The good soldier system
Powers, Thomas
The Agency had managed to trap another Of several minds: Thomas Powers CIA book in the courts--costing the pub- lisher $150,000 in legal fees--and to suppress 168 separate words or passages on the...
...Colby had ordered that no one would be allowed to refuse a medal...
...What, then, are we to make of the Supreme Court's decision on February 19 that Snepp had violated a "construc- tive trust" to submit his book for review, and must surrender all his earnings...
...The Snepp decision marks a retreat from this traditional system, in which officials are free to break with the con- sensus if conscience pushed them to it...
...He was sickened by the debacle...
...Government offi- cials do not by nature seem to be obstreperous men and women...
...and Snepp...
...The result was chaos when reality could no longer be denied...
...The world at large, and the CIA, both learned of the book's publication from front-p~age stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post on November 18, 1977...
...After fifteen years of fighting, the end had come suddenly...
...It goes a long way toward explaining the American fail- ure in Vietnam, which was cursed from the beginning by a kind of elephantine wallowing as Americans argued with Americans over American programs to make good on an American commitment in the interests of American prestige...
...This will not help officials to be wise, but only to mask and confuse their failures of wis- dom...
...Perhaps the most enduring result of his book is a far-reaching victory by the CIA for the right to harass and impede other defectors with the law's delay...
...The Agency had managed to trap another Of several minds: Thomas Powers CIA book in the courts--costing the pub- lisher $150,000 in legal fees--and to suppress 168 separate words or passages on the grounds that its principal author, Victor Marchetti, had signed a binding THE GOOD SOLDIER SYSTEM WHEN THE CIA PLAYS BOOK REVIEWER A T THE END of April, 1975, a Marine helicopter took off from the roof of the U.S...
...The Agency was furious...
...It did not occur to him to wonder why the North Viet- nanese would surrender in bargaining what their army was about to win in the field...
...National security, after all, does not depend on the government's absolute freedom to act, nor on its prestige, nor on an image of confident omniscience, but rather on its pursuit of realistic policies which enjoy the informed support of American citizens...
...By chance it was Snepp who drove Thieu to the airport when he finally de- cided to quit the country...
...A number of proposals for variants of an official secrets act have been made in recgnt years, and the Snepp decision is clearly a step in that direction...
...The solution he proposed to Random House was for the secret publication of his book, Decent Interval...
...As I say, Snepp's book is extremely interesting and quite painful, and the CIA has never claimed it...
...No government can function where every official refuses to budge from his own position, or to accept bureaucratic defeat...
...They had been promised es- cape, but no more helicopters returned...
...It was an ugly end to an ugly war...
...Huge stockpiles of war matdriel--tanks, artil- lery, aircraft, fuel, ammunition--were captured intact by the victors...
...Only a handful of editors knew of its existence...
...Decent Interval--the title is an ironic use of Henry Kissinger's phrase for his goal in the peace talks--captures a sense of the passionate confusions and illusions as a twenty-year policy collapsed in disarray...
...Far from -damaging the national security, the handful of de- fectors helped to...
...The world of intelligence is an hermet- ic one...
...it didn't matter if the United States was successful, only that the world should see we made an honest effort...
...a huge milling crowd surrounded the embassy in the last days, begging to be taken...
...Snepp worried that his book would be tied up in legal proceedings while the CIA surrep- titiously attacked and discredited him...
...THOMAS POWERS Commonweal: 262...
...Ambassador, Graham Martin, insisted something might still be salvaged, a new line of defense established, the war con- tinued...
...When he got back to the United States he tried t~ per- suade the CIA's director, William Colby, to order an official investigation of the disaster...
...Then the issue must be taken to a larger audience, so the general public--which pays the ultimate price for failure--may at least know what it's in for...
...But the tragedies were Vietnamese...
...There was no great flood of secret information from policymaking circles even when the government was engaged in blatantly illegal acts, from the secret bombing of Cambodia to the wiretapping of civilians...
...flag had been lowered and folded and carried away by the American ambassador, the doors of the embassy had been locked, files were still smolder- ing in the incinerators, the war was over...
...This means, as a practical matter, that things have to go a long way before a con-troversy erupts in public...
...soldiers...
...contract with the CIA not to reveal clas- sifted information...
...The United States had often predicted a bloodbath in the event of defeat...
...clear the air and focus the debate on what had really happened, and why...
...Random House agreed and the book was sent to the printer in the summer of 1977...
...In February, 1978, the Department of Justice sued Snepp for breach of con- tract, asking the court for all of Snepp's earnings from the book without regard to any classified information it might con- rain...
...The classification sys- tem, whereby "sensitive" facts are .placed on a scale from CONFIDENTIAL to TOP SECRET, COSMIC and beyond, was established by executive order, not by Congress...
...Snepp had signed a similar a- greement on joining the CIA in 1968, and he was afraid it would be used to emascu- late his book...
...Embassy in Saigon with all that remained of an American presence in Vietnam which had once included more than half a million U.S...
...The atmosphere of secrecy and intrigue closes in like a jungle's gloom...
...The U.S...
...The CIA's station chief, Thomas Polgar, hoped to negotiate a coalition govern- ment at the last moment through the help of Hungarian diplomats...
...Even a week or two before the end, the U.S...
...If they go in silence they can expect to be invited back some• day, while a noisy dissent can be counted on to pretty much end a career...
...It would be hard to imagine people with better reason for fearing a victory by Hanoi...
...The government itself, for obvious reasons, would like something still more certain, a way to impose discipline (which means silence) when the good soldier system can no longer be counted on to do the job...
...When Snepp contacted an editor at Ran- dom House, he insisted they meet in'sec- ret and speak in a kind of code...
...In December, 1975, Snepp resigned from the Agency and decided to write a book about what he had seen...
...Better late than never...
...Damage to the nation's security was not at issue, in short, but whether or not the CIA could successfully insist on a right to censor manuscripts by its former employees...
...On paper, at least, it had seemed a match for its North Vietnamese enemies...
...The ambassador played the part of a stoic Roman, as if no one could be hurt by anything he disdained to notice...
...I can think of no high official who resigned in open protest during the Viet- nam years, when disagreements were at their sharpest...
...they were the ones who died in the last futile battles and were left stranded on the tarmac as the Americans pulled out...
...The Agency, meanwhile, was leaking its own version of events in Saigon to friendly journalists...
...In a period of only fifty-five days the South Vietnamese army first abandoned the Central High- lands and then disintegrated...
...Because he did not want to panic the government of President Nguyen Van Thieu, he refused to allow his staff to begin planning for a final evacuation...
...No one has clainied Snepp did not tell the truth...
...Colby was not interested in an official investigation...
...In effect the court ruled that one condition of employment by the CIA is a partial surrender of Con- stitutional rights to freedom of the press and speech...
...But there comes a time when the disagreements are too pro- found to be masked in silence...
...Snepp's book is quite long, 580 pages...
...One of the strengths of the American good soldier system in these matters is that it is designed to break down under stress...
...Victor Marchetti who attacked covert operations in The Cult of Intelligence...
...This apparently fluid system has in fact been extremely strong and effec- tive...
...9 May 1980:261 is filled with circumstantial detail...
...Many of the final tragedies might have been avoided if only the Americans had been willing to admit failure e~,en a week or two sooner...
...But that wasn't all...
...A good part of the CIA's files were abandoned as well, not just the usual office memos and intelligence dossiers, but computer tapes containing the names and operational histories of thousands of Vietnamese who had worked, in one way or another, for the CIA...
...The government seems to have learned nothing from the truth he told...
...The government's purpose in suing Snepp was to reestablish the discipline which had broken down under the twin shocks of Vietnam and Water- gate, prompting government officials to speak out on matters they felt too impor- tant to be tolerated with the customary silence of "the good soldier...
...John Stockwell who revealed the CIA's secret operations in Angola...
...indeed it is probably too difficult to get them to take a principled position even where it's clearly called for...
...But it was too late for an orderly flight when Martin finally conceded there was nothing further to be done...
...As many as 130,000 Vietnamese were evacuated in the final days, but in the confusion many were left behind...
...and makes for painful reading...
...William Bundy once called it "the good doctor" theory...
...The court went out of its way to do this, refusing to hear argument on the matter and going further than the Justice De- partment had asked in its appeal of a lower court decision...
...When Snepp was given a medal for his role he tried to refuse it...
...One passagewhich it tried but failed to suppress reported that Richard Helms, then the Agency's direc- tor, had once mispronounced the name of the Malagasy Republic in an official meeting...
...One of the last Americans to leave Saigon, just before the city fell, was a CIA officer named Frank Snepp...
...it was not announced in the fall catalog, no galleys were sent to the usual advance reviewers, the jacket copy was typed at the last minute and printed directly from manuscript, 15,000 copies of the book were sent'to 2000 bookstores with a covering letter explaining the un- precedented procedure...
...The exceptions embarrassed the gov- ernment by revealing the reality behind bland official pronouncements, but it would be hard to argue they damaged "the national security" in any significant way...
...Discipline ob- tained in the White House, in the milit- ary, in the CIA and elsewhere with only a handful of exceptions-- Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Defense Department's history of decision-making in Vietnam...
...Among those left were thousands of Vietnamese--code clerks and computer operators, Special Branch policemen, officers in the Central Intelligence Organization, translators, defectors from the National Liberation Front--who had worked closely with the CIA...
...Left behind in the embassy compound, as the helicopter disappeared in the distance towards the sea, was a long, patient line of Vietnamese, stand- ing in the gathering dark with their bags and parcels...
...Hun- dreds of thousands of Vietnamese were afraid of the same thing...
...Apart from the crime of treason, which is defined in the Con- stitution, there have traditionally been no laws governing the flow of information in official circles...
...Snepp was there to see the honest effort come to an end, caught between officers in the field who knew what was happening and the embassy officials locked into a dialogue with Washington which considered things from every con- ceivable angle except that of the Viet- namese...
...The Snepp case has been typical of official reaction to the great controver- sies of recent years...
...revealed a.ny classified information of value to an enemy...
...An official might be fired for leaking a secret, but he could not be pro- secuted...
...He was obsessed with a fear the CIA would somehow find a way to kill his book, or to strip it of the detail that might explain the disaster in Saigon and make it real...
...it claimed Snepp had broken his promise twice--the promise he made on joining, ~ and a second promise, made to Stansfield Turner personally on May 17, 1977, that he would submit his manuscript for re- view...
Vol. 107 • May 1980 • No. 9
