Author’s Note:
Last spring, just before the fiftieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, I submitted a draft article, “The Last Spy Story of the Vietnam War,” to the CIA for clearance.
You’ll find the piece – finally “CIA-approved” — at the close of these introductory remarks.
I had hoped to publish the article during the anniversary commemorations. That didn’t happen.
Here’s why — a cautionary tale.
Long ago, in 1980, the US Supreme Court decided that the unapproved publication of my Vietnam memoir, Decent Interval (1977), had violated implicit and explicit obligations to the CIA, my former employer in-country.
The Court held that these duties required that I seek Agency clearance before publishing any material, classified or not, that I had picked up while on the CIA’s dime.
There was never any charge that my book had compromised national security. Indeed, the government officially declared it secrets-free.
Yet the Court ruled against me summarily, issuing an unsigned per curium opinion without allowing my lawyers, or the government’s, to file written or oral briefs.
Since then, I have dutifully sought CIA sign-offs for all writings that arguably fall within the purview of US v Snepp – stuff drawn from my CIA experience.
The substance of the article below – as a well as well as information contained in a related interview I gave to Jeff Stein at “Spy Talk” – shouldn’t have raised any security concerns. The same facts and the same framing had already been explicitly cleared by the CIA during its review of four earlier manuscripts I had submitted on the same subject.
In other words, the piece I turned over last spring simply recycled previously vetted material, with some reinforcing documentation attached.
But in early May the CIA’s Pre-Publications Review Board not only rejected my request for expedited clearance; it gutted the manuscript, striking out more than twenty passages, claiming that what I had written contained classified information. I was also directed to remove references to the previously posted “Spy Talk” podcast, even though such extemporaneous presentations have never been subject to official review or sanction unless they breach secrecy, which my “Spy Talk” exchange with Jeff plainly did not.
I responded to the CIA by meticulously documenting what was already in its files, the stack of official notices, dating back more than twenty years, indicating that I had previously received clearance for the same story in virtually every detail.
The “hold” on my draft should have been lifted immediately. It wasn’t.
Only recently, more than four months later, did the CIA finally authorize publication of the manuscript — without requiring a single change.
I recognize that Agency personnel are under enormous strain, given Trump’s ongoing assaults on the intelligence community, and have much more to worry about than my puny writings.
But the fact remains: for four months the CIA effectively imposed a pocket veto on material from this author that it had already “signed off” on.
This isn’t a just personal gripe. Because of the ruling in US v Snepp, millions of government security experts, present and former, are subject to the same censorship rules that I face – and to the same potential abuses.
One of them, John Bolton, has been back in the headlines recently because of problems arising from his alleged mishandling of government secrets.
I have no political sympathy for Bolton. None. But back in 2020 the first Trump administration demonstrated how fickle the official clearance process can be: first, by approving Bolton’s draft memoir about his recent stint as the president’s national security adviser, then by rescinding the clearance notice as if it had never existed.
Bolton, by then an unlikely Trump critic, cried foul. After inconclusive “negotiations” and some judicial skirmishing he published his book in June 2020 without a final government check-off. A related investigation was closed a year later without charges.
But in recent days Trump’s Justice Department has taken a new swing at Bolton, reportedly probing whether he used a private server to email sensitive classified materials to his wife and daughter in 2020. Depending on the evidence, he could be prosecuted criminally, like Pentagon Papers leaker Dan Ellsberg, under the espionage act, and/or face a Snepp-type civil lawsuit.
The larger point is that Snepp remains embedded in the government’s anti-free-speech arsenal, and as Bolton’s 2020 case showed, the constraints on official excess remain appallingly lax. Clearance decisions can be delayed, reversed, or weaponized, leaving authors effectively silenced.
Nearly a decade after the Snepp ruling, I sued the government for sitting (for months) on a short, innocuous item I had submitted for clearance, the outline for a TV spy series. The stall-off eventually killed the project.
In my court filings I argued that under First Amendment precedent any undue delay in the official vetting of a disputed work is unacceptable “prior restraint.” I urged the courts to mandate a thirty-day limit on clearance procedures. The lower courts demurred, essentially ruling that the CIA should not be inconvenienced by petty deadlines. The Supreme Court allowed this judgment to stand without review.
Result: even now, the government can “delay your manuscript to death.”
In May 2022, the current High Court declined a petition from the Knight Foundation to review the original ruling in my case.
So, we are stuck with it, flaws and all.
In theory, an author can always go to court to challenge censorship decisions. In practice Federal judges almost always defer to national security claims, and in the current climate they are less likely than ever to push back.
So, here’s my advice to beleaguered authors: keep a meticulous record of your dealings with government reviewers, preferably with the help of a lawyer (one with a security clearance), and above all, document how every word in your manuscript is handled by the screeners.
Now, for my essay, dated but unbowed.
(The CIA insisted that I make clear that its approval of this material – now many times over – does not signify certification of its accuracy.)
The Last Spy Story of the Vietnam War
My friend and fellow Vietnam spy vet, Jeff Stein, whose “Spy Talk” is a must-read on Substack, has just released a podcast called “The Last Spy Story of the Vietnam War.” It features an interview with me about the CIA’s two best sources of intelligence on the enemy in Vietnam.
You can find it on “Spy Talk,” You Tube and elsewhere and Jeff has graciously consented to let me re-link it on “Frank Snepp 360.”
The intelligence provided by the two spies in question saved thousands of American and South Vietnamese lives during the war. It also helped trigger emergency planning for the final helicopter airlift in April 1975, despite Ambassador Graham Martin’s reluctance to approve any such “rush to the exits,” which he feared might upend a potential negotiated settlement.
As I was one of the last seventeen CIA officers to be lifted off the US embassy roof on April 29, I owe my own survival in part to these two secret agents. The same is true for the 1400 other Americans and third-country nationals and the more than 5,000 Vietnamese who escaped the country, often by helicopter, on the final day.
Both spies had enormous impact on US policy throughout the war and changed the way certain key events unfolded. But their exploits and heroism have gone largely unmentioned in Vietnam histories.
One of these secret sharers, whose identity remains under classified wraps even after fifty years, operated inside North Vietnam.
The other, Vo Van Ba, was planted inside the Communist command for the Saigon area and the delta – the so-called Central Office for South Vietnam known as COSVN, a portable communist mini-Pentagon often based on Black Virgin Mountain in Tay Ninh Province.
Ba was so accomplished and did such damage to the communist cause that Hanoi security officials felt compelled after the war to research his activities and try to draw lessons from them. Their findings, many of which have been published, reveal that Ba stole and gave to his South Vietnamese police and CIA case officers every major COSVN directive from 1965 to the last days of the war.
By my reckoning, the Ba operation was the Vietnam-era equivalent of having a spy in Hitler’s bunker. He was that good.
His case officers did brilliant work managing him and keeping him safe. The final two, John Stockwell and retired Major Nguu Phan of the South Vietnamese police deserve high praise, as do their predecessors, translators and collaborators.
Major Phan now lives in Orange County after spending seventeen years in a Vietnamese communist concentration camp. He has posted his own recollections of the Ba case and publicly acknowledged Stockwell’s role and my own.
Hanoi’s own publications have referenced my involvement with Ba, and after the war Ambassador Graham Martin testified about it before a congressional committee.
As Nguu Phan has confirmed, I began meeting with Ba periodically in 1971 and continued to do so till the last days of the war. As the CIA Station’s lead analyst of enemy intentions, I became deeply immersed in Ba’s reporting and routinely frontloaded it into every assessment I prepared for the Station and the Vietnam Task Force at CIA headquarters.
When I returned briefly to headquarters in 1971-1972 to become the designated assessor of North Vietnam policy for the Task Force, I made sure to headline Ba’s insights in articles I contributed to the President’s Daily Brief.
During that time, Ba kept the CIA and President Thieu abreast of Kissinger’s secret negotiations with Le Duc Tho, even though Kissinger himself kept the Thieu regime and much of official Washington in the dark. Ba was able to track what was going on in Paris because his COSVN’s contacts were routinely briefed on it, as now-public official records reveal.
Ba’s disclosures helped prompt Thieu to dig in his heels in October 1972 when Kissinger visited him to try to force his lopsided draft agreement on him.
Duly forewarned, Thieu balked and walked away from the entire peace process, and when he did, the North Vietnamese followed suit. It was only Nixon’s Christmas bombing of Hanoi in December 1972 that brought the two sides back to the negotiating table.
It was a message with two addressees. It warned Hanoi’s leaders not to screw around any longer. It ostensibly assured Thieu that the US continued to have his back,
That said, when the dust settled, Thieu had no choice but to accept Kissinger’s decision to leave 140,000 NVA troops in South Vietnam. But Ba’s reporting did enable Thieu, at the last minute, to thwart an effort by Le Duc Tho to turn a proposed tripartite electoral commission, envisioned in the draft agreement, into a de facto coalition government.
Thus, Ba’s reporting and the Christmas bombing delivered a dividend for the much-abused President of South Vietnam, leaving Thieu slightly better positioned to deal with the horrendous peace Kissinger and Le Duc Tho had cobbled together on their own.
As revealed in recently declassified documents, Kissinger was so irked at Ba’s temerity in second-guessing him to the CIA that he directed Saigon Station Chief Tom Polgar in late 1972 to stop disseminating Ba’s reports. Polgar simply ignored the Great Henry, and Ba remained the CIA’s go-to touchstone for all things related to enemy plans and preparations.
On April 9, 1975, CIA Director William Colby described Vo Van Ba to Gerald Ford as the best asset the Agency had in South Vietnam.
My interactions with the Hanoi source, first described (very circumspectly) in my memoir Decent Interval published soon after the war, enabled me to cross reference and corroborate Ba’s revelations in real time.
It doesn’t get any better than that in spy work, and though I was woefully ill-prepared for the duties thrust on me, I regard my modest contributions to the Ba case as being among the few highlights of my Vietnam service.
(Note to reader: And What happened to Vo Van Ba after NVA troops entered Saigon on April 30, 1975? As I observed in another, previously CIA-cleared article: “The spy who had reported Resolution 9 and everything else was betrayed to the Communists by one-time colleagues. Facing execution, he hung himself by his belt.”)