My name is Ralph McGehee and I am a 25-year decorated  
veteran of the CIA and am a critic of the Agency.  I served 
in Vietnam in 1968-1970 as chief adviser to the Vietnamese 
Special Police and after leaving CIA, I wrote the book 
DEADLY DECEITS: MY 25 YEARS IN THE CIA.  My purpose in writing is  
to comment on the review of Robert McNamara's book, IN RETROSPECT, 
that appears in The Nation's 12 June 1995 issue.

     I concur with the general thrust of the book review, 
"Bombing for the Hell of it,"  but disagree strongly with 
the repeated statements regarding the accuracy of CIA intelligence. 
I served in Vietnam in 1968 through mid 1970 and 
protested the CIA's intelligence about the war from then 
until the Vietnamese regained their country in April 1975.

     Specifically the authors of the review, Carol Brightman and 
Michael Uhl, state that the CIA accurately predicted the bombing 
of North Vietnam would not stem the flow of troops and supplies 
to the South.  I note that the Agency at that time was merely 
recording, that the bombing, which had gone on for some time, 
had proved ineffective.  Not a surprising or particularly 
prescient conclusion in view of North Vietnam's undeniable 
ability to support the war in the South. Earlier, the Agency 
made similar claims about the bombing being ineffective but 
then urged increased bombing. 

     The authors further argue that only the CIA had 
any sense  of the determination and capabilities of the 
opposing armies.  This I find an appalling statement - 
I have railed for over two and a half decades about 
the Agency's incompetence and blindness about the forces 
of the opposition. For my sins I was banished to "Siberia," 
the International Communist Branch of the Counterintelligence 
Staff. There, I composed a study on Asian Communist 
Revolutionary Structures based on the writings of Chinese, 
and Vietnamese leaders -- structures virtually unrecorded in 
CIA intelligence.

     I was not alone in protesting the grotesquely 
inaccurate intelligence. Sam Adams an intelligence analyst 
covering the Viet Cong vehemently protested the CIA's 
undercounting of their forces.  His superiors threatened 
to fire him on thirteen occasions.  He finally left the 
Agency in disgust and wrote an article in the 5/75 issue of 
Harpers magazine, "Vietnam Cover-up: Playing War with Numbers, 
A CIA Conspiracy Against its Own Intelligence." In one of 
history's most egregious intelligence failures he notes that 
four hours after the start of the Viet Cong's nation-wide 
1968 Tet offensive, the CIA's Watch Office reported 
"military activity had slackened...there is nothing of 
significance to report."

     David Corn's book, BLOND GHOST, notes, inter alia, 
that when Shackley was Chief of Station in Saigon from 1969-1972 
that one of his top officers complained  that the CIA Station
did not know what the "f..." was going on.

    John Stockwell, a CIA case officer said that in 1974-1975 
the CIA's Chief of Station was ordering officers not to report 
on the failure of Nixon's Vietnamization policy.  Frank Snepp, 
an intelligence analyst in Saigon, reported that the same 
Chief of  Station, Tom Polgar, delayed the evacuation because 
he believed the Communists would allow a decent interval for 
the U.S. to pull out of Vietnam. This led to our final ignominy  
-- the helicopter evacuation off the Embassy roof. 

    As a rebuttal I offer another review of McNamara's book -- 
IN RETROSPECT: THE TRAGEDY AND LESSONS OF VIETNAM. The book is 
a superficial and selective mea culpa. The former Secretary 
of Defense claims he had little understanding of the
Vietnamese and the war -- and from the perspective 
of 25 years -- explains all that he did (does)
not know. McNamara decries the Vietnamese lack 
of resolve to fight, he still does not realize that
they won, repelling the world's strongest military force. 
McNamara was the best and brightest of the "best and 
brightest," but his book does not cite a single communist 
source.  The shallowness of his analysis exposes the 
intellectual prostitution demanded of America's elite. 
Asian communist leaders set forth in their writings the 
plans and programs of their revolutions but I doubt if any
member of the best and brightest, or any officer of the 
CIA, ever read those writings.  Sam Adams, said the 
Agency in undercounting the VC refused to use until late, 
what should have been its primary source -- captured enemy 
documents. In my own experience I discovered that the CIA 
buried any information that did not support its pro-war policies. 
The CIA recruited and paid agents to tell it what it wanted 
to hear, ignoring the mass of overt information that so 
disproved its rationales for the war. This practice to a 
major degree epitomizes CIA policy-supporting intelligence 
from 1947 to the present.