IRREPARABLE HARM.

• Author: Garrow, David J.
• Position: Review

IRREPARABLE HARM by Frank Snepp Random House, $26.95

TWENTY-TWO YEARS AGO, Frank Snepp published Decent Interval, a stunningly powerful account of how American officials in Saigon abandoned thousands of South Vietnamese compatriots when North Vietnamese troops captured the city in April 1975. Snepp had been a 32-year-old CIA agent in the U.S. Embassy, and he had anticipated all too well how his superiors' wishful thinking and inadequate planning would lead to a chaotic American evacuation once the North Vietnamese forces moved in. Overcome by anger at how many committed South Vietnamese had been left behind to face tortured futures at the hands of their captors, Snepp pressed for a thorough inquiry into the American failure. The CIA was not interested, and once Snepp decided to write just such a study himself, his resignation was a foregone conclusion.

Decent Interval became justly famous as much for the circumstances of its publication as for its riveting and painful narrative. Snepp chose to believe that his several CIA secrecy agreements--one dating from when he joined the Agency, and a second decidedly different one from when he resigned--obligated him to submit the manuscript to CIA censors only if it contained classified information, which he firmly (and correctly) believed it did not. Random House editor Robert Loomis worked assiduously with Snepp to assure that no government intervention would delay publication, and in November 1977 the book's appearance was heralded by a front-page story in The New York Times and extended coverage on CBS News' Sixty Minutes.

But the CIA was not about to let Snepp enjoy his triumph. Overcoming initial vacillation by the Carter Justice Department, the government filed suit against Snepp in federal court, seeking to seize all of the income generated by Decent Interval and to impose official censorship on anything Snepp might write in the future. The government's suit was assigned to a spectacularly biased federal district judge in northern Virginia, Oren R. Lewis, and a pathetically, unfair trial resulted in an across-the-board CIA victory. Eighteen months later, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an opinion affirming both portions of the judgment without even deigning to hear arguments. An all-but-bankrupt defendant paid $144,931 to the U.S. Treasury and mailed the manuscript of a never-to-be-published novel to the CIA.

Irreparable Harm is Snepp's richly autobiographical account of all his trials and...