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

Rating:
Summary: Very Useful Memoir
Review: Orrin DeForest's brilliant and incisive memoir serves both as an instruction manual and as a dire warning for the American intelligence apparatus. While the book was published several years ago, I can think of few volumes more relevant for our troubled times. As the United States struggles with a highly complex insurgency in Iraq, while also battling a new form of international terrorist insurgency, it should look with an intense focus at our failure in Vietnam. While many will point out the numerous differences between the Vietnam war and the current situation, our current failure to combat the Iraqi insurgency shares a multitude of disturbing traits. It is the readers, and indeed, the countries misfortune to drip over unfortunate South East Asian parallels in the fight against an insurgency that appears as mysterious as it did a year ago. These mirror images are described clearly in DeForest's valuable historical perspective.

DeForest was an Air Force veteran who has served both in the Pacific campaign and in the post war occupation of Japan. During his stint in Japan, DeForest served as an police officer, performing liaison duties with the Japanese national police. Little did he know that this perfunctory service would pay appreciable dividends in a war yet to come. This was war found in Vietnam, where DeForest was sent to in 1968, as an employee of the CIA. DeForest's veteran eye saw an agency in absolute criminal disarray, far removed from legendary "successes" such as Operation Phoenix. The insurgency was alive and well, and even worse, unknown. American officials, both military and civilian, had little grasp on the organizational structure behind the Viet Cong and various other local forces within South Vietnam. The enemy was a ghost, with the United States relying almost exclusively on South Vietnamese intelligence, whose officials were either hopelessly corrupt or incompetent. Vietnamese speaking CIA agents were few, and a sense of impending doom and failure had settled in among various CIA officials in Saigon. DeForest quickly recognized what needed to be done and what he could do to help. The tale of his individual and low level efforts to restructure the CIA's efforts inside Vietnam is a story of a man not given to professional resignation in the face of hostile forces.

Within his assigned local area of responsibility, DeForest soon went about creating a system of tracking and indexing who the insurgents were and who they sought aid from. This simple card catalog type technique, ignored by the CIA before, quickly became indispensable in grasping the overall picture of the communist insurgency. On another front, DeForest created a more effective way of debriefing defectors or prisoners by using forms of respect and care that would ingratiate the communists to their captors. With a better way of procuring information and then compiling it in an organized manner, DeForest quickly began producing superior results, including battle field intel and political information concerning the makeup and distribution of the insurgency's political effort. Agency officials were wary of his radical success, primarily because they could not understand that the grand plans hatched back home in Langley were woefully inadequate. Through a mixture of official chicanery and the ignorance or tacit support of his superiors, DeForest managed to keep his intelligence center going for over 5 years, destroying large swaths of the communist infrastructure inside South Vietnam, along with the deaths of thousands of NVA soldiers. One man can do little in the face of such widespread failure however, and as history proved in Vietnam, one man cannot prop up the rotten corpse that was the Republic of South Vietnam.

DeForest's book is written in a very earthy and understandable way, as to make it rapidly accessible by all readers. While his superiors were busy with infighting and career advancement, DeForest and a few others continued to advocate a sensible response to increased Vietcong activity. At the same time, DeForest learned to respect and even love the culture of Vietnam, and used this understanding to construct an interrogation plan. He married a Vietnamese woman, and became good friends with many of his Vietnamese employees. His description of Vietnam is a tragic one, of a people betrayed by corrupt leaders and American officials who did not fully understand the battle against communist forces. Slow Burn should serve as a pertinent warning to anyone involved in the security of the United States.


Rating:
Summary: Crystal-clear insights into intelligence failure in Viet-Nam
Review: This is one of two books I regard as essential to an understanding of our intelligence failures in Viet-Nam. DeForrest was a former military enlisted man who ended up managing a great deal of the prisoner interrogation for a major Agency facility in-country. His story ties together a number of important themes, from the failure of Ivy League types to understand what they were dealing with to the inadequacies (and sometimes the superiority) of vast numbers of "contract" case officers who would normally not have been hired, to the very real value of systematically debriefing all prisoners and entering the results into a database amenable to search and retrieval, something we don't know how to do today. Across every major military operation since Viet-Nam, it has been my experience that we have no table of organization and equipment, completely inadequate numbers of trained interrogators and translators, and no commitment to the tedious but essential work of extracting knowledge from large numbers of hostile prisoners.

Rating:
Summary: Crystal-clear insights into intelligence failure in Viet-Nam
Review: This is one of two books I regard as essential to an understanding of our intelligence failures in Viet-Nam. DeForrest was a former military enlisted man who ended up managing a great deal of the prisoner interrogation for a major Agency facility in-country. His story ties together a number of important themes, from the failure of Ivy League types to understand what they were dealing with to the inadequacies (and sometimes the superiority) of vast numbers of "contract" case officers who would normally not have been hired, to the very real value of systematically debriefing all prisoners and entering the results into a database amenable to search and retrieval, something we don't know how to do today. Across every major military operation since Viet-Nam, it has been my experience that we have no table of organization and equipment, completely inadequate numbers of trained interrogators and translators, and no commitment to the tedious but essential work of extracting knowledge from large numbers of hostile prisoners.