Sept. 14, 2007 – 7:17 p.m.
No matter President Bush’s assurances of an “enduring relationship” with Iraq, it’s not soon to plan for a swift evacuation of Baghdad, says the CIA man at the center of the chaos when the Vietnam War ended three decades ago.
The swift retreat of the South Vietnamese Army in the face of an enemy offensive was as much of a surprise to American commanders in Saigon as a complete Iraq government collapse is unimaginable to U.S. leaders today, says Frank Snepp, who was the CIA’s top analyst on communist strategy in Saigon in 1975.
“Wishful thinking is a narcotic, and it doomed us, and a lot of our friends, in Vietnam in the last days,” Snepp said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles, where he now works as an investigative producer for KNBC-TV.
“If we want to go through that humiliation again, then we should proceed along with our blinkers intact. That should be one cautionary lesson from the last moments of that war,” he said. “There are others, but that is an overriding one.”
Snepp, then 32, had been in Saigon for four and a half years when a modest initial enemy offensive sent the South Vietnamese Army reeling. The resulting mass panic in Saigon and other cities ended in the ignominious flight of Americans from rooftops in helicopters and the execution or imprisonment of tens of thousands of loyal Vietnamese in communist “re-education” camps.
In 1977, Snepp published a searing, unauthorized book on the debacle, “Decent Interval: An Insider’s Account of Saigon’s Indecent End,” which detailed how CIA and other embassy officials, blinded by wishful thinking about the resilience of the South Vietnamese government and army, refused to plan for the unthinkable. When the unthinkable came, it was too late for an orderly withdrawal.
Although CIA officials conceded that Snepp’s expose contained no classified information, the courts ruled that the former true believer had violated his secrecy oath and thus forfeited any claim to royalties.
Now, three decades later, Snepp has grayed at the temples but lost little of the fire over what he saw as the CIA’s unnecessary losses of agents and files in the Saigon evacuation.
In two interviews last week, the former spy, who says he regularly talks with contacts going in and out of Iraq, said the differences between 1975 and 2007 are at once starkly different and uncomfortably similar.
“You’re not going to have an overnight collapse as you did in March 1975, when half the South Vietnamese Army disintegrated,” he said, if only because “we don’t have any army to disintegrate in Iraq yet, not one that can face up to major insurgent challenges.”
But “there are parallels [to Vietnam] in the way we look at our allies,” he continued. “We were as blinkered with respect to their capabilities as we seem to be to the Iraqis. They aren’t near to being a full-fledged army like South Vietnam’s, but what we do see is that some of our generals and our intelligence people are not realistically assessing the prospects of that army taking on any real responsibility.
“It’s almost absurd,” he declared, “to think they could do what a well trained American expeditionary army can do” if U.S. units leave.
Over the summer, the U.S. command put a lot of chips on Sunni tribes turning on the largely foreign suicide bombers of al Qaeda in Iraq. But the murder of Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, the Sunni coalition’s leader, by a road mine on Sept. 13 showed just how vulnerable the strategy is to assassination, blackmail and coercion.
In any event, how backing provincial Sunni tribes leads to the professed U.S. goal of creating a unified government with murderous Shiite militias baffles most independent experts.
In Vietnam, Snepp recalled, the CIA similarly fostered local militias to fight the communists, circumventing corrupt and ineffectual Saigon government officials.
But “none of the guys at the top ever trusted these local sects,” said Snepp. “It makes it impossible for a country to cohere if you have these pockets of secure but self-sustaining influence.”
Still, administration supporters were singing an optimistic, if tentative, tune by week’s end.
That’s another Vietnam parallel, Snepp thinks.
“There is still such wishful thinking in Iraq, nobody is planning for an endgame. There is no substantial planning for taking care of those who work with us.”
Ironically, that’s where the Vietnam analogy falls short, he says, for the bleakest of reasons: We may not have many friends left in Iraq.
About 2 million Iraqis who might have worked with us have fled the country, and the exodus continues to Syria, Jordan and elsewhere. “The best people have left,” he maintains.
In comparison, right up to the end in Saigon, he said, “I think that there were still lots of talented Vietnamese who hoped that things would work out. But the most talented, the best trained, have left in this mass migration from Iraq. So the question is, who can handle the infrastructure?”
No matter what, U.S. commanders need to prepare to exit with what friends they have, Snepp said.
“What they need to do is prepare for an endgame. I’m not talking a vague preparation of some possible landing zones and egress routes for American forces and our friends. They have to get down to the nitty-gritty, and talk about how many people can be evacuated by whatever means, whether overland or by airlift, within a particular given time and emergency circumstances.”
In Saigon, U.S. officials feared setting off mass panic by even thinking aloud about evacuation plans, much less making them, right up until North Vietnamese tanks were crunching up the city’s streets.
“Then it was too late. We didn’t have time to draw up lists of the people we should be assisting,” Snepp said — or plans for how to get rid of huge volumes of incriminating files overnight, from the field offices up to and including the embassy.
“You’ve got to have plans for destroying your files,” Snepp said. “And certainly you can’t spread them around where they can be captured if you’re overrun.”
Recruited into the CIA out of Columbia University’s School of International Affairs in 1968 and shipped to Saigon shortly after, Snepp had a well-placed North Vietnamese spy feeding him inside dope on the communists’ plans.
Today Snepp wonders how much the CIA really knows about what’s going on in Baghdad or other parts of Iraq.
The dicey security outside the Green Zone makes it impossible for CIA agents to safely walk the streets, chat up prospective spies in the markets and restaurants or meet informants already on the payroll.
“From what I can determine with my contacts within the agency,” he said, “we don’t have the kind of high level or very well placed agents inside [the insurgent groups] that we had in Vietnam. You get some tactical intelligence, but . . . I wonder if we have anybody in the Sadr Army [a powerful Shiite militia]. How could you access them? Sure you can have a radio contact. But I can’t imagine that really taking place. It has to be difficult as hell.”
Several other intelligence sources say the same.
“The guys I talk to say you don’t know beyond the next street how many people have been killed,” Snepp said. “Now you can make a spot check in the morgue. Maybe more bodies are there, but that simply presupposes that people weren’t burned up or buried alive.
“So the notion that you can truly measure, in any finite way, levels of violence or casualties, is ludicrous,” he continued. “One guy who was in Vietnam told me it makes the statistics in Vietnam seem really solid, because the statistics out of Iraq are so elusive, making any quantifications almost impossible.”
And now the British have pulled their troops out of Basra, port capital of the oil-rich south .
“I mean, how do we know what the hell is happening?” Snepp said. “In the southern part of the country, now that the ‘coalition of the willing’ has disappeared, we have no [human spy] coverage at all. You can monitor cell phones, and that is an advantage, and maybe you can spot a roadside bomb through infrared or some other spy-in-the-sky technology, but beyond that we really are blinkered.”
In the end, there aren’t any “lessons of Vietnam” that lead to the kind of solution U.S. leaders hope for in Iraq — a national unity government of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.
“What they do is teach you how to pacify a small section of the map,” he said. “And you can do it by making local accommodations, by buying people off, by doing an ‘Anbar province awakening,’ if you will. But where are ‘lessons from Vietnam’ that teach you how to go from there to reconciliation?”
They don’t exist.
“These assholes on the Sunday talk shows who say you’ve got to have reconciliation before you can have a solution to these problems — they have it ass-backwards,” says Snepp, his North Carolina lilt stiffening. “You’ve got to be able to move from local accommodation to national reconciliation, but there are no lessons to teach us how to do it.”
“You can look at Vietnam in vain,” he says, “for diamonds from this area.”
BACKCHANNEL CHATTER
FBI Gets its Man: The FBI has vaulted yet another agent with a dearth of field experience into its top intelligence ranks. An FBI admirer calls Timothy J. Healy, who last week was named special agent in charge (SAC) of the Washington Field Office’s Intelligence Division, “a very bright guy who will do well.”
But outside of recent stints in the managerial ranks of the FBI-led Terrorist Screening Center, which he helped stand up and subsequently was named deputy director, and as deputy intelligence director at the WFO over the past year, Healy’s resume doesn’t show any operational experience actually running a terrorism case. It’s a pattern that has concerned critics of the FBI’s high-turnover counterterrorism program since 9/11.
“He may be a great guy and very competent, but geez . . . ,” says one former top FBI intelligence official, who calls the Washington Field Office “probably the most critical counterterrorism field office” in the bureau.
Joining the FBI in 1986, Healy followed a traditional crimebuster’s career path busting mokes in the hinterlands, winning awards along the way. In 1997, he was made manager of the Telemarketing Program in the Economic Crime Unit of the Criminal Investigative Division, according to the FBI. In 2000 “he initiated the Internet Fraud Complaint Center and became the center’s first unit chief.”
The FBI needs good folks in the terrorism fight. We wish him the best of luck.
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.