He began his professional life as a lockstep secret warrior - and wound up an improbable battler for free speech. This is a personal chronicle of the journey that carried Frank Snepp from the innermost circles of the CIA to the Supreme Court itself and changed the meaning of one of the most sacred liberties guaranteed to us by the United States Constitution.

Among the last CIA agents to be airlifted from Saigon in the closing moments of the Vietnam War, Snepp returned to Agency headquarters determined to force his colleagues to assist Vietnamese left behind. But this was the summer of 1975, when the CIA was under investigation by Congress and unwilling to admit to any more transgressions, least of all its final ones in Vietnam.

Unable to prompt even an official summary of the disastrous evacuation, Snepp resigned to write his own account in the hope of generating help for those abandoned, and spent the next eighteen months like a fugitive on the run, dodging CIA agents out to silence him.

His expose, Decent Interval, was published in total secrecy under conditions reminiscent of a classic espionage operation - the first time any American book had been brought out this way. But it ignited a firestorm of publicity that drove the CIA and Jimmy Carter's White House to launch a campaign of retaliation unparalleled in the annals of American law, a strategy of vengeance designed to leave Snepp impoverished and gagged for life.

Snepp's firsthand account of his ordeals, from his shadowy trench battles with the Agency, to the destruction of his friends and family, to his historic showdown with the CIA in the courts, recounts a tale of government persecution that will leave the reader wondering how any of this could have happened in America.