Ralph McGehee

Ralph Walter McGehee (born 1928 ) is an American former officer of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He worked for the CIA from 1952 to 1977, yet went on to be highly critical of the agency.

Life and career
McGehee was born in Moline, Illinois. He was an All-American football player at University of Notre Dame when they won three national championships in 1946-1949. McGehee received a B.S. in Business Administration (cum laude). Upon graduation, he spent a year as an offensive line coach at University of Dayton.

After moving to Chicago and taking a job as a management trainee at Montgomery Ward, he was recruited by the CIA. Upon completion of training, he was stationed in numerous field offices as well as at CIA headquarters.

Since leaving the CIA, he has been highly critical of the organization. His 1983 book, Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA outlines his experiences there. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair hailed it as "one of the outstanding books written by former CIA agents".



A downside of this book for many was McGehee's personal knowledge of the extent to which the famed physician, Thomas Anthony Dooley III, was involved in CIA warfare across Indochina. This included awareness that the atrocities alleged in the best seller, "Deliver Us From Evil", 1956, were fabricated for the beginning of a psywar campaign (later revealed by the Church Committee in 1975).

McGehee has written articles on CIA activities for the Washington Post, The Nation, The Progressive, Harper's Magazine and Gannet News Service among others. He has also developed CIABASE, a computer database of CIA figures and programs compiled from available public information. He has discussed his time spent in Vietnam and claimed that the CIA supported anti-Communist counterinsurgency in the Philippines,

A 1981 allegation by McGehee about CIA involvement in the Indonesian killings of 1965–1966 was censored by the CIA, prompting the American Civil Liberties Union to sue on his behalf. The CIA prevailed. McGehee also alleged that "The CIA forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders", in order to provoke them into launching the 1973 Chilean coup d'état.



Quotes
The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency. It is the covert action arm of the President's foreign policy advisers. In that capacity it overthrows or supports foreign governments while reporting "intelligence" justifying those activities. It shapes its intelligence, even in such critical areas as Soviet nuclear weapon capability, to support presidential policy. Disinformation is a large part of its covert action responsibility, and the American people are the primary target audience of its lies.

FOIA requested
The 1983 criticism of the Central Intelligence Agency for which McGehee had worked, Deadly Deceits: My 25 years in the CIA, an exposé of the organization, was published again in 1999 with updates.

In 1999 he also filed a Freedom of Information request, claiming that he had been harassed since 1993, suspected to be because of his criticisms. Asking for a halt of the actions, he sent a letter to the president of the United States, the director of the CIA, and his town council, documenting many of the incidents. He asserted his intention to pursue the issue through the FOIA process because of receiving no response to earlier letters.