This is I spy. Show from foreign policy. Where spies tell their story.

It turned out this guy had warmed his way into the center of the Communist

Command for the Saigon area and the Delta. He had access to all their secrets.

This guy, T.U. Hackel, from our standpoint was the walking equivalent of having a spy in Hitler's bunker.

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. Frank Snipp was a CIA analyst based in Saigon during the Vietnam War.

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

Snipp wrote reports about the coming offensive based on information from his best source, a Communist defector named T.U. 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 Snipp's story about the fall of Saigon.

Early April 1975, four weeks before the end, the Ambassador Graham Martin and the CIA station chief Tom Pogor were convinced for various reasons that either we could win the war with what we had left or that we could negotiate a surrender.

And the question was, what were our best assets telling us? The first guy that we needed to check in with was a Hanoi source.

I had been for the past two years exclusively responsible for debriefing and briefing this asset.

He came into Saigon, snuck into Saigon, CIA caterers laid on a big, sumptuous lunch to make up for the slim pickings he had to endure in Hanoi.

And so we opened up and what he said simply was this.

The Communists are on a blood-scent. They are going to go for military victory in the shortest possible time.

Well, there seemed to be an absolute thumbs down on the idea that we could negotiate our way out of this madness.

After talking to the source, I raised back to the embassy to let my immediate superior Tom Pogor know what I had learned and I briefed Ambassador Martin.

I had been doing this job now for the past three years. I had risen to become the ambassador's chief briefing officer.

I was extremely close to him. I had once dated his daughter and survived the breakup to remain in the ambassador's good graces.

The CIA station chief Tom Pogor and I were very close because Pogor love to use me to spy on Martin and Martin used me to spy on Pogor.

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