Deadly Deceits_ My 25 Years in the CIA - Ralph W. McGehee, Mark Crispin Miller, David MacMichael (2015).epub

Publication Date: March 3, 2015
A veteran of two and a half decades with the Central Intelligence Agency unmasks the culture of lethal lies at its foundation in this devastating exposé, now with a new foreword by David MacMichael

Ralph W. McGehee was a patriot, dedicated to the American way of life and the international fight against Communism. Following his graduation with honors from Notre Dame, McGehee was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1952 and quickly became an able and enthusiastic cold warrior. Stationed in Southeast Asia in the mid-1960s, he worked to stem the Communist tide that was sweeping through the region, first in Thailand and later in Vietnam.

But despite his notable successes in reversing enemy influence among the local peasants and villagers, McGehee found himself increasingly alienated from a company culture built on deceit and wholesale manipulation of the truth. While his country was being pulled deeper and deeper into the Vietnam quagmire, McGehee awoke to a chilling reality: The CIA was not a gatherer of actual intelligence to be employed in a legitimate war against dangerous enemies, but a tool of the president’s foreign-policy staff designed solely to stifle the truth and fabricate “facts” that supported the agency’s often immoral agenda.

With courage and candor, Ralph McGehee illuminates the CIA’s dark catalog of misdeeds in his stunning, no-holds-barred memoir of a life in the service of deception. Startling, eye-opening, and infuriating, Deadly Deceits is an honest and unflinching insider’s look at a toxic government agency that the author cogently argues has no useful purpose and no moral right to exist.

Revealing September 3, 2003
By Luc REYNAERT

This is another book by an ex-CIA agent which is full of disgust with the incompetence, bureaucracy, infighting for career reasons and opportunism of the Agency.
It was partly censured by the CIA, but it is nevertheless very revealing.
It shows how CIA agents concealed the truth by dispatching false reports and how they created their own reality, for the sole reason of saving their jobs. The end (jobs) justified all means.
The author didn't have the same high level duties as e.g. Joseph B. Smith (Portrait of a Cold Warrior). He was more an executive field worker and that mostly in Vietnam and Thailand.
His report contains however very interesting information about, among other things, the hiring procedures of the Agency, the terrible fate of the Hmong tribe in Laos or the training of Tibetan guerrillas for an invasion of Mao's China.
His conclusion is deadly: If the Agency reported the truth about the Third World, it would say that the US installs foreign leaders, arms their armies and empowers their police, all to help those leaders repress, kill, torture and impoverish an angry, defiant people in order to maintain their position of privilege.'
McGehee gives us an incisive view of the dark and murky ploys of a governmental institution.
Not to be missed.