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

As a CIA interrogation officer in Vietnam from 1968 to 1975, DeForrest ran an intelligence network. In this exciting, opinionated memoir, written with Chanoff ( Vietcong Memoir ), he describes how he collected information from Vietcong and North Vietnamese prisoners and defectors through ``the art of sympathetic interrogation'' while engaged in bitter feuds with his superiors, about whom he is harshly critical here. With the assistance of his Vietnamese mistress, Lan, DeForrest developed a stable of agents who, he maintains, brought in most of the hard intelligence reported to the main CIA station in Saigon. The book captures the terror and claustrophobia of the final days of U.S. involvement in Vietnam when DeForrest's arrangements for the evacuation of his agents proved unsuccessful. Photos. (May)