief. She said that because the office of training had used my suggestion about the survey operation, I had been awarded $300 and a certificate of appreciation from CIA director Richard Helms. Nelson would present these to me at a staff meeting the next day if I could be present. I agreed.

  I lay awake all night dreading the award ceremony. The irony of receiving the award from Nelson, who had threatened to ruin my career for submitting the proposal, was not lost on me. But of course he was required by regulations to make such ceremonial presentations. The six months in Vietnam had shown me the insanity of Agency programs there. An almost uncontrollable rage possessed me. I wanted to shout obscenities at the Agency for its blind intelligence and senseless killings. I feared the ceremony, for if it was necessary for me to speak, I knew I would lose control and the bottled-up rage would come bursting out.

  The next day I went reluctantly to the Far East division’s conference room located on the fifth floor. About a dozen of the division’s top officials attended the meeting, and by the time I got there most had assembled. I took a seat on the couch in the rear while the others sat around a conference table. Some of the people in the room who had been my friends tried to engage me in conversation, but gave up when they saw my glare. Nelson began the meeting with the award ceremony. Petulantly he said, “Don’t spend all 300 dollars. The tax hasn’t been deducted yet.” After reading part of the letter from the chief of the suggestion and achievement awards committee, he said, “That’s enough here.” He put the check and the letter and the certificate on the table in front of him, and I was forced to go up to him and pick them up. I grabbed them, turned, and without a word stomped out, slamming the door. My heart was pounding, and I was furious, but I had escaped without blowing up.

  By about the tenth day of home leave I had begun to relax a little, only to feel the tension rising as I contemplated returning to Vietnam. I knew I ought to quit the Agency, but I was in a financial trap—four children in school, two of them in expensive colleges, a mortgage, no salable skills, and a mental condition ripe for an institution, not a new job. I justified staying by telling myself that I would continue to fight for the truth. If I quit, I would have no way to voice my views.

  When I returned to Vietnam, I became ambitious. If I could not influence policy at my current middle level, GS-13, then I decided I would win promotions and work my way up in the bureaucracy where I could. I had not believed Nelson’s earlier threat to block my promotions. I should have.

  When Ted Shackley took over as chief of station, he notified all personnel that he based promotion recommendations on three criteria: the number of communists neutralized, the number of reports produced, and the number of unilateral recruitments achieved. Both Tom and Herman repeated over and over Shackley’s message on promotion criteria.

  My job as officer in charge, special police, would have been fascinating if I had believed in my work. Every major event in South Vietnam from January 1969 to July 1970 seemed to have at least some threads to my office. Until I was assigned to that position, however, the office had produced only one-half of one report a month. With three simple changes I increased the office’s production 5,000 percent.

  The first change in office procedure was to hire an adequate number of translators and interpreters. My case officers had frequently been standing in line waiting for a translator. Reports given to us for information or action would pile up and a month could go by before a necessary decision was made merely because of the translation backlog.

  The second change was that I assumed a requirements and collation responsibility. I required case officers to route copies of all raw police reports to me. Frequently one report alone was not worthy of dissemination, but by combining a group of reports, significant and disseminable intelligence emerged. On one occasion I received a raw report that said all villagers had been warned by the communists to stay home for the next few days. Several other reports from the same vicinity indicated that the communists were planning something. I put these reports together into one collated report and noted that the various indicators suggested that the communists were planning an attack in that area. I sent my report to the station’s report office, which disseminated it immediately. The attack occurred, but the government and U.S. troops were prepared and it was thwarted. Reports also frequently indicated a trend. By noting the trend, I suggested the kind of intelligence our people should be looking for. I was serving as an on-the-spot requirements and reports staff—a function normally performed by a rigid Headquarters bureaucracy back in Langley.

  The last change merely amounted to placing square-shaped case officers in square jobs and round-shaped officers in round jobs. The case officers were talented but had not been slotted right. With them in proper assignments for their abilities, they began to produce.

  Tom, my outgoing boss, suggested that I spread the office’s production increase out over a longer period of time. He said the jump from one-half report a month to 25 within a two-month period made it appear as if he had not been doing his job, a correct assessment of the situation. In addition to the numerical increase, the reports were more substantive in content. It was a major coup to have a report published in the Agency’s Current Intelligence Digest, but it became commonplace for us.

  Our office handled what was probably the most important of the many spy cases in Vietnam—the Projectile operation. It had begun a year or more before I arrived and it was supposed to be providing information about the activities of a North Vietnamese spy net that had penetrated the highest levels of the Thieu government of South Vietnam. However, the information was so flimsy and our source had such dubious access that everyone doubted the story. I had followed the operational reports for a year. One of those said that Thieu’s special assistant for political affairs, Huynh Van Trong, was a communist intelligence agent. Trong, in fact, according to the Projectile source, was a rather new member of the net and was less important than others in the group. The top man in the net was Vu Ngoc Nha, President Thieu’s close friend, a respected Catholic intellectual, and an unofficial adviser on Catholic affairs. The Projectile source said the net included many other important government officials and military officers.

  I received all of the special police reports from the CIA case officer working under my supervision. Every week or two I would prepare summaries of the operation for Herman and others in the station and occasionally a dispatch for Headquarters.

  The information began to predict the exact movement of the alleged communist spies. Police surveillance confirmed that they followed the schedules noted by the Projectile source. Weeks before the newspapers had the story, we learned from the source that President Thieu’s special assistant for political affairs, Huynh Van Trong, was going to the United States on an extended trip to visit top-level officials there.

  As confirmation piled on confirmation, I began to grow concerned. If, as it appeared, this was a communist intelligence net into the highest levels of Thieu’s government, we should stop it. I broached the subject with the special police leadership, who seemed reluctant to end their best case. I then told Herman: “Look, we can no longer deny all of these accusations. If Huynh Van Trong is a communist spy and all the others are also, we should take some measures to roll up the net.”

  Herman, reflecting the prevailing wisdom, said, “It might be a communist deception operation. If the special police go out and
arrest top government leaders and they’re wrong, can you imagine the problems that would cause here and at home? Trong has just been to the U.S. He’s just held talks with congressional and national security officials, so we’ve got to be careful. As a first step I want you to send a telepouch and get Headquarters’ reaction to the idea.”

  The telepouch disturbed Headquarters. Its reply suggested the operation might be a communist deception and warned us to go slowly with plans to roll up the net. Any document from Headquarters came with the director’s imprimatur and authority, though we had no way of knowing who was actually making the comments. As a result we all felt we were fighting a faceless bureaucracy.

  When we received the reply from Headquarters, Herman buzzed me to come down. “I want you to do a full-scale review of the Projectile operation,” he said. “I want to be absolutely sure of our position because if we are wrong, heads will roll. When you’ve finished with the summary analysis, we’ll give copies to the special police and Headquarters. And if what we suspect is true, we will ask Langley for permission to arrest members of the net.”

  An amazing amount of paper—police and station reports, photos, and correspondence—had accumulated. One four-drawer filing cabinet contained most of the material. I vowed to resist Herman’s pressure for immediate results, promising myself to take enough time to process the information thoroughly and to do a complete job.

  I began by skimming through all of the material twice and eliminating three-fourths of it as repetitious or unessential. Next came the carding, a very tedious, time-consuming but necessary process. I carded to separate the information by individuals, to record links between people and events, and to record those in ways that would be easy to recall and locate. Carding the information required double processing—once to bring together the various scattered bits of information on individuals, and then to unite these into a discernible chronological or substantive pattern, much the way you would put together a jigsaw puzzle. As I compared the operation’s information with police and Agency investigative material, most items checked out. Yet various explanations could account for the source’s ability to predict the movement of government officials. Various explanations could account for any aspect of the operation’s information. What was needed was some outside confirmation that this was, indeed, a communist intelligence net.

  I had put off dealing with a discolored, ratty-looking old document that I had found in the back of the bottom drawer of our Projectile file cabinet. The document virtually defied understanding. It was an abominable translation from the Vietnamese of a report by an uneducated Vietnamese policeman. After postponing and procrastinating until everything else was done, I began to card the document. The language and syntax were terrible. It was as if someone had taken a box of phrases, like the old game of pick-up-sticks, and had thrown them out to fall where they may. Carding forced me to break the sentences down into component phrases and put them together again in an intelligible form. As I worked with the report, phrase by phrase, a form emerged.

  The old document proved to be a gold mine. It described a communist intelligence operation in the South Vietnamese government. It was not unlike the net we were currently investigating, except there was one important difference. This operation had been directed at Diem’s government years earlier. The document, dated circa 1962, showed that many members of the current Projectile net had held similar positions in that earlier communist intelligence group. With that information supporting what we got from Projectile, we had undeniable proof. I compiled a summary analysis, disseminated copies to various station elements, passed a copy to the special police, and telepouched copies to Headquarters.

  Langley cabled acknowledgment of my summary. It acquiesced in our plans to roll up the net and again included a thinly disguised threat about what would happen if we were wrong. Herman and Shackley, convinced by my summary, backed efforts to roll up the net. But the police urged delay, as an important member of the net had left Saigon and might return.

  One Agency case officer I shall call Vince had worked with President Thieu for years; his sole job was to maintain direct contact with Thieu. He carried all of the day-to-day messages that passed between the station and the embassy and Thieu, lessening the need for regular contact between Thieu and Shackley and Thieu and U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker. Over the years Vince and Thieu had come to understand and like each other and had become close friends. Shackley told Vince that he had to impress on Thieu the importance of arresting all the individuals in the net. Shackley could not justify continued CIA support when the top levels of the government were loaded with Communist spies.

  Vince met with Thieu, who was extremely upset when he heard about the operation and our plans to arrest all of the members of the net. He claimed that if the story broke, the publicity would undermine his government. Thieu suggested delaying so that he could slowly and quietly dismiss those individuals in the net. Vince reported that for the first time he had to get nasty with Thieu. “I shook my fist under his nose,” he said, “and asked him, ‘How in hell can we justify further expenditure of American lives and money while communist spies are everywhere and you won’t take action against them?’”

  After a long argument, Thieu finally relented.

  The colonel in charge of the special police took extreme precautions to ensure that word of the impending arrests would not leak out. His small secret police cadre prepared individual files on each person to be arrested. Late one afternoon, he called a task force in to his office, then cut them off from outside contact. He briefed each three-man arrest team separately and passed them copies of the file on their target individual. At midnight the police fanned out through Saigon and pulled in the net.

  Herman had directed me to go to police headquarters that night and use a walkie-talkie radio to report the progress of the arrests to him. When the first arrests came in and the early information indicated that this was indeed a North Vietnamese intelligence net, I tried to call Herman. But because of the interference from the metal in the police buildings I couldn’t get through, so I went out in the middle of the street in front of the police compound. In the daytime this pavement was a cacophonous swirl of cars, bicycles, and pedestrians. Now it was deserted, silent, and serene, a soft breeze blowing in the darkness. I called Herman and told him the good news. He was excited, and for the first time since coming to Vietnam I had a feeling of personal satisfaction.

  I talked to Herman many times that night and the news got better and better. The operation had been a complete success. House searches by the police had uncovered a wide assortment of clandestine paraphernalia—microfilm of secret documents, document-copying cameras, one-time radio encoding and decoding pads, radios, secret ink, and a host of other material. The police also apprehended someone who had been visiting one of the targets. This visitor later turned out to be the head of a military intelligence net, providing my office with further work when that net was apprehended.

  The police arrested more than 50 persons, 41 of whom ultimately were tried and convicted. The net had penetrated upper echelons of South Vietnamese society and government, including businessmen, military officers, teachers, students, and two top officials in the “open arms” program which was supposed to encourage Viet Cong to defect to the government. President Thieu’s special assistant for political affairs, Huynh Van Trong, held the highest office. His Communist superior, however, Vu Ngoc Nha, possessed the most influence and was a close friend of President Thieu.

  Nha confessed and said he had joined the Communist Party in 1949. In 1955 he came south in the CIA-generated refugee migration to set up an intelligence net, which had achieved some success before Diem’s police rolled it up. Following Diem’s fall in 1963 the new government released thousands of political prisoners, including Nha and all of his group. Nha arranged to have all record of his group’s activities removed from police files and destroyed. The only report he did not get was the one old, tattered, English-language tra
nslation that had somehow ended up in the Projectile file cabinet. After a short cooling-off period, Nha rebuilt his net. The Catholics accepted him as a leading intellectual and made him an important member of their group. He served as President Thieu’s adviser on Catholic affairs and was instrumental in having Thieu appoint Trong as his special assistant.

  Trong confessed and said he attained that position through Nha’s intercession with Thieu. Nha had recruited Trong by promising him the position of presidential special assistant. Trong understandably did not know where the power lay in Thieu’s administration. Once, Trong had taken an official trip to the United States and held discussions over a period of weeks with top-level officials in our government. Upon returning to South Vietnam, he went directly to Thieu’s office. Nha was with Thieu. Thieu ordered an immediate oral report of the trip. Trong said he was a little abashed to give his report simultaneously to the President and his own Communist superior. Later he compiled a written report for Thieu and gave a duplicate to Nha.

  Our office wrote an intelligence report based on Trong’s confession. Langley nit-picked and questioned its validity. We rechecked all details and forwarded those results to Headquarters. Langley finally permitted limited dissemination of that report to the U.S. intelligence community. While our Projectile operation had been successful beyond any of my dreams, this was obviously not the kind of success that the CIA’s top officials wanted to see. For the report of the Projectile operation showed that our ally in this longest of wars had a government so riddled by enemy spies that they were able to operate under the nose of the President. It provided further evidence that the CIA had not only stubbornly refused to see the strength of the enemy but also had never acknowledged the weakness of our “friends.” To me, it was obvious that we were bolstering a hopelessly corrupt government that had neither the support nor the respect of the Vietnamese people. This was not welcome news to the Agency or to U.S. policymakers who had invested so much money and human life in this futile struggle.