United States, Vietnam War, General, Legal History, Communication & Media Studies, Political Science, Intelligence & Espionage, 20th Century, Federal Government, Media Studies, Constitutional Law 

CIA v Snepp was a constitutional train wreck--and you can't avert your eyes from Irreparable Harm, Frank Snepp's hypnotizing and heartbreaking account of his case." --Jeffrey Toobin He began his professional life as a lockstep secret warrior--and wound up an improbable battler for free speech. This is a searingly personal chronicle of the journey that carried Frank Snepp from the innermost circles of the CIA to the Supreme Court itself and forever changed the meaning of one of the most sacred liberties guaranteed to us by the United States Constitution. Irreparable Harm tells of terror and sacrifice, and of the obsessive determination of CIA officials to destroy a man who dared call them on their mistakes. Among the last CIA agents to be airlifted from Saigon in the closing moments of the Vietnam War, Snepp returned to Agency headquarters determined to force his colleagues to assist Vietnamese left behind. But this was the summer of 1975, when the CIA was under investigation by Congress and unwilling to admit to any more transgressions, least of all its final ones in Vietnam. Unable to prompt even an official summary of the disastrous evacuation, Snepp resigned to write his own account in the hope of generating help for those abandoned, and spent the next eighteen months like a fugitive on the run, dodging CIA agents out to silence him. His expose, Decent Interval, was published in total secrecy under conditions reminiscent of a classic espionage operation--the first time any American book had been brought out this way. But it ignited a firestorm of publicity that drove the CIA and Jimmy Carter's White House to launch a campaign of retaliation unparalleled in the annals of American law, a strategy of vengeance designed to leave Snepp impoverished and gagged for life. In struggling to survive, the onetime spy was forced to accept help from ACLU liberals, antiwar activists, and a fiery Harvard professor named Alan Dershowitz, whom he would previously have viewed as his ideological enemy. Snepp's harrowing firsthand account of his ordeals, from his shadowy trench battles with the Agency, to the destruction of his friends and family, to his historic showdown with the CIA in the courts, reads at times like Kafka's The Trial and at times like a John Grisham thriller, and recounts a tale of government persecution that will leave the reader wondering how any of this could have happened in America.  

Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Ghosts ..............................................................................p. 3
Chapter 2 Reentry .............................................................................p. 11
Chapter 3 First Temptations ...............................................................p. 26
Chapter 4 Leaks, Lies, and Loomis .....................................................p. 40
Chapter 5 Sudden, Bitter Good-bye .....................................................p. 53
Part II Mightier Than the Sword
Chapter 6 Martin's Artful Dodge .........................................................p. 67
Chapter 7 Muzzled ............................................................................p. 74
Chapter 8 Betrayed ...........................................................................p. 87
Chapter 9 Showdown .........................................................................p. 98
Chapter 10 First Reprisal .....................................................................p. 108
Chapter 11 Unveiling ...........................................................................p. 122
Chapter 12 Self-Inflicted Wounds ..........................................................p. 137
Part III Trials
Chapter 13 Suit and Subterfuge ............................................................p. 153
Chapter 14 Enter the Defense ...............................................................p. 161
Chapter 15 Roarin' Oren ......................................................................p. 170
Chapter 16 Inquisition .........................................................................p. 183
Chapter 17 Pat and Bill.........................................................................p. 193
Chapter 18 The Admiral's Unburdening ..................................................p. 207
Chapter 19 Spoiler ..............................................................................p. 220
Chapter 20 Reckoning .........................................................................p. 230
Part IV No Quarter
Chapter 21 Ill-Gotten Gains ..................................................................p. 265
Chapter 22 Black Dog and Stephani .......................................................p. 287
Chapter 23 Road to Richmond .............................................................p. 299
Chapter 24 Second Life .......................................................................p. 310
Chapter 25 Auguries ...........................................................................p. 329
Chapter 26 Judgment Day ...................................................................p. 338
Postscript: Settling Accounts ...........................................................p. 355
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