CIA Officer Frank Snepp Discusses Planting Stories in Vietnam (Frank Snepp)

CIA Officer Frank Snepp Discusses Planting Stories in Vietnam
Author	Frank Snepp
Spoken on	1983
First published	Vietnam Reconsidered Conference
Source	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwerBZG83YM

Foreword by ProleWiki

A 1983 interview of former CIA officer Frank Snepp conducted by journalist Clete Roberts. Uploaded to YouTube by Witness to War on October 1, 2017 with the title "CIA Officer Frank Snepp Discusses Planting Stories in Vietnam."

Transcript

Journalist: Frank, I think a good many of us have the impression that the CIA operates completely undercover, that you're all "spooks," as they say, or they used to say, out in the Pacific. Do you have a high profile? Do people know what you do for a living?

Frank Snepp: Surely. In Saigon, I had various covers. I was a State Department officer; I was a military officer at one time. But everybody I dealt with—agents, journalists—knew that I worked for the CIA. It is the agent who works under very deep cover, under unofficial cover, as a businessman, as a journalist—now, he's the one who is not identifiable, and whom nobody else would identify with the agency.

Journalist: What years were you there?

Frank Snepp: I got there in 1969, just as "Vietnamization" was getting underway. And I left with the last CIA contingent on the roof of the American embassy when the north Vietnamese were moving on the city in 1975. I was there through the latter stages of the war.

Journalist: Did you go out on that helicopter? In the famous pictures we saw?

Frank Snepp: The CIA helicopter was the one that forms that famous photograph, but I wasn't on that one, no.

Journalist: You were—you briefed the press, did you not, when you were there?

Frank Snepp: Well, I had several jobs. One of my jobs was that of an analyst. I also was an interrogator and, indeed, briefed the press when we, the CIA, wanted to circulate disinformation on a particular issue. This information is not necessarily a lie; it may be a half-truth. And we would pick out a journalist, I would go do the briefing, and hope that he would put the information in print.

Journalist: What was your percentage of success?

Frank Snepp: We were pretty successful in planting information of a rather rarefied nature. For instance, if we wanted to get across to the American public that the north Vietnamese were building up their force structure in south Vietnam, I would go to a journalist and advise him that in the past six months, X number of north Vietnamese forces had come down the Ho Chi Minh Trail system through southern Laos. Now, there is no way a journalist can check that information. That's data derived from radio intercepts, spy-in-the-sky photography. So either he goes with the information or he doesn't. And ordinarily, or usually, the journalist would go with it because it looked like some kind of exclusive. And I would say our percentage planting that kind of data was 70 to 80 percent.

Journalist: Can you recall the names of any of the correspondents you used in that manner?

Frank Snepp: "Used" is a loaded term. The correspondents we targeted were those who had terrific influence, the most respected journalists in Saigon: like Robert Shaplen of The New Yorker magazine, Keyes Beech of the Los Angeles Times from time to time—and also, he worked for the Chicago Daily News—Bud Merrick of U.S. News & World Report, Malcolm Browne of The New York Times, even Maynard Parker of Newsweek magazine. We would go after these gentlemen. I would be directed to cultivate them, to spend time with them at the Caravel Hotel or the Continental Hotel, to socialize with them, and slowly but surely to try to gain their confidence by dolloping out valid information—information which was true. And then I would drop into a conversation the data that we wanted to get across, which might not be true. One piece of data, for instance, that we managed to plant in The New Yorker magazine had to do with a supposed north Vietnamese effort in 1973 to develop airfields along the border of south Vietnam. The reason we wanted to plant this information was that we were trying to persuade the U.S. Congress that Saigon should continue to get a great deal of aid and that the north Vietnamese were the chief violators of the ceasefire accord. That was printed in The New Yorker magazine under the byline of Robert Shaplen, as indeed was a great deal of such information which we tried to circulate.

Journalist: Considering that you knew the amount of disinformation, or most of it, that was being fed to the correspondents, what do you think, or what did you think, of the quality of reporting that came out of Vietnam?

Frank Snepp: Reporting from correspondents who were operating independently of the agency, who did not rely on agency sources, was very good. I cite, in particular, Peter Arnett. I remember after the fall of Saigon, one of my jobs was to query journalists who'd stayed in Vietnam after the collapse, and as they came out, I was to get in touch with them and try to persuade them to report on what they'd seen. This was not a disinformation job; it was an intelligence collection operation. I contacted Peter Arnett at Associated Press headquarters, and I said, "Mr. Arnett, I'm Frank Snepp from the American embassy. Could you tell me what you saw?" And there was a silence on the line, and he said, "You can read about it in my Associated Press dispatch." He was one of the few journalists who turned me down, however. There were a great many others who were willing to trade their information for information I might have, which was a frequent transaction in Vietnam.

Journalist: Any other reporters you can remember who refused to have anything to do with the CIA? Can you name them?

Frank Snepp: Well, there were lots of young reporters who didn't want to deal with the agency because they were very suspicious. Many of them had come out of the anti-war movement in the United States and had a natural disinclination to trust any official agency. Offhand, the names escape me because, again, we weren't interested in going after the reporter for Ramparts magazine. We were interested in those reporters who could get their material in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and so forth. And once again, I want to make it perfectly clear that we were not hiring these reporters. They were not operating as our spies or as our dupes. But in a war situation, when there are so few sources of information, a reporter may rely on a CIA contact, and he becomes vulnerable. In Saigon, if I planted a piece of information with a reporter, I would ordinarily then try to create an environment in which he could not check the information. I would go to the British ambassador and brief him on the disinformation I had just given the reporter. So when the reporter wanted to cross-check what I told him with, say, the British ambassador, New Zealand ambassador, or what have you, he would get false confirmation—the same message coming back at him. He would say, "Aha, I've got proof that Frank Snepp told me the truth," when in fact what he'd gotten was simply an echo of what I'd given him in the first place via the British ambassador or other of our friendly diplomatic contacts.

Journalist: Frank, I have a two-part question. What were the objectives of, or what was the objective of the CIA? And what about the moral implications of what you were doing in feeding disinformation? Did the objective override the moral implications? Moral problems?

Frank Snepp: Well, the objective of the agency, in general, is to generate intelligence and get it back to Washington, to get at the truth and make sure the policymakers understand it. When you plant disinformation, you are diverging from that objective, and I think probably, in retrospect, it was very counterproductive. I am, as an ex-CIA agent, opposed to the disinformation activities in which I was involved. I admit that I was involved, and I think it served no useful purpose. Propagandizing the American public or Congress is not the CIA's job. As to the morality of what the CIA was doing or that particular activity, the war was a very relative thing. It was a relativist environment, and morality seldom came into play when you were operating in the field. In my estimation, a CIA man should be amoral. That may sound pretty shocking to somebody, but what if my morality were that of a Nazi, or an agent, if you will? You wouldn't want me to be your intelligence officer. Keep the morals out of intelligence, keep the truth in, and stay away from disinformation.

Journalist: Well, what was the primary purpose of the CIA as you viewed it? Was it an intelligence-gathering agency, or was it an agency that was primarily involved in covert operations?

Frank Snepp: They were both part of the CIA's mandate in Vietnam, and the agency performed covert action—covert operations—very well when the operations were held to a limited size and were of limited objective. When they got big, like the Phoenix Program, they got out of hand, and innocent people died as a result. Innocent, by that I mean people who were not connected with the communist movement.

Journalist: You might refresh our memory on the Phoenix Program briefly.

Frank Snepp: The Phoenix Program was an assassination—well, it was a program designed to neutralize the communist cadre network throughout south Vietnam, mainly through capture. But it got out of hand, and what happened was Phoenix operatives, operating under CIA control and the control of other agencies, would kill the suspects, the people who were suspected of VC connections.

Journalist: Let's talk about Frank Snepp for just a moment. You wrote a book titled Decent Interval, right? It was published; it's on the stands right now. What was your personal experience with the CIA after writing that book?

Frank Snepp: My personal experience with the CIA was a lawsuit. The U.S. government sued me for publishing Decent Interval without the CIA's approval, even though nobody ever accused me of publishing any secrets in the book. The lawsuit went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court came down with a decision which is historic in its implications. The Supreme Court decided that every government worker in a position of trust—whether in the CIA, State Department, National Security Council—has an implicit obligation to submit what he says or writes about his work to the government for censorship. If he doesn't, he is liable to monetary penalties, forfeiture of all of his profits. And all of the profits from Decent Interval, my profits, were forfeited to the government. And he is subject to a lifelong gag order, which means that he must continue to submit his statements to the government for approval, again, even if there are no secrets involved and even if he has signed no secrecy agreement with the government. This involves an implicit obligation.

Journalist: Had you signed a secrecy agreement when you left?

Frank Snepp: I'd signed six different secrecy agreements. And the secrecy agreement that I signed on leaving the agency said the only thing I had to protect was secrets. I protected secrets. The Supreme Court said that didn't matter; I was obliged to protect even non-secrets. This is something unprecedented in American law.

Journalist: Straighten me out on one thing. If you write on anything else other than the CIA and your experiences, you do not have to submit it, right?

Snepp: Novels, screenplays. All are submitted.

Journalist: Everything?

Frank Snepp: Everything. Not to the CIA, but to the U.S. government, for censorship. And again, anybody in the government now is under the same regime of censorship. One of the victims of the Vietnam War was the First Amendment, and my case was one of the cases that came out of the Vietnam War.

Journalist: To whom in the government do you submit it for review?

Frank Snepp: I submit it first to the Central Intelligence Agency. And it's a case of having the criticized censor the criticism. If I object to something the CIA tries to delete, then I go to court, and I have to argue before a judge that what I want to keep in is not injurious to the agency. That's an impossible argument to make because the courts in this country increasingly defer to the national security community in any cases like this.

Journalist: Well now, how did your case differ from the decisions in the Pentagon Papers? Was there any similarity at all?

Frank Snepp: Yes, indeed. Because in the Pentagon Papers case, the Supreme Court recognized for the first time in American history—or I should say, for the second time—that prior restraint, the use of gag orders, was permissible under certain circumstances, in instances of impending peril to the national security. In my case, the Supreme Court broadened the circumstances under which prior restraint, the use of gag orders, is permissible. And now, gag orders can be applied to people who are not threatening the national security, who have simply held a job in the government and wish to speak about something that they have gained knowledge of as a result of their government employment.

Journalist: What is your view of the Supreme Court decision in the Pentagon Papers case?

Frank Snepp: It differs with the view normally held by the press. The press views the Supreme Court decision to let the New York Times, The Washington Post publish the Pentagon Papers as a great victory for the journalistic profession and the principle of free speech. My view is somewhat different. As I said before, that decision by the Supreme Court, in effect, recognized the legitimacy of prior restraint in the use of gag orders under certain conditions. And that's something that is not in the press's interest. And yet the press is often so short-sighted as to emphasize the small victories and to neglect the implications of what has been done by a court.

Journalist: Well, as a strategy analyst, you've seen and read the Pentagon Papers, I presume. Was there any breach of security in that, in your opinion?

Frank Snepp: There were several pieces of information in the Pentagon Papers which bore classified labels. As to whether their publication was injurious to the national security, I would say not. Some of the information which bore a classified label was, in fact, disinformation—information which was not accurate but nonetheless classified.

Journalist: Can you think of anything that would have given aid and comfort to Moscow?

Frank Snepp: Absolutely not. The Central Intelligence Agency has itself conducted a post-mortem on the Pentagon Papers—so has the Pentagon. Both have concluded that the publication of the papers had no adverse consequences for national security.