Roger Gathman is a freelance writer who reviews books for the Austin Chronicle and Publishers Weekly. He edits a Webzine, Calumny and Art.

A review of Irreparable Harm by Frank Snepp Random House, $26.95

Irreparable Harm

The events in Irreparable Harm have a clear forward motion. Frank Snepp, the book's author, was a high-level CIA operative in South Vietnam who returned in 1975, shaken by the massive failure of both the intelligence agency and the American ambassador to respond with due speed to the advance of the North Vietnamese army in South Vietnam. As a result of negligence, Snepp believed the agency left its assets (meaning contacts) on the ground, where they suffered the indignities of death and imprisonment by the Vietnamese government. Outraged, Snepp demanded that the agency review its actions in the waning months of the war to no avail.

In response he resigned and went public, both with his first book, Decent Interval, and with a much ballyhooed interview on "60 Minutes." He fingered the agency; as well as Ambassador Graham Martin for having gotten much too close to the corrupt regime of Thieu. Of course, he also criticized then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who, as in most other accounts of the end of the Vietnamese War (except for his own), plays a role not unlike the Penguin's in the Batman series, committing a number of small deceits and major villanies. In response, in the late 1970s, the CIA took him to court on the charge that he violated his contract.

Building on the Marchetti case, in which the CIA managed to censor one of the first (and still one of the central) books about CIA operations, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, with the claim that Marchetti and his publisher had violated Marchetti's contractual obligation to the CIA, the agency exploited its legal innovation even further with Snepp. The advantage here is obvious: with a National Security claim, you have to prove harm with each instance of censorship -- while a contractual claim is, potentially much broader, and turns what is actually a censorship case ( in which the censored can claim victim status) into a financial gains case (in which the victim becomes an exploiter of secrets for his own grubby enrichment). In the Snepp case, the agency claimed Snepp had violated his fiduciary trust by not submitting his manuscript for pre-publication approval. In this way, the CIA, along with Griffin Bell, President Carter's attorney general, shifted the issue from the province of First Amendment rights to one of common contractual obligation. The judiciary, from original Judge Oren Lewis up to the Supreme Court, swallowed that story.

Snepp was taken to the cleaners, with the CIA seizing his profits from Decent Interval and legally empowered to make sure he was not committing any treasons in the TV scripts he wrote for an ABC series, "Undercover." (These had to be routed to Langley CIA headquarters for the good of the republic.)

Firing back

Snepp's telling of the controversy surrounding the publication of Decent Intervalmakes up much of his new book, and it is a sordid affair. One imagines what would have happened to the famed Russian dissident, Sakharov, if Brezhnev had only had the presence of mind to pull the contract trick. The judiciary, here, had basically moved us back to the old days of the Aliens and Sedition Act, with a little window dressing. This is only, however, to be expected. The last place you would turn, nowadays, for a robust defense of civil liberties is the U.S. Supreme Court.

Snepp's book is more than a brief of past events, however. It is flavored with Snepp's character, which is delightfully retro, a throwback to the 1970s. He is a combination of angst and self-absorption, a righteous cocksman, with a moral agenda that is hopelessly entangled in girlfriend problems. He is never without at least two lovely ladies to sleep with at any one time, and he also gets them to do his typing. In return, he never screws up his courage to that sticking point called "commitment."

It is in keeping with his egotism that Snepp truly hated being classified as an agency bad boy. The list includes Phillip Agee, John Stockwell (by Snepp's account, a publicity hound tending toward the lunatic fringe), and Victor Marchetti. Marchetti in particular is a kind of symbol, for Snepp, of the horrors of agency ex-communication. Marchetti is a self-pitying lush, whose household affairs have clearly been wrecked by his involvement/non-involvement with the agency.

Although Snepp never says it, the strange thing about the CIA is that even loyal spooks -- one thinks of the legendary Bill Harvey or James Jesus Angleton-- balance liquorishly between maudlin sentimentality and rabid paranoia. On a deeper level, Snepp's neediness must explain, to some extent, the reception he received when he got back from Southeast Asia. It must have seemed to his superiors that Snepp conflated the agency failure in Vietnam with the CIA failure vis-a-vis Snepp. Although I take Snepp's moral revulsion at the abandonment of the Vietnamese to be sincere, sincerity for Snepp always seems to wind back to Snepp. He is just that kind of guy.

The corruption of the CIA

A more interesting issue, never addressed by the courts, looms large in Snepp's account. The CIA discriminates outrageously in the enforcement of its own security requirements. If the person who wants to reveal information is important, or if the agency thinks the leaks will make the agency look good, they have no problem with the revelation of classified info. Snepp's crime, really, was to make the agency look bad. He never revealed a secret.

An article by James Dempsy in A Culture of Secrecy says the agency still heartily maintains its double standard. They allowed Robert Gates to gleefully spill his secrets in his recent memoir. On the other hand, they have responded with glacial slowness and many objections to President Clinton's Executive Order 12958, which orders records over 25 years old to be declassified. At the last count, in 1997, the CIA had complied with .0001%of the required declassification.

Ho hum. This isn't really unexpected. Edmond Burke once wrote: "Liberty, if I understand it at all, is a general principle, and the clear right of all subjects within the realm, or none. Partial freedom seems to me a most invidious mode of slavery." The CIA, born in the corruption of democratic principle, will only cease to be a malign influence when it ceases, forever, to be.