Colonel Flagg

Col. Flagg is a U.S. Military Intelligence agent with the CIA. His behavior is rather paranoid and irrational, and he appears to the staff of the 4077th to be mentally unstable; the fact that he deliberately seriously injures himself to advance an investigation seemed proof of that. At one point he tried to get into Counter Intelligence Corps headquarters by crashing his jeep into a brick wall and setting himself on fire. Another time, to get into the 4077th, he ordered a helicopter pilot to crash and then twice broke his own arm.[1] He claimed that he was either with the CIA, the CIC, or the CID, depending on who he was dealing with, occasionally all at once. Example: "I'm with the CIA, but I tell people I'm with the CIC, so they think I'm with the CID." Majors Frank Burns and Margaret Houlihan, strong anti-Communists and super-patriots, followed his assignments with great interest, but were unable to "buddy up" to him as they'd hoped.

His paranoia was so fanatical that Flagg even accused Major Burns of being a communist agent on the grounds that Burns had seen a performance of the Bolshoi Ballet in Tokyo and was reading Reader's Digest, which Flagg noted would be "Red's Digest" if the 3rd, 5th, and 6th letters were eliminated.

Flagg used multiple aliases, including "Captain Goldberg" (a Jewish chaplain with horn-rimmed glasses) and others. (One of his code names was "Queen Victoria".) At the conclusion of his second appearance, a rival intelligence officer asked, "Buy you a cup of coffee, Sam?", revealing his first name. However, his disguises were so obvious that people generally saw through them immediately. Once, he showed up as an Italian officer ("The Abduction of Margaret Houlihan") and Radar O'Reilly casually greeted him by name. When pressed, Radar's hasty explanation was that since Flagg looked nothing like himself, it had to be him, as only Flagg had that skill.

Flagg used his position to intimidate the first 4077th commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake. When Colonel Potter took Blake's place, Potter made a point of standing up to Flagg, telling him coldly, "I'm not fond of personal abuse." Army psychiatrist Major Sidney Freedman also refused to cave in to Flagg's intimidation, "I'd like to help you, but with your schizophrenia, I'd have to charge you double rates." Freedman, Hawkeye Pierce, Trapper John McIntyre, and later B.J. Hunnicutt were high on Flagg's list of suspects (as "unpatriotic" Communist sympathizers or subversives), but always outwitted him, if Flagg wasn't busy outwitting (or harming) himself.

Flagg's "trademark" was to assure that no one saw him leave when he finished a job. ("I have no home, I am the wind.") Keeping up that image backfired at least once when he ordered all of the others in the room to close their eyes as he exited via a leap through the window in Col. Potter's office. (When the others opened their eyes after hearing a yelp of pain, Hawkeye investigated and dryly noted, "It looks like the wind just broke his leg.")

Flagg made a serious mistake when he tried to manipulate Major Winchester into spying on Hawkeye when he put the welfare of a communist soldier over the other patients, which led to Flagg thinking Hawkeye was a Communist Sympathizer. Winchester, who was of better character than Flagg suspected, instead duped him into thinking a camp bridge game (which included the mayor of Uijongbu and his brother, the city's chief of police, as guest players), was a meeting of conspirators, which Flagg then attempted to raid. Even though they found out that Major Winchester set the whole thing up, the two angry Korean officials vowed to use their U.S. military contacts to ensure that Flagg would be punished, and since Flagg was never seen again in the series, they apparently succeeded.

Flagg did appear several years after the war in a visit to General Pershing Veteran's Hospital (on the short-lived spinoff AfterMASH), indicating that he at least remained in the military.