Slow Burn; The Rise and Bitter Fall of American Intelligence in Vietnam

25 cm. [4], 294, [2] pages. Illustrations. Maps. Glossary. Index. DJ in plastic sleeve with sticker over barcode. Orrin DeForest was by far the United States' most successful spymaster in the Vietnam war, inflicting massive damage to the Vietcong's political and military structure. David Chanoff is a noted author of non-fiction work. His work has typically involved collaborations with the principal protagonist of the work concerned. His collaborators have included; Orrin deForest, Augustus A. White, Joycelyn Elders, oàn V n To i, William J. Crowe, Ariel Sharon and Kenneth Good. He has also written about a wide range of subjects including literary history, education and foreign for The Washington Post, and The New Republic and the New York Times Magazine. He has more than twelve books. Derived from a review in the New York Times: Written in hard-boiled prose, it is a sort of play-by-play manual of interrogation and penetration techniques and includes lessons on how to extract military intelligence without resort to torture. It is also a disturbing tale of Central Intelligence Agency thickheadedness, incompetence and infighting. The story of his seven years in South Vietnam as a chief regional interrogation officer for the C.I.A. When Mr. DeForest, with several years' experience as an Army Criminal Investigations Division officer behind him, arrived for duty in 1968 he was in his late 40's, and he joined some 600 C.I.A. officers already at work in the war zone. He judged them to be poorly trained, and unable to penetrate the Vietcong guerrilla superstructure of perhaps 700,000 men, women and children through which North Vietnam was laying the groundwork for conquest. Mr. DeForest was not a very high-ranking officer but, pleading lack of coherent direction from his superiors in Saigon, he skirted rules to build a maverick Joint Interrogation Center (J.I.C.) in Bien Hoa, Military Region Three, and fashioned a network of informants and spies within some of the Vietcong's most important operations. He and his crew of American and South Vietnamese interrogators gained intimate intelligence about the Vietcong network by means of guileful patience and gentle stroking, in contrast to the brutal techniques of the South Vietnamese special police. All of this penetration came long after the United States and the South Vietnamese should have achieved it if they were to fight knowingly against the Vietcong and their North Vietnamese backers. To make matters more frustrating, the top brass in Saigon and at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., paid little if any attention to the stream of information coming from Bien Hoa. The South Vietnamese Government took no advantage of it either.…