Slow Burn: The Rise and Bitter Fall of American Intelligence in Vietnam [Hardcover]

Orrin Deforest (Author), David Chanoff (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

As a CIA interrogation officer in Vietnam from 1968 to 1975, DeForrest ran an intelligence network. In this exciting, opinionated memoir, written with Chanoff ( Vietcong Memoir ), he describes how he collected information from Vietcong and North Vietnamese prisoners and defectors through "the art of sympathetic interrogation" while engaged in bitter feuds with his superiors, about whom he is harshly critical here. With the assistance of his Vietnamese mistress, Lan, DeForrest developed a stable of agents who, he maintains, brought in most of the hard intelligence reported to the main CIA station in Saigon. The book captures the terror and claustrophobia of the final days of U.S. involvement in Vietnam when DeForrest's arrangements for the evacuation of his agents proved unsuccessful. Photos.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 294 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First Edition edition (April 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671692585
• ISBN-13: 978-0671692582
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,325,342 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Crystal-clear insights into intelligence failure in Viet-Nam, April 8, 2000

By 

Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Slow Burn: The Rise and Bitter Fall of American Intelligence in Vietnam (Hardcover)

This is one of two books I regard as essential to an understanding of our intelligence failures in Viet-Nam. DeForrest was a former military enlisted man who ended up managing a great deal of the prisoner interrogation for a major Agency facility in-country. His story ties together a number of important themes, from the failure of Ivy League types to understand what they were dealing with to the inadequacies (and sometimes the superiority) of vast numbers of "contract" case officers who would normally not have been hired, to the very real value of systematically debriefing all prisoners and entering the results into a database amenable to search and retrieval, something we don't know how to do today. Across every major military operation since Viet-Nam, it has been my experience that we have no table of organization and equipment, completely inadequate numbers of trained interrogators and translators, and no commitment to the tedious but essential work of extracting knowledge from large numbers of hostile prisoners.