The book the government doesn't want you to read

 

“Spies in Saigon” is the book the CIA and the U.S. government tried to keep secret from the American people and the rest of the world.

Written by Houston author and historian James Bevill, the book recounts the story of his father-in-law, Paul Springer, who worked for the Central Intelligence Agency as the first station chief in Vietnam, long before the United States became embroiled in the conflict there.

The book traces how American intelligence officers worked under diplomatic cover beginning in 1950. Bevill tells how those operatives gathered intelligence on the Viet Minh, Communist China, French colonial authorities, and competing Vietnamese political factions while helping establish the foundations of the CIA's espionage network across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

I asked Bevill, who is a friend of mine, what was the most interesting thing he discovered while working on the book.

“Just how deeply the CIA and the U.S. government were involved during the French Indochina War, and the fact that it was it was Harry Truman that sent the first U.S. forces over there,” he said.

At nearly 500 pages, “Spies in Saigon: CIA Covert Operations in French Indochina and South Vietnam 1950-1963” was published in June by Schiffer Military. It is the result of nine years of extensive research by Bevill and includes first-hand accounts from Springer’s personal letters and unclassified CIA documents that Bevill had to sue to receive.

“The way the whole thing came about was when we moved my wife’s father from an independent apartment to a to an assisted living. We found a trunk full of letters, just file cabinet after file cabinet of original letters from the 1930s to the 1960s,” he said. “And it ended up being 595 separate documents that I scanned and put them in order because I wanted to read through them. The family just wanted to throw them away.”

Bevill said he was fascinated by the history that unfolded through the letters.

“But I read that – and this part of the story is when he’s writing home from Vietnam to his mother, ‘We had lunch with the King of Cambodia today.’ And ‘Oh, you should see the pictures of Angkor Wat that I took from the side of the airplane. And then we went to Laos and we met with those guys over there.” And so he’s writing home and telling about things that he’s doing on the diplomatic side as an embassy officer. He never wrote about CIA business in there,” he said.

In addition to the letters, Springer also had a large collection of photographs, several of which are in the book.

“One of the most valuable things we had were photographs in in picture albums. … We had a lot of other pictures of people that were CIA and non-CIA and Vietnamese that were in the photos. And thank goodness, my mother-in-law labeled them either on the back of the photo with a pen or a pencil, or she labeled some of them in the photo album,” he said.

Although Bevill and his wife Jodie had a pretty good idea of what Springer went through in Vietnam in the 1950s, the picture was incomplete.

“We made a Freedom of Information Act request, and after two and a half years, they had denied everything,” he said. “And then we got a hold of the right attorney, and he said we’ll sue the CIA and we’ll sue the State Department because we had an outstanding FOIA requests with them. The State Department records were actually more helpful than the CIA’s because a lot of that was redacted, but they did help us unlock and link together things that we thought were true and were in his writings and his assignments.”

Bevill said a lot of his information came from things he was told by his now late father-in-law on Christmas Eve in 2007.

“I was able to interview two of the other officers that he served with, one in Saipan and one in Vietnam. I had two rather lengthy telephone interviews with both of those guys, and then you’ve got to just string it all together. And the deeper that I dug, the more interesting I found the story to be, especially when I got to the part about the two Vietnamese counterspies that come in the story in the second half of the book. Actually, there were three of them,” he said.

Although there are many books and documentaries about American involvement in Vietnam, Bevill’s book is the first and most complete telling of the precursor events leading to the war.

“If you’re going to start something like this, a book completely breaking ground, you have to have something that no one else has, and what that was all those letters that came from my father-in-law and my mother-in-law. And then we’re able to match them with declassified CIA records, and we used the information from the lawsuit to confirm that, and through friends of the family … we’re able to get in touch with two other retired CIA officers that were in that period, and then we used the memoirs and the oral histories of the other guys. So, you want to get as close to the original source as you can,” he said.