FRANK SNEPP

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000200790002-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: December 21, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 27, 2008
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: July 17, 1983
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 656-4068
FOR PUBLIC AFFAIRS STAFF
PROGRAM Sunday Morning STATION WDVM-TV
CBS Network
DATE July 17, 1983 10:00 A.M. CITY Washington, D.C.
SUBJECT Frank S n e p p
DIANE SAWYER: Frank Snepp once worked for the Central
Intelligence Agency in Vietnam.. He wrote a book about the fall
of Vietnam and what he and the agency did there. The CIA sued
and the Supreme Court said he shouldn't have written anything
without CIA permission. When that ruling came down in 1980, a
lot of people worried that it was stepping on freedom of speech,
an issue still. So we thought we'd repeat the profile Eric
Engberg brought us of the man who started it all, Frank Snepp.
ERIC ENGBERG: On this winter night at a small Mid-
western college, a spy comes in from the cold, briefly, to talk
about a losing war that for him has never ended.
FRANK SNEPP: One February morning in 1978, a journalist
called me at my Arlington apartment to give me some chilling
news. The government, he said, was suing me for a book I'd
written about my former employer, the CIA, even though nobody had
accused me of packing any secrets between its covers.
Well, two years later, after debilitating legal battle,
the Supreme Court rendered final verdict in my case, handing down
a ruling that did as much damage to the first amendment as it did
to me.
ENGBERG: Frank Snepp had written his expose, "Decent
Interval," in the white heat of anger over the evacuation of
Saigon. His bosses, he claimed, had bungled. Secrets and secret
agents had been compromised.
But Snepp himself became the central issue after
then-CIA Director Stansfield Turner charged that by publishing
without agency approval, the ex-spy had hurt the country.
Material supplied by Radio N Reports, Inc. may be used for file and reference purposes only It may not be reproduced, sold or publicly demonstrated or exhibited.
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ADMIRAL STANSFIELD TURNER: What he did was to violate a
contract that he made with the Central Intelligence Agency. It
is a contract that all of us make when we join the CIA. It says
that we will submit to the Central Intelligence Agency for
security review all writings that we're going to put into the
public domain.
You don't have to join the CIA. And if you do, you have
to agree to sign up for this contract. He did. He failed to
comply with that contract. And therefore we took him to court.
He lost the profits of his book.
ENCBERC: Legal decisions that went all the way to the
Supreme Court forced Snepp to pay the government $163,000. As a
result of a federal court injunction, he could be sent to jail if
he writes again about intelligence matters without first clearing
his words with the CIA. Agency censors even cleared a novel he
once wrote. And Snepp claims the censors try to categorize much
of his writing as fair game.
SNEPP: The injunction reads that I cannot write about
what I learned during employment -- and here is the catch phrase
-- or as a result of employment. And now the agency has gone one
step further and said that it's an open legal question whether or
not I can write about intelligence-related matters or intel-
ligence generally which I've learned about independent of
employment.
So, the ambiguities, the gray areas get larger and
larger. And I find myself again facing another bend in that
tunnel where, when I thought I was a little free, there was no
freedom there at all.
ENCBERC: Financially crushed by the lawsuit, Snepp
travels the lecture talk-show circuit, moving from city to city,
marketing his knowledgeand his rage at his unique legal status.
At Mid-America Nazarene College in Olathe, Kansas, the
fee was a thousand dollars. The whiff of Big Brother is in the
room when Frank Snepp speaks of intelligence matters.
SNEPP: The White House couldn't bring itself to admit
the Shaw was on the ropes. Neither could Turner nor the CIA.
Although the agency, words deleted, words deleted -- picking up
teh sentence -- It had no idea until...
ENGBERG: From the text of his lecture, CIA censors cut
Snepp's comments on the Iranian revolution, even though it
happened after he left the agency and even though he based his
remarks entirely on news stories he had read.
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Snepp spends most of his time at home, a small apartment
in the Washington suburbs, frantically trying to write himself
out of his financial hole. He is a bachelor, a loner, surrounded
by the relics of his twin obsessions: the war and the lawsuit.
The ammunition he had in his pocket the day he fled Saigon, he
says, is his reminder of the fleeting character of life.
SNEPP: My publisher says that being sued by the
government is the next worst thing to a terminal disease. I can
tell you that it is a terminal disease. There is no escaping it.
It dominates your every waking moment. When you are outsmarted
in court, you spend the next night awake, smarting over it and
thinking of some way you can rebound. It becomes an obsession,
and such an obsession that you lose your capacity for emotion
elsewhere. I have not been able to sustain friendships during
the period of the litigation -- ironically, a period in which
friendships were almost mandatory -- simply because I was focused
on this thing that was happening to me in court. It's almost
like being present at your own execution. You're watching the
people put the bullets in the weapons and you're watching them
sight down the barrel.
ENGBERG: None of that, Snepp insists, has caused him to
regret his decision to publish his book in violation of the
rules.
SNEPP: I had played the company game for five years in
Vietnam. I had lied when it was necessary. I had tricked the
press when it was necessary. I had toed the company line in
briefings and in analyses that I had written. And I had dealt
with the Vietnamese in such a way that I had been instrumental in
getting them to trust us. Not instrumental, but certainly I had
contributed to their trust in the American commitment.
And so when we didn't rescue the Vietnamese to whom we
had some obligation, I wanted to do a kind of penance by getting
the truth out finally, by rolling back the lies, and also,
selfishly, by trying to lift some of the burden from my shoulder,
the burden of guilt from my shoulders.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Let me say on Snepp's behalf now, while
I'm very annoyed with him for what he did with me in terms of
welshing on his agreement, I think Snepp is a basically patrio-
tic, conscientious type of person. I think he tried not to put
any classified material in that book.
His problem is that he's a zealot. He believes he has
great wisdom to give to this country. And he's also paranoid.
He thinks the Central Intelligence Agency is determined to
prevent his giving that wisdom out.
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Now, the problem with zealots is that in the name of
doing good, they frequently do wrong. And that's what Snepp did.
He's misguided. He's overzealous in trying to get his message
across.
SNEPP: I suppose if you're brought up in the South, as
I was, that's part of your heritage. My grandmother used to
regale me with stories about how my forebears -- the fellows in
gray, by the way -- charged up Cemetery Ridge right into the
cannos of Meade's army. She told me this over and over. It
became part of my outlook. And maybe I was charging the cannons,
too. Maybe I was playing out that Southern role. And it would
almost have been unthinkable not to have charged the cannons once
I had spotted them and knew that they were there to be assaulted
and that there was a cause there. Like my forebears, it turned
out to be a lost cause.
ENGBERG: The running Snepp says, stiffens his will to
fight back.
He has always been an oddball among the spy-and-tell
authors. He is a strong believer in an effective CIA. He
supported the Vietnam War. His book gave away no secrets. Yet,
in an era when government secrets were gushing out, Snepp was
singled out for harsh treament. It happened that way because an
example was needed and he was handy.
ADMIRAL TURNER: I think the Achilles heel of intel-
ligence in this country today is our inability to keep our
secrets. Not just Snepp, but the leaks, the whistle-blowers who
go out and say things that they shouldn't, people who delibe-
rately try to scotch an ongoing intelligence operation by leaking
it.
If we can't keep secrets, you can't have a good intel-
ligence organization. People's lives are at stake. Your tax
dollars and my tax dollars are at stake. We've just got to
tighten up all the way around.
ENCBERG: The courts, and especially the Supreme Court,
seemed in the mood to stop ex-spies from talking. The ruling in
U.S. versus Snepp was widely criticized by constitutional
scholars, even some, like Professor Benno Schmidt (?) of Columbia
University, who believe there are distinct limits to the First
Amendment.
BENNO SCHMIDT: The case amounts to a kind of draconian
punishment of Snepp by the Supreme Court. And I think in its
hurry to punish Snepp, it overrode the usual rules of procedure
and separation of powers and the usual rules of contracts, and it
gave absolutely no serious consideration, in my judgment, to the
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very serious First Amendment problems that are involved in a rule
of law that says a government employee cannot go public with
matters of great public interest about what the government is
doing without first submitting to a wholesale system of censor-
ship. That's a very alien notion in our constitutional scheme.
ENGBERG: Snepp's legal dilemma has left him not only
broke, but virtually unemployable with think tanks, universities,
news organizations.
SNEPP: I run up against the clearance problem. What
can I write about, what can I do for them, if they're in inter-
national consultantcy, that won't bring the agency trundling into
their inner sanctums? I have inquired at universities. Would
students come to my class if they knew that every lecture had
been cleared by the CIA in advance?
I have been disabused of my naive belief that the
American system can correct itself and that the CIA is subject to
the administrations of truth and that the right will triumph, and
so on and so on. I guess now I am a disillusioned romantic.
That's a cynic, in other words. But not so cynical as to be
immobilized. The next fight I will fight in a different way. I
will charge up Cemetery Ridge perhaps from a differnt -- a
different direction.
SAWYER: A footnote. Stansfield Turner, who retired
from the CIA, is writing a book now. He submitted the first
chapters to the agency for review, and the CIA cut certain
material. He's contesting the decision and wants some of it
restored.
As for Frank Snepp, next fall he will be at the Univer-
sity of Southern California School of Journalism teaching a
course on censorship. He says his lectures are subject to CIA
review.
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