Ralph McGehee, the CIA and Deadly Deceits

[Jan Klimkowski]

In the wake of the accolades, William Colby (future CIA director, and then the Far East division chief) visited, and McGehee briefed him:"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...'We have found that the Communists concentrate the majority, almost the entirety, of their time winning the cooperation of the peasants.'"McGehee exposed the communist movement as a grass roots movement with peasant support, mainly because their goal was freeing themselves from colonial and neocolonial oppression, enforced by the Thai ruling class and their industrialized-nation sponsors. The Communist Revolution in Southeast Asia was an exercise in freedom, although McGehee would not attain that realization for years. In 1967, McGehee was ecstatic that his method reversed communist infiltration.Colby silently received McGehee's presentation, finally muttering, "We always seem to be losing." McGehee was astonished by Colby's response.Soon after Colby's visit, McGehee was removed from the field, his successful program was canceled, and he found himself behind a meaningless desk at Langley. He was shocked and confused for years. He eventually realized that his intelligence work, although arguably the most effective the West had ever seen in Southeast Asia, produced an undesirable answer. Communism could not be damned as an evil if the people wanted it. If that fact became widely known, our Vietnam adventure could be seen in an unsavory light: killing millions to prevent them from choosing a government we disapproved of. The American experience in Vietnam was an attempt at reconquering the region, keeping it in the capitalistic fold and keeping those people enslaved.McGehee still believed his indoctrination and volunteered for Saigon, something that no sane CIA employee did in 1968. McGehee was a true believer in America's good intentions, even if their tactics sometimes seemed regrettable. Defeating the communists was his great desire. One pivotal evening in his quarters near Saigon in December of 1968, McGehee finally figured it out."I sat there in agony thinking about all that had led me to this private hell. My idealism, my patriotism, my ambition, my plans to be a good intelligence officer to help my country fight the communist scourge - what in the hell had happened? Why did we have to bomb the people we were trying to save? Why were we napalming young children? Why did the CIA, my employer for 16 years, report lies instead of the truth?"I hated my part in the charade of murder and horror. My efforts were contributing to the deaths, to the burning alive of children - especially the children. The photographs of young Vietnamese children burned by napalm destroyed me."McGehee will never lose the memory of the smell of burning Vietnamese flesh. McGehee thought of killing himself that night in Vietnam. He thought of various ways to kill himself to protest what was happening. In the end, however, he committed his life to telling the world what really happened in Vietnam and the true nature of America's fight against communism. McGehee embarked on the hard, lonely road of exposing what his nation was really up to.When his devastating tour of duty in Vietnam was finished, McGehee left:"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 made me what I was, had died in Vietnam. 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."The year was 1970, and McGehee had nearly twenty years of CIA service.

I've spent many an hour searching through the spiders' webs of Ralph McGehee's CIABASE.

Somehow, when finally faced with the horror, the terrible consequences of his actions, McGehee found his moral compass and acted.

The tragedy is that most never cut through the lies and smoke and see what they have done.

And most of those that do shrug their shoulders and carry on.