The group in the Tokyo area supervised and supported four other offices or bases in East Asia (Seoul, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Okinawa).

Yet his wife would repeat her complaints about CIA rules which prohibited any talk of company business, even within families; she insisted that the "marital bonds and trust" should be the stronger.

[11] At CIA headquarters near the Washington Monument, McGehee became chief of records for counterintelligence at China activities, basically supervising the work he had been doing in Japan.

Two requests routinely came in: for a "file trace" (a search for records about a person, e.g., a candidate for doing business with the Agency); and a "clearance" (a more thorough check, often for potential CIA employees).

In McGehee's unit, the Chinese characters (often ambiguous to non-Chinese) could be variously transliterated into different roman letters, making for file repetition and much confusion.

The remote hill tribes practiced a slash-and-burn agriculture, necessitating frequent relocations; their "major cash crop was opium from the poppy."

Once a week Colby, the Far East division chief (and later DCI), would review the reports (with Langley comments) and pass on "rating sheets" that had been written up.

In finding the best name for Hmong tribal groups that fought against communists guerillas, the middle path between "Hunter-Killer Teams" and "Home Defense Units" was agreed to be "Mobile Strike Forces".

[40][41][42] Following the departure of the disagreeable deputy COS,[43] the CIA station offered McGehee the job of "establishing an intelligence-collection program" for "the 50,000-man national police".

After questioning the criteria and support available (especially his status per the American Agency for International Development (AID) program), McGehee welcomed this "difficult and challenging" task.

Although little was clearly understood, the CIA thought several thousand Communists in guerrilla bands hid out in the highlands, chiefly in the Thai northeast, and raided lowland villages for "rice, money and recruits".

The literate villager could provide information anonymously, about local insurgent activities, and about the identities and whereabouts of communist 'jungle soldiers' and supporters ... yet remain safe from reprisals.

He and others, however, also used aggressive techniques involving simulated threats of death and other cruel ruses to obtain information from suspected guerrillas, or "to sow dissension" in enemy ranks.

Yet he was then persuaded that an efficient intelligence process, even if somewhat flawed, which also threw light on murky shadows where the guerrillas hid, would save lives in the long run of a counterinsurgency war.

McGehee proudly told him of his teams' work on the district Survey and its findings, showing him the file cabinets with the carded and collated intelligence information.

In retaliation the Thai government ordered unfocused, brutal attacks that often fell on innocent farmers, creating an "atmosphere of hate" that the Communists were eager to exploit politically.

[62] He'd last visited Saigon in 1960, which then seemed "a peaceful city with tree-lined boulevards," with herbal aromas and flower markets, and "Vietnamese women wearing the flowing ao-dai".

[63][64] In his 1983 book, McGehee at this point describes the institutional history of the CIA and counterinsurgency in Vietnam, in caustic terms informed by his later turn to the left.

[74][75] Back in Saigon, he followed Special Police reports apparently about "a North Vietnamese spy net that had penetrated the highest levels of the Thieu government of South Vietnam."

Huynh Van Trong held the highest government office, but his communist superior Vu Ngoc Nha was a close friend of Thieu.

He recalled that when at Gia Dinh province early in his tour, he had considered suicide, in despair at the horrible events of the war: the deaths, the napalm, the children and the old people in refugee camps.

While back in Washington, he looked for another job; yet his lack of any work history (due to his inability to list his CIA employment) sank his efforts.

Although remaining committed "to stop the spread of the Communist Party of Thailand" he opposed what he considered the CIA's false testimony and counterproductive operations.

The stories that the CIA planted might be further spread by third parties, in a slightly altered form, or even picked up as news and then rewritten by a journalist.

I agreed to accept it for three reasons: to give my children an occasion to be proud of their father, not to embarrass Jake [his supervisor at CIA who recommended McGehee for the Medal], and to lend credibility to any criticisms of the Agency I might make in the future.

Accordingly, the CIA backs a United States which often supports a privileged local strata whose rule works to abuse and impoverish the majority of its subject people.

He also developed CIABASE, a website containing information on events, people, and programs concerning the CIA or American intelligence, including links to other texts available to the public.

[135] A downside of his book, Deadly Deceits, 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 1956 best seller, Deliver Us From Evil, were fabricated for the beginning of a psywar campaign (later revealed by the Church Committee in 1975).

[137] McGehee described the terror of Suharto's takeover in 1965–66 as "the model operation" for the US-backed coup that got rid of Salvador Allende in Chile seven years later: "The CIA forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders, just like what happened in Indonesia in 1965.