Ralph McGehee’s CIA Journey
Ralph’s long, slow, path of awakening
The USA’s national security state and I go way back, even before I was born. One grandfather fought in World War I (and nearly died in it), the other served in World War II (and came back an emotional wreck), and my father was a Marine in Korea. I nearly became a soldier myself, and both of my brothers became soldiers. My wife’s father was in World War II (and nearly died), and both of her brothers were in the military. If there was The American Way in those Superman days, it was serving in the military. I was raised in a military household in a military community in history’s most globally dominant empire. My father had to get a top-secret security clearance to work at NASA during the Space Race.
Before I ever met Dennis Lee, I heard about my close relative’s secret life as a CIA contract agent who worked for Henry Kissinger. He nearly tried to recruit me into the family “business.” Dennis was a paratrooping medic who was dropped into Cambodia to clean up a CIA operation gone bad, to help keep alive the fiction that the USA was not at war with Cambodia. During my days with Dennis, the CIA offered him a billion dollars to fold the operation before they lowered the boom on us. While Dennis was in solitary confinement, I met With Gary Wean, in my efforts to help Dennis. Gary’s advice was critical in helping me spring Dennis from jail, in the biggest miracle that I ever witnessed. Gary’s book had a chapter in it about the CIA’s involvement in the operation that got JFK killed.
The next year, 1990, as I began my media studies at the scholarly feet of Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman, I saw an ad for a memoir of a CIA case officer named Ralph McGehee. I began reading it that autumn. After a moving introduction that included Ralph’s devastating moment of awakening in a hotel in Saigon in 1968, when Ralph finally realized what the CIA really did and he nearly killed himself, the book was a dry read in its early chapters. I put the book aside about halfway through it, in the stack of publications that I was reading, next to my bed. I remember looking at the book that autumn, thinking that I needed to finish it, even if it was dry reading. I quickly learned that the startling revelations had yet to come. By the book’s end, it was one of the most influential works that I ever read.
In the mid-1960s, Ralph was at the top of his game as a case officer in Thailand, fighting the communist insurgency, and he developed a method to flush out the communists and reverse communist inroads in Thailand. His effort won him universal praise in intelligence circles, but as he soon discovered when briefing William Colby on his findings, Ralph had come up with the wrong answer. The Thai peasants did not cooperate with the communists due to terror or coercion, as the CIA stated at the time, but because the communists were truly helpful to the peasants and provided an alternative to neocolonial exploitation.
Ralph’s highly successful program was soon canceled and he found himself behind a meaningless desk at Langley. Ralph was confused by what had happened, but was so gung-ho that he volunteered for Vietnam in 1968, which nobody sane did. During his stint in Vietnam, Ralph finally understood: the CIA was the handmaiden of genocide. Ralph left Vietnam a ruined man, but the night that he nearly killed himself, he made a personal pledge to expose what the CIA really was and did. Ralph became one of those zombies that John Stockwell wrote about, shuffling through the halls at Langley, counting his days to retirement, but Ralph was also getting educated in the CIA’s archives, in preparation for the book that he planned to write.
Ralph got lucky, in a way. Watergate and the Church Committee hearings dragged the CIA through the mud, the CIA soon offered early-retirement packages, and Ralph leapt at the opportunity.
Ralph diligently worked on his book in his retirement. Until this millennium, Ralph was one of only two ex-CIA employees who abided by their secrecy agreements in publishing their CIA-critical memoirs. The other was Victor Marchetti. Ralph and Victor engaged in epic legal battles with the CIA to publish their memoirs, and the published versions were riddled with censorship deletions. Marchetti wrote a book to describe his legal battles with the CIA. Ralph called the CIA an unsalvageable organization and called for its abolition in Deadly Deceits. Ralph said that the primary target of the CIA’s lies was the American public.
Ralph then founded CIABASE, which exposed the CIA by using public-domain sources. Ralph also hit the speaking tour, talking around the world about what the CIA is and does. Ralph is featured in Bill Moyers’s The Secret Government documentary.
In 1996, when I wrote my first website, I discussed works that influenced my worldview, and I wrote a section on Deadly Deceits. I contacted Ralph for his permission to publish it and he gave his blessing. My original site came down in early 1997 and it did not reappear for years. In 1998, as I was deep into my studies that led to my site largely as it stands today, I surfed around to see what of my work might have survived on the Internet. Somebody reproduced my entire site, and I discovered that my section on Deadly Deceits was plastered all over the Internet. I began asking around about that, and at a site run by a former spook who became a lefty, who had published my Deadly Deceits section, I asked who gave it to him, and he replied that Ralph did. Ralph considered my little write-up to be the defining summary of his work. It was the first time that I got feedback like that, that my work was considered competent by an expert in the subjects that I wrote about.
Ralph was one of the overgrown Boy Scouts that I encountered on my journey, one of those disillusioned idealists that comprise my target audience. He was one of my early finds like that, and it helped establish my template for the people that I seek. As far as my summary of Deadly Deceits went, I think that it takes one to know one, which is why we resonated and became friends. When I had a letter to the editor published in the Seattle Times in 1998, in which I predicted something like 9/11 (and my family warned me that I was going to get into trouble), Ralph was amazed that any American newspaper would publish something like that. He said that the East Coast papers would never run something like that. Around that time, I was invited to be on a radio show but kept my head down and kept studying and writing. I marched on the eve of the 1999 WTO meeting, and the next day, Ralph watched the imposition of martial law in Seattle with amazement. Ralph was appreciative of my report on some of the USA’s methods of interrogation used in Vietnam.
The CIA harassed Ralph, gadfly that he was. Ralph lived only a few miles from Langley, and he was targeted by the local police and businesses, to make his life there miserable. Ralph also received threats and was even injured by their harassment. When Ralph reached his 70s, he was worn out from the battle and went into his second retirement. He sold off his 1,000-volume intelligence library to a university for almost nothing, and I bought a few things from it. Ralph then moved with his wife to Florida in 2001, to be near his family, and the FBI immediately began harassing him. He sent me a statement to publish, which I did, and he said that it helped take the heat off of him, but maybe he was just being generous.
The 9/11 terror attacks were the next month, and Ralph dropped out of sight soon after that. We didn’t have any contact after early 2002, as I recall. He just wanted to quietly live out his last years, he was tired of the battle, and I left him alone. Ralph died of COVID in 2020, and I am in touch with his family. Like with most whistleblowers, Ralph’s own family was not very supportive and most considered his tales of harassment to be a product of his imagination. Oh, how I know that feeling. I lost many friendships and family relationships during my journey, and still do.
Unlike Ed Herman’s libelous Wikipedia biography, Ralph’s Wikipedia biography is a fair one, at least for now, and I had nothing to do with it. It used to link to my Ralph essay, but Philip Cross and friends have long since erased anything related to me at Wikipedia.
Ralph was a great man, an all-too-rare man of conscience who could not stay silent. He is in my pantheon and I miss him.