Deadly Deceits

by Ralph W. McGehee

  The success of the Projectile operation would seem at first glance to support William Colby’s statement in his book, Honorable Men, that CIA officers in the early 1970s “… were getting more—and more accurate—reports from inside VCI [Viet Cong infrastructure] provincial committees and regional [Communist] party headquarters from brave Vietnamese holding high ranks in such groups. They had been first identified by people who knew them, then recruited by our intelligence officers.”36 But if I could reveal the identity of our source on the Projectile operation, it would lend no support to Colby’s contention, which is pure fantasy. The truth is that never in the history of our work in Vietnam did we get one clear-cut, high-ranking Viet Cong agent. The Agency, in collaboration with the South Vietnamese intelligence services, developed hundreds of so-called access agents. Yet one purge of its agent lists saw more than 300 dropped for fabrication or lack of contact. Despite a single-minded determination to recruit a valid penetration of the Viet Cong, the Agency failed. The chief of station, desperate to prod his troops, offered an on-the-spot promotion to the officer able to recruit a province-level communist agent. No one earned that promotion. The fact that neither we, nor the South Vietnamese government, could produce one valid high-level reporting communist penetration agent is a comment on Honorable Men and on the South Vietnamese attitude toward the Diem, Ky, and Thieu regimes. The Viet Cong, on the other hand, had thousands of penetrations into the South Vietnamese government.

  There were a few others within the Agency who were noticing the same things that I was. In May 1969 two analysts at Langley, Sam Adams and Robert Klein, using some of our Projectile material, began trying to estimate the number of spies in Thieu’s government. Adams told a top official in the South Vietnam branch of the Directorate for Operations that he had discovered references in various documents indicating that there were more than 1,000 communist agents in Thieu’s government. The official said: “For God’s sake, don’t open that Pandora’s box. We have enough trouble as it is.” In late November 1969, Klein and Adams compiled a report concluding that the total number of Viet Cong agents in the South Vietnamese army and government was in the neighborhood of 30,000. If that report had been made public, it would have had enormous ramifications. How could we continue to support a government and army that were so widely infiltrated, that obviously had no hope of standing on their own? But the Agency forbade dissemination of that report. Both Adams and Klein later quit the CIA.

  The follow-up to the serendipitous arrest of the head of another intelligence net during the roll-up of Nha’s group occupied much of the time of the police and my office. That accidentally apprehended Communist intelligence officer, Van Khien, had led a North Vietnamese military intelligence operation into command elements of the South Vietnamese army (ARVN). Van Khien refused to talk, but careful checking, investigation, and police action located 10 members of his net. From that point we continued to unravel leads from Khien’s and Nha’s nets and other nets, arresting agents in two- and three-man increments.

  Intelligence production from my office continued at an average of 25 reports a month. My officers were forbidden by the station from attempting to recruit their police liaison counterparts, so I had now more than fulfilled all of Shack-ley’s requirements for promotion. Herman, before he left for a better job in the station, wrote a fitness report for me. It was highly complimentary but not enough so to bring about the automatic promotion as dictated by Shackley’s guidelines. I gathered together the office logs and made an appointment with Herman.

  I went over my accomplishments since taking over the job as officer in charge of special police—the increase in quantity and quality of reports, the Projectile net, the ARVN net. “You know my case officers are forbidden to attempt unilateral recruitments,” I said, “but in Shackley’s two remaining categories for promotion I have the best record in the station. I have more than fulfilled all the requirements you have been harping on, and now I deserve and expect a promotion.”

  “You know, Ralph,” Herman said, “there are various people in this station younger than I am who are higher grades. But I can’t let this bother me. I just do my job the best I can. I recommend that you do the same.”

  “Are you telling me that you and Shackley have no intention of honoring your pledge?”

  Herman was disconcerted by my question. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair and then responded, “Ralph, did you really believe he meant that? If you did, you are naive.”

  We talked for an hour, but he would not rewrite the fitness report. Months later Herman’s deputy came to my office. He said that I was not in the just-completed round of GS-13 promotions but that I would be promoted the following year.

  Herman was replaced by a Shackley protégé from the European division I shall call Harry. He had not particularly wanted to come to Vietnam and quickly proved to me that he was an incompetent flake. In a matter of weeks he destroyed all that I had so carefully built. He assigned key positions to officers from the European division who had been drafted for a tour in Vietnam. These new European case officers were inexperienced and not overly motivated. The old Vietnam hands, transferred to less attractive junior assignments, became bitter and uncooperative. The results were predictable and immediate. For the last three months of my tour we did not produce one intelligence report. Harry blamed me for the fall in production, but the trend continued for at least another year after I left. Harry, based on his unquestioning loyalty to Shackley, eventually attained supergrade rank and assignment to an important overseas post.

  When it was time for me to go home, the head of the special police awarded me a medal and at the ceremony draped across my shoulders the Viet Cong flag that had flown over Saigon’s central marketplace at the height of the Tet offensive. He entreated me to stay, and so did various station officers, but I couldn’t wait to get out of that desolate country.

  At the airport, I had an hour’s wait before my plane took off. I sat down at a table in the dirty terminal restaurant and ordered a beer. A Eurasian who spoke fair English joined me. We exchanged casual conversation for a while, and then he asked if I would mind carrying a suspicious-looking package to the States for him. It struck me as absurd and ironic that the last thing I was being asked to do on my Vietnam tour was to transport heroin back to the United States. I told the man to go to hell.

  My plane took off, and I sat by the window looking down at all the bomb pockmarks in the Vietnamese landscape. There seemed no hope for this poor, tortured country nor for ours. How many more Vietnamese and Americans would die here? How many more civilians would we kill, how many children would we napalm? Nothing seemed capable of stopping the U.S. juggernaut from pursuing its own fantasies. Certainly my own efforts to stop it had been in vain. The reality that I had seen and reported and urged my superiors to recognize had been totally rejected. The fantasies and illusions lived on.

  I thought back to the time in Gia Dinh Province when I had planned to kill myself as a way of protesting all the things the Agency had done to create the bestial inhumanity of the Vietnam War. I had seen at first hand the ubiquitous refugee camps inhabited by scarred children and old people who had been bombed out of their villages and forced into those abysmal hovels. I again visualized the panic and pain of the children and could smell the stench of their burning flesh as they ran from the napalm. These things and others the CIA through its false information and covert operations had brought forth and, at that point in Gia Dinh, I had chosen to live by promising that some day I would expose the Agency’s role in Vietnam. As I looked down on the battered countryside I renewed that promise and swore never to rest until I fulfilled that commitment.

  I was glad to be going home. But I knew I would never be the same person again. All of my ideals of helping people, all my convictions about the processes of intelligence, all my respect for my work, all the feelings of joy in my life, all my concepts of honor, integrity, trust and love, all in fact that had made me what I was, had died in Vi
etnam. Through its blindness and its murders, the Agency had stolen my life and my soul. Full of anger, hatred, and fear, I bitterly contemplated a dismal future.

  11. COMING HOME

  The director of the Agency for International Development, John Hannah,… “acknowledged today that the USAID program is being used as a cover for operations of the CIA.…”1

  BEFORE leaving Saigon, I had asked for and been granted another tour in Thailand. I did not particularly want to go there or anywhere with the Agency, but if I had to remain with the CIA, being with my family overseas in Thailand seemed the least objectionable option.

  I first had to return to Washington from Saigon [14 words deleted]. AID conducted several weeks of briefings in the old street-car barn just across Key Bridge in Georgetown for [one word deleted] and retired police officials recruited for overseas slots. I looked for a job during free periods between briefings and later during several weeks of home leave. Again security was an insurmountable problem. Unable to admit CIA employment and with no apparent salable talents, I could not find other employment.

  The few weeks between my return from Saigon and our moving to Thailand were difficult for the family and me. Norma took my brooding silence personally. She had vehemently proclaimed so many times that she never wanted to go overseas again, especially to Thailand, and here we were making travel plans. Her attempts to talk with me about our problems got nowhere. I either shouted her down or, when that didn’t work, rushed out of the house. It seemed that I had lost the ability to communicate with anyone.

  I did not want my children damaged by my experiences, so I tried to protect them from the causes of my problems. In the years after we told the children I worked for the CIA, I had talked, even boasted, about the Agency and the good it was doing in the world. This was particularly true during my last tour in Thailand, where I constantly preached that we were fighting the communist murderers. The children had absorbed my teachings. Now I had changed but could not and would not explain this to them.

  My older daughter, Peggy, thoroughly indoctrinated by me about the Agency and its benefits to the world, carried these views with her to college. She attended Wellesley College while I was serving in Vietnam. One day the professors and students held an anti-war protest, but Peggy refused to join them. Almost alone of the staff and students, she went to all her classes in a counter protest.

  Scott, my older son, was 16 when I returned. He had the long hair, the raggedy clothes, and the contempt of all things parental and traditional that was typical of the era. He and his friends wanted nothing to do with school activities, working, studying, and all the things that my generation felt were so necessary. His long hair drove me wild. Did not tradition, wisdom, and custom dictate that a clean shave and a close-cropped head of hair embodied respectability and goodness?

  One day Scott and I had a confrontation in our downstairs rec room, Scott standing on one side of our pool table and I on the other like a pair of reluctant combatants. He had cut school and had been seen driving around town in his combination clubhouse-van with his buddies. I had been away in Vietnam, and he was not used to my authority. When I told him I was taking away his privilege of driving the van—part of his identity—he reacted angrily. The tension was considerable, but each of us was puzzled by the other. We had grown distant in the past year and a half, and neither knew just what to do. Norma finally stepped in and suggested a compromise, which I welcomed.

  I had ambivalent feelings. The long-haired hippies were protesting the war, something I now wanted to do. Yet I could not apply those feelings to my own family. If I could accept one, I should have been able to accept the other. But I could not.

  One day while attending the AID briefings in Georgetown, I decided to take a walk on the extended lunch break. It was a hot summer day, but I was dressed in a dark blue suit and a tie. I carried a briefcase with me and must have appeared the typical bureaucrat.

  That area of Georgetown was the gathering place of hippies. Young people in various stages of dress hung out or sat on second- and third-story window ledges, watching the passing scene. Observing the new culture, I strolled down M Street to Wisconsin Avenue, where young people were walking, lounging in doorways, holding hands, passing out leaflets, and conducting serious discussions. I felt out of place yet in sympathy with them. I wished I could join them. Two young girls in long, peasant-style dresses came up and asked if I would attend a performance of live theatre being held around the corner. I looked at them, expecting mockery, but there was none. I could not say it, but I felt close to them. I wanted to say yes, I agree the war should be stopped, what we are doing is evil and wrong, I want to shed my protecting suit and put on jeans and be one of you. But all these things I could not say or do.

  12. DOWN AND OUT IN THAILAND

  IN late September 1970, Norma, Scott, Dan, and I flew to Thailand, leaving the two girls behind in college. We soon found an apartment building located not far from the International School of Bangkok. A large number of American safe-haven families lived there to be near their husbands and fathers in Vietnam.

  The American high school reflected the unhappiness and frustrations of the time for families. The school had earned a reputation for its high academic standards and strict discipline. On a previous tour our daughters had attended the school and had received a good education in a healthy atmosphere. But things had changed.

  The school was now separated from the surrounding Thai community by an eight-foot-high fence topped by barbed wire. The shadow of the Vietnam War and the large military presence in Thailand brought increasing numbers of unhappy and alienated young people to the school. Many of them were the sons and daughters of military officials carrying out the war. Each morning these disaffected students had to endure a clothing inspection, filing into the school compound through a single narrow entrance. Those not properly dressed were sent home. Drug use was common. GIs on leave were ready sources, and directly outside the school, a vendor sold small bags of pot from a tea cart. For $10 students bought gum opium or vials of 98 percent pure heroin powder. Thai pharmacies sold barbiturates and amphetamines.

  One night Norma and I were relaxing in our apartment just after dinner when a teenage girl started pounding at our door, screaming that her friend, Mary, was threatening to jump off the roof. I dashed out the door and up the stairs with Norma close behind. Mary was sitting near the railing in one corner and was strangely quiet. We approached carefully to avoid scaring her, but when she did not seem aware of our presence, we rushed forward and grabbed her. I carried her downstairs to the apartment and put her on the couch.

  Mary, her friend explained, had taken some pills and freaked out. I went two floors down to her apartment and the maid told me that Mary’s parents would not be home for some time. Back upstairs everything was wild. Mary was thrashing about, hollering and screaming that she wanted to go back on the roof. We tried to placate her, but refused to let her leave. Moaning and mumbling, looking wildly at nothing, Mary started hallucinating, pointing at the wall, and crying out. Norma restrained her while I tried to call the American doctor, who was not available. Finally she relaxed and slowly drifted off to sleep shortly before her parents came to pick her up.

  A few weeks later, a high school student living above us, whose father was a much-decorated Marine colonel in Vietnam, convulsed from an overdose of drugs and was rushed to the U.S. Military’s Fifth Field Hospital, where he almost died. It was only after these incidents that I discovered that the leaders of the American community had kept a lid on stories about drug-related problems. I learned that in the 1971-1972 school year, six students died from overdoses. More than 20 percent of all official American families in Thailand had to return to the States before the end of their tours because of drug problems.

  Scott’s attitude remained the same as it had been back in Herndon. He wanted nothing to do with school and the traditional life I had always taken for granted. He would board the school bus each morning, but frequ
ently got off and spent the day drifting around the city. He hated the school and the atmosphere and was confused by the events occurring all around him. He tried to convince us to send him back to the States. Finally, after months of discussion and an invitation for him to stay in the home of friends in Herndon, we relented. It seemed that this was the only acceptable alternative.

  On Scott’s last day in Thailand I took him to school to pick up his report card, which showed he had earned grades from incomplete down to F. We sat in the car in the school parking lot and I tried to explain to him the necessity of an education.

  “Scott,” I said, “for thousands of years, billions of people have all had the same thoughts and ideas that you have now. They have all lived through the same feelings you have now. And yet they have recognized that education is important. Can’t you entertain the idea that you might be wrong?”

  I knew some of what he was feeling. My own experiences with the Agency often made me feel that I was the only one who was right and everyone else was wrong.

  That night we took Scott to Don Muang airport. Norma, Dan, and I tried to be cheerful, while hiding our sorrow. The plane was announced and he departed, leaving a gaping hole in our life.

  My job as deputy chief of the anti-Communist Party operations branch required that I help the chief of the branch supervise the activities of a number of persons, mostly case officers working in liaison. But I soon realized that nothing had changed except my perception about the CIA’s work. We were doing the same old things as before, collecting intelligence designed to support U.S. policy goals in Thailand. This meant, of course, supporting the military dictatorship in power and ignoring problems caused by it. For the most part we got our intelligence directly from the leaders themselves or our liaison counterparts, who never, never reported derogatory information about the regime. We lived in a fantasy world; conversations sounded like the movies. We all had assigned roles and lines. To speak outside of the script was to bring down the wrath of all. Even now I have difficulty understanding how we played the game.