The helicopters were being filled, ready to lift off from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon. It was the spring of 1975, the government of South Vietnam was collapsing, and in these last, desperate moments, Vietnamese who had cast their lot with the Americans – as agents, secretaries, staff of all kinds – were frantically trying to climb walls and break into the American compound. The hope was that they could cling to one of those choppers and be delivered to safety. Frank Snepp, a young intelligence officer, would long remember the scenes of women gripping the bars on the gates, with soldiers clubbing the fingers of these women in an effort to beat them away. For Snepp, it would be a lasting scene of nightmares, marking layers of betrayal. It would also be the source of an enduring outrage that would express itself in a memoir of the American defeat and withdrawal: The story would include an American ambassador so heedless of the intelligence reports that he held back from taking prudent measures to move the files or destroy the records of Vietnamese who had collaborated with the Americans. When Saigon fell quickly, the files would fall nearly as quickly into the hands of the Communists, and for those who had annexed themselves to the side of the Americans the result would be torture and death.