Corrosion: A Spy Story from the Vietnam War

When Dick Helms became CIA Director in mid-1966, he ordered Saigon Station to penetrate the North Vietnamese and Vietcong (VC) intelligence services. When years passed with little progress, he called in Mr. Locke, an old friend and a senior counterintelligence officer. Charlie, I’m frustrated. We know a lot about VC capabilities, but not nearly enough about their intentions. And we won’t know those until we penetrate them. Saigon Station’s too damned bloated and bureaucratic to do it. We need more scalpels, here, than meat cleavers. You see my point? Locke quickly assembled a small team (small, to stay under Saigon Station’s radar) and recruited Jake Ashton, a young, motivated Japanese-American case officer, to be his tip of the spear in Saigon. But how will Jake and his companions accomplish what Saigon Station, with all its resources, failed to do? And how will Jake and his people survive when the North Vietnamese and VC operatives in Saigon feel their presence and strike back? This story, like any real intelligence operation in a war zone, is about cat-and-mouse games and snowballs that roll down mountains and become avalanches.