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.
Read more about this topic: Ralph Mc Gehee
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