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

DeForest, Orrin, and Chanoff, David

ISBN 10: 0671692585 / ISBN 13: 9780671692582

Published by Simon and Schuster, New York, 1990

About this Item

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.

Seller Inventory # 24500

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Slow Burn; The Rise and Bitter Fall of American Intelligence in Vietnam
• Publisher: Simon and Schuster, New York
• Publication Date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0671692585
• ISBN 13: 9780671692582
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Printing [Stated].
• Condition: Very good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Guerrillas
  • Espionage
  • Insurgency
  • CIA
  • Spies

About this title

Synopsis

A CIA leader in Vietnam recalls his experiences

Reviews

As a CIA interrogation officer in Vietnam from 1968 to 1975, DeForrest ran an intelligence network. In this exciting, opinionated memoir, written with Chanoff ( Vietcong Memoir ), he describes how he collected information from Vietcong and North Vietnamese prisoners and defectors through "the art of sympathetic interrogation" while engaged in bitter feuds with his superiors, about whom he is harshly critical here. With the assistance of his Vietnamese mistress, Lan, DeForrest developed a stable of agents who, he maintains, brought in most of the hard intelligence reported to the main CIA station in Saigon. The book captures the terror and claustrophobia of the final days of U.S. involvement in Vietnam when DeForrest's arrangements for the evacuation of his agents proved unsuccessful. Photos.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.