Deadly Deceits

by Ralph W. McGehee

  John’s energy and enthusiasm outpaced his good sense. But the truth was that his theories were no crazier than what the entire U.S. intelligence community was saying about Vietnam.

  Despite their skewed perspective, John’s lectures provided the first break in my mental block. In those lectures John used communist writings, primarily Mao Tse-tung’s, to explain their terms and the historical context from which they sprang. With his definitions I began to read and comprehend communist newspapers, journals, and broadcast transcripts. Then I began reading historical works and Chinese and Vietnamese revolutionary writings. Gradually, in an almost physically painful process, the accumulated facts and knowledge forced my mind to open to look at reality from the communists’ perspective. To my amazement they had a case to make. Vietnam, of course, was the most dramatic example of this. For the first time now I had a chance to read the history of that war and for the first time I became aware that the Agency, in conjunction with the U.S. military and other elements of the U.S. government, had for 21 years attempted to deny the communists their legitimate claim to govern the people who overwhelmingly supported them.

  The 1967 survey operation in Northeast Thailand had taught me there were aspects of Asian communism about which the CIA dissembled. I now began to see that its ability to hide from reality went far beyond pretending not to notice in those areas. I began to realize that the CIA had a charter for action regarding Vietnam similar to 1984’s Ministry of Truth. The Agency, however, unlike George Orwell’s ministry, tried not only to obliterate and rewrite the past through its National Intelligence Estimates (supposedly the highest form of intelligence), but it also attempted via its covert operations to create the future.

  I did not comprehend the CIA’s deceits in a sudden burst of enlightenment; that knowledge came to me gradually over a period of years through direct, intense study and involvement. My final rejection of Agency “newspeak,” however, was sudden. One day I came across an article by Sam Adams in the May 1975 issue of Harper’s magazine. Entitled “Vietnam Cover-up: Playing War with Numbers, A CIA Conspiracy Against Its Own Intelligence,”4 the article described a captured document from the Viet Cong high command showing that the VC controlled six million people! Adams had routed that report, and others, to the Agency’s upper echelons—and had received no response. Adams, who had been the sole Agency analyst responsible for counting the number of armed communists in South Vietnam, described his long, unsuccessful battles with Agency authorities to force them to stop issuing false, low estimates of armed communists in South Vietnam. His battles earned him 30 threats of firing—finally in disgust he quit.

  Here was someone else saying the same things that I had been saying. I was not alone. I was not crazy. Someone else had seen, had struggled, and had fought. But more importantly, here was the clue solving the mystery that had plagued me for years: why I had been dismissed from Thailand in 1967, why the survey operation had been cancelled, and why the information from the surveys had been muzzled.

  Adams’ article described a bitter battle being fought within the upper echelons of the CIA and U.S. military intelligence about the numbers of armed communists that we were up against in South Vietnam. In September 1967, just about the time Colby came to see me in Northeast Thailand, Adams—following numerous struggles within the Agency’s hierarchy —was finally allowed, alone of the Agency’s legions, to try to persuade the U.S. military that its estimates of the number of armed communists in South Vietnam were ridiculously low. This fact, if acknowledged, would of course have shattered the basis for our entire policy. While Sam was fighting alone in Saigon and Washington without any real support from the CIA leadership, my survey reports were circulating at Langley. They showed that the armed element was only one facet of the many-sided Asian communist revolutionary organization. If the Agency would not tolerate Adams’ figures on armed communists, it certainly could not acknowledge my revelations, which went a giant step further and assessed enemy strength as far greater than the mere number of armed units would ever lead anyone to believe.

  Now I knew the answer to the puzzle. My survey reports had arrived at Langley at precisely the moment when the battle over the numbers of communists was coming to a climax. The reports proved exactly what the designers of U.S. policy in Vietnam refused to see or hear—that we had lost the war years before. To support their specious position, Agency leaders had to suppress the facts contained in the reports that contradicted it and had to make certain that neither I nor anyone else within the CIA could ever gather such information again.

  All of my assigned duties in ICB consumed about one hour a day. After years of working long, hard hours, this sudden calm was strange. Former friends in the division avoided me and I them. I often sat and stared at the phone, wondering how in hell I could take the silent treatment for four more years until I might qualify for retirement.

  One day it occurred to me that the job offered a real opportunity to study and write about Asian communism as no one in the CIA seemed to have done before. As a first step I checked the CIA’s publication index for its studies of Asian revolutionary practices—there were none! I next began to gather think-tank studies and books and to set up files for the project. After a few months I prepared a memo to the East Asia division chief, Shackley, asking his approval to continue the project. He did not answer that memo. Realizing the division would never agree to the study and determined to go ahead, I transferred permanently to ICB. Jake, my boss, favored the study, so now I had approval to continue.

  It soon became obvious that the various books and think-tank studies in the CIA library only brought together all of the many misconceptions within the military-intelligence community about “insurgency-counterinsurgency.” Totally ignored by the Agency were four basic data banks about Asian communism: French writings on the Vietnamese revolution; State Department “China hands” reports from China in the 1940s; works by American scholars and newsmen with access to Chinese Communist source material; and, amazingly, writings on revolution by Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, Lin Piao, and General Vo Nguyen Giap. To read these documents would have meant rejecting all of the pet theories floating around in the think-tanks and counterinsurgency schools. These organizations needed a different sort of war, so they invented one and ignored what the enemy was saying about his own forces. While 700 Agency staff employees were paid large salaries to gather information on the nature and strengths of the Viet Cong, not one person was assigned to read the books by the communist leaders that laid out clearly all that the Agency wanted to know. Just one intelligent analysis of that source material over the two decades would have exposed the terrible inadequacies of the CIA’s intelligence and foretold our inevitable defeat in Vietnam.

  But the Agency’s ability to hide its head in the sand went far beyond ignoring this obvious source material, which thousands of students on campuses in the U.S. were reading voluntarily. In addition the CIA ignored the content of Vietnamese Communist radio broadcasts that its subsidiary office, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, monitored, translated, and distributed in booklet form every day. In the broadcasts the Communist leaders addressed themselves at great length and gave instructions to the various liberation associations operating in Vietnam. Yet the Agency pretended that the liberation associations with membership in the millions did not exist.

  The Agency’s refusal to see what was right in front of its face went even further. From the 1950s to the 1960s, China provided training for Third World revolutionaries. Over the years we spied on returning trainees and stole copies of their notes and other training material. Happy case officers would submit that material for intelligence dissemination. Gasps would emit from the China reports office: those stupid Chinese taught their brother revolutionaries the same things they broadcast to the world. The stolen training material, although slightly more specific, based itself on publicly available Chinese revolutionary writings. Lin Piao’s highly publicized pamphlet, “Long Live the Victory of People
’s War,” epitomized the entire training curriculum. Yet the China reports office would stamp “Do Not Disseminate” across those captured training manuals. George Orwell’s fictional Ministry of Truth had its counterpart in reality.

  As I began to understand Vietnamese Communist terminology and to learn the movement’s historical development, it became even more apparent that our reporting failed to include the basics of that movement. In early 1974, I prepared another memo for the chief of East Asia division noting the inaccuracies of our reporting of the communist movement not only in Vietnam but also in the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, and Singapore. I requested Shackley’s permission to brief division personnel, both in Headquarters and overseas, on the realities of Asian communism. As always, Shackley did not bother to respond. A few months later I sent him another memorandum and again requested permission to talk to someone, but the only answer I got was silence.

  In November 1974 two draft intelligence reports came across my desk indicating that the government of South Vietnam was disintegrating. The reports originated from the station’s southern regional base called ROIC IV. Normally, cabled intelligence reports, except for those requiring immediate dissemination, were routed through and cleared by the Saigon station. But in this case, in order to avoid the station chief’s censorship, two brave case officers, supported by the regional officer in charge, cabled their reports directly to Headquarters. Copies of these cables came to me. I read them in amazement, as they contradicted everything the station was trying to sell regarding the situation in Vietnam. The first report gave a year’s statistics on the number of South Vietnamese military personnel and civilian government employees from one province who either defected to the Viet Cong or deserted—one-third of them in one year. The second report said government forces in one southern province controlled only the capital of the province, with all the remaining area controlled by the communists.

  When he heard what had happened, Tom Polgar, the chief of Saigon station, fired off priority cables to Headquarters virtually ordering it not to disseminate the information in the cables; it did not. He also wrote cables, which I read, to the authors of the reports, ridiculing them for submitting unsubstantiated, poorly sourced, gloomy, inaccurate information and laying out guidelines that would make further such reporting impossible. Among these guidelines was an instruction that the case officer must personally travel to every area he claimed was controlled by the communists to verify his statement. Of course, had the officer attempted this, the Viet Cong would have captured or killed him.

  When I saw the intelligence reports and Polgar’s angry reaction, I did not jump up and charge into Shackley’s office to try to force him to recognize what was happening. Shackley was reading the same cables. He knew what was going on, and he must have acquiesced. I did, however, try to call attention to the information in the reports. I extrapolated it to apply to a lesser or greater degree to other areas of Vietnam and included my own assessment of the strength of South Vietnamese Communist organizations and North Vietnamese forces. I put all of this in an end-of-year 1974 report that was disseminated only to the deputy director for operations and the chief of the East Asia division. My report said that the government of South Vietnam was in grave danger of imminent collapse. As always, I received no response.

  Only a few months later, in April 1975, the Thieu government collapsed. I sat at home and watched the eerie television images of helicopters evacuating people from the top of the U.S. Embassy fortress in Saigon. This seemed so preventable. From the first days in 1954 to the last minutes in April 1975 all the evidence was there. There were no Russian soldiers in Vietnam, no Chinese; the victorious forces were all Vietnamese. In anger I watched it all, knowing that as soon as we recovered from this disaster, we would go charging off again somewhere else, chasing the lead of false Agency intelligence bolstered by disinformation operations.

  The wave of exposures of illegal Agency operations peaked in 1975 with investigations by the House of Representatives’ Pike Committee and the Senate’s Church Committee. The Pike Committee’s final report was classified and not released to the public. Portions of it were leaked, however, and appeared in the February 16, 1976 issue of The Village Voice. The report recorded the Agency’s intelligence performance in six major crises, and in each situation the CIA’s intelligence ranged from seriously flawed to non-existent. The report noted that during Tet 1968, the CIA failed to predict the communist attack throughout all of South Vietnam. In August 1968 in Czechoslovakia the Agency “lost” an invading Russian army for two weeks. On October 6, 1973 Egypt and Syria launched an attack on Israel that the Agency failed to predict. It concentrated all of its efforts on following the progress of the war, yet it so miscalculated subsequent events that it “contributed to a U.S.-Soviet confrontation … on October 24, 1973.… Poor intelligence had brought America to the brink of war.”5 The Pike Committee also cited flawed Agency information concerning a coup in Portugal in 1974, India’s detonation of a nuclear device the same year, and the confrontation between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus in July 1974.

  The Church Committee, after an exhaustive review, concluded that the Agency acted more as the covert action arm of the Presidency than as an intelligence gatherer and collator. Its final report said the CIA was heavily involved in covertly sponsoring the publication of books and that over the years until 1967 it had in some way been responsible for the publication of well over 1,000 books—a fifth of these in the English language. According to the Church Committee, the Agency was running news services, had employees working for major press organizations, and was illegally releasing and planting stories directly into the U.S. media. Frequently these stories were false and were designed to support the Agency’s covert action goals.

  Pictures of CIA director William Colby testifying and holding up a poison dart gun, details of CIA failures to destroy biological warfare chemicals under direct orders, information on the Agency’s illegal opening of the mail of U.S. citizens, specifics of the Agency’s years-long preoccupation with trying to overthrow the government of Chile, sordid details of Agency officers providing drugs to customers of prostitutes in order to film their reactions, and facts about numerous other illegal operations revealed during the congressional investigations all created a depressing atmosphere around Langley.

  The morale of CIA employees in this period was at an all-time low. Surprisingly, few seemed particularly bothered by the activities themselves, just upset at having them exposed. There was no remorse, just bitterness. The true believers held to the position that if the general public knew what we knew, then it would understand and support the Agency’s activities.

  The Church Committee’s observation that the Agency was more the covert action arm of the President than an intelligence gatherer confirmed all my suspicions about the true purpose of the Agency: it existed under the name of the Central Intelligence Agency only as a cover for its covert operations. Its intelligence was not much more than one weapon in its arsenal of disinformation—a difficult, concept to accept. But with these revelations I began to see where my experience in Southeast Asia had broader ramifications. The Agency refused or was unable to report the truth not only about Asian revolutions; it was doing the same wherever it operated.

  To confirm this observation I began reviewing current events in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa and saw the same patterns of Agency disinformation operations, including its intelligence supporting its covert operations. This convinced me. The Agency is not, nor was it ever meant to have been, an intelligence agency. It was created slightly after the United Nations. It was the United States’ substitute for gun-boat diplomacy that was no longer feasible under the scrutiny of that world organization. The Agency was to do covertly that which was once done openly with the Army, the Navy, and the Marines. The Central Intelligence Agency, I now knew, was in truth a Central Covert Action Agency.

  After the 1976 Christmas holiday season I returned to wo
rk. I walked into our vaulted area where we kept the coffee pot. There on the bulletin board was a memorandum from the deputy director for operations, William Wells. The memorandum said the Agency was currently overstaffed and that operations officers with a minimum of five years overseas and a total of 25 years of service could volunteer for early retirement. I tore the memo off the board and raced around yelling, “I can retire, I can retire.”

  I ran into my office and called Norma. Then I walked into the office of the chief of ICB, Jake, and told him of my decision, just in case he had not heard my yelling. He asked me to think the decision over for a day or so. “No need,” I said, “no need.”

  Some weeks later, the awards office notified me that based on Jake’s recommendation, I had been awarded the Agency’s Career Intelligence Medal. I agreed to accept it for three reasons: to give my children an occasion to be proud of their father, not to embarrass Jake, and to lend credibility to any criticisms of the Agency I might make in the future. Otherwise I very much wanted to say, “Take your medal and shove it.”

  My wife, my four children, one son-in-law, and a grandson all gathered for the awards ceremony. I was deeply moved by my family’s presence there with me. I had lived through 25 years of illusion, the last decade of which had been filled with anger, bitterness, self-doubts, mistrust, disbelief, disgust, and struggle. That I had emerged with my sanity intact was a testimonial to their backing and loyalty.

  William (“Wild Willie”) Wells made the presentation in a room off of the director’s office on the seventh floor. He read the award citation aloud. As with nearly everything else touched by the Agency, its intelligence was flawed. It said that the Agency gave me the medal, in part, for my excellent work in Malaysia—a country I had never even visited.