Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Frank Snepp spent eight years in the CIA, five of them in Vietnam as interrogator, agent debriefer, and chief CIA strategy analyst in the Saigon embassy. A constitutional scholar and freelance writer, he currently works as an investigative reporter and producer for cable television.

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Irreparable Harm

University Press of Kansas

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...