Customer Reviews

Irreparable Harm: A Firsthand Account of How One Agent Took On the CIA in an Epic Battle over Secr ecy and Free Speech

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Frank Snepp portrays an ugly picture of the warped sense of loyalty which allows ordinarily honorable individuals to perform dishonorable deeds in the name of national security. Every reader will be left with a sense of dismay at the things the CIA has done to protect itself from detractors.

Regardless, I think it is important that readers not take everything Mr. Snepp says at face value, especially his interpretation of events. Often, he is either coloring events to appear more noble (as we are all wont to do) or is incredibly naive about the way the world works. How could one of the top CIA press briefers in Vietnam not know about the politics of national security? Whether over editorializing or naive, clearly there is more to the story than the reader sees.

This book tells the story of how the CIA once again used trumped-up secrecy issues and character smearing to conceal its bungling. For local cops the public demands citizen review boards, but amazingly we let the CIA effectively censor criticism of itself. This book is at its best detailing how CIA conflates national security with institutional prestige and that, in turn, with petty personal interests. (If the director looks foolish, the agency looks foolish; if the agency looks foolish, national security is hurt. Therefore, criticizing the good old boys of the CIA is a national security offense. Ahhh...)

Still, it is hard to empathize with Snepp for many reasons. His self-portrait is unflattering, but convincing... an unfortunate combination. At base, Snepp did sign an agreement allowing CIA to review everything he wrote and then broke that agreement. Sure, there may be technical legal reasons to let him off, and the CIA review policy reeks with abuse potential. But to a non-lawyer, the fact that he signed the agreement is more compelling than the legal minutiae. And I could sympathize more with his ensuing financial plight if he had, say, stooped to getting a day job. Finally, I could maybe relate to the destruction of his personal life, if it weren't centered on simultaneous mistresses.

One of the aspects of organizational whistle-blowing that makes it such a hazardous choice for the individual wanting to tell the explosive truth he has to share with us is the fact that too often he or she must pay a terrible personal price for the singular act of selflessness the whistleblowing represents. So here in the case of former CIA analyst Frank Snepp, who used his considerable writing skills to such advantage in the best-selling book "Decent Interval", which details the manifest ways in which the American government deliberately misled, betrayed, and deceived the government and people of South Vietnam by deciding to withdraw all American forces and then allow the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) to execute what would almost certainly be a fatal sweep southward to envelop and overwhelm the Army of the Republic Of Vietnam (ARVN).

In the present book Snepp describes the ways in which his former employers, the Central Intelligence Agency, used its considerable influence, powers, and resources to derail his effort to publish the book, and upon the failure of that effort ("Decent Interval" was published in 1977), to then punitively pursue confiscation of all of the monies earned by Snepp in association with the book's overwhelming sales success in order to punish Snepp for his trangression of the rules forbidding publication of any materials by former employees without express permission by the CIA. The law suit subsequently filed by the CIA went through all of the appropriate venues, finally landing in the Supreme Court and, according to Snepp, an audience that was quite sympathetic to the Agency's argument. Thus, although he was defended well by a then little-known Harvard lawyer by the name of Alan Dershowitz, Snepp lost the case to the CIA.

Of course, given his personal involvement and the loss of a substantial sum of money as a result, one suspects Snepp is less than objective in his analysis of the case. He admits as much by way of an extended critique of himself and his own actions, which he readily admits may have had the inadvertent and ironic effect of increasing the degree of governmental restrictions on information, acting to further bias the government's restrictions on free speech, open government, and secrecy itself. This is a very interesting read, although it hardly for the faint of heart. I recommend it for anyone interested in the ways in which the bureaucracy works and operates. Enjoy!

Frank Snepp was a CIA analyst in Vietnam who witnessed the abandonment of those who had helped us there during that war. Snepp, although part of the deception himself, tried to warn his superiors of the signs of the impending doom. This is his heartrending account of his attempts to clear his own conscience and make the truth known.

Irreparable Harm is written with quiet, beautiful understatement. I consider its publication a tremendous achievement. I think that few who haven't experienced first-hand in their own lives the sort of driven need to stand by one's own highest principles of truth and honor as Snepp, and who haven't been thus harrassed and persecuted for it, could grasp the monument Snepp has built. Snepp writes a meticulously detailed and researched, blow-by-blow account of the events that led the CIA to shun him, leading him to produce his first book, Decent Interval, and of the aftermath of its publication. He makes vividly clear his own moral dilemmas and suffering. Finally, he puts happened, events so mind-boggling and incomprehensible out of context.

The book is a template. It impresses on us the images of corruption and deceit and shows us the difficult way out of them. It is a road few will voluntarily travel

Frank Snepp's "Irreparable Harm" is one of the most frightening page-turners I've ever read, because it exposes some of our worst fears about the system we trust with our ultimate well-being. Brave enough to venture the Supreme Court, even that fails him, and I find this hard to live with. But the most fascinating part of this book is the fearlessness of this man to face his own demons. Such brutal self-examination is hard to find and something to which all humans must aspire if they care about their own spiritual progress. In that sense, it's a healing book and in the end he does overcome the harm that would otherwise have remained irreparable.

Former chief analyst of North Vietnamese strategy for the CIA during the Vietnam War. He worked as interrogator, agent debriefer, and chief CIA strategy analyst in the Saigon embassy; subject of a landmark US Supreme Court First Amendment/national security decision; author of two non-fiction best sellers, Decent Interval and Irreparable Harm. Both of which I've
read and both I recommend.

Decent Interval is about the sloppy American evacuation of Saigon/Vietnam. Irreparable Harm is about his court fight with the CIA over its publication. Freedom of speech vs national security.

This ex-CIA agent provides the most detailed account to date of the operations of the CIA inside South Vietnam. Giving a first hand account of high-level disagreements. Replete with important disclosures.

There's some Augie March here, a bit of Pnin, maybe some Bech, and one is always waiting for the author to fall in love with a cow a la Ike Snopes, but the analog which kept returning to me is The Sot-Weed Factor. You have to love these features: the author laments that women can't stop falling in love with him (and, incidentally, giving him money); he is bewildered as to what other people do when they don't have any money (hint: like those 130,000 VN refugees, maybe get a job, Frank?) He is offended by an opposing lawyer who 'hid out' in law school during the VN era (uh, Frank, you hid out in grad school yourself.) Over and over, he is betrayed by friends and lovers; hilariously, he seems to be the only one not to see why nobody likes him. Try this: he even reports suffering flashbacks of VC in the treeline! (Earth to Frank: try to remember, you never actually spent a night on the ground . . .) Despite his pretense of self-investigation, this fellow is markedly less introspective than Rabbit Angstrom himself. Conclusion: were it fiction, this would be a work of genius; as autobiography, it ranks with Zsa Zsa and her ilk.