Decent Interval

An Insider's Account of Saigon's Indecent End Told by the CIA's Chief Strategy Analyst in Vietnam

Frank Snepp

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780700620654
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Vietnam War
• Index: History

Widely regarded as a classic on the Vietnam War, Decent Interval provides a scathing critique of the CIA's role in and final departure from that conflict. Still the most detailed and respected account of America's final days in Vietnam, the book was written at great risk and ultimately at great sacrifice by an author who believed in the CIA's cause but was disillusioned by the agency's treacherous withdrawal, leaving thousands of Vietnamese allies to the mercy of an angry enemy. A quarter-century later, it remains a riveting and powerful testament to one of the darkest episodes in American history.

Part 1

First Rites

Homecoming

When I returned to Saigon in October 1972 after a year’s absence, the North Vietnamese offensive was beginning to sputter out, the country was awash with rumors of imminent peace and the Vietnamese for the first time in decades were allowing themselves the luxury of hoping against hope it would all end soon. As the big Cathay Pacific jet began its final approach to Tan Son Nhut air base, I had an immediate sense of how far we and our allies had come since I had first set foot on Vietnamese soil back in June 1969. On that sweltering summer’s day three years before, the plane had corkscrewed in for a landing to avoid Communist ground fire on the outskirts of the airfield. This time the final descent was a long, slow glide over rows of corrugated roof shanties that had grown up around the city with the continuing influx of refugees, and the green and brown patchwork terrain stretching away into the distance looked as pacific as the Louisiana countryside.

As I jogged across the tarmac to beat the crowds to immigration I remembered my seat companion on that first flight in ’69, a colonel’s wife who was paying a surprise call on her husband to check into rumors he had taken up with a Vietnamese bar girl. By the time we rolled to a stop in front of the arrival terminal, she had rehearsed her worst fears to me a dozen times, over nearly as many martinis, and when she stepped out on the tarmac in the blazing sun she had collapsed on the spot, sending the marines on duty at the front gate into gales of laughter.

Now there were no army wives among my fellow passengers. The only westerner besides myself was a potbellied Australian construction worker with a scruffy Chinese girl on his arm, and if there were any M.P.s backboning the scattering of Vietnamese sentries, they were keeping themselves well out of sight, in deference to Vietnamization.

The ramshackle barn of a building that served as the arrival terminal was in its perennial state of disarray, with broken crates and abandoned luggage strewn across the cement floor—and still without a money changer’s window to accommodate new arrivals. At the immigration counter the same rumpled functionaries who had tested patience and endurance during my first tour of duty still took an eternity picking through passports and shot records, and the Vietnamese who had arrived with me, mostly bejeweled old mama-sans and their shriveled husbands, all seemed quite typically oblivious of the carefully stenciled signs admonishing everyone to line up and wait his turn.

The Vietnamese chauffeur whom the Embassy had sent to pick me up apologized for the chaos, said he remembered me from before, and quickly guided me through the crowds of cabbies and cyclo drivers out front to his air-conditioned Chevrolet. As we pulled out of the main gate of the sprawling air base I caught a glimpse of the small monument the South Vietnamese had recently erected to commemorate U.S. war dead. “The Noble Sacrifice of the Allied Soldiers Will Never Be Forgotten” read the inscription. It was all but overgrown with elephant grass. Three years hence, after the fall of Saigon, the Communists would repaint it yellow and substitute a quote from Ho Chi Minh.

Like all new arrivals I was bedded and boarded in the Duc Hotel, a heavily fortified CIA residential complex only a few blocks away from the South Vietnamese Presidential Palace and the U.S. Embassy. In the late 1960s, during my first tour in Saigon, the Duc had been run like an enlisted men’s barracks, with a carnival atmosphere and T-shirt informality. There had always been a poker game in progress in one of the bedrooms downstairs, and although house rules strictly forbade Vietnamese guests after curfew, few of the foot-loose CIA men had slept alone. The old Vietnamese gentleman who ran the restaurant on the ground floor had never learned to cook hot dogs or hamburgers, and the French bread he bought on the local market had always had a weevil or two baked inside.

In the past year, however, somebody at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, had decided that the boys on the front deserved better, particularly now that consideration was being given to opening Saigon to the families of Embassy personnel, and the Due was in the process of being Americanized and sanitized. The restaurant had been moved upstairs and remodeled in Howard Johnson’s modern; a bar, swimming pool and sun deck had been built alongside so you could sunbathe and sip Bloody Marys simultaneously; and the menu was all staple American and fresh-frozen besides. Even the bread was now imported (bugless) from stateside. The Vietnamese waitresses had all been rung through CIA security investigations to make sure none had Communist connections and the tuniclike ao dai dresses that had once made them so provocative had been replaced by neat little uniforms straight out of a kindergarten graduation.

Every evening at eight o’clock you could catch a first-run movie in the new screening room just off the downstairs lobby, and a fully equipped photographic darkroom, recording studio and library were open at all hours. CIA shuttle buses made the run to the Embassy each morning so you didn’t have to fight rush-hour traffic, and there were always chauffeured cars available to take you to the PX or to the commissary or to the CIA’s ultramodern infirmary down the street, where two reasonably qualified doctors were on duty around-the-clock to tend to the ravages of your overindulgence. Eventually almost every CIA officer was issued an automobile of his own, together with a free gas ration, although usually only after he had also been assigned a permanent residence, an apartment or villa depending on rank, elsewhere in the city. Curiously enough, Ford Pintos were the Station’s automotive preference, and whoever drove one might as well have been wearing a sign “I work for the CIA,” for we were the only “official Americans” in Vietnam who used them.

For the 300 men and women who now made up the CIA Station, life had been wrapped up in a neat little package, complete with one stateside vacation each year to break the routine. Nowhere in the world, in no other hot spot did CIA personnel live so well or so expensively, courtesy of the American taxpayer.

A day or so after settling in at the Duc, I made a foray into downtown Saigon, only a few blocks away. It was midday when I managed to break away, and the hands of the big clock on the face of the Post, Telephone and Telegraph building had just gone upright as I maneuvered my borrowed Pinto in among the milling Vietnamese out front, many of whom were dispersing for home or heading across the street to vie for sleeping space in the shadowed porticoes of the Catholic cathedral. As I repeatedly applied my brakes to avoid running down an oblivious pedestrian, I remembered a similarly lazy day in the summer of 1969, when the Viet Cong had tied wires and a charge of plastique to the hands of the clock and had blown out the entire façade of the PTT offices. Scores of dozers and passers-by had been wounded or killed outright and the local diocese had kept day laborers working for weeks picking shards of glass out of the cathedral’s clay columns.

Now the prospect of such violence seemed almost whimsical. No doubt you could still go to the roof of the Caravelle Hotel at night and watch Vietnamese helicopter gunships rivet parachute flares out along the skyline like studs in black velvet, and the crump of artillery and distant B-52 strikes still shook the bed at night. But there had been no spectacular Communist sabotage for months and the last native to immolate himself in the bizarre tradition of the Buddhist radicals of the early and mid-1960s had been a one-armed disabled veteran who had dropped a Bastos cigarette in his lap three weeks before as he dozed under the eaves of a flower vendor’s kiosk on Nguyen Hue Boulevard.

When I returned to the Duc Hotel at dusk, one of the old-timers who had done several tours in Vietnam had his elbows on the bar and was reminiscing about Saigon as he had known it in the early 1960s, when it was still the Paris of the Orient, with wide tree-lined boulevards, the best Chinese restaurants in Southeast Asia and equally superior brothels, one of which—the “House of a Thousand Mirrors”—had reputedly offered as many diversions as its name implied.

But as I listened, his memories ran out around the year 1965, for it was then that the explosion of easy money touched off by the influx of U.S. combat forces had reduced the best of the city to debris. By the time the great Communist offensive of 1968 had done its worst, Saigon had become a grimy imitation of frontier Dodge City. American GIs with bandoliers over their shoulders and a month’s salary in their fatigues had the run of the place, and the local citizenry had either withdrawn into their own quiet lives to wait out the storm or begun working up schemes to turn a profit from it. Even the brothels had turned low-quality, as inexperienced peasant girls flocked in from the countryside, determined to make up in fast service and easy availability what they lacked in finesse. The cleverer and prettier ones eventually settled in at the 147 Club on Vo Thanh Street or the Dragon Bar off Le Loi Boulevard or the incomparable Mimi’s Flamboyant, a grubby niche in a wall on Nguyen Hue, where a generation of American GIs lost both their shirts and their innocence.

Doing a tour of duty in Saigon in those earlier days was like being locked up in an overcrowded sweatbox for a year and a half. None of the saner Americans who had worked in the Embassy in 1969 and ’70 had wanted to be there; and those who did were tottering drunks, old maids or fuzzy-headed romantics who were too intoxicated with their own illusions to realize where they were. The Vietnamese, of course, had wished a plague on all our houses and would have preferred being left totally alone. But since the war in those days still washed around the edges of the city, there had been no margin for anyone’s solitude. We were all in it together, elbow to elbow, with no headroom and no diversions except the bars or massage parlors on Tu Do Street or the waterfront rattraps that passed for nightclubs, where hyped local bands like the CBC could lay down Jimi Hendrix or “American Woman” with a mocking vengeance.

Not all of that had disappeared by the time I returned to Saigon in October 1972. Some of the old shabbiness still clung to the city like a scab. The stubby apartment houses and hotels in the center of town near Lam Son Square all wore the flaking gray façades that had always betrayed their age, and the gutters even along the major thoroughfares still reeked of urine and garbage, despite periodic rounds by trash-sweeping trucks provided to Saigon municipal authorities under U.S. aid programs. The traffic itself was as lethal and improvisatory as ever, and invariably at rush hour the air over the city turned gray and spongy from the exhausts of the countless Hondas and Japanese automobiles the Vietnamese managed to keep running despite the rising price of gas. The last of the surviving tamarind trees along lower Tu Do Street seemed finally to be succumbing to the pall, although wits in the local French community continued to blame their passing on the residual effects of U.S. military defoliants.

From what I could see and touch, there had been no improvement in the esthetic or hygienic qualities of the city’s night life. A few weeks before, the government in a paroxysm of energy had shut down all the junkier bars and massage parlors along Tu Do and Nguyen Hue to celebrate the shrinkage of the American market and to staunch the resulting inflation. But like most efforts at reform in this city, this one turned out to be mere shadow play. The toughest hookers had decamped to the veranda of the colonial Continental Hotel, where Graham Greene had sat at a corner table in the early 1950s and scrawled out a first draft of The Quiet American, and most of the “restaurants” that had sprung up in place of the bars offered the same attractions, except now the girls all wore white “waitress” smocks and offered you a salad and a hamburger of water-buffalo meat before lapsing into the usual hard sell.

For all the shabbiness, though, there was an air of accomplished and impending change about the city that perhaps only a Vietnamese could fully appreciate. The people I brushed up against in the streets or in the marketplace or in the course of business seemed more generous, less driven than before. The beggars and street urchins along Nguyen Hue Boulevard were more polite and deferential in their ancestral manner, as if they realized that the American bonanza was ending and hoped through some small act of diplomacy to keep a few of the big spenders on. And the Vietnamese GIs who still crowded into the shops and cafés on weekends were holding hands again, as they had ceased doing at the height of the American involvement only a few years before, when U.S. GIs—not knowing the custom to be an old and venerated one among Vietnamese men—had dubbed them a nation of queers.

An old Chinese merchant who had bought up one of the better massage parlors on Tu Do and turned it into a noodle stand told me with a great show of candor that it was the disappearance of the American GIs that had made all the difference, just as their arrival, he insisted, had caused the war. “Because of the riches you brought us,” he said, “we were forced to acknowledge our own poverty and to compete among ourselves to change as you wanted us to do. But now that you Americans are going home, we can again feel safe and comfortable with our illusions.”

The same old merchant would be among the first of my Saigon friends to leave Vietnam in April 1975, as the Communists, Vietnamese all, began their final drive on the city.

Except for the dwindling numbers of American GIs, Saigon’s principal cast of characters remained as I had remembered it: a menagerie of innocents and rogues and variations on the two that might have sprung from the imagination of Hieronymus Bosch.

Over there, at the corner of Le Loi and Nguyen Hue—surely you remember him—that aging cyclo driver perched vulture-like on the seat of his cab, the very portrait of the city’s resiliency and indifference, as familiar as yesterday, pith helmet pressed down over the ears, sunglasses vainly seeking purchase on an archless nose. And there, at the corner of Tu Do: tough, vacant, hips swinging in imitation leather, breasts silicone-stretched to centerfold proportions, the hooker maybe seventeen or eighteen, hopped up on coke or bennies, babbling half-understood obscenities in barroom Americanese at the cabbies, who ignore her.

Or the peasant girl: feline, timid, the conical hat tipped to one side, the rubber-tire sandals slapping the pavement as she moves just ahead of you from stall to stall in the Central Market, the black silk trousers billowing around thin legs. Or her counterpart: the young South Vietnamese soldier, eyes extinguished beneath steel visor, the M-16 rifle almost as big as he, the unappreciated, undermotivated fall guy forced to eke out a living for his wife and expanding family on the equivalent of twelve dollars a month, with no hope of escape or respite until he is carried out on a stretcher or turns thirty-seven, too old to become anything else.

And remember, too, the elite, the central players. By noon on an average day they’ve already gathered at the ramshackle French colonial sports club, Le Cercle Sportif, for their two-hour lunch break at poolside. On one side of the sun deck: expatriates from the underside of French society, old colons and young pretenders, lean, bronzed mixed-bloods in rubber-band bikinis, their talk careening from plastic intellectualism to drugs to fast cars, to swapping lovers to shady deals and contraband. And there, just beyond them, in a claque of their own: quiet men gone to flab, each balancing himself on a lounge chair with care and a certain flourish, to give maximum girth to an already considerable paunch, the mark of prosperity and distinction in this strange land. Vietnamese or Chinese doyens all, whispering business or politics over their citrons presses, with the wealth to buy their way out if the latest plot fails.

Later, maybe at three or four, you drive over to Tu Do Street and stop by Givral’s café for a French coffee, black as ink. And here, too, the elite holds court—but young faces these, bonnets of black hair, the two sexes indistinguishable in their tie-dye shirts and bell bottoms: the student set in Saigon, detesting the Americans they imitate.

And should you wander down the street to browse through some of the more expensive shops in the Eden Arcade, sooner or later another of the city’s privileged brushes past, head up, unnoticing, a gilded copy of the latest vogue, nose and eyes surgically reshaped to western proportions, the Thai silk dress and Cambodian amulets radiating wealth, all advertisements for a discreet affair, pitched to gentlemen of means. Second wife or concubine to a prominent Vietnamese general or politician: speaking French, patronizing the French, condescending to flirt with an American only when it might prove more profitable.

At last cocktail hour rolls around, and you drop by Mimi’s for a quick beer, and inevitably, at the center of the courtesans, he is already granting audience, another lord in this domain. Florid, bull-necked, checkered shirt hanging loose over the barrel gut, he hardly looks the part. But lord he is, for here, in all his glory, is the American homesteader, the former truckdriver or factory foreman, who hangs on from year to year bossing Vietnamese road gangs or construction teams on behalf of the American firms contracted out to pick up after every skirmish. Master to a cringing Vietnamese wife or mistress, keeper of the American superiority complex, the last of us they will see when the Americans go home.

• • •

The United States Embassy on Thong Nhut Street had not changed much in the year I had been away. Someone at last had planted flowers in the urns in the courtyard, where the Viet Cong had set up machine-gun nests during their attack on the compound in the opening days of their offensive in 1968, but the concrete artillery shield covering the façade of the building, with its rows of rectangular portholes, still had no more esthetic appeal than the underside of a waffle iron, and the plastic-paned windows just behind it rattled and shimmied as they always had with each burst of artillery fire on the city’s outskirts. Looking out from inside, you could not see much of the surrounding grounds, for the portholes transformed the vista into a series of disjointed triptyches that seemed to bear little relation to each other. But perhaps that was a fitting metaphor for the way Americans had seen Vietnam all along—disconnected images, never the whole.

Architecturally there was something about the Embassy that had always seemed a mockery of our pretenses here. I suppose that if you have to build the seat of your diplomatic Mission in the image of a self-sustaining fortress, that says a little about the efficacy of your diplomacy. And fortress it was, with its own sixty-man Marine guard force, its artillery shield, a rooftop helicopter landing pad and a ten-foot-high wall to keep locals and tourists out of the compound.

Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker and his State Department staff still occupied the first three floors of the building, while the top three were given over to the CIA Station. Initially I was assigned a desk in the office of the CIA’s counterintelligence staff, which to my delight was located on the fifth...