Snepp, Frank. Decent Interval: An Insider's Account of Saigon's Indecent End. New York: Random House, 1977. New York: Vintage Books, 1978. [pb] London: Allen Lane, 1980. Decent Interval: An Insider's Account of Saigon's Indecent End Told by the CIA's Chief Strategy Analyst in Vietnam. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2002.
Clark comment: Frank Snepp is a former CIA intelligence analyst who served in Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war. Snepp's outrage and pain at the mishandling of the preevacuation and evacuation periods seem real. Nevertheless, his criticisms bear the mark of someone neither in a command position nor high enough up in the decisionmaking chain to know (nor in the final analysis to understand) the basis on which decisions were being made in Saigon and Washington.
Snepp's decision to publish his book without submitting the manuscript to the CIA for security review, as he was required by his employment agreement to do, brought about litigation that went all the way to the Supreme Court. The government's secrecy agreement was upheld and all profits from Decent Interval have gone to the government. As far as I can determine, the 1978 injunction that requires Snepp to submit all future writings for prepublication review remains in effect.
Decent Interval would be best read today with the following article, written by the CIA's Saigon Base Chief when Saigon fell in 1975, in hand: William R. Johnson, "Recalling Snepp's Indecent Breach of Trust," International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 9, no. 4 (Winter 1996/97): 473- 481. Johnson details what he calls "the inaccuracies and venal mendacities of Snepp's book."
Snepp has also published a book concerning his travails associated with publishing the first one: Frank Snepp, Irreparable Harm (New York: Random House, 1999).
With regard to Decent Interval, Pforzheimer notes that Snepp blames the CIA Chief of Station, the U.S. Ambassador, the Secretary of State, and the President for "the last disorderly days of the war and failure to evacuate many Vietnamese collaborators of the U.S."
According to Minnick, NameBase, Snepp's "descriptions of the CIA's performance in Vietnam, particularly during the fall of Saigon, are stunning. However, his negative portrayal of Saigon [Vietnam] station chief Thomas Polgar seems unfair given the complexity of the events."
Constantinides comments that the criticisms directed against Decent Interval "still leave much of Snepp's story ... intact." Nonetheless, it remains "one man's view."
Commenting on the 25th anniversary edition, Berger, I&NS 20.2 (Jun. 2005), says that Snepp's account "remains one of the more important first-hand accounts of the internal workings of the US intelligence, military and political operations in Saigon and the eventual retreat in 1975."
[CIA/Memoirs; Vietnam]
Snepp, Frank. Irreparable Harm: A Firsthand Account of How One Agent Took on the CIA in an Epic Battle Over Secrecy and Free Speech. New York: Random House, 1999.
Philosophically inclined to be sympathetic to Snepp, Whitten, Washington Post, 1 Aug. 1999, nevertheless comments that "for most ... book readers, the legal skirmishing, the testimony that could be summarized in a paragraph, the thick unleavened judicial opinions may induce sleep." The author "is not a sympathetic hero. At times his compulsiveness, his inconsistency, his untidy personal life, his melodramatic writing (though it sometimes rises to real drama), and his self-importance come close to making the reader sympathize with the windbags and sneaks who brought him down." On the other hand, Bamford, NYTBR, 18 Jul. 1999, calls the book "well-written" and "candid."
Hedley, IJI&C 13.1, notes that Snepp "wants us to feel sorry for him. Unfortunately, he feels too sorry for himself.... [W]hat he portrays as an 'epic battle over free speech' was in fact a cut-and-dried tort case over a simple violation of contract.... Irreparable Harm is a sad book to read, largely because its author is such a troubled soul after all these years."
For background on Snepp and the writing of Irreparable Harm, see Vernon Loeb, "The Spy Who Was Left Out In the Cold: When Saigon Fell, CIA Agent Frank Snepp's Battle Had Just Begun," Washington Post, 12 Oct. 1999, C1.
[CIA/Memoirs]
Sniffen, Michael J. "FBI Intelligence Efforts Have Risen Sharply." Washington Post, 28 Aug. 2000, A2. [http://www.washingtonpost.com]
According to a report from Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) on 27 August 2000, "[t]he number of FBI intelligence officers has grown almost fivefold during the Clinton administration.... Citing federal employment data, [TRAC] said the total of FBI intelligence officers increased from 224 in 1992 to 1,025 in 1999, but their exact duties are not known."
[FBI]
Snow, Donald M. Distant
Thunder: Third World Conflict and the New International Order. New York:
St. Martin's, 1993.
[GenPostwar/NatSec]
Snow, Donald M. National Security for a New Era. 2d ed. New York: Longman, 2006. [pb]
From publisher: This work offers "a comprehensive examination of American national security policy since the events of 9/11 galvanized change. It starts from the premise that there have been two fundamental 'fault lines' in national security policy during the last two decades: the end of the Cold War and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Each transformed security policy."
Clark comment: Snow is a prolific writer and updater of texts dealing with national and international security. I used his earlier work, National Security: Enduring Problems in a Changing Defense Environment, 2d ed. (New York: St. Martin's, 1991), as a text in the POLS 320 National Security Issues course I taught at Muskingum College.
[GenPostwar/NatSec/00s]
Snow, Donald M., and
D. Eugene Brown. Puzzle Palaces and Foggy Bottom: U.S. Foreign and Defense Policy-Making in the 1990s. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994.
[GenPostwar/Policy/90s]
Snow, John Howard. The Case of Tyler Kent. New York: Domestic & Foreign Affairs & Citizens Press, 1946.
Constantinides calls this book "a rambling, incoherent, and disconnected political tract that adds nothing relevant to our knowledge."
[SpyCases/U.S./Other]
Snyder, Alvin A. Warriors of Disinformation: American Propaganda, Soviet Lies, and the Winning of the Cold War -- An Insider's Account. New York: Arcade, 1995.
According to Surveillant 4.4/5, the author tells the story of Charles Z. Wick's USIA and that organization's role in American foreign policy in the last decade of the Cold War.
[CA/White; GenPostwar/CW/End]
Snyder, Lynda [Capt/USA], and David P. Warshaw [Capt/USA]. "Force Protection: Integrating Civil Affairs and Intelligence." Military Intelligence 21, no. 4 (Oct.-Dec. 1995): 26-28.
During Operation UPHOLD DEMOCRACY in Haiti.
[MI/Ops][c]
Return to S Table of Contents
Return to Alphabetical Table of
Contents