This is I Spy. Show from foreign policy. We're spies till their story.

I went down by the wall to help grab people over. I was looking for a woman I had hoped could make it to the wall.

But I couldn't find her. There was chaos. We were dragging people through the gates. Marine guards were on the walls with their rifles barring people trying to get over.

We would pull one Vietnamese over, but the child of that Vietnamese would be left behind. It was the most horrible circumstance.

From foreign policy, welcome back to I Spy. On each episode we get one former intelligence operative to tell the story of one operation.

I'm Margot Martin Dale. On this episode, we return to Frank Snep, who was a CIA analyst based in Saigon during the Vietnam War.

This is a two-part story, so if you haven't heard episode seven yet, you should start there and come back to us.

In April of 1975, Snep discovered that North Vietnamese forces were preparing a large-scale attack on Saigon.

Snep wrote reports about the coming offensive based on information from his best source, a communist defector named TU Hackel.

But the higher-ups refused to believe it. When the attack began later that month, Americans conducted a frenzy evacuation, leaving behind many Vietnamese allies and marking a humiliating end to the war.

This is the rest of Snep's story about the fall of Saigon.

During those four days that remained to us, we were facing Armageddon. On the night of April 27th, the communist lobbed five rockets into the center of Saigon, and one of them ignited a firestorm.

And that, to me, signal that the game was up, that Tuesday's departure was useless. There was chaos in the boarding areas.

There were makeshift efforts to get people out. The integration papers, the visa forms, the laissez-faire forms that enable Americans to claim Vietnamese as dependents, have been totally counter-fitted.

So that you could take any Vietnamese out. You didn't have to prove that you were married to them.

Anybody in his mother could get out if they could get some American to shoehorn them into a departure line.

The following day, selfie to me as assembly got together and decided that afternoon they would vote into office the neutralists who everybody thought except me would satisfy the communists.

Holger was convinced the communists were standing down. And he sent me and a colleague, agency colleague, out to the parameters of Saigon.

He said, look for communist forces to see if they're standing put.

My friend and I headed for the perimeter of Saigon up in the Iowa. And my pal and I were pinned down by hostile fire.

And we hastily beat a retreat to the embassy to let Holger know that there was no stand down. The enemy was on the move.

That afternoon, roughly six aircraft piloted by the North Vietnamese captured aircraft, swooped in on Tonsonute, bombed the airfield.

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