INTERVIEW WITH FRANK SNEPP

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000100080002-5
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 12
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 17, 2007
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: February 26, 1982
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20015 656-4068
PBS Late Night Crnnnnl WETA TV
D A T E February 1 I , 1982 12:30 AM CITY
Interview with Frank Snepp
Washington, DC
DENNIS WHOLEY: Frank Snepp is our guest right now.
Frank is a former CIA agent. He was awarded the Medal of Merit
for his work in Vietnam. His book "Decent Interval" calls the
evacuation of Saigon a fiasco, and he criticizes the CIA for
stupidity and mismanagement. The Justice Department sued, claim-
ing that Snepp's book broke his secrecy agreement and caused harm
to the national security. The Supreme Court upheld that ruling.
Kind of a broad question, putting it out on the table
right now: Should former agents of the CIA be allowed to criti-
cize the agency, or, in some cases, use their knowledge, their
experience or their expertise in civilian life?
Good to have you here.
FRANK SNEPP: Thank you.
WHOLEY: The last four or five years, how has this book
changed your life?
SNEPP: Well, it's changed my life in many ways. One
thing, it has turned my name into an italicized synonym for gov-
ernment censorship. The Supreme Court ruling in my case, in fact,
gives legitimacy, for the first time, to an American official
secrets act.
In your introduction you left out one important fact
about my situation, and that is, I was never accused of publish-
ing any secrets in that book.
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SNEPP: So I was impoverished, and also socked with a
gag order, simply for ignoring the CIA's censorship program. And
it has left me -- the decision has left me very much in a quandary
and somewhat disillusioned about the state of the law in the coun-
try. My father is a superior court judge in North Carolina. I
was brought up to respect the law. And I expected better from
the law than I got.
So, I have spent -- rounding out my answer to your
question. I've spent the past two or three years acquainting
myself with First Amendment law, and I spend a great deal of time
now writing about it. And I am working on a book for my publisher,
Random House, which will deal with my case and other national
security cases which likewise have altered the meaning of the
First Amendment in this country.
WHOLEY: Do you have to submit the new manuscript to
the CIA for their approval?
SNEPP: Oh, yes indeed. In fact, I have to submit even
my speeches to the CIA for clearance. And the agency now main-
tains, at least according to its latest pronouncements -- and
they seem to change from week to week. The agency claims that
even material which I did not learn as a result of my employment,
independent of my employment, is subject to their censorship as
well. In other words, I left government service lobotomized. I
cannot, in effect, speak about intelligence-related matters or
topics bearing thereon without the government's sufferance.
WHOLEY: When you left the service, or before you left
the service, as I understand it, after the fall of Saigon -- and
I understand from many, many testimonials that you were an incre-
dible intelligence officer, many testimonials coming your way --
that you approached some members in the CIA to try to get them
to do a report, do a look -- a damage assessment, I think, quote-
unquote, are the words that come to my mind -- of what happened
in Vietnam, and especially the evacuation part. And you were
turned down. To complicated, quote-unquote, you're writing. I'm
not sure exactly you were quoting there. So you ended up deci-
ding that you'd better do it yourself.
Is that roughly the case?
SNEPP: That's precisely so.
WHOLEY: In a sentence or two -- and that is unfair,
because this is a book that obviously you worked at for a long,
long time, personal experience and research. In a couple of
sentences, though, what do you say in the book, "Decent Interval,"
about the conduct of the United States policy in South Vietnam?
SNEPP: The book is not designed to be a critique of
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U.S. policy in Vietnam. It's designed to draw some inferences
from the experience of the CIA there, some lessons which I wish
we learned. If we had, we might not have ended up as we did in
Iran.
For instance, in Vietnam we embraced Nguyen Van Thieu,
the last South Vietnamese president, as vigorously as we had ever
embraced the Shah; and we blinded ourselves to Thieu's weaknesses,
just as we blinded ourselves to the Shah's weaknesses and to the
corruption around him, which finally helped to do him in.
If we had looked at the lessons of Vietnam and what had
happened during the last two years of the war, very possibly our
intelligence analysts could have done a better job in assessing
the evolving crisis in Iran. Very possibly, too, they might have
avoided the hostage-taking. Certainly we could have avoided, if
we'd learned anything from what happened in Saigon, we could have
avoided the loss of all the documents, the intelligence materials
which were left behind in the embassy in Teheran.
WHOLEY: What could have been learned in Vietnam that
would have prevented, say, the taking of the hostages?
SNEPP: Well, when you begin seeing a situation desta-
bilize, as weas quite apparent in the latter part of 1978, then
you begin drawing down, you being drawing down your manpower, you
begin drawing down American personnel. You don't let American
companies keep their people there as long as Ambassador Sullivan
did.
WHOLEY: As an intelligence agency operating throughout
the world, how would you rate the CIA on a scale of zero to 100?
SNEPP: The CIA is an excellent intelligence organiza-
tion, so long as it remains unpoliticized. I'm afraid right now
that another lesson we didn't learn from Vietnam is that you
should not politicize intelligence. The Reagan Administration
is again moving in that direction. Witness the fact that Reagan's
own campaign manager is now head of the CIA. That's...
WHOLEY: In itself, that's not...
SNEPP: ...the most blatant example.
WHOLEY: Well, in itself, that doesn't necessarily have
to work against him.
SNEPP: It doesn't have to work against him. But I
should think that it would be far more prudent -- in fact, it
would be consistent with patterns of the past -- to bring in
professionals, or at least an outsider who is not so very close
to the President.
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WHOLEY: On a scale of zero to 100, how do you rate
SNEPP: I would say that the agency is somewhere around
WHOLEY: Forty?
WHOLEY: In what areas would you criticize them?
SNEPP: I would say the CIA's analysis is not up to par;
again, because of a politicizing process that is taking place --
that has taken place.
Just to give you an example, we were so fixed on the
notion that the Soviets were going to intervene in Poland that
all of our intelligence analyses throughout the government, begin-
ning with the CIA's, were keyed to that assumption; and so was
our contingency planning. The analyses were wrong, the contin-
gency planning was off. The crackdown was undertaken by the
Polish government itself. That's what happens when induction
takes the place of deduction in the analytical process.
WHOLEY: They did invade Poland. They did go into
Poland. The Russians did go into Poland. Huh?
SNEPP: Well, the russians certainly pulled the strings.
But our analyses anticipated direct Soviet intervention, not in-
direct via the Polish government itself.
WHOLEY: So you fault them on analysis. What area --
other areas do you fault them on?
SNEPP: Well, we are very weak, and have been up until
Casey's taking charge, in the covert action area. I am one of
these people who believes...
WHOLEY: What is covert action?
SNEPP: Covert action is dirty tricks: destabilization
of governments, the spreading of propaganda, even paramilitary
operations.
During the regime of Stansfield Turner, the agency's
paramilitary and covert action and clandestine apparatus was very --
well, it was drawn down.
WHOLEY: Invent an action for us out of your head that
you think we might -- should very well be involved in.
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SNEPP: Well, I think it would be very prudent for us
to arm the Afghan rebels. And, in fact, we're trying to do so.
I think it would be very prudent for us also to -- well, look at
the Afghan rebel situation for a moment. The Afghan -- when the
Afghan crisis began to heat up, we discovered that we had very
few people on staff who could speak the native language of the
country. That was how bad our covert action apparatus -- what
terrible shape it was in when that crisis began to materialize.
WHOLEY: What do you know about what's going on in
El Salvador?
SNEPP: El Salvador is outside my account, and it's
something that I can only comment on from reading the newspapers.
WHOLEY: You're on PBS Late Night.
MAN: People, I think, take it for granted that you
have to have a certain level of education to join the CIA. How
can anybody with such a level of education sign an unlimited
document, the secret [unintelligible]?
I know a little about the M15 and 6 in Britain, and
they have a 10 year limit. Why on earth would anybody sign such
a document?
WHOLEY: Are we talking about the oath?
SNEPP: We're talking about the secrecy agreement.
And as a matter of fact, I had the same question when I went into
the agency, and I asked the briefing officer whether or not this
document I was signing meant that I couldn't write any letters
home. Because if it's read literally, that's precisely the kind
of stricture it places on you. It says you cannot divulge any-
thing you learn about as a result of your employment. The brief-
ing officer told me no, and I believed him.
When I left the agency, I signed another secrecy agree-
ment. That one was more limited and far more reasonable. It
said the only thing I had to clear with the agency was secrets
or confidential information. I have not disclosed either type
of information. So I've lived up to that secrecy agreement.
That, I think, is a reasonable stricture on someone
who has had access to intelligence material. They shouldn't be
in a position to exploit classified information for their own
profit.
WHOLEY: You're on PBS Late Night.
MAN: My point of view is this: The Central Intelli-
gence Agency serves multinational corporate interests and not
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the public's. Primarily, they benefit from CIA operations in
unfriendly nations by the covert destabilizing activities that
you mentioned, such as media manipulation. A couple of examples
are El Mercurio from Chile, which is the major national newspaper
there, and a major newspaper in Jamaica. Specifically, the train-
ing of SAVAK, LSD and mind-control experiments, assassination
plots I don't view as a very good mark of a responsible agency
in a free country, supposedly, as America is.
My question is this: The CIA charter apparently is
now being violated by the granting of domestic surveillance acti-
vities. I really view this as a return to the Nixon years or
worse, 1984.
What's the comment on that?
WHOLEY: Okay. Let's get a comment.
SNEPP: [Laughter] An awful lot to comment on.
WHOLEY: Yeah. The interesting one, because [he]
raises it and I had it down as a note also, is what do you think
about the CIA now being operative within the United States?
SNEPP: It's an insult to the FBI. Stansfield Turner,
with whom I do not always agree, said the other day in the Wash-
ington Post that the agency shouldn't be in domestic operations
because agency personnel are not trained in obeying the law. I
think he's right. I think the FBI is perfectly well equipped
or capable of handling the counterintelligence task here in the
United States. The agency doesn't need to get into that par-
ticular field.
Looking back at some of the other matters which the
gentleman on the line brought up. It would be very nice if this
were not a Hobbesian world and it would be very nice if there
was not a KGB or the Cuban DGI or any of the other hobgoblins
around that one has to deal with in the shadowy world of espi-
onage. They exist, however. And, frankly, you can't wish them
away, and you have to deal with them, in a way, on their own
terms.
So, I cannot fault the agency for having a covert
action arm or for even running certain covert action or dirty
tricks operations that we've seen in the past.
WOMAN: I have a question concerning a possible solu-
tion. If we are indeed to keep intelligence in the Central
Intelligence Agency and attract intelligent personnel to that
service, it seems absolutely absurd to think that we can muzzle
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a thinking mind for an indefinite period. Is there not a possi-
bility that some use could be made of a neutral arbitrator, let's
say in the form of a legal person who would not be on the Supreme
Court, who would not be politically involved with the President
or anyone else in the government?
WHOLEY: Well, the Supreme Court's not supposed to be
involved with the President. It went there and the vote was six
to three. Huh?
SNEPP: That's right. And besides that, the CIA refuses
to allow anyone to arbitrate questions that bear on its interests.
And we asked at one point that an agency censor -- or that the
agency tolerate an outside censor to look over the material written
by agency operatives; and the agency said no, that it retained
that right for itself.
I want to bring out something which we haven't dealt with
quite yet. My predicament is not peculiar to CIA operatives. The
Supreme Court ruling in my case was so broadly cast that now the
mantle of censorship is thrown over every government official who
is in a trusted position. You don't have to sign a secrecy agree-
ment to become subject to the same strictures that apply to me.
The only thing you have to do is to assume a position of trust in
the government. And Big Brother can then demand to look at what
you write and can delete anything Big Brother thinks is classifi-
able, not merely classified. And that is the real danger of what
the Supreme Court did to me.
My situation is meaningless. It's the growth of govern-
ment -- or I should say censorship-by-lawsuit that I'm most con-
cerned about.
WHOLEY: You're on PBS Late Night.
WOMAN: I have a very interesting question. I assume
that Mr. Snepp is aware of the fact that the disclosure by CIA
agents on TV in reference to what has occurred in Vietnam and
the covert actions and -- actually, we have [unintelligible]
General Westmoreland and Secretary Graham have sold out the
American GIs in Vietnam. It has been disclosed by CIA agents
openly on TV.
Why is no follow-up taken [unintelligible] case here?
Mr. Graham is'still Secretary of the Intelligence in the Penta-
gon today, And was openly disclosed by several agents as being
a traitor, because this whole Vietnam War was lost on account of
the cover-up of General Westmoreland and Mr. Graham.
WHO LEY: Okay.
WOMAN: Are you aware of this?
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WHOLEY: Okay. Hold on a second.
You wouldn't go so far as to call Ambassador Graham
a traitor, would you?
SNEPP: Well, the lady is not referring to Graham Mar-
tin. She's referring to General Daniel Graham.
SNEPP: No, I wouldn't refer to him as a traitor. But
the lady has a point.
What happened right before the Tet '68 offensive was
that somebody -- and we can't quite be sure whom -- decided to
cook the figures relating to the size of the Communist force
structure in South Vietnam. The American military wanted to
believe that it was winning the war. And so somebody along the
line said, "Let's deflate our estimates which reflect how big
the enemy army is. Let's cut it down to 250,000."
Well, a CIA analyst, who happens to be a friend of
mine, came up with double that figure by looking at captured
documents and what have you. And his estimate was thrown out.
His estimate was rejected by Richard Helms, by George Carver, by
lots of other people in the CIA hierarchy, and by Daniel Graham,
who was General Westmoreland's -- one of his intelligence chiefs,
I believe, at that particular time.
Well, the Communists launched the Tet offensive with
the Communist forces that the American military had refused to
acknowledge existed. And somebody has the blood of American boys
on their hands, the boys who died in that offensive.
That is not dealt with in my book. It is going to be
dealt with in a book written, with the CIA's clearance, by the
CIA analyst involved.
WHOLEY: Different than you.
SNEPP: It's not me, no.
WHOLEY: It's not you.
But you do suggest in your book from time to time that,
many times, intelligence officers of the CIA gave information and
that information was rejected. Huh?
SNEPP: That's right. It is characteristic of the in-
telligence business that, unfortunately, that when you have a very
hot, critical situation, there are very, oh, very firm views at
the top. And when that happens, it's difficult to move contrary
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views up the system.
WHOLEY: Can I just run some names by you? And we'll
get back to the phones in a second. I want to take you here --
you write this book, and the CIA, the Federal Government, the
Supreme Court, they jump all over you. And you're thing is, "I
tried to get a report done. Nobody would listen. I thought it
was important. I did it." I gather there's some kind of a higher
morality thing that you have in your mind. And you say, "I didn't
give away any classified secrets." Right?
SNEPP: I don't say it. The government conceded that I
gave away no secrets.
WHOLEY: Okay. What's your view of CIA agents like
Frank Terpil and Edwin Wilson? They're the people who are alle-
gedly tied up with Qaddafi?
SNEPP: I think they're a disgrace to the organization.
These gentlemen have been, since 1976, as the CIA knows, been
dealing with Libyan terrorists, and also with Id! Amin. They
should have been reined in. They could have been reined in using
the same principles that were marshaled against me in my case.
They had signed the secrecy agreements. They were in positions
of trust, with implicit obligations not to exploit the information
they learned on the job. They did so in the training of terror-
ists.
They have not been reined in. Why not? Why were they
allowed to operate up until 1980, when they were finally indicted,
with pretty much a free hand? The answer is simple. The CIA has
a lot of alumni who are out there making money off of their agency
experience. Richard Helms runs a consultancy agency. So does
William Colby. As a lawyer, he is a consultant to the Japanese.
The list goes on and on. Vernon Walters, the Deputy Director, is
also a foreign consultant.
If you began pulling in the Wilson and Terpils, you
would set a precedent for suits against these much more respec-
table gentlemen. And, in fact, you would make it impossible for
any CIA operative or analyst to leave the agency and take any job
on the outside. So...
WHOLEY: How do you draw the Iine?
SNEPP: Well, the government has drawn the line. It
says that you can't write, but you can disclose by sales pitch.
It's a double standard.
WHOLEY: Do you think that the CIA has known what Wilson
and Terpil have been up to and given them a nod?
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SNEPP: If the CIA didn't know what Wilson and Terpil
were up to beginning in 1976, it wasn't doing its job. And there
is now a witness who's come forward who says that the agency did
indeed indicate to Wilson, at least as of 1977, thta he should
go ahead and collect intelligence on Qaddafi.
WHOLEY: How about people like Agee and Stockwell?
Stockwell blew the thing on Angola, as I recall.
SNEPP: Well, Philip Agee I regard as really a coward.
Agee has made a career of blowing the names of CIA agents. That's
one thing. If you want to do that, all right. But why not divide
some time between the CIA and the KGB? He seems to think that
only the CIA commits the sins of the world. If he's going to blow
names for moral reasons, why not blow some KGB operatives' names
or Cuban operatives' names? He has a very selective sense of
outrage.
In addition, he has -- he's done something which I think
is even worse. He's failed to face the music. He's stayed abroad.
He has not been willing to face up to the legal consequences of
his actions. Only as a result of the lawsuit against me and sev-
eral legal glitches has he finally been gagged.
WHOLEY: So you're saying that people who work for the
CIA over a period of time, other than material which is confi-
dential or would hurt the United States in some way -- and you
define this for me. I'm not putting words in your mouth...
SNEPP: It's very simple. A CIA operative or a trusted
government employee, be he Henry Kissinger or Brzezinski or William
Colby, has no right to exploit classified information for is own
profit. Otherwise...
WHOLEY: Anything goes.
SNEPP: Everything goes.
WHOLEY: You're on PBS Late Night.
MAN: I'd like to ask Mr. Snepp a question. He's eval-
uated the effectiveness of the CIA on a scale of zero to 100 at
about 40. I'd like to know if he's prepared to evaluate on the
same scale the KGB.
WHOLEY: Terrific question. Terrific.
SNEPP: The KGB is further down the l i st, or further
down the scale. The KGB operates on a vacuum cleaner principle.
It's a huge organization, about 70,000 operatives or personnel,
as opposed to 15,000 for the CIA. And it picks up every kind
of information, every piece of intelligence it can. But it has
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no analytical capability, because the Politburo knows that know-
ledge is power. So the final analytical arm of the Soviet system,
or analytical branch of its intelligence apparatus, is in fact
the Politburo, and it does impose a bias on the intelligence as
it makes its way up the system.
Therefore, its analysis is not very good, although it
does pull in a great deal of information.
The same is true of the Chinese. They operate on the
vacuum cleaner approach.
WHOLEY: Is there any agency floating around in another
country which you think is terrific?
SNEPP: I think the Israelis are terrific because they
have a national purpose behind them that enables them to do a lot
of unscrupulous things which American intelligence couldn't do.
And the British are very good because they're very small.
WHOLEY:
SHEPP:
WHOLEY:
What marks?
Huh?
What marks for Britain,
zero to
100?
SNEPP:
I
would say they're about 75.
WHOLEY:
And hte Israelis?
SNEPP:
T
hey're about 75 to 80.
WHOLEY:
We're at the end of our half-hour.
Frank's book is called "Decent Interval."
Do you get any money for these books?
SNEPP: No. A hundred sixty-three thousand dollars
has accumulated in the U.S. Treasury thanks to that book.
WHOLEY: And if we all wanted to read a good book on
the CIA, or a good film, what one comes to your mind that you
think is a pretty good picture?
WHOLEY: Oh, is that the one you're going to push?
SNEPP: I was just going to show William Buckley's --
one of his latest spy novels. William Buckley worked with the
CIA. He doesn't clear his novels. I have to clear mine. For
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some reason, there's a double standard there too. But he gives
a pretty good reflection of the...
[Confusion of voices]
SNEPP: ...of the agency.
WHOLEY: Okay. "Stained Glass."
Thank you, Frank, for being with us today.
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