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Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA
A new, updated edition of this classic account of the CIA's deeds and deceptions by one of its formerly most prized recruits. "One of the outstanding books written by former CIA agents."-Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
231 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
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About the author
Ralph W. McGehee
1 book2 followersRalph W. McGehee was an all-American football player at the University of Notre Dame, where he helped the team to win three regional championships between 1946 and 1949. He graduated cum laude with a bachelor of science degree in business administration. McGehee was an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1952 to 1977. Upon retirement he was awarded a career achievement medal, yet he went on to be highly critical of the organization. In addition to publishing an exposé, Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA, for years he maintained the CIABASE digital archives, which revealed the agency's activities through the use of public domain resources.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
April 24, 2013
Having encountered McGehee speaking in various political documentaries and being concerned about our government's spy apparatus, I picked this up from the sale shelves of Evanston's Amarynth Bookstore.
Arranged along a narrative autobiographical framework, this memoir elucidates the thesis that the CIA, created as an objective information-gathering office in service to the president, has long been at odds with its ostensible purpose. Rather than reporting facts, its primary function has been to try to create them. In the case of disinformation campaigns this has often led to one set of CIA analysts reporting as fact what operatives in the CIA have fabricated, lies that get passed upstream to policymakers--a phenomenon characteristic, as McGehee documents, of United States activity in Southeast Asia during the period of the fifties, sixties and seventies when he was involved there.
Attached to this book is an appendix detailing the process whereby the text was censored by the CIA. That should be read prior to reading the book itself.
Arranged along a narrative autobiographical framework, this memoir elucidates the thesis that the CIA, created as an objective information-gathering office in service to the president, has long been at odds with its ostensible purpose. Rather than reporting facts, its primary function has been to try to create them. In the case of disinformation campaigns this has often led to one set of CIA analysts reporting as fact what operatives in the CIA have fabricated, lies that get passed upstream to policymakers--a phenomenon characteristic, as McGehee documents, of United States activity in Southeast Asia during the period of the fifties, sixties and seventies when he was involved there.
Attached to this book is an appendix detailing the process whereby the text was censored by the CIA. That should be read prior to reading the book itself.
March 8, 2021
Break it into 1,000 pieces
If you had any doubt about what an absolutely worthless, bumbling bunch of misfits the CIA is, this book will erase it. Written by a 25 year highly decorated CIA veteran, this book describes in spades just how destructive, petty and inept this malignant cancer is on the body America.
If you had any doubt about what an absolutely worthless, bumbling bunch of misfits the CIA is, this book will erase it. Written by a 25 year highly decorated CIA veteran, this book describes in spades just how destructive, petty and inept this malignant cancer is on the body America.
February 1, 2020
I know that Goodreads classes three stars as "liked it", but really this is not appropriate here. This is not a likeable book. It is valuable and reasonably interesting, although very dry, but I find it difficult to differentiate between the book and the author. Given it's a memoir of sorts, however, this is not an insurmountable point.
Basically, McGehee worked for the CIA in South Asia before and during the Vietnam conflict, fighting communism during the Cold War. The appalling history of CIA involvement in that region is well-known; I feel disinclined to go into it here. Suffice to say that the author, grinding his way to some actual understanding of the situation, as opposed to the understanding the CIA had decided upon in advance, became severely disillusioned. If I am supposed to feel sorry for him I don't. One of the blurbs on the back describes him as "a principled man" but I'm not particularly feeling that either. But then, he was never trained to be - certainly not by the CIA.
There's a small section at the beginning of the book that talks about his recruitment and training. As part of that recruitment, McGehee had to undergo a number of intelligence and personality tests, as it took a certain type to work for the CIA, or so they thought. Notable here is the brief focus on two areas. The first is that McGehee was assessed as being rather more flexible than the average recruit; he expresses surprise that they let him through, arguing that flexibility was not a particularly valued trait. I beg to differ. I mean, yes, there is intellectual flexibility, which McGehee shows eventually, realising that the standard approach to intelligence is not working. I can see how that might cause difficulties for the agents in charge of him. But you simply cannot recruit people for this type of work without banking on a certain moral flexibility, and he has that in spades. There's one point where he's talking about his involvement in the interrogation of Thai villagers. One teenage boy was so distressed by the accusations he took his own life. One man had to listen to the mock execution of his father by CIA agents in order to get him to talk. A similar approach was taken with the child of a mother suspected of communist loyalties. McGehee comments, "I was not particularly disturbed by these violations of human rights" (106) and you can't tell me that moral flexibility is not one of his defining traits. You just can't. He justifies it on the old, tired grounds of ends, means, omelette, but if you can support threatening to kill a child in order to torture a mother you are not a principled man. You are just not.
McGehee goes on to feel guilt over the results of American intervention in Vietnam, along with frustration that his own work - which indicated the futility of such a conflict - was ignored. The argument seems to be "If they had only listened, all this suffering could have been prevented!" Yet clearly he had no real problem with suffering when it was his plans being implemented, as was the case in the Thai region under his control, so there's a strong part of me suspects that this turn to principles is fuelled - at least in part - by misplaced anger at being taken for a mug by the institution he has given his life to.
Because he is, frequently, and that's where the second characteristic of those personality tests comes in. Washed out of recruitment early were those people who showed a tendency to think for themselves. Closely related to this, I feel, is curiosity. The people described here seem to have none. Their intellect - impressive in other areas as it may be - is absolutely stagnant. The most shocking sentence in the book, a sentence far worse than the blase dismissal of torture, is this: "Although I had been in the CIA for 20 years, I really never had attempted to understand communism on its own terms" (182). HOW STUPID CAN YOU BE? HOW INSULAR, AND HOW INCURIOUS? He's working on China at one point, trying to stem Chinese communism, and he never bothers to read Mao.
If I'm trying to change someone's mind about something, I not only need to know what they think, but why they think it. How this very basic technique bypasses this author (and many of his colleagues) I do not know. Well yes, I do. They're unimaginative, intellectually lazy, and hold no more than superficial interest in the world around them. They are, in fact, recruited for these very failings.
I sincerely hope that the CIA has raised its standards since this book was published, but given the intellectual giant currently running that country, who is lionised by half its population, I very much fucking doubt it.
Principled intelligence my arse.
Basically, McGehee worked for the CIA in South Asia before and during the Vietnam conflict, fighting communism during the Cold War. The appalling history of CIA involvement in that region is well-known; I feel disinclined to go into it here. Suffice to say that the author, grinding his way to some actual understanding of the situation, as opposed to the understanding the CIA had decided upon in advance, became severely disillusioned. If I am supposed to feel sorry for him I don't. One of the blurbs on the back describes him as "a principled man" but I'm not particularly feeling that either. But then, he was never trained to be - certainly not by the CIA.
There's a small section at the beginning of the book that talks about his recruitment and training. As part of that recruitment, McGehee had to undergo a number of intelligence and personality tests, as it took a certain type to work for the CIA, or so they thought. Notable here is the brief focus on two areas. The first is that McGehee was assessed as being rather more flexible than the average recruit; he expresses surprise that they let him through, arguing that flexibility was not a particularly valued trait. I beg to differ. I mean, yes, there is intellectual flexibility, which McGehee shows eventually, realising that the standard approach to intelligence is not working. I can see how that might cause difficulties for the agents in charge of him. But you simply cannot recruit people for this type of work without banking on a certain moral flexibility, and he has that in spades. There's one point where he's talking about his involvement in the interrogation of Thai villagers. One teenage boy was so distressed by the accusations he took his own life. One man had to listen to the mock execution of his father by CIA agents in order to get him to talk. A similar approach was taken with the child of a mother suspected of communist loyalties. McGehee comments, "I was not particularly disturbed by these violations of human rights" (106) and you can't tell me that moral flexibility is not one of his defining traits. You just can't. He justifies it on the old, tired grounds of ends, means, omelette, but if you can support threatening to kill a child in order to torture a mother you are not a principled man. You are just not.
McGehee goes on to feel guilt over the results of American intervention in Vietnam, along with frustration that his own work - which indicated the futility of such a conflict - was ignored. The argument seems to be "If they had only listened, all this suffering could have been prevented!" Yet clearly he had no real problem with suffering when it was his plans being implemented, as was the case in the Thai region under his control, so there's a strong part of me suspects that this turn to principles is fuelled - at least in part - by misplaced anger at being taken for a mug by the institution he has given his life to.
Because he is, frequently, and that's where the second characteristic of those personality tests comes in. Washed out of recruitment early were those people who showed a tendency to think for themselves. Closely related to this, I feel, is curiosity. The people described here seem to have none. Their intellect - impressive in other areas as it may be - is absolutely stagnant. The most shocking sentence in the book, a sentence far worse than the blase dismissal of torture, is this: "Although I had been in the CIA for 20 years, I really never had attempted to understand communism on its own terms" (182). HOW STUPID CAN YOU BE? HOW INSULAR, AND HOW INCURIOUS? He's working on China at one point, trying to stem Chinese communism, and he never bothers to read Mao.
If I'm trying to change someone's mind about something, I not only need to know what they think, but why they think it. How this very basic technique bypasses this author (and many of his colleagues) I do not know. Well yes, I do. They're unimaginative, intellectually lazy, and hold no more than superficial interest in the world around them. They are, in fact, recruited for these very failings.
I sincerely hope that the CIA has raised its standards since this book was published, but given the intellectual giant currently running that country, who is lionised by half its population, I very much fucking doubt it.
Principled intelligence my arse.
Read
December 18, 2025The arc of one man's career with the CIA, from idealism to disillusion. Could have saved much grief in the Middle East.
This is a personal history of Ralph McGehee who spent 25 years with the CIA, 1950 to 75. It is a chronicle of his own disillusionment, paralleling the disillusionment of America itself.
McGehee started out as a fervent anti-Communist. The United States was proud of having won World War II and confident of its leading role in the postwar world. Americans were equally confident that they had the answer and that the Communists decidedly did not. We were only too aware of the freedoms that were being lost in Eastern Europe.
McGehee himself looked like an ideal recruit for the agency. He was a football player at Notre Dame and a decent scholar, racking up 143 points on an IQ test. That makes him somewhere between one in 100 and one in 1000 as far as intelligence goes… depending on whose measuring scheme was being used. In any case, he was pretty smart, and his intelligence comes through in the quality of his writing.
He discovered immediately upon joining the CIA the fact that is central to his book. It is not an intelligence gathering agency so much as a covert operations group. He goes into the kind of cloak and dagger activities that almost all governments seem to do, but which democracies have a hard time admitting to, and therefore do not seem to be particularly effective at.
The fact that the CIA must operate outside the ethical system espoused by our democratic system means that it has relatively little oversight. It has a “black budget” so our enemies do not know how much we are spending or what we are spending it on. This means that government oversight is minimal, and the leaders of the CIA must be trusted to dedicate themselves to the best interests of the country.
But alas… these are civil servants. They are careerists. They put their own interests above that of the government and the people, and due to the clandestine nature of the whole organization they are only very rarely called to account.
Another book I review, Legacy of Ashes, offers a complete history of the CIA. It is a good companion volume, an overview of the things that McGehee saw up close. They both recount that the CIA started during World War II as the office of special services, the OSS. Roosevelt needed an intelligence operation and there was none in existence in the United States. The British helped us set it up, and Roosevelt staffed it with contacts from the East Coast establishment.
The first generation of CIA was exactly that – East Coast Brahmans. The first leader was wild Bill Donovan, a Wall Street lawyer. I used to drink coffee with another of the early recruits, Hayden Estey - there is a classy WASP name for you – Harvard class of 1936 who had been a Time magazine reporter in France and was spirited out into Spain by his Jewish paramour one step ahead of the Nazis. Hayden’s stories lend credence to the accounts I’ve read in both these books.
The CIA was growing fast when McGehee joined in 1950. His section, the paramilitary operations, was growing most quickly. Its mission was covert action, the kind of thing that led to the Bay of Pigs fiasco. McGehee’s territory was Asia. He was stationed in Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.
The heart of the book is a retelling of the Pentagon Papers story. I had not read the Pentagon Papers in any detail, and I find this account to be succinct and riveting. The French were not kind masters in Vietnam, and the people’s aspiration to be free of them was totally legitimate. The United States originally endorsed their quest for freedom, but then flip-flopped and wound up supporting the French, ultimately taking over the funding of the war even when the French were still involved. Once having committed to it, we continually compounded the error.
McGehee’s biggest career mistake was in taking his job seriously. He wanted to gain intelligence, to learn what the real attraction of the Communists was. Doing so would have been anathema to the political leadership in Washington, and hence the leadership of the CIA. They were committed to fighting a war, and they used the CIA to justify the war, not to gather real intelligence. When McGehee attempted to gather true intelligence from farmers in Thailand, he found out that he was the first to do so. But he proceeded. Then he found out why he had been the first to do so. They did not want to know the truth. The CIA, and presumably the military and political leadership in the United States, was committed to underestimating the numbers, and the attraction of the Communists in order to justify their ongoing mission.
As an aside, I spent four years in Vietnam as a technician with IBM. I wrote the Vietnamese language support for IBM computers, which was used to support the programs McGehee would say were used for the United States to lie to itself. One was the Hamlet Evaluation System, a subjective rating system that was used to rank the relative safety of each hamlet in the country, to be reported upstream. The people gathering the data to feed the system, of course, had every motivation to tell the CIA and what they wanted to hear. The other was the Land to the Tiller program which expropriated large land holdings from the rich and redistributed them to the farmers who were working the land. Such a program had worked for the British in Malaysia. McGehee does not mention the program that was eventually put in place, but does note that the need for such a program was evident to him much earlier than our efforts to implement one.
McGehee’s conclusion is rather short, direct, and perhaps a bit naïve. He would probably agree with this. He says that what we need to do is to scrap the CIA and start from scratch with an organization that is truly dedicated to gathering intelligence rather than clandestine operations. As unattractive as it is, it appears that countries will always engage in clandestine activities. Whether or not they see their self-interest clearly is another issue. I now live in Ukraine, which is being threatened by Russia, led by former KGB operative Vladimir Putin. The entire assault against Ukraine has been
carried out exactly the way a covert operative would do it. The level of lying is incredible. The extent to which Putin is misleading the Russian people, and attempting to sway world opinion, notably the libertarian right in the United States, is incredible. However, at the end of the day he has not won much land at all, and the land that he has taken is among the less desirable in all of Ukraine. Napoleon and Hitler, not trying to fool anybody, had much more to show for their first year’s aggression.
In the 25 years since its publication, the US has witnessed many other intelligence failures. The greatest ones have been in the Middle East, the most spectacular of those being blindsided on 9/11. However, the weapons of mass destruction fiasco in Iraq and our ongoing failure to understand what is happening in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and more countries than I can name is a direct outgrowth of the flaws that McGehee names in this book. This book is already
of historical interest, and when researchers in the not-too-distant future do a postmortem on the failed democracy in the United States they may find some interesting material.
This is a personal history of Ralph McGehee who spent 25 years with the CIA, 1950 to 75. It is a chronicle of his own disillusionment, paralleling the disillusionment of America itself.
McGehee started out as a fervent anti-Communist. The United States was proud of having won World War II and confident of its leading role in the postwar world. Americans were equally confident that they had the answer and that the Communists decidedly did not. We were only too aware of the freedoms that were being lost in Eastern Europe.
McGehee himself looked like an ideal recruit for the agency. He was a football player at Notre Dame and a decent scholar, racking up 143 points on an IQ test. That makes him somewhere between one in 100 and one in 1000 as far as intelligence goes… depending on whose measuring scheme was being used. In any case, he was pretty smart, and his intelligence comes through in the quality of his writing.
He discovered immediately upon joining the CIA the fact that is central to his book. It is not an intelligence gathering agency so much as a covert operations group. He goes into the kind of cloak and dagger activities that almost all governments seem to do, but which democracies have a hard time admitting to, and therefore do not seem to be particularly effective at.
The fact that the CIA must operate outside the ethical system espoused by our democratic system means that it has relatively little oversight. It has a “black budget” so our enemies do not know how much we are spending or what we are spending it on. This means that government oversight is minimal, and the leaders of the CIA must be trusted to dedicate themselves to the best interests of the country.
But alas… these are civil servants. They are careerists. They put their own interests above that of the government and the people, and due to the clandestine nature of the whole organization they are only very rarely called to account.
Another book I review, Legacy of Ashes, offers a complete history of the CIA. It is a good companion volume, an overview of the things that McGehee saw up close. They both recount that the CIA started during World War II as the office of special services, the OSS. Roosevelt needed an intelligence operation and there was none in existence in the United States. The British helped us set it up, and Roosevelt staffed it with contacts from the East Coast establishment.
The first generation of CIA was exactly that – East Coast Brahmans. The first leader was wild Bill Donovan, a Wall Street lawyer. I used to drink coffee with another of the early recruits, Hayden Estey - there is a classy WASP name for you – Harvard class of 1936 who had been a Time magazine reporter in France and was spirited out into Spain by his Jewish paramour one step ahead of the Nazis. Hayden’s stories lend credence to the accounts I’ve read in both these books.
The CIA was growing fast when McGehee joined in 1950. His section, the paramilitary operations, was growing most quickly. Its mission was covert action, the kind of thing that led to the Bay of Pigs fiasco. McGehee’s territory was Asia. He was stationed in Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.
The heart of the book is a retelling of the Pentagon Papers story. I had not read the Pentagon Papers in any detail, and I find this account to be succinct and riveting. The French were not kind masters in Vietnam, and the people’s aspiration to be free of them was totally legitimate. The United States originally endorsed their quest for freedom, but then flip-flopped and wound up supporting the French, ultimately taking over the funding of the war even when the French were still involved. Once having committed to it, we continually compounded the error.
McGehee’s biggest career mistake was in taking his job seriously. He wanted to gain intelligence, to learn what the real attraction of the Communists was. Doing so would have been anathema to the political leadership in Washington, and hence the leadership of the CIA. They were committed to fighting a war, and they used the CIA to justify the war, not to gather real intelligence. When McGehee attempted to gather true intelligence from farmers in Thailand, he found out that he was the first to do so. But he proceeded. Then he found out why he had been the first to do so. They did not want to know the truth. The CIA, and presumably the military and political leadership in the United States, was committed to underestimating the numbers, and the attraction of the Communists in order to justify their ongoing mission.
As an aside, I spent four years in Vietnam as a technician with IBM. I wrote the Vietnamese language support for IBM computers, which was used to support the programs McGehee would say were used for the United States to lie to itself. One was the Hamlet Evaluation System, a subjective rating system that was used to rank the relative safety of each hamlet in the country, to be reported upstream. The people gathering the data to feed the system, of course, had every motivation to tell the CIA and what they wanted to hear. The other was the Land to the Tiller program which expropriated large land holdings from the rich and redistributed them to the farmers who were working the land. Such a program had worked for the British in Malaysia. McGehee does not mention the program that was eventually put in place, but does note that the need for such a program was evident to him much earlier than our efforts to implement one.
McGehee’s conclusion is rather short, direct, and perhaps a bit naïve. He would probably agree with this. He says that what we need to do is to scrap the CIA and start from scratch with an organization that is truly dedicated to gathering intelligence rather than clandestine operations. As unattractive as it is, it appears that countries will always engage in clandestine activities. Whether or not they see their self-interest clearly is another issue. I now live in Ukraine, which is being threatened by Russia, led by former KGB operative Vladimir Putin. The entire assault against Ukraine has been
carried out exactly the way a covert operative would do it. The level of lying is incredible. The extent to which Putin is misleading the Russian people, and attempting to sway world opinion, notably the libertarian right in the United States, is incredible. However, at the end of the day he has not won much land at all, and the land that he has taken is among the less desirable in all of Ukraine. Napoleon and Hitler, not trying to fool anybody, had much more to show for their first year’s aggression.
In the 25 years since its publication, the US has witnessed many other intelligence failures. The greatest ones have been in the Middle East, the most spectacular of those being blindsided on 9/11. However, the weapons of mass destruction fiasco in Iraq and our ongoing failure to understand what is happening in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and more countries than I can name is a direct outgrowth of the flaws that McGehee names in this book. This book is already
of historical interest, and when researchers in the not-too-distant future do a postmortem on the failed democracy in the United States they may find some interesting material.
December 28, 2020
A bit shocking if completely true. But Mr McGehee does not claim that his experiences were the be-all of what is wrong about the CIA. I believe that his job was a lot of paper pushing, and quite a lot of recruiting, not the "undercover spy" that first comes to mine when the CIA is mentioned.
Having been in the service, and what little I know about the Federal Government, and what I suspect goes on, and the politics of the last 4 years (The Reign of His Orangeness), this book's premise is not surprising.
Having been in the service, and what little I know about the Federal Government, and what I suspect goes on, and the politics of the last 4 years (The Reign of His Orangeness), this book's premise is not surprising.
January 4, 2010
No surprises that the CIA did what it did. McGehee did a good job in making lots of his activities vague, but the message he has comes through loud and clear.
January 27, 2024
From this book, I learned that this organization is not about intelligence gathering but rather covering actions around the world. R. McGehee insights and suggestions about the organization should be implemented by the next administration.
July 11, 2017
CIA
Great and important information. This story is constantly repeating itself. It is as true today as it was then. Done
Great and important information. This story is constantly repeating itself. It is as true today as it was then. Done
May 11, 2023
Some interesting insights and stories. But too many editing mistakes. Repeated paragraphs and sentences. I thought I was drunk reading it.
October 20, 2014
stormtrooper blows whistle on empire. some Vietnam content.
April 8, 2015
Good read
Great book. This book shows how it's always been govt vs the people and that the abuses of the federal gov't remain in place today long after the Vietnam war ended.
Great book. This book shows how it's always been govt vs the people and that the abuses of the federal gov't remain in place today long after the Vietnam war ended.
August 7, 2011
Met Ralph many years ago. What he has to say is still cogent.
April 22, 2017
Short read about an ex-CIA agent who was stationed in Thailand and Vietnam and Japan. Interesting in his perspective that the CIA is primarily not information gathering and analysis but propaganda and overthrow of countries.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews