Irreparable Harm: A Firsthand Account of How One Agent Took On the CIA in an Epic Battle over Secr ecy and Free Speech

CIA v Snepp was a constitutional train wreck--and you can't avert your eyes from Irreparable Harm, Frank Snepp's hypnotizing and heartbreaking account of his case."           --Jeffrey Toobin


He began his professional life as a lockstep secret warrior--and wound up an improbable battler for free speech.  This is a searingly personal chronicle of the journey that carried Frank Snepp from the innermost circles of the CIA to the Supreme Court itself and forever changed the meaning of one of the most sacred liberties guaranteed to us by the United States Constitution.
        
Irreparable Harm tells of terror and sacrifice, and of the obsessive determination of CIA officials to destroy a man who dared call them on their mistakes.
        
Among the last CIA agents to be airlifted from Saigon in the closing moments of the Vietnam War, Snepp returned to Agency headquarters determined to force his colleagues to assist Vietnamese left behind. But this was the summer of 1975, when the CIA was under investigation by Congress and unwilling to admit to any more transgressions, least of all its final ones in Vietnam. Unable to prompt even an official summary of the disastrous evacuation, Snepp resigned to write his own account in the hope of generating help for those abandoned, and spent the next eighteen months like a fugitive on the run, dodging CIA agents out to silence him.
        
His expose, Decent Interval, was published in total secrecy under conditions reminiscent of a classic espionage operation--the first time any American book had been brought out this way. But it ignited a firestorm of publicity that drove the CIA and Jimmy Carter's White House to launch a campaign of retaliation unparalleled in the annals of American law, a strategy of vengeance designed to leave Snepp impoverished and gagged for life.
        
In struggling to survive, the onetime spy was forced to accept help from ACLU liberals, antiwar activists, and a fiery Harvard professor named Alan Dershowitz, whom he would previously have viewed as his ideological enemy.
        
Snepp's harrowing firsthand account of his ordeals, from his shadowy trench battles with the Agency, to the destruction of his friends and family, to his historic showdown with the CIA in the courts, reads at times like Kafka's The Trial and at times like a John Grisham thriller, and recounts a tale of government persecution that will leave the reader wondering how any of this could have happened in America.

A graduate of Columbia College in New York and Columbia's School of International Affairs, Frank Snepp,/B> spent eight years in the CIA, five of them in Vietnam as interrogator, agent debriefer, and, finally, chief CIA strategy analyst in the Saigon embassy, from whose rooftop he was airlifted on the last night of the war. Since the publication of his first book, Decent Interval, which became the focus of CIA efforts to block all such exposes, Snepp has taught constitutional law, written for magazines and dramatic TV shows, and worked as an investigative television news reporter and producer, responsible for covering such stories as the Iran-Contra affair and the Monica Lewinsky scandal.