Frank Snepp

Snepp sued KNBC-TV for age discrimination after he was dismissed from his job in 2012. A jury deadlocked in 2015, and the case was settled in March 2016.

In 2001 Snepp published a second book, Irreparable Harm, about his court battle with the CIA.

Snepp won an Emmy Award in 1997 for an investigation into Mexican drug trafficking. He won a Peabody Award in 2006 as producer on an investigation for KNBC-TV-Los Angeles of a Los Angeles housing development sited on a toxic landfill.

Snepp worked in television for ABC's World News Tonight (1987–92), CBS (2003–05) and NBC from 2005. At World News Tonight he got Eugene Hasenfus to confirm that he had signed a government secrecy agreement, confirming the government's involvement in the Iran-Contra affair.

In 1980, following the Supreme Court decision against him, Snepp became an investigative journalist, contributing to publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Village Voice and others.

During the late 1980s, he taught a Journalism and the Law course at California State University, Long Beach. He was a technical consultant for the comedy film Spies Like Us and was interviewed on his Vietnam War experiences for Ken Burns's series The Vietnam War and Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War.

Snepp wrote a memoir, Decent Interval, about the evacuation of US personnel from Saigon. It was published in 1977 without prior approval from the CIA Publications Review Board. Prior to publication, and while still employed at the CIA, Snepp attempted to tell the inspector general about the problems surrounding the evacuation, but was told that it "could not deal with anything so controversial".

Snepp was on hand for the Fall of Saigon and was one of the last Americans to leave the US Embassy, Saigon before the city fell to the North Vietnamese on April 30, 1975. Snepp was evacuated with other American personnel in Operation Frequent Wind. On his return to the US Snepp was awarded the Intelligence Medal of Merit in December 1975, but he resigned from the Agency in January 1976, upset at its refusal to rescue Vietnamese left behind in the pull-out, and its refusal to acknowledge mistakes made.

Snepp was recruited to the CIA in 1968, by the Associate Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, Philip Mosely. Initially working on NATO and European security, he was sent to Saigon in 1969. Here Snepp worked as an analyst and counter-intelligence officer, coordinating agent networks and interrogation of captured enemy forces as well as preparing strategic estimates regarding the enemy. Snepp rejected the usual 2-year rotation, and stayed in Vietnam until the US was forced out in 1975. Snepp wrote in 2009 that he was "still haunted" by the "psychological manipulation and torment of a prisoner" he was involved with as a CIA interrogator.

Born in Kinston, North Carolina, Snepp studied Elizabethan literature at Columbia University, graduating in 1965. After spending a year at CBS News, he returned to Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, graduating in 1968.

Frank Warren Snepp, III (born May 3, 1943) is a journalist and former chief analyst of North Vietnamese strategy for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Saigon during the Vietnam War. For five out of his eight years as a CIA officer, he worked as interrogator, agent debriefer, and chief strategy analyst in the United States Embassy, Saigon; he was awarded the Intelligence Medal of Merit for his work. Snepp is a former producer for KNBC-TV in Los Angeles, California. He was one of the first whistle blowers who revealed the inner workings, secrets and failures of the national security services in the 1970s. As a result of a loss in a 1980 court case brought by the CIA, all of Snepp's publications require prior approval by the CIA.