Word: martin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...through the underbrush. Last week the Justice Department disclosed that the documents included top secret copies of communications between Washington and the U.S. Embassy in Saigon from 1963 to 1975, and that the FBI for months has been quietly investigating the car's owner, former Career Diplomat Graham Martin...
...Martin was U.S. Ambassador to South Viet Nam from the summer of 1973 until Saigon's capture by Communist troops in April 1975. He was later criticized, most recently by former CIA Officer Frank Snepp in his book Decent Interval, for mishandling the evacuation of Americans and Vietnamese supporters from Saigon. Soon after Martin returned to Washington, he retired...
...Martin insists there was no impropriety in his obtaining the papers or keeping them. He claims that a number of people, including former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, knew that he had them. Some federal officials speculate that Martin retained the documents just in case he had to defend his Saigon performance against critics...
...Sheer nonsense," retorted Martin to speculation that he was preparing a defense. Last week from the Winston-Salem hospital bed where he is recovering from surgery for lung cancer, Martin also maintained that keeping the papers secret is no longer required by national security. "Viet Nam is over," he said. "There is nothing that could possibly hurt the security of the United States. Here is a personal, single collection of communications dating back to the days of Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. They would be of value to future historians...
...Martin said that he took the papers out of Saigon at the last minute and put them in a U.S. Justice Department office in Rome, where he had once served as ambassador. Last December he flew back to Rome to retrieve the documents. After returning to Washington, he drove home with them to Winston-Salem and simply had not got around to unloading the trunk. His intention, he said, was to give the papers to the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Texas, after he had finished annotating them...