Interrogations
JUNE 12, 1970
WESTOVER AIR FORCE BASE
CHICOPEE, MASSACHUSETTS
In accordance with the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, the Uniform Code of Military Justice forbids any branch of the military from forcing soldiers to incriminate themselves for any violation of military law. Military regulations specify that statements acquired by the “use of coercion (physical or psychological pressure)” or “unlawful inducement (empty promises)” are inadmissible as evidence into any military proceeding. Because of these regulations, the investigative agencies of each branch of the armed forces all have written policies banning coercion during interviews.
Each branch of the service adamantly denies that it ever engages in such tactics. However, every branch of the service routinely resorts to every form of psychological pressure in order to coerce statements from suspected homosexuals. The practices are so routine as to appear to be official policy, even though such a policy is officially forbidden. As a practical matter, one can understand why coercion is necessary. Consider the dilemma for investigators. They can only rarely find evidence of homosexuality in a soldier’s service record. Rarely do aggrieved “victims” volunteer as witnesses. Nor are investigators likely to find direct proof that homosexual deeds actually took place. Given this, illegal coercive interrogations are not an unfortunate side effect of antigay regulations; they are virtually the only way to execute the work that the regulations demand.
As soon as the antihomosexual regulations went into effect in the early 1940s, military investigators learned that the only sure way to prove their cases against gays was to force suspects into supplying the self-incriminating evidence. The nature of the interrogations changed little from the 1940s to the 1970s; they would change little from the 1970s to the 1990s. The procedures, after all, worked. They tended to be indelicate, though, and, to the uninitiated, terrifying.
This was what Sergeant Rich McGuire was going to find out on the morning after the shakedown inspection, when his sergeant told him he was wanted at headquarters. There, two agents from the Office of Special Investigations escorted Rich to the backseat of a nondescript blue Plymouth Valiant with black-walled tires. As the car sped away, Rich noticed there were no handles on the insides of the back doors.
The military manuals on criminal investigations agree that choosing the proper interview site is crucial. The manual for the Army Criminal Investigation Division, for example, suggests that friendly witnesses should be interviewed at their homes or wherever they are most comfortable. “With suspects and hostile witnesses,” the manual continues, “it is best to conduct the questioning in a proper interrogation room … or in any other available location where the investigator enjoys the psychological advantage.”
The car did not drive to the lawyers’ offices, where McGuire thought such an interview would take place. Instead, it drove to the Stonybrook Nuclear Arsenal in a remote corner of the base and pulled in front of a quaint New England-style wooden frame house with shutters. The agents ushered McGuire into the house, down a flight of stairs into the basement, and then down another flight of steel stairs into a huge subterranean cinder-block room. The expansive subbasement seemed the size of a warehouse, certainly much larger than the house above, and smelled damp and musty. Rich was not a large man, and he felt even smaller here.
In the center of the huge chamber was a small, thickly padded cell. McGuire was guided inside. The cell contained only one table, two chairs, and a very bright light.
It was a room where OSI agents definitely enjoyed psychological advantage. More than twenty years later when Rich tried to obtain the government records of his interrogations under the Freedom of Information Act, the OSI insisted it did not have a single piece of paper with his name on it. In fact, they maintained, there was no record of anybody named Richard Joseph McGuire in any file of any security agency of the United States. It was an odd assertion, considering McGuire’s copious documentation of security questionnaires he had filled out for his top-secret clearance in the Air Force. What follows, therefore, is McGuire’s account of his interrogation, buttressed by Air Force documentation that the service moved to investigate him for homosexuality in those very days. More significantly, however, McGuire’s account is corroborated by several hundred other gay soldiers who have cited interrogations so utterly identical that they appear to be completely scripted, chapter and verse.
OSI agents read McGuire his rights. He did not have to answer questions and he could demand a lawyer right then. The two investigators looked angry. Rich did not want to get them any more pissed off than they already were. Besides, he had not done anything wrong. Should he get a lawyer? They suggested he should do an “interview” now; Rich thought they knew what was best.
Criminal-investigation manuals propose three principal means of interrogation. For friendly witnesses, the indirect method is suggested, more of a rambling conversation than a question-and-answer session, designed to make the witness comfortable, and induce him to supply maximum information. For the suspects most likely to be guilty, there is the direct approach. According to the Army manual: “In using this approach, the investigator assumes an air of confidence with regard to, and stresses the evidence or testimony indicative of the guilt of the suspect. In the direct approach, the investigator behaves in an accusatory manner displaying complete belief in the suspect’s guilt and strives to learn why the suspect did what he did rather than if the suspect did that of which he was suspected.”
The third method is called “logic and reasoning” and is employed for the most nefarious criminal suspects. “The habitual criminal who feels no sense of wrongdoing in having committed a crime must normally be convinced by the investigator that his guilt can be easily established or is already established by testimony or available evidence. The investigator should point out to the suspect the futility of denying his guilt. The suspect should be confronted at every turn with testimony and evidence to refute his alibis, that his guilt is definitely a matter against which no lies will defend.”
Interrogation techniques in the Army, Air Force, Marines, and Navy all indicate that homosexuals are dealt with as the worst kind of criminal suspects, almost always deserving of direct interview techniques, and, when this fails, logic and reasoning. The tact of subjecting homosexuals to interrogation techniques reserved for “habitual criminals” is odd considering that the offense in question is not a violation of a criminal statute but an administrative regulation against homosexuals. Only in instances of copulation proved beyond a shadow of a doubt can criminal charges of sodomy be pressed in a court-martial, which is why most gays are not court-martialed but, rather, administratively processed out of the military. The tougher interrogative style cannot be justified by military law, but it does reflect the military’s position, at least during those times when the military chooses to enforce its regulations. And the harshest techniques were to be employed that day, June 12, 1970, against a very frightened twenty-year-old named Rich McGuire.
By McGuire’s account, one OSI agent stood in front of him and one stood behind. One was kind and understanding; the other was harsh and confrontational. They alternated; the tough agent began. They knew McGuire was part of an entire network of homosexuals in the Air Force, he said. There was no denying it. They already had the evidence. McGuire could make it easy on himself if he helped them flesh out their case. They needed names, a list of other gays.
McGuire insisted he knew no other homosexuals. He had never had sex himself.
“If you help us, we’ll help you,” the other, more sympathetic OSI agent said.
There was nothing he could do to help, McGuire said. He did not know any other gays.
The OSI agents then proceeded to tell Rich whom he spent time with, who his friends were, what he did in his spare time. To the young sergeant, it seemed as if there had been an OSI agent whose only duties consisted of following him. “So you see,” the agent concluded, “we already know practically everything about you, and we will find out the rest. You could save us a lot of trouble by telling us the rest now.”
When this tact did not work, the tough agent pulled out the briefcase McGuire had shoved through the window the previous night. Gingerly, he held out each magazine and started thumbing the pages, pointing at pictures of men.
“Do you like that? Does that turn you on? Is that cute?”
It was the first time in McGuire’s life that he had ever discussed his sexuality. His code was broken. He broke down and told them what he believed they knew already, about the night at the motel in Texas with the other airman. The agents seemed very pleased. “Did the airman ejaculate?” the nicer agent asked solicitously.
“No,” McGuire replied. Neither of them had. He had never ejaculated with anybody else.
Neither agent believed that, and they demanded Rich repeat the story. Then they demanded he repeat it again, and again, and again; and they tore into every detail of it, trying to get Rich to change any part of the story. But he could not, because he told them the truth.
Up to this point, the questioning had been entirely within the law. The agents did not really have proof of a homosexual ring in the Air Force, nor did they have any evidence on McGuire other than a few magazines, which would not have been enough to support even an Article 15 nonjudicial punishment. Rich didn’t know this. He believed that agents of the United States government would never lie to him. But there is no rule that investigators have to tell the truth when conducting an interrogation. As the Army’s Manual of Law Enforcement Investigations states, “Trickery and deceit … will not render [a statement] inadmissible unless the tactics amount to coercion in and of themselves.”
What followed next, however, elevated trickery and deceit to the level of coercion. By McGuire’s account, the tough agent spoke gravely: “The punishment for what you’ve done is a twenty-thousand-dollar fine and life imprisonment at hard labor,” he said. If Rich could not pay the fine, the government could seize his parents’ home to secure the money. Did his parents know he was queer? Did they know they were about to lose their home because of their queer son?
It would be so much easier if Rich just told them what he knew now, the nicer agent said. Just get it all off his chest. All they wanted were the names of other homosexuals. Rich insisted he had told them everything.
Where would his parents live, they asked, once they lost their home?
And one more thing. Rich was to tell no one of this investigation, or even that he was being questioned. If he told, he could go to prison for obstruction of justice. This was a national security investigation.
McGuire was shattered by the time the OSI agents had finished and led him back up the two flights of stairs. This time, a slightly overweight brown-haired woman sat waiting at a typewriter. Rich cringed when she took the OSI agents’ handwritten notes about the details of his sex life and began typing them up.
“Don’t worry,” the nicer agent said to him kindly. “She types a hundred and twenty words a minute. She’s not even reading it.”
Minutes later, Rich signed the statement, which included the routine assertion that the OSI had done nothing to coerce him into making his confession. It had been morning when the OSI agents first took him into the little house at the weapons arsenal; it was dark when he left.
If Rich had known names of other homosexuals, he surely would have given them up to the OSI by the end of the interrogation. Most did. By a conservative estimate, that is how at least 80 percent of the gays who were ejected from the military services were discovered from the 1970s through the early 1990s. Even as OSI agents at Westover interviewed Rich McGuire, other OSI personnel at Offutt Air Force Base were going great guns on a gay investigation instigated by an intercepted letter to a twenty-five-year-old staff sergeant. As Staff Sergeant Richard Burchill later told The Advocate, the OSI had threatened him with criminal prosecution and imprisonment if he did not give the names of all the homosexuals he knew. If he did cooperate, the OSI would drop prosecution and allow him to stay in the Air Force. Burchill, who had entered the Air Force at the age of eighteen, worked as a security policeman with the Strategic Air Command. The son of a thirty-one-year Air Force veteran, Burchill had planned to make the Air Force his career and he was desperate to stay in the service. Believing both the threats and the promises, he gave the OSI a sixty-two-page statement, including numerous names of gays in all branches of the military.
OSI agents fanned out from there and continued investigating those whom Burchill had named. By April 1970, they had the names of 270 suspected homosexuals, according to a story in Air Force Times, although many were only nicknames or first names. Ultimately, the list included fifty-five military personnel and seventy-six civilians. At Offutt alone, nineteen airmen were discharged, most with undesirable discharges. One major was allowed to resign. By May, Burchill told The Advocate, the Air Force had gathered nearly seven hundred names to investigate, presumably by taking other young airmen into small rooms and threatening them with prison. For all his assistance, Burchill was rewarded with a discharge—and an uncertain future.
His stomach knotted and cramped after his interrogation, Rich McGuire returned to his room and curled into a fetal position on his bed. He left the bed only to throw up. He was so afraid of what people would say if they saw him in the mess hall that he did not eat for the next week.
Rich’s security clearance was immediately revoked, so he lost his job. He was assigned to be a bay orderly, which essentially meant cleaning barracks bathrooms, scrubbing behind the post’s Pepsi machines, and mowing lawns.
Off the job, he was, in effect, under house arrest and was not permitted to leave an area within a certain small radius of Westover. Whenever he left his barracks, he noticed that the two OSI agents who had questioned him followed him. When he finally decided to duck back to his parents’ home in Delaware for a weekend, a nondescript blue Plymouth Valiant with black-walled tires followed him there.
At unpredictable times, they hauled him back to the same interrogation chamber at the nuclear-weapons arsenal and questioned him again.
They knew he was queer and that he had fucked with half the guys on the base, the harsh one said. Did he want to go to prison? Did he want his parents to lose their home? It would be so much easier if he just told them what they knew already, the nice one said. Hard labor could take a lot out of a man—especially if he had to do it for the rest of his life.
JUNE 30, 1970
NEAK LUONG, CAMBODIA
When President Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia on April 30, he had promised that the troops would be out within two months, which was why, on June 30, Lieutenant (junior grade) Armistead Maupin and his crew were chugging down the Mekong River toward the Vietnamese border, the last boat in the “Brown Water Armada” the Navy had deployed for the invasion. Though the crew had spent most of their time in Cambodia in cutoffs, they wore their camouflaged fatigues accessorized with hand grenades and jungle knives for the benefit of the cameras recording the first televised retreat in the history of modern warfare. Nobody complained about shoving off from the riverbank twice so the cameraman could get the right angles from another boat. As the flotilla chugged along, however, somebody fired at them. To make matters worse, the Navy public-affairs man was wounded when a sniper’s bullet ricocheted off his beer can.
Maupin’s boat went to General Quarters, which was when he noticed his was the last boat in the flotilla. He knew he’d be off duty about a half hour before the boat reached the border between the two countries. If he happened to be nonchalantly showering on the boat’s fantail as it passed out of Cambodia, he would be the last person on the last boat leaving the country.
When the historic moment approached and Maupin was stripped down to take his shower, he noticed the ranking officer, a lieutenant commander, walking aft and then loitering in the stern, behind Maupin. Seeing his place in history slipping away, Maupin set aside his soap and walked to the anchor winch at the very rear of the boat. He saluted the commander as he walked past, then climbed out on the winch. The commander, seeing his own historic distinction usurped by a mere lieutenant, grabbed a line and began to lower himself off the stern so he would trail behind the boat, making him the last American sailor in Cambodia. Maupin crawled farther out on the winch, his hands slipping on the oily metal. If he fell in and drowned, how would the Red Cross explain this in the obligatory letter to his family? he wondered. Nevertheless, he inched out farther and just before the Vietnamese flagpole that marked the border slid abeam he arched his back and shoved his left leg out behind him, his big toe just surpassing the commander.
That was how a young Navy lieutenant, who in a few years would become the most celebrated gay fiction writer in America, became the last American sailor to leave Cambodia, naked and trailing soapsuds.
JUNE 1970
WESTOVER AIR FORCE BASE
CHICOPEE, MASSACHUSETTS
“Why the hell did you sign this?” the Air Force lawyer asked Rich McGuire.
McGuire explained that the OSI had said it would be easier for him if he did.
“And you believed them?” the lawyer asked incredulously. “Why didn’t you ask for an attorney?”
McGuire said he did not believe he had done anything wrong, so he did not think he needed a lawyer. The attorney sighed and laid out the bad news. By signing the statement, McGuire had admitted to homosexual tendencies, which was all the Air Force needed to kick him out. All the lawyer could do was try to get a decent grade of discharge.
McGuire looked pale and wan. He had never been robust. In the weeks since the interrogations started, he had shrunk from 145 to 120 pounds. Both his sergeant and a colonel had taken him aside and given him their home numbers to call if he had any … personal emergencies. “If you get to feeling really bad,” the colonel said, “don’t do anything dumb.”
Nobody ever said, “Don’t commit suicide.” But it was what they were thinking, Rich knew. It was what Rich was thinking, too.