S6 Ep3: The fall of Kabul and the fall of Saigon with Frank Snepp

On this episode of Secrets & Spies, we are joined by former CIA officer and Peabody Award-winning investigative journalist Frank Snepp.

Frank was a CIA officer who served in the Vietnam war and he was there at the fall of Saigon, so in light of the recent events in Afghanistan we take a look at the similarity and differences between the fall of Saigon and Kabul.

We also discuss the intelligence picture that led up to the chaotic scenes we have witnessed as US and NATO forces attempt to evacuate personnel and Afghan allies from Afghanistan.

Frank has asked me to add this about the fall of Saigon:

"Because of US Ambassador Graham Martin’s reluctance to accelerate departures and risk upsetting the “controlled conditions he thought were needed for a diplomatic solution to the military crisis, the pullout from Saigon devolved into every man and woman for themselves. 

Every agency battled for seat space on outgoing aircraft, violating the quotas assigned to each one. Vietnamese girlfriends and maids were often shoehorned into evacuee lists ahead of Vietnamese who had loyally at great hazard worked with US agencies in sensitive positions.  On the last day of the war there was no master list in the embassy of the Vietnamese at highest risk and most deserving of being flown to safety. 

As Snepp points out in his memoir of these events, Decent Interval, nearly 52,000 people were lifted out of Vietnam in the month of April 1975 on American military aircraft – 6,763 Americans and roughly 46,000 Vietnamese and other third-party personnel. Counting people who departed by commercial carriers, undocumented black flights and the 6,000 who came out by barge the total number of evacuees for which the embassy could claim some responsibility that month was 65,000. 

Another 65,000 escaped on their own just before the Communist takeover and in the two years that followed, bringing the total evacuees for that period to 140,000.

Ambassador Martin told Congress in early 1976 that 22,294 Vietnamese employed by US agencies had been evacuated by April 30 of the previous year. That was a small fraction of the indigenous employees of these agencies and their families – 90,000. To judge from Martin’s figures less than one third of these deeply imperiled people benefitted from the airlift.

Only the Defense Attaché’s Office which had largely controlled available aircraft and the boarding process, came close to evacuating all the “locals” on its payroll, 3,800. But Colonel William Le Gro, who headed DAO intelligence operations, later acknowledged that only 20 percent of the Vietnamese whom his staff had ushered onto outgoing aircraft were truly high risk.

Out of the 1,900 “indigenous employees” of the CIA station only about 500 were finally evacuated – together with 2,000 others including family members who had enjoyed privileged contacts with the Agency over the years." 

You can read more about Frank’s experiences in Vietnam in his excellent books “Decent Interval” and “Irreparable Harm” which are both available to buy via Frank’s website:http://franksnepp.com/

Frank’s journalism and other writings can be viewed on his blog: franksneppexclusives.com/

Check out our past interview with Frank about the CIA mission in Vietnam
https://pod.fo/e/213e1

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Music

Music on this podcast is provided by Andrew R. Bird (Andy Bird) You can check out his work here:
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