Secrets from the CIA's Last Days in Vietnam

Secrets from the CIA's Last Days in
Vietnam

Forgotten lessons from the fall of Saigon and what is left out of the
history books
“This was the period of my government service that shattered my ideals,
my romanticism . . . it shattered my idealistic vision of what my
government, my country was all about, and particularly, the CIA was all
about.”
-John Stockwell

Three weeks before Tay Ninh was captured in 1975, John Stockwell, the
CIA chief of a small outpost in the city, ordered a helicopter to seek
personal assurances from his superiors in Saigon. He had heard their
official line, that there was to be no evacuation and that the end of the
war not in sight, but he wanted to hear it from them himself. In his view,
the signs were clear from intelligence and the daily shelling of his area
that the South Vietnamese army, ARVN, would not hold and that it was

only a matter of time before the North Vietnamese army would prevail.
He decided before he got to Saigon what he wanted to say. He pictured it
as a showdown where he would confront them on their lies:

Hey fellas, between you and me, I want you to look me in the face and
admit that this country is breaking apart. It’s about to go. Tay Ninh is a
targeted place. I’ll hold my post open and keep the intelligence flowing,
but I want to be sure that you’re not blowing smoke up my backside. I
want to make sure that we understand each other. And that when the
crunch comes, the helicopters will come in and get us.

After landing on the embassy’s rooftop, Stockwell entered the CIA’s
station in Saigon. He had been with the Agency for over a decade, had
worked as an intelligence case officer, a chief of base, and a station
chief, and was therefore familiar with the senior leadership. He could see
Thomas Polgar, the Saigon Chief of Station, running down the hall and
other high-ranking officers were similarly preoccupied with little time
for Stockwell. As lunchtime approach, they offered: “Let’s go to lunch,
we want to hear what you have to say.” This would give Stockwell his
chance to present his case, or so he thought. Then there was a change in
plans: “Let’s stop off for a quickie,” they decided. This statement was to
preface the most bizarre experience of his professional career.

The CIA leadership cadre in Vietnam took Stockwell to the No Name
Bar, a converted house down an alleyway. He observed that the living
room had been turned into a bar and the palatial dining room area had
stalls and booths without tables. The reason for this, Stockwell found
out, was that the house specialty was blowjobs. Standing at the bar, “two
of the top guys go into the next room and laid back and girls come to
attend to them,” Stockwell recalled. He tried to talk to another superior
standing next to him as a girl approached. Despite now being indisposed
in a chair, the boss claimed to want to know what Stockwell had to say.
“I’m talking to talk him about the fact that the country is collapsing,”

Stockwell lamented, “while she unzips him and hauls him out and starts
to do him.” He reflected on the madness of the moment:

What’s the protocol when you’re down in the capital to talk to your boss
about the collapse of a country and the United States’ first total defeat
and your life and other people’s lives are in danger and your boss is
getting a blowjob, you know? Are you supposed to smile in his face and
encourage him? And you know, ‘Come on,’ and help him along? Or
should you look off at the bar and pretend it’s not happening until he’s
finished? . . . Nobody had ever taught me in Marine Corps training or
CIA training what the protocol for that was.

Stockwell’s account of his time in Vietnam with the CIA was revealed
in a 1985 TV interview, which was ostensibly to promote his book on
the topic, one that was never released. What likely prevented this
publication was the situation faced by his CIA colleague, Frank Snepp,
who had published Decent Interval five years prior on his time in
Vietnam. The CIA sued to prevent Snepp from publishing future work
without CIA approval and to seize his profits. Similar to the revelations
found in the book, the stories Stockwell told in the hour-long
conversation inescapably bring to mind parallels with the fall of Kabul
in the Afghanistan War.

Stockwell’s tour of duty as a CIA officer in Vietnam began in 1973
following the withdrawal of American ground troops. Despite the Paris
Peace Accords signed in January of that year, the CIA remained at full
force in South Vietnam (with around 600 officers in total), to keep the
invisible government in place and to signal to the North that the U.S.
was not going to abandon the South. Unfortunately, the need for such a
presence had dried up; Stockwell estimated that there was only enough
work for “six serious case officers” among the 70-80 officers stationed
in Saigon alone.

Stockwell was posted to Tay Ninh, one of the two provincial capitals the
North Vietnamese army planned to take in order to launch their next

offensive. The area was also an important source of intelligence: “The
flow of their agents,” he remarked, “their corruption, their money,
payments from the Bank of Saigon going up the road would go right in
front of my compound, literally, to go up to COSVN (North Vietnam’s
Central Office for South Vietnam).” His sources provided him with
intelligence on the North’s plan to capture provincial capitals, with a
target date set of 1976 for overtaking the entire country. The North’s
miscalculation was in overestimating the strength of the Army of the
Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), the South Vietnamese army, which
collapsed much more quickly than the North expected. “I was trying to
tell my government,” Stockwell remembered. “I was trying to tell my
Chief of Station, I was trying to send reports back to Washington and the
reports would get to Saigon and they were stopped.” He would soon
learn why the White House had no use for hearing the truth of the
situation on-the-ground in South Vietnam.

Ignoring local and CIA corruption

Upon his arrival in the country, Vietnamization from Stockwell’s
perspective appeared to be working, the concept of “handing most of the
dirty work over to the South Vietnamese themselves” as Snepp
explained it. Stockwell believed in the optimism displayed by Graham
Martin, the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, that the United States’
plan was working. The longer he worked in Vietnam, however, an
obvious rot began to reveal itself, particularly as the North began serious
attempts at taking over the South in the spring of 1974. To extend the
war effort further, Martin and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger pushed
the U.S. Congress for an additional $1.45 billion in aid for South
Vietnam. Stockwell by this point realized why this money would be
wasted: it was clear to any honest observer that the South Vietnamese
government and military were thoroughly corrupt. Money intended for
the military was duly siphoned by the Vietnamese leadership into their
own pockets. “The corruption went beyond your imagination,”
Stockwell explained. “Let half of the soldiers go home so that you could

pocket their salaries. Then you could sell their uniforms and equipment
to the Communists and get money from that. Then you could have half
of your trucks you could use to haul produce and half of your helicopters
to haul heroin. And the result, it was so corrupt, for example, in Tay
Ninh province, that if the 25th division commander was going to engage
the enemy, to get a shipment of ammunition, of artillery shells, he would
have to make a payment to the regional commander. He would have to
get some cash and deliver it and the guy would send a truckload of shells
up for him to fire at the enemy.”

The same concept applied for military members looking for artillery or
air support. Snepp reported the corruption ran so deep that wounded
government soldiers had to pay to be medically evacuated on the
battlefield. Snepp also recorded the consequences of reporting this
corruption. One of the agents the Agency had recruited “knew too much
about corruption and drug-trafficking at the highest levels of the South
Vietnamese government.” Rather than risk the revelations, the local
authorities eliminated her before she could speak to a U.S. interrogator,
who arrived in her cell to find her “swinging from the light cord in her
cell, her four-year-old son—also arrested—sitting quietly in a corner,
playing with her sandals.”

Correspondingly, CIA leadership had no use either for learning about the
corruption. Polgar, the ultimate Agency authority in Saigon, made it
clear to his officers: “I don’t want any more reports about the corruption
in the South Vietnamese army,” Stockwell recalled Polgar saying. “I
don’t believe it, I don’t accept it. If you insist on sending them in, I’m
going to tear them up. If you insist after that, I will put notes in your file
that you can’t follow instructions.” There was a political motive to
suppress this type of negative information; Kissinger would not be able
to obtain the $1.45 billion in aid money if it were revealed that the South
Vietnamese army was too corrupt to wage battle. Ambassador Martin
adopted a similar posture of freezing out those who presented
counternarratives to him internally. In one instance, a regional

commander reported corruption to Martin, and Stockwell relayed the
reaction: “Just the fact that he would dare to report about it would make
Martin so angry that he would just shut the man out, the man would
never set foot in his office again.”

The aid request was presented as a necessity to keep South Vietnam
from going down the drain. Stockwell noticed orders coming from the
top “ordering the embassy analysts and the CIA analysts to write reports
that would support this. They were selecting out of the reports that we
would write and forward the ones that would support this and squelch
the ones that would say anything different.” Despite these efforts to
mislead the decision-makers, Congress failed to appropriate the funds as
Kissinger had hoped, and during the summer of 1974, Stockwell
reported a sense of doom hitting the CIA. Intelligence sources were
drying up, the North’s agents were no longer willing to talk, and
imminent failure seemed to be fast approaching.

Sharing information with the enemy

In a relationship that served to undermine U.S. efforts, Hanoi in North
Vietnam had a special source who kept them regularly informed of the
actions of the CIA. Stockwell was stunned to learn of the amount of
information being shared by none other than his Station Chief, Thomas
Polgar: “The corruption boggled the mind.” Born in Hungary, Polgar
immigrated to the U.S. in his teenage years and still spoke with a heavy
accent. Hungary was a member of the International Commission of
Control and Supervision (ICCS), which was formed following the Peace
Accords. Polgar became fast friends with the Hungarian colonels.
Stockwell found out that through this close bond, Polgar would share
U.S. positions on sensitive matters, despite reservations from
headquarters on the burgeoning relationship and the security
implications it entailed. “He got so involved in telling them what we
were doing, that he was giving regular briefings. He would take the
briefing charts that we used for visiting National Security Council

people, for the Senators who had Top Secret clearances. He would take
those same charts out and brief the Hungarians, who of course were
telling Hanoi, that was the understanding.” Snepp confirmed that the
Hungarians were used as a conduit to Hanoi and that Polgar “was drawn
to [Hungarian ICCS delegation] as if by an affinity of blood.” In
particular, Snepp reported that the lead Hungarian intelligence officer
was sent to mislead Polgar and played on his sense of nostalgia for his
country of birth and “with each passing month he allowed the Hungarian
to draw him ever more deeply into a relationship of openness and
intimacy that would ultimately cloud his own vision of what lay ahead.”

What this information sharing did to the U.S. effort was sabotage South
Vietnam’s security posture and allow the North to adjust their plans and
launch a surprise attack on the Central Highlands rather than on Tay
Ninh as originally planned. “We’ll never know how many of our agents
he gave away when he briefed about the agent identities,” Stockwell
lamented. “We would write a top analysis to headquarters . . . ‘Here is
our latest sense of the situation.’ And he would take it, or a version of it,
and brief his Hungarian buddies.” Hanoi, for their part, received
intelligence through this method they would have otherwise paid
millions of dollars to obtain. The Hungarians were able to overturn
Polgar’s skepticism, converting him to the belief that Saigon would
remain a free city despite the North’s advances. “This was a total fraud
and we knew it,” Stockwell said. Their sources told him there would
soon be “tanks in the streets of Saigon” but Polgar chose to believe the
Hungarians rather than his own CIA officers. This had several
consequences for the front line, including inadequate preparation for
evacuation, an inability to acknowledge the South was collapsing.
Stockwell concluded: “It was kind of maddening to people. It
violated . . . any professional ethic you could possibly have.”

Downplaying the possibility of losing the war

By March 1975, while Stockwell reasonably expected an imminent
invasion of Tay Ninh where he was stationed. Rather than being allowed
to leave, he instead got to hear the harrowing sounds of another CIA
office be overtaken. As the city of Ban Me Thuot fell, he listened to the
radio transmissions of a CIA team speaking to an Air American plane:
“There are tanks at the front of the house,” they said. “We’ve got to talk
in a quiet voice. We better cool it now because people are coming in the
front yard.” This standoff lasted for three days until the team’s radios ran
out of batteries and Stockwell learned they were captured.

Disturbingly, all Stockwell heard from Polgar were platitudes about
being “greatly encouraged by the situation.” Stockwell understood the
need for a positive spin for an external audience, perhaps the political
class, but Polgar was speaking in this case to internal staff who knew
better. Even after Tay Ninh was captured, Polgar continued to believe
the North would leave Saigon as a free city so that the U.S. would not
need to evacuate completely. As the fantasy scenario went, the U.S.
would stave off humiliation and would support the Vietnamese with
reconstruction, including technical assistance for pumping oil from the
South China Sea. In reality, the North had no intentions of entertaining
anything other than the South’s complete surrender and reunification of
the country, having gone through occupation from the Japanese and the
French in previous decades, with the Americans simply the latest to
follow in the footsteps of failed imperial efforts. Stockwell’s intelligence
sources reiterated to him the reality: the North planned “tanks in the
streets of Saigon as soon as possible.”

In accordance with this stated intent, the fall of Ban Me Thuot marked
only the beginning of the 1975 offensive, which was swift and effective.
Following the attack on March 10, the North successfully defeated all
ARVN contingents within six weeks and the CIA ultimately left the
country by April 30. Stockwell likened the crumbling of the South’s
army to “a vase hit by a sledgehammer.”

Refusing to plan for evacuation in advance

Since CIA leadership did not allow for the thought of failure in Vietnam,
this meant that the front line in turn was not permitted to plan for
evacuation. In early April, Polgar visited Bien Hoa and Can Tho,
relaying to staff located there of his continued positivity and his feeling
of being encouraged by the situation. Simultaneously, behind the scenes
he was shipping his personal values out of the country. For another two
weeks, Polgar stonewalled his staff, telling them: “There will be no
evacuation.” In the final week, he eventually relented, as Stockwell
found “he was still paying lip service to his position, but letting
evacuations start to happen in great chaos and confusion.”

Stockwell’s time in Tay Ninh came to an end, hampered by this lack of
planning: “Every source we had, the high ones and the low ones . . . they
were all saying, today or tomorrow the attack begins. Every place that
had been attacked in the north had collapsed instantly so there was no
reason to think that we would hold. We had about seven divisions
against us and one division defending and it was a notoriously corrupt
division.” Stockwell called his regional chief: “We’ve got to get out of
here,” he said to his boss, whom Snepp referred to using the pseudonym
Bill Taggart. “It’s happening today and ARVN won’t hold. I want a
helicopter to come and get us.” Stockwell prepared by destroying the
vast majority of his sensitive documents and was left with a briefcase
full of codes and his team was ready to depart. His superior officer was
unhelpful to say the least, informing Stockwell that Washington had not
approved the closing of Tay Ninh. Stockwell was frustrated at this lack
of foresight, as he had been reporting the deteriorating situation three
times daily. There had also been the notorious briefing at the No Name
Bar three weeks prior where, unsurprisingly, Stockwell never got a
satisfactory answer from his superiors while they were attended to by
prostitutes. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Things are not as bad as you
think,” they told him, “but we understand your position. You’re up there
on the frontline and you probably feel the pressure. We really admire

you guys, we really admire you guys for your guts and sticking it out up
there. Don’t worry, when the crunch comes, we’ll come and get you.
Don’t worry a minute.”

The moment of truth had arrived and there was no support to leave Tay
Ninh. Stockwell and his team had no choice but to wait. Fortunately for
them, the attack had not yet arrived and the next morning Taggart
decided to review the situation the following day in person and make a
recommendation to Washington. Stockwell’s team waited with
apprehension throughout the night and morning. Taggart was reported
over their radios as being airborne and then he disappeared. Where is
he? Where is he? his team wondered in a panic. It’s a thirty-minute
flight. He’s been airborne for 30 minutes, an hour. An hour and a half.
Has he been shot down? What is going on?

The team later learned that Taggart had landed partway through the trip
at at the ARVN 25th Division command post, where had intended to
question them on the safety of flying 12 additional miles to Stockwell’s
post, not trusting his subordinate’s assessment that it was in fact safe to
fly to that location. Stockwell described the scene when Taggart landed:

ARVN is in the middle of a pitched battle and it’s within artillery
range of the Communist forces. So this shiny, silver Air America
chopper lands and immediately all hell breaks loose. And all the
mortar rounds and artillery rounds start landing on the headquarters.
The ARVN commanders ducked down in their bunkers and the pilot
takes off and my boss just barely had his time to get on the plane and
get back in the air. So they panic and instead of coming to get me, they
conclude it’s not safe so they go back home.

At long last, Taggart got on the radio and explained: “I’m in Bien Hoa.”
Stockwell replied with annoyance, “What the hell are you doing in Bien
Hoa?” as shells exploded around the area. Stockwell feared that tanks
were on their way into town. Stockwell reiterated his plea: “It’s safe.
Send the plane back to get us.” Taggart replied, “Well, we have a

problem. Now Air America is refusing to fly because it’s too dangerous
and they’re civilians and they’re not being paid combat time.” Stockwell
asked desperately, “What do you propose for us to do?” Taggart
responded, “You don’t have any choice but to sit tight and we’ll work on
the problem down here.”

Stockwell and his team were left again without support for another day
and night. He realized he could only rely on himself to get out safely. He
managed to fly to Bien Hoa on a South Vietnam Air Force ammunition
plane. Stockwell confronted a surprised Taggart in person, he recalled:
“He was a coward and he didn’t resist. And I went and I got an Air
America pilot and said, ‘We’re going back.’ And their first reaction was,
‘Like hell,’ and I said, ‘No, no. I just flew out of there, I’m going with
you, I’ll show you how to fly, it’s safe. We got to get these people out.’
And if I would go with them, they flew back. And we went back and got
my people and went down to Bien Hoa . . . Right after that
experience . . . I found that the cowards from Nha Trang had been put in
positions over us.”

Leaving local employees behind

Two days before the fall of Danang, the chief of base there who was
loyal to Polgar continually denied the city would be taken and told his
officers to remain calm. Once the inevitable attack by the North
Vietnamese arrived, ARVN fled using ships, planes, and boats, along
with the CIA, while the CIA’s Vietnamese employees were left behind.
This scenario was to play out repeatedly as the South fell. Stockwell was
horrified to learn that the official position of the Agency to abandon its
local employees and that the chief of base in this instance was later
rewarded with a “high position in Washington.”

Snepp also confirmed in his book the fact that many of the CIA’s
Vietnamese employees were left behind without support to leave the
country. To add insult to injury, the CIA left safehouses full documents
in several instances “that had the names and identities of everybody who

had worked for the CIA, and the codes and everything,” Stockwell
recalled. This occurred in Playku, where the CIA officers fled without
informing their embassy colleagues that ARVN was also on the way out.
“So ARVN is panicking,” Stockwell remembered, “fleeing the city, the
CIA flees, and it leaves the State Department people behind without
telling them about what it knew about what was happening. Those State
Department people did get out, no thanks to the CIA.”

The evacuation of Playku was nothing compared to the Agency’s actions
in Nha Trang, which Stockwell called “one of the most cowardly
incidents in U.S. history.” There the CIA went as far as actively
deceiving and turning on the Vietnamese people who had served the
U.S. government. Stockwell recounted how the chief of base acted
towards the local staff in the final weeks of the war:

He decided they were not worthy of his respect. He had a policy of
leaving them behind, which was Polgar’s policy and [CIA Director]
Bill Colby’s policy in Washington. He dumped them, he left behind
safehouses full of the documents, once again, that identified them. To
get clear of them, he told them in one instance that they should come,
everybody is leaving in the morning on planes and told them where the
pick-up point would be, but gave them a false pick-up point so they
would go to the wrong side of the strip. When he went to take off,
some managed to follow him and he actually fired on them with
machine guns . . . so they wouldn’t crowd on the helicopter so he
could get away. He didn’t even pay their last month’s salaries so that
they would have enough cash, because there was still commerce and
boats, so they could pay their own way to get out of the region and left
them. Now, three weeks later the first Communist forces entered the
city. He fled in this total hysteria and panic and dumped his people.

Stockwell was shocked by this conduct, particularly since he knew many
of them well. “I played chess with these people, I played rugby, we went
to dinner. These were my professional colleagues.” He decided to do the
opposite and save as many people as he could: “I was committed to

trying to save our Vietnamese employees. I saw no reason not to. In my
own post, I worked up a plan early on, a contingency plan on how we
would get them out. I got them out, I got all of them out. I got all of the
files out or burned.”

Snepp in his book Decent Interval described this bond with the local
employees: “Stockwell had developed a strong personal attachment to
the locals under his care, both his agents and his translators, and he was
now determined to do all he could to assure their safety, whatever the
oracles from Saigon said.” Snepp added that Stockwell had refused to
leave his twenty Vietnamese staff members behind when he had been
told to instead evacuate his small two-man American team. Stockwell
recalled he faced similar opposition at their new location: “When I got
down to Bien Hoa, the chief of base there was supporting Polgar once
again and Colby’s policy of dumping the Vietnamese. To make sure that
myself and a couple of the other case officers who were devoted to the
principle of saving our Vietnamese employees, which we easily,
obviously could have done. They brought in the case officers from
[Military Region 1] and [Military Region 2] and they put them in charge
of us in our own region. We had been running operations, the chief of
operations, the deputy chief of operations . . . the structure. They brought
in these incredible cowards who had panicked and run, and put them in
positions over us . . . to manage us in the evacuation of [Military Region
3]. To make sure that the principles of dumping all our agents would be
adhered to. To keep us from coming up with plans that would have got
our people out.”

Snepp recounted Stockwell screaming “When are we going to start
trying to help our locals!” at his boss during a contentious staff meeting.
Taggart had no interest in the charade of preparing a list, whereas when
Snepp tried to contribute a few Vietnamese names to a list in Saigon’s
headquarters, he was told: “Why not? None of this is going to work
anyway. If you want to waste your time, be my guest.”

While Taggart dragged his heels, Stockwell hatched a new plan: “I got
some boats, there was an admiral who had retired there and gotten some
surplus ships and had a little company going. And he saw it was
collapsing, he gave me two of his landing craft that were enough for me
to take all of our Vietnamese out to sea with all of their families.”
Stockwell procured the ships, as well as rice and water. In addition, he
bought machine guns in case they encountered enemy fire down the
river. He explained this contingency plan to Taggart, which turned out to
be his biggest mistake. In a dramatic scene, Taggart brought Stockwell
to the Saigon embassy on a helicopter and hauled him into Polgar’s
office and asked for authority to have Stockwell arrested and thrown out
of the country. Stockwell explained how Taggart finally succeeded in
getting his way:

He said I had this mutinous effort afoot that would endanger the safety
of the whole mission and start a giant panic and everything. Polgar
asked me what my plan was, what I was up to because he liked me and
he was astonished that I would [plan a] mutiny or something. I told
him the plan and he said, ‘That’s a great plan. What’s wrong with
that?’ he asked my boss. ‘What’s wrong with it is Stockwell wants to
go down the river with them in the boats.’ And Polgar said, ‘Well . . .’
and the boss said, ‘Remember, we just lost this guy up country.’ They
had . . . another case officer on a suicidal mission up country and left
him stranded and didn’t get him out and he was captured just the day
before. And so he said, ‘See, we can’t lose another one’ and Polgar
said, ‘Oh yeah, we can’t risk that.’ So he agreed that I wouldn’t take
the ships down to sea. And I went back to Bien Hoa thinking, Well
that’s alright, my boss is leaving today for Bangkok, when he’s gone I
can take the people out to sea. But the son of a bitch before he left, the
last thing he did was he gave my boats to the province chief so that our
people would have no way they could get out to sea. He took away the
means. And the province chief put soldiers on them with arms so there
was nothing I could do . . . and then he left the country. That was his
last official act.

Snepp documented this incident in Decent Interval, writing in part that
“Although Polgar had always respected Stockwell, he decided to act on
Taggart's recommendation, particularly since Stockwell seemed insistent
on taking all sorts of personal risks (to the point of accompanying the
boats downriver) to ensure the success of the operation. Having just lost
[James Lewis] to the Communists, Polgar was not about to let another
CIA man put himself in jeopardy.” Following his capture on April 16,
Lewis was subjected to sleep deprivation and malnutrition and was
eventually released on October 30, reportedly the last American prisoner
of war from the Vietnam War to return home.

Contrary to the Agency’s direction, the chief of base in Can Tho
attempted Stockwell’s idea and successfully evacuated his Vietnamese
employees. The consequences for this insubordination were clear: “He
did not move on to a higher position in the Agency afterwards.” The
chief of base in Saigon similarly came up with a clever scheme, using
Polgar’s denialism against him, after being replaced by the “coward”
base chief who had fled Nha Trang:

[He] didn’t get upset. I couldn’t believe that he wasn’t screaming and
yelling a little bit but he was real cool. And later I found out why.
What he did was, he came up with a scheme which he was able to sell
to Polgar, saying, ‘OK we want to keep the radios going, if you want
to have an interim city, a Hong Kong or a free city, we’ll want the
clandestine radios working. I’ll put them on an island offshore, so give
me the authority’ and he got the authority. And he quietly moved all of
his employees to this island offshore, knowing there wasn’t going to
be any radio thing, but just as a ploy to get his people out.

A week later when the country collapsed, this scheme was put into
action: the former chief of base used the Navy to save all of his team,
including the Vietnamese employees. As per the pattern, this officer also
never received a high position in Washington. Stockwell could not
fathom the reasoning behind the policy, given how many Vietnamese
were able to leave the country: “almost 300,000 people left in those

weeks safely. We certainly could have brought out all our people. All it
would have taken was a decision from the CIA Director and the Station
Chief to say, ‘Find ways to save people,’ and we would have done it.
Everybody could have done it.”

The aftermath and legacy of the fall of Saigon

Parallels between the fall of Saigon and the fall of Kabul on August 15,
2021 are numerous and appear to reflect the truism of history repeating
itself. As captured in recent news articles and opinion pieces, the lessons
from the CIA’s experiences in Saigon were nowhere to be found in the
policies and planning leading up to the end of the conflict. Examples
include:

• Misread warnings helped lead to chaotic Afghan evacuation: “The
Afghan government would likely fall once U.S. troops pulled
out. But intelligence agencies and ultimately President Joe Biden
missed how quickly it would happen, losing weeks that could
have been used for evacuations and spurring a foreign policy
crisis.” (AP News)

• Majority of Interpreters, Other U.S. Visa Applicants Were Left
Behind in Afghanistan: “The U.S. still doesn’t have reliable data
on who was evacuated, nor for what type of visas they may
qualify, the official said, but initial assessments suggested most
visa applicants didn’t make it through the crush at the airport.”
(Wall Street Journal)

• The collapse of Afghan military: We’ve seen this movie before:
“Alongside the US, these leaders allowed networks of patronage
and corruption to take root in their countries’ militaries during
their respective rebuilding processes, enabling the eventual
success of ISIL and the Taliban.” (Al Jazeera)

Stockwell was not part of the famous rooftop evacuation of the Saigon
embassy on April 30, 1975, the final day of the Vietnam War. “I left a
few days before that,” he remembered. “I had proposed to be . . . part of

that group, because I wanted to try to keep on getting my people out.
That was the last battle that I lost was selling myself on being able to
stay with the last group. They wouldn’t have me. For the obvious
reason: I was committed to getting people out and they were committed
to leaving people behind.”

For his service during the war, Stockwell was awarded the
CIA’s Intelligence Medal of Merit, which is given “for the performance
of especially meritorious service or for an act or achievement
conspicuously above normal duties which has contributed significantly
to the mission of the Agency.” It may be needless to note that the award
for not for his evacuation attempts of Vietnamese employees. He
explained the Agency’s reasoning: “Five months before [the fall of
Saigon], [the North] had declared Tay Ninh a free-fire zone in order to
get the population out of the way. They had ordered the population to
leave and then fired shells every day to make the people get the message
and leave. So the population had evacuated. And we were shelled every
day . . . This is what I got the medal for afterwards . . . because I held my
post open for five months when we were shelled every day in order to
keep this intelligence flowing, this top agent working.”

Being recognized by the Agency felt hollow as Stockwell’s psyche and
belief in U.S. institutions had been thoroughly damaged by all that he
had witnessed: “At the end, my final mental state was: I felt like my
mind had been raped or my soul had been raped. If it’s possible to
conceive of such a thing. I felt violated. The things that I had believed
in, in terms of honor and integrity. The things that had led me to
volunteer in the Marine Corps and try it, to get into the elite units in the
Marine Corps and then get into the CIA which I understood was the elite
of our foreign service, had all been violated by the conduct of my
leaders in Vietnam. What they had done to prevent us from reporting the
truth. The games they had played, giving our information to the
Communists. Leaving our people behind when we could just as easily
have saved them.”

One aspect that is unavoidable in Stockwell’s and Snepp’s recounting of
their history in Vietnam is the discrepancy between management and the
front line, one side making poor decisions (or none at all) and the other
paying the price. This is the common tale of institutional dysfunction,
made especially more fraught with dire consequences in times of war.
Obedience is institutionally rewarded, while those who push back are
punished or shunned. For holding the company line, Polgar became
Chief of Station in Mexico City, which Stockwell termed as “the largest,
most prestigious station in the CIA.” Forgotten in the political
machinations were the locals who propped up the United States’ efforts
in Vietnam. While Stockwell and Snepp were at a minimum able to
escape during the evacuation and return to their lives in the United
States, Stockwell’s Vietnamese employees never made it out of the
country. Soon after leaving Vietnam, flying back to Clark Air Base in
the Philippines he learned that President Ford had ordered the
evacuation of at-risk South Vietnamese nationals two days before the
fall of Saigon. “I realized that I could have brought all of my people out
just like that. But I didn’t and they were left behind.” Taking his first trip
back to Vietnam ten years later, Stockwell discovered their nightmare
still had not ended: “They’ve been in re-indoctrination centers ever
since.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za2kq2U7JKg