Decent Interval: An Insider's Account of Saigon's Indecent End Told by the CIA's Chief Strategy Analyst in Vietnam

by Frank Snepp

Widely regarded as a classic on the Vietnam War, Decent Interval provides a scathing critique of the CIA's role in & final departure from that conflict. Still the most detailed & respected account of America's final days in Vietnam, the book was written at great risk & ultimately at great sacrifice by an author who had believed in the CIA's cause but was disillusioned by the agency's treacherous withdrawal, leaving thousands of Vietnamese allies to the mercy of an angry enemy. A quarter-century later, it remains a powerfully riveting testament to one of the darkest episodes in US history.
Foreword
Homecoming --
A great day --
In good faith --
Leaves from a pocket notebook --
Son of cease-fire --
Martin's embassy --
Nibblers and anti-nibblers --
Fiscal whores --
Improvisatory offensive --
A thousand cuts --
Hail-fellow --
Pyrrhic victories --
Blossoming lotus --
Light at the top --
Glass mountain --
Black box --
Cannonball to Papa Lima --
Ides of March --
Piece of my tongue --
Primary responsibility --
Limp little rags --
The bombing --
Spotlighting --
Eagle pull --
Discarded luxury --
Worst case --
Controlled conditions --
Panic button --
A bargain whose day has passed --
Secret caller --
Polarized thinking --
High-class chauffer --
Our turn --
They're in the halls --
Morning --
Afternoon --
Evening
Postscript
Index

Genres: History, Nonfiction, War, Military History, Politics, Espionage, Banned Books

603 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1977

About the author

Frank Warren Snepp, III is a journalist and former chief analyst of North Vietnamese strategy for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Saigon during the Vietnam War. For five out of his eight years as a CIA officer, he worked as interrogator, agent debriefer, and chief strategy analyst in the United States Embassy, Saigon; he was awarded the Intelligence Medal of Merit for his work. Snepp is currently a producer for KNBC-TV in Los Angeles, California. He was one of the first whistle blowers who revealed the inner workings, secrets and failures of the national security services in the 1970s. As a result of a loss in a 1980 court case brought by the CIA, all of Snepp's publications require prior approval by the CIA.

Reviews

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Page-turning account of South Vietnam's chaotic final days, told by a CIA analyst stationed in Saigon. Snepp's book offers the same grim momentum and dramatic power of most apocalyptic "end of an era" books: South Vietnamese officials and civilians panicking at the Communist approach, contradictory directives from higher-ups, the air of unreality within the embassy itself, as stoic CIA officials, resigned Marines and terrified diplomats jostle for space, unsure when the end will come and how they might escape. All this and military struggles (especially ARVN's shameful collapse, after a decade of resistance, into self-immolating panic), diplomatic intrigues (from American dealings with the ICCS, controlled by Hungarian and Polish diplomats sympathetic to North Vietnam, to the French government's futile efforts at mediating with the NVA), political miscalculations at home - all receive compelling treatment. The final chapters, recounting the panicked evacuations under Communist fire, are written in true white-knuckle style. It's not a straightforward memoir as Snepp remains relatively detached, only describing his own adventures occasionally. Nonetheless, the narrative's colored by anger, particularly directed towards Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger and Congressional leaders who consigned their allies, and their own soldiers and civil servants, to an indecent end. A reader can challenge Snepp's specific conclusions, but not his authority to give them. An angry, powerful book, part nonfiction thriller, part expose and entirely gripping.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly. This is how a Hemingway character describes going bankrupt in The Sun Also Rises, but it’s appropriate for the fall of Saigon.

Snepp in Decent Interval covers this, with his key CIA Saigon analyst’s perspective and which he fortifies with writings, testimony, and interviews of other key players - including the North Vietnamese general who lead the final attack and the maligned American ambassador.

The structure and pacing of the book follows the two ways: gradually and suddenly. The first few pages bring the reader to the US - NV cease fire in June 73. After another 120 pages we are brought up to 75. Snepp spends about 150 pages on the first three months of 75 and then closes with about 200 on the final and cruelest month with the last 24 hours taking up three solid chapters.

Snepp wrote this to expose the lies and snow jobs officials gave Americans. His sources and accounts are legit. Coincidentally. I started reading this the same week the Washington Post published the Afghanistan Papers, which has, despite efforts to the contrary, rhymed tight with Vietnam.

Snepp wrote that the last two years in Vietnam were like a microcosm of the previous two decades. We don’t learn from history and so we repeat it.

He also wrote that the Ambassador was like the US officials - they fancied themselves a Swamp Fox, but were really a Swamp Fire.

Read the book and you’ll get the analogy.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

The classic account of the tawdry American evacuation of South Vietnam which we now take for granted but nobody wanted to hear when it was first published. If ever there was a case of shooting the messenger then the American governments response to Mr. Snepp's book is it. It also shows the total futility of such actions - they couldn't prevent the book being read everywhere and while they spitefully targeted Mr. Snepp's royalties it was the ill-tempered response of an elephant smacking at a fly.

Even after all these years it is book worth reading and weeping over - because never has the hollowness of American promises been so balefully reveled - America promised much to the people of South Vietnam and don't think it kept any of them, not even to those most loyal and compromised, most especially the compromised. In their precipitate haste the Americans couldn't even destroy their secret files with the names of local supporters; or collaborators as they would soon be known as the North Vietnamese systematically explored the thousands of unshredded and shredded pages abandoned unburnt in the embassy compound (why the Americans were so surprised at that the Iranians could reassembled shredded documents found in the Tehran embassy is hard to understand. The North Vietnamese had already proven this after the capture of Saigon).

That the end of America's Vietnam adventure was shameful, sordid and sad only reflects the truth of the whole enterprise - a lot of young Americans died in Vietnam and the politicians who sent them there should be strung up for their deaths as much as for the deaths of so many innocent Vietnamese. But we only see monsters in others, not ourselves.

This is a must read book for anyone interested in America's inglorious twentieth century.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the last encrypted communiqué of Thomas Polgar, CIA Station Chief in Saigon, on April 30, 1975: “This experience unique in the history of the United States does not signal necessarily the demise of the United States as a world power. The severity of the defeat and the circumstances of it, however, would seem to call for a reassessment of the policies of niggardly half measures which have characterized much of our participation here despite the commitment of manpower and resources which were certainly generous. Those who fail to learn from history are forced to repeat it. Let us hope that we will not have another Vietnam experience and that we have learned our lesson. Saigon signing off.”
Sadly, not unique anymore. Kabul signing off.

[Ian Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

CIA intelligence analyst Frank Snepp recounts his three year tour in South Vietnam, giving a particular emphasis to the final days of the collapse of South Vietnam. The parallels to Iraq have been made, but I don't think anyone can really understand the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of a force completely dependent on the U.S. can be conveyed without reading this book. This is collapse, minute-by-minute and incredibly detailed. There is an intelligence angle that plays a dominant role throughout the book as Snepp is acquiring intelligence and briefing top officials, but really the golden part of this book is just reliving the collapse and abandonment of South Vietnam. This book took a bite out of my soul and I'm still haunted by it.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Initially disappointed by the failure of the US government to manage the evacuation of Vietnam, outraged by its subsequent cover-up, former CIA analyst Snepp, veteran of two tours in country and witness to much of what he describes, details the last months, weeks, days, then hours of the American presence in Cambodia and, especially, South Vietnam. More than this, Snepp's account is a description of bureaucracies in action.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story of a CIA analyst stationed in Saigon at the end of the Viet Nam war. He is very critical of the way the evacuation was handled from Kissinger down to those in Saigon

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

American nightmare.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Decent Interval... helped me to better understand the Vietnam War. It has also been a heavily pronounced research item for my upcoming historical fiction.

[Don · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frank Snepp’s incisive view of the American embassy in the closing months of the Vietnamese war speaks volumes. The lessons of the failure of the intelligence community and upper levels of the military command are stunning, valid, and instructive today.
The failed attempt at stopping the distribution of this book was for one reason only – to keep the contents from the American public’s view. A bit like Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia. No secret to the Cambodians on the ground, just from the Americans, albeit for not long. No, this book is an essential read for all students of the Vietnamese era, and the reason the Vietnamese people won their freedom.

[Stephan D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to know the true story of America's pullout in Vietnam, this is it. This book was pulled from the shelves shortly after it was published due to a confidentiality agreement in author's employment contract. That has since been resolved and Frank Snepp wrote another book about this secrecy issue.

[Hulananni · Rating 5 out of 5]

It seems impossible that we got anyone out of VietNam during the drawdown of personnel in '75. First at Danang...and finally in Saigon. Can't wait to read Snepp's "Irreparable Harm."

[Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heady, dense, damning. The litany of mistakes made in Vietnam could fill a library, but Snepp's focus here dwindles along with the areas under South Vietnamese control, from the strategic errors that had determined the correlation of forces c. 1973 to the final, desparate, delayed struggle for evacuation in the waning hours of the war. Few figures are exempt from criticism - Henry Kissinger weighs heavily as distracted and conflicted, while Chief of Mission Graham Martin is a dithering dilettante convinced until far too late that a negotiated settlement with the North was still possible. Chief of Station Thomas Polgar is in over his head and equally deluded by visions of a peaceful end. American leadership is resistant up to the point of no return that some sort of arrangement is around the corner, and that the need to evacuate Saigon will never come to pass.

So it is, for the most part, the line analysts and "ops guys" of the CIA, the Defense Attache's Office, and other organizations who manage to get anything done at all, planning for evacuation in the face of Martin's conviction that any sign of departure will plunge Saigon into chaos. But in the end their efforts aren't even close to enough, with tens and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese - including an unfathomable number who had been directly employed by the US Government - abandoned to their fates as the last minute helicopter evacuation came to an ignominious end in the face of the advancing NVA and poor weather off Vung Tau.

Snepp's account is mildly self-serving but even he comes under self-criticism at times, and one is left with the conclusion that there are no real heroes in this - just a few people who tried their best, many more who did not, and a government utterly complicit in both losing the war and ensuring it ended in the most humiliating way possible.

In this light, Afghanistan looks like an smashing success.

[Kas Avallon · Rating 5 out of 5]

As Clear As if You Were There
Incredibly well sourced, Frank Snepp’s “Decent Interval; An Insider’s Account of Saigon’s Indecent End Told by the CIA’s Chief Strategy Analyst in Vietnam,” reads like a conversation. It tells the behind-the-scenes- story of real people, real accounts, and real history. Although, “It does not intend to pretend to be a definitive history… it does offer at least one perspective from the Bull’s eye.” The quote is taken from the book’s introduction, but the writing does exactly that; offers an authentic perspective.

In the read, one can clearly tell that Snepp intended to write the story by the notes he kept of his firsthand experiences. He also uses excerpts from a North Vietnamese General’s memoirs published in 1976. As if he anticipated the book may be cause for further study, the people, planning, and some places are indexed in the back. Earning a Master’s in Internal Affairs from Columbia College, working as copywriter for CBS News, and eight years in the CIA prepares and positions the author in a unique vantage for honestly and clearly recounting events.

Told in three parts; Homecoming, The Unraveling, and Collapse, the reader has time to absorb and reflect on what has happened, tease out the ideas against what one might know of the era, and set their mind to take in the next phase. Few can walk through the trenches of such a controversial time in history and come away to objectively tell the world what has occurred in the way Frank Snepp has in this text. Gripping. Bold. Insightful. Find a sense of what it was like to be there by reading “Decent Interval.”

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the last year I had the pleasure of reading Decent Interval, Eastern Approaches (Maclean), and Twin Stars of China (Carlson). Decent Interval is, of course, well-known, but the same cannot be said about the latter two. I just happen to learn of them in the citations of Guerilla Communications, a 1967 publication - which I stumbled on by chance. I have no idea how to go about finding more works of a similar nature. If anyone has any suggestions, please leave a comment!

It's unfortunate and unjust that Snepp became a pariah. I could find no grounds to warrant Polgar's accusation that Snepp was lacking in patriotism. Frankly, I was amazed by how effectively the author detailed myriad facts and circumstances without divulging the CIA's sources and methods. The mistakes made by the actors in this drama are largely forgivable, if only they were transparent, took accountability, and an objective "damage assessment" was performed.

Minor note: "Even the Communist party of North Vietnam was an import, modeled after the Chinese Kuomintang" (p. 58). I believe that Chinese Kuomintang should be swapped with the Chinese Communist Party. The KMT is a right wing political party that fought against the CCP during China's civil war.

[Sam Williamson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Astounding. Historic. Spellbinding. Monumental. Thank you Frank Snepp!

Hard to find enough superlatives to describe this account of the last days of US involvement in the Vietnam conflict. This had been on my shelf for a while, and I was not sure I would read it till the end, but once I started I could not put it down.

It is a political, spy and military thriller of the first order. The back stories and tales of what really occurred during the US's last two years in Vietnam coming from a first hand on the ground observer is entertainment and education of the first order. I can find at least 30 different characters in this work who each on their own could be the star of a feature film. Yes, this book is that good.

And, for anyone interested in Vietnam and Southeast Asia as well as a career in politics or diplomacy they better have this one at the top of their shelf. Sadly, the lessons learned are forgotten and the mistakes made continue to be repeated.

[Jeff Moffatt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps the definitive account of the collapse of South Vietnam and the chaotic fall of Saigon, written by the CIA's controversial Chief Strategy Analyst in Vietnam and first-hand witness to the final Communist victory in April 1975. His emphatically unauthorized book is an excoriating, almost unbearably painful account of the last days, with emphasis on the delusions and derelictions of high-ranking Americans. The author, Frank Snepp, perhaps over aggrandizes his own role in Station, but at the same time has drafted a riveting and powerful testament to one of the darkest episodes in American history.

[Mark Singer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good thorough review of the final days of US involvement in Vietnam in the 70s. It’s very detailed and I found challenging to keep up with all the various factions involved.
Key quote: concerning “CIA losses and failures in Vietnam” - Not since the Abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 had the agency put so much on the line, and lost it through stupidity and mismanagement.

[David Piedra · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has been around for a while and much has been written about it. For me, Snepp's highly descriptive and visual style made for a great read and he challenged some assumptions I had about the Vietnam War.

[Robert Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

I

[Peter Woltemade · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book offers some interesting firsthand descriptions of and insights into the last days of South Vietnam. Random House's copyeditor missed quite a few things, though.

[Alex Booth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not wholly convinced with the characterisation of some situations, however Snepp writes assuredly and with purpose

[Gary Allen, PhD · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many interesting insights but the book just drags on and on.

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book that supposedly exposes aspects of secret strategies of both North and South Vietnamese forces. Most significant is the making of American policy, its operation and some of the chief actors involved in Saigon and Washington. The thrust of most of the book is the final offensive from late 1974 through the middle of 1975. I found the details interesting, but the most exciting moments were the stories about those who prepared and executed an evacuation plan at the very end. The book raises the real moral questions about the Americans' responsibilities to those Vietnamese who aided them.

[Kent Hinckley · Rating 2 out of 5]

I learned much about the final days of the USA in Vietnam but it was too long, too detailed, and it seemed as though the author had an axe to grind on many people. He was probably correct in many of his opinions since so many of our military and government leaders displayed their incompetence about this conflict, but I don't like reading when someone is on a soapbox.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've seen several different titles. I recall this as the book that I read, but it's been many years ago. I've always felt that the C.I.A. shot themselves in the foot by pressing their case against Snepp for his publication of the book.

[Brian Boyd]

This book was inscribed to me from Francisco Ramirez on the occasion of Fathers Day with me described as a permanent reader. Described as deserving for his labor and dedication to his family and his daughter.
Also: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_...

[John]

history

[Dennis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book

[Georges Ranger · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best recountings of that pivotal period I have ever read! Both deeply personal and sweeping at the same time.