"More than fifty years ago, South Vietnamese forces arrested a man who turned out to be the most senior North Vietnamese officer ever captured during the Vietnam War. This was Nguyen Tai-a man who had run intelligence and terrorist operations in Saigon for more than five years, operations that had killed or wounded hundreds of South Vietnamese and Americans. He was imprisoned for five years and was rescued by the communists the day Saigon fell. US and South Vietnamese intelligence and security officers interrogated him for more than two years, employing every interrogation technique in both countries arsenals in an effort to obtain his secrets. Frank Snepp, the CIA officer who conducted the final portion of the interrogation, devoted a chapter in his classic memoir Decent Interval of the last years of the CIA station in Saigon to the interrogation of Nguyen Tai, whom he called the "man in the snow white cell." Snepp thought that the South Vietnamese had killed this prisoner just before Saigon fell in April 1975 to keep him from retaliating against those who had tormented him in prison for so long. Snepp was wrong. In 1999, Nguyen Tai published a memoir of his years of imprisonment and interrogation, titled Face to Face with the CIA (Doi Mat voi CIA My).

This extraordinary book describes how he resisted years of unrelenting interrogation by some of the CIAs most skilled, and South Vietnams most brutal, interrogators. In addition to providing new insight into this chapter of the Vietnam War, Nguyen Tai also illuminates many of the problems, both practical and moral, facing American interrogators today, especially in the war against terrorism"-- Provided by publisher.