ABOVE: Myself (left) and McGehee (right)
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14 March 2024 (Thursday)
Cold War CIA Antics in Taiwan
McGehee's Forgotten CIA Ops Revisited
By Wendell Minnick (Whiskey Mike) 顏文德
TAIPEI - I met the late Ralph McGehee in the early 1990s while I was writing a history of CIA covert operations against China.
From 1953 to 1977, he had served as a CIA Case Officer in the Far East Division for 25 years, with assignments in Japan, Laos, Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam.
He passed in 2020 due to Covid-19.
It was his Taiwan chapter in his 1983 book Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA that made me reach out to him during my whirlwind visit to Washington for two-weeks of interviews of retired CIA officers and research at the U.S. National Archives.
I had the membership list of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) and prepared for the trip by sending out old fashioned letters asking for interviews in the DC area the month before. AFIO is kind of like the VFW for the military, except anyone who served in the intelligence community (IC) can join, including retired folks from the FBI counter-intelligence section and Defense Intelligence Agency.
His book is available HERE for free. I read it before meeting him at his Herndon home where we talked for several hours about his experiences not mentioned in the book and of his database CIABase.
His CIABase was an MS-DOS coded database that would not survive the transitions that came later with computer software changes and is now lost to history. But for myself, at the time, it was a goldmine of data. The program had been written by the same man who created the anti-CIA database dubbed Namebase, Daniel Brandt, that allowed researchers to cross identify U.S. intelligence operators and operations via government documents and open-source materials.
On his desk was one of the CIA’s famous medals given at retirement. There are a variety of different types, but I was shocked by the size and weight of the thing. I had imagined it roughly the size of a U.S. fifty cent piece, but instead it was around three inches across and heavy.
It was the Career Intelligence Medal, roughly sixth from the top and a common medal for retirees.
While admiring it, I dropped the damned thing.
It hit the floor and rolled across his office as I chased it looking like a moron.
McGehee laughed it off and told me the medals were so hard that they could survive a nuclear blast.
After 25 years in the CIA, with his extensive operational experience in the field, the award citation read “…for excellent work in Malaysia”…a country he had never even visited.
Though much of his book is focused over U.S. policy in Vietnam, resulting in an emotional breakdown that came close to a suicide, the chapter on Taiwan is worthy.
Of particular interest, at least to myself, was the CIA’s Chief of Station in Taipei, the legendary Ray Cline, who grew up near my hometown and attended my synagogue (though decades before I arrived).
He joined the forerunner of the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and served in China with the legendary Major General John Singlaub.
Singlaub, whom I also interviewed, and my personal hero of Cold War covert operations, was involved in almost every conceivable special operation the CIA could conjure up. I urge all to read his 1992 book, Hazardous Duty, which details operations never known before via open-sources.
Cline’s antics, chronicled in McGehee’s book, do not reflect Cline’s autobiographic renderings written after his retirement, but I suppose there are many perspectives on a man who became one of the most powerful members of the CIA during the Cold War.
The other issues via his Taiwan chapter was local intelligence efforts to mislead the CIA on intelligence on China, going so far as creating a fake “James Bond” agent that claimed to have infiltrated mainland China. The man turned out to have been a plant by the Taiwan intelligence apparatus under the KMT.
His recollections of flying to Kinmen Island at nearly sea level to avoid Chinese radars are amusing, but his interviews of captured Chinese fishermen provided little intelligence except daily life in the mainland.
I wanted to revisit McGehee's life in Taiwan after stumbling recently on an old photograph of us together. We had kept in touch after the interview, but after arriving in Taiwan permanently in 1997 our e-mails slowly dwindled over the coming years.
My planned book for a history of CIA operations in China collapsed after the book publisher filed bankruptcy. I kept the pitiful $700 advance, despite their demands I return it.
I had already spent my own money flying to Hong Kong and Taiwan in 1992 and 1993, respectively, for research, not to mention my expensive trip to Washington.
So the book died on the vine, but the research and knowledge created a foundation for my career as a journalist in Asia. I later joined Jane’s Defence Weekly as the Taiwan correspondent (2000-2006) and Defense News as the Asia Bureau Chief (2006-2016) covering the Middle East, India, and all of Asia.