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Decent Interval

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

Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition

Frank Snepp

With a new foreword by Gloria Emerson

October 2002
636 pages, 35 photographs, 6 x 9-1/8
Paper ISBN 978-0-7006-1213-0, $24.95

book cover imageWidely 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 had 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.

“A great service to everyone’s understanding of what happened in Vietnam in the spring of 1975. . . . Other accounts of that time will have to be measured against what Snepp, from his unique and highly informed vantage point, has produced.”—Kevin Buckley, New York Times Book Review

“By far the richest document yet produced on the American and South Vietnamese end game.”—Laurence Stern, Washington Post Book World

“An astonishing book. . . . Brilliantly argued and elegantly written.”—Seymour Hersh, Los Angeles Times

“The value of Snepp’s book is that it teaches us, in an absorbing and brilliant manner, where the mistakes were made in the CIA and in the highest ranks of officials. . . . Even the most ardent critics of the war could not have ever guessed what Snepp the [CIA] insider has revealed.”—Gloria Emerson, winner of the National Book Award for Winners and Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses, and Ruins from a Long War

“Replete with important disclosures. Provides the most detailed account to date of the operations of the CIA inside South Vietnam, as well as giving a first-hand account of high-level disagreements between Washington and Saigon over the use and integrity of intelligence.”—New York Times

“Vigorous, gripping, novelistic in its evocation of mood, setting, and character.”—Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times

“Important revelations. The incredible history of the American role in Vietnam would have been forever poorer without Snepp’s perspective.”—Boston Globe

“Those who read the book will shudder anew at the tragedy, confusion, and gross incompetence Snepp lays bare.”—John Barkham Reviews

FRANK SNEPP spent eight years in the CIA, five of them as interrogator, agent debriefer, and chief CIA strategy analyst in the Saigon embassy. His second book, Irreparable Harm, recounts the Supreme Court case that emerged from the CIA’s efforts to punish Snepp for publishing Decent Interval. A freelance writer and cable television producer, he currently works as an investigative reporter for ABC’s “20/20” television news magazine.