Irreparable Harm. - Review - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1999 by David J. Garrow

IRREPARABLE HARM by Frank Snepp Random House, $26.95

TWENTY-TWO YEARS AGO, Frank Snepp published Decent Interval, a stunningly powerful account of how American officials in Saigon abandoned thousands of South Vietnamese compatriots when North Vietnamese troops captured the city in April 1975. Snepp had been a 32-year-old CIA agent in the U.S. Embassy, and he had anticipated all too well how his superiors' wishful thinking and inadequate planning would lead to a chaotic American evacuation once the North Vietnamese forces moved in. Overcome by anger at how many committed South Vietnamese had been left behind to face tortured futures at the hands of their captors, Snepp pressed for a thorough inquiry into the American failure. The CIA was not interested, and once Snepp decided to write just such a study himself, his resignation was a foregone conclusion.

Decent Interval became justly famous as much for the circumstances of its publication as for its riveting and painful narrative. Snepp chose to believe that his several CIA secrecy agreements--one dating from when he joined the Agency, and a second decidedly different one from when he resigned--obligated him to submit the manuscript to CIA censors only if it contained classified information, which he firmly (and correctly) believed it did not. Random House editor Robert Loomis worked assiduously with Snepp to assure that no government intervention would delay publication, and in November 1977 the book's appearance was heralded by a front-page story in The New York Times and extended coverage on CBS News' Sixty Minutes.

But the CIA was not about to let Snepp enjoy his triumph. Overcoming initial vacillation by the Carter Justice Department, the government filed suit against Snepp in federal court, seeking to seize all of the income generated by Decent Interval and to impose official censorship on anything Snepp might write in the future. The government's suit was assigned to a spectacularly biased federal district judge in northern Virginia, Oren R. Lewis, and a pathetically, unfair trial resulted in an across-the-board CIA victory. Eighteen months later, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an opinion affirming both portions of the judgment without even deigning to hear arguments. An all-but-bankrupt defendant paid $144,931 to the U.S. Treasury and mailed the manuscript of a never-to-be-published novel to the CIA.

Irreparable Harm is Snepp's richly autobiographical account of all his trials and tribulations, and it is the first book he has published since Decent Interval. It is powerfully written, confessional and self-critical, and its central story is the ease with which the CIA's fallacious claims beguiled the federal judiciary. The Supreme Court's behavior in Snepp v. United States has been roundly criticized from the day of its decision, but Irreparable Harm uses the now-available case files of Justices Thurgood Marshall and William J. Brennan, Jr., to provide an historically eye-opening behind-the-scenes account. The files document how Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., a military intelligence officer during World War II, single-handedly convinced his colleagues to rule against Snepp. Initially Powell was the sole justice who wanted to address the merits of the case, but his insistence won over Chief Justice Burger as well as Justices Stewart, Blackmun, Rehnquist and White. Justice John Paul Stevens (joined by Brennan and Mark shall) filed a powerful dissent. Still, anyone with access to a legal database can readily see how often Snepp is cited by courts when public employees unsuccessfully seek legal shelter for blowing the whistle on some government malfeasance that involves unclassified, but nonetheless "confidential," information.

Snepp worries that the litigation reduced him to little more than "an italicized metaphor for a very bad First Amendment case." But despite the magnitude of that disgraceful Supreme Court ruling, Snepp fails to appreciate how enduring a book Decent Interval truly is (even now that it is regrettably out of print).

Irreparable Harm's most revealing confession, however, concerns a story which appears only fleetingly in Decent Interval. In Decent Interval, Snepp included the following story about Saigon's penultimate day:

"Around midmorning a Chinese girl, an old acquaintance, called to ask my help. Her American husband had abandoned her and her children, she explained tearfully; she had no one else to call on but me. I told her wearily I could do nothing at the moment. I was chained to my desk. `But contact me again in an hour,' I said. `I'll see what I can do.' There was a brief silence on the other end of the line. Then her voice drifted in, cool and distant. `If you won't help me,' she said, `I'm a dead woman. I'll kill myself and my children. I've already bought the pills.'.... `Look,' I said, `just phone in an hour. I'll help you then.'

Precisely on schedule, an hour later, she called again. As it happened, I was away from my desk. She left a message with the duty officer: `I would have expected better of you. Goodbye.' That was the last I heard from her."