Among the last CIA agents airlifted from Saigon in the waning moments of the Vietnam War, Frank Snepp returned to headquarters determined to secure help for the Vietnamese left behind by an Agency eager to cut its losses. What he received instead was a cold shoulder from a CIA that in 1975 was already in turmoil over congressional investigations of its operations throughout the world.

In protest, Snepp resigned to write a damning account of the agency’s cynical neglect of its onetime allies and inept handling of the war. His expose, Decent Interval, was published in total secrecy, eerily evocative of a classic spy operation, and only after Snepp had spent eighteen months dodging CIA efforts to silence him. The book ignited a firestorm of controversy, was featured in a 60 Minutes exclusive, received front-page coverage in the New York Times, and launched a campaign of retaliation by the CIA, capped by a Supreme Court decision that steamrolled over Snepp’s right to free speech.

In the wake of Snepp's harrowing experiences, his legal case has been used by Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton to narrow the First Amendment freedoms of all federal employees, especially “whistleblowers.” Such encroachments make it clear that Snepp’s very personal story has a great deal of relevance for all of us and certainly for anyone who has grown increasingly distrustful of the federal government’s “national security argument.”

“The First Amendment to the Constitution protects our right to say what we think, however unwelcome the message may be. And the ‘central meaning of the First Amendment,’ as the Supreme Court has put it, is the right to criticize government and its officials. So we believe. But the story of Frank Snepp mocks our belief. . . . A shocking revelation of how the law can be twisted in a country that prides itself on ‘Equal Justice Under Law.’”—Anthony Lewis (from the Foreword)

Irreparable Harm

A Firsthand Account of How One Agent Took on the CIA in an Epic Battle Over Free SpeechBy Frank Snepp

University Press of Kansas

Copyright © 2001 Frank Snepp
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780700610914

Chapter One

Ghosts

So, HOW do you crawl out of a country standing up!"

    Offering this judgment with a finality that defied argument, BillJohnson shoved himself away from the ship's rail and turned his back onthe reporter with whom he'd been sharing confidences. His eyes glitteredlike splintered mica under the flop-brimmed fishing hat he'd worn throughoutthe evacuation. He'd just run out of rationalizations for the debaclewe'd been through. But maybe this last one said it all.

    Gazing beyond him at the mist-shrouded bleakness of the South ChinaSea, I marveled at his capacity to rationalize at all. I felt dazed,disembodied, incapable of much more than self-recrimination. But he, a twenty-year veteran of the espionage wars, seemed to have lost none of his typicalsangfroid. Perhaps it was experience that made the difference. Or perhaps simplyVietnam. Vietnam had always been an old man's war and a young man'stragedy. The old men had rationalized their way in and had almost as deftlyrationalized their way out, and the young men had been left to bury thebodies and ideals and bear the shame of America's first lost cause withoutthe soothing panaceas of high policy, so often classified "top-secret," beyondtheir ken.

    I moved away from Johnson and forced my unsteady sea legs toward theafterdeck of the USS Denver. Below, on the helipad itself, another groupof evacuees, all Vietnamese, were doing penance, Buddhists and Catholicsranged side by side, mourning loved ones dead and abandoned. A strongbreeze riffled the women's áo dàis and the red and yellow banner of thelost republic draped over a makeshift altar. I was glad not to be among them,not to have to look into their eyes. The memories were enough.

    Memories ?already wheeling through the imagination like unsettledghosts ... Mr. Han, the translator, screaming over his CIA radio forhelp ... Loc, the Nung guard, plucking at my sleeve, begging me not to forgethim ... Mai Ly, phoning just hours before the collapse, threatening tokill herself and her child if I didn't find them a way out ...

    I stared at the Denver's wake, trying vainly to put Mai Ly behind me.She'd phoned too late, I kept telling myself. What could she have expectedso late? But there was no consolation in that. The first time she'd called, I'dbeen chained to my typewriter, hammering out another piece of analysiswhich I was foolish enough to hope would nudge the ambassador towardthe choppers. So I'd told her, "Call back in an hour. I'll be glad to help."But in an hour, I'd been down in the ambassador's office, trying to sell himon the analysis, and she'd left a message, "I would have expected better ofyou," and then had bundled up the baby boy she'd let me believe was myown and had retreated to that dingy room off Tu Do, and there had madegood her promise.

    Mother and child: they might have been sleeping when a friend foundthem hours later except for the blood on the pallet and my misplaced prioritiesthat day. But no more than the ambassador or any of the others Iwas now so ready to condemn had I troubled to remember that far morethan American prestige was at stake those last moments before midnight.

    But I remembered now, too late, and the memories plucked at the mind'seye like conscience's own scavengers. Which is why I'd barely slept the pasttwo nights since my own chopper flight out, despite a bone-numbing wearinessand a melancholy that already weighed like a sentence of guilt.

    As the days passed and the evacuation fleet closed on Subic Bay in thePhilippines, the weather cleared, and the Americans on the upper deckstook to sprawling in the incandescent May sun like Caribbean vacationers.Below, in the ship's bowels where the Vietnamese were now quarantined, anold man died of heat prostration, a baby was born, and the stench gave appallingmeasure to the despair and humiliation arrayed on every inch ofmetal planking.

    Sometime midjourney, from Admiral Steele's flagship, came word thatmy old boss, Tom Polgar, would shortly give a press conference to dampdown unhelpful speculation about the way the pullout had been handled.As the reporters among us choppered over for the show, the teletypes in theDenver's signals room beat out preemptive communiqués from Washington,absolving Secretary of State Kissinger of any wrongdoing, quotinghim as saying that the North Vietnamese had been committed to a negotiatedpolitical settlement up until the last two days of the war and hadshifted plans so abruptly as to make an orderly evacuation impossible.

    I read these dispatches with a rage that was to become chronic.Kissinger knew as well as the rest of us that our intelligence told a differentstory, and that it was his own blind stubbornness, not any change inHanoi's strategy, that accounted for the delay in the evacuation and thusthe chaos in the end.

    When Polgar opened his own dog and pony show, I expected him to setthe record straight. It was his moral duty to do so, for without someacknowledgment of failure, there would never be any incentive in Washingtonto make amends, no pressure for anyone to mount rescue missions orattempt diplomatic initiatives to ease the plight of those we'd abandoned.

    But to my chagrin, this resilient little man whom I had served so longmerely replayed Kissinger's line, imputing unpredictability to Hanoi andimperfections to our intelligence to explain his own and others'miscalculations. And when an opportunity arose for some self-servingscapegoating, he couldn't resist singling out Ambassador Martin himself,claiming that the old man's inflexibility, his refusal to sacrifice the Thieuregime, had doomed the prospects for a last-minute political fix.

    During this peroration, the accused himself wandered in, munching anapple. He said nothing in his own defense, but later pulled several reportersaside and repaid Polgar's slights by suggesting that it was the CIA stationchief himself who had precipitated the breakdown of order and disciplinein the embassy by spiriting his own wife and household belongings out ofSaigon prematurely.

    Absurd though this allegation was, State Department officials on boardquickly took up the refrain, and before long brickbats were flying fast andfurious between them and Polgar's apologists. I listened and fumed but saidnothing, confident that back home in official Washington somebody wouldinsist on getting the facts and the lessons right.

    When the task force docked in Subic Bay on May 5, most of my CIAcolleagues were hustled off to the United States for badly needed R&R.But not I. Believing naively that more intelligence might make a difference,I volunteered to fly to Bangkok to interrogate some "sensitive sources" whohad just come out of Vietnam.

    En route, I stopped off in Hong Kong to replace the wardrobe I'd lostduring the evacuation, and there encountered the New Yorkercorrespondent Robert Shaplen, who had likewise been witness to the fall. He wasin the process of wrapping up a story on it all and asked if I would confirmsome details for him. I consented, since the hulking, bushy-browed Shaplenhad long been viewed as a "friendly" by the Agency and had often been thebeneficiary of official secrets-laden briefings by me.

    Out at his Repulse Bay apartment, he softened me up with two martinisand some flattery, claiming that my tips to him during the final offensivehad kept him from being wholly misled by Polgar and the ambassador. Hewas so grateful, he said, he wanted to credit me publicly, and despite mydemurrals, did so (though with a typographical error) in the May 19, 1975,issue of The New Yorker. "Where Martin was more misguided," he wrote,"was in persistently believing that a political settlement was possible,though he had in fact been told for weeks by his military analysts, particularlyby Mr. Frank Sneff, a civilian expert well qualified to judge, that thesituation was deteriorating very rapidly."

    Despite the misspelling, this delicately hedged homage to one who wassupposed to be invisible did not endear me to colleagues back home, andthough weeks would pass before I'd begin feeling their ire, the start of mylong, slow descent into official disrepute can surely be traced to Shaplen'sgenerosity.

    As I rose to say good-bye, Shaplen draped an arm around my shoulderand, surprising me again, urged me good-naturedly not to let the story ofSaigon's defeat become journalism's preserve alone. There was a book in itfor somebody, he said, and given my knowledge of Vietnam and Martin'sembassy, what better candidate to write it than I? He'd even supply a preface,he added jocularly.

    I looked at him in amazement. A book? Impossible, I told him. Toomany reputations at stake. Besides, the Agency always performs its ownpostmortems, or suffers them, after a foul-up. Witness the Taylor Reportafter the Bay of Pigs, and the autopsy on Tet '68. There'd be one on thisdebacle too, no question. A book would be superfluous.

    When I reached Bangkok a day later, I'd all but forgotten his suggestion.Would that I could have forgotten the assignment, too. Protestors were ragingthrough the streets in search of fresh pretexts for their resurgentanti-Americanism, and within days of my arrival an American merchant vessel,the Mayaguez, was commandeered off the coast of neighboring, newly"liberated" Cambodia by Khmer marauders and the White House had decidedto send in the Marines just to show we still had some of our oldspunk left. Suddenly, CIA and military colleagues from Vietnam werecrowding into Bangkok on their way to staging areas up-country, and forone eerily incongruous moment, American might with flags flying musteredoff to war again.

    By the time the smoke had cleared, however, this plucky show of forcehad degenerated into a cruel parody of yesterday's humiliations. Forty-oneservicemen had died to save thirty-one crewmen and one tin tub, and theWar Powers Act, designed to limit our involvement in such improvisatoryhostilities, had been made a mockery again, the president having deployedthe troops without fully alerting Congress as required by the law.

    To the north of us, meanwhile, another sequel to recent tragedy wasbeing played out around the now irrelevant Laotian capital of Vientiane.Pathet Lao forces had already invested the city, and the few remaining U.S.embassy staffers there were now hunkered down in barricaded compoundsawaiting their own inevitable evacuation. Outside the city, beyond anysuccor, the hapless Meo tribesmen who had once made up the CIA'sthirty-thousand-man secret army were already threading their waysouth toward Thai sanctuaries to escape Communist reprisals. Only a thirdwould make it.

    To some of my CIA brethren in Bangkok, the paucity of white facesamong the past weeks' casualties seemed to offer consolation. But I knew,as many of them still did not, that the Mayaguez losses weren't the onlyones to be accounted for. In addition to a CIA officer and several consularofficials who had been captured up-country in Vietnam weeks before, twoU.S. Marines had been killed in the final bombardment of Saigon, theirbodies shamefully abandoned at the airfield, and another CIA veteran, anAgency retiree who'd returned to Saigon belatedly to help evacuate Vietnamesefriends, had missed the last chopper out. Now, reports had it,Hanoi's secret police had him under hostile interrogation and were forcinghim to finger those he had meant to save.

    Given all this and the lingering trauma of my own departure fromSaigon, the last thing I needed was to be dragged back through the charnelhouse. But in the course of the Bangkok assignment, my interview schedulewas rapidly expanded to include the debriefing of more and more latearrivals from the war zone?journalists, stragglers, boat people?and witheach new source's revelations, I was forced to relive the horrors of theevacuation as few other CIA officers had.

    One of my interlocutors, an American journalist who'd just come out ofVietnam on a Red Cross flight, told me of a former Radio Saigon announcerwho had been tortured and mutilated, her tongue cut out by herNorth Vietnamese "liberators," and then allowed to drown in her ownblood. Another source recounted summary executions of defectors, CIAcollaborators, and cadre of the once feared Phoenix counterterror program.And still another recalled how Communist troops had sought out aCIA billet in Saigon and systematically slaughtered the Vietnamese maidsand houseboys who had gathered there in anticipation of last-minute deliverance.

    These and other outrages I duly reported in hopes that someone alongthe chain of command might be shamed into taking ameliorative action,diplomatic or otherwise. But by mid-June, my harping upon betrayed commitmentshad become an unwelcome dissonance. One morning, by urgenttelex from CIA headquarters, I was ordered home.

    In my last two and a half years in Indochina, I'd had only five days ofleave and few Sundays off, and I badly needed to decompress. But mymonthlong odyssey back through the Mideast and Europe didn't do it. Mytraveling companion, an itinerant CIA secretary, promptly grew weary ofmy angst, the casual romance she'd anticipated descending quickly into akind of joyless sexuality which I clung to with the desperation of a drowningman.

    Nor was there any comfort in the prospect of heading home. The onlyreal home I knew was the Agency, and the disillusionment I'd suffered thesepast few months was only a foretaste of worse to come. For this was theSeason of the Reckoning, the summer of 1975, and scandal and exposéwere now swirling about the Agency like predators on a blood scent. Thesavaging had begun the previous winter when the press, emboldened byWatergate, had homed in on rumors of CIA kill plots and illegal domesticspying, and since then White House and congressional investigators hadjoined in the carnage.

    During the long months of Saigon's demise I'd been too preoccupied tobe able to dwell on any of these indelicacies. But now, with unaccustomedleisure on my hands, I had time to contemplate as never before the overwroughtheadlines, the tales of murderous excess and lawlessness, and theintimations of perjury by one of my idols, former CIA director RichardHelms, who, it was reported, had deliberately lied to Congress about CIAcomplicity in the overthrow of Chile's Salvador Allende years before.

    Initially, I tried to convince myself it was all spiteful gossip, but themore I read en route the more insistent the truth became, for many of the mostserious charges had recently been confirmed by a vice presidential panel,the Rockefeller Commission, appointed (ironically) to dispel them: notonly had the Agency, together with the FBI, illicitly spied on thousands ofAmericans at home, many of them Vietnam War protestors; it had alsoripped open and read the mail of countless citizens and exposed still otherssurreptitiously to deadly drug experiments.

    Beyond all this, there was the ghastly prospect, now being avidly exploredby congressional muckrakers, that the CIA had systematically triedto rub out foreign leaders like Fidel Castro. Three years before, then CIAdirector Helms had assured all of us by official circular that the Agencynever assassinates anybody. Admittedly, I'd seen that rule bent in Vietnam.But Vietnam had been a special case, a hot war. All rules were bent there.But now it appeared they'd been bent elsewhere too, with no war to provideexcuses. And if that were so, then Helms had lied to us, and the Agencymight well be the rogue elephant some congressmen thought it to be.

    That prospect was more terrifying than anything else. The rogue elephantcan't be forgiven its excesses, and God knows I wanted to be forgiven,to be able to wrap myself in presidential rationales. But if the leashhad snapped and the beast was on the rampage, then there were no rationales,no forgiveness. And perhaps no end to it either. The CIA's current director,William Colby, had recently admitted publicly that neither Nixonnor Ford had ever been told of the "family jewels," a ticklist of theAgency's most egregious transgressions compiled by the director's ownstaff two years before. Two presidents?not told! If not, then what elsehad gone unreported? Maybe much more, and that could mean that the beasthad not merely kicked the traces, but blinded the master as well.

    No, I couldn't believe it. I wouldn't. Congress was the culprit, not theCIA. Weren't these investigations ostensibly being conducted "behindclosed doors"? And yet, just look at the leaks. Could anyone be trusted whopermitted such leaks? I took refuge in the most convenient and craven answer.

    There was no refuge, though, from my other torments, the demons outof memory that hounded me home. For time and distance only invigoratedthem, their images, even their pained cries of reproach soon invading myconsciousness and conscience and finally my dreams, thus banishing sleep,so that by the time I touched down stateside, I was not only bitter and confusedbut exhausted, nearing nervous collapse. And still, hard as I tried, Icould not rid myself of Mai Ly or Han or Loc, the Nung guard....

    Or Le. No, least of all, her. She'd been "U.N. quality," that one, the bestinterpreter I'd ever taken with me into Saigon's dungeons, her femininity itselfan asset in the interrogations, for who could resist unburdening himselfto her? The irony was that she'd been more the revolutionary than most ofthe prisoners we'd grilled. She'd detested the Americans as interlopers andhad embraced us only as the lesser of two evils. I'd once tried to fix herloyalties by offering to help her set up a pig farm so she'd have some lifeoutside the interrogation center. She'd politely rebuffed me and gone her ownway. By the time the enemy was at the gates this past April, I'd lost trackof her, and only later, in Bangkok, had I discovered that those responsiblefor getting her out had botched it. So she was back there still, with theinmates she'd interrogated. Only they were the jailkeeps now and she the inmate,and God knows how bad off, for they wouldn't forget the role she'dplayed.

    Forgive me.

    And Tan?what of Tan? There was no forgetting him either, eventhough I'd tried and was now exhausted trying, and wished to the pit of mysoul he'd never crossed over after the Viet Cong medics had let his wife diein childbirth. They'd been short of medicine as usual, and he'd watched herdie in agony; and then, broken and defeated, he had walked out of the jungleand into our arms and had let slip every secret he knew. I'd slapped adefector's label on him and one night had taken him out on the town to anAmerican hangout to try to build rapport. We'd sat at a corner table watchingfat, sweating round-eyes wrestle Vietnamese girls around the dancefloor, and after a while he'd turned to me, his face ashen, and murmured,"We're going to lose. I've made the wrong choice." A chill had knifedthrough me, and I'd wanted to send him off into the night, back to his own.But it was too late. He was in. We had him, a certified defector. He couldnever go back.

    Unless we abandoned him?which we did, along with nearly every otherdefector we'd exploited and turned into a pariah.

    Tan must be dead now. An easy death, I hope.

    Forgive me.

Continues...

Excerpted from Irreparable Harmby Frank Snepp Copyright © 2001 by Frank Snepp. Excerpted by permission.
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