Deadly Deceits Read Free Page A

stayed I had to do something to fight the terrible things I had seen the CIA do. I knew then that the United States and the CIA had gone very wrong. Killing myself was not the answer. I had to stay alive and tellwhat I had found out. I owed that much to the American and Vietnamese people—and to myself.
    This book is a journey through my 25 years in the CIA. I worked from 1952 to 1977 in many places, including Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Langley, Virginia. I had a range of jobs, both in cities and rural areas, working as a case officer on covert operations, as a paramilitary operator, as a liaison officer with foreign police and intelligence agencies, and as an intelligence analyst. I also studied the CIA for years after I retired. This range of experience and research has led me to realizations and conclusions, many of which are unpleasant and painful to me. I choose now to share these experiences and conclusions for two main reasons.
    The first is political. I want to reveal to those who still believe in the myths of the CIA what it is and what it actually does. My explanation will not include the usual pap fed to us by Agency spokesmen. My view backed by 25 years of experience is, quite simply, that the CIA is the covert action arm of the Presidency. Most of its money, manpower, and energy go into covert operations that, as we have seen over the years, include backing dictators and overthrowing democratically elected governments. The CIA is not an intelligence agency. In fact, it acts largely as an anti-intelligence agency, producing only that information wanted by policymakers to support their plans and suppressing information that does not support those plans. As the covert action arm of the President, the CIA uses disinformation, much of it aimed at the U.S. public, to mold opinion. It employs the gamut of disinformation techniques from forging documents to planting and discovering “communist” weapons caches. But the major weapon in its arsenal of disinformation is the “intelligence” it feeds to policymakers. Instead of gathering genuine intelligence that could serve as the basis for reasonable policies, the CIA often ends up distorting reality, creating out of whole cloth “intelligence” to justify policies that have already been decided upon. Policymakers then leak this “intelligence” to the media to deceive us all and gain our support. Now that President Reagan, in his Executive Order of December 4, 1981, has authorized the Agency to operate within the United States, the situation can only worsen.
    But beyond contributing to the political dialogue about the CIA, I want to understand my own life, to try to adjust to the world as it is, not to the fairy-tale world I was led to believe in. I write with the knowledge that my experiences reflect, at least to a degree, those of the more than two million Americans who served in Vietnam and millions of others at home who idealistically believed, as I did, in the American dream. If this book helps some of them to understand how they were misled and how that dream was shattered, and to adjust, then it will have achieved its goal.

1. GUNG HO!
    BEFORE I went to work for the CIA I believe I was a typical American, if there is such a creature. My family goes back three generations in Louisiana and many of the Scotch-Irish McGehees lie buried in the East Fork Baptist Church cemetery near Kentwood. My father, as a teenager, moved north to make his fortune and after several years returned to marry his childhood sweetheart, a neighboring girl from Osyka, Mississippi. I was born in Moline, Illinois in 1928. Shortly thereafter my parents, my older sister, and I moved to the South Side of Chicago, where my father worked long, hard hours as a janitor to support us. Despite the Depression, my family prospered.
    I grew up in the lower middle class all-white South Side neighborhood and after graduating from grammar school