Deadly Deceits by Ralph W. McGehee Page A

in the summer of 1958, we were called into the office of our crusty boss. He gruffly announced that we were getting our chance—we had been chosen to go to the career training course for case officers.
    In a daze I went back to my desk. I reached down and opened the bottom drawer of my safe that for several years had held the accumulated backlog of dreaded clearance and trace requests. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The drawer was nearly empty. My days of dull paperwork were over. Finally I was to become a case officer—the cream of the Agency’s manpower. Finally I would be out on the front lines gathering intelligence and conducting covert operations against the communists.
    Following three months training back at the “farm,” Allen and I both got the same assignment: Taipei, Taiwan.

4. A COMPANY MAN IN CHINA
    NORMA, the children, and I landed at Taipei’s airport in early February 1959. We were greeted by a cold drenching rain and by Tom, a bubbly extrovert who had worked with Allen and me in China activities back at Headquarters. Tom drove us to the house that we had been assigned on the outskirts of Taipei and then announced that we were expected to attend a party my new boss was throwing that night for Chinese intelligence liaison. A car and driver and a baby-sitter would arrive at about seven to pick us up. Norma objected vehemently to leaving the children with a stranger, in a strange house, in a strange land. However, this appeared to be not so much an invitation as a command.
    After Tom left, we took a quick tour of the house and surrounding area. The neighborhood—rice paddies and pounded-out tin shacks—seemed to offer little potential for the children. There were obviously few Americans living in the area and the isolation from other children would not be good for them. The house was no better. Water was seeping in around the edges, most of the appliances were broken, and a high concrete fence that surrounded the small lot blocked the light from the windows. At this point, our eight-year-old, Jean, asked, “Daddy, is that cow ours?” We all looked out the window and there in the small front yard was a huge water buffalo. The children found this quite exciting, but Norma didn’t. I grabbed a broom and a bit hesitantly went out and shooed the beast away.
    That night a baby-sitter arrived with the chauffeur-driven car. Although extremely uneasy about the children, we dutifully went off to the liaison party. My new co-workers,both American and Chinese, seemed pleasant. My boss, whom I shall call Al Barton, a former Naval officer and a dyed-in-the-wool cold warrior, took it upon himself to tell Norma about the new assignment.
    â€œRalph will be required to work long, hard hours,” he said. “He’ll have to be gone weekends and on occasion he may be gone for periods of several days or weeks. His work is extremely important, but it must remain secret. You must not ask him where he goes or what he does. You must just understand and accept it. There’s some danger associated with his work, but we all recognized this when we joined the company.”
    Al’s timing was poor. Norma was unhappy enough about the move. For three years we had lived on Cherry Street in Vienna, Virginia, where we had many close friends, young couples like us with small children. We had partied together and visited back and forth. The children had played together, gone to school together, and become good friends. For the children and Norma it had been an idyllic time, and they were reluctant to leave. But we had talked over the decision and as happened so many times, Norma had put aside her doubts to accommodate my plans and visions of career advancement. Now she was being told that she’d come all this way to a leaky house in a rice paddy, and she wouldn’t even be allowed to know where her husband was. She said nothing to Al, but when we got home, she hit the