Ghosts Beckon From Old Saigon

Leaves from my book of the dead, missing and mourned of the Vietnam war

Ghosts Beckon From Old Saigon

With the 50^th Anniversary of the fall of Saigon now upon us, friends and fair-weather facsimiles with some knowledge of my involvement in that episode have kindly inquired about my frame of mind, as if it were contingent on the flip of a calendar page.

In fact, the date is meaningless to me. The ghosts are with me always, whether it’s Christmas, New Year’s, or Ground Hog’s Day.

Come to think of it, Ground Hog’s Day is an apt reference, since every new day bears resonances of April 29, 1975 when the roof fell in and the last of us tried to crawl out of Saigon standing up.

At age 81, I don’t assume any general familiarity with that remote piece of history, much less my role in it. So, here’s a brief summary of the latter, written in the third person so the ghosts won’t immediately pounce and begin clawing at my sensibilities.

What Once Was

“A graduate of Columbia’s school of international affairs, Frank joined the CIA in 1968 and instantly volunteered to serve in its Vietnam Station. During multiple tours there spanning cumulatively five and a half years, he became the Station’s senior analyst of enemy intentions, and a close aide to two ambassadors and two station chiefs. He interrogated many key prisoners and was centrally involved in tasking and debriefing the CIA’s two top intelligence sources working behind enemy lines.

“During an interim tour at CIA headquarters, mid-1971-mid 1972, he served as “Hanoi policy analyst” for the Agency’s Vietnam Task Force, where he monitored the Paris peace talks and wrote extensively for the President’s Daily Brief.

“He returned to Vietnam just before the 1973 ceasefire to interrogate the highest-ranking enemy officer ever captured by the allies. When that assignment ended with inauguration of negotiated prisoner exchanges, he assumed expanded analytical and operational duties at the station and became Ambassador Graham Martin’s principal intelligence briefer. He also dated Martin’s daughter for awhile, which didn’t hurt his career.

“Two years later, in the spring of 1975, Frank accurately assessed enemy plans for seizing Saigon militarily. Hoping to head off disaster and enhance slim chances for a negotiated ending, Martin enlisted Frank on April 25 to smuggle newly resigned President Nguyen Van Thieu to his own escape flight out of the country. It made no difference. Three days later, Frank was among the last 17 CIA officers to be lifted off the embassy roof as communist forces moved on the city as predicted.

“He later received one of the CIA’s highest medals for his service. But in early 1976 he resigned to write an account of what had gone wrong. His memoir, Decent Interval, published a year later, became an instant bestseller and helped focus attention on the plight of Vietnamese allies left behind.”

Secrets begat secrets

What is not included in the mildly upbeat CV outlined above is reference to the US government prosecuting me for not getting Decent Interval approved by the CIA.

Though the Carter Justice Department acknowledged that the book contained no classified information or even any non-public material, its prosecutors claimed without proof that by jumping into print minus the CIA’s okay I had diminished global confidence in US security procedures, frightened off unnamed allies and thus done “irreparable harm” to the national security, a charge just short of treason. They demanded that I be gagged for life, forbidden from writing ever again about my CIA experiences absent an official nod, and surrender every cent I owned and any future profits from the book.

In 1980, the US Supreme Court, without allowing my lawyers or the government’s to file any briefs or oral arguments, summarily upheld the government’s case on all counts, presumably based on news clips, administration press releases, and judicial bias

Justice Lewis Powell, who wrote the per curiam opinion, was a prickly old intelligence officer who believed the free press imperiled Big Business and ought to be reined in.

By stomping me, the Brethren validated the use -- ad infinitum-- of sweeping non-disclosure agreements and implicit gag rules to keep any civil servant in a position of trust or any retired version of the same from speaking out of turn.

Think about that. There’s irony in it.

A war born of secrecy, including the deceitful Tonkin Gulf Resolution, wound up producing a regime of secrecy throughout the government, the likes of which we had never seen before.

The current Supreme Court declined a petition from Columbia’s Knight Foundation to overturn the findings and the precedent in US v Snepp. So, the bad stuff I coaxed out of the legal system is going to be with us until the fat lady sings -- with a muzzle on.

Rallying

Not about to let any bad outcome go unnoticed or un-dissed, I wrote a book about my case, Irreparable Harm, got the CIA to sign off on it, and created a record for First Amendment apostates and nitpickers to answer for.

Over the years, I took further revenge on the deadheads by going into investigative broadcast journalism and made a pretty good career of it, zeroing in on tricksters and scamsters in public and private life and the likes of Oliver North, Bibi Netanyahu and the Orange Julius.

And as each new generation rediscovers an ancient artifact known as the Vietnam War, I’ve been asked to share my ghosts by reliving the nightmare in print and other media over and over. I have appeared in scores of Vietnam-related documentaries, produced some of them myself, and seen myself grow grey and wrinkled (if not wiser) on camera.

I have also written so much marginalia about the war, and gotten so much material cleared by Langley’s blue pencilers (though often with legal help) that much of what was once under official wraps is now part of the public record or included in the CIA’s massive newly declassified treasure trove known as the CREST system. (Check it out).

Under some polite pressure to give a nod to the 50th Anniversary -- but unwilling to cede too much new space to my unforgiving ghosts -- I am resorting here to a limited hangout.

Rather than crank out any new material, I am simply summoning up several previously generated items that you can link to. Their only virtue is that they show me slowly but surely maturing in my views of what I witnessed and how I sinned.

60 Minutes

This venerable CBS news magazine aired my first public interview after Decent Interval was published in November 1977. It was the longest 60 Minutes segment to date, and attracted an enormous audience, (much to the CIA’s chagrin) because the opening segment focused on Anwar Sadat’s historic meeting with Menachem Begin.

As a tag to my own interview, Mike Wallace quoted an unnamed Washington official as describing Ambassador Graham Martin, my last boss in Vietnam, as “batty.”

Off camera, Wallace told me the anonymous ankle-biter was none other than Henry Kissinger himself. In effect, Kissinger was saying that the man he had trusted to oversee the final years of the US commitment in Vietnam and the perilous evacuation itself was off his rocker.

That was one of the most newsworthy aspects of the interview, though because of Wallace’s protective deference to Kissinger its full significance was not apparent.

To see the interview, the airing rights to which Wallace granted me (it’s preserved on YouTube), press the link here.

Last Chopper Out

While working for a local television station in Los Angeles twenty years ago, I produced and fronted a highly personal report on the evacuation in which I recounted a memory that remains personally eviscerating. It involves a Vietnamese woman and child who, because of ill luck and bad timing, I was unable to spirit out of Saigon at the eleventh hour. The segment is crude and imperfectly edited but it conjures two ghosts who will be with me when my own ghost departs. To view the segment, press here.

The Intelligence Failure That Lost Vietnam

US Army Colonel Henry Shockley was one of the most honest and honorable souls I ever met in Vietnam. A member of the original US advisory mission in-country, he did several war-related tours for Pentagon agencies and wound up as head of intelligence collection for the Defense Attache’s Office, 1974-75. After the fall of Saigon, he was subpoenaed by the Pike committee and provided blistering testimony about how Ambassador Martin and the Defense Attaché’s

own staff had repeatedly papered over bad news, concealed corruption among our allies and misled the press.

Ten years ago, I rediscovered Shockley, freshly retired, teaching college in Sherman Oaks California. I persuaded him to sit for an on-camera retrospective in which we compared notes about life and times at the US embassy. The hour-long docu-interview, which I produced and fronted, is called the “Intelligence Failure that Lost Vietnam” and highlights one of the most important lessons of the war, which is: “Know your friends as well as you know your enemies.” To view the hourlong piece, press here.

Vo Van Ba, Spy Extraordinaire

In the early 1990s, security officials in Hanoi began publishing their own postmortems about the most accomplished spy of the war on either side, a brilliant operative who had been planted inside the communists’ top command for the Saigon area and the delta, known as COSVN

Once a Viet Minh youth organizer, Vo Van Ba had soured on the revolution because of what he saw as its penchant for winning hearts and minds through terror. Retiring to Tay Ninh province northwest of Saigon to become a slash-and-burn farmer, he soon found himself rubbing shoulders with the top Communist honchos in the neighborhood.

It so happened that his farm lay thwart pathways leading two and from COSVN, a kind of portable mini-Pentagon often based on Black Virgin Mountain near Tay Ninh City,

Knowing that he had once been a fellow traveler, the iterant kingpins of COSVN frequently got casual with him and let drop confidences. The local South Vietnamese police glimpsed a golden opportunity and persuaded Ba to go to work for them as an informant.

At their instruction he got ever tighter with his new-found buddies by pretending to be a born again revolutionary and began reporting what he learned to the cops. Since he was a member of the local Cao Dai religious sect, a favorite communist recruitment target, he had extra appeal for COSVN as a potential mole inside the group’s Holy See.

The collaboration paid off and soon, with the help of his secret police case officers, Ba had become a prized operative for COSVN with increasing access to the Cao Dai’s inner circles. He also became better and better positioned to pocket COSVN secrets and lateral them to his police handlers.

By 1969 the CIA had elbowed its way into the operation, and soon after my arrival I became involved in analytical assignments that required heavy reliance on Vo Van Ba’s reporting and eventually direct consultation with him.

In short order, I realized he was a career maker for me. If this had been Nazis Germany, he would have been the archetypical “spy in Hitler’s Bunker.” He was that good.

After the war, Hanoi’s researchers confirmed (grudgingly) that Ba had stolen every one of COSVN’s major directives from 1965 to the end of the war. His former police case officer, Major Nguu Phan, who moved to Orange Country, California, after spending 17 years in a postwar communist concentration camp, published his own recollections of the Ba case and discussed my interactions with both of them.

This abundance of very public information about the CIA’s top spy has made it possible to give him the recognition he is due.

Through his reporting, Ba probably saved more American and allied lives than any other single individual in the war.

His timely reports to his brave police and CIA case officers and (periodically) to me also help spur preparations for the final emergency airlift that saved me, 1400 other Americans and third country nationals and 5,000 highly imperiled Vietnamese on the final day of the war.

Included below are links to two interviews I have given about Ba, drawing on public material and my own recollections.

One is an interview I helped produce for an online series, called Vietnam Stories, hosted by Jackie Bong, one of the great South Vietnamese patriots in her own right. It is in English but with Vietnamese subtitles since he is a hero worthy of his former countrymen’s full attention. To access the piece, press here.

Another Ba-related item that I hold dear is a very recent podcast, produced by Jeff Stein of Spy Talk, in which I reminisce about Ba and the CIA’s other prime source of intelligence on the enemy, this one based in North Vietnam. Like Ba, this second source was part of my personal orbit.

Provocatively enough the podcast is called “The Last Spy Story of the Vietnam War.” To access it press here.

Final note: After all these years, Decent Interval is soon to be issued as an audio book by Tantor audio books, narrated by the great Eric Jason Martin.