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The Invisible Government Dan Moot
The Invisible Government David Wise
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NHẬN ĐỊNH - QUAN ĐIỂM
"No book to date conveys the hideousness of the
Vietnam War as thoroughly as this one."
-Publishers Weekly
THE PHOENIX PROGRAM
INTRODUCTION
It was well after midnight. Elton Manzione, his
wife, Lynn, and I sat at their kitchen table, drinking steaming cups
of coffee. Rock 'n' roll music throbbed from the living room. A
lean, dark man with large Mediterranean features, Elton was
chain-smoking Pall Malls and telling me about his experiences as a
twenty-year-old U.S. Navy SEAL in Vietnam in 1964. It was hot and
humid that sultry Georgia night, and we were exhausted; but I
pressed him for more specific information. "What was your most
memorable experience?" I asked.
Elton looked down and with considerable effort,
said quietly, "There's one experience I remember very well. It was
my last assignment. I remember my last assignment very well.
"They," Elton began, referring to the Navy
commander and Special Forces colonel who issued orders to the SEAL
team, "called the three of us [Elton, Eddie Swetz, and John Laboon]
into the briefing room and sat us down. They said they were having a
problem at a tiny village about a quarter of a mile from North
Vietnam in the DMZ. They said some choppers and recon planes were
taking fire from there. They never really explained why, for
example, they just didn't bomb it, which was their usual response,
but I got the idea that the village chief was politically connected
and that the thing had to be done quietly.
"We worked in what were called hunter-killer
teams," Elton explained. "The hunter team was a four-man unit,
usually all Americans, sometimes one or two Vietnamese or Chinese
mercenaries called counterterrorists -- CTs for short. Most CTs were
enemy soldiers who had deserted or South Vietnamese criminals. Our
job was to find the enemy and nail him in place -- spot his
position, then go back to a prearranged place and call in the killer
team. The
killer team was usually twelve to twenty-five
South
Vietnamese Special Forces led by Green Berets.
Then we'd join up with the killer team and take out the enemy."
But on this particular mission, Elton explained,
the SEALs went in alone. "They said there was this fifty-one-caliber
antiaircraft gun somewhere near the village that was taking potshots
at us and that there was a specific person in the village operating
the gun. They give us a picture of the guy and a map of the village.
It's a small village, maybe twelve or fifteen hooches. 'This is the
hooch,' they say. 'The guy sleeps on the mat on the left side. He
has two daughters.' They don't know if he has a mama-san or where
she is, but they say, 'You guys are going to go in and get this guy.
You [meaning me] are going to snuff him.' Swetz
is gonna find out where the gun is and blow it. Laboon is gonna hang
back at the village gate covering us. He's the stoner; he's got the
machine gun. And I'm gonna go into the hooch and snuff this guy.
"'What you need to do first,' they say, 'is sit
alongside the trail [leading from the village to the gun] for a day
or two and watch where this guy goes. And that will help us uncover
the gun.' Which it did. We watched him go right to where the gun
was. We were thirty yards away, and we watched for a while. When we
weren't watching, we'd take a break and go another six hundred yards
down the trail to relax. And we did that for maybe two days --
watched him coming and going -- and got an idea of his routine: when
he went to bed; when he got up; where he went. Did he go behind the
hooch to piss? Did he go into the jungle? That sort of thing.
"They told us, 'Do that. Then come back and tell
us what you found out.' So we went back and said, 'We know where the
gun is,' and we showed them where it was on the map. We were back in
camp for about six hours, and they said, 'Okay, you're going out at
o-four-hundred tomorrow. And it's like we say, you [meaning me] are
going to snuff the guy, Swetz is going to take out the gun, and
Laboon's going to cover the gate.'"
Elton explained that on special missions like
this the usual procedure was to "snatch" the targeted VC cadre and
bring him back to Dong Ha for interrogation. In that case Elton
would have slipped into the hooch and rendered the cadre
unconscious, while Swetz demolished the antiaircraft gun and Laboon
signaled the killer team to descend upon the village in its black
CIA-supplied helicopters. The SEALs and their prisoner would then
climb on board and be extracted.
In this case, however, the cadre was targeted for
assassination.
"We left out of Cam Lo," Elton continued. "We
were taken by boat partway up the river and walked in by foot --
maybe two and a half, three miles. At four in the morning we start
moving across an area that was maybe a hundred yards wide; it's a
clearing running up to the village. We're wearing black pajamas, and
we've got black paint on our faces. We're doing this very carefully,
moving on the ground a quarter of an inch at a time -- move, stop,
listen; move, stop, listen. To check for trip wires, you take a
blade of grass and put it between your teeth, move your head up and
down, from side to side, watching the end of the blade of grass. If
it bends, you know you've hit something, but of course, the grass
never sets off the trip wire, so it's safe.
"It takes us an hour and a half to cross this
relatively short stretch of open grass because we're moving so
slowly. And we're being so quiet we can hardly hear each other, let
alone anybody else hearing us. I mean, I know they're out there --
Laboon's five yards that way, Swetz is five yards to my right -- but
I can't hear them.
"And so we crawl up to the gate. There's no booby
traps. I go in. Swetz has a satchel charge for the fifty-one-caliber
gun and has split off to where it is, maybe sixty yards away. Laboon
is sitting at the gate. The village is very quiet. There are some
dogs. They're sleeping. They stir, but they don't even growl. I go
into the hooch, and I spot my person. Well, somebody stirs in the
next bed. I'm carrying
my commando knife, and one of the things we
learned is how to kill somebody instantly with it. So I put my hand
over her mouth and come up under the second rib, go through the
heart, give it a flick; it snaps the spinal cord. Not thinking!
Because I think 'Hey!' Then I hear the explosion go off and I know
the gun is out. Somebody else in the corner starts to stir, so I
pull out the sidearm and put it against her head and shoot her.
She's dead. Of course, by this time the whole village is awake. I go
out, waiting for Swetz to come, because the gun's been blown. People
are kind of wandering around, and I'm pretty dazed. And I look back
into the hooch, and there were two young girls. I'd killed the wrong
people."
Elton Manzione and his comrades returned to their
base at Cam Lo. Strung out from Dexedrine and remorse, Elton went
into the ammo dump and sat on top of a stack of ammunition crates
with a grenade, its pin pulled, between his legs and an M-16 cradled
in his arms. He sat there refusing to budge until he was given a
ticket home.
***
In early 1984 Elton Manzione was the first person
to answer a query I had placed in a Vietnam veterans' newsletter
asking for interviews with people who had served in the Phoenix
program. Elton wrote to me, saying, "While I was not a participant
in Phoenix, I was closely involved in what I think was the
forerunner. It was part of what was known as OPLAN 34. This was the
old Leaping Lena infiltration program for LRRP [long-range
reconnaissance patrol] operations into Laos. During the time I was
involved it became the well-known Delta program. While all this
happened before Phoenix, the operations were essentially the same.
Our primary function was intelligence gathering, but we also carried
out the 'undermining of the infrastructure' types of things such as
kidnapping, assassination, sabotage, etc.
"The story needs to be told," Elton said,
"because the whole aura of the Vietnam War was influenced by what
went on in the 'hunter-killer' teams of Phoenix, Delta, etc. That
was the point at which many of us realized we were no longer the
good guys in the white hats defending freedom -- that we were
assassins, pure and simple. That disillusionment carried over to all
other aspects of the war and was eventually responsible for it
becoming America's most unpopular war."
***
The story of Phoenix is not easily told. Many of
the participants, having signed nondisclosure statements, are
legally prohibited from telling what they know. Others are silenced
by their own consciences. Still others are professional soldiers
whose careers would suffer if they were to reveal the secrets of
their employers. Falsification of records makes the story even
harder to prove. For example, there is no record of Elton Manzione's
ever having been in Vietnam. Yet, for reasons which are explained in
my first book, The Hotel Tacloban, I was predisposed to believe
Manzione. I had confirmed that my father's military records were
deliberately altered to show that he had not been imprisoned for two
years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in World War II. The
effects of the cover-up were devastating and ultimately caused my
father to have a heart attack at the age of forty-five. Thus, long
before I met Elton Manzione, I knew the government was capable of
concealing its misdeeds under a cloak of secrecy, threats, and
fraud. And I knew how terrible the consequences could be.
Then I began to wonder if cover-ups like the one
concerning my father had also occurred in the Vietnam War, and that
led me in the fall of 1983 to visit David Houle, director of veteran
services in New Hampshire. I asked Dave Houle if there was a part of
the Vietnam War that had been concealed, and without hesitation he
replied, "Phoenix." After explaining a little about it, he mentioned
that one of his clients had been in the program, then added that his
client's service records -- like those of Elton
Manzione's and my father's -- had been altered.
They showed that he had been a cook in Vietnam.
I asked to meet Houle's client, but the fellow
refused. Formerly with Special Forces in Vietnam, he was disabled
and afraid the Veterans Administration would cut off his benefits if
he talked to me.
That fear of the government, so incongruous on
the part of a war veteran, made me more determined than ever to
uncover the truth about Phoenix, a goal which has taken four years
to accomplish. That's a long time to spend researching and writing a
book. But I believe it was worthwhile, for Phoenix symbolizes an
aspect of the Vietnam War that changed forever the way Americans
think about themselves and their government.
Developed in 1967 by the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), Phoenix combined existing counterinsurgency programs
in a concerted effort to "neutralize" the Vietcong infrastructure
(VCI). The euphemism "neutralize" means to kill, capture, or make to
defect. The word "infrastructure" refers to those civilians
suspected of supporting North Vietnamese and Vietcong soldiers like
the one targeted in Elton Manzione's final operation.
Central to Phoenix is the fact that it targeted
civilians, not soldiers. As a result, its detractors charge that
Phoenix violated that part of the Geneva Conventions guaranteeing
protection to civilians in time of war. "By analogy," said Ogden
Reid, a member of a congressional committee investigating Phoenix in
1971, "if the Union had had a Phoenix program during the Civil War,
its targets would have been civilians like Jefferson Davis or the
mayor of Macon, Georgia."
Under Phoenix, or Phung Hoang, as it was called
by the Vietnamese, due process was totally nonexistent. South
Vietnamese civilians whose names appeared on blacklists could be
kidnapped, tortured, detained for two years without trial, or even
murdered, simply on the word of an anonymous informer. At its height
Phoenix managers imposed quotas of eighteen hundred neutralizations
per month on the people running the program in the field, opening up
the program to abuses by corrupt security officers, policemen,
politicians, and racketeers, all of whom extorted innocent civilians
as well as VCI. Legendary CIA officer Lucien Conein described
Phoenix as "A very good blackmail scheme for the central government.
'If you don't do what I want, you're VC."'
Because Phoenix "neutralizations" were often
conducted at midnight while its victims were home, sleeping in bed,
Phoenix proponents describe the program as a "scalpel" designed to
replace the "bludgeon" of search and destroy operations, air
strikes, and artillery barrages that indiscriminately wiped out
entire villages and did little to "win the hearts and minds" of the
Vietnamese population. Yet, as Elton Manzione's story illustrates,
the scalpel cut deeper than the U.S. government admits. Indeed,
Phoenix was, among other things, an instrument of counterterror --
the psychological warfare tactic in which VCI members were brutally
murdered along with their families or neighbors as a means of
terrorizing the neighboring population into a state of submission.
Such horrendous acts were, for propaganda purposes, often made to
look as if they had been committed by the enemy.
This book questions how Americans, who consider
themselves a nation ruled by laws and an ethic of fair play, could
create a program like Phoenix. By scrutinizing the program and the
people who participated in it and by employing the program as a
symbol of the dark side of the human psyche, the author hopes to
articulate the subtle ways in which the Vietnam War changed how
Americans think about themselves. This book is about terror and its
role in political warfare. It will show how, as successive American
governments sink deeper and deeper into the vortex of covert
operations -- ostensibly to combat terrorism and Communist
insurgencies -- the American people gradually lose touch with the
democratic ideals that
once defined their national self-concept. This
book asks what happens when Phoenix comes home to roost.
SOUTHEAST ASIA
CORPS AND PROVINCES OF SOUTH VIETNAM
CIA officer Ralph Johnson, in safari jacket and
baseball cap, standing beside his donkey in Muong Sai, Laos, circa
1959 (Johnson family collection)
Phoenix officials, spring 1969; left to right:
National Police officer Duong Tan Huu; Lt. Col. Loi Nguyen Tan;
Phoenix Director Evan J. Parker, Jr.; Parker's replacement, John H.
Mason; Lt. Col. Robert Inman; two unidentified Vietnamese (Parker
family collection)
American pacification officials in Binh Dinh
Province, circa 1963; left to right: Major Harry "Buzz" Johnson;
State Department officer Val Vahovich; USIS officer Frank
W. Scotton; Special Forces Sergeant Joe Vaccaro
(Johnson family collection)
Nelson H. Brickham, Jr., in Dalat, circa 1966
(Brickham family collection)
William Colby, circa 1969 (Colby family
collection)
Tulius Acampora with General Nguyen Ngoc Loan,
circa 1966 (Acampora family collection)
Acampora with Major Nguyen Mau (Acampora family
collection)
GALLERY
Colonel William "Pappy" Grieves walking behind
National Police Field Forces chief Colonel Nguyen Van Dai, February
1970 (Grieves family collection)
Khanh Hoa Province Interrogation Center, Nha
Trang, circa 1966 (Brickham family collection)
Province Interrogation Center, unidentified
province, circa 1966 (Brickham family collection)
Colonel Douglas Dillard with the director of the
Military Security Service, General Vu Duc Nhuan, circa 1969 (Dillard
family collection)
Province Interrogation Center program director
Robert Slater
in Dalat, December 1968, holding Bridget Bardot
Rose, with Vietnamese Special Branch officers in background (Slater
family collection)
Slater flanked by PIC program advisers Frank
Cerrincione, left, and Orrin DeForest in Bao Loc, Lam Dong Province,
December 1968 (Slater family collection)
Phoenix officer Warren Milberg standing beside I
Corps National Police Chief Vu Luong, in Danang, spring 1968
(Milberg family collection)
THE PHOENIX PROGRAM -- PICTURE GALLERY
Quang Tri Province Provincial Reconnaissance Unit
(PRU), circa 1967 (Milberg family collection)
Delta PRU adviser John Wilbur with the Kien Hoa
Province PRU team, circa 1967 (Wilbur family collection)
PRU cadre, Vung Tau training center, circa 1967
(Wilbur family collection)
II Corps PRU advisers, circa 1969; left to right:
Aussie Ostera; Blue Carter; Captain John McGeehan; Sergeant John
Fanning; Major Paul Ogg; Captain Charles Aycock; Captain John
Vaughn; Sergeant Buzz Brewer; Sergeant Al Young; Sergeant Larry
Jones (Ogg family collection)
II Corps PRU adviser Paul Ogg with Colonel Ruel
P. Scoggins, circa 1970 (Ogg family collection)
Phoenix training officer Lt. Col. Walter V.
Kolon, right, with John E. MacDonald, senior State Department
representative to the Phoenix staff, circa 1969 (Kolon family
collection)
From left: Phoenix Director John H. Mason,
Phoenix Operations Chief Lt. Col. Thomas P. McGrevey, and Deputy
Phoenix Director Colonel James W. Newman, circa 1970 (Newman family
collection)
GALLERY
From left: Phung Hoang chief Colonel Ty Trong
Song, John Mason, James Newman, and senior Phung Hoang
officer Lt. Col. Pham Van Cao, circa 1970 (Newman
family collection)
Sergeants Ed Murphy, left, and Blane Baisley
outside Dragon Mountain Combined Interrogation Center, 4th Military
Intelligence Detachment, Pleiku Province, circa 1968 (Murphy family
collection)
Public Safety Adviser Douglas McCollum at
National Police Field Force outpost in Darlac Province, circa 1968
(McCollum family collection)
Member of the Bien Hoa special Phoenix team,
displaying Phoenix tattoo
Ancient and Oriental Order of Phoenicians
certificate, provided by Phoenix district adviser Major Claude Alley
Special Police Saigon chief, Major Pham Quant Tan
(Roberts family collection)
Saigon Phoenix Deputy Director Captain Shelby
Roberts, at the beach at Vung Tau, circa 1969 (Roberts family
collection)
GALLERY
Phoenix Directorate staff, circa 1972; left to
right: Operations Chief Lt. Col. George Hudman; Phoenix Director
John S. Tilton; Deputy Director Colonel Herb Allen; Major Carl
Moeller (seated); unidentified secretary; unidentified officer;
unidentified secretary; Major Doug Collins; unidentified secretary;
Sergeant Jim Marcus; unidentified officer, unidentified civilian;
unidentified secretary (Hudman family collection)
Phoenix Directorate function, circa 1971; left to
right: Deputy Director Colonel Chester B. McCoid; Director John S.
Tilton; Lt. Col. Russ Cooley; unidentified Public Safety officer;
Colonel Ly Trong Song; National Police adviser Frank Walton; Captain
Albright; Special Branch Deputy Director Dang Van Minh; Lt. Col.
John Ford (McCoid family collection)
Criminal Investigation Division Sergeant William
J. Taylor (Taylor family collection)
CIA officer and senior SOG adviser George French
flanked by Special Operations Group chief Colonel J.F. Sadler, left,
and unidentified SOG officer, circa 1971 (French family collection)
Lt. Col. Walter Kolon and Lt. Col. Al Weidhas at
a Tai Kwon Do exhibition in Saigon in 1969, sponsored by the
Vietnamese American Association (Baillargeon family collection)
Phoenix officers at a farewell ceremony for State
Department officer Seton Shanley; left to right: Captain Paul
Baillargeon; National Police Chief Colonel Tran Van Hai; John Mason;
Colonel Robert E. Jones; Captain Richard Bradish; Seton Shanley;
Charles Phillips; unidentified Vietnamese officer (Baillargeon
family collection)
CIA officers Bruce Lawlor and Patry Loomis in
Quang Nam Province, circa 1972 (Lawlor family collection)
THE PHOENIX PROGRAM
CHAPTER 1: Infrastructure
What is the VCI? Is it a farmer in a field with a
hoe in his hand and a grenade in his pocket, a deranged subversive
using women and children as a shield? Or is it a self- respecting
patriot, a freedom fighter who was driven underground by corrupt
collaborators and an oppressive foreign occupation army?
In his testimony regarding Phoenix before the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 1970, former Director
of Central Intelligence William Colby defined the VCI as "about
75,000 native Southerners" whom in 1954 "the Communists took north
for training in organizing, propaganda and subversion." According to
Colby, these cadres returned to the South, "revived the networks
they had left in 1954," and over several years formed the National
Liberation Front (NLF), the People's
Revolutionary party, liberation committees, which
were
"pretended local governments rather than simply
political bodies," and the "pretended Provisional Revolutionary
Government of South Vietnam.
Together," testified Colby, "all of these
organizations and their local manifestations make up the VC
Infrastructure." [1]
A political warfare expert par excellence, Colby,
of course, had no intentions of portraying the VCI in sympathetic
terms. His abbreviated history of the VCI, with its frequent use of
the word "pretended," deliberately oversimplifies and distorts the
nature and origin of the revolutionary forces lumped under the
generic term "VCI." To understand properly Phoenix and its prey, a
more detailed and objective account is required. Such an account
cannot begin in 1954 -- when the Soviet Union, China, and the United
States split Vietnam along the sixteenth parallel, and the United
States first intervened in Vietnamese affairs -- but must
acknowledge one hundred years of French colonial oppression. For it
was colonialism which begat the VCI, its strategy of protracted
political warfare, and its guerrilla and terror tactics.
The French conquest of Vietnam began in the
seventeenth century with the arrival of Jesuit priests bent on
saving pagan souls. As Vietnam historian Stanley Karnow notes in his
book Vietnam: A History, "In 1664 ... French religious leaders and
their business backers formed the Society of French Missionaries to
advance Christianity in Asia. In the same year, by no coincidence,
French business leaders and their religious backers created the East
India Company to increase trade ....
Observing this cozy relationship in Vietnam, an
English competitor reported home that the French had arrived, 'but
we cannot make out whether they are here to seek trade or to conduct
religious propaganda.'"
"Their objective, of course," Karnow quips, "was
to do both." [2]
For the next two centuries French priests
embroiled
themselves in Vietnamese politics, eventually
providing a pretext for military intervention. Specifically, when a
French priest was arrested for plotting against the emperor of
Vietnam in 1845, the French Navy shelled Da Nang City, killing
hundreds of people, even though the priest had escaped unharmed to
Singapore. The Vietnamese responded by confiscating the property of
French Catholics, drowning a few Jesuits, and cutting in half,
lengthwise, a number of Vietnamese priests.
Soon the status quo was one of open warfare. By
1859 French Foreign Legionnaires had arrived en masse and had
established fortified positions near major cities, which they
defended against poorly armed nationalists staging hit-and- run
attacks from bases in rural areas. Firepower prevailed, and in 1861
a French admiral claimed Saigon for France, "inflicting heavy
casualties on the Vietnamese who resisted." [3] Fearing that the
rampaging French might massacre the entire city, the emperor
abdicated ownership of three provinces adjacent to Saigon, along
with Con Son Island, where the French immediately built a prison for
rebels. Soon thereafter Vietnamese ports were opened to European
commerce, Catholic priests were permitted to preach wherever
Buddhist or Taoist or Confucian souls were lurking in the darkness,
and France was guaranteed "unconditional control over all of
Cochinchina." [4]
By 1862 French colonialists were reaping
sufficient economic benefits to hire Filipino and Chinese mercenary
armies to help suppress the burgeoning insurgency.
Resistance to French occupation was strongest in
the north near Hanoi, where nationalists were aligned with anti-
Western Chinese. The rugged mountains of the Central Highlands
formed a natural buffer for the French, who were entrenched in
Cochin China, the southern third of Vietnam centered in Saigon.
The boundary lines having been drawn, the
pacification of Vietnam began in earnest in 1883. The French
strategy was simple and began with a reign of terror: As many
nationalists as could be found were rounded up
and guillotined. Next the imperial city of Hue was plundered in what
Karnow calls "an orgy of killing and looting." [5] The French
disbanded the emperor's Council of Mandarins and replaced it with
French advisers and a bureaucracy staffed by suppletifs --
self-serving Vietnamese, usually Catholics, who collaborated in
exchange for power and position. The suppletif creme de la creme
studied in, and became citizens of, France. The Vietnamese Army was
commanded by French officers, and Vietnamese officers were
suppletifs who had been graduated from the French military academy.
By the twentieth century all of Vietnam's provinces were
administered by suppletifs, and the emperor, too, was a lackey of
the French.
In places where "security" for collaborators was
achieved, Foreign Legionnaires were shifted to the outer perimeter
of the pacified zones and internal security was turned over to
collaborators commanding GAMOs -- group administrative mobile
organizations. The hope was that pacified areas would spread like
oil spots. Suppletifs were also installed in the police and security
forces, where they managed prostitution rings, opium dens, and
gambling casinos on behalf of the French. From the 1880's onward no
legal protections existed for nationalists, for whom a dungeon at
Con Son Prison, torture, and death were the penalties for pride. So,
outgunned and outlawed in their homeland, the nationalists turned to
terrorism -- to the bullet in the belly and the bomb in the cafe.
For while brutal French pacification campaigns prevented the rural
Vietnamese from tending their fields, terrorism did not.
The first nationalists -- the founding fathers of
the VCI -- appeared as early as 1859 in areas like the Ca Mau
Peninsula, the Plain of Reeds, and the Rung Sat -- malaria- infested
swamps which were inaccessible to French forces. Here the
nationalists honed and perfected the guerrilla tactics that became
the trademark of the Vietminh and later the Vietcong. Referred to as
selective terrorism, this meant
the planned assassination of low-ranking
government officials who worked closely with the people; for
example, policemen, mailmen, and teachers. As David Galula explains
in Counter-Insurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, "Killing
high-ranking counterinsurgency officials serves no purpose since
they are too far removed from the population for their deaths to
serve as examples." [6]
The purpose of selective terror was
psychologically to isolate the French and their suppletifs, while
demonstrating to the rural population the ability of the insurgents
to strike at their oppressors until such time as a general uprising
was thought possible.
In the years following World War I, Vietnamese
nationalists organized in one of three ways: through religious
sects, like the Hoa Hao or Cao Dai, which secretly served as fronts
for anti-French activity; through overt political parties like the
Dai Viets and the Vietnam Quoc Dan Dang (VNQDD); or by becoming
Communists. All formed secret cells in the areas where they
operated, and all worked toward ousting the French.
In return, the French intelligence service, the
Deuxieme Bureau, hired secret agents and informers to identify,
capture, imprison, and murder core members of the underground
resistance.
In instances of open rebellion, stronger steps
were taken. When VNQDD sailors mutinied in 1932 in Yen Bai and
killed their French officers, the French retaliated by bombing
scores of VNQDD villages, killing more than thirty thousand people.
Mass deportations followed, and many VNQDD cadres were driven into
exile. Likewise, when the French caught wind of a general uprising
called for by the Communists, they arrested and imprisoned 90
percent of its leadership. Indeed, the VCI leadership was molded in
Con Son Prison, or Ho Chi Minh University, as it was also known.
There determined nationalists transformed dark dungeons into
classrooms and common criminals into hard-core cadres. With their
lives depending
on their ability to detect spies and agents
provocateurs whom the French had planted in the prisons, these
forefathers of the VCI became masters of espionage and intrigue and
formidable opponents of the dreaded Deuxieme Bureau.
In 1941 the Communist son of a mandarin, Ho Chi
Minh, gathered the various nationalist groups under the banner of
the Vietminh and called for all good revolutionaries "to stand up
and unite with the people, and throw out the Japanese and the
French." [7] Leading the charge were General Vo Nguyen Giap and his
First Armed Propaganda Detachment -- thirty-four lightly armed men
and women who by early 1945 had overrun two French outposts and were
preaching the gospel according to Ho to anyone interested in
independence. By mid-1945 the Vietminh held six provinces near Hanoi
and was working with the forerunner of the CIA, the Office of
Strategic Services (OSS), recovering downed pilots of the U.S.
Fourteenth Air Force. A student of American democracy, Ho declared
Vietnam an independent country in September 1945.
Regrettably, at the same time that OSS officers
were meeting with Ho and exploring the notion of supporting his
revolution, other Americans were backing the French, and when a U.S.
Army officer traded a pouch of opium for Ho's dossier and uncovered
his links to Moscow, all chances of coexistence vanished in a puff
of smoke. The Big Three powers in Potsdam divided Vietnam along the
sixteenth parallel. Chinese forces aligned with General Chiang
Kai-shek and the Kuomintang were given control of the North. In
September 1945 a division of Chinese forces advised by General
Phillip Gallagher arrived in Hanoi, plundered the city, and disarmed
the Japanese. The French returned to Hanoi, drove out the Vietminh,
and displaced Chiang's forces, which obtained Shanghai in exchange.
Meanwhile, Lord Louis Mountbatten (who used the
phoenix as an emblem for his command patch) and the
British were put in charge in the South. Twenty
thousand Gurkhas arrived in Saigon and proceeded to disarm the
Japanese. The British then outlawed Ho's Committee of the South and
arrested its members. In protest the Vietnamese held a general
strike. On September 23 the Brits, buckling under the weight of the
White Man's Burden, released from prison those French Legionnaires
who had collaborated with the Nazis during the occupation and had
administered Vietnam jointly with the Japanese. The Legionnaires
rampaged through Saigon, murdering Vietnamese with impunity while
the British kept stiff upper lips. As soon as they had regained
control of the city, the French reorganized their quislings and
secret police, donned surplus U.S. uniforms, and became the nucleus
of three divisions which had reconquered South Vietnam by the end of
the year. The British exited, and the suppletif Bao Dai was
reinstalled as emperor.
By 1946 the Vietminh were at war with France once
again, and in mid-1946 the French were up to their old tricks --
with a vengeance. They shelled Haiphong, killing six thousand
Vietnamese. Ho slipped underground, and American officials passively
observed while the French conducted "punitive missions ... against
the rebellious Annamese." [8] During the early years of the First
Indochina War, CIA officers served pretty much in that same limited
capacity, urging the French to form counterguerrilla groups to go
after the Vietminh and, when the French ignored them, slipping off
to buy contacts and agents in the military, police, government, and
private sectors.
The outgunned Vietminh, meanwhile, effected their
strategy of protracted warfare. Secret cells were organized, and
guerrilla units were formed to monitor and harass French units,
attack outposts, set booby traps, and organize armed propaganda
teams. Assassination of collaborators was part of their job. Company
and battalion-size units were also formed to engage the French in
main force battles.
By 1948 the French could neither protect their
convoys from ambushes nor locate Vietminh bases. Fearful French
citizens organized private paramilitary self-defense forces and spy
nets, and French officers organized, with CIA advice, commando
battalions (Tien-Doan Kinh Quan) specifically to hunt down Vietminh
propaganda teams and cadres. At the urging of the CIA, the French
also formed composite airborne commando groups, which recruited and
trained Montagnard hill tribes at the coastal resort city of Vung
Tau. Reporting directly to French Central Intelligence in Hanoi and
supplied by night airdrops, French commandos were targeted against
clandestine Vietminh combat and intelligence organizations. The
GCMAs were formed concurrently with the U.S. Army's First Special
Forces at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
By the early 1950s American soldiers were
fighting alongside the French, and the 350-member U.S. Military
Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG) was in Saigon, dispensing and
accounting for U.S. largess. All in all, from 1950 through 1954, the
United States gave over three billion dollars to the French for
their counterinsurgency in Vietnam, including four million a year as
a retainer for Emperor Bao Dai, who squirreled away the lion's share
in Swiss bank accounts and foreign real estate.
In Apri1 1952, American advisers began training
Vietnamese units. In December 1953, an Army attache unit arrived in
Hanoi, and its officers and enlisted men began interrogating
Vietminh prisoners. While MAAG postured to take over the Vietnamese
Army from the French, the Special Technical and Economic Mission
provided CIA officers, under station chief Emmett McCarthy, with the
cover they needed to mount political operations and negotiate
contracts with the government of Vietnam (GVN).
Finally, in July 1954, after the Vietminh had
defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu, a truce was declared at
the Geneva Conference. Vietnam was divided along
the seventeenth parallel, pending a nationwide election to be held
in 1956, with the Vietminh in control in the North and Bao Dai in
control in the South. The French were to withdraw from the North and
the Vietminh from the South, where the United States was set to
displace the French and install its own candidate, Ngo Dinh Diem, a
Catholic mandarin from Hue. The CIA did this by organizing a cross
section of Vietnamese labor leaders and intellectuals into the Can
Lao Nham Vi (Personalist Labor party). Diem and his brothers, Nhu,
Can, and Thuc (the archbishop of Hue), thereafter controlled tens of
thousands of Can Lao followers through an interlocking maze of
clandestine cells present in the military, the police and security
services, the government, and private enterprise.
In Vietnamese History from 1939-1975, law
professor Nguyen Ngoc Huy, a Dai Viet politician who was exiled by
Diem in 1954, says about the Diem regime: "They persecuted those who
did not accept their orders without discussion, and tolerated or
even encouraged their followers to take bribes, because a corrupt
servant must be loyal to them out of fear of punishment
To obtain an
interesting position, one had to fulfill the
three D conditions: Dang [the Can Lao party]; Dao [the Catholic
religion]; and Dia phuong [the region -- Central Vietnam]. Those who
met these conditions and moreover had served Diem before his victory
over his enemies in 1955 enjoyed unbelievable promotions." [9]
Only through a personality cult like the Can Lao
could the CIA work its will in Vietnam, for Diem did not issue from
or have the support of the Buddhist majority. He was, however, a
nationalist whose anti- French reputation enabled the Americans to
sell themselves to the world as advisers to a sovereign government,
not as colonialists like the French. In exchange, Diem arranged for
Can Lao businessmen and their American associates to obtain
lucrative government contracts and commercial interests once owned
exclusively
by the French, with a percentage of every
transaction going to the Can Lao. Opposed to Diem were the French
and their suppletifs in the Surete and the Vietnamese Mafia, the
Binh Xuyen. Together with the Hoa Hao and Cao Dai religious sects,
these groups formed the United Sect Front and conspired against the
United States and its candidate, Diem.
Into this web of intrigue, in January 1954,
stepped U.S. Air Force Colonel Edward Lansdale. A confidential agent
of Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles and his brother,
Secretary of State John Dulles, Lansdale defeated the United Sect
Front by either killing or buying off its leaders. He then hurriedly
began to build, from the top down, a Vietnam infused with American
values and dollars, while the Vietcong -- as Lansdale christened the
once heroic but now vilified Vietminh -- built slowly from the
ground up, on a foundation they had laid over forty years.
Lanky, laid-back Ed Lansdale arrived in Saigon
fresh from having managed a successful anti-Communist
counterinsurgency in the Philippines, where his black bag of dirty
tricks included counterterrorism and the assassination of government
officials who opposed his lackey, Ramon Magsaysay. In the
Philippines his tactics earned him the nickname of the Ugly
American. He brought those tactics to Saigon along with a team of
dedicated Filipino anti-communists who, in the words of one veteran
CIA officer, "would slit their grandmother's throat for a dollar
eighty-five." [10]
In his autobiography, In the Midst of Wars,
Lansdale gives an example of the counterterror tactics he employed
in the Philippines. He tells how one psychological warfare operation
"played upon the popular dread of an asuang, or vampire, to solve a
difficult problem." The problem was that Lansdale wanted government
troops to move out of a village and hunt Communist guerrillas in the
hills, but the local politicians were afraid that if they did, the
guerrillas would
"swoop down on the village and the bigwigs would
be victims." So, writes Lansdale:
A combat psywar [psychological warfare] team was
brought in. It planted stories among town residents of a vampire
living on the hill where the Huks were based.
Two nights later, after giving the stories time
to circulate among Huk sympathizers in the town and make their way
up to the hill camp, the psywar squad set up an ambush along a trail
used by the Huks. When a Huk patrol came along the trail, the
ambushers silently snatched the last man of the patrol, their move
unseen in the dark night. They punctured his neck with two holes,
vampire fashion, held the body up by the heels, drained it of blood,
and put the corpse back on the trail. When the Huks returned to look
for the missing man and found their bloodless comrade, every member
of the patrol believed that the vampire had got him and that one of
them would be next if they remained on the hill.
When daylight came, the whole Huk squadron moved
out of the vicinity. [11]
Lansdale defines the incident as "low humor" and
"an appropriate response ... to the glum and deadly practices of
communists and other authoritarians." [12] And by doing so, former
advertising executive Lansdale -- the merry prankster whom author
Graham Greene dubbed the Quiet American -- came to represent the
hypocrisy of American policy in South Vietnam. For Lansdale used
Madison Avenue language to construct a squeaky- clean, Boy Scout
image, behind which he masked his own perverse delight in atrocity.
In Saigon, Lansdale managed several programs
which were designed to ensure Diem's internal security and which
later evolved and were incorporated into Phoenix. The
process began in July 1954, when, posing as an
assistant Air Force attache to the U.S. Embassy, Lansdale got the
job of resettling nearly one million Catholic refugees from North
Vietnam. As chief of the CIA's Saigon Military Mission, Lansdale
used the exodus to mount operations against North Vietnam. To this
end he hired the Filipino-staffed Freedom Company to train two
paramilitary teams, which, posing as refugee relief organizations
supplied by the CIA-owned airline, Civil Air Transport, activated
stay-behind nets, sabotaged power plants, and spread false rumors of
a Communist bloodbath. In this last regard, a missionary named Tom
Dooley concocted lurid tales of Vietminh soldiers' disemboweling
pregnant Catholic women, castrating priests, and sticking bamboo
slivers in the ears of children so they could not hear the Word of
God.
Dooley's tall tales of terror galvanized American
support for Diem but were uncovered in 1979 during a Vatican
sainthood investigation. [C-1]
From Lansdale's clandestine infiltration and
"black" propaganda program evolved the Vietnamese Special Forces,
the Luc Luong Duc Biet (LLDB). Trained and organized by the CIA, the
LLDB reported directly to the CIA-managed Presidential Survey
Office. As a palace guard, says Kevin Generous in Vietnam: The
Secret War, "they ... were always available for special details
dreamed up by President Diem and his brother Nhu." [13] Those
"special" details sometimes involved "terrorism against political
opponents." [14]
Another Lansdale program was aimed at several
thousand Vietminh stay-behind agents organizing secret cells and
conducting propaganda among the people. As a way of attacking these
agents, Lansdale hired the Freedom Company to activate Operation
Brotherhood, a paramedical team patterned on the typical Special
Forces A team. Under CIA direction, Operation Brotherhood built
dispensaries that were used as cover for covert counterterror
operations. Operation Brotherhood spawned the Eastern Construction
Company, which
provided five hundred hard-core Filipino
anti-Communists who, while building roads and dispensing medicines,
assisted Diem's security forces by identifying and eliminating
Vietminh agents.
In January 1955, using resettled Catholic
refugees trained by the Freedom Company as cadre, Lansdale began his
Civic Action program, the centerpiece of Diem's National Security
program. Organized and funded by the CIA in conjunction with the
Defense Ministry, but administered through the Ministry of Interior
by the province chiefs, Civic Action aimed to do four things: to
induce enemy soldiers to defect; to organize rural people into
self-defense forces to insulate their villages from VC influence; to
create political cadres who would sell the idea that Diem -- not the
Vietminh -- represented national aspirations; and to provide cover
for counterterror. In doing these things, Civil Action cadres
dressed in black pajamas and went into villages to dig latrines,
patch roofs, dispense medicines, and deliver propaganda composed by
Lansdale. In return the people were expected to inform on Vietminh
guerrillas and vote for Diem in the 1956 reunification elections
stipulated by the Geneva Accords.
However, the middle-class northern Catholics sent
to the villages did not speak the same dialect as the people they
were teaching and succeeded only in alienating them. Not only did
Civic Action fail to win the hearts and minds of the rural
Vietnamese, but as a unilateral CIA operation it received only lip
service from Diem and his Can Lao cronies, who, in Lansdale's words,
"were afraid that it was some scheme of mine to flood the country
with secret agents." [15]
On May 10, 1955, Diem formed a new government and
banished the French (who kept eighty thousand troops in the South
until 1956) to outposts along the coast. Diem then appointed Nguyen
Ngoc Le as his first director general of the National Police. A
longtime CIA asset, Le worked with the Freedom Company to organize
the Vietnamese Veterans Legion. As a way of extending Can Lao party
influence, Vietnamese veteran legion posts were
established throughout Vietnam and, with advice
and assistance from the U.S. Information Service, took over the
distribution of all existing newspapers and magazines. The legion
also sponsored the first National Congress, held on May 29, 1955, at
City Hall in Saigon. One month later the Can Lao introduced its
political front, the National Revolution Movement.
On July 16, 1955, knowing the Buddhist population
would vote overwhelmingly for the Vietminh, Diem renounced the
reunification elections required by the Geneva Accords. Instead, he
rigged a hastily called national referendum. Announced on October 6
and held on October 23, the elections, says Professor Huy, "were an
absolute farce. Candidates chosen to be elected had to sign a letter
of resignation in which the date was vacant. In case after the
election the representative was considered undesirable, Nhu had only
to put a date on the letter to have him expelled from the National
Assembly." [16]
Elected president by a vast majority, Diem in
1956 issued Ordinance 57-A. Marketed by Lansdale as agrarian reform,
it replaced the centuries-old custom of village self-government with
councils appointed by district and province chiefs. Diem, of course,
appointed the district chiefs, who appointed the village councils,
which then employed local security forces to collect exorbitant
rents for absentee landlords living the high life in Saigon.
Universal displeasure was the response to
Ordinance 57-A, the cancellation of the reunification elections, and
the rigged election of 1955. Deprived of its chance to win legal
representation, the Vietcong launched a campaign of its own,
emphasizing social and economic awareness. Terror was not one of
their tactics. Says Rand Corporation analyst J. J. Zasloff in
"Origins of the Insurgency in South Vietnam 1954-1960": "There is no
evidence in our interviews that violence and sabotage were part of
their assignment." Rather, communist cadres were told "to return to
their home provinces and were instructed, it appears, to limit their
activities to organizational and
propaganda tasks." [17]
However, on the basis of CIA reports saying
otherwise, Diem initiated the notorious Denunciation of the
Communists campaign in 1956. The campaign was managed by security
committees, which were chaired by CIA-advised security officers who
had authority to arrest, confiscate land from, and summarily execute
Communists. In determining who was a Communist, the security
committees used a three-part classification system: A for dangerous
party members, B for less dangerous party members, and C for loyal
citizens. As happened later in Phoenix, security chiefs used the
threat of an A or B classification to extort from innocent
civilians, while category A and B offenders -- fed by their families
-- were put to work without pay building houses and offices for
government officials.
The military, too, had broad powers to arrest and
jail suspects while on sweeps in rural areas. Non-Communists who
could not afford to pay "taxes" were jailed until their families
came up with the cash. Communists fared worse. Vietminh flags were
burned in public ceremonies, and portable guillotines were dragged
from village to village and used on active and inactive Vietminh
alike. In 1956 in the Central Highlands fourteen thousand people
were arrested without evidence or trial -- people were jailed simply
for having visited a rebel district -- and by year's end there were
an estimated twenty thousand political prisoners nationwide. [18]
In seeking to ensure his internal security
through the denunciation campaign, Diem persecuted the Vietminh and
alienated much of the rural population in the process. But "the most
tragic error," remarks Professor Huy, "was the liquidation of the
Cao Dai, Hoa Hao and Binh Xuyen forces. By destroying them, Diem
weakened the defense of South Vietnam against communism. In fact,
the remnants
... were obliged to join the Vietnamese
Stalinists who were already reinforced by Diem's anti-communist
struggle
campaign.
"Diem's family dealt with this problem," Huy goes
on, "by a repressive policy applied through its secret service. This
organ bore the very innocent name of the Political and Social
Research Service. It was led by Dr. Tran Kim Tuyen, a devoted
Catholic, honest and efficient, who at the beginning sought only to
establish a network of intelligence agents to be used against the
communists. It had in fact obtained some results in this field. But
soon it became a repressive tool to liquidate any opponent." [19]
By then Ed Lansdale had served his purpose and
was being unceremoniously rotated out of Vietnam, leaving behind the
harried Civic Action program to his protege, Rufus Phillips.
Meanwhile, "Other Americans were working closely with the
Vietnamese," Lansdale writes, noting: "Some of the relationships led
to a development which I believed could bring only eventual disaster
to South Vietnam."
"This development was political," Lansdale
observes. "My first inkling came when several families appeared at
my house one morning to tell me about the arrest at midnight of
their men-folk, all of whom were political figures. The arrests had
a strange aspect to them, having come when the city was asleep and
being made by heavily armed men who were identified as 'special
police.'" [20]
Sensing the stupidity of such a program, Lansdale
appealed to Ambassador George Reinhardt, suggesting that "Americans
under his direction who were in regular liaison with Nhu, and who
were advising the special branch of the police, would have to work
harder at influencing the Vietnamese toward a more open and free
political concept." But, Lansdale was told, "a U.S. policy decision
had been made. We Americans were to give what assistance we could to
the building of a strong nationalistic party that would support
Diem. Since Diem was now the elected president, he needed to have
his own party." [21]
"Shocked" that he had been excluded from such a
critical policy decision, Lansdale, to his credit, tried to persuade
Diem to disband the Can Lao. When that failed, he took his case to
the Dulles brothers since they "had decisive voices in determining
the U.S. relationship with South Vietnam." But self-described
"visionary and idealist" Lansdale's views were dismissed
off-handedly by the pragmatic Dulleses in favor "of the one their
political experts in Saigon had recommended." Lansdale was told he
should "disengage myself from any guidance to political parties in
Vietnam." [22]
The mask of democracy would be maintained. But
the ideal was discarded in exchange for internal security.
Librarian's Comment:
[C-1] July 30, 1979 Vol. 12 No. 5 18 Years After
Dr. Tom Dooley's Death, a Priest Insists He Was a Saint, Not a CIA
Spook, By Rosemary Rawson
Tom Dooley was a real taskmaster, and he had an
Irish temper, there's no doubt about that," says the Rev.
Maynard Kegler. "But the documents in no way
imply that he was an agent of the CIA." The papers in question are
recently disclosed agency records that identify Dr. Dooley as a
sometime CIA informant (but not as an actual spy).
They have sparked a new flurry of interest in the
controversial medical missionary—once known as "Dr. America"—whose
work in Laos captured the hearts and minds of his countrymen in the
innocent days before the war in Vietnam. Ultimately, suspicions
about the doctor could torpedo a cause Father Kegler has promoted
for five years—the elevation of Dooley, who died in 1961, to
sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church.
Father Kegler, 54, acted as U.S.-based liaison
between his religious order, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, and
Dooley from 1958 to 1961. "I spent time with him in this country,
not in Laos," says Kegler, "and got to know him
well." After Dooley's death from cancer, Kegler,
now director of a Buffalo, Minn. retreat house, began the research
that would enable him to argue the case for Dooley's beatification.
It is the first step in the complex process of attaining sainthood.
Kegler claims he was not surprised when his
investigation led him to the CIA. There he found 500 unclassified
documents showing that Dooley occasionally helped the agency and
that it kept a close watch on him. "He gave them information out of
patriotism, love of country and all that the United States stood for
in 1958," Kegler insists. "He was willing to do that in return for
having a little more freedom to do his work and a little less
harassment. But he didn't initiate contact with the CIA, and he took
no money for his work."
Nonetheless, Dooley's reputation has taken a
beating in recent years from critics on both the left and the right.
In the '60s antiwar activists came to regard his brand of self-
righteous anti-Communism as one of the causes of U.S. intervention
in Vietnam. Others have dismissed him as an aggressive
self-publicist who practiced ineffective "hit- and-run" medicine. A
fund set up to continue Dooley's work after his death went bankrupt,
and the man who succeeded him in Laos died by his own hand.
Father Kegler, however, believes Dooley has been
maligned. "All of the people I have interviewed who knew Tom
personally have been very positive," he reports. "The negative
response was all from people who never knew him and never worked
with him." As evidence of Dooley's sanctity, the priest cites his
decision, while a Navy surgeon, to devote his life to Indochina.
"When he saw the plight of those hundreds of thousands of people,"
Kegler reports, "he said, 'My God, I can't go home and leave them.'
Up until that time I believe Tom Dooley was just an ordinary
Christian—maybe not even that." The priest is equally impressed with
Dooley's courage in fighting his cancer. "The example he gave while
facing suffering, facing death, was a great service to the American
people," says his sponsor. "Cancer is the greatest fear in the
country today."
Kegler's quest to establish Dooley's sainthood—
technically, church certification that a dead person is now in
heaven—is far from over. He may possibly have to prove that Dooley
is responsible for two certifiable miracles, then must submit his
entire case to Vatican- appointed "devil's advocates" who will
attempt to pick it apart. Kegler remains confident. "When we
interpret Tom Dooley's actions in Laos, we have to do it in the
context of what he knew of the CIA at the time," he concludes. "In
no way will this connection hurt his cause for sainthood—in fact, I
think it's going to help it."
CHAPTER 2: Internal Security
In 1954, in the professed belief that it ought to
extend the "American way" abroad, Michigan State University (MSU)
offered to provide the government of Vietnam with a huge technical
assistance program in four areas: public information, public
administration, finance and economics, and police and security
services. The contract was approved in early 1955, shortly after the
National Security Council (NSC) had endorsed Diem, and over the next
seven years MSU's Police Administration Division spent fifteen
million dollars of U.S. taxpayers' money building up the GVN's
internal security programs. In exchange for the lucrative contract,
the Michigan State University Group (MSUG) became the vehicle
through which the CIA secretly managed the South Vietnamese "special
police."
MSUG's Police Administration Division contributed
to Diem's internal security primarily by reorganizing his police and
security forces. First, Binh Xuyen gangsters in the Saigon police
were replaced with "good cops" from the Surete. Next, recruits from
the Surete were inducted into the Secret Service, Civil Guard, and
Military Security Service (MSS), which was formed by Ed Lansdale in
1954 as "military coup insurance." On administrative matters the MSS
reported to the Directorate of Political Warfare in liaison with the
CIA, while its operations staff reported to the Republic of Vietnam
Armed Forces (RVNAF)'s Joint General Staff in liaison with MAAG
counterintelligence officers. All general directors of police and
security services were military officers.
The Surete (plainclothesmen handling
investigations, customs, immigration, and revenue) was renamed the
Vietnamese Bureau of Investigations (VBI) and combined with the
municipal police (uniformed police in twenty-two autonomous cities
and Saigon) into a General Directorate of Police and Security
Services within the Ministry of the Interior. This early attempt at
bureaucratic streamlining was undermined by Diem, however, who kept
the various police and security agencies spying on one another. Diem
was especially wary of the VBI, which as the Surete had faithfully
served the French and which, after 1954, under CIA management, was
beyond his control. As a result, Diem judged the VBI by the extent
to which it attacked his domestic foes, spied on the Military
Security Service, and kept province chiefs in line.
Because it managed the central records
depository, the VBI was the most powerful security force and
received the lion's share of American "technical" aid. While other
services got rusty weapons, the VBI got riot guns, bulletproof
vests, gas masks, lie detectors, a high-command school, a modern
crime lab and modern interrogation centers; and the most promising
VBI officers were trained by the CIA and FBI at the International
Police Academy at Georgetown University in agent handling, criminal
investigations, interrogation, and counterinsurgency. The VBI (the
Cong An to Vietnamese) is one of the two foundation stones of
Phoenix.
Whereas the majority of Michigan State's police
advisers were former state troopers or big-city detectives, the men
who advised the VBI and trained Diem's Secret Service were CIA
officers working under cover as professors in the Michigan State
University Group. Each morning myopic MSUG employees watched from
their quarters across the street as senior VBI adviser Raymond
Babineau and his team went to work at the National Police
Interrogation Center, which, Graham Greene writes in The Quiet
American, "seemed to smell of urine and injustice." [1] Later in the
day the MSUG contingent watched while truckloads of political
prisoners -- mostly old men, women, and children arrested the night
before -- were handcuffed and carted off to Con Son Prison.
America's first colonialists in Saigon looked, then looked away. For
four years they dared not denounce the mass arrests or the fact that
room P-40 in the Saigon Zoo was used as a morgue and torture
chamber. No one wanted to incriminate himself or get on the wrong
side of Babineau and his proteges in the "special police."
The fear was palpable. In his book War Comes to
Long An, Jeffrey Race quotes a province chief: "I hardly ever dared
to look around in the office with all the Can Lao people there
watching me, and in those days it was just impossible to resign --
many others had tried -- they were just led off in the middle of the
night by Diem's men dressed as VC, taken to P-40 or Poulo Condore
[Con Son Prison] and never heard from again." [2]
While the VBI existed primarily to suppress
Diem's domestic opponents, it also served the CIA by producing an
annual Ban Tran Liet Viet Cong (Vietcong order of battle). Compiled
for the most part from notes taken by secret agents infiltrated into
VC meetings, then assembled by hand at the central records
depository, the Ban Tran Liet was the CIA's biography of the VCI and
the basis of its anti-infrastructure operations until 1964.
In 1959 Diem held another sham election. Said one
Vietnamese official quoted by Race: "The 1959 election was very
dishonest. Information and Civic Action Cadre went around at noon
when everyone was home napping and stuffed ballot boxes. If the
results didn't come out right they were adjusted at district
headquarters." When asked if anyone complained, the official
replied, "Everyone was terrified of the government
The Cong An beat people and used 'the water
treatment.' But there was nothing anyone could
do. Everyone was terrified." Said another official: "During the Diem
period the people here saw the government was no good at all. That
is why 80% of them followed the VC. I was the village chief then,
but I had to do what the government told me. If not, the secret
police [VBI] would have me picked up and tortured me to death. Thus
I was the very one who rigged the elections here." [3]
As is apparent, Diem's security forces terrorized
the Vietnamese people more than the VCI. In fact, as Zasloff noted
earlier, prior to 1959 the VCI carried out an official policy of
nonviolence. "By adopting an almost entirely defensive role during
this period," Race explains, "and by allowing the government to be
the first to employ violence, the Party -- at great cost -- allowed
the government to pursue the conflict in increasingly violent terms,
through its relentless reprisal against any opposition, its use of
torture, and, particularly after May 1959, through the psychological
impact in the rural areas of the proclamation of Law 10/59." [4]
In Phoenix/Phung Hoang: A Study of Wartime
Intelligence Management, CIA officer Ralph Johnson calls the 10/59
Law "the GVN's most serious mistake." Under its provisions, anyone
convicted of "acts of sabotage" or "infringements on the national
security" could be sentenced to death or life imprisonment with no
appeal. Making matters worse, Johnson writes, was the fact that 'The
primary GVN targets were former Viet Minh guerrillas -- many of whom
were nationalists, not Communists -- regardless of whether or not
they were known to have been participating in subversive
activities."' The 10/59 Law resulted in the jailing of fifty
thousand political prisoners by year's end. But rather than suppress
the insurgency, Vietnamese from all walks of life joined the cause.
Vietminh cadres moved into the villages from secluded base camps in
the Central Highlands, the Rung Sat, the Ca Mau swamps, and the
Plain of Reeds. And after four years of Diem style democracy, the
rural population welcomed them with open arms.
The nonviolence policy practiced by Vietcong
changed abruptly in 1959, when in response to the 10/59 Law and CIA
intrusions into North Vietnam, the Lao Dong Central Committee
organized the 559th Transportation and Support Group. Known as Doan
559, this combat-engineer corps carved out the Ho Chi Minh Trail
through the rugged mountains and fever-ridden jungles of South
Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
Doan 559 paved the way for those Vietminh
veterans who had gone North in 1954 and returned in 1959 to organize
self-defense groups and political cells in Communist- controlled
villages. By the end of 1959 Doan 559 had infiltrated forty-five
hundred regroupees back into South Vietnam.
Sent to stop Doan 559 from infiltrating troops
into South Vietnam were U.S. Army Special Forces commandos trained
in "behind-the-lines" anti-guerrilla and intelligence-gathering
operations. Working in twelve-member A teams under cover of Civic
Action, the Green Berets organized paramilitary units in remote
rural regions and SWAT team-type security forces in cities. In
return, they were allowed to occupy strategic locations and
influence political events in their host countries.
Developed as a way of fighting cost effective
counterinsurgencies, the rough-and- tumble Green Berets were an
adjunct of the CIA -- which made them a threat to the U.S. Army. But
Special Forces troopers on temporary duty (TDY) could go places
where the Geneva Accords restricted the number of regular soldiers.
For example, in Laos, the "Sneaky Petes" wore civilian clothes and
worked in groups of two or three, turning Pathet Lao deserters into
double agents who returned to their former units with electronic
tracking devices, enabling the CIA to launch air attacks against
them. Other double agents returned to their units to lead them into
ambushes. As Ed Lansdale explains, once inside enemy ranks, "they
could not only collect information for passing secretly to the
government but also could work to induce the rank and file to
surrender." Volunteers for such "risky business," Lansdale adds,
were trained singly or in groups as large as companies that were
"able to get close enough in their disguise for surprise combat,
often hand to hand." [6]
By the late 1950s, increasing numbers of American
Special Forces were in South Vietnam, practicing the terrifying
black art of psychological warfare.
***
Arriving in Saigon in the spring of 1959 as the
CIA's deputy chief of station was William Colby. An OSS veteran,
Princeton graduate, liberal lawyer, and devout Catholic, Colby
managed the station's paramilitary operations against North Vietnam
and the Vietcong. He also managed its political operations and
oversaw deep-cover case officers like Air America executive Clyde
Bauer, who brought to South Vietnam its Foreign Relations Council,
Chamber of Commerce, and Lions' Club, in Bauer's
words, "to create a strong civil base." [7] CIA
officers under Colby's direction funneled money to all political
parties, including the Lao Dong, as a way of establishing long-range
penetration agents who could monitor and manipulate political
developments.
Under Colby's direction, the CIA increased its
advice and assistance to the GVN's security forces, at the same time
that MSUG ceased being a CIA cover. MSUG advisers ranging across
South Vietnam, conducting studies and reporting on village life, had
found themselves stumbling over secret policemen posing as village
chiefs and CIA officers masquerading as anthropologists. And even
though these ploys helped security forces catch those in the VCI,
they also put the MSUG advisers squarely between Vietcong cross
hairs.
So it was that while Raymond Babineau was on
vacation, assistant MSUG project chief Robert Scigliano booted the
VBI advisory unit out from under MSUG cover. The State Department
quickly absorbed the CIA officers and placed them under the Agency
for International Development's Public Safety Division (AID/PSD),
itself created by CIA officer Byron Engel in 1954 to provide
"technical assistance" and training to police and security officials
in fifty-two countries. In Saigon in 1959, AID/PSD was managed by a
former Los Angeles policeman, Frank Walton, and its field offices
were directed by the CIA-managed Combined Studies Group, which
funded cadres and hired advisers for the VBI, Civil Guard, and
Municipal police.
Through AID/PSD, technical assistance to police
and security services increased exponentially. Introduced were a
telecommunications center; a national police training center at Vung
Tau; a rehabilitation system for defecting Communists which led to
their voluntary service in CIA security programs; and an
FBI-sponsored national identification registration program, which
issued ID cards to all Vietnamese citizens over age fourteen as a
means of identifying Communists, deserters, and fugitives.
Several other major changes occurred at this
juncture. On the assumption that someday the Communists would be
defeated, MSUG in 1957 had reduced the Civil Guard in strength and
converted it into a national police constabulary, which served
primarily as a security force for district and province chiefs (all
of whom were military officers after 1959) and also guarded bridges,
major roads, and power stations. CIA advisers assigned to the
constabulary developed clandestine cells within its better units.
Operating out of police barracks at night in civilian clothes, these
ragtag Red Squads were targeted against the VCI, using intelligence
provided by the VBI. However, in December 1960 the U.S. Military
Assistance Advisory Group seized control of the constabulary and
began organizing it into company, battalion, and regimental units
armed with automatic rifles and machine guns. The constabulary was
renamed the Regional Forces and placed under the Ministry of
Defense. The remaining eighteen thousand rural policemen thereafter
served to enforce curfews and maintain law and order in agrovilles
-- garrison communities consisting of forcefully relocated persons,
developed by MSUG in 1959 in response to Ed Lansdale's failed Civic
Action program.
With the demise of Civic Action teams,
pacification efforts were by default dumped on the Vietnamese Army,
whose heavy-handed tactics further alienated the rural Vietnamese
and enabled the Vietcong to infiltrate the Self-Defense Corps and
erode the program from within. In an attempt to stop the bleeding,
Civic Action cadres were redirected toward organizing "community
development" programs, in which class A and B Communist offenders
were forced to build agrovilles, as well as roads leading to and
from them. When construction had been completed, South Vietnamese
army units leveled the surrounding villages, "resettled" the
inhabitants in agrovilles, and manned outposts along the roads as a
means of facilitating the movement of security forces in search of
Communist offenders.
The idea behind agrovilles was to control the
rural population by physically moving the sea of sympathetic people
away from the guerrilla fish. By making relocated persons build
agrovilles -- tent cities protected by moats, mud walls, and bamboo
stakes -- internal security, it was imagined, could be established,
laws enforced, and potential revolutionaries tacitly involved in the
fight against the guerrillas and thus psychologically prone to act
as informers to VBI case officers. Their information would then lead
to the elimination of the insurgent political cells through their
imprisonment, assassination, or defection. Agrovilles were defended
by Regional Forces and the Popular Force -- derived from
Self-Defense Corps -- trained and advised by U.S. Army, AID/PSD, and
CIA personnel.
The secondary nation-building goal of the
agroville program was physically to construct a social and economic
infrastructure connected to the GVN. In reality, though, by
uprooting the people from their ancestral homes, the program
generated legions of Vietcong sympathizers. Moreover, the massive
infusion of American aid amounted to a boondoggle for the corrupt
government officials administering the program. Piled on top of a
land reform program that stole from the poor and gave to the rich
and of the 10/59 Law, agrovilles replaced Civic Action as the main
target of the burgeoning insurgency and its North Vietnamese
sponsors.
In response, when he became chief of the CIA's
Saigon station in 1960, William Colby accelerated the pace of CIA
operations into North Vietnam. He and Gilbert Lawton (a CIA officer
disguised as a Special Forces colonel) also launched the Civilian
Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) program as a means of preventing
North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and roving Vietcong guerrilla units from
moving through, drawing sustenance from, or maintaining agents in
GVN-monitored villages.
Extrapolated from the French commando program
begun in 1951, the CIDG program used Vietnamese Special Forces to
organize "favorable minorities" into static Self- Defense Corps
through Civic Action, which were armed, trained, and targeted by the
CIA against Communist political and military units.
Father Hoa's Sea Swallows exemplify the CIDG
program in operation. Imprisoned in the 1940's by the Communist
Chinese for conspiring with the Kuomintang, Father Nguyen Loc Hoa
led two thousand Catholic converts into Laos in 1950, shortly after
Chiang Kai-shek had fled to Taiwan with his Nationalist Army.
Eight years later, after enduring religious
persecution in Laos, Father Hoa was persuaded by Bernard Yoh -- a
Kuomintang intelligence officer on loan to the CIA -- to resettle
his flock in the village of Binh Hung on the Ca Mau Peninsula in
southern South Vietnam. The deal was this: Father Hoa was appointed
chief of a district where 90 percent of the people were Vietcong
supporters. He was given quantities of military aid and advice from
a series of CIA officers disguised as Special Forces colonels. In
exchange, Father Hoa had merely to fight the Vietcong, as he did
with vigor. As Don Schrande reported in the Saturday Evening Post of
February 17, 1962, "Father Hoa personally led his pitifully small
force into the swamps nightly to strike the enemy on his own
ground." [8]
Stuck in the midst of a VC stronghold, Binh Hung
village resembled a military outpost, replete with an obstacle
course Father Hoa called "our own little Fort Bragg." As district
chief Father Hoa used CIA funds to run "an intelligence network"
consisting of "a volunteer apparatus of friendly farmers and a few
full time agents." On the basis of this intelligence Father Hoa
mounted raids against individual Vietcong cadres. By 1962 he had
corralled 148 prisoners, whom he used as slave laborers in the
village's rice paddies. In the evenings Sea Swallow cadres
indoctrinated their captives with religious and political
propaganda, prompting the weaklings to defect and join the ranks of
Father Hoa's Popular Force battalion -- five hundred Vietnamese
dressed in ill-fitting U.S. Army-supplied khaki uniforms.
Because it was composed of Vietnamese, the
Popular Force battalion was not trustworthy, however, and did not
include the Sea Swallows' own cadre. Described by Schrande as former
Boy Scouts who gave the three-fingered salute, this "group of
black-clad commandos armed to the teeth" was "[c]lustered around the
priest like a personal bodyguard." [9] Unlike their Vietnamese
neighbors, Father Hoa's Chinese Catholic zealots held what Bernard
Yoh calls "an ideology that there can be no compromise with
Communism." [10]
The image of a defiant band of foreigners,
transplanted by the CIA to Vietnam to suit its purposes and
surrounded by captives, defectors, and enemies, symbolizes perfectly
the state of the counterinsurgency in the early 1960's. Things were
not going well
inside the GVN either. The Military Security
Service was infiltrated by Communist agents, and in June 1959 the
VBI arrested the personal bodyguard to the ARVN chief of staff and
charged him with spying. In January 1960 two officers in the
Operations Division of the Vietnamese Joint General Staff (JGS) were
arrested as Vietcong agents. Even the Can Lao was penetrated by
Communist agents, as events proved. The situation climaxed in
November 1960, when a group of disgruntled Dai Viet paratroopers led
a coup against Diem. Although a failure, the coup attempt drew
attention to Diem's lack of popular support, a situation made worse
when his brother Nhu sicced the secret police on the Dai Viets and
their Buddhist allies. This purge sent the Buddhists underground and
into alliances with the Communists, and what was called "the
Buddhist crisis" ensued, eventually causing the demise of the Ngo
regime.
Sensing that Diem was on the ropes and bolstered
by the Buddhists' having joined their cause, the Communists on
December 20, 1960, announced the formation of the National Front for
the Liberation of South Vietnam and called for the expulsion of all
Americans. Ho Chi Minh appointed Le Duan secretary-general of the
southern branch of the party, and one year later the People's
Revolutionary party (PRP) was activated in the South. The insurgency
had begun in earnest.
***
How the insurgency was organized is essential to
understanding Phoenix, which was targeted specifically against its
leadership, the VCI. At the top of the VCI organizational chart was
the Central Office of South Vietnam (COSVN), an executive committee
answering to the Lao Dong Central Committee's Reunification
Department in Hanoi. From its floating headquarters along the
Cambodian border, COSVN in turn directed the activities of the
People's Revolutionary party, the National Liberation Front, and the
Liberation Army -- aka the Vietcong. COSVN's marching orders were
sent to six regional committees in South Vietnam, plus one more for
the Saigon capital zone. Province committees in turn directed
district committees, which were formed by groupings of at least
three village committees. Likewise, each village committee was
composed of at least three hamlet-level chapters, which constituted
the fundamental link to the rural population. Hamlet chapters had
three to five members, who were organized into cells with elected
leaders. The cell was the smallest VCI organizational unit but could
not exist unless integrated into a chapter.
The National Liberation Front sought to mobilize
the "people" through associations encompassing all sectors of
society. The NLF coordinated the Communist party with other South
Vietnamese political parties through its Central Committee, which
floated along the Cambodian border in the area referred to as the
Parrot's Beak. When operations were mounted against it, the Central
Committee slipped into the Iron Triangle area north of Saigon, or
into the famous tunnels of Cu Chi, or into Tay Ninh
City. Regardless of where it was headquartered,
the NLF was most viable at the grass- roots level. There farmers'
associations preached land reform; women's associations trained
nurses; and liberation youth associations opposed the draft.
Liberation associations existed for all classes of society,
including writers and Buddhists.
Initially, only Communist party members headed
NLF associations, and all ambitious revolutionaries sought admission
to the People's Revolutionary party, which by 1962 boasted half a
million members. Entrance to the PRP required a sponsor, a
background check, and a trial membership. As the insurgency's
managers, party members were the primary target of Phoenix and its
predecessor organizations.
Topping the hit list were party secretaries --
the people directing Vietcong operations at region, province, and
district levels. Although usually known by name, they were
nevertheless hard to find. VCI "duty expert" Robert Slater, a Marine
captain on contract to the CIA from 1967 to 1969, writes: "In over
three years in Vietnam, I knew of no Province Party Secretary ever
being captured." Why so hard to kill? "Since he is the most
important VC committee member in the province, access to him is
limited to province and district committee members. This is to
prevent any attempted assassination by Allied penetration agents or
VC 'sell-outs.'" [11]
High on the list was the district party
secretary, in Slater's words, "the indispensable link between COSVN,
region, province and the villages." Armed and always on the move,
the "DPS usually does not sleep in the same house or even hamlet
where his family lives," Slater notes, "to preclude any injury to
his family during assassination attempts or Allied raids." Such
precautions did not always work. Writes Slater: "The Allies have
frequently found out where District Party Secretaries live and
raided their homes; in an ensuing fire fight the secretary's wife
and children have been killed and injured." [12]
The village party secretary was another priority
target. Traveling alone to hamlets to conduct person-to-person
business in rice paddies, cafes, and barbershops, the village
secretary was responsible for feeding, billeting, and guiding VC and
NVA troops in the area. More visible than district or province
cadre, village secretaries were considered easy pickings.
Managing revolutionary intelligence operations in
South Vietnam was the Central Research Agency (Cuc Nghien Cuu)
reporting to the National Defense Committee in Hanoi in conjunction
with the Reunification Department of the Lao Dong Central Committee.
The task of Cuc Nghien Cuu agents in South Vietnam, according to CIA
officer Ralph Johnson, was the penetration of GVN offices, "to
determine plans and capabilities, to recruit GVN military members,
and to provide intelligence for
paramilitary activities, espionage, subversion,
and other political operations." [13] Agents of the Cuc Nghien Cuu
reported through an intricate radio and courier network directly to
Hanoi, where intelligence data were analyzed and collated with
information from elsewhere in South Vietnam and abroad. The Cuc
Nghien Cuu maintained secret bases and courier networks in the South
as a means of supplying its agents with direction and equipment.
Introduced into South Vietnam in 1960 as the
insurgency's security service was the An Ninh. Composed mainly of
North Vietnamese agents who reported to Hanoi's Ministry of Public
Security, the An Ninh investigated VCI members suspected of being
double agents or potential defectors. From its headquarters in
COSVN, the An Ninh ran intelligence nets, propaganda campaigns, and
counterespionage operations at the village level, drawing up
blacklists of double agents and manning armed reconnaissance teams
that kidnapped and assassinated GVN officials. More than any other
branch of the Communist shadow government in South Vietnam, the An
Ninh was responsible for destabilizing the GVN. Ralph Johnson calls
it "the glue that held the VCI together." [14] The Cuc Nghien Cuu
and the An Ninh were the CIA's archenemies and, ironically, the
models for its Phoenix coordinators.
Indeed, as the CIA saw how the insurgency was
organized, it structured its counterinsurgency accordingly. Unable
to admit that nationalism was the cause of the insurrection and that
the United States was viewed as an intruder like the French, the CIA
instead argued that Communist organizational techniques, especially
its use of selective terror, compelled the Vietnamese people to
support the insurgency. As William Colby testified before Congress,
"the implication or latent threat of force alone was sufficient to
insure that the people would comply with Communist demands." [15]
In drumming up public support in America for
military intervention, the CIA portrayed all armed anti-GVN sects as
Communist puppets, and because the agency asserted that the "people"
were not behind the insurgency but were mindless peasants who had
been coerced by a clever mix of propaganda and terror, the
legitimate grievances of the people -- primarily their anger at
Diem's dictatorship
-- could be ignored. This being the case, the GVN
did not have to comply with the Geneva Accords, provide fair
elections, or enact land reform. It did not have to end preferential
treatment for Catholics, curb police corruption, or discipline ARVN
soldiers. All grievances were dismissed as smoke and mirrors
disguising the criminal ambitions of the Communists.
This revisionist view is what Stanley Karnow
calls "the myth ... that the Vietcong was essentially an indigenous
and autonomous insurgent movement." [16] The revisionists argued
that the wily Communists had recognized the legitimate grievances of
people,
then adapted their organization to exploit local
conditions. Having gained toeholds in the villages, they used
selective terror to eliminate GVN authority and frighten the people
into joining NLF associations and armed VC units. Ipso facto the VCI
and the "people" were in no real sense connected, and one had only
to destroy the VCI -- the apparatus -- to stop the revolution.
Key to revisionist theory was the notion that
selective terror was a more effective social control than the GVN's
suppressive terror, which only fanned the revolutionary fires. As
Jeffrey Race notes, "violence will work against the user, unless he
has already preempted a large part of the population and then limits
his acts of violence to a sharply defined minority." [17]
Ironically, by using selective terror effectively, the VCI handed
the CIA the rationale it needed to develop counterterror teams. And
by announcing the formation of the NLF in a bid for political
legitimacy -- just as this notion of killing off the enemy's
civilian leadership was being advanced -- the VCI offered itself as
a target.
Meanwhile, as the CIA became aware of what
political warfare entailed, Diem and his brother Nhu began to be
perceived as liabilities. Convinced that William Colby had organized
the November 1960 coup attempt, Nhu prohibited his Can Lao followers
from consorting with the CIA. This edict threw a wrench into CIA
attempts to organize internal security in South Vietnam, and in May
1961 Ambassador Elbridge Durbow asked Diem to abolish the Can Lao,
claiming it denied advancement to the majority of Vietnamese and
nullified democratic reforms.
Unwilling to divest himself of his power base,
Diem refused, and instead sought to appease the Americans by
authorizing a statute legalizing the creation of the Central
Intelligence Organization (CIO), a move Colby credits as the
beginning of Phoenix. Station chief Colby then directed Raymond
Babineau to provide the people and the equipment required to put the
CIO in business. [18] Colonel Nguyen Van Y was named chief, a
building in Saigon was selected as his headquarters, and he
recruited his staff from a faction of the Can Lao that included
General Tran Thien Khiem, the man who eventually managed Phoenix,
and Nguyen Van Thieu, the army colonel who eventually became
president of South Vietnam. Not limited to the coordination of
police and military intelligence, the CIO also managed political and
foreign intelligence operations. Smaller and more sophisticated than
the Cong An, the CIO became the nerve center of the
counterinsurgency.
Knowing that the single-minded Americans would
carry the fight against the North, Diem, through his spymaster, Dr.
Tuyen, and the Office of Political and Social Studies, redoubled his
attack against his domestic opponents. However, Karnow writes,
"Tuyen feared that Diem's failings would bring about a Communist
takeover. Ironically, he filled his faction with dissenters he had
blacklisted, and he also attracted
disgruntled junior officers. He teamed up as well
with Colonel Pham Ngoc Thao, unaware of Thao's clandestine Communist
ties. Thao's followers included a young air force pilot, Nguyen Cao
Ky." [19]
Believing Thao to be trustworthy, Nhu appointed
him to manage the strategic hamlet program, which replaced the
agroville program in 1962. Thus, by forcing Diem and Nhu into
greater dependence on reactionary programs and a Communist double
agent, the formation of the CIO in 1961 further hastened the demise
of the Ngo regime.
Meanwhile, in order to stem the tide of cheap
little wars of liberation that Nikita Khrushchev promised would
"bury" the West, President John Kennedy formed the National Security
Council Special Group to manage U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in
Vietnam and elsewhere. A special assistant for covert and special
activities (SACSA) was assigned to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, former Lansdale aide General William B. Rosson was made
the special warfare assistant to the Army's chief of staff, and the
CIA got a new headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
When, on September 18, 1961, an An Ninh terror
squad decapitated the Catholic chief of Phuoc Long Province.
President Kennedy, ignoring troop limits set at the Geneva Accords,
rushed legions of Special Forces advisers to the South Vietnamese.
The 704th Military Intelligence Group arrived and began advising the
Military Security Service, and the Army sent its first province
advisers to Vietnam, supplementing MAAG with the Military Assistance
Command, Vietnam (MACV).
CIA psywar and paramilitary officers, their
brains bursting with big ideas and their Abercrombie and Fitch
safari jacket pockets bulging with big bucks, converged on Vietnam
from Cuba, Africa, Greece, Korea, the Philippines, Laos, and
Indonesia. By the end of 1962 nearly twelve thousand American
soldiers were in South Vietnam, flying helicopters, dropping napalm
on Communist villages, spraying Agent Orange, advising ARVN
battalions, patrolling rivers and the coast, conducting
"behind-the-lines" missions, and mounting anti-infrastructure
operations that included attacks on Diem's political opposition. The
counterinsurgency, too, had begun in earnest.
CHAPTER 3: Covert Action
The dynamics of political warfare, as conceived
by the Communists and copied by the CIA, revolved around armed
propaganda teams. In South Vietnam a Vietcong armed propaganda team
(APT) would enter a village at dusk, and the political cadres, being
friendly and "upright," would go from person to person introducing
themselves and getting everyone's attention. They would then gather
everyone together for entertainment -- old tunes with a
revolutionary twist -- followed by propaganda on GVN corruption and
American war crimes, for example, a lecture
on how American-made defoliants destroyed crops
and caused disease or a skit depicting an American soldier raping a
Vietnamese girl. Next came the obligatory self-criticism session,
and last but not least, the recruitment of people into clandestine
cells, liberation committees, guerrilla units, and informant nets.
As standard procedure, an armed propaganda team
would return to the village to repeat the performance, and if the
villagers resisted over a period of time, terror came into play. The
APT would go through its routine, then announce that a spy had been
discovered -- usually a secret policeman or corrupt village chief,
sometimes a wife and children, too. The unfortunate person was put
on trial before a "people's court" and, after being summarily
convicted, was brutally murdered in the center of the village. A
death notice was pinned to the body, and the body put on display.
The message was clear. The CIA determined early
the economic advantages of this village-level selective terror
approach. Only when selective terror was used by the CIA, it was
called counterterror. The origin of the CIA's counterterror doctrine
in South Vietnam may be traced to political warfare pioneer Ralph
Johnson. A Chicago native, veteran of the Flying Tigers, and
notorious ladies' man, whose most famous liaison was with Nguyen Cao
Ky's wife, Johnson was described by one colleague as "a
good-looking, fast-talking snake-oil salesman." [1] Johnson dubbed
his counterterror doctrine Contre Coup and, in The Phoenix Program:
Planned Assassination or Legitimate Conflict Management, describes
it as "Turning the Communist terrorist strategy, which had proven
effective, into a U.S.-Saigon pacification strategy." [2]
CIA officer Johnson formulated his theory in
the Philippines in the mid-1950's and as a police adviser in
Indonesia in 1957 and 1958, prior to the failed Sukarno coup. His
cover having been blown in Jakarta, he was posted to Laos and
assigned to the remote northern region bordering China and North
Vietnam. There, working undercover for the Agency for International
Development, Johnson began organizing Montagnard tribesmen and
Pathet Lao defectors into Civic Action/commando teams on the Ed
Lansdale "combat psywar" model.
In mid-1960, shortly before the Buddhist
crisis, Johnson was transferred to Hue to serve as the CIA officer
in charge of South Vietnam's northern provinces and to implement a
program similar to the one he had created in Laos. In staffing the
pilot programs they created, Johnson and his CIA colleagues spotted,
vetted, and hired qualified military and police officers as agents.
These Vietnamese nationals were detached from the military or the
police and served at the pleasure of the local civilian authority.
Such was the arrangement that enabled Johnson and Vietnamese Army
Captain Le Xuan Mai to devise the Mountain Scouts, a political
action program
employing tactics and techniques Johnson had
copied from the Communists and perfected in Laos.
According to Stu Methven, a veteran CIA officer
who followed Johnson from Laos to Hue in early 1961, the Mountain
Scouts were a unilateral CIA operation managed by CIA-funded
province and district chiefs. The scouts were composed of Montagnard
tribesmen recruited by Vietnamese agents in the CIA's employ. The
"Yards" and their Vietnamese officers were then organized into
fifteen-man teams that -- like the VC's armed propaganda teams --
had both paramilitary and political action capabilities.
Their job, says Methven, was to "make the GVN
presence felt outside the district capitals." Once inside a VC
village, the Mountain Scout political officer would denounce the
Communists and make a pro-GVN speech, co-written by Mai and Johnson.
Other team members would take a census and make a map of the
village. If possible, the team returned with defectors, left
informers behind, and stuck a VC head on a pole as they left. The
latter was a counterterror function, distinct from any strictly
paramilitary function, which involved combat with enemy units.
Now a special assistant to the vice-president
of the Center for Naval Analysis, Methven co-managed the Mountain
Scout program with Ralph Johnson in 1961 and 1962. To counter what
he perceived as rampant VC terror, Methven began extracting the most
aggressive individuals from Mountain Scout teams and hiring
mercenaries -- often Vietnamese convicts or Chinese Nungs -- to act
as counterterrorists, to do unto the Vietcong's armed propaganda
teams what they were doing to GVN officials. With the creation of
these counterterror teams, the second of Phoenix's foundation stones
was set in place.
Ralph Johnson defines the CTs as "small teams
... particularly well trained, aggressive, and consisting of a large
percentage of former Viet Cong who had become disillusioned and were
now violently anti-Viet Cong. Designed like SWAT units employed by
the Police Departments of any major city, the Counter-Terror Teams
were constituted of five to 20 men whose mission was to collect
intelligence in Communist-controlled areas, as well as to apprehend
key Viet Cong leaders. At maximum strength the Counter-Terror Teams
never totaled more than 3,500 throughout all South Vietnam, but
because of their CIA support, and the need to protect not only Team
members but their families from Viet Cong reprisals, an aura of
mystery and secrecy came to surround these units." [4]
With the appearance of CT teams in 1962, three
separate and distinct programs began to emerge; political action,
paramilitary, and counterterror. At this point Ralph Johnson was
transferred to Saigon as an adviser to several important government
officials, and the CIA station's chief of covert action, Cliff
Strathern, assigned Methven the task of selling the Mountain Scout
program to the province chiefs in I Corps and II Corps. Assisted by
half a dozen CIA contract officers, Methven eventually installed the
program in thirteen provinces with a force of fifteen thousand men.
[5]
Selling the Mountain Scout program to province
chiefs, what he called "fostering local initiatives," was easy,
Methven recalled, "because we gave them money and supplies."
Province chiefs also found the program attractive because as a
unilateral CIA operation the Mountain Scouts were not under GVN
control and because having the teams under their control
strengthened the hand of province and district chiefs in their
dealings with Saigon.
In expanding the Mountain Scout program,
Methven noted, "MAAG was our biggest supporter." But in return for
logistical support, MAAG ultimately assumed control.
And being less concerned with political action
than with fighting NVA and VC combat units, MAAG advisers began
transforming the Mountain Scouts and other paramilitary CIDG teams
from "static" defense groups into mobile strike (Mike) forces. The
CIA, however, did not forsake its political action or counterterror
missions, and while MAAG increased the size of the units under its
control, the CIA purposely kept its CT and political action teams in
small units -- usually fewer than two hundred men in a province --
and in this way maintained greater control over political
developments at the local level.
With the militarization of the Mountain Scouts,
hunter/killer teams first appeared on the scene. Composed of two or
three Montagnards or mercenaries and one or two American advisers,
the hunter team penetrated enemy areas, reconnoitered for
intelligence, and conducted kidnapping and assassination (snatch and
snuff) operations. When the hunter teams, which performed as
counterterrorists, stumbled on large enemy troop concentrations,
they called in killer teams in black, unmarked helicopters provided
by the CIA. Although they worked in tandem, hunter teams were not
under the operational control of killer teams.
Also at this time the CIA began using selective
terror not just to do to the Vietcong what they were doing to GVN
officials. Knowing that an act of selective terror against one
Montagnard would send the whole village scurrying to a refugee
center or a strategic hamlet, where they were then recruited into
CIDG teams, the CTs began disguising themselves as Vietcong and
committing acts of selective terror against ethnic rivals.
However, as became increasingly clear during
the early 1960's, organizing favorable minorities through the CIDG
program was not enough to stem the Communist tide. Through arrogance
and repression, Diem had alienated the Buddhist majority, and even
his generals were plotting against him. Meanwhile, the NLF was
organizing
more and more Buddhist villages, and the CIA
was failing to do likewise on behalf of the GVN. As Jeffrey Race
points out, "The [GVN] could not create a viable 'underground'
apparatus like the Party's, because of the low level of motivation
of the government's operatives and their lack of a sympathetic
environment." [6]
For VC and CIA alike, the purpose of political
action was threefold: to expand influence through propaganda and
civic action, to organize villagers to fight enemy military units,
and to destroy the enemy's infrastructure -- meaning that if the
counterinsurgency was to succeed, the CIA had to create cadres that
were every bit as motivated as the Vietcong. So, in the spirit of
Contre Coup, the CIA turned to defectors to spread its message in
the rural villages of Vietnam, in effect, into enemy territory.
According to William Colby, "The Armed
Propaganda Team has [a number of] former Vietcong who are recruited
to work for you Their
function is to go around
in the countryside and indicate to the people
that they used to be Vietcong and that the government has received
them and taken them in and that the Chieu Hoi [amnesty] program does
exist as a way of VC currently on the other side to rally. They
contact people like the families of known VC, and provide
transportation to defector and refugee centers. [7]
As Colby explained, communication is the
essence of political warfare. Thus, to understand political warfare
and how Phoenix fits within that context, it is essential first to
understand the role of language.
In its broadest political warfare application,
language is the means by which governments, through subtle
suggestion and disinformation, shape public opinion on issues.
Communists and capitalists alike recognize the power of slogans and
packaging to sell political as well as commercial products. For
example, the Vietcong used language to peddle a totalitarian state
in the guise of social justice, while language allowed Ed Lansdale
to wrap the Diem dictatorship in the robe of Jesus Christ and sell
it as a democracy. The difference in Vietnam, of course, was that
the Vietcong slung their slogans at the rural population,
proclaiming, "Land for the Landless," while Lansdale (who prior to
World War II handled accounts for an advertising agency in San
Francisco) declared straight-faced that "Christ has moved South," a
pitch obviously aimed at the American public.
Lansdale was not unaware of what he was doing.
The first objective of a covert action program is to create
plausible denial -- specifically, in South Vietnam, to cloak the
CIA's role in organizing GVN repression. The CIA did this by
composing and planting distorted articles in foreign and domestic
newspapers and by composing "official" communiques which appeared to
have originated
within the GVN itself. This disinformation
campaign led predisposed Americans to believe that the GVN was a
legitimately elected representative government, a condition which
was a necessary prerequisite for the massive aid programs that
supported the CIA's covert action programs. Insofar as language --
information management -- perpetuated the myth that Americans were
the GVN's advisers, not its manufacturer, public support was rallied
for continued intervention.
Next, the CIA judges a covert action program on
its intelligence potential -- its ability to produce information on
the enemy's political, military, and economic infrastructure. That
is why the CIA's covert action branch operates as an intelligence
arm under cover of civic action. What makes these intelligence
operations covert is not any mistaken impression on the part of the
enemy, but rather the CIA's ability to deny plausibly involvement in
them to the American public. Here again, language is the key.
For example, during Senate hearings into CIA
assassination plots against Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders,
"plausible denial" was defined by the CIA's deputy director of
operations Richard Bissell as the use of circumlocution and
euphemism in discussions where precise definitions would expose
covert actions and bring them to an end. [8]
The Church Committee report says, "In November
1962 the proposal for a new covert action program to overthrow
Castro was developed. The President's Assistant, Richard Goodwin,
and General Edward Lansdale, who was experienced in counter-
insurgency operations, played major staff roles in creating this
program, which was named Operation MONGOOSE." A special group was
created to oversee Mongoose, and Lansdale was made its chief of
operations. Those operations included "executive actions." [9]
A memo written by Lansdale and introduced
during the hearings in part states that the "Attack on the cadre of
the regime including key leaders ... should be a 'Special Target'
operation. CIA defector operations are vital here. Gangster elements
might prove the best recruitment potential for actions against
police G-2 officials." When questioned about his language, Lansdale
testified that the words "actions" and "attack" actually meant
killing. He also testified that "criminal elements" were contracted
for use in the attack against Castro. He euphemistically called
these gangsters the Caribbean Survey Group. [10]
Further to ensure plausible denial, the CIA
conducts covert action under cover of proprietary companies like Air
America and the Freedom Company, through veterans and business
organizations, and various other fronts. As in the case of fake
newspaper articles and official communiques, the idea is to use
disinformation to suggest initiatives fostering
positive values -- freedom, patriotism, brotherhood, democracy --
while doing dirty deeds behind the scenes. In CIA jargon this is
called black propaganda and is the job of political and
psychological (PP) officers in the covert action branch. PP officers
played a major role in packaging Phoenix for sale to the American
public as a program designed "to protect the people from terrorism."
[11]
***
Language, in its narrowest political-warfare
application, is used to create defectors. Not only were defectors
valued for their ability to sap the enemy's will to fight, but
having worked on the inside, defectors were also the most accurate
and timely source of intelligence on Vietcong and NVA unit strength
and location. For that reason they made the best guides and
trackers. After defecting, many returned immediately to their area
of operations with a reaction force to locate hidden enemy arms or
food caches. Others, upon turning themselves in, were screened and
interrogated by security officers. Once turned, these defectors
became penetration leads back into the VCI. Defectors who returned
to their former positions inside enemy military units or political
organizations were provided with a "secure" means of contacting
their VBI case officer, whom they fed information leading to the
arrest or ambush of enemy cadres, soldiers, and secret agents.
VBI case officers monitoring the defector
program for potential recruits also conducted CIA-advised political
reeducation programs for Communists and common criminals alike.
Recycled wrongdoers were transformed by CIA advisers into
counterterrorists and political action cadres who then co-opted
former comrades, prepared leaflets, and conducted interrogations.
Where hardened criminals were unavailable, counterterror elements
were extracted from political action teams and hidden in sealed
compounds inside Special Forces camps and CIA safe houses.
So it was that political and psychological
warfare experts moved to the forefront of the counterinsurgency in
the early 1960's, fighting, under cover of Civic Action, a plausibly
deniable war against enemy agents and soldiers, using black
propaganda, defectors, criminals (the entire Fifty-second Ranger
Battalion was recruited from Saigon prisons), selective terror,
forcible relocations, and racial hatred to achieve its goal of
internal security.
The importance of information management in
political warfare also meant a larger role in Vietnam for the U.S.
Information Service (USIS). Ostensibly the overseas branch of the
U.S. Information Agency -- performing the same propaganda and
censorship functions outside America as the USIA performs within --
the USIS has as its raison d'etre promotion of the "American way" in
its narrowest big
business sense. In its crusade to convert the
world into one big Chamber of Commerce, the USIS employs all manner
of media, from TVs, radios, and satellites to armed propaganda
teams, wanted posters, and counterterror.
The USIS officer most deeply involved in
Phoenix was Frank Scotton. A graduate of American University's
College of International Relations, Scotton received a U.S.
government graduate assistantship to the East-West Center at the
University of Hawaii. About the CIA-sponsored East-West Center,
Scotton said in an interview with the author, "It was a cover for a
training program in which Southeast Asians were brought to Hawaii
and trained to go back to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos to create
agent nets." After passing the Foreign Service exam, Scotton was
persuaded by a patron to join the USIS, which "dealt with people,"
unlike the State Department, which "observed from a distance." [12]
A fabulously charismatic personality, tall and
swarthy, Scotton had recently returned from a trip to Thailand --
which included taking his teenage son on a patrol into Cambodia,
where they were shot at by Khmer Rouge guerrillas -- when William
Colby introduced us in 1986. According to Scotton, when he arrived
in Saigon in November 1962, he was met by and fell under the
influence of Everett Bumgartner, chief of USIS field operations in
Vietnam. A Lansdale disciple, Bumgartner had launched wanted poster
and defector programs in Laos in 1954 and implemented similar
programs in Vietnam after he arrived there in 1959.
Bumgartner introduced Scotton to John Paul
Vann, the senior adviser to the ARVN Seventh Division and a friend
of Colonel Tran Ngoc Chau's, the controversial Kien Hoa Province
chief. A graduate of Fort Bragg, where he roomed with Nguyen Van
Thieu, Chau was a CIA asset who in 1962 had just finished a six-year
tour as chief of the GVN's Psychological Warfare Service. Over the
next ten years Chau's relationship with Scotton, Bumgartner and Vann
came to symbolize Phoenix and the duplicitous nature of U.S.
Vietnamese relations.
Scotton, Bumgartner, and Vann are described by
Ngo Vinh Long in The CIA and the Vietnam Debacle:
Frank Scotton was the originator of the
Provincial Reconnaissance Units program, the predecessor of the
Phoenix program. For years he worked closely with John Paul Vann,
the famous CIA operative who specialized, among other things, in
black propaganda, which involved him in murder, forgery and the
outright deception of the American press in order to discredit the
NLF in particular and the opposition to American intervention in
general. Everett Bumgartner was Colby's deputy and used to oversee
pacification efforts in the
central provinces of Vietnam. Any person who
has the faintest knowledge of the pacification program would know
what disasters have visited the Vietnamese people as a result of
such programs. Bumgartner was also in charge of the Phoenix program
in that area. [13]
When Scotton arrived in Vietnam, Bumgartner
assigned him to the Central Highlands, the expansive area between
Saigon and Qui Nhon City, the capital of Binh Dinh Province.
Bumgartner thought there was "a vacuum of knowledge" in the
highlands and directed Scotton "to energize the Vietnamese" in what
Scotton calls "prerevolutionary development." As Scotton likes to
say, "pacification wasn't even a term then." [14]
The emphasis at the time was on the strategic
hamlet program -- separating the guerrilla fish from the sea of
people through forced relocations. Begun in March 1962 with
Operations Sea Swallow in Ca Mau Province and Royal Phoenix in Binh
Dinh Province, more than four million Vietnamese had been relocated
into strategic hamlets in most of South Vietnam's forty-four
provinces by the time Scotton arrived in-country. The program was
administered by CIA-advised province security officers reporting to
Ngo Dinh Nhu's confidential agent in Saigon, the notorious double
agent Pham Ngoc Thao. However, because VC guerrillas had at least
the tacit support of the rural population, police and security
officials had difficulty conducting law enforcement and intelligence
operations outside strategic hamlets or other secure, generally
urban areas. In following Bumgartner's orders to fill the vacuum of
knowledge in Central Vietnam, Scotton told me, "We would take a
Vietnamese employee of the Vietnam Information Service (VIS) and put
him in the provincial information system and have him provide
resources -- leaflets, school kits, films that sort of thing. In
return we expected reporting."
Having placed his agent net, Scotton turned his
attention to the job of "energizing" the Vietnamese. However, as a
result of CIA machinations against his regime, Diem had instructed
his provincial appointees to resist American influence and to blunt
U.S. efforts to escalate the war against the Communists. Indeed,
Diem's brother Nhu was secretly negotiating with the North
Vietnamese in hopes of reaching a settlement before the United
States found a pretext to call in the Marines, as the Pentagon
seemed intent on doing.
In looking for motivated individuals to mold
into political cadres, Scotton turned to the CIA's defector program,
which in April 1963 was placed under cover of the Agency for
International Development and named the Chieu Hoi (Open Arms)
amnesty program. There Scotton found the raw material he needed to
prove the viability of political action programs. Together with
Vietnamese Special Forces Captain Nguyen Tuy (a graduate of Fort
Bragg's Special Warfare Center who
commanded the Fourth Special Operations
Detachment) and Tuy's case officer, U.S. Special Forces Captain
Howard Walters (a Korean War veteran and psywar expert), Scotton
worked through an extension of the Mountain Scout program Ralph
Johnson had established in Pleiku Province.
As part of a pilot program designed to induce
defectors, Scotton, Walten, and Tuy crossed the An Lao Valley, set
up an ambush deep in Vietcong territory, and waited till dark. When
they spotted a VC unit, Scotton yelled through a bullhorn, "You are
being misled! You are being lied to! We promise you an education!"
Then, full of purpose and allegory, he shot a flare into the night
sky and hollered, "Walk toward the light!" To his surprise, two
defectors did walk in, convincing him and his CIA sponsors that "a
deter- mined GVN unit could contest the VC in terms of combat and
propaganda."
Back in camp, according to Scotton, "We told
the VC defectors that they had to divest themselves of untruths. We
said that certainly the U.S. perpetrated war crimes, but so did the
VC. We acknowledged that theirs was the stronger force, but that
didn't mean that everything they did was honorable and good and
just." In this manner, Scotton indoctrinated cadres for his
political action teams. [15]
***
But these were tumultuous times in South
Vietnam, as wild as the 1955 battle for Saigon. In early 1963, two
hundred lightly armed VC guerrillas routed an ARVN force of
twenty-five hundred, advised by John Vann and supported by U.S.
bombers and helicopters at Ap Bac, a mere forty miles from Saigon.
The incident reaffirmed what everyone already suspected: that the
top-heavy, bloated, corrupt ARVN was no match for the underequipped,
starving, but determined Vietcong.
Next, Diem's brother Thuc, the archbishop of
Hue, forbade the display of Buddhist flags at a ceremony in Hue
commemorating the 2587th birthday of Buddha. A demonstration led by
Buddhist priest Thich Tri Quang erupted on May 8, and Nhu sent the
LLDB in to put it down. In doing so, they killed nine people, mostly
women and children. Official communiques blamed VC "terrorists," but
the Buddhists knew better; they strengthened their alliance with the
NLF and began organizing massive demonstrations. On June 11, 1963, a
Buddhist monk doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire
in Saigon. Soon others were doing likewise across Vietnam. "Let them
burn," Madame Nhu, the Dragon Lady, cooed, "and we shall clap our
hands." [16]
Two months later, while Nhu negotiated with the
North Vietnamese and the Joint General Staff pressured Diem to
declare martial law, a South Vietnamese Special
Forces unit disguised as ARVN troops attacked
Saigon's Xa Loi Temple, the city's most sacred Buddhist shrine.
Buddhists immediately took up arms and began fighting the LLDB in
Hue. The spectacle was repeated across Vietnam, as thousands of
Buddhists were arrested, jailed, and summarily executed. In
response, on August 21, 1963, the Special Group in Washington
ordered the CIA to pull the financial plug on the Vietnamese Special
Forces. The search for a more dependable, unilaterally controlled
army began, and the nascent counterterror teams emerged as the most
promising candidates.
Meanwhile, in Saigon Diem's downfall was
originating within his own palace guard. CIA asset Tran Van Don
conspired with secret police chief Dr. Tran Kim Tuyen, NVA double
agent Pham Ngoc Thao, and, among others, General Duong Van Minh
(known as Big Minh), who had the backing of the Dai Viets in the
ARVN. Colonel Nguyen Van Thieu and Tran Thien Khiem joined the plot.
In October President Kennedy suspended economic aid, and the pope
ordered Thuc to leave his post in Hue, a decision "that eased the
conscience of the Catholic plotters." [17]
As plotters swirled around them, Nhu and Diem
instructed the Vietnamese Special Forces chief Colonel Le Quang Tung
to prepare a counter-coup. But Tung was summoned to the senior
officers' club at Joint General Staff headquarters and shot dead by
Big Minh's personal bodyguard. That prompted III Corps Commander
General Ton That Dinh to withdraw the Special Forces under his
command from Saigon. The CIA-controlled palace guard vacated the
premises, and the military began arresting Diem loyalists. Knowing
the end was near, Nhu and Diem fled to a friend's house in Cholon,
then sought sanctuary in a nearby church. Soon a military convoy
arrived, arrested them, and took them for a ride. When the convoy
reached Hong Thap Tu Alley, between Cao Thang and Le Van Duyet
streets, the brothers were shot dead. "The military men in the
vehicle, who hated Nhu, stabbed his corpse many times." [18]
On December 19, 1963,
the Pentagon's planning branch in the Pacific, CINCPAC (Commander in
Chief, Pacific), presented its plans to the Special Group. Two weeks
On July 31, 1964, SOG
achieved its goal of creating a provoked response. That night SEALs
Elton Manzione and Kenny Van Lesser led twenty South Vietnamese
marines in a raid against Ron Me Island. Dropped at the wrong end of
the island, Manzione and Van Lesser failed to knock out their target
-- an NVA radar installation -- but the raid did push the North
Vietnamese into attacking the USS Maddox, which was monitoring NVA
electronic defenses activated by the attack. The incident was sold
to the American public as a North Vietnamese "first strike" and
resulted in Congress's passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The
resulting air strikes against North Vietnam are cited by many
historians as the start of the Vietnam War. Tonkin Gulf also allowed
LBJ to sell himself as tougher than Republican candidate Barry
Goldwater and to win the 1964 presidential election.
In Saigon, South Vietnamese armed forces
Commander Duong Van Minh, who was supported by the important
generals, the Dai Viets, and the CIA, surfaced as the new chief of
state. Big Minh appointed General Khiem III Corps commander, and, in
league with Nguyen Van Thieu, had General Ton That Dinh, the
Vietnamese Military Security Service chief Mai Huu Xuan, CIO chief
Nguyen Van Y, and Tran Van Don arrested. Generals Thieu and Khiem
then used the unpopular arrests to undercut Big Minh, their main
adversary, whom they replaced with General Duong Van Khanh.
General Khanh, in the spirit of the times,
called for an invasion of North Vietnam. But the plan was subverted
three days later, when Air Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky -- fired from
Operation Haylift for smuggling opium on his "black" flights --
revealed that the CIA had been sending teams into North Vietnam
since July 1963. Diem's spy chief, Dr. Tuyen, was sent into
honorable exile as ambassador to Egypt. NVA double agent Pham Ngoc
Thao temporarily escaped detection and was appointed Ben Tre
province chief; he served until 1965, when he was killed by Thieu,
who suspected Thao of working against him on behalf of Ky. Thieu,
Khiem, and Ky emerged as the big three power brokers and invited Dai
Viet leaders Nguyen Ton Hoan and Professor Huy to return from ten
years' exile in France to join a new but very loose coalition
government. [19]
In the wake of the coup, according to Frank
Scotton, "administrative paralysis set in. The VC exploited that and
physically dismantled the strategic hamlets as despised symbols of
the GVN." And as the grateful inmates returned to their villages,
the country erupted in open revolt. Even the road leading from
Saigon to John Vann's headquarters in My Tho was unsafe, so in
December 1963 Ev Bumgartner sent
Scotton to Long An Province, a few miles south
of Saigon. Scotton brought along his political cadre from Quang Ngai
Province, Civic Action recruits were provided by the Long An
province chief, and Scotton set about "seeing what was wrong and
getting a fix on the hamlets." He did this by using "small armed
teams seeking information." [20]
Working with the American province adviser,
Scotton organized three survey teams, which operated in three
neighboring hamlets simultaneously: Each six-member team was
equipped with black pajamas, pistols, a radio, and a submachine gun.
Standard procedure was to regroup at the last moment before
daybreak, then shift at dawn to a fourth hamlet, where the team
would sleep during the day. At night they sat beside trails used by
the VC cadres they had identified during visits to the hamlets. When
Vietcong armed propaganda teams under their surveillance departed
from a hamlet, Scotton's cadre would move in and speak to one person
from each household, so the VC "would have to punish everyone after
we left. But that never happened. A woman VC leader would bring in a
unit after us," Scotton added, "but there were never any
recriminations.
"The mission of these survey teams," according
to Scotton, "was intelligence, not an attack on the VCI. But Long An
proved the viability of small units. I felt confident that motivated
small units could go in and displace the VC simply by their
presence. Will and intent had to be primary, though; if they were,
then the method generated useful reports."
With Diem dead, three quarters of South
Vietnam's province chiefs fired from their jobs, and no more
prohibitions on taking CIA money, the time was ripe for "local
initiatives." Local officials, along with legions of Diem loyalists
purged from government after the coup, were hired by the CIA and put
in management positions in its covert action programs in the
provinces and districts. But it was an American war now, with GVN
stature at an all-time low, making it harder than ever to wage
political war. And of course the situation was exploited by the
North Vietnamese, who started infiltrating regular NVA troops, not
just regroupees, into South Vietnam.
Other changes were also forthcoming as a result
of the coup. With Operation Switchback and the transfer of the CIDG
program to MACV, Ralph Johnson launched a new covert action program
in Dam Pao outside Pleiku. Called Truong Son, it organized
Montagnards into small units having civic action, counterterror, and
intelligence functions. Meanwhile, Stu Methven was assigned to the
Delta to stimulate "local initiatives" among the new generation of
province chiefs.
Methven's plan was to create a three-part
program with separate teams for civic action, counterterror, and
intelligence. However, because the fighting was less intense
in the Delta than in central Vietnam, Methven
advocated easily monitored teams no larger than six men each -- the
type Scotton was toying with in Long An. Methven also incorporated
ideas developed in Kien Hoa Province by Tran Ngoc Chau, whose
innovative census grievance teams were proving quite successful.
Using Chau's and Scotton's programs as his models, Methven sold
"local initiatives" to province chiefs across South Vietnam.
Behind every province chief, of course, was a
CIA paramilitary officer promoting and organizing the CIA's
three-part covert action program. Walter Mackem, who arrived in
Vietnam in early 1964, was one of the first. After spending two
months observing the CIDG program in Ban Me Thuot, Mackem was
transferred to the Delta to institute similar programs in An Giang,
Chau Doc, Sa Dec, and Vinh Long provinces. Mackem also reported
directly to Washington on the political activities of the various
sects and favorable ethnic minorities in his area of operations, the
most important of which were the Hoa Hao (Theravada Buddhists) and
the closely related ethnic Cambodians, the Khmer.
According to Mackem, there were no
counterterror teams prior to his arrival on the scene. What did
exist were private armies like the Sea Swallows, and those belonging
to the sects. It was from these groups, as well as from province
jails and defector programs, that Mackem got recruits for his CT
teams. The composition of the teams differed from province to
province depending "on what form opposition to the GVN took, and on
the motives of the province chief" -- as Mackem puts it, "if he
wanted the CT program tidy or not." The biggest contributors to
Mackem's CT teams were the Khmer, who "didn't get along with the
Vietnamese," while the armed propaganda team served as "a Hoa Hao
job corps." [21]
Mackem personally selected and trained his CT
and political action cadres. He dressed in black pajamas and
accompanied them on missions deep into enemy territory to snatch and
snuff VCI cadres. "I wandered around the jungle with them," Mackem
admitted. "I did it myself. We were free-wheeling back then. It was
a combination of The Man Who Would Be King and Apocalypse Now!"
To obtain information on individual VCI in GVN
villages, according to Mackem, the CTs relied on advisers to the
VBI, "the liaison types who set up an Embassy House." Information on
VCI members in their own villages, or those in dispute, was provided
by undercover agents in the villages, who, because of their
vulnerability, "had a more benevolent approach [toward the VCI] than
the police."
Such was the situation following the coup. The
Vietcong controlled most of the countryside, and the Vietnamese
Bureau of Investigations had little role to play outside Saigon and
the major cities. In the countryside counterterror and armed
propaganda teams, aided by secret agents in the
villages, gathered intelligence on and attacked the Vietcong
infrastructure. Meanwhile, U.S. airplanes, artillery, and combat
units arrived and began driving the rural population into refugee
camps or underground. However, the division of labor within the CIA
station, which pitted police advisers against paramilitary advisers,
had to be resolved before an effective attack on the VCI could be
mounted, and first, the CIA would have to incorporate its covert
action programs within a cohesive strategy for political warfare.
Such is the subject of the next chapter.
CHAPTER 4: Revolutionary Development
In February 1964 Frank Scotton returned to Qui
Nhon to work on what Ogden Williams, the senior American adviser in
neighboring Quang Ngai Province, called "a Phoenix-type thing." In
developing this Phoenix-type program, Scotton teamed up with Ian
Tiege, an Australian paramilitary adviser on contract to the CIA,
and Major Robert Kelly, the MACV district adviser. "Kelly was the
American on the spot," Scotton recalled. "I advised on training and
deployment." [1] Tiege was the professional soldier, deciding how to
fight the enemy.
Formal relations between MACV and CIA officers
at the district level had begun only one month earlier, when General
William Westmoreland arrived in Saigon as MACV commander and, in an
effort to strengthen the American hand, assigned MACV advisers to
each of South Vietnam's 250 districts. Military intelligence
advisers assigned to the Fifth Special Forces also entered the
districts at this point. However, coordination among MACV advisers,
CIA officers, and their Vietnamese counterparts depended primarily
on personal relationships and varied from place to place.
Notably, the impetus for Scotton's Phoenix-type
program on the Vietnamese side came from the Tu Nghia District
police chief, Colonel Pham Tuong. A long-standing CIA asset, Tuong
anted up a platoon of volunteers, all of whom had been victimized by
the VC, in exchange for equipment, money, and advice. "They wanted
to fight," Scotton said, "but they didn't want to lose." Money and
supplies were provided by Ralph Johnson. A fifteen-day "accelerated"
training cycle was set up using what Scotton called his motivational
indoctrination program. Modeled on Communist techniques, the process
began on "a confessional basis. On the first day," according to
Scotton, "everyone would fill out a form and write an essay on why
they had joined." The district's Vietnam Information Service
representative "would study their answers and explain the next day
why they were involved in a special unit. The instructors would lead
them to stand up and talk about themselves." This motivational
function was handled by the unit's morale officer, chosen by his
peers through what Scotton referred to ''as the only honest
elections held in South Vietnam." The morale officer's job, he said,
"was to keep people honest and have them admit mistakes."
Not only did Scotton co-opt Communist
organizational and motivational techniques, but he also relied on
Communist defectors as his cadre. "We felt ex- Vietminh had unique
communication skills. They could communicate doctrine, and they were
people who would shoot," he explained, adding, "It wasn't necessary
for everyone in the unit to be ex-Vietminh, just the leadership."
In copying the Communists, Scotton was
selective. "People from the other side knew the value of motivation,
but they confessed too much. So we refined the technique based on
what the Vietminh disliked the most: that the party set itself up as
the sole authority. We didn't have the party as number one. We had
the group as the major motivational factor."
Key to Scotton's motivational indoctrinational
program was the notion of a "special" unit. To enhance this esprit
de corps, Scotton's units were better equipped and better paid than
regular ARVN units. Carbines were replaced with submachine guns, and
instead of wearing uniforms, the cadres wore black pajamas -- just
like the average Vietnamese. Scotton's teams were also special
insofar as they reported directly to the province security chief
and, ipso facto, the CIA.
"Tuong's original group was thirty-four,"
Scotton said, noting that Quang Ngai was a more heavily contested
province than Long An and that the teams required more men and
greater firepower, "so we bumped it up to forty and started a second
group in an adjacent district. That's three teams of twelve men
each, strictly armed. The control element was four men: a commander
and his deputy, a morale officer, and a radioman. These are commando
teams," Scotton stressed, "displacement teams. The idea was to go
into contested areas and spend a few nights. But it was a local
responsibility so they had to do it on their own."
Scotton named his special unit the Trung-doi
biet kich Nham dou (people's commando teams). "Two functions split
out of this," Scotton said. "First was pacification under Nguyen Be.
Second was the anti-VCI function taken out to form the Provincial
Reconnaissance Units. The PRU thing directly evolves from this."
Indeed, the phrase "Biet Kich," meaning "commando," is the name the
Vietnamese applied to counterterrorists and later the PRU.
***
Concurrent with the creation of the people's
action teams (PATs), as Scotton's teams were renamed by station
chief Peer DeSilva, there began a synthesis of White House policies
and police and paramilitary programs that culminated three years
later in Phoenix. It was, in effect, a blueprint for political
warfare, conceptualized by Ralph Johnson, adapted to Vietnamese
sensibilities by Le Xuan Mai, and formalized by
Frank Scotton, Bob Kelly, Ian Tiege, and Stu
Methven. At its heart was the doctrine of Contre Coup, particularly
the notion of counterterror, which more than any other factor seized
the imagination of station chief DeSilva, under whose direction the
synthesis began.
In his autobiography, Sub Rosa, DeSilva
describes arriving in Vietnam in December 1963 and being introduced
to VC terror by one of his CIA officers. Two VC cadres had impaled a
young boy, a village chief, and his pregnant wife on sharp poles.
"To make sure this horrible sight would remain with the villagers,
one of the terror squad used his machete to disembowel the woman,
spilling the fetus onto the ground." Having arrived on the scene
moments after the atrocity had occurred, DeSilva writes, "I saw
them, the three impaled bodies and the unborn child lying in the
dirt. A Catholic member of the village was making the sign of the
cross over each body, murmuring a prayer in Vietnamese." [2]
A white-collar intelligence officer who put
agent work above political warfare, DeSilva was shocked by what he
saw. "The Vietcong," he writes, "were monstrous in their application
of torture and murder to achieve the political and psychological
[author's emphasis] impact they wanted." But DeSilva also recognized
that "This implacable use of terror in its own way served an
intelligence purpose," that "A bloody act of terror in a populated
area would immobilize the population nearby, make the local
inhabitants responsive to the Vietcong and, in return, unresponsive
to the government element requests for cooperation." [3]
So DeSilva authorized the extraction of
counterterror teams from Scotton's Political Action Teams. He
describes this "radically different form of activity" as "a
counterterror program consisting of small teams," dressed in black
pajamas, armed with folding stock carbines which could be hidden
under their black tunics, and with grenades carried in the pockets
of their loose-fitting shorts. [4]
The idea, DeSilva continues, was "to bring
danger and death to the Vietcong functionaries themselves,
especially in the areas where they felt secure. We had obtained
descriptions and photographs of known cadres who were functioning as
committee chiefs, recruiters, province representatives and heads of
raiding parties. Based on these photographs and their known areas of
operation, we had recruited really tough groups of individuals,
organized in teams of three or four, who were willing and able by
virtue of prior residence to go into the areas in which we knew the
Vietcong senior cadres were active and to see what could be done to
eliminate them." [5]
Here DeSilva is describing Phoenix, the attack
on the VCI on its own turf, using intelligence provided by commandos
and selective terror conducted by counterterrorists. One of the
soldiers who participated in DeSilva's counterterror program was
Elton Manzione. A self-described "supersoldier," Manzione received
extensive training in hand-to-hand combat, combat swimming, sniping,
parachuting, and demolition. When his schooling was completed,
Manzione was dropped in the jungles of Panama with a knife and a
compass and told to find his way out, and he did. "By then," he
noted with no small degree of understatement, "I was fairly
competent."
In December 1964 Manzione left California
aboard an oil tanker and, ten days later, crossed over to a guided
missile destroyer, the USS Lawrence, in the middle of the Pacific
Ocean. To ensure plausible denial, Manzione's service records were
"sheep- dipped" and indicate that he never got off the Lawrence.
Manzione stepped ashore in Cam Ranh Bay in
January 1964 and was met by a Special Forces colonel who briefed him
on his mission. Manzione was told he would be working for the
Special Operations Group under a number of directives called OPLANS
which had been drawn up to accomplish specific goals. Insofar as SOG
had absorbed the Combined Studies Group, he would be working for
U.S. Army and civilian personnel, as well as the U.S. Navy. He was
sent to the Hoa Cam Training Center near Da Nang, where in 1961
Ralph Johnson had based the Mountain Scout training camp and where
in 1964 the CIA trained its special operations personnel in
long-range reconnaissance patrols.
At Hoa Cam Manzione completed an intensive
orientation course. He was taught advanced tracking and camouflage
techniques, made familiar with Soviet and Chinese weapons, put on a
steady diet of Oriental food, told not to bathe and not to shave.
And he was briefed on the various OPLAN directives and goals. "The
actual goals were to stop the infiltration from the North of arms
and supplies," he recalled. "How did they phrase it? 'Undermining
the enemy's ability to fight in the South.' Another goal was to deal
with enemy violations of the international accords -- I'm assuming
the 1962 Geneva Accords. It meant taking out command centers in
Laos. And there was anti- infrastructure stuff, too."
Manzione was next assigned to Nam Dong in the
Central Highlands, where he and two other SEALs were quartered
inside a U.S. Special Forces camp. "Basically what they said was,
'Welcome to Nam Dong. This is the town you'll work out of. You're
gonna get orders to do something, and the orders are going to be
verbal.' The orders were always verbal and never said, 'Do this
specifically.' It was always 'Go there and do what you think you
ought to do.' It was so free-form it was hard to connect being in
the military, let alone the Navy."
In March the SEALs started running
"over-the-fence" missions as part of SOG's Leaping Lena program.
Three quarters of the missions were in Laos, the demilitarized zone,
and North Vietnam. At times the SEALs sat along the Ho Chi Minh
Trail counting enemy troops and trucks. Other times they moved from
one set of coordinates to another, reconnoitering. They also shot
field-grade NVA officers, kidnapped prisoners, escorted defectors
from the North to the South, demolished downed U.S. aircraft, and
engaged in counterterror.
In regard to this last function, the SEALs
worked with CTs, whom Manzione described as "a combination of ARVN
deserters, VC turncoats, and bad motherfucker criminals the South
Vietnamese couldn't deal with in prison, so they turned them over to
us. Often they'd been pardoned to fight Communists. Some actually
had an incentive plan: If they killed X number of Commies, they got
X number of years off their prison terms." The CTs taught Manzione
and his SEAL comrades the secrets of the psywar campaign, which in
practice meant exploiting the superstitions, myths, and religious
beliefs of the Vietnamese. One technique was based on the Buddhist
belief that a person cannot enter heaven unless his liver is intact.
So Manzione would snatch an NVA courier off the Ho Chi Minh Trail or
sneak into a VCI's hooch at night, crush the man's larynx, then use
his dagger to remove the man's liver. Some of the CTs would actually
devour their enemies' vital organs.
In the summer of 1964 Manzione was assigned to
SOG's northern headquarters in Dong Ha. "Back then," he said, "being
as close to the DMZ as we were, it was hard to tell where any
particular Vietnamese civilian came from." Here he referred to the
fact that the demilitarized zone separated families and communities
without regard for their political affiliations. In light of this
ambiguity, counterterror was one way of co-opting uncommitted
civilians. To facilitate their political awakening, according to
Manzione, "We left our calling card nailed to the forehead of the
corpses we left behind. They were playing card size with a light
green skull with red eyes and red teeth dripping blood, set against
a black background. We hammered them into the third eye, the
pituitary gland, with our pistol butts. The third eye is the seat of
consciousness for Buddhists, and this was a form of mutilation that
had a powerful psychological effect."
Curiously, terror tactics often involve
mutilating the third eye (the seat of insight and secret thoughts)
and playing on fears of an "all-seeing" cosmic eye of God.
Used by morale officers in World War I, the eye
of God trick called for pilots in small aircraft to fly over enemy
camps and call out the names of individual soldiers. Ed Lansdale
applied the technique in the Philippines. "At night, when the town
was asleep, a psywar team would creep into town and paint an eye
(copied from the Egyptian eye that appears atop the pyramid in the
Great Seal of the United States) on a wall facing the house of each
suspect," Lansdale writes. "The
mysterious presence of these malevolent eyes
the next morning had a sharply sobering effect." [6]
To appreciate the "sobering effects" of the
"malevolent" and "mysterious" eye of God, it helps to know something
of the archetype's mythological origins. In ancient Egypt, the eye
of God was plucked from Horus, an anthropomorphic sun-god with a
falcon's head. Pictured as the morning sun cresting a pyramid, the
eye of God represents the dawn of self-awareness, when the ego
emerged from the id and no longer required human sacrifice to
overcome its primeval anxiety. Awed by the falcon's superlative
sight, talons, and flight, the Egyptians endowed Horus with the
bird's predatory prowess, so he could avenge the murder his father,
Osiris, whose name means "seat of the eye." Set on high, scanning
the earth for the forces of darkness, the falcon as sun- god -- as
the manifestation of enlightenment -- carries out the work of
organization and pacification, imposing moral order on earth.
The eye of God assumes its mysterious
"counterespionage" qualities through this myth of the eternal cycle
-- the battle between good and evil -- in which, if the perfidious
gods of darkness can guess the sun-god's secret name, they can rob
him of his powers and trap him forever in the underworld. Thus a
falcon emblem was placed above the gates of all Egyptian temples,
scanning for the sun-god's enemies, while the sun-god relied on code
names to conceal his identity.
Oddly enough, the eye of God was the symbol of
the Cao Dai sect, whose gallery of saints include Confucius, Buddha,
Joan of Arc, Jesus, and Victor Hugo. Inside the Cao Dai cathedral in
Tay Ninh City, the Cao Dai pope divined upon his planchette the
secrets of the Great pyramid; over the temple door loomed a huge
blue "all- seeing" eye surrounded by snakes and trees. For this
reason, some people suggest that the Cao Dai eye of God endowed
Phoenix, the all-seeing bird of prey that selectively snatched its
prey, with its ubiquity.
In South Vietnam the eye of God trick took a
ghastly twist. CIA officer Pat McGarvey recalled to Seymour Hersh
that "some psychological warfare guy in Washington thought of a way
to scare the hell out of villagers. When we killed a VC there, they
wanted us to spread-eagle the guy, put out his eye, cut a hole in
the back [of his head] and put his eye in there. The idea was that
fear was a good weapon." Likewise, ears were cut off corpses and
nailed to houses to let the people know that Big Brother was
listening as well.
The subliminal purpose of terror tactics was to
drive people into a state of infantile dependence. In this sense,
CIA psywar experts were not exorcists come to heal Vietnam and free
it from Communist demons; their spells were meant to break up the
society and project its repressed homicidal
impulses onto the Communists -- cast as carrion and snakes.
"It was all part of the counterterror doctrine
developed by the Ugly American to beat the enemy at his own game,"
Elton Manzione said. In beating the VC at their own game, the SEALs
were told to ignore the rules of engagement. "Our camp was always
separate," he explained. "Just CTs and us. Sometimes a Special
Forces colonel would walk in, but rarely. Nam Dong was not populated
by the spooky hunter-killer type folks you associate with the Green
Berets. A lot of them were medical specialists, or agricultural
specialists, or language specialists that worked with the villagers
on different things. So the great majority of this particular
Special Forces camp were not hit team types. We were, however, and
our camp was separated by wire and a gate.
"Now everyone knows about the airborne
interrogation -- taking three people up in a chopper, taking one guy
and saying, 'Talk,' then throwing him out before he even gets the
chance to open his mouth. Well, we wrapped det [detonator] cord
around their necks and wired them to the detonator box. And
basically what it did was blow their heads off. The interrogator
would tell the translator, usually a South Vietnamese intelligence
officer, 'Ask him this.' He'd ask him, 'Who gave you the gun?' And
the guy would start to answer, or maybe he wouldn't -- maybe he'd
resist -- but the general idea was to waste the first two. They
planned the snatches that way. Pick up this guy because we're pretty
sure he's VC cadre -- these other two guys just run errands for him.
Or maybe they're nobody; Tran, the farmer, and his brother Nguyen.
But bring in two. Put them in a row. By the time you get to your
man, he's talking so fast you got to pop the weasel just to shut him
up." After a moment's silence he added, "I guess you could say that
we wrote the book on terror."
Having seen the intelligence potential in
Scotton's PATs and CTs, DeSilva, according to Stu Methven, "decided
he wanted a version in each province in South Vietnam." The job of
standardizing the political action teams, along with the
counterterrorists and Chau's Census Grievance program, was given to
Methven, whose first step was to find them a permanent home on the
Vung Tau Peninsula. Methven did this with the help of Tran Quoc Buu,
a wealthy Vietnamese warlord and founding member of the Can Lao
party who in 1954 had headed the CIA-funded Vietnamese Federation of
Labor. Buu had been charged by Diem with laundering Can Lao rake
offs through the federation's foreign accounts. Buu, however,
pocketed the money and used it to buy huge parcels of land,
including a portion of Vung Tau.
After the coup the tables turned on Buu, whose
association with Diem led to his imprisonment; in need of cash to
buy his way out of jail, he sold Methven a choice piece of property
on the Vung Tau Peninsula. Located at Cat Lo, Buu's estate had been
used by the French as a transshipment point in their lucrative opium
trade and as
a training camp for their Montagnard maquis.
Buu himself had used Cat Lo as a training camp for his private army
of resettled Catholic refugees. Called the Shrimp and Cinnamon
Soldiers, for their civilian jobs, Buu's troops were highly
motivated and, according to Methven, were admired by Nguyen Van
Thieu because "unlike the ARVN, they stayed at their posts at
night." With Thieu's consent, Methven arranged for CIA contract
employees to start training counterterror, census grievance, and
political action cadres at Buu's Vung Tau facility. This was a
unilateral CIA operation, extralegal, with no GVN oversight.
Isolated and accessible only by Air America, Vung Tau was the
perfect place for such a covert action undertaking.
Vung Tau became the seedbed of the CIA's
political cadres, who were trained to enter VC villages, to convince
the people that the GVN represented their interests and, having done
that, to help the villagers form self-defense forces to fight the
VC. However, the generals who dominated the GVN viewed the image of
an armed citizenry with alarm and were reluctant to support the
program. Even MACV commander Westmoreland argued that anyone with a
gun should be in the army.
Thus, before the GVN could join the synthesis,
it first had to put its house in order -- which, in the summer of
1964, was a remote possibility at best.
To begin with, the Montagnards had mutinied
against their Special Forces officers in Ban Me Thuot and four other
districts, temporarily diverting the CIA's attention.
Meanwhile, the Dai Viets had assumed control of
the government, created a Directorate of Political Warfare, and
established their own pacification program managed by Professor
Nguyen Van Huy. Called Rural Construction and centered in Thu Duc,
the program used mobile cadre teams to organize villagers into
pro-GVN associations. But the Dai Viets were split internally over
the issue of allowing VNQDD cadres into the program, and when other,
more powerful Dai Viets launched an unsuccessful coup against
General Khanh in April, Huy and his associates were exiled once
again.
With the CIDG program and the GVN in shambles,
the CIA looked to its nascent Vung Tau program for stability. The
CIA officer chosen to build the facility and create a national
pacification program that could maintain operations independently of
the GVN by fostering local initiatives was a garrulous, blustering
Irish-American named Tom Donohue. A product and practitioner of Cook
County politics, Donohue resembled W.C. Fields in looks and
mannerisms and, you get the feeling, in ethics, too; to wit, he
joined the CIA when he perceived the cold war as "a growth
industry." When he spoke, his words came in melodramatic
exclamations. As he pondered, he paced nervously, like a pool
hustler circling the table, picking his next shot. In all these
respects, Donohue was the prototypical CIA officer -- a cagey
position player using a glib exterior to mask a calculating mind.
When we met in 1986, Tom Donohue was working as
the Mideast representative for a Filipino construction company. When
he arrived in Saigon twenty-two years earlier to replace Cliff
Strathern as chief of covert action, he worked under State
Department cover in the embassy's political office. One of his jobs
at the time, he said, was managing "a small training camp down in
Vung Tau which had about a hundred students run by a very dynamic
guy -- Le Xuan Mai.
"I spent a lot of time with Mai," Donohue
recalled, "and was mighty impressed. Mai was a wizard at appealing
to a particular sensory element the Vietnamese seemed to have about
the fatherland. He had the ability to interweave Vietnamese myth and
modern-day nationalism that seemed somehow to make an impact on the
tutored and the untutored alike. He was trilingual," Donohue said
with admiration, "but he was controversial. What kind of army
officer goes around talking about fairies and dragons?" [8]
Donohue immediately picked up where Stu Methven
had left off, hammering out a deal with the minister of the interior
to rent an even larger chunk of the Vung Tau Peninsula. He then got
Mai a promotion to major and arranged for "a guy who had been
training agency people to come up with three or four others to run
the camp. This is an early program called armed propaganda team,"
what he termed an armed social working element.
"Anyway," Donohue said, "I decided this was the
route we should be following, and I began looking for a means of
expanding the program. I got rid of most of the other stuff I had
responsibility for, and from that point on programming evolved
rapidly.
We began to build up the program with more and
more officers coming in from Washington on permanent change of
station."
Donohue leased a Catholic seminary, whose
owners had "decided it was time to cut and run," and used Seminary
Camp, as it became known, as headquarters for his staff. "It was
really just a stopgap," Donohue explained, "but it gave us the
ability to have a good permanent base. "Then we started building our
training facility -- Ridge Camp. It was five miles beyond the
airport, so we built roads. We built barracks, mess halls,
classrooms, armories, and offices. We built a training camp for five
thousand and opened it on the fifteenth of January, 1965."
Having put his management team and facilities
in place, Donohue next had to demonstrate that the CIA could develop
people's action teams for every province, which meant centralized
training and using Scotton's forty-man model from Quang Ngai.
Donohue also arranged for the training of CTs and Census Grievance
cadre. To manage the CT training program, he imported "a couple of
guys from headquarters. They were experts. They taught how to get
in, how to abduct prisoners, and how to
get the hell out with good sources for
interrogation. I brought them out TDY and kept talking them into
extending, and they both ended up doing a full tour." Both, Donohue
said in 1986, "are still gainfully employed by the CIA."
Donohue's pet program was Census Grievance,
"the most sophisticated program in the whole goddamned country --
the most effective political tool, if you accept the fact that the
government really didn't care what people thought or what their
political needs were." Noting that the VC had made the problem worse
by cutting the lines of communication, "through the skillful use of
terror," Donohue said, "the population had been cut adrift, and
Census Grievance was the ersatz system that allowed us to say, 'We
accept the fact that there are no normal political lines of
influence, so we'll put this on and hope to God we can jump-start
this body politic.'"
Donohue explained Census Grievance like this:
"Everybody knows the government takes a census, so you'd have a guy
make a map of every house in the village -- put everything into
perspective. Then the edict was issued that once a month every head
of household had to talk to the Census Grievance officer. We tried
to get somebody from the village who was older -- retired teachers,
retired civil servants -- older people who appeared harmless but
were respected." To make it possible for a head of household to
speak privately with the Census Grievance officer, "We would put
together a little two-by-four shack (patterned on the Catholic
confessional) so that there ain't nobody else around.
"Basically the census, scaled down, had three
questions: (One) What would you like the GVN to do for you? All of
the basic precinct-type needs. 'A bridge across this particular
canal would save us a three-mile walk to get our produce to market.'
Very legitimate needs. (Two) Is there anybody in the GVN giving you
a hard time? Are the police at the checkpoint charging you a toll
every time you take your rutabagas to market? (Three) Is there
anything you want to tell me about the Vietcong? If the answer was
no, the whole thing wasn't pursued, but once a month the head of
household had to touch base. If the Census Grievance officer finds
that X number of people say they need a bridge, you begin to get a
consensus. Okay, money is allocated. If it went to the wrong things,
you might as well keep it back here. So the point we would make with
the province and district chiefs was 'This is a political need. If
you are responsive to it, people will look at you in a different
light.'"
"Census Grievance produced a good bit of
intelligence," Donohue concluded. "So did the cadre program. But
there were areas that were so tough and so inaccessible that there
was just no intelligence coming out. Some of the Chieu Hois would
bring it in, but we never really had what we thought was a good
enough handle on continuing intelligence, which is a terrible blind
spot if you're trying to win a war that's got all the built in
problems that Vietnam had."
The next problem Donohue faced was "how to
imprint a political system on a foreign country." That was no easy
task, even for an irrepressible huckster like Tom Donohue. Donohue
described the typical province chief as "a military officer who was
a product of a mandarin system," a person with total discretion over
how to spend funds, who "couldn't care less about what some grubby
little old peasant lady in black pajamas had to say. He didn't have
a political bone in his body." By way of comparison he added,
"They're as bad as our military. They never understood either what
we were doing." All that led Donohue to say, "We were running a
coaching school for army officers."
Further complicating things was the fact that
corruption in the provinces was a way of life. So Donohue spent a
good deal of time "trying to keep the local parties from using it to
their own advantage. The VNQDD element had to be goddamned careful
that they weren't pushing the long-range interests of the party," he
said, referring to Mai's habit of inserting four VNQDD cadres into
every PAT team. "The same is true when you get into Hoa Hao country.
If you had a province chief who looked upon it as a source of
revenue or if a guy wanted to use it as a private army, then you had
real trouble."
Donohue told each province chief, "If you use
these people in the way they've been trained, we'll feed them, pay
them, and equip them. If you decide at any time they're a hindrance
rather than a help, you give me a call, and within thirty days we'll
get them out of here. If I decide that you're not using them
properly -- that you're using them as a palace guard here in the
province -- I'll give you thirty days' notice and pull them out."
And that was the agreement. It was that simple. Nothing in writing.
Nothing went through the central government.
"Next, I'd take an agency officer -- or
officers in a big province -- and stick him in the province and tell
him, 'Find a place to live. Get some sandbags. We'll try to get you
some Nung guards. Stay alive and do as you see fit.' And then he was
responsible for the direction of the teams -- payroll, logistics,
the whole smear." The CIA officer then selected "a vigorous young
lieutenant" whom the province security officer would appoint to his
staff as the Rural Construction cadre liaison, "so we would have a
guy we could work with day in and day out. Then we would work down
to the district level, where we had a similar arrangement, and then
into a village."
As soon as the district chief had vouched for
his recruits, "We'd put them on an airplane and send them down to
Vung Tau," Donohue said. "This is pretty heady stuff. These guys had
never been out of the village before. The food was spectacular.
Suddenly they had more protein in their systems
than they've ever had before, and they're able to stay awake in
class. Our training program was vigorous as hell, but they all put
on weight. We treated them for worms as soon as they came in the
door.
Then Mai began telling them stories about the
fairies and the dragons and the great cultural heritage of the
Vietnamese people. He had all sorts of myths which were at least
apparent to many of these people. Then he would work in the
political applicability of today."
According to Donohue, this is "precisely" what
political warfare is all about: Having been selected into a
"special" program and given "special" treatment, CIA political
cadres were taught the corporate sales pitch. In effect, rural
youths were put on a political assembly line, pumped full of protein
and propaganda, cross-trained as interchangeable parts for
efficiency, then given one last motivational booster shot. "The
graduation ceremonies at Vung Tau were something else." Donohue
chortled. "At night. Total darkness. Then the one candle lit. Oh!
This is the schmaltz!
Remember, these are kids that have never seen
anything like this. The pageantry!"
The New York Times reporter R.W. Apple
described on February 21, 1965 the Ridge Camp graduation ceremony
occurring in an amphitheater the size of a football field. Filipino
trainers were present and, writes Apple, "The ceremony had a
theatrical, almost religious quality. Vietnamese national symbols,
including the old imperial flag, were arrayed before an altar.
Multi-colored pennants bearing the names of the nation's ancient
heroes were mounted behind the speaker. Captain Mai stood at an
illuminated lectern. The recruits were grouped on the three other
sides of the arena. At a signal, all the lights except one focused
on Captain Mai went out, and the recruits stripped off their white
shirts and dark trousers. When the lights came on again, all were
clad in black pajamas."
Whipped into an ideological fervor, the CIA's
political cadres were then sent into villages to spread democratic
values and undermine the infrastructure.
"It's a GVN presence that's really comprised of
your own people that have, by God, gone off and been washed in the
blood of the lamb. They've been trained and they've seen the light,"
Donohue palavered. "They spoke the local dialect, and they're there
to defend and focus people on their own defense, to try to enlist
the people into doing something positive. If the government can't
protect you, it ain't no government."
Of course, the GVN was not a government but a
military dictatorship which was opposed to independence in the
countryside. The GVN at that time, writes Professor Huy, "could be
curiously compared to that of the USSR with the Armed Forces Council
as the Supreme Soviet, the Committee Leading the Nation as its
Presidium, and the Central Executive Committee as the Soviet
government before World War Two when its ministers were called
commissars. General Nguyen Van Thieu was elected chairman of the
Committee Leading the Nation and so
became chief of state. General Nguyen Cao Ky
was appointed chairman of the Central Executive Committee, i.e. the
government." [9]
In June 1965 the National Council of Security
was created and placed under Ky, who reported to Thieu but in fact
exercised greater power than Thieu. As prime minister controlling
the Interior Ministry, Ky appointed his people to the CIA 's covert
action program and appointed his confidential agent, General Nguyen
Ngoc Loan, director of the Military Security Service in June 1965,
director general of the National Police in October 1965, and head of
the Central Intelligence Organization in Apri1 1966.
Explains Huy:
Nguyen Cao Ky was strongly backed by the
Americans anxious to find a leader for the Vietnamese. A program
called Rural Development, later called the Phoenix program, was set
up. It aimed at detecting and destroying the communist cells in
villages and reconstructing the countryside. This program was
undertaken with means provided by the USA. It was smaller than what
we had tried to apply when Nguyen Ton Roan was deputy prime minister
in charge of Pacification. The only difference was that now, the
personnel in use were not politically motivated and trained cadres,
but merely dispirited employees of the government. [10]
Frank Scotton was also critical of Vung Tau. "I
shied away from Vung Tau," he said, "because the American hand
became too big and because having a fixed complex was spiritually
uncomfortable. Spiritually the thing to do was to go into the
villages. At Vung Tau they were not dealing with unconventional
warfare, but with warehousers. There was always the threat that
'We'll turn off the water' if you don't do it our way." [11]
He also criticized the "development of
incantation and rote" and the resulting "doctrinaire" mind-set that
led to the Rural Construction program's being compared with Hitler's
Strength Through Joy camps. Its cadre studied the ninety-eight
duties, the eleven-point criteria, and the twelve phases of action.
They sang the "New Life Hamlet Construction" song, with its symbolic
twelve stanzas and ninety-eight notes, and recited the ritual Five
Oaths: "Standing before the altar of our Fatherland and the national
Flag, we, in the capacity of rural construction cadres, take the
oath ... to remain faithful ... to firmly believe ... that cadres
are created by the people ... to mingle with the people ... and to
make constant efforts in study in order to progress in behavior,
education and techniques." [12]
Scotton's biggest complaint, however, was the
shift from intelligence and displacement to civic action. The change
took place in early 1965, when Robert Kelly joined the CIA and took
his team of instructors to duplicate the Quang Ngai program in other
provinces. At that point Harry "The Hat" Monk took over in Binh Dinh
Province and began working as case officer to Major Nguyen Be, the
former insurgent who, before defecting, had been party secretary for
the Ninth Vietcong Battalion. A visionary, Be wanted Rural
Construction to be more than an attack on the VCI; he wanted to
provide services to the people as well. Perceiving the PATs as "too
American," he retrained his people as they returned to Binh Dinh
from Vung Tau and, with the help of Monk, combined "mobile" Census
Grievance cadres, PATs, and CTs, and came up with the fifty-nine-man
Revolutionary Development (RD) team.
Be's fifty-nine-man RD teams had group leaders
and psywar, intelligence, and medical specialists in staff
positions. There were three eleven-man teams constituting an "action
element" and having a counterterror mission, and there was a Rural
Construction leader with a six-man Civic Action team; a six-man
"mobile" Census Grievance team under the intelligence office; and a
six-man economic unit. Be's teams were called Purple People Eaters
by American soldiers, in reference to their clothes and terror
tactics. To the rural Vietnamese they were simply "idiot birds."
Said Scotton: "Be was trying to create a
climate to make the VC blunder into ambushes and fear the
unpredictable." His goal was to neutralize the VC, but his style was
"be nice to VC agents, give them gifts, smother them with affection,
and then let them try to explain that to their superiors." It was a
style Scotton did not approve of, although he loved Be himself. "Be
was like an older brother to me and an uncle to my children,"
Scotton said. "He lived with us from 1976 until he died in summer of
1981."
Despite Scotton's compunctions, by mid-1965 the
CIA was using Be's fifty-nine-man model as its standard team, at
which point the Rural Construction Cadre program was renamed the
Revolutionary Development Cadre program. With larger teams and
standardization came the need for more advisers, so Donohue began
recruiting military men like Joe Vacarro, a Special Forces sergeant
working as a Public Safety adviser in Quang Nam Province. "I met Joe
and chatted with him," Donohue said, "and he looked interesting, so
I went to AID, and he was sort of seconded to me; although he still
worked for AID, I wrote his fitness reports. Then I worked out a
direct hire for him, and he came back here to D.C., did some formal
Vietnamese training, then went back out for another tour." Vaccaro
was to become heavily involved in the Provincial Reconnaissance Unit
training program at Vung Tau.
Donohue also hired Jean Sauvageot out of the
Army. Sauvageot was to become the scion of Vung Tau and a close aide
to Frank Scotton, his mentor, and William Colby.
"We get to the point," according to Donohue,
"where the CIA was running a political program in a sovereign
country where they didn't know what the hell we were teaching. So I
had Thieu and Ky down to Vung Tau, and I did all the right things.
But what kind of program could it be that had only one sponsor, the
CIA, that says it was doing good? It had to be sinister. Any
red-blooded American could understand that. What the hell is the CIA
doing running a program on political action?
"So I went out to try to get some cosponsors
for the record. They weren't easy to come by. I went to [USIS chief]
Barry Zorthian. I said, 'Barry, how about giving us someone?' I
talked to MACV about getting an officer assigned. I had AID give me
a guy." But most of it, Donohue said, "was window dressing. We had
the funds; we had the logistics; we had the transportation."
The CIA also had the approbation of Ky and
Thieu. "Ky and Thieu saw the wisdom of it," Donohue said, "so they
offered up (as their liaison to the program) General Nguyen Duc
Thang. And he was indefatigable. He went everyplace." There was,
however, one catch. As a way of monitoring the Saigon station, in
August 1965 the Special Group assigned Ed Lansdale as senior liaison
to General Thang, who instantly advocated transferring the entire
Revolutionary Development program to the Defense Ministry.
"Ed Lansdale was an invention of Hubert
Humphrey's," Donohue grumbled. "The idea was 'We did it before, we
can do it again.' So Lansdale came out two years too late.
He brought a lot of his old cohorts; some were
agency guys that he'd suborned. He had some Army people and some
retired folks, but there was really nothing," Donohue said wearily,
"for them to do."
"My boss [Gordon Jorgenson, who replaced Peer
DeSilva in February 1965] said, 'Tell them everything.' I said okay,
and I spent two and a half hours briefing his full group about a
week after they arrived. And they said, 'Let's have a joint office.'
So we had our logistics people put in offices and all the right
things. Then I had to get somebody to run the office. Thang said,
'Who do you want?' And I said, 'Chau.'"
Tran Ngoc Chau, according to Donohue, "was a
farsighted, bright guy with an ability to keep meaningful statistics
-- which is not very Vietnamese. He'd been the apple of Diem's eye
during the strategic hamlet program, and he had a special phone to
the palace -- Diem was on the horn to him constantly. Because he had
that kind of sponsorship, he was able to do an awful lot of
experimentation. So we used Kien Hoa as a proving ground. I spent a
lot of time between Mai and Chau looking at programs," Donohue
recalled, "trying to introduce refinements."
By having Chau transferred to Vung Tau, Donohue
also got greater control over his pet project. "We took Census
Grievance and expanded it," he said. "I got a villa in Gia Dinh and
set up a training school for Census Grievance people. We would bring
people in that had been spotted in various villages and run them
through the training; then they would go back to their provinces. I
had a French gent, Matisse, who ran the school. We trained in small
groups, and it was a much faster process than the PATs; but these
were literate people, so they were quick on the uptake. And it was
very pleasant surroundings. It was a well-handled program." To it
Donohue assigned John O'Reilly, John Woodsman, Dick Fortin, and Jean
Sauvageot.
"But I had forced the transfer," Donohue
confessed, "and Chau was so damn mad that he was in a permanent
pout. So he decided to go down to Vung Tau and shape the place up.
Which we really didn't need. 'Cause here you have two dynamic
personalities [Mai and Chau] who couldn't stand each other."
The conflict was resolved in 1966, when Mai was
reassigned to the Joint General Staff, while Chau took over the Vung
Tau training program. Donohue minimized the effect. "I couldn't
really do much business out there anyway," he noted, "because I
needed our own system to talk to people. But at least for the record
it looked pretty good. We had a MAVC guy, an AID guy, and a USIS guy
down at Vung Tau, so all the bases had been touched. You see," he
added, "at this point all we were trying to do was expand the thing
and say that there's at least plausible denial that the agency is
solely responsible."
Indeed, with the creation of Vung Tau and the
synthetic Revolutionary Development Cadre program, South Vietnam
began slouching toward democracy. But it was an empty gesture. The
rule in South Vietnam was one step forward followed by two steps
back.
CHAPTER 5: PICs
"A census, if properly made and exploited, is a
basic source of intelligence. It would show, for instance, who is
related to whom, an important piece of information in
counterinsurgency warfare because insurgent recruiting at the
village level is generally based initially on family ties." [1]
As counterinsurgency expert David Galula notes
above, a census is an effective way of controlling large numbers of
persons. Thus, while CIA paramilitary officers used Census Grievance
to gather intelligence in VC-controlled villages, CIA police
advisers were conducting a census program of their own. Its origins
are traced to Robert Thompson, a British counter-insurgency expert
hired in 1961 by Roger Hilsman, director of the State Department's
Office of Research and Intelligence, to
advise the United States and GVN on police
operations in South Vietnam. Basing it on a system he had used in
Malaya, Thompson proposed a three-pronged approach that coordinated
military, civilian intelligence, and police agencies in a concerted
attack on the VCI.
On Thompson's advice, the National Police in
1962 initiated the Family Census program, in which a name list was
made and a group photo taken of every family in South Vietnam. The
portrait was filed in a police dossier along with each person's
political affiliations, fingerprints, income, savings, and other
relevant information, such as who owned property or had relatives
outside the village and thus had a legitimate reason to travel. This
program was also instrumental in leading to the identification of
former sect members and suppletifs, who were then blackmailed by VBI
case officers into working in their villages as informers. By 1965
there were 7,453 registered families.
Through the Family Census, the CIA learned the
names of Communist cell members in GVN-controlled villages.
Apprehending the cadre that ran the cells was then a matter of
arresting all minor suspects and working them over until they
informed. This system weakened the insurgency insofar as it forced
political cadres to flee to guerrilla units enduring the hardships
of the jungle, depriving the VCI of its leadership in GVN areas.
This was no small success, for, as Nguyen Van Thieu once observed,
"Ho Chi Minh values his two cadres in every hamlet more highly than
ten military divisions." [2]
Thompson's method was successful, but only up
to a point. Because many VCI cadres were former Vietminh heroes, it
was counterproductive for Political Action Teams and
counterterrorists to hunt them down in their own villages. Many VCI
were not terrorists but, as Galula writes, "men whose motivations,
even if the counterinsurgent disapproves of them, may be perfectly
honorable. They do not participate directly, as a rule, in direct
terrorism or guerrilla action and, technically, have no blood on
their hands." [3]
Thompson's dragnet technique engendered other
problems. Mistakes were made, and innocent people were routinely
tortured or subject to extortion by crooked cops. On other occasions
VCI agents deliberately led Political Action Teams into arresting
people hostile to the insurgency. Recognizing these facts, Thompson
suggested that the CIA organize a police special branch of
professional interrogators who would not be confused with PATs
working to win hearts and minds. In 1964, at Thompson's suggestion,
the Police Special Branch was formed from the Vietnam Bureau of
Investigation and plans were made to center it in Province
Intelligence Coordinating Committees (PICCs) in South Vietnam's
provinces.
Creation of the police Special Branch coincided
with the reorganization of the "Special Branch" of the Vietnamese
Special Forces into the Special Exploitation Service (SES), the
GVN's counterpart to the Special Operations Group. SOG and SES
intelligence operations were coordinated with those of the Special
Branch through the CIO, though only at the regional and national
level, an inadequacy the PICCs were designed to overcome.
The birth of the police Special Branch also
coincided with the Hop Tac (Pacification Intensive Capital Area)
program, activated in July 1964 to bring security to the besieged
capital. A variation on the oil spot technique, Hop Tac introduced
twenty- five hundred national policemen into seven provinces
surrounding Saigon. In October 1964 the National Identification and
Family Census programs were combined in the Resources Control Bureau
in the National Police Directorate, and a Public Safety adviser was
placed in each region specifically to manage these programs. By
December 1964 thirteen thousand policemen were participating in Hop
Tac, seven thousand cops were manning seven hundred checkpoints,
more than six thousand arrests had been made, and ABC TV had done a
documentary on the program. In the provinces, Public Safety advised
policemen-enforced curfews and regulations on the movement of
persons and goods under the Resources Control program.
Also in September 1964, as part of the effort
to combine police and paramilitary programs, Frank Scotton was
directed to apply his motivational indoctrination program to Hop
Tac. Assisted by cadres from his Quang Ngai PAT team, Scotton formed
paramilitary reaction forces in seven key districts surrounding
Saigon.
Scotton's cadres were trained at the Ho Ngoc
Tau Special Forces camp where SOG based its CS program for
operations inside Cambodia. Equipment, supplies, and training for
Scotton's teams were provided by the CIA, while MACV and Special
Forces provided personnel. Lists of defectors, criminals, and other
potential recruits, as well as targets, came from Special Branch
files.
The aim of the motivational indoctrination
program, according to Scotton, was to "develop improved combat
skills -- increased commitment to close combat -- for South
Vietnamese. This is not psywar against civilians or VC. This is
taking the most highly motivated people, saying they deserted,
typing up a contract, and using them in these units. Our problem,"
Scotton said, "was finding smart Vietnamese and Cambodians who were
willing to die." [4]
The first district Scotton entered in search of
recruits was Tan Binh, between Saigon and Tan Son Nhut airport,
where he extracted cadres from a Popular Force platoon guarding Vinh
Loc village. These cadres were trained to keep moving, to sleep in
the jungle by day and attack VC patrols at night. Next, Scotton
trained teams in Nha Be, Go Vap, and Thu Duc districts. He recalled
going two weeks at a time without a
shower, "subliminating the risk and danger,"
and participating in operations. "We had a cheap rucksack, a
submachine gun, and good friends. We weren't interested in making
history in the early days."
So successful was the motivational
indoctrination program in support of Hop Tac that MACV decided to
use it nationwide. In early 1965 Scotton was asked to introduce his
program in SOG's regional camps, in support of Project Delta, the
successor to Leaping Lena. Recruits for SOG projects were
profit-motivated people whom Scotton persuaded to desert from U.S.
Special Forces A camps, which were strung out along South Vietnam's
borders. On a portable typewriter he typed a single-page contract,
which each recruit signed, acknowledging that although listed as a
deserter, he was actually employed by the CIA in "a sensitive
project" for which he received substantially higher pay than before.
The most valuable quality possessed by
defectors, deserters, and criminals serving in "sensitive" CIA
projects was their expendability. Take, for example, Project 24,
which employed NVA officers and senior enlisted men. Candidates for
Project 24 were vetted and, if selected, taken out for dinner and
drinks, to a brothel, where they were photographed, then blackmailed
into joining special reconnaissance teams. Trained in Saigon,
outfitted with captured NVA or VC equipment, then given a "one-way
ticket to Cambodia," they were sent to locate enemy sanctuaries.
When they radioed back their position and that of the sanctuary, the
CIA would "arc-light" (bomb with B52's) them along with the target.
No Project 24 special reconnaissance team ever returned to South
Vietnam.
Notably, minds capable of creating Project 24
were not averse to exploiting deviants within their own community,
and SOG occasionally recruited American soldiers who had committed
war crimes. Rather than serve time in prison or as a way of getting
released from stockades in Vietnam or elsewhere, people with
defective personalities were likely to volunteer for dangerous and
reprehensible jobs.
In June 1965 Colonel Don Blackburn commanded
SOG. His staff numbered around twelve and included the commanders of
the First and Fifth Special Forces groups, plus various special
warfare Marine, Air Force, and Navy officers. SOG headquarters in
Saigon planned operations for the four hundred-odd volunteers in its
operational units. However, 1965 was rough going for border
surveillance. The Montagnards were no longer effective after their
revolt, and as compensation, Project Delta was organized to provide
intelligence for newly arrived U.S. Army and Marine divisions. About
the paramilitary police, SOG, and pacification programs he and his
compatriots developed, Scotton said, "For us, these programs were
all part of the same thing. We did not think of things in terms of
little packages." That "thing," of course, was a
grand scheme to win the war, at the bottom of
which "were the province interrogation centers.
***
John Patrick Muldoon, Picadoon to the people
who knew him in Vietnam, was the first director of the PIC program
in Vietnam. Six feet four inches tall, well over two hundred pounds,
Muldoon has a scarlet face and a booming bass voice remarkably like
Robert Mitchum's. He was friendly and not overly impressed with
either himself or the CIA mystique. That makes Muldoon one of the
few emancipated retired CIA officers who do not feel obligated to
call headquarters every time a writer asks a question about Vietnam.
A Georgetown University dropout, Muldoon joined
the agency in 1958, his entry greased by two sisters already in the
CIA's employ. He did his first tour in Germany and in 1962 was sent
to South Korea. "I worked interrogation in Seoul," Muldoon recalled.
"I'd never been involved in interrogation before. Ray Valentine was
my boss. Syngman Rhee had been replaced by Park Chung Hee, who was
running the show.
Park's cousin Colonel Kim Chong Pil was
director of the ROK [Republic of Korea] CIA. There was a joint
KCIA-CIA interrogation center in Yon Don Tho, outside Seoul."
Here it is worth pausing for a moment to
explain that in recruiting cadres for the Korean CIA, the CIA used
the same method it used to staff the Vietnamese CIO. As revealed by
John Marks in The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, the CIA sent
its top psychologist, John Winne, to Seoul to "select the initial
cadre" using a CIA- developed psychological assessment test. "I set
up an office with two translators," Winne told Marks, "and used a
Korean version of the Wechsler." CIA psychologists "gave the tests
to 25 to 30 police and military officers," Marks writes, "and wrote
up a half-page report on each, listing their strengths and
weaknesses. Winne wanted to know about each candidate's ability to
follow orders, creativity, lack of personality disorders, motivation
-- why he wanted out of his current job. It was mostly for the
money, especially with the civilians." [5]
In this way secret police are recruited as CIA
assets in every country where the agency operates. In Latin America,
Marks writes, "The CIA ... found the assessment process most useful
for showing how to train the anti-terrorist section. According to
results, these men were shown to have very dependent psychologies
and needed strong direction" -- direction that came from the CIA.
Marks quotes one assessor as saying, "Anytime the Company spent
money for training a foreigner, the object was that he would
ultimately serve our purposes." CIA officers "were not content
simply
to work closely with these foreign intelligence
agencies; they insisted on penetrating them, and the Personality
Assessment System provided a useful aid." [6]
Following his tour in Korea, Muldoon was
assigned to Vietnam in November 1964. "I was brought down to the
National Interrogation Center [NIC] and told, 'This is where you're
going to work
You're going to advise X number of interrogators. They'll
bring you their initial debriefing of the guy
they're working on; then you'll give them additional CIA
requirements.'"
The CIA had different requirements, Muldoon
explained, because "the South Vietnamese wanted information they
could turn around and use in their battle against the Vietcong. They
just wanted to know what was going on in the South
But we
were interested in information about things in
the North that the South Vietnamese couldn't care less about. And
that's where the American advisers would come in -- to tell them,
'You gotta ask this, too.'"
"We had standard requirements depending on
where a guy was from. A lot of VC had been trained in North Vietnam
and had come back down as volunteers. They weren't regular NVA. So
if a guy came from the North, we wanted to know where he was from,
what unit he was with, how they were organized, where they were
trained If
a guy had been North for any length of time, we
wanted to know if he'd traveled on a train. What kind of
identification papers did he need? Anything about foreign weapons or
foreigners advising them. That sort of thing."
Built in 1964, the National Interrogation
Center served as CIO headquarters and was where civilian, police,
and military intelligence was coordinated by the CIA. "It was
located down on the Saigon River," Muldoon recalled, ''as part of a
great big naval compound
On the left was a wing of offices where the American military
chief, an
Air Force major, was located. In that same wing
were the chief of the CIO
his
deputy and the CIA advisers." Muldoon referred
to the CIO chief by his nom de guerre, Colonel Sam. "There was only
one CIO chief the whole time I was there," he added, "up until
August 1966. His deputy was there the whole time, too, and the same
interrogators."
Muldoon estimated there were several hundred
prisoners in the NIC and four interrogator-advisers. Muldoon was the
fifth. Three were Air Force enlisted men serving under an Army
captain. Muldoon's boss, the CIA chief of the NIC, was Ian "Sammy"
Sammers, who worked under the station's senior liaison officer, Sam
Hopper, who had supervised construction of the NIC in early 1964.
One year later, according to Muldoon, "There
was a conference in Nha Trang, in late April 1965. They were putting
together an interrogation center in an existing building
they had taken over, and they asked for help
from the NIC. So I was sent up there with the Army captain to look
at the place, figure out what kind of staff we needed, and how we
were going to train them
And while we were up there trying to break these
guys in, the police liaison guy in Nha Trang,
Tony Bartolomucci, asked Sammy if they could keep me there for this
conference, at which all of our people were going to meet Jack 'Red'
Stent, who was taking over from Paul Hodges as chief of foreign
intelligence. Bartolomucci wanted to show off his new interrogation
center to all these big shots.
"The military people from the NIC had done
their job," Muldoon continued, "so they left. But I stayed around.
Then Tucker Gougleman and Red showed up for this conference. Tucker
was chief of Special Branch field operations, and things were just
starting to get off the ground with the PICs. A couple were already
under way -- one in Phan Thiet and one in Phuoc Le -- and Tucker
told me, 'We're going to build, build, build, and I need someone to
oversee the whole operation. I want you to do it.'"
"So we had this big conference, and they packed
the interrogation center full of prisoners. Bartolomucci wanted to
show off with a bunch of prisoners, so he got his police buddies to
bring in a bunch of prostitutes and what have you and put them in
the cells. I don't think they had one VC in the place. After the
conference they all went back to the regular jail, and I went to
work for Tucker."
John Muldoon spoke affectionately about Tucker
Gougleman. "Tucker was loud and foulmouthed, and he had a terrible
temper; but it was all a big front. He was very easy to get to know
a likable guy. Always in a short-sleeved shirt and sneakers.
He was
married three times, divorced three times. He
had adopted a girl in Korea, and in Vietnam he had what he called
his family. He was back in Saigon trying to get them out when he was
picked up. When the evacuation was over, he was still there, staying
in the hotel. One day he came down, got off the elevator, walked
into the lobby, and they were waiting for him. They took him out,
threw him in a car, and took him to the National Police
Interrogation Center. A French newspaper guy saw it happen. The
North Vietnamese denied they had him, but they returned his body
about a year later.
"It's funny, but me and Tucker used to talk
about the PICs. He said something like 'John, if we lose this war
one day, we could end up in these goddammed things if we get
caught.'
"'Well,' I asked, 'what would you do if you
were in there?'
"He said he thought he'd kill himself rather
than go through interrogation. But he didn't. The report I heard was
that when his body got to the graves registration people in Okinawa,
the broken bones had yet to heal. So obviously they had tortured him
right up until the time he died. And I'd be
willing to bet he didn't say a damn thing to help them. I can see
him spitting in their faces."
Muldoon laughed. "Tucker wanted to turn the
PICs into whorehouses. The interrogation rooms had two-way mirrors.
"Tucker was a hero in the Marine Corps in World
War Two," Muldoon added. "He joined the agency right after and
worked with [station chief] John Hart in Korea, running operations
behind the lines. He was in Afghanistan and worked in training, too.
He got to Vietnam in 1962 and was base chief in Da Nang running
everything [i] that had to do with intelligence and paramilitary
operations He was no longer
the
Da Nang base chief when I arrived in Saigon,"
Muldoon continued, "but he hadn't taken over field operations yet
either. He was in Saigon trying to set up the Province Intelligence
Coordination Committees with Jack Barlow, a British guy from MI Six.
Barlow had been in Africa and Malaya with Robert Thompson, and they
were the experts. They'd succeeded in Malaya, and we wanted them to
show us how to do it. Barlow and Tucker worked hand in hand. I
shared an office with them at the embassy annex -- which I had
besides my office at the NIC -- and that's where I first met
Tucker."
Forerunner to the Province Interrogation Center
program, the Province Intelligence Coordination Committee program,
established in November 1964, was designed to extend CIO operations
into the provinces. Each PICC was to serve as the senior
intelligence agency within each province and to guide, supervise,
and coordinate all military, police, and civilian operations.
"Barlow was the guy pushing the PICCs, and
Tucker agreed it was a good idea," Muldoon recalled. "But they
weren't able to convince the military to go along with them. It was
bought by us and the embassy, but not by the military, and that's
the one you needed -- 'cause they were the ones who initially had
control of the prisoners.
And the Vietnamese military wasn't going to go
along unless the U.S. military approved it. So when the U.S.
military said, 'Don't turn those prisoners over,' there was no way
we were going to get them. So the PICC project never got off the
ground. Then after the embassy bombing [February 1965] they had a
reorganization, and Tucker became chief of field operations. We
started building the Province Interrogation Centers, and it was
thought that people would say, 'Hey, man, this is a great spot!
We'll send all our prisoners here!' and that then they'd start
moving in and set up the PICCs around the PICs. But that never
happened either.
"So after the Nha Trang conference we went down
to Phuoc Le to set up a training schedule for the PIC that had
already been built down there. The paramilitary guy, Pat, wanted to
cooperate, and he had great relations with the province chief and
the
military. The intelligence guy, Ben, was
serious about making everything in his province work. He wasn't
happy that he got stuck with building the interrogation center and
being the adviser, but he wanted to be the best. And he had great
relations with the Special Branch and the CIO. Now some paramilitary
and liaison guys didn't even talk to each other, but together Pat
and Ben were able to make the thing work. It cost a lot of loyal
Vietnamese their lives, but Ben would get hamlet informants to tell
us who the VC were; then Pat would send the CTs out to get the
names."
What Muldoon described was the one-two punch of
the counterinsurgency -- the Province Interrogation Centers and the
counterterrorists. Through the PICs, the CIA learned the identity
and structure of the VCI in each province; through the CTs, the CIA
eliminated individual VCI members and destroyed their organization.
The problem with the Phuoc Le PIC, according to
Muldoon, was its design. "Ben had built his PIC with the guard posts
outside each corner, so there was no way for the guards to get back
into the inner compound during an attack. Once the shooting started
and they ran out of ammunition, they were finished. So the first
thing we did was change the design so they were still on each corner
and could see in all directions but had a door leading inside the
compound."
CIA architects settled on a standard design
based on the modified Phuoc Le PIC. Strictly functional, it
minimized cost while maximizing security. Under cover of Pacific
Architects and Engineers (PA&E), the CIA's logistics staff hired
local Vietnamese contractors to build interrogation centers in every
province. Funds and staff salaries came from the Special Branch
budget. After it was built, the CIA bought the interrogation center,
then donated it to the National Police, at which point it became a
National Police facility under the direction of the Special Branch.
In practice, however -- because they got their operating funds
directly from the CIA -- Special Branch employees wielded more power
than their supervisors in the National Police, who received
Aid-in-Kind funds indirectly from the Agency for International
Development through the National Police Directorate in Saigon.
Each provincial capital would eventually have a
PIC. However, regional interrogation centers were built first and
were larger, holding two to three hundred prisoners each. In IV
Corps's regional capital, Can Tho, where the French had built a jail
capable of holding two thousand prisoners, existing facilities were
renovated. In choosing where to build in the provinces, each CIA
regional officer selected priority provinces. Then, according to
Muldoon, it was up to the liaison officer in the province to talk to
the province chief and his CIO counterpart to find a spot near the
provincial capital. "'Cause that's where our guy lived. Some of the
guys had a hell of a time getting PICs started," Muldoon noted,
"because some province chiefs wanted money under the table."
Once the interrogation center was built, the
liaison officer became its adviser, and Muldoon helped him recruit
its staff. There were deadlines for each phase, and part of
Muldoon's job was to travel around and monitor progress. "In one
place construction would be half done," he recalled, "and in another
they'd be trying to find a piece of land. It was a very big
undertaking. We even had nit-PICs, which were smaller versions for
smaller provinces." Most interrogation centers were built or under
construction by the time Muldoon left Vietnam in August 1966, at
which point he was transferred to Thailand to build the CIA's huge
interrogation center in Udorn, "where the CIA ran the Laos war from
the Air America base." Muldoon was replaced as PIC chief in Vietnam
by Bob Hill, a vice cop from Washington, D.C. Hill replaced Muldoon
in Thailand in 1968.
***
One story high, fashioned from concrete blocks,
poured cement, and wood in the shape of a hollow square, an
interrogation center was four buildings with tin roofs linked around
a courtyard. In the center of the yard was a combination
lookout-water tower with an electric generator under it. "You
couldn't get the guards to stay out there at night if they didn't
have lights," Muldoon explained. "So we had spotlights on the
corners, along the walls, and on the tower shooting out all around.
We also bulldozed around it so there were no trees or bushes.
Anybody coming at it could be seen crossing the open area." People
entered and exited through green, steel-plated gates, "Which were
wide open every time I visited," said Muldoon, who visited only
during the day. "You didn't want to visit at night," when attacks
occurred. PICs were located on the outskirts of town, away from
residential areas, so as not to endanger the people living nearby,
as well as to discourage rubbernecking. "These were self-contained
places," Muldoon emphasized. Telephone lines to the PICs were tapped
by the CIA.
On the left side were interrogation rooms and
the cellblock -- depending on the size, twenty to sixty solitary
confinement cells the size of closets. Men and women were not
segregated. "You could walk right down the corridor," according to
Muldoon. "It was an empty hallway with cells on both sides. Each
cell had a steel door and a panel at the bottom where you could slip
the food in and a slot at the top where you could look in and see
what the guy was doing." There were no toilets, just holes to squat
over. "They didn't have them in their homes." Muldoon laughed. "Why
should we put them in their cells?"
Prisoners slept on concrete slabs. "Depending
on how cooperative they were, you'd give them a straw mat or a
blanket. It could get very cold at night in the highlands." A system
of rewards and punishments was part of the treatment. "There were
little things you could give them and take away from them, not a
lot, but every little bit they got they were grateful for."
Depending on the amount of VCI activity in the
province and the personality of the PIC chief, some interrogation
centers were always full while others were always empty. In either
case, "We didn't want them sitting there talking to each other,"
Muldoon said, so "we would build up the cells gradually, until we
had to put them next to each other. They were completely isolated.
They didn't get time to go out and walk around the yard. They sat in
their cells when they weren't being interrogated. After that they
were sent to the local jail or were turned back over to the
military, where they were put in POW camps or taken out and shot.
That part I never got involved in," he said, adding parenthetically,
"They were treated better in the PICs than in the local jails
already there for common criminals. Public Safety was advising them,
working with the National Police. Sometimes they had sixty to
seventy people in a cell that shouldn't have had more than ten. But
they didn't care. If you're a criminal, you suffer. If you don't
like it, too bad. Don't be a criminal."
The interrogation process worked like this. "As
we brought prisoners in, the first thing we did was ... run them
through the shower. That's on the left as you come in. After that
they were checked by the doctor or nurse. That was an absolute
necessity because God knows what diseases they might be carrying
with them. They might need medication. They wouldn't do you much
good if they died the first day they were there and you never got a
chance to interrogate them. That's why the medical office was right
inside the main gate. In most PICs," Muldoon noted, "the medical
staff was usually a local ARVN medic who would come out and check
the prisoners coming in that day."
After the prisoner was cleaned, examined,
repaired, weighed, photographed, and fingerprinted, his biography
was taken by a Special Branch officer in the debriefing room. This
initial interrogation extracted "hot" information that could be
immediately exploited -- the whereabouts of an ongoing party
committee meeting, for example -- as well as the basic information
needed to come up with requirements for the series of interrogations
that followed. Then the prisoner was given a uniform and stuck in a
cell.
The interrogation rooms were at the back of the
PIC. Some had two-way mirrors and polygraph machines, although
sophisticated equipment was usually reserved for regional
interrogation centers, where expert interrogators could put them to
better use. Most province liaison officers were not trained
interrogators. "They didn't have to be," according to Muldoon. "They
were there to collect intelligence, and they had a list of what they
needed in their own province. All they had to do was to make sure
that whoever was running the PIC followed their orders. All they had
to say was 'This is the requirement I want.' Then they read the
initial reports and went back
and gave the Special Branch interrogators
additional requirements, just like we did at the NIC."
The guards -- usually policemen, sometimes
soldiers -- lived in the PIC. As they returned from guard duty, they
stacked their weapons in the first room on the right. The next room
was the PIC chief's office, with a safe for classified documents,
handguns, and the chief's bottle of scotch. The PIC chief's job was
to turn those in the VCI -- make them Special Branch agents -- and
maintain informant networks in the hamlets and villages. Farther
down the corridor were offices for interrogators, collation and
report writers, translator-interpreters, clerical and kitchen staff.
There were file rooms with locked cabinets and map rooms for
tracking the whereabouts of VCIs in the province. And there was a
Chieu Hoi room where defectors were encouraged to become
counterterrorists, political action cadre, or Kit Carson scouts -
- a play on the names Biet Kich and Kit Carson,
the cavalry adviser who gave a reward for Navajo scalps. Kit Carson
scouts worked exclusively for the Marines.
Once an interrogation center had been
constructed and a staff assigned, Muldoon summoned the training team
from the NIC. Each member of the team was a specialist. The Army
captain trained the guards. Air Force Sergeant Frank Rygalski taught
report writers how to write proper reports -- the tangible product
of the PIC. There were standard reporting formats for tactical as
opposed to strategic intelligence and for Chieu Hoi and agent
reports. To compile a finished report, an interrogator's notes were
reviewed by the chief interrogator, then collated, typed, copied and
sent to the Special Branch, CIO, and CIA. Translations were never
considered totally accurate unless read and confirmed in the
original language by the same person, but that rarely happened.
Likewise, interrogations conducted through interpreters. were never
considered totally reliable, for significant information was
generally lost or misrepresented.
Another Air Force sergeant, Dick Falke, taught
interrogators how to take notes and ask questions during an
interrogation. "You don't just sit down with ten questions, get ten
answers, then walk away," Muldoon commented. "Some of these guys, if
you gave them ten questions, would get ten answers for you, and
that's it. A lot of them had to learn that you don't drop a line of
questioning just because you got the answer. The answer, if it's the
right one, should lead you to sixty more questions. For example," he
said, "Question one was 'Were you ever trained in North Vietnam?'
Question two was 'Were you ever trained by people other than
Vietnamese?' Well, lots of times the answer to question two is so
interesting and gives you so much information you keep going for an
hour and never get to question three, 'When did you come to South
Vietnam?'"
For Special Branch officers in region
interrogation centers, a special interrogation training program was
conducted at the NIC by experts from the CIA's Support Services
Branch, most of whom had worked on Russian defectors and were
brought out from Washington to handle important cases. Training of
Special Branch administrative personnel was conducted at region
headquarters by professional secretaries, who taught their students
how to type, file, and use phones. This side of the program was run
by a former professional football player with the Green Bay Packers
named Gene, who chain-smoked and eventually died of emphysema. "In
between puffs, he'd put this box to his mouth, squeeze it, and take
a breath of oxygen," Muldoon recalled.
On the forbidden subject of torture, according
to Muldoon, the Special Branch had "the old French methods,"
interrogation that included torture. "All this had to be stopped by
the agency," he said. "They had to be retaught with more
sophisticated techniques."
In Ralph Johnson's opinion, "the Vietnamese,
both Communist and GVN, looked upon torture as a normal and valid
method of obtaining intelligence." [7] But of course, the Vietnamese
did not conceive the PICs; they were the stepchildren of Robert
Thompson, whose aristocratic English ancestors perfected torture in
dingy castle dungeons, on the rack and in the iron lady, with
thumbscrews and branding irons.
As for the American role, according to Muldoon,
"you can't have an American there all the time watching these
things." "These things" included: rape, gang rape, rape using eels,
snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electrical
shock ("the Bell Telephone Hour") rendered by attaching wires to the
genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; "the
water treatment"; "the airplane," in which a prisoner's arms were
tied behind the back and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling,
suspending the prisoner in midair, afterwhich he or she was beaten;
beatings with rubber hoses and whips; and the use of police dogs to
maul prisoners. All this and more occurred in PICs.
One reason was inexperienced advisers. "A lot
of guys in Vietnam were career trainees or junior officer trainees,"
Muldoon explained. "Some had been in the military; some had just
graduated from college. They put them through a six-month course as
either intelligence or paramilitary officers, then sent them over.
They were just learning, and it was a hell of a place for their
baptism of fire. They sent whole classes to Vietnam in 1963 and
1964, then later brought in older guys who had experience as region
advisers ... They were supposed to hit every province once a week,
but some would do it over the radio in one day.
"The adviser's job was to keep the region
officer informed about real operations mounted in the capital city
or against big shots in the field," Muldoon said, adding that
advisers who wanted to do a good job ran the PICs themselves, while
the others hired assistants -- former cops or Green Berets -- who
were paid by the CIA but worked for themselves, doing a dirty job in
exchange for a line on the inside track to the black market, where
VC in need of cash and spies seeking names dealt in arms, drugs,
prostitution, military scrip, and whatever other commodities were
available.
PICs are also faulted for producing only
information on low-level VCI. Whenever a VCI member with strategic
information (for example, a cadre in Hue who knew what was happening
in the Delta) was captured, he was immediately grabbed by the region
interrogation center, or the NIC in Saigon, where experts could
produce quality reports for Washington. The lack of feedback to the
PIC for its own province operations resulted in a revolving door
syndrome, wherein the PIC was reduced to picking up the same
low-level VCI people month after month.
The value of a PIC, according to Muldoon,
"depended on the number of people that were put in it, on the
caliber of people who manned it -- especially the chief -- and how
good they were at writing up this information. Some guys thought
they were the biggest waste of time and money ever spent because
they didn't produce anything. And a lot of them didn't produce
anything because the guys in the provinces didn't push them. Other
people say, 'It's not that we didn't try; it's just that it was a
dumb idea in the first place, because we couldn't get the military
-- who were the ones capturing prisoners -- to turn them over. The
military weren't going to turn them over to us until they were
finished with them, and by then they were washed out.'
"This," Muldoon conceded, "was part of the
overall plan: Let the military get the tactical military
intelligence first. Obviously that's the most important thing going
on in a war. But then we felt that after the military got what they
could use tomorrow or next week, maybe the CIA should talk to this
guy. That was the whole idea of having the Province Intelligence
Coordination Committees and why the PICs became part of them, so we
could work this stuff back and forth. And in provinces where our
guys went out of their way to work with the MACV sector adviser,
they were able to get something done."
The military's side of the story is given by
Major General Joseph McChristian, who arrived in Saigon in July 1965
as MACV's intelligence chief. McChristian recognized the threat
posed by the VCI and, in order to destroy it, proposed "a large
countrywide counterintelligence effort involved in countersabotage,
countersubversion and counterespionage activities." [8] In
structuring this attack against the VCI,
McChristian assigned military intelligence
detachments to each U.S. Army brigade, division, and field force, as
well as to each South Vietnamese division and corps. He created
combined centers for intelligence, document exploitation,
interrogation, and materiel exploitation and directed them to
support and coordinate allied units in the field. And he ordered the
construction of military interrogation centers in each sector,
division, and corps.
McChristian readily conceded the primacy of the
CIA in anti-VCI operations. He acknowledged that the military did
not have sophisticated agent nets and that military advisers at
sector level focused on acquiring tactical intelligence needed to
mount offensive operations. But he was very upset when the CIA,
"without coordination with MACV, took over control of the files on
the infrastructure located" in the PICs. He got an even bigger shock
when he himself "was refused permission to see the infrastructure
file by a member of the [CIA]." Indeed, because the CIA prevented
the military from entering the PICs, the military retaliated by
refusing to send them prisoners. As a result, anti-VCI operations
were poorly coordinated at province level. [9]
Meanwhile, MACV assigned intelligence teams to
the provinces, which formed agent nets mainly through Regional and
Popular Forces under military control. These advisory teams sent
reports to the political order of battle section in the Combined
Intelligence Center, which produced complete and timely intelligence
on the boundaries, location, structure, strengths, personalities and
activities of the Communist political organization, or
infrastructure. [10]
Information filtering into the Combined
Intelligence Center was placed in an automatic data base, which
enabled analysts to compare known VCI offenders with known aliases.
Agent reports and special intelligence collection programs like
Project Corral provided the military with information on low-level
VCI, while information on high-level VCI came from the Combined
Military Interrogation Center, which, according to McChristian, was
the "focal point of tactical and strategic exploitation of selected
human sources." [11]
The South Vietnamese military branch
responsible for attacking the VCI was the Military Security Service
under the direction of General Loan. Liaison with the MSS was
handled by MACV's Counter-Intelligence Division within the 525th
Military Intelligence Group. The primary mission of
counterintelligence was the defection in place of VCI agents who had
penetrated ARVN channels, for use as double agents. By mid-1966 U.S.
military intelligence employed about a thousand agents in South
Vietnam, all of whom were paid through the 525th's Intelligence
Contingency Fund.
The 525th had a headquarters unit near Long
Binh, one battalion for each corps, and one working with SOG in
third countries. Internally the 525th was divided into bilateral
teams working with the Military Security Service and ARVN military
intelligence, and unilateral teams working without the knowledge or
approval of the GVN. Operational teams consisted of five enlisted
men, each one an agent handler reporting to an officer who served as
team chief. When assigned to the field, agent handlers in unilateral
teams lived on their own, "on the economy." To avoid "flaps," they
were given identification as Foreign Service officers or employees
of private American companies, although they kept their military IDs
for access to classified information, areas, and resources. Upon
arriving in- country, each agent handler (aka case officer) was
assigned a principal agent, who usually had a functioning agent
network already in place. Some of these nets had been set up by the
French, the British, or the Chinese. Each principal agent had
several subagents working in cells. Like most spies, subagents were
usually in it for the money; in many cases the war had destroyed
their businesses and left them no alternative.
Case officers worked with principal agents
through interpreters and couriers. In theory, a case officer never
met subagents. Instead, each cell had a cell leader who secretly met
with the principal agent to exchange information and receive
instructions, which were passed along to the other subagents. Some
subagents were political specialists; others attended to tactical
military concerns. Posing as woodcutters or rice farmers or
secretaries or auto mechanics, subagents infiltrated Vietcong
villages or businesses and reported on NLF associations, VCI cadres,
and the GVN's criminal undertakings as well as on the size and
whereabouts of VC and NVA combat units.
Case officers handling political "accounts"
were given requirements, originated at battalion headquarters, by
their team leaders. The requirements were for specific information
on individual VCIs. The cell leader would report on a particular VCI
to the principal agent, who would pass the information back to the
case officer using standard tradecraft methods -- a cryptic mark on
a wall or telephone pole that the case officer would periodically
look for. The case officer would, upon seeing the signal, send a
courier to retrieve the report from the principal agent's courier at
a prearranged time and place. The case officer would then pass the
information to his team leader as well as to other customers,
including the CIA liaison officer at the embassy house, as CIA
headquarters in a province was called.
The finished products of positive and
counterintelligence operations were called army information reports.
Reports and agents were rated on the basis of accuracy, but insofar
as most agents were in it for money, accuracy was hard to judge. A
spy might implicate a person who owed him money or a rival in love,
business, or politics. Many sources were double agents, and all
agents were periodically given lie
detector tests. For protection they were also
given code names. They were paid through the MACV Intelligence
Contingency Fund, but not well enough to survive on their salaries
alone, so many dabbled in the black market, too.
The final stage of the intelligence cycle was
the termination of agents, for which there were three methods. First
was termination by paying the agent off, swearing him to secrecy,
and saying so long. Second was termination with prejudice, which
meant ordering an agent out of an area and placing his or her name
on a blacklist so he or she could never work for the United States
again; third was termination with extreme prejudice, applied when
the mere existence of an agent threatened the security of an
operation or other agents. Case officers were taught, in
off-the-record sessions, how to terminate their agents with extreme
prejudice. CIA officers received similar instruction.
Notes:
i. Karnow calls Gougleman "the principal
adviser" to OPLAN 34A.
CHAPTER 6: Field Police Four Opinions on
Pacification
The corporate warrior: "Pacification was the
ultimate goal of both the Americans and the South Vietnamese
government. A complex task involving military, psychological,
political, and economic factors, its aim was to achieve an
economically and politically viable society in which the people
could live without constant fear of death or other physical harm" --
WILLIAM WESTMORELAND, A Soldier Reports
The poet: "Defenseless villages are bombarded
from the air, the inhabitants driven into the countryside, the
cattle machine-gunned, the huts set afire with incendiary bullets:
this is called pacification" -- GEORGE ORWELL, Politics and the
English Language, 1946
The reporter: "What we're really doing in
Vietnam is killing the cause of 'wars of liberation.' It's a testing
ground -- like Germany in Spain. It's an example to Central America
and other guerrilla prone areas" -- BERNARD FALL, "This Isn't
Munich, It's Spain," Ramparts (December 1965)
The warlord: "A popular political base for the
Government of South Vietnam does not now exist. The existing
government is oriented toward the exploitation of the rural and
lower class urban populations. It is in fact a continuation of the
French colonial system of government with upper class Vietnamese
replacing the French. The dissatisfaction of the agrarian population
... is expressed largely through alliance with the NLF" -- John Paul
Vann, 1965
In retaliation for selective terror attacks
against Americans in South Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson ordered
in 1965 the bombing of cities in North Vietnam. The raids continued
into 1968, the idea being to deal the Communists more punishment
than they could absorb. Although comparisons were unforthcoming in
the American press, North Vietnam got a taste of what England was
like during the Nazi terror bombings of World War II, and like the
Brits, the North Vietnamese evacuated their children to the
countryside but refused to say uncle.
Enraged by infiltrating North Vietnamese
troops, LBJ also ordered the bombing of Laos and Cambodia. To help
the Air Force locate enemy troops and targets in those "neutral"
countries, SOG launched a cross-border operation called Prairie
Fire.
Working on the problem in Laos was the CIA,
through its top secret Project 404. Headquartered in Vientiane,
Project 404 sent agents into the countryside to locate targets for
B-52's stationed in Guam and on aircraft carriers in the South China
Sea. The massive bombing campaign turned much of Laos and Cambodia
into a wasteland.
The same was true in South Vietnam, where the
strategy was to demoralize the Communists by blowing their villages
to smithereens. Because of the devastation the bombing wrought, half
a million Vietnamese refugees had fled their villages and were
living in temporary shelters by the end of 1965, while another half
million were wandering around in shock, homeless. At the same time
nearly a quarter million American soldiers were mired in the muck of
Vietnam, a small percentage of them engaged in pacification as
variously defined above. The Pentagon thought it needed half a
million more men to get the job done.
Reacting to the presence of another generation
of foreign occupation troops, COSVN commander General Nguyen Chi
Thanh called for a renewed insurgency. The head of the NLF, Nguyen
Huu Tho, agreed. The battle was joined. And with the rejuvenated
revolution came an increased demand by the CIA for VCI prisoners.
However, the VCI fish were submerged in the sea of refugees that was
rolling like a tidal wave over South Vietnam. Having been swamped by
the human deluge, only three thousand of Saigon's eighteen thousand
National Policemen were available to
chase the VCI; the rest were busy directing
traffic and manning checkpoints into Saigon.
Likewise, in the countryside, the hapless
police were capturing few VCI for interrogation -- far fewer, in
fact, than U.S. combat units caught while conducting cordon and
search operations, in which entire villages were herded together and
every man, woman, and child subjected to search and seizure, and
worse. As John Muldoon noted, the military rarely made its prisoners
available to the police until they were "washed out."
Making matters worse was the fact that province
chiefs eager to foster "local initiative" often made deals with the
CIA officers who funded them. At the direction of their paramilitary
advisers, province chiefs often pursued the VCI with counterterror
teams, independently of the police, put the VCI in their own
province jails and sent them to PICs only if the CIA's Special
Branch adviser learned what was going on, and complained loud enough
and long enough. Meanwhile, amid the din of saber-rattling coming
from the Pentagon, the plaintive cries of police and pacification
managers began to echo in the corridors of power in Washington.
Something had to be done to put some punch in the National Police.
What was decided, in the summer of 1965, was to
provide the National Police with a paramilitary field force that had
the mission and skills of counterterror teams and could work jointly
with the military in cordon and search operations. The man given the
job was Colonel William "Pappy" Grieves, senior adviser to the
National Police Field Forces from August 1965 till 1973.
"I was trying to create an A-One police force
starting from scratch," Grieves told me when we met at his home in
1986. [1] A blend of rock-solid integrity and irreverence, Grieves
was the son of a U.S. Army officer, born in the Philippines and
reared in a series of army posts around the world. He attended West
Point and in World War II saw action in Europe with the XV Corps
Artillery, then came the War College, jump school at Fort Benning
(he made his last jump at age sixty) and an interest in
unconventional warfare. As MAAG chief of staff in Greece in the mid-
1950's, Grieves worked with the CIA, the Special Forces, and the
Greek airborne raiding force in paramilitary operations behind enemy
lines.
Grieves ended his career as deputy commander of
the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg under General William
Yarborough. "I've often thought that if he had gone to Vietnam
instead of Westmoreland, the war would have taken a different
course. More would have been put on the Vietnamese. Yarborough,"
said Grieves, "realized that you can't fight a war on the four-year
political cycle of the United States -- which is what we were trying
to do. I'm convinced the war could have been won, but it would
have taken a long time with a lot less U.S.
troops." The notion that "you can't go in and win it for somebody,
'cause you'll have nothing in the end'" was the philosophy Pappy
Grieves brought to the National Police Field Forces.
Days before his retirement from the U.S. Army,
Grieves was asked to join the Agency for International Development's
Public Safety program in South Vietnam. "Byron Engel, the chief of
the Public Safety Program in Washington, D.C., had a representative
at the Special Warfare Center who approached me about taking the
job," Grieves recalled. "He said they were looking for a guy to head
up the paramilitary force within the National Police. They
specifically selected me for the job with the Field Police, which
were just being organized at the time, because they needed someone
with an unconventional warfare background. So I went to Washington,
D.C., was interviewed by Byron Engel, among other people, took a
quick course at the USAID Police Academy, and as a result, when I
retired in July 1965, by the end of the next month I was in Vietnam.
"Let me give you a little background on what
the Field Police concept was," Grieves continued. "In a country like
Vietnam you had a situation where a policeman couldn't walk a beat
-- like Blood Alley in Paris. In order to walk a beat and bring
police services to the people, in most parts of Vietnam you had to
use military tactics and techniques and formations just for the
policeman to survive. So you walk a beat by squads and platoons. The
military would call it a patrol, and, as a matter of fact, so did
the police.
"That was the basic concept. Whether you had an
outfit called Phoenix or not, there was a police need for a field
force organization in a counterinsurgency role. The British found
this necessary in Malaya, and they created Police Field Forces
there. In fact, the original idea of the Vietnamese Police Field
Forces came out of Malaya.
Robert Thompson recommended it. And when I got
to Vietnam, they had a contract Australian ... who had taken over
for himself the Police Field Forces: Ted Serong. If you looked at
the paper, he was hired by AID as a consultant; but he was paid by
the CIA, which was reimbursed by AID. This arrangement allowed the
CIA to have input into how the Field Police were managed.
"When I got to Vietnam," Grieves continued, "I
found myself responsible on the American side of this thing, and yet
Serong was in there, not as an adviser, but directly operating. He
had some money coming in from Australia, which he would dispense to
get [Vietnamese] to come over to his side, and he had five or six
Australian paramilitary advisers, paid by the Company [CIA], same as
him."
The problem was that the CIA wanted to
establish the Field Police under its control, not as a police force
but as a unit against the infrastructure. The CIA tried to do that
by having Serong suborn the Vietnamese officers
who managed the program, so that he could run it like a private
army, the way the agency ran the counterterror teams. "Under Serong
and the CIA," Grieves explained, "the Field Police program was not
for the benefit of the Vietnamese; when they were gone, there wasn't
going to be anything left. Well, they could run it like the
counterterror teams, or they could be advisers."
As a matter of principle, Grieves felt
obligated to run his program legitimately. "Now Serong and I were
both dealing with the same Vietnamese," he recalled, "with him on
the ground trying to make it anti-VCI. Then I discovered that some
very peculiar things were going on. There was no accountability. The
CIA was furnishing piasters and weapons to get the Field Police
going, but these things were dropped by the Company from
accountability when they left Saigon. Serong would take a jeep, ship
it by Air America up to the training center in Da Lat, ship it back
on the next airplane out, and he'd have a vehicle of his own off the
books! A lot of piasters were being used to pay personal servants,
to buy liquor, things of that nature.
And he had sources of information. He was going
with the director of AID's administrative assistant, and she would
take things Serong was interested in and let him see them before
[USAID Director] Charlie Mann did. There were all sorts of things
going on, and this just put me across the barrel.
"It took me a couple of months to figure it
out" -- Grieves sighed -- "and it made it hard to put the Field
Police back on the police track, which was my job. So the first
thing we did was try to get rid of that crowd. But Bob Lowe, who was
the head of Public Safety in South Vietnam and my boss through the
chief of operations, wanted me to stay out of it. Serong had pulled
the wool over his eyes, and he just wasn't interested. Then John
Manopoli replaced Lowe, and John called me in and said he wanted to
see me get into it; he had a directive to get rid of Serong, and I
supplied the ammunition.
"It was [not] just his personality," Grieves
said in retrospect, "but his handling of funds, equipment, and
everything else was completely immoral. And eventually it all came
out. After about a year the services of Brigadier Serong were
dispensed with; his and his people's contracts ran out or were
turned over to the Company, and my relationship with the CIA station
soured as a result."
The final parting of ways came when Grieves was
asked to work for the CIA without the knowledge of his AID
superiors. From his experience with the agency in Greece, Grieves
knew that CIA staff officers were protected but that contract
employees were expendable. He did not trust the CIA enough to put
himself in the tenuous position of having to depend on it.
Grieves's refusal to bring the Field Police
under CIA control had a significant effect. "In the eyes of Serong
and that crew, the Field Police were to be an outlet of the
Company," Grieves explained. "So when it became obvious they were a
part of the National Police, the CIA developed the Provincial
Reconnaissance Units (PRU) -- units operating separately, hired and
commanded by Company people." Unfortunately, he added, "The Field
Police could never develop across the board as long as PRU existed."
Indeed, the PRU and the Field Police worked at cross- purposes for
years to come, reflecting parochial tensions between U.S. agencies
and undermining the U.S. war effort in Vietnam.
The Field Police was formally established on
January 27, 1965, at the same time as the Marine Police. Its
mission, as written by Grieves, was "for the purpose of extending
police services to the people of Vietnam in areas where more
conventionally armed forces and trained National Police could not
operate, and to provide a tool to assist in the extension of the
National Police into the rural areas." Field Police units were to
patrol rural areas, control civil disturbances, provide security for
the National Police, act as a reserve, and conduct raids against the
VCI based on information provided by the Special Branch.
Notably, Grieves placed the anti-VCI role last,
a priority that was reversed two years later under Phoenix. In the
meantime, he was intent on bringing order, discipline, and a public
service purpose to the Field Police. "The headquarters was in
Saigon, collocated with Public Safety," Grieves recalled. "As soon
as we could, however, we constructed a separate headquarters and a
warehouse on the outskirts of Saigon. We hired Nungs as security.
There was a Nung platoon in Cholon at our central warehouse and
forty to fifty Nungs at our training center in Da Lat. We got them
through Chinese brokers in Cholon.
"Between 1965 and 1966," Grieves explained,
"the Field Police were just getting organized. Under Serong the
planned strength was eighteen thousand, but the actual force in July
1965 was two thousand." There were six companies in training at the
original center in Nam Dong, which Serong moved to Tri Mot, about
six miles outside Da Lat. "He was also dealing with piaster funds on
the black market, using the profits to build a private villa for his
vacations up there," Grieves revealed.
The Tri Mot facility accommodated twelve
companies. The American in charge was retired Special Forces
Sergeant Major Chuck Petry. Training of field policemen began with a
two-month course at the National Police training center in Vung Tau,
followed by a three-month course at Tri Mot. Field policemen were
assigned to provinces initially as a unit, later as individuals.
Offshore training in jungle operations and riot control was given to
selected recruits at the Malayan Police Field Force training center
(created by Serong) through the Colombo Plan, while other field
policemen
were trained at the International Police
Academy in Washington. The first two Field Police companies, from
Long An and Gia Dinh provinces, completed their training in December
1965.
Grieves then arranged for MACV to provide
logistical support to the Field Police through U.S. Army channels on
a reimbursable basis. In order to make sure that supplies were not
sold on the black market, equipment was issued directly into the
American warehouse and parceled out by Grieves and his staff. "We
did not issue it to the Vietnamese," he said, "until they had the
troops for it. We didn't give them twenty- seven companies' worth of
equipment when they only had ten companies of people.
"We were the administrators;" Grieves
explained, "which forced us to account for funds and do a lot of
things that were not in an advisory capacity. But it was the only
way to get the job done. From the very beginning the idea was to
turn it back to the Vietnamese when they could handle it, but at
first we had to expand our advisory role to create this force.
"My first counterpart," Grieves recalled, "for
about eight months was a Special Forces lieutenant colonel named
Tran Van Thua. He was assigned to the National Police and was
working with Ted Serong. Thua meant well but was not a strong
officer. He was attempting to play us against each other by not
allowing himself to become too aware of it. Then Nguyen Ngoc Loan
became director general of the National Police, and he brought in
Colonel Sanh, an army airborne officer." At that point Thua was
reassigned as chief of the National Police training center at Vung
Tau. "Colonel Sanh was an improvement over Thua, but he was also a
little hard to get along with," according to Grieves. "He had no
real interest in the police side of it. He came from one of the
Combat Police [i] battalions and was interested primarily in the
riot control aspect of the Field Police."
Reflecting General Loan's priorities, Colonel
Sanh in early 1966 revised Field Police operating procedures to
emphasize civil disturbance control, and he directed that Field
Police units in emergencies would be available as a reserve for any
police chief.
Concurrently with this revised mission, the two
existing Combat Police battalions -- still advised by Ted Serong
under CIA auspices -- were incorporated into the Field Police.
Available as a nationwide reaction force, the Combat Police was used
by General Loan to suppress Buddhist demonstrations in the spring of
1966 in Da Nang, Hue, and Saigon. Likewise, Field Police units in
provinces adjacent to Saigon were often called into the capital to
reinforce ongoing riot control operations. In such cases platoons
would generally be sent in from Long An, Gia Dinh, and Binh Duong
provinces.
"The trained provisional Field Police companies
were finally deployed to their provinces in July 1966," Grieves
said, "after being held in Saigon for riot control during the
Buddhist struggle movement, which dominated the first half of that
year. By year's end there were forty-five Field Police companies,
four platoons each, for a total of five thousand five hundred forty
five men." By the end of 1967 the Field Police had twelve thousand
men in fifty-nine companies.
"My counterpart for the longest time," said
Grieves, "was Major Nguyen Van Dai, who started out as a ranger
captain in the Delta. Dai was the best of the bunch -- an old
soldier and a real hard rock. He was the one who really built the
Field Police."
From July 1968 until February 1971 Dai served
as assistant director of the National Police Support Division and as
commandant of the National Police Field Forces. "Over two years and
a half," said Dai, ''as commandant NPFF, my relationship with
Colonel Grieves and his staff was very friendly. We had open
discussions to find an appropriate and reasonable solution to any
difficult problems. After twenty-two years in the army, most of that
in combat units, I have only one concept: Quality is better than
quantity. All soldiers in my command must be disciplined, and the
leader must demonstrate a good example for others." [2]
"Dai," Grieves said with respect, "brought to
the National Police Field Forces the attitude of 'service to the
people.'
"My personnel," explained Grieves, "the Field
Police advisers, were hired in this country and sent over to
Vietnam. In addition, because they were coming over so slowly, we
got a couple of local hires who were military and took their
discharges in Vietnam. The Field Police advisers were all civilians.
[Of 230 Public Safety advisers in Vietnam, 150 were on loan from the
military.] We also had a bunch of peculiar deals. I needed advisers,
and I needed them bad. The Fifth Special Forces at Nha Trang
meanwhile had a requirement for men in civilian clothes in three
particular provinces where I needed advisors, too. Theirs was an
intelligence requirement, mine was a working function, but a guy
could do both jobs. When this came out, I went and laid it on the
table with my boss. I wasn't pulling anything underhanded, and I got
their permission to do this. These guys came along and were
documented as local hires by AID, but actually they were still in
the military. They took over and did a damn fine job in the
provinces.
"There were some officers, too," Grieves said,
adding that "most of them were staff members. We also had an
ex-military police major as an adviser to two Field Police companies
working with the First Cavalry near Qui Nhon, rooting out VC. He was
there two days and said he wanted a ticket home. He said, 'I'd have
stayed in the Army if I wanted this.'
"So Ed Schlacter took over in Binh Dinh,"
Grieves continued. "Based on Special Branch intelligence that
Vietcong guerrillas were in the village, around first light the
First Cavalry would go in by chopper and circle the village,
followed by a Field Police squad, platoon, or company. While the Cav
provided security, the Field Police would search people and look in
the rice pot. The Americans never knew what was going on, but the
Vietnamese in the Field Police would know how many people were
feeding by looking in the rice pot. If they saw enough rice for ten
people but only saw six people in the hooch, they knew the rest were
hiding underground."
About the Special Branch, Grieves commented,
"They had a security and intelligence gathering function. Special
Branch furnished the intelligence on which the Field Police would
react. They could pick up two or three guys themselves and actually
didn't need to call in the Field Police unless it was a big deal.
"What we did was put a company of Field Police
in each province," Grieves explained. "Originally the plan was for a
fixed company: four platoons and a headquarters. If you had a big
province, put in two companies. Then it became obvious, if you're
going to put platoons in the districts, that it would be better to
have one company headquarters and a variable number of platoons. So
the basic unit became the forty-man three-squad platoon. They had
M-sixteens and were semi- mobile.
"In theory, each company had an adviser, but
that was never the case. There were never enough. In fact, some of
the places where we didn't have a Field Police adviser, the Public
Safety adviser had to take it over. When I first went out there,
some Public Safety people had to cover three provinces and were
supposed to take the Field Police under their wing. In most cases,
however, they didn't have any interest, and it didn't work too well.
But when the thing got going, the Public Safety adviser had the
Field Police adviser under him, and by the very end the companies
were so well trained that they could run themselves."
***
Doug McCollum was one of the first Public
Safety advisers to manage Field Police units in Vietnam. Born in New
Jersey and reared in California, McCollum served three years in the
U.S. Army before joining the Walnut Creek Police Department in 1961.
Five years later one of McCollum's colleagues, who was working for
Public Safety in Vietnam, wrote and suggested that he do likewise.
On April 16, 1966, Doug McCollum arrived in Saigon; two weeks later
he was sent to Pleiku Province as the Public Safety police adviser.
"There was no one there to meet me when I
arrived," McCollum recalled, "so I went over to the province senior
adviser ... who didn't know I was coming and was surprised to see
me. He didn't want me there either because of the previous Public
Safety adviser, who was then living with his wife in Cambodia.
Rogers didn't think Public Safety was any good." [3]
Not many people did. To give the devil his due,
however, it was hard for a Public Safety adviser to distinguish
between unlawful and customary behavior on the part of his
Vietnamese counterpart. The province police chief bought his job
from the province chief, and in turn the police chief expected a
percentage of the profits his subordinates made selling licenses and
paroles and whatever to the civilian population. Many police chiefs
were also taking payoffs from black-marketeers, a fact they would
naturally try to keep from their advisers -- unless the advisors
wanted a piece of the action, too.
The problem was compounded for a Field Police
commander and his adviser. As Grieves noted, "the Vietnamese Field
Police platoon leader could not operate on his own. He received his
orders and his tasks from commanders outside the Field Police, and
the National Police commanders he worked for were in turn subjected
to the orders of province and district chiefs who had operational
control of the National Police."
Another limitation on the Field Police was the
fact that Vietnamese policemen were prohibited from arresting
American soldiers. Consequently, Doug McCollum worked closely with
the Military Police in Pleiku to reduce tensions between American
soldiers and Vietnamese and Montagnard pedestrians who often found
themselves under the wheels of U.S. Army vehicles. With the
cooperation of his counterpart, McCollum and the MPs set up stop
signs at intersections and put radar in place in an effort to slow
traffic. To reduce tensions further, McCollum and the MPs restricted
soldiers to bars in the military compound.
A dedicated professional who is now an
intelligence analyst for the Labor Department, McCollum believed he
"was doing something for our country by helping police help people."
One of his accomplishments as a Public Safety adviser was to
renovate the province jail, which before his arrival had male and
female prisoners incarcerated together. He inspected the PIC once a
week, did manpower studies which revealed "ghost" employees on the
police payroll, and managed the national identification program,
which presented a unique problem in the highlands because "it was
hard to bend the fingers of a Montagnard." McCollum also led the
Field Police in joint patrols with the MPs around Pleiku City's
perimeter.
Soon McCollum was running the Public Safety
program in three provinces -- Pleiku, Kontum, and Phu Bon. As
adviser to the police chief in each province McCollum was
responsible for collecting intelligence "from the police side" on
enemy troop movements, caches, and cadres and for sending
intelligence reports to his regional headquarters in Nha Trang.
Then, in February 1967, McCollum was reassigned to Ban Me Thuot, the
capital city of Darlac Province. There he had the police set up "a
maze of barbed wire, allowing only one way into the city. I put
people on rooftops and had the Field Police on roving patrols."
McCollum also began monitoring the Chieu Hoi program. "They'd come
in, we'd hold them, feed them, clothe them, get them a mat. Then
we'd release them, and they'd wander around the city for a while,
then disappear. It was the biggest hole in the net."
McCollum's feelings reflect the growing tension
between people involved in police programs and those involved in
Revolutionary Development. At times the two approaches to
pacification seemed to cancel each other out. But they also
overlapped. Said Grieves about this paradoxical situation: "We used
to send Field Police squads and platoons down to Vung Tau for RD
training, which was political indoctrination, and for PRU training,
which was raids and ambushes. Now the RD Cadre were patterned on the
Communists' political cadre, and they paralleled the civilian
government. But most were city boys who went out to the villages and
just talked to the girls. On the other hand, the Vietcong had been
training since they were twelve.
So the CIA was trying to do in twelve weeks
what the Communists did in six years."
Phoenix eventually arose as the ultimate
synthesis of these conflicting police and paramilitary programs. And
with the formation of the Field Police, its component parts were set
in place. The CIA was managing Census Grievance, RD Cadre,
counterterror teams, and the PICs. Military intelligence was working
with the MSS, ARVN intelligence, and the Regional and Popular
Forces. AID was managing Chieu Hoi and Public Safety, including the
Field Police. All that remained was for someone to bring them
together under the Special Branch.
Notes:
i. The two Combat Police battalions (later
called Order Police) were CIA-advised paramilitary police units used
to break up demonstrations and provide security for government
functions.
CHAPTER 7: Special Branch
Nelson Brickham is fiercely independent, hungry
for information, and highly skilled at organizing complex systems in
simple terms. "I've been called an organizational genius," he said
modestly, "but that's not true. I'm just well read." [1] He is also
engaging, candid, and willful, with interests ranging from yachting
and bird watching to religious studies. When we met in November
1986, he had just completed a master's thesis on the First Book of
John.
His motive for speaking with me, however, had
nothing to do with atonement; in his words, it was a matter of
"vanity," the chance that "maybe I'll wind up as a footnote in
history." Said Brickham: "I feel that I, as well as a number of
other people, never got recognition for some of the things we did."
Brickham also believed his analysis of the CIA's role in the Vietnam
War might help reverse what he saw as a dangerous drift to the right
in American politics. "The events we've seen in recent years," he
told me, "are a reaction to the psychic trauma of the country
following Vietnam, a reaction which, on a far more modest scale, is
similar in character -- and here's where it's dangerous -- to the
frustration and bitterness of the German nation after the First
World War."
Coming from a CIA officer who did everything in
his power to win the war, to the extent of creating Phoenix, such a
warning carries double weight. So, who is Nelson Brickham? Prior to
joining the CIA in 1949, Brickham attended Yale University, from
which he was graduated magna cum laude with a degree in
international politics. His first CIA assignment was on the
Czechoslovakian desk in the Office of Reports and Estimates. During
the Korean War Brickham worked for the agency's Special Intelligence
Branch, gathering intelligence on Soviet political and foreign
officers.
Next came a stint in the Office of Current
Intelligence, where he got involved in "depth research" on the
Soviet political process and produced with several colleagues the
landmark Caesar Project on the selection process of Soviet leaders
after Stalin's death. As a result of the Caesar Project, Brickham
was invited to London as a guest of British intelligence-MI6.
Overseas travel and liaison with foreign nationals appealed to him,
and in 1955 he transferred from the sedate Directorate of
Intelligence to the Soviet Russia (SR) Division in the freewheeling
Directorate of Plans, where the CIA's clandestine operations were
then being hatched.
In 1958 Brickham was appointed chief of the
operations research branch of the SR Division, where he planned
covert operations into Soviet territory. These operations included
the emplacement of photographic and signet equipment near Soviet
military bases and the preparation of false documents for "black"
agents. Brickham also wrote research papers on specific geographic
targets.
Then the Russians sent up Sputnik, which
"scared everyone," Brickham recalled, "and so I was put in charge of
a massive research project designed to develop collection targets
against the Soviet missile program. Well, in 1954 I had read a
report from British intelligence describing how they had developed a
target plot approach to guiding espionage and other collection
activities. In applying that target plot idea to the Soviet problem,
it immediately occurred to me to magnify it as a systems analysis
study so we could go after the whole Soviet missile program. It was
the first time," he said, "that any government agency had taken a
systems approach toward a Soviet target. We wanted to pull together
all information from whatever source, of whatever degree of
reliability, and collect that information in terms of its geographic
location. And from that effort a series of natural targets sprang
up."
A systems approach means assembling information
on a weapons system from its theoretical inception, through its
research and development stage, its serial production, its
introduction to the armed forces, finally to its deployment. "For
the first time," Brickham said, "there was a complete view of
everything known about Russian military and missile development
systems. The British called this the best thing achieved by American
research since the war."
Insofar as Phoenix sought to combine all
existing counterinsurgency programs in a coordinated attack on the
VCI, Brickham's notion of a systems approach served as the
conceptual basis for Phoenix, although in Phoenix the targets were
people, not missile silos.
With yet another feather in his cap, Brickham
was posted in 1960 to Teheran, where he managed intelligence and
counterintelligence operations against the Soviets in Iran. As one
of only three neutral countries bordering the USSR, Iran was a plum
assignment. For Brickham, however, it devolved into a personality
conflict with his desk officer in Washington. Frustrated, he
requested a transfer and in 1964 was sent to the Sino-Soviet
Relations Branch, where he managed black propaganda operations
designed to cause friction between the USSR and China. At the heart
of these black operations were false flag recruitments, in which CIA
case officers posed as Soviet intelligence officers and, using
legitimate Soviet cipher systems and methodology, recruited Chinese
diplomats, who believed they were working for the Russians, although
they were actually working for the CIA. The CIA case officers, on
Brickham's instructions, then used the unsuspecting Chinese agents
to create all manner of mischief. Although it was a job with "lots
of room for imagination," Brickham was unhappy with it, and when the
agency had its "call-up" for Vietnam in the summer of 1965, Brickham
volunteered to go.
His preparation included briefings from experts
on the Vietnamese desk, reading books and newspaper articles, and
reviewing reports and cable traffic produced by
every government agency. Upon arriving in
Saigon in September 1965, he was assigned to the station's liaison
branch as deputy chief of police Special Branch field operations.
His boss was Tucker Gougleman.
The chief of station was Gordon Jorgenson, "a
kindly, thoughtful person. He'd been through the bombing of the
embassy the previous February. Peer DeSilva, who was hurt in the
explosion, went home, and Jorgy, who had been his deputy, became
station chief. But within a matter of months he went home, too, and
John Hart came out as the new chief of station in January 1966." The
subject of John Hart gave Brickham pause. "I have described the
intelligence service as a socially acceptable way of expressing
criminal tendencies," he said. "A guy who has strong criminal
tendencies -- but is too much of a coward to be one -- would wind up
in a place like the CIA if he had the education. I'd put John Hart
in this category -- a mercenary who found a socially acceptable way
of doing these things and, I might add, getting very well paid for
it.
"John Hart was an egomaniac," Brickham
continued, "but a little bit more under control than some of the bad
ones. He was a smart one. A big, imposing guy over six feet tall
with a very regal bearing and almost a British accent. He claims to
be Norman, and he spoke fluent French and was always trying on every
occasion to press people to speak French. Red Stent used to say that
you could tell somebody who parades his knowledge of French by the
way he uses the subjunctive, and John Hart used it properly. But
John Hart had both feet on the ground. He was a bright guy, very
energetic, and very heavy into tennis -- he played it every day.
"When John Hart came out as chief of station, I
was one of his escort officers; our job was to take him on a tour of
the whole country, to visit the facilities and explain what was
going on. And my job was in question at that moment because Hart had
another guy -- his pet, John Sherwood -- slated to replace Tucker as
chief of field operations
.... Anyway," Brickham said, "there's a great
division in the Foreign Service world between people who get out on
the local economy and try to eat native and find out what's going on
versus the people that hole up in the American colony, the so-called
golden ghetto people. So we're sitting around, talking about
Vietnamese food and about the guys who go down to the MAAG compound
for dinner every
night, and Hart makes this sort of sneerlike
remark to me at the restaurant where we're having dinner; he says,
'Well, really, I would have figured you for the kind of person who
would eat dinner in the MAAG compound every night.' Well, he later
found out that wasn't true, and he was persuaded to appoint me to
the position of chief of field operations. And even though I started
out with that base of insecurity, Hart respected me. And later on
that became quite evident."
Perhaps as a result of his eating habits,
Brickham got assigned as chief of Special Branch field operations in
the spring of 1966, after Tucker Gougleman's tour had ended and he
was transferred to New Delhi. And once installed in the job, he
began to initiate the organizational reforms that paved the way for
Phoenix. To trace that process, it is helpful to understand the
context.
"We were within the liaison branch," Brickham
explained, "because we worked with the Vietnamese nationals, dealing
with the CIO and Special Branch on questions of intelligence and
counterespionage. The chief of the liaison branch was Jack Stent."
Brickham's office was in the embassy annex, while Special Branch
headquarters was located in the National Police Interrogation
Center. As chief of field operations Brickham had no liaison
responsibilities at the national level. "I had field operations,"
Brickham explained, "which meant the province officers. I managed
all these liaison operations in the provinces, but not in the
Saigon-Gia Dinh military district. That was handled by a separate
section under Red Stent within the liaison branch."
As for his duties, Brickham said, "In our
particular case, field operations was working both positive
intelligence programs and counterespionage, because police do not
distinguish between the two. Within the CIA the two are separate
divisions, but when you're working with the police, you have to
cover all this." Brickham compares the Special Branch "with an
intelligence division in a major city police force, bearing in mind
that it is within a national police organization with national,
regional, province, and district police officers. There is a
vertical chain of command. But it is not comparable with FBI, not
comparable with MI Five, not comparable with Surete. It's the
British Special Branch of police
And with the Special Branch
being concerned specifically with intelligence,
it was the natural civilian agency toward which we would gravitate
when the CIA got interested. Under Colby, the Special Branch became
significant."
If under Colby (who was then chief of the CIA's
Far East Division) the Special Branch became significant, then under
Brickham it became effective. Brickham's job, as he defined it, "was
to bring sharpness and focus to CIA field operations." He divided
those operations into three categories: the Hamlet Informant program
(HIP), which concerned low-level informants in the villages and
hamlets; the Province Interrogation Center program, including Chieu
Hoi and captured documents; and agent penetrations. "I did not
organize these programs," he acknowledged. "They were already in
place. What I did do was to clean up the act ... bureaucratize
We had
some province officers trying to build PICs,
while some didn't care. We even had police liaison people putting
whistles on kites at night to scare away the VC when that wasn't
part of their job. We were not supposed to be propagandists; that's
covert operations' job."
As Brickham saw it, a Special Branch adviser
should limit himself to his primary duties: training Vietnamese
Special Branch case officers how to mount penetrations of the VCI,
giving them cash for informers and for building interrogation
centers, and reporting on the results. Brickham did this by imposing
his management style on the organization. As developed over the
years, that style was based on three principles: "Operate lean and
hungry, don't get bogged down in numbers, and figure some way to
hold their feet to the fire.
"When I got there, we had about fourteen
province officers who were not distributed evenly around the country
but were concentrated in population centers, the major ports, and
provinces of particular interest. A lot of provinces were empty, so
we had to fill them up, and we eventually got our strength up to
fifty."
Training of incoming officers was done in
Washington, although Brickham and his staff (including John Muldoon
and an officer who handled logistics) gave them briefings on
personal security, aircraft security, emergency behavior, and
procedure -- "what to do if your plane is shot down in VC territory
or if the VC overrun a village you're working in
Some guys took it seriously; some did not," Brickham noted.
"We also gave them reading material -- a Time
magazine article on the Chinese mind and several books, the most
important of which was Village in Vietnam. But we had to cut back on
this because the stuff was constantly disappearing. Then, as the
police advisory program expanded, Washington set up another training
program for ex- police officers being brought in on contract and for
military officers and enlisted men assigned to the agency
We had a bunch of guys on contract as province officers
who were not CIA officers, but who were hired
by the agency and given to us."
Not the sort of man to suffer fools, Brickham
quickly began weeding out the chaff from the wheat, recommending
home leave for province officers who had operational fund shortages
or were not at their posts or otherwise could not cut the mustard.
Brickham's method of evaluating officers was a
monthly report. "I wanted a province officer to tell me once a month
every place he'd been and how long he'd been there. Normally this
kind of thing wouldn't show up in a report, but it was important to
me and it was important to the Vietnamese that our people 'show the
flag' and be there when the action was going on. Reporting makes for
accountability.
"A Special Branch monthly report, as I designed
it, would go up to four pages in length and would take province
officers two or three days to complete
The reports
were then sent in from the province through the
region officer [a position Brickham placed in the chain of command],
who wrote his report on top of it. We studied them in Saigon,
packaged them up, and sent them on to Washington, where they had
never seen anything like it."
To streamline the rapidly expanding Special
Branch advisory program further, Brickham set up six regional
offices and appointed region officers; Gordon Rothwell in Da Nang,
for I Corps; Dick Akins in Nha Trang, handling the coastal provinces
in II Corps; Tom Burke in Ban Me Thuot, handling Montagnard
provinces; Sam Drakulich in Bien Hoa in III Corps; Bob Collier in My
Tho for the northern Delta; and Kinloch Bull in Can Tho for the
southern provinces. Brickham's liaison branch was the first to have
region officers; the rest of the station was not operating that way.
In fact, while the liaison branch had one officer in each province,
reporting to a region officer, the discombobulated covert action
branch had five or six programs in each province, with an officer
for each program, with more than two hundred officers coming in and
out of headquarters, each operating under the direct supervision of
Tom Donohue.
Donohue scoffed at Brickham's attention to
reporting. "My point, of course, was quite the opposite of
Brickham's," he said. "I felt it was better to keep those guys
working and not tie them up with paper work (that can be handled
elsewhere). What I did was take raw reporting and give it to an
officer who was not really any good in the field, and he was
responsible for doing nothing but producing finished reporting from
raw reporting. That takes the problem off the guys in the field.
It's the same problem that so many sales organizations have: Do they
want their people on the street or doing reports?" [2]
Donohue's budget ("about twenty-eight million
dollars a year") was considerably larger than his archrival
Brickham's, which was approximately one million dollars a year.
Otherwise, according to Brickham, "The main difference between
Foreign Intelligence and Paramilitary was the fact that we had
region officers, but the PM people worked directly out of Saigon
And it was this situation that Hart wanted to
straighten out.
"Hart's first move was to adopt this regional
officer concept from the liaison branch," Brickham explained.
"Second was to establish province officers so all CIA operations in
a particular province came under one coordinated command. The fact
that it operated on the other basis for as long as it did is almost
unbelievable, but there was just too much money and not enough
planning.
"The covert action people are a breed apart" --
Brickham sighed -- "especially the paramilitary types. They've had a
sort of checkered history within the agency, and in Vietnam most of
them were refugees from the Cuban failure.
More than one of them said they were damned if
they were going to be on the losing end of the Vietnam operation,
too." Backing away from the knuckle draggers, Brickham noted: "We
had very little to do with one another. They were located across the
hall from us in the embassy annex, and we knew each other, and we
were friends, and we drank beer together. But
we had our separate programs, theirs being the covert programs the
station was conducting in the provinces. The PM shop was basically
an intelligence arm under cover, getting its own intelligence
through armed propaganda teams, Census Grievance, and the whole
Montagnard program run out of Pleiku
Then they had the so-called counterterror teams, which
initially
were exactly as leftist propaganda described
them. They were teams that went into VC areas to do to them what
they were doing to us. It gets sort of interesting. When the VC
would come into villages, they'd leave a couple of heads sticking on
fence posts as they left. That kind of thing. Up there in I Corps
there was more than one occasion where U.S. advisers would be found
dead with nails through their foreheads."
As for the Census Grievance program, managed by
John Woodsman, Brickham said, "We wanted access to its intelligence
because they could get intelligence we didn't have access to. But
because we were more compartmented within ourselves than we should
have been, the police could not necessarily absorb this stuff
The basic
contract with the Vietnamese peasant," Brickham
explained, "was that anything that was learned through Census
Grievance would not be turned over to the police authorities. This
was to get the confidence of the rural population. So we had almost
nothing to do with it. It was for the province chief's advice and
guidance. They took Census Grievance stuff and turned around and
used it in the counterterror teams, although on occasion they might
turn something over to the military." Brickham cited Chieu Hoi as
"one of the few areas where police and paramilitary advisers
cooperated."
Regarding his own programs, Brickham said, "All
counterinsurgency depends in the first instance on informants;
without them you're dead, and with them you can do all sorts of
things. This is something that can only be a local operation. It's a
family affair. A few piasters change hands."
In "The Future Applicability of the Phoenix
Program," written for the Air University in 1974, CIA Province
Officer Warren Milberg calls the Hamlet Informant program the focus
of the Special Branch's "bread-and-butter" activities, designed
specifically "to gain information from and on the people who lived
in rural hamlets
The
problem," he writes, "was in recruiting
informants in as many hamlets as possible." This task was made
difficult by the fact that informing is dangerous work, so "it
became necessary to do detailed studies of various motivational
factors." Consequently, at the top of Special Branch recruitment
lists were "people who had been victims of Viet Cong atrocities and
acts of terrorism." [3]
Recruiting victims of VC terror as informers
was a condition that dove-tailed neatly with counterterror and the
doctrine of Contre Coup. For, as David Galula explains,
"pseudo insurgents are another way to get
intelligence and to sow suspicion at the same time between the real
guerrillas and the population." [4]
By 1965 defectors who joined counterterror
teams had the words Sat Gong (Kill Communist) tattooed on their
chests as part of the initiation ceremony to keep them from
returning to former VC and NVA units. Their unit insignia was a
machete with wings, while their unofficial emblem was the Jolly
Roger skull and crossbones. When working, CTs dispensed with the
regalia, donned black pajamas, and plundered nationalist as well as
Communist villages. This was not a fact reported only by the leftist
press. In October 1965, upon returning from a fact-finding mission
to Vietnam, Ohio Senator Stephen Young charged that the CIA hired
mercenaries to disguise themselves as Vietcong and discredit
Communists by committing atrocities. "It was alleged to me that
several of them executed two village leaders and raped some women,"
the Herald Tribune reported Young as saying. [5]
Indeed, CT teams disguised as the enemy,
killing and otherwise abusing nationalist Vietnamese, were the
ultimate form of psywar. It reinforced negative stereotypes of the
Vietcong, while at the same time supplying Special Branch with
recruits for its informant program.
In his autobiography, Soldier, Anthony Herbert
tells how he reported for duty with SOG in Saigon in November 1965
and was asked to join a top-secret psywar program. "What they wanted
me to do was to take charge of execution teams that wiped out entire
families and tried to make it look as though the VC themselves had
done the killing. The rationale was that other Vietnamese would see
that the VC had killed another VC and would be frightened away from
becoming VC themselves. Of course, the villagers would then be
inclined to some sort of allegiance to our side. [6]
"I was told," writes Herbert, "that there were
Vietnamese people in the villages who were being paid to point the
finger." Intrigued, he asked how they knew for certain that the
informer might not have ulterior motives for leading the death
squads to a particular family. "I suggested that some of their
informers might be motivated, for instance, by revenge or personal
monetary gain, and that some of their stool-pigeons could be double
or triple agents." [7]
Milberg concedes the point, noting that the
Special Branch recruited informants who "clearly fabricated
information which they thought their Special Branch case officers
wanted to hear" and that when "this information was compiled and
produced in the form of blacklists, a distinct possibility existed
that the names on such lists had
little relation to actual persons or that the
people so named were not, in fact, members of the VCI." [8]
Such concerns, unfortunately, were overlooked
in the rush to obtain information on the VCI. "The Special Branch
kept records of people who had been victims of Viet Cong atrocities
and acts of terrorism, of people who had been unreasonably taxed by
the Viet Cong, of families which had had sons and husbands impressed
into Viet Cong guerrilla bands, and those people who, for differing
reasons, disliked or distrusted the Viet Cong. Depending on the
incentive, be it patriotism or monetary gain, many hamlet residents
were desirous of providing information on the activities of the
local VCI. The Special Branch then constructed sometimes elaborate,
sometimes simple plans to either bring these potential informants
into province or district towns or to send undercover agents to the
hamlets to interview them on a regular basis." [9]
In recommending "safe, anonymous" ways for
informers to convey information, counterinsurgency guru David Galula
cites as examples "the census, the issuing of passes, and the
remuneration of workers." Writes Galula: "Many systems can be
devised for this purpose, but the simplest one is to multiply
opportunities for individual contacts between the population and the
counterinsurgent personnel, every one of whom must participate in
intelligence collection." [10] The idea, of course, is that
"intelligence collection" is the primary task of the
counterinsurgent and that all his contacts with the population are
geared toward this purpose, whatever ulterior motive they may appear
to have.
Apart from the Hamlet Informant program,
Special Branch advisers also managed the PIC program -- what
Brickham called "a foundation stone upon which it was later possible
to construct the Phoenix program. The PICs were places where
defectors and prisoners could be taken for questioning under
controlled circumstances," he explained. "Responsibility was handled
by a small group assembled by Tucker Gougleman. This group worked
with province officers setting up training programs for translators,
clerks doing filing and collation, and interrogators. John Muldoon
was the chief of this little group. He was CIA staff, and he had a
good program there. Everything led me to believe that he was
top-notch."
The third major program run by the Special
Branch was agent penetrations, what Brickham termed "recruitment in
place of Vietcong," adding, "This is by far the most important
program in terms of gathering intelligence on the enemy. My motto
was to recruit them; if you can't recruit them, defect them (that's
Chieu Hoi); if you can't defect them, capture them; if you can't
capture them, kill them. That was my attitude toward high-level
VCI."
The penetration process worked as follows,
according to OSS veteran Jim Ward, the CIA officer in charge of IV
Corps between 1967 and 1969. An athletic, good-looking man, Ward
noted, when we met together at his home, that the Special Branch
kept dossiers on all suspected VCI in a particular area of
operations, and that evidence was gathered from PIC interrogations,
captured documents, and "walk-ins" -- people who would walk into a
police station and inform on an alleged VCI. When the accumulated
evidence indicated that a suspect was a high-ranking VCI agent, that
person was targeted for recruitment in place. "You didn't send out
the PRU right away," Ward told me. "First you had to figure out if
you could get access to him and if you could communicate with him
once you had a relationship. Everybody in the Far East operates
primarily by family, so the only opportunity of getting something
like that would be through relatives who were accessible people.
Does he have a sister or wife in town that we can have access to? A
brother? Somebody who can reach him?
Somebody he can trust? If that could be
arranged, then you looked for a weakness to exploit. Is there any
reason to believe he's been in this position for five years and
hasn't been promoted when everybody else around him has been moving
up the ladder? Does he bear resentment? Anything you can find by way
of vulnerability that would indicate this guy might be amenable to
persuasion to work for us." [11] Bribes, sex, blackmail, and drugs
all were legitimate means of recruitment.
Speaking of the quality of Special Branch
penetration agents, Brickham remarked, "We had some that were fairly
good. By which I mean their information checked out." That
information, he added, concerned "the movements and activities of
district and province and COSVN cadre. COSVN people might come
around on an inspection tour or an indoctrination mission. Sometimes
they had major political conferences where you might have a number
of province and COSVN cadre together in one place. Now this is the
kind of thing we'd go right after however we could. It was usually
militarily; artillery if you could reach it."
Because of the unparalleled "intelligence
potential" of penetrations, one of the main jobs of liaison advisers
was training Special Branch case officers to handle penetration
agents. At the same time, according to Brickham, "if the opportunity
came their way, our own people would have a unilateral penetration
into the VCI without their Special Branch counterparts knowing.
These things for the most part were low-grade, but occasionally we
had some people on the payroll as penetration agents who worked at
district level, and as I recall, we had three or four at province
level, which is fairly high up."
In 1967, Brickham told me, the CIA had "several
hundred penetration agents in South Vietnam, most of them
low-level." They were not cultivated over a period of years either.
"In a counterinsurgency," he explained, "it's either quickly or not
at all.
However, the unilateral operations branch in
the station went after some very high-
level, very sophisticated target penetration
operations." Since this unit played a major role in Phoenix, it
requires a brief accounting.
The CIA's special operations unit for
unilateral penetrations was largely the work of Sam Drakulich, the
senior Special Branch adviser in III Corps in 1965. "I've always had
a notion ever since I was a kid," Brickham said, "that it's the
crazy people that have the bright ideas. So I've always been willing
to play along with people like that, even though they're ignored by
the other kids in school. Same thing with Drakulich. He had a lot of
good ideas, but he was a little flaky -- and he got more so. He
refused to live in Bien Hoa, and he was the region officer in
charge. Now I wanted all the region officers to live in their
capitals. Anyway, Drakulich had a place to live out there, and it
hadn't been bombed in thirty years; but he was terrified, so he came
to Saigon every night. The point came [March 1966] where he was not
supervising the province operations, and therefore, I persuaded
Tucker to relieve him of duty.
"Howard 'Rocky' Stone [Jack Stent's replacement
as chief of Foreign Intelligence (FI)] had just come into country
and was putting on pressure for VCI penetrations. So what Tucker and
I did -- to respond to Stone, on the one hand, and to solve the
Drakulich problem, on the other -- was to create a high-level VCI
penetration unit and switch Drakulich to run it."
Drakulich claimed to me, in a 1986 interview,
that he had written a proposal for the high-level penetration unit
before he was given the job by Brickham. Big and powerfully built,
Drakulich said he designed the unit specifically to identify a group
of high-level VCI that had killed, in broad daylight, a CIA officer
on the main street of Bien Hoa. Hence his angst about sleeping
overnight in Bien Boa. In any event, Drakulich devised a special
unit for penetrating the high-level VCI who were targeting CIA
officers for assassination, and it was his contention that this
special unit, which supplied blacklists to a special CT unit in
Saigon, was the prototype for Phoenix. [12]
The special unit organized by Drakulich
consisted of several high-ranking CIA officers who traveled through
the country reviewing all penetration cases. This team would visit
each province officer, interview everyone on his staff, evaluate all
the cases, in some instances meeting with the agent, then determine
which of the cases were promising enough to set up special
arrangements. The special unit would bring back to Saigon the cases
that were promising, and in Saigon, Brickham said, "We would apply
special care to their development. We would nurture them, generate
requirements, and make sure they had communications and full
exploitation.
"Regardless of the potential importance of this
job," Brickham added, "Sam could never adjust to the fact that he
had been relieved of his regional officer job, and so he
left Vietnam in the summer of 1966. And that
was the end of that. Then Rocky Stone set up his special unit [under
Burke Dunn] I to take over what Sam Drakulich was supposed to be
doing, and suddenly these cases, if they were thought to be good,
would disappear from our purview all together.
"Stone pressed very hard for unilateral
operations. He was interested in high-level penetrations of the VCI;
I was interested in fighting a counter-insurgency war. As a result,
he set up this separate shop, which took away my best operations --
which is always a source of resentment. Stone and I later became
best of friends, but not in this period." Brickham took a deep
breath, then said solemnly, "This competition for intelligence
sources is one of the underlying, chronic conflicts that you can't
avoid.
There's a tension because there are two
different purposes, but you're utilizing basically the same
resources.
"Anyway, the penetrations Stone wanted to take
away were our unilaterals. Out in the provinces we would provide
advice and guidance to the Special Branch for their penetrations
into the VCI. But on our side, maybe through Chieu Hoi or some other
resource, we would develop independent unilateral penetrations
unknown to the police. We had a number of these around the country,
and it's that kind of thing that Stone's special unit was interested
in reviewing. And if it was very good, they'd take it away from us."
Not only did Rocky Stone abscond with the
special unit, but he also took steps to have Special Branch field
operations expelled from the station. This issue is central to
Phoenix. "There was always a big fight in the agency as to how
covert it should be," Brickham explained. "In particular, there was
a lot of opposition in the station to the extent of exposure we had
in Special Branch field operations. So Stone came in and tried to
reduce that operation in favor of unilateral espionage into the VCI.
Which I resisted."
A believer in David Galula's theories on
political warfare, Brickham stated, "My feelings were simple. We're
in a war, an intelligence war, meaning fought on the basis of
intelligence. It will either succeed or fail on intelligence.
Special Branch field operations are a crucial element of this whole
thing with Special Branch operations -- informants, defectors, PICs
-- critical against the enemy infrastructure. American boys are over
here who are being killed. We don't have time to worry about
bureaucratic niceties. We don't have time to worry about
reputations. We got to win the goddamned thing!
"So I was all gung ho for continuation and
improvement of field operations. But Stone said, 'Get rid of field
operations. I don't want it as part of my responsibility.' So I was
turned over to the new Revolutionary
Development Cadre unit that was run by Lou Lapham, who was brought
out from Washington especially for that purpose."
CHAPTER 8: Attack on the VCI
In the summer of 1966 steps were finally taken
in Washington and Saigon to resolve the debate over who should
manage the pacification of South Vietnam. At the heart of the
problem was the fact that despite the U.S. Army's success against
NVA main force units in the Central Highlands, the Vietnamese people
were not supporting the GVN to the extent that President Lyndon
Johnson could withdraw American forces and leave the Vietnamese to
manage the war on their own.
On one side of the debate was the Pentagon,
recommending a single chain of command under MACV commander
Westmoreland. The reasons were simple enough: The military was
providing 90 percent of pacification resources, a single chain of
command was more efficient, and there was danger in having
unsupervised civilians in a battle zone. On the other hand, the
civilian agencies were afraid that if the military managed
pacification, any political settlement calling for the withdrawal of
troops would also require civilians under military management (in,
for example, refugee programs) to depart from Vietnam along with
U.S. soldiers.
In 1965 Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge had handed
the problem to Ed Lansdale, whom he appointed senior liaison to the
Ministry of Revolutionary Development. But Lansdale (a "fifth
wheel," according to Brickham) was unwanted and ignored and failed
to overcome the bureaucratic rivalries in Saigon. By 1966 the
problem was back in Washington, where it was determined that
pacification was failing as the result of a combination of poor
management and the VCI's ability to disrupt Revolutionary
Development. As a way of resolving these interrelated problems,
President Johnson summoned his war managers to a conference at
Warrenton, Virginia, in January 1966, the result of which was an
agreement that a single pacification manager was needed. Once again,
this point of view was advanced by the military through its special
assistant for counterinsurgency and special activities, General
William Peers, who suggested that the MACV commander be put in
charge of pacification, with a civilian deputy.
Although the civilians continued to object,
Johnson wanted quick results, the kind only the military could
provide, and shortly thereafter he named National Security Council
member Robert Komer his special assistant for pacification. Komer
was an
advocate of military control, whose master plan
was to unite all agencies involved in pacification under his
personal management and direct them against the VCI.
Meanwhile, the Saigon Embassy commissioned a
study on the problem of interagency coordination. Begun in July 1966
under mission coordinator George "Jake" Jacobson, the Roles and
Missions Study made eighty-one recommendations, sixty-six of which
were accepted by everyone. Consensus had been achieved, and a major
reorganization commenced. Notably, the policy for anti-VCI
operations as stated by the Roles and Missions Study was "that the
Police Special Branch assume primary responsibility for the
destruction of the Viet Cong Infrastructure." [1]
"We did claim in Roles and Missions," according
to Brickham, the CIA representative on that committee, "that the
police should have a major civilian role and be the spearhead of the
effort because it was the police over the long haul, and in terms of
ultimate victory, that would have to settle the problem ... and that
therefore we should not let the military run everything till the end
of the war, then let everything fall into chaos when the military
was brought out." [2]
But in pursuit of total victory, the size and
pace of military operations were steadily escalating in 1966, more
and more to the exclusion of the concerns of the civilian agencies
involved in pacification. For example, the military was more
concerned with gathering intelligence on the size and location of
enemy combat units than on its political infrastructure. Military
agent nets and interrogators zeroed in on this type of information,
reflecting what Brickham termed the military mentality, the object
of which is "to set up a battle." The police mentality, according to
Brickham, is "to arrest, convict, and send to jail," while the
intelligence mentality "is to capture, interrogate, and turn in
place."
Expanding on this theme, Brickham said, "If the
military were going into a province, the sector adviser and the
sector S-two [sector intelligence adviser] would be brought in, do
their thing, and come out without ever being aware of the enormous
intelligence capability residing in the Special Police. When -- in
provinces manned by bright military officers -- they did bring in
the Special Police, it was done on an ad hoc basis. Conversely,
anytime the military took over a civilian operation or activity,
nine times out of ten it would be a perversion of the civilian
capability into a military support arm. And when that happened, we
would almost invariably find that the so-called civilian
intelligence operation was quickly perverted to provide tactical
combat intelligence for U.S. or ARVN forces. This was a tendency
which had to be constantly opposed. "
However, Brickham qualified his opposition to
the emphasis on tactical military concerns by noting: "The CIA could
not claim exclusive jurisdiction for an attack on
the VCI. We would not have wanted to. Special
Branch wasn't strong enough. It suffered from incompetent leadership
and from poor training, even though Special Branch personnel and
leadership were a cut above the regular staffing of the National
Police."
What was needed was cooperation. But while turf
battles between the CIA and the military were obstructing the war
effort, the problem was exacerbated when the Vietnamese were
factored into the equation. "Talk about bureaucratic infighting."
Brickham laughed. "Well, it was far worse on the Vietnamese side.
There was unquestionably contempt held by the ARVN for the National
Police. The Vietnamese military had no use for them. And to the
extent that the U.S. military may have reflected the ARVN point of
view, if there was a joint ARVN-American operation, well, the
Special Police would have been systematically cut out of the thing."
Into this bureaucratic minefield in August 1966
stepped Robert Komer, packing a mandate from President Johnson and
intent upon effecting the military takeover of pacification.
Predictably the civilian agencies recoiled in horror. The State
Department cited the political nature of pacification, and neither
the Agency for International Development nor the CIA thought the
military capable of doing the job. So, under pressure from
Ambassador Lodge (who bestowed upon Komer the nickname Blowtorch),
President Johnson gave the civilians one last shot. The result was
the Office of Civil Operations (OCO).
Formed in October 1966, OCO combined the field
operations units of AID, USIS, and CIA and on this basis was
organized into branches for psychological operations, political
action, defectors, public safety, refugees, and economic
development. Under the director, Wade Lathram, and his military
deputy, General Paul Smith, OCO region directors were assigned to
each corps; John Vann from AID in II Corps; State Department officer
Art Koren in I Corps; CIA officer Vince Heyman in IV Corps; and
Robert Mattson in II Corps. Ed Lansdale was slated for Mattson's job
but turned it down.
Given four months to show results, the Office
of Civil Operations was doomed from the start, but it did prove
valuable by forcing the civilian agencies to work together. Faced
with the prospect of military control, agency chains of command --
extending from Washington to Saigon to the provinces -- were
wrenched apart and realigned. And even though nothing was achieved
in terms of improving pacification, the formation of the Office of
Civil Operations spared MACV commander Westmoreland from having to
reorganize the civilian agencies himself. In March 1967 President
Johnson was to incorporate OCO within MACV under the Revolutionary
Development Support Directorate, managed by General William
Knowlton.
Announced in May 1967, the Military Assistance
Command for Civil Operations and
Revolutionary Development (CORDS) was to be the
bureaucratic vessel from which Phoenix would be born.
"During the big reorganization at the end of
1966," Brickham recalled, "they were trying to clean up the RD
programs and streamline the war effort. So all the field operations,
both covert and police Special Branch, were more or less divorced
from the station and put under OCO, which was later called CORDS, in
the Revolutionary Development Cadre Division. Lou Lapham came out
from Washington to become the new deputy chief of station and chief
of the RDC. I moved over from Rocky Stone's jurisdiction to Lapham's
jurisdiction and answered to him. Lou was a very quiet, laid- back
ex-professor with thick-rimmed glasses. He did not have a
paramilitary background; his bag was propaganda and psychological
warfare.
"RDC took over the CIA's covert action programs
under its operations branch, RDC/O," Brickham explained, "while a
second branch, RDC/P [Plans], took over police field operations.
That was my shop. I no longer had the title of chief of field
operations. But it was the same job with basically the same duties,
except we were theoretically working toward a coordinated system. I
became chief of RDC/P, and we and RDC/O moved from the embassy annex
to another building called USAID Two. Donohue went home, and a new
guy, Renz Hoeksema, came out from Washington and took over that
shop. Renz and I had done two tours together in Teheran. He was a
hard-driven officer, very smart ... one of those Midwest Dutchmen of
whom we have several in the agency." Brickham described Hoeksema as
"ruthless" and "an expert on self-promotion."
"During the reorganization," Brickham
continued, "the station adopted the Special Branch field operations
organizational structure as a model for coordinating liaison and
covert operations, only instead of using six regions, they used the
four corp zones. My Tho and Ban Me Thuot were no longer regional
offices." After that all CIA activities in a region were brought
under one officer called the region officer in charge (ROIC).
Likewise, province officers in charge followed automatically. "The
POIC was in charge of all CIA operations, covert and liaison, in a
province," Brickham explained. "He could have been drawn from
liaison or covert operations, depending on who the ROIC thought was
the best guy in the province. Incidentally, we did not actually
assign POICs right away, because the rivalry and lack of trust
between FI and PM people wouldn't allow it. When I talk about
coordination problems in Vietnam, the fact is that we could not even
coordinate the station programs in province.
"After the ROICs were named, we set up bases.
The engineers went out and built vaults in each of these places and
set up the complete multi-channel automatic teleprinter
encryptographic system radio communications. From this point on the
line command went from the chief of station to the deputy chief of
station for RDC, to the
ROICs, then to the POICs. Renz Hoeksema and I
were no longer supervisors in the chain of command to the field
operations; we were now running branches as staff assistants to the
chief of RDC, outside the station. It made little difference, except
the ROICs would occasionally thumb their noses at us. But I didn't
object. You couldn't run it any other way.
"So the major result of the fall 1966 decision
was to separate the station and the counterinsurgency effort. That
was a result of Stone's attitude toward this. And he was right. It's
mixing oil and water."
One other significant event occurred at this
juncture. "The Provincial Reconnaissance Units were offered to me in
the fall of 1966," Brickham recalled. "It was one of the options
discussed at the time of the reorganization. This offer was made to
me in terms of John Hart's dissatisfaction with the reputation the
CTs had acquired. He wanted to turn the CTs into an intelligence arm
for capturing prisoners and documents, and not a paramilitary
service. But I didn't want them," Brickham said, "mainly because I
didn't think we could manage them properly. My Foreign Intelligence
guys were in no way, in terms of experience, able to control or
direct PRU teams." Consequently, as of November 1966 the recycled
counterterrorists were called Provincial Reconnaissance Units and
were thereafter managed by CIA officer William Redel in Renz
Hoeksema's operations shop in CORDS's Revolutionary Development
Cadre Division.
***
It is commonly agreed that the U.S. military
went to Vietnam to fight a conventional war. However, by late 1966
it was clear that gains on the battlefield were transitory and that
the war would not be won by seizing pieces of territory. Grudgingly
the military was forced to admit that VCI political power could
offset U.S. firepower. "Bear in mind," Brickham told me, "that the
military was only over there from mid- 1965, so it took a period of
time for this realization to sink in. The exploitation of province
National Police resources by the U.S. military was sporadic at best
up until the fall of 1966, when we made a systematic procedure out
of it."
Indeed, the process of systematizing the attack
against the VCI began in the fall of 1966, when Rocky Stone arranged
for Nelson Brickham to brief General Westmoreland on the subject.
The impetus for the briefing came from the Roles and Missions Study
and the conclusion reached at the 1966 Combined Campaign Plan that
"increased emphasis will be given to identifying and eliminating the
VC Infrastructure and to small unit operations designed specifically
to destroy guerrilla forces." [3]
"These things were all evolving and coming
together because of the Office of Civil Operations," Brickham noted.
"People wanted to know what you meant when you said 'attack against
the VCI.'" So, while preparing for his hour-long briefing of
Westmoreland, Brickham wrote a paper aptly titled "Attack Against
the Viet Cong Infrastructure." His purpose was to summarize
everything that was known about intelligence sources and reaction
forces involved in the antisubversive facet of the war. "I don't
think Westy had ever heard of the Special Branch before our
briefing," Brickham quipped, "or the fact that we had provincial
interrogation centers or political order of battle files on VC in
the villages and districts."
In any event, "Attack" was circulated among the
MACV and CIA staffs and was accepted as the definitive statement on
the VCI. Written on November 22, 1966, "Attack" is significant for
three reasons. First was its definition of the VCI ''as the VC
organizational hierarchy, the management structure, as opposed to
guerrillas, troops, and even in many cases VC terrorists. Many if
not most of these categories -- guerrillas, troops and even
terrorists -- are young people who have been either impressed or
seduced into the VC and cannot in any way be considered 'hard core'
Communists." [4]
Specifically cited in "Attack" as VCI were "all
Party members and front organization officers, as opposed to the
rank and file of these front organizations. Thus all members of a
village chapter, all District Committee and all Province Committee
cadre are included, as of course are the higher echelons, Region and
COSVN. We would also include members of the so-called sapper units
-- these people are hardened Communist troops, organized in military
formations to carry out sabotage and terrorism of the larger and
more dramatic nature -- hotel bombings in Saigon, Long Binh
Ammunition dump, General Walt's residence. These latter are not
casual acts of terrorism, but carefully planned and fully organized
military operations -- Commando type operations." [5]
About the word "infrastructure," Brickham said
during our interview, "it may be peculiarly applicable to
insurgency, due to the animistic conceptual view held by rural
people in want of literacy and hygiene, let alone technology."
Brickham held the revisionist view that in an insurgency among such
people, only 5 percent of the population is politically active, with
2-1/2% percent for the insurgents, and 2- 1/2% percent against them.
The rural population is not the driving force. Their attitude, he
said, is "a pox upon both your houses."
"Without an infrastructure," Brickham said,
"there is only a headless body. Destroy the infrastructure, you
destroy the insurgency. However, this is not such an easy thing to
do, despite any disaffection on the part of the majority of the
people. Nor is it exclusively a matter of winning hearts and minds.
That only makes it easier to destroy
the infrastructure." Brickham viewed the VCI as
a criminal conspiracy, a Mafia operating under the pretense of
political ideology, coercing people through the selective use of
terror. The insurgency, in his opinion, attracted people oriented
toward violence and, through political fronts, "naive" individuals.
The presence of such marginal characters, he contends, made the
attack on the VCI a difficult task.
Secondly, "Attack" is significant in that it
defines "the attack against the VCI" in terms of Special Branch
field operations -- informants, interrogations, and penetrations --
of which interrogations are "by far the most important source."
Informant operations produced information mostly on hamlet and
village cadres and guerrillas, while penetrations could produce
"substantial bodies of infrastructure information -- identification
of cadre, movements and activities -- and at times advance
information of meetings and conferences." As of September 30, 1966,
as stated in "Attack," there were 137 penetrations of district
committees, 93 belonging to Special Branch, 44 to the CIO. Special
Branch was then developing 92 more penetrations, and the CIO 61.
The "action tools" in the attack on the VCI
were primarily "ambushes by the police, PRU or Regional Forces and
Special Forces elements" and "military search and destroy, hamlet
search, or 'Country Fair' type operations. For these operations,"
Brickham explains in "Attack," "the police prepare search lists from
their files ... and collect VC defectors and other sources to use as
'identifiers' of VC caught in these cordon and sweep operations."
Even though William Colby later testified to Congress that Phoenix
was a South Vietnamese police program, Brickham in "Attack" states:
"A final and not insignificant tool are direct military operations
For example, 175m
artillery fire was directed on the reported
site of a combined conference [of] COSVN representatives." On the
basis of after-action reports, Brickham writes, "we are confident
that the damage to the infrastructure, in terms of key personnel
killed, is significant." [6]
"Attack" also mentions "A special Task Force
organized to launch a combined
intelligence/police/military assault against
the MR-4 (Saigon/Cholon/Gia Dinh Special Zone Committee)
headquarters and base area." [7] This is the third significant point
raised by "Attack." Called Cong Tac IV by its Vietnamese creators,
it is the operational model for Phoenix and as such deserves a
detailed explanation.
General McChristian writes that Cong Tac IV
evolved, concurrently with the joint U.S.-Vietnamese Combined
Intelligence Staff, from an intensive intelligence program (Project
Corral) which he initiated in the spring and early summer of 1966
and directed against MR-4. The purpose was to produce "intelligence
on the identification and location of Viet Cong operating in MR-4"
and "the dissemination of this
intelligence to user agencies for apprehension
and exploitation of enemy personnel." [8]
In September 1966 McChristian met with General
Loan to discuss his plans for a combined intelligence staff. The
idea was approved in November by Prime Minister Ky, the Vietnamese
Joint General Staff, and the U.S. Mission Council. As a result --
and as a substitute for Hop Tac -- Operation Fairfax was begun in
December, using three American and three ARVN battalions for the
purpose of "searching out and destroying VC main force units,
guerrillas, and infrastructure in the MR-4 area." Operation Fairfax
and the Combined Intelligence Staff (CIS) were the primary elements
of Cong Tac IV. [9]
"The initial actions of the Combined
Intelligence Staff," McChristian writes, "were to compile a
blacklist of MR-4 infrastructure personalities in support of the
combined US and Vietnamese military actions in this area." In the
process, the Combined Intelligence Staff compiled, by hand, more
than three thousand names, which were stored in a central registry
and made available to U.S. and Vietnamese units. Later "the
systematic identification and location of VC and the rapid retrieval
of these data in usable form was [sic] made possible by the use of
the automated data processing system located at the Combined
Intelligence Center, Vietnam." [10]
In fact, the foundation for the Combined
Intelligence Staff was laid, on the American side, in 1964, when CIA
security chief Robert Gambino created the Combined Security
Committee inside Saigon's First Precinct headquarters. Through a
secure radio network linking each of Saigon's nine precincts, the
Combined Security Committee coordinated CIA and State Department
security officers at the American Embassy with MACV and Vietnamese
Military Security Service officers at Tan Son Nhut and with the
Special Branch at National Police headquarters and alerted them of
pending VC attacks. The Combined Security Committee was directed by
Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Xinh, chief of staff of the Saigon police and
the deputy to the Saigon police chief, Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Van
Luan. By mid-1967 the Combined Security Committee's "Blue Network"
covered all of CT IV.
***
For deeper insights into Cong Tac IV we turn to
Tulius Acampora, a U.S. Army counterintelligence officer and Korean
War veteran who was detached to the CIA in June 1966 as General
Loan's adviser. As an officer on General James Van Fleet's staff in
Korea, Acampora had had prior dealings with John Hart, who as
station chief in Korea had masqueraded as an Army colonel and had
interfered in military operations
to the extent that General Van Fleet called him
"an arrogant SOB." [11] The old grudges were carried forward in
Saigon to the detriment of Phoenix.
"I assisted Hart." Acampora sighed when we
first met in 1986 at Ft. Myers. "He called me in and said, 'We're
dealing with an enigma. A cobra. General Loan.' Now Loan had a
mandarin Dai Viet background, and his father had rescued Diem.
Consequently, under Ky, Loan was very powerful; and Hart resented
Loan's concentration of power. Although he was not a political
animal, Loan was substantial. So Hart took away first his
supervision of the Military Security Service and eventually his
oversight of Central Intelligence Organization. But for a while Loan
ran them both, along with the National Police.
"When I arrived in Saigon," Acampora continued,
"at the national level, the
U.S. Embassy, with the agency and MACV, had
decided to take over everything in order to change the political
climate of Vietnam. Through the CIO, the agency was running all
sorts of counteroperations to VC infiltration into political
parties, trying to find compatible elements to create a counterforce
to take over control from Ky, who was a peacock. This was done by
intercepting VC political cadre: surveilling them, then arresting
them or moving toward them, then buying them over to your side in
order to destroy the integrity of the VC." Acampora qualified this
statement by noting: "The VC would always say yes, but they were
usually doubles.
"It was a dual-level scheme," Acampora went on.
"We were faced with the threat of terrorism from sappers, but we
also had to stop them at the political level. We stopped them at
sapper level with PRU under the Special Operations Group and at the
political level through the CIO -- the centerpiece of which was the
National Interrogation Center under [Special Branch chief Nguyen]
Tien. The CIO operated over and above CT Four. It could take
whatever it wanted -- people or information or whatever -- from any
of its elements. Its job was to turn around captured VCI and preempt
Loan. When it came to CT Four, however, Loan wanted control. Loan
said to Hart, 'You join us; we won't join you.' In effect, Loan told
Hart to go screw himself, and so Hart wanted me to assuage Loan --
to bring him in tow."
But this was not to be, for General Loan, a
dyed-in-the-wool nationalist, had his own agenda. In fact, the basis
for CT IV derived, on the Vietnamese side, from a countersubversion
program he commissioned in the summer of 1966. The thrust of the
program was to prevent VC agents from infiltrating pro-GVN political
parties and to prevent sappers from entering Saigon. Called the
Phung Hoang program, it was, according to Acampora, "wholly inspired
and conducted by the Vietnamese."
The man who conceived Phung Hoang at the
request of General Loan was the Special Branch deputy director,
Colonel Dang Van Minh, a Claude Rains type of character
who, according to Acampora, was "a stoic who
took the path of least resistance." Born on Con Son Island, where
his father was a nurse, Minh at age eighteen joined the accounting
department of the French Surete. During the Ngo regime he received
CIA training overseas and was then appointed chief of the Judicial
Police -- the only National Police branch with the power to arrest.
After the coup Minh became deputy director of the Special Branch.
Insulated behind his desk at Special Branch
headquarters on Vo Thanh Street, Minh weathered each successive
regime by serving his bosses as "a professional intelligence
officer." Indeed, when I met Minh at his office in 1986, he
attributed the fall of Saigon to "the many changes of command in
Saigon, while North Vietnam had only one leader and one chain of
command." [12] That, plus the fact that the Vietcong had infiltrated
every facet of the GVN -- a fact Loan also acknowledged when he
confessed to Acampora, "We're twenty percent infiltrated, at least."
Minh's attack against the VCI was measured,
sophisticated and diametrically opposed to American policy. In
contrast with Brickham, Minh viewed the VCI as village-level cadres
"to be monitored, not killed." As Minh conceived the attack on the
VCI, all Vietnamese agencies receiving information on the VCI would
forward their reports to the Special Branch for inclusion in its
political order of battle file. The goal was the "combination of
intelligence," as Minh termed it, phoi hop in Vietnamese. Seeking an
appropriate acronym, Minh borrowed the Ph from phoi and the Ho from
hop and christened the program Phung Hoang, after the mythological
Vietnamese bird of conjugal love that appears only in times of
peace. In Vietnamese myth, the Phung Hoang bird holds a flute and
represents virtue, grace, peace, and concord. Its song includes the
five notes of the Vietnamese musical scale, and its feathers include
the five basic colors.
Before long, however, Phung Hoang was
transformed into Phoenix, the mythological bird that perpetually
rises from its own ashes. As the Americans drew it, the bird held a
blacklist in its claw. In this manifestation, Phoenix is an
omnipotent, predatory bird that selectively snatches its prey -- a
symbol of discord rather than harmony.
Nowhere is the gap between American and
Vietnamese sensibilities more apparent than in their interpretations
of Phoenix and Phung Hoang, which also represent the struggle
between General Loan and John Hart for control over the attack on
the VCI. In this contest, Loan scored first when, for legal reasons,
Cong Tac IV was placed under his control. Loan assigned as many as
fifty officers to the program from the participating Vietnamese
agencies, with Major Nguyen Mau in charge of operations, assisted by
Dang Van Minh. The United States provided twenty MACV
counterintelligence officers, each of whom served as a desk officer
in a Saigon
precinct or outlying district capital. CIA
officer Tom Becker supervised the headquarters staff; the
Australians assigned their embassy security officer, Mike Leslie;
and the Koreans provided a representative. Members of CT IV were not
part of any separate unit but remained identified with their parent
agencies and did not have to back-channel to bring resources to
bear.
Cong Tac IV came into existence on November 1,
1966, the day Lou Lapham arrived in Saigon to take over the "second"
station, as the Revolutionary Development Cadre program was
sometimes called. Curiously, it was the same day that VC mortars
first fell on Saigon. U.S. generals, dozing in reviewing stands only
a few blocks away, were oblivious of the fact that the VC were using
a nearby church spire as a triangulation point for their fire.
From November 1 onward, Tully Acampora managed
CT IV with Major Mau. The program kicked in when Tom Becker,
assisted by MACV officers Larry Tracy and John Ford adopted the
standard American police ID kit (replete with Occidental facial
features). With their ID kits in hand, CT IV desk officers ventured
into the precincts and districts, accompanied by Special Branch and
Military Security Service officers. They screened suspects who had
been corralled by military units conducting cordon and search
operations, took photographs, put together composites of suspected
VCI members, then compiled the results and sent their reports to CT
IV headquarters in the National Police Interrogation Center in
Saigon, where it was collated, analyzed, and used to compile
blacklists of the VCI.
"They called it police work," Acampora said,
"because the police had the constitutional responsibility for
countersubversion. But it was paramilitary. In any event, Loan was
going to bring it all together, and he did, until Komer came out in
February 1967 and was briefed by Mau and Tracy."
In a 1986 interview with the author, Tracy
agreed that the demise of CT IV came from "politicking" on the part
of the Americans. "It was short-lived," he told me, "because Komer
saw it as a prototype and wanted to make it nationwide before
working out the methodology. Komer wanted to use CT Four as a
showcase, as part of the Combined Intelligence Staff, but General
Loan was reluctant to participate and had to be strong- armed by
Komer in February 1967." [13]
By April 1967 the Combined Intelligence Staff
would have entered more than sixty- five hundred names in its Cong
Tac IV data base and would be adding twelve hundred per month. As
the methodology was developed, a search unit consisting of three
forty- nine-man Field Police platoons began accompanying the U.S.
and Vietnamese military units conducting cordon and search
operations in MR-4. With the military providing a shield, the Field
Police checked IDs against blacklists, arrested VCI
suspects, and released innocent bystanders.
According to General McChristian, "From the inception of the
Combined Intelligence Staff until 1 December 1967, approximately 500
VC action agents were apprehended in Saigon and environs. The
significance of these arrests -- and the success of the staff --
cannot be fully measured, but unquestionably contributed to the
Communist failures in Saigon during the 1968 Tet offensive." [14]
Whether or not Tet was a failure for the VC
will be discussed later. But once the CIA had committed itself to
the attack on the VCI, it needed to find a way of coordinating its
efforts with the other civilian agencies, American and Vietnamese,
working independently of each other in the provinces. Considering
the number of agencies involved, and their antipathy, this was no
easy thing to do. To wit, at Nelson Brickham's request, the liaison
officer in Gia Dinh Province, John Terjelian, did a study on the
problem of coordination. "The count he made," Brickham recalled,
"was something like twenty-two separate intelligence agencies and
operations in his province alone. It was a Chinese fire drill, and
it didn't work because we had so many violently conflicting
interests involved in this thing."
But while the bureaucratic titans clashed in
Saigon, a few military and CIA officers -- in remote provinces where
battles raged and people died -- were trying to cooperate. In the
northernmost region, I Corps, the Marines and the CIA had especially
good relations, with the Marines supplementing many of the agency's
personnel needs and the CIA in turn sharing its intelligence.
Because of this reciprocal relationship, a solution to the problem
of interagency coordination was developed there, with much of the
credit going to Bob Wall, a CIA paramilitary officer in Quang Ngai
Province. In December 1966 Wall was made deputy to I Corps region
officer in charge, Jack Horgan. Wall recalled, when we met in 1987:
"In the winter of 1966 to '67, General Lou Walt was the First Marine
Amphibious commander and we (the CIA region staff] would cross the
river to attend his briefings each morning. Casualties were minimal,
and he was the picture of a marine, taking his briefings quickly,
sitting erect at his desk. Within the next two months, however,
casualties rose from two or three a day to ninety a day -- and yet
the VC body count was minimal." Said Wall: "Walt went to the picture
of abject frustration, slumped at his desk, his head in his hands.
He needed help. [15]
"My experience had been as cadre officer in
Quang Ngai, where I ran the PATs, the PRU, and Census Grievance,"
added Wall. "Forbes was the Special Branch adviser but there was no
coordination between us and the military or AID. There were about
fifteen separate programs in Quang Ngai, and it took me awhile to
realize this was the problem. Then I got transferred to Da Nang,
where as a result of Walt's inability to make contact with the
enemy, I personally proposed Phoenix, by name, to establish
intelligence close to the people. Based on a
British model in Malaya, we called it a DIOCC, a District
Intelligence and Operations Coordination Center. "
Having learned through the Quang Ngai Province
Interrogation Center the structure of the VCI in the province, Wall
was aware that the VCI operated from the hamlet up and that to
destroy it the CIA would have to create in the districts what the
PICs were doing in the provinces. Hence the DIOCC.
"Walt grabbed it," Wall recalled. "He assigned
a crackerjack sergeant to make the necessary equipment available,
and this sergeant set it up in Dien Ban, just south of Da Nang in
Quang Nam Province. Then we did two more" -- in Hieu Nhon and Phuong
Dien districts in Thua Thien Province.
The Dien Ban DIOCC went into effect in January
1967 and was the model on which Phoenix facilities were later built
throughout Vietnam. A prefab building ten by forty feet large, it
was built by marines and located in their district compound. On duty
inside were Sergeant Fisher and Lieutenant Morse, along with two
people from Census Grievance, one from RD Cadre, and one from
Special Branch. There were two interpreter-translators and three
clerk-typists. Census Grievance supplied desks, typewriters, and a
file cabinet. The Marines supplied the wall map and an electric fan.
Office supplies came from the CIA 's paramilitary officer in Quang
Nam Province. A radio was used for high-priority traffic, with
normal communications going by landline to other districts and Third
Marine HQ. It was not a sophisticated affair.
The purpose of the DIOCC was that of an
intelligence clearinghouse: to review, collate, and disseminate
critical information provided by the various intelligence agencies
in the area. But what made it innovative was that dissemination was
immediate at the reaction level, whereas the member agencies had
previously reported through their own channels to their province
headquarters, where the information was lateraled to other
interested agencies, which then passed it down to the districts.
Also, a summary was made at the end of each day. In the Dien Ban
DIOCC, the Americans handled the record keeping, with Lieutenant
Morse managing the order of battle reporting and Sergeant Fisher
taking care of the VCI files and source control cards. In order to
protect agents, each agency identified its own sources by number.
Local Marine and ARVN commanders made units
available as reaction forces for the DIOCC. More than one hundred
policemen in Dien Ban were also made available, along with the
Provincial Reconnaissance Unit from the province capital in Hoi An.
The DIOCC provided guides from Census Grievance, and the police
supplied ID kits, to the operating units. The Marines screened
civilian detainees (CDs) arrested in operations, using informants or
Special Branch officers to check names against the DIOCC's
blacklist. When a positive identification was made, they delivered
the
suspect to the PIC in Hoi An. A marine detached
to the PIC, Warrant Officer Richardson, made a daily run from the
PIC to the DIOCC, bringing interrogation reports and other
province-generated information. Most CDs were turned over to
district police, at which point, the Americans complained, they paid
bribes and returned home, there to be arrested again and again.
"Phoenix," insisted Wall, "represented the
strategy that could have won the war. The problem was that Phoenix
fell outside Foreign Intelligence, and paramilitary programs are
historically trouble for intelligence. So Phoenix never got primary
attention.
MACV did not have the mentality to work with
the police, the police were not trained to win hearts and minds, and
[Minister of Interior] Khiem, fearing a coup, mistrusted the police
and would not assign quality personnel. Phoenix did not work in
Vietnam because it was dominated," Wall told me, "by the military
mentality. They couldn't believe they would lose."
CHAPTER 9: ICEX
In May 1967 CIA officer Robert Komer arrived in
Saigon as deputy for Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development.
Thereafter he was called the DEPCORDS, a job that afforded him full
ambassadorial rank and privileges and had him answering only, in
theory, to MACV Commander William Westmoreland and Ambassador
Ellsworth Bunker.
"I'd known Komer from 1952, when he was with
the Office of National Estimates," Nelson Brickham told me, [1]
"which from the beginning was a high-level organization. Komer would
go on to move from one high-level job to another, and in 1967, of
course, he was working for the national security adviser, Walt
Rostow, in the White House. Komer and I always chatted when he came
around and talked to the branches, as he had been doing since
February 1967. But in May he was even more acerbic than before.
Komer was intensely ambitious, intensely energetic, intensely
results-oriented.
"In May," Brickham continued, "in connection
with Komer coming out to run CORDS, Hart called me into his office
one day and said, 'I want you to forget your other duties -- you're
going home in June anyway -- and I want you to draw me up a plan for
a general staff for pacification.' I was still chief of field
operations," Brickham noted, "so my replacement, Dave West, was sent
out early to free me up while I was working on this special paper.
Then I asked for another officer in the
station [John Hansen] to work with me on this
paper. He was counterespionage. But he was also into computers, and
he could say the right things about computers and be persuasive in
ways that I could not. So Hansen was assigned to me, and we set
about writing it up. Hansen focused on the computer end of this
thing, and I focused on the organizational end.
"In complying with John Hart's request for a
general staff for pacification, there were three things I had to
review: strategy, structure, and management. Now the important thing
to remember is that we were never at war in Vietnam. The ambassador
was commander in chief. The MACV commander was under him. So all the
annual military operations and everything else were focused under
the Country Plan rather than a strictly military plan. And I was the
principal agency representative each year for the development of
next year's Country Plan.
"Regarding strategy, basically this was it: We
had an army to provide a shield from North Vietnamese field units
and to engage in military sweeps to go after Vietcong units
And the Vietnamese Army did basically the same thing. That's
in-country
military. Pacification efforts
were to operate behind the military shield to stabilize
and to secure the situation. That's the
civilian side. Then you had out-of-country military, which was
aircraft reconnaissance, naval blockades, bombing operations in the
DMZ and along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and operations in North
Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
"My point," Brickham emphasized, "was not to
change anything, just do it better. We didn't need more
intelligence; we needed better intelligence, properly analyzed and
collated. That's the strategy.
"Next, the structure, which, of course, was
interagency in nature and encompassed MACV, CIA, CORDS,
Revolutionary Development, and the embassy. Now when you start
fooling around with other agencies, you're in trouble. Each one has
its own legislative mandate, meaning its job prescribed by Congress
or as defined in the Constitution. Then there is legislative
funding, funds allocations, accounting procedures, and the question
of who is going to pay for something. Those legislative givens have
to be respected. I as a CIA officer cannot set up an organizational
arrangement where I'm going to spend Pentagon money unless the
Pentagon gives it. And even if they give it to me, it still has to
be within the framework of the congressional appropriation. Then
there are the bureaucratic empires, in both Saigon and Washington,
all deeply committed to these things. You have overlap,
contradictory programs, ill-conceived ventures which receive
hearings; time is wasted, and you get corruption, embezzlement, and
low morale. And yet somehow you have to pull all these different
agencies together."
In looking for a solution, Brickham seized on
the personality and presidential mandate of Robert Komer. "Komer had
already acquired the nickname Blowtorch," Brickham said, "and his
position was a bureaucratic anomaly. He was a deputy ambassador on a
par with General [Creighton] Abrams ... but actually he was
reporting to Lyndon Johnson, and everyone knew that. So my idea was
to set up a board of directors in which each agency head or his
deputy was a member, then establish a reporting system that would
allow a guy like Komer to hold their feet to the fire -- to make
each agency responsive, to give it goals and targets, and to
criticize its failures in performance, whether deliberately or
inadvertently through sloppiness.
"Remember, the strategy was to sharpen up
intelligence collection and analysis and to speed up the reaction
time in responding to intelligence, whether on a military or a
police level. So the idea was to set up a structure in which
agencies had to participate and had to bring their own resources and
funds to bear, without interfering with their legislative mandate or
financial procedures."
In determining how to do this, Brickham
borrowed an organizational model from the Ford Motor Company, which,
he said, had "set up a command post to run their operations, with
the policy of the corporation coming from the chief executive
officer and a board of directors. Call it the operating committee at
the top, supported by a statistical reporting unit that put
everything together for the chief executive and the board of
directors, giving management the bottom line for them to consider
and make decisions
This became the basic structure for the
general staff, which Hart was calling ICEX --
intelligence coordination and exploitation. I wrote it so the
different agencies would provide their own money, personnel, and
direction, but as part of a machinery by which they would be
directed to a specific purpose."
Having formulated a strategy and structure,
Brickham turned to management, which for him boiled down to two
things: the bottom line, telling management only what it needed to
know; and using reporting as a tool to shape behavior, as
articulated by Rensis Likert in New Patterns of Management.
"Basically," Brickham explained, "a reporting
format fosters self-improvement, if the people reporting know what
they are expected to do, and are provided with objective
measurements of performance in terms of those expectations
So we designed the
reporting structure to provide critical types
of information to the ICEX board of directors, primarily Komer. But
also, by focusing attention in the regions and the provinces on the
things we felt were important, we tried to guarantee that those
things worked properly."
In particular, Brickham hoped to correct "the
grave problem of distortion and cover- up which a reporting system
must address." In explaining this problem to Komer, Brickham quoted
a CIA officer who had criticized "the current system of reporting
statistics that prove ... that successive generations of American
officials in Vietnam are more successful than their predecessors."
The officer observed that "Americans in the field, the majority of
whom serve a one-year tour ... go through a honeymoon phase in which
they try to see everything good about their counterpart and about
the situation and report it thus. Then they go through a period of
disillusionment in which they realize that nothing has been
accomplished, but by this time they have become the victims of their
own past reports and they have to maintain the fiction. Ultimately
they go out of there very discouraged and probably very unhappy with
their own performance because about the same time they become
knowledgeable enough to really do something they are on their way
home and have no desire to hurt their own professional career."
Explained Brickham: "The key to ICEX was
decentralization" -- in other words, forcing field officers to do
their jobs by putting responsibility on the scene, while at the same
time trying to deliver to these officers the kinds and amounts of
information they needed, fast. "This means feedback," Brickham
stressed, "which reflects and recognizes the province officer's own
activities, tells him what other people are doing, identifies to him
the important and reportable activities, and induces a competitive
and emulative spirit."
Keyed to Special Branch reporting cycles, the
initial ICEX reporting format was submitted monthly and contained
narrative and statistical data responding to requirements from
Washington, Saigon, and the regions. It reflected the activities,
understanding, and writing abilities of field officers, enabling
managers like Komer to judge performance. It also revealed program
progress and functioning of related systems. Meanwhile, John Hansen
was developing a comprehensive input sheet capable of listing every
piece of biographical information on VCI individuals, operations,
and organization in general. He was also designing collated
printouts on the VCI, which were to be sent to region, province, and
district ICEX officers plugged into the ICEX computer system.
"Anyway," said Brickham, "those were the ideas
that involved this statistical reporting unit for the ICEX staff,
which was to pull everything together and analyze it. The
statistical reporting unit was the guts, with a plans and programs
unit and a special investigations unit tacked onto it."
On May 22, 1967, Nelson Brickham and John
Hansen delivered to Komer a three- page memo titled "A Concept for
Organization for Attack on VC Infrastructure."
Hurriedly prepared, it recommended four things.
First was the creation of a board of directors chaired by the
DEPCORDS and including the senior intelligence and operations
officers from MACV, CIA, and CORDS -- a general staff for
pacification under Robert Komer. Next, it recommended the creation
of a command post in Saigon and ICEX committees in the regions and
provinces. Thirdly, it recommended that the Americans "coordinate
and focus" the attack on the VCI and that they "stimulate" their
Vietnamese counterparts. Lastly, it recommended that province
officers create DIOCCs, which Brickham called "the essential
ingredient in the Phoenix [as ICEX would eventually be renamed]
stew." The concept paper was approved by the CIA station, then sent
to Komer, who turned it down. As Brickham recalled, "Komer said, 'A
concept paper is not what I want. I want a missions and functions
paper -- something in military style that the military can
understand.'"
"At this point," Brickham said, "I was seconded
over to Komer's office. He was buying everything that we proposed to
him, but he wanted to develop 'action papers.' He kept repeating,
over and over again, that he wanted a 'rifle shot' approach -- a
sniper's attack, not a shotgun approach -- against the VCI. And
Komer is a stickler. He was constantly throwing papers back at me to
rewrite over and over again until they satisfied him in those
terms."
In response to Komer's demands, Brickham and
Hansen incorporated the major themes of the concept paper into a
detailed missions and functions paper titled "A Proposal for the
Coordination and Management of Intelligence Programs and Attack on
the VC Infrastructure and Local Irregular Forces." What resulted,
according to Brickham, "was not a general staff planning body, but
an executive action organization that was focused on getting the job
done, not thinking about it, by taking advantage of Komer's dynamic
personality."
Eleven pages long (plus annexes on
interrogation, data processing, and screening and detention of VCI),
"A Proposal" was accepted by Komer in early June 1967. Its stated
purpose was: "to undertake the integration of efforts of all US and
GVN organizations, both in intelligence collection and processing
and in operations directed against the elimination of the VC
Infrastructure and irregular forces" and "to insure that basic
programs conducted by different organizations and components, as
they relate to the elimination of the VCI, are made mutually
compatible, continuous, and fully effective." [2]
ICEX as the embodiment of executive action had
emerged as the solution to the problem posed by the VCI. It was a
"machine" composed of joint committees at national, corps, province,
and district levels. At the top sat Robert Komer as chairman of the
board, setting policy with the approval of the ambassador and MACV
commander. Serving as Komer's command post was the ICEX Directorate
in Saigon,
to be headed by "the senior U.S. coordinator
for organizing the overall attack on the VCI." [3]
The ICEX Directorate was to be subdivided into
three units. The intelligence unit was to be composed of two senior
liaison officers -- one from MACV and one from the CIA -- who were
to prepare briefings, conduct special investigations, and evaluate
the effectiveness of the attack on the VCI.
The operations (aka the plans and programs)
unit was to be composed of three program managers who planned
activities, set requirements, managed funds, and were responsible
for three specific problem areas: (1) intelligence collection
programs and their coordination and reaction operations; (2)
screening, detention, and judicial processing of VC civil
defendants; and (3) the interrogation exploitation of VC captives
and defectors. How ICEX handled these problem areas will be
discussed at length in Chapter 10.
The reports management unit was to refine the
attack on the VCI through the science fiction of statistical
analysis. Reports officers were to help program managers "in
developing reports to be required from Region and Province" and to
analyze those reports. The reports dealt with province staffing;
prisoner and defector accession and disposition; RD team locations,
actions, and casualties; quantitative and qualitative descriptions
of intelligence reports and PRU operations; and province inspection
reports, among other things. The reporting unit included an
inspections team because, as Brickham observed, "Everybody lies
These guys are supposed to be
on the road most of the time, dropping in
unexpectedly to look at your files and to verify what was being
reported to us in writing was true."
ICEX field operations were to be grafted onto
the CIA's liaison and covert action programs, with the region and
province officers in charge continuing to manage those programs and
in most cases assuming the added job of ICEX coordinator. The ICEX
Province Committee was to be "the center of gravity of intelligence
operations against the VCI." The ICEX province coordinator in turn
was to establish and supervise DIOCCs (usually seven or eight per
province), "where the bulk of the attack on the low level
infrastructure and local guerrilla forces must be generated and
carried out." ICEX committees at each level were to be composed of
the senior intelligence, operations, and pacification officers. And
the ICEX coordinator was to "recommend and generate operations for
the attack on infrastructure" and "stimulate Vietnamese interagency
cooperation and coordination." [4]
"I'm a great advocate of committee meetings,"
Brickham told me, "provided they're properly run. That's why Phoenix
wound up as a committee structure at nation, region, province, and
district levels. A joint staff at every level down to district is
the essence
of Phoenix. We hoped the committee structure
would be a nonoperative kind of thing, but we had to have some
machinery for bringing together everybody involved in these
programs."
Added Brickham: "Some Phoenix coordinators were
from the Agency for International Development or the military. They
didn't have to be CIA. Same with the province officer in charge; the
POIC would be a member of the Phoenix committee, whether or not he
was the coordinator." However, insofar as the PICs and the PRU were
the foundation stones of Phoenix, if someone other than the CIA
province officer in charge was the ICEX Province Committee chairman.
or its coordinator, that person was totally dependent on the POIC
for access to information on, and reaction forces for use against,
the VCI. In addition, the committee structure allowed the CIA to
deny plausibly that it had anyone operating in the DIOCCs.
"I was opposed to the DIOCCs at the beginning,"
Brickham admitted, "but after I visited three places up north and
wrote the early June paper, I had converted into believing in them
as important
And then Komer said we could have as many men
as we asked for, and at that point we tried to
get district officers." In any event, according to Brickham, "ICEX
institutionalizes the thing."
"Okay," said Brickham. "Komer approved this,
and we sent a cable to Washington headquarters outlining the
situation and requesting approval. And we got a cable back from
Colby which basically said, 'Well, we don't know what you're going
to do.' And as I recall, they suggested that we sort of pull in our
horns."
"Well, we said, 'This is the only way to do it,
so we'll just go ahead and do it.' We came up with the ambassador's
approval out there in the field, so back in Washington they were
left with a fait accompli. And the irony is, Colby had nothing to do
with ICEX or Phoenix. He had to go along with it. It was approved by
Komer and the ambassador and the White House, so we implemented it."
At that point Nelson Brickham returned to Washington for a job on
the Vietnamese desk, and a new personality appeared on the scene,
willing and ready to pick up where Brickham had left off.
***
Having chatted with Roger Trinquier in Vung Tau
in 1952, Evan Parker, Jr., was no stranger to Vietnam. As the son of
an American pilot who had served in King George's Royal Flying Corps
in the First World War, Parker was also well connected. Upon
graduating from Cornell University in 1943, Parker, who was fluent
in French, was invited to join the fashionable OSS. Trained with the
jaunty Jedburghs, [i] he was slated to parachute into France but
instead was sent to Burma,
where he served in Detachment 101, as an
interrogation and logistics officer fighting with Kachin hill tribes
behind the Japanese lines. Parker later served as Detachment 101's
liaison officer to Merrill's Marauders and the British Thirty-sixth
Division. His service with the OSS (followed by a brief stint as a
traveling salesman) led to a career in the CIA's clandestine
services and to personal relationships with many of the major
Vietnamese, French, and American players in Vietnam.
Parker began his CIA career as a courier in the
Far East, then was graduated to case officer, operating mostly in
Hong Kong and China. Over the ensuing years, he told me when we met
in 1986, he made "four or five" trips to Vietnam and, when he
arrived again in Saigon in June 1967, was slated to become the
station's executive director, its third-highest-ranking position.
However, Robert Komer and John Hart thought that Parker could better
serve "the cause" as ICEX's first director.
Parker was chosen to manage ICEX, first and
foremost, because Komer needed a senior CIA officer in that
position. The CIA alone had the expertise in covert paramilitary and
intelligence operations, the CIA alone was in liaison with the
Special Branch and the CIO, and the CIA alone could supply money and
resources on a moment's notice, without the red tape that strapped
the military and the State Department. As a GS-16 with the
equivalent rank of a brigadier general, Evan Parker, Jr., had the
status and the security clearances that would allow him access to
all these things.
Parker's persona and professional record also
made him the perfect candidate for the job. Having just completed a
tour as the CIA officer assigned to the Pentagon's Pacific Command,
Parker had helped draw up the military's strategic plan for Vietnam
and was well aware of how Vietnam fitted into the "big picture."
Possessing the persuasive skills and political connections of a
seasoned diplomat, Parker also enjoyed the status and the style
necessary to soothe the monumental egos of obstinate military
officers and bureaucrats. And ''as the expert on unconventional
warfare," which was how Tully Acampora facetiously referred to him,
Evan Parker had the tradecraft qualifications required to launch a
top secret, highly sensitive, coordinated attack on the VCI.
Upon arriving in Saigon, Parker prepared
himself by reading Brickham's papers and reviewing "the fifty to
sixty" programs we already had in place to deal with the
"infrastructure," a word Parker described to me as "hideous." [5]
[ii] At an informal conference in Da Nang called to discuss the
attack on the VCI, Parker learned that Brickham "and his partners in
crime" wanted to concentrate their efforts initially on the
Americans, then on the Vietnamese, but that Komer first had to ram
ICEX through the impervious Saigon bureaucracy.
This was not hard to do, considering that
President Johnson had given Komer a mandate that encompassed not
only the formulation of an integrated attack on the VCI but also the
reorganization of the Republic of Vietnam's armed forces, management
of the October 1967 Vietnamese presidential elections, and
revitalizing South Vietnam's economy. When faced with the
irresistible force called Robert "Blowtorch" Komer, the immovable
Saigon bureaucracy gave way quickly, if not altogether voluntarily.
Flanked by John Hart and General George
Forsythe, MACV's chief of Revolutionary Development, Komer on June
14, 1967, presented MACV's chiefs of staff with Brickham's
"Proposal." Komer made a forceful presentation, writes Ralph
Johnson, but Generals Phillip B. Davidson Jr., Walter Kerwin, and
William Pearson balked, "because MACV personnel requirements were
not included." [6]
But it did not matter that the majority of
DIOCC advisers were slated to be military men. Komer, backed by
Hart, simply took his case to MACV commander Westmoreland, who,
having been informed of President Johnson's wishes in the matter by
Ambassador Bunker, overruled his staff on June 16. A few days later
the White House Coordinating Committee (Director of Central
Intelligence Richard Helms, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Earle Wheeler, and Chairman William
Sullivan) nodded their final approval. And so it was that ICEX --
soon to be Phoenix -- was born. And not without resentment. General
McChristian recalled, "On my last day in Vietnam, I became aware
that a new plan for attacking the VCI was to be implemented. It was
to be called ICEX. To put it mildly, I was amazed and dismayed."
McChristian was amazed that he had not been told earlier, and was
dismayed because ICEX was going to replace Cong Tac IV.
On the morning of June 20, [iii] Evan Parker
met with General Davidson (McChristian's replacement as MACV
intelligence chief) and General Pearson, the MACV chief of
operations. At this meeting, Parker recalled, the generals agreed
"to staff this thing out." But, he added, "I think from the point of
view of the military, well, they may have felt this was being shoved
down their throats by the chief of station.
"Anyway," said Parker, "[Komer and Hart] said,
'Do it,' and they identified me as the man they proposed to head up
this staff, and the agency said they would supply assistance. Okay,
but immediately you have a problem because there are already
advisers to the Special Branch ... and if all of a sudden I come in
and am put in charge, that means I'm getting into somebody else's
business. So if I want to get to the Special Police, I have to sound
out the American adviser to see if he wants to cooperate with this.
Maybe he wants to, and maybe he doesn't. Maybe he feels he's already
doing this.
('Well, he may not like it" -- Parker smiled --
"but he has to do it, because the chief of station tells him to. So
he does it. But that doesn't make the pill any easier to swallow. In
effect he's getting another layer of command or, I should say,
coordination, over him."
Ed Brady, an Army officer on contract to the
CIA and assigned to the ICEX Directorate, elaborated when we met in
his office in 1987. "There certainly was a conflict going on," Brady
said. [8] "Dave West [Nelson Brickham's replacement] didn't want to
share his prerogatives with another powerful CIA guy
Why should
there be two organizations working with the
Special Branch? It wasn't proposed that [ICEX] be under his control.
It was proposed that it interact with the Special Branch on a
separate basis and that separate Special Branch officers would be
assigned over there to do that. And West wouldn't have any control
or influence over it.
"The Special Branch," Brady explained, "was
supposed to be carrying out internal surveillance and operations
against subversives. That's its job. The problem
was
that the vast majority of Special Branch energy
went into surveilling, reporting on, and thwarting opposition
political parties. Non-Communists. Every now and then they did
something about a VC -- if he was in Saigon. But they didn't have
any systematic program against the Communists. Their main activity
was to keep the existing regime in power, and the political threat
to the existing regime was not the Communist party, 'cause the
Communist party was outlawed! What the Special Branch was doing was
keeping track of the so-called loyal opposition
-- keeping track of what Tran Van Don or what
Co Minh Tang or what the Vietnam Quoc Dan Dang was doing.
"Phoenix," Brady explained, "at an absolute
minimum caused a focus to be brought to bear on anti-Communist
activities."
Having pulled rank to get MACV and the liaison
branch in line, John Hart then assigned four CIA officers to Evan
Parker on a temporary basis, as well as the services of "key CIA
personnel stationed outside of Saigon" and "integrated and CIA-
funded programs such as Census Grievance Teams, PRU, RD Cadre, and
Special Police." [9] Parker was then told to select a military
deputy, and he asked for an old friend from OSS Detachment 101,
Colonel Junichi Buhto, then the MACV chief of counterintelligence.
"Junichi agreed to assist," Parker said when we
met at his home, "even though he had plenty to do in his own job. It
was agreed he would keep his regular job and be my assistant on a
part-time basis as another duty. And with his assistance we found a
bunch of Army officers, all of whom were near the end of their tours
but who could be spared from whatever they were doing. And so it
went. That's the ICEX staff.
"Then the police were brought into it," Parker
added, referring to the National Police. "Leaving aside the agency
people, the key people are John Manopoli and myself because he was
head of the National Police."
A retired New York State Police lieutenant,
Manopoli had served as a police adviser in Vietnam from 1956 through
1959 and had returned to Saigon as chief of Public Safety in 1966.
Although he had no authority over Special Branch, as senior adviser
to the National Police, Manopoli was responsible for meeting its, as
well as ICEX's, logistical and administrative needs.
"Manopoli," Parker pointed out, "was actually
the senior police adviser in-country. I didn't have that kind of
responsibility. Mine was a staff responsibility. We in Phoenix were
not put over the police or military; we simply gave a directive in
the name of MACV or Komer or Colby. The idea was to come up with an
organization that would pool intelligence on the infrastructure and
try to get these people to use that intelligence to go out and
arrest them. This is so easily said and so difficult to do because
all these agencies have their own jobs and they existed long before
Phoenix."
Manopoli also got the job of kicking Tully
Acampora out of his office and moving Parker's staff in. "They found
some space for us in USAID Two," Parker said. "We were squeezed in."
He was given some part-time secretarial help, and with the officers
lent from Hart, "what we did first was come out with a MACV staff
paper which described what this program was, what we were going to
do, and what this coordinated program -- this ICEX -- was going to
be."
This staff paper, titled "Intelligence,
Intelligence Coordination, and Exploitation for Attack on VC
Infrastructure (C)," short title: ICEX (U), commonly known as MACV
381-41, was promulgated on July 9, 1967, and marked the birth of
ICEX as a formal entity. It also signaled the end to the escalation
of the Vietnam War. Five days later the Defense Department imposed a
523,000-man troop limit on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
One of the authors of MACV 381-41 was CIA
officer Jim Ward, who was then preparing to replace Kinloch Bull as
region officer in charge of IV Corps. "The first meeting back in
those days," Ward recalled, "was between Evan, me, and Junichi
Buhto. That's early July 1967. I had known Juni from Germany and OSS
Detachment One-oh-one. Just by chance all three of us had been in
Detachment One-oh-one of OSS in World War Two. In fact, Evan and I
were together at Camp David, where the Jedburghs were trained." [10]
A paramilitary expert who had commanded a unit
of Kachin guerrillas operating behind Japanese lines, Ward -- whose
CIA career began in 1948 in Malaya, where he
was schooled by Claude Fenner -- was well aware
of the prominence of the Special Branch in counterinsurgency
warfare. According to Ward, "The key to the Vietnam War ... was the
political control of people. And the Communists were doing a better
job of this than we were, and the best way to stop this was to get
at the infrastructure. Not the people who were sympathizers or
supporters in any way of the VC. They didn't count. The people who
counted were the key members of the People's Revolutionary party.
These were the people behind the NLF.
"Anyway, Evan set up this meeting. He wanted
input from someone with field operations experience and know-how,
and what we talked about was concepts: what we had to do to bring
everybody together who was collecting intelligence and that
everybody should be channeling intelligence into the DIOCC. There
intelligence would be collated, analyzed, interpreted, and then
reaction operations could be undertaken almost immediately. And new
intelligence directives would be drafted. Whoever was in charge was
supposed to be doing that all the time -- that is, letting people
know that a particular piece of information [needed to mount an
operation against a particular VCI] was missing, or asking, 'What's
the pattern of this guy's movements every day?' Then you decide who
should get these directives -- the police if you're talking about an
infrastructure guy or the military if you're talking about a
battalion of VC. Anyway, the guy who runs the DIOCC -- be it Special
Branch or MSS or S-two or whoever -- usually does the laying of
requirements.
"First we talked about the coordination of
intelligence. For instance, in the Delta there were approximately
ten thousand intelligence reports a month coming in from different
levels ... a few hundred were coming up through police channels,
some through ARVN and American battalions, and others through the
Green Berets and their [Vietnamese] counterparts. All of them were
sending information through their own chains of command, rather than
using it laterally and exploiting it locally. And we wanted them, at
the reaction level [the DIOCC], to collate the information and
exploit it. That's the first objective.
"The second objective -- assuming the military
intelligence gets exploited by the military units -- is making sure
the infrastructure intelligence gets exploited by whoever appears to
be the most appropriate unit to coordinate it. If it's the kind of
thing that can be handled only by a large military organization,
fine. Even the largest of the American outfits get involved in this,
like the First Air Cavalry and the Hundred First Airborne, which was
especially good at cordon and search operations. They would take PRU
or Field Police units along with them and Special Branch units to do
the interrogating. But generally the outfit that's best equipped to
get a single guy in a remote place is the PRU."
These concepts of intelligence collection and
exploitation, as outlined by Ward, were incorporated in MACV 381-41
along with Brickham's organizational concepts.
Timetables were set for the region officers in
charge to draft missions and functions statements, to determine in
which districts the first DIOCCs were to be built, and to prepare
guidelines for DIOCC operations. All this was to be done by the end
of July. MACV 381-41 also charged the CIA's region officers in
charge with briefing their Vietnamese counterparts as soon as
possible.
With MACV 381-41 in hand, Evan Parker and John
Hart visited each ROIC. "We told them what we had in mind," Parker
recalled, "what the objective was and what their function was.
Briefly stated, they were to be the nucleus to get it going. This
was all done orally They
were simply told, 'You've now heard what Ev's in charge
of -- you'll get it done here; you'll pass the
word to your people.' Then we briefed the senior military people in
the four regions."
Parker attributed his success in co-opting the
ROICs to the fact that "in addition to being the Phoenix fellow, I
was also a senior CIA officer wearing my other hat." In that
capacity he attended CIA station meetings three times each week. In
July 1967 the ROICS, who may be thought of as Phoenix's first field
generals, were Jack Horgan in I Corps, Dean Almy in II Corps,
Kinloch Bull in IV Corps, and Bob Wall in III Corps.
Each region was unique, geographically and
politically, and Phoenix in flight conformed to those contours. As
Parker explains, "Four Corps was different because there weren't as
many Americans there." The Delta was also the breadbasket and
population center of Vietnam, thus the locus of the
counterinsurgency and Phoenix. I Corps was distinct by virtue of its
proximity to North Vietnam and the extent to which Phoenix was
directed against Thieu's domestic political opponents. Headquartered
in Nha Trang under the shadow of Fifth Special Forces, II Corps was
an admixture of SOG and Phoenix operations. And as the region
encompassing Saigon and the Central Office of South Vietnam, III
Corps was perhaps the most critical region -- although one in which,
according to Nelson Brickham, there was little success against the
VCI.
***
In June 1967 Robert Komer sent a cable to
Richard Helms commending Nelson Brickham for "an outstanding job in
helping design new attack on infrastructure" and asking that
Brickham be made available for occasional temporary duty in Vietnam
"if critical problems arise." Three weeks after arriving back in
Langley, with yet another feather in his cap, Brickham was
transferred from the Vietnamese desk to the office of the special
assistant for Vietnamese affairs (SAVA).
"SAVA was up at the DCI level," Brickham noted,
''as a coordination point for an agency and interagency activities
relating to Vietnam. The reason I was brought up there was that
[SAVA Director George] Carver was obliged to brief [the secretary of
defense] and other people on ICEX/Phoenix, and he didn't have a
clue. He couldn't understand. Nobody in Washington could understand
what we had done out there in the station. So Carver called me in
and asked me to write a memorandum."
Brickham described Yale graduate Carver as the
person who "provided the theoretical basis for U.S. intervention in
Vietnam in an article he wrote for Foreign Affairs magazine ["The
Faceless Viet Cong"] on the nature of the Vietnam insurgency and
American interests there.
"I stayed in SAVA for two months," Brickham
continued. "Then I went back out to Vietnam TDY to work with Ev
Parker ... to assist him in the reporting formats, the requirements,
and this and that and to implement the philosophy I explained
earlier. And it was at this point that we ran into problems with Bob
Wall.
"Bob Wall was a paramilitary type." Brickham
sighed. "He was first assigned as a province officer, then as deputy
in I Corps, and in that capacity he was instrumental in creating the
first DIOCCs. He invited some Brits from Kuala Lumpur to explain
what they had done there, and he was always hustling papers around
the station. He was not a regional officer before the
reorganization, but he ended up as our ROIC in Third Corps, in Bien
Hoa. Now that was shortly before I left country, and I had very
little to concern myself with that situation. It was when I came
back TDY to help Evan Parker in the fall of 1967 that it became
evident that Bob Wall was one of our less satisfactory region
officers.
"One of our problems in Vietnam," Brickham
philosophized, "is that that part of the world seems to generate the
warlord. It's the damnation of the Far East and a disease that
infects the white man when he goes there
And the upshot in Vietnam, before
someone came out with the sledgehammer to knock
heads together, was that you had forty-four different wars in
forty-four different provinces and forty-four different warlords
and American region advisers often would fall victim to this
same virus: Bob Wall is a prime example. So I
recommended disciplinary action and relief from duty.
"Ev Parker, of course, was in charge of it, and
he didn't do that. I'd never known Ev Parker before that, but just a
finer gentleman you'll never know; he's what the Russians would call
a cultured individual. Now Ev Parker is less abrasive than I am; he
would see a problem and seek a diplomatic solution. Whereas I would
rock a boat and sometimes sink it, Ev Parker would steer it in a
different course, so it wouldn't
take the waves. Ev Parker has a Chinese mind,
and he chose a different way to soften Wall's position."
That position, according to Brickham, was that
"Bob Wall was permitting the military people in Third Corps to turn
the entire intelligence operation into a military support adjunct,
ignoring the infrastructure. Even though he was pushing the DIOCCs
like crazy, he and his military counterpart in Region Three were
using the PRU as blocking forces for military operations. He was not
following policy. He was pursuing his own war out there in the
region. This became the issue between Bob Wall and myself in Third
Corps."
Bob Wall, a balding, roly-poly man,
emphatically denied Brickham's charges. "No way!" he said, adding
that it was perfectly proper to use the Provincial Reconnaissance
Units in village sweeps, because "the PRU could actually deal with
the people. They spoke their language and knew what to look for,
whereas U.S. forces were only interested in killing people."
Wall did solicit the help of his corps's deputy
intelligence chief, Lieutenant Colonel John Kizirian, who anted up
fifteen second lieutenants as DIOCC advisers in III Corps. But that
in itself did not make him a warlord. For a CIA region officer could
push Phoenix only to the extent that his military counterpart
provided qualified personnel to run the DIOCCs. And the military
always wanted something in return. And then, of course, there was
the overriding question of Vietnamese participation.
On this issue Brickham said, "We put [Phoenix]
together and presented, it to the Vietnamese. General Loan by this
time was chief of the National Police. Everybody knows what he looks
like -- they've seen pictures of him shooting the VC on TV -- but
I'm convinced that Loan was an absolutely honest, dedicated patriot.
Anyway, this ICEX proposal was presented to Loan, and it didn't take
him long to turn it down, mainly because they looked upon it as an
infringement on their sovereignty. When I say Loan was a patriot, he
was! He was looking out for the Vietnamese. He recognized the fact
that Vietnamese and American interests were not always identical. So
they turned it down flat.
"We said, 'Well, that's okay 'cause we're gonna
do it anyway.' ... Regardless of what the Vietnamese were going to
do, we were going to go ahead with it anyway, if nothing else, to
try to serve as an example. And there was really no need for the
Vietnamese to string along with us, although up in Da Nang they did.
Which, as you know, is where the name Phoenix came from.
"Jack Horgan was our ROIC up there," Brickham
went on. "He was in good liaison with both the Vietnamese military
and police, and when he presented this to the
Vietnamese up there, one of them said, 'Well,
we should really call this Phoenix, because it's to rise from the
ashes and seek victory.' So Jack Horgan came down with a cable and
said, 'By the way, so-and-so has coined the name Phoenix for this
activity" and it took immediately. It became known as Operation
Phoenix, and everybody was happy with that. By then it was beginning
to go."
Notes:
i.
Elite OSS officers trained at Camp David. Colby, Ward,
Parker, and Buhto all were Jedburghs.
ii.
According to Parker, Komer liked the phrase "attack on the
infrastructure" because "he thought it sounded sexy."
iii.
That afternoon Parker had "a brief conversation with General
Loan," during which Loan rejected the ICEX proposal, claiming it
infringed on Vietnamese sovereignty.
CHAPTER 10: Action Programs
Before he bade adieu to Vietnam in November
1967, Nelson Brickham helped put together what was entitled "Action
Program for Attack on VC Infrastructure 1967- 1968." Signed by the
CORDS assistant chief of staff, Wade Lathram, "Action Program"
represented Robert Komer's administrative and operational directives
for the ICEX program. It is the most significant Phoenix document,
charting the program's dimensions and course over its first eighteen
months. It set in place Brickham's reporting requirements,
established tables of organization, identified major problems, and
formed groups to find solutions.
"Action Program" consisted of twelve separate
tabs, each addressing a separate mission or function to be
accomplished by a specific deadline. First on the list, Tab 1,
called for promulgating the ICEX mission directive, MACV 381-41. Tab
2 called for briefing all corps senior advisers, and Tab 3 directed
the CIA region officers to designate corps and province ICEX
coordinators, all by July 31, 1967. By year's end ICEX committees
were operating in thirty-nine provinces, thirty-four of which were
chaired by CIA officers. Most were meeting monthly and had initiated
anti-VCI operations. Also by year's end twenty-nine Province
Intelligence Operations Coordination Centers (the province
equivalents of a DIOCC) were functioning and
sending reports to the ICEX Directorate. In
certain provinces, such as Vinh Long in the Delta, the PIOCC doubled
as a Phoenix committee.
Tab 4 called for continuation and expansion of
DIOCC development. At the time "Action Program" was issued, 10
DIOCCs were in operation; by year's end there were 103, although
most were gathering tactical military intelligence, not infiltrating
and attacking the VCI. In November 1967 more than half a million
dollars were authorized for DIOCC construction, salaries of
Vietnamese employees, office equipment and supplies, and
transportation. "These were not operational funds in the sense of
supporting anti-infrastructure activities." [1] Money for anti-VCI
operations came from the parent agency.
To his credit, Evan Parker did not approve of
the rapid pace at which Phoenix was expanding. "I didn't think we
needed an elaborate structure everywhere in the country," he told
me. "Some of the provinces didn't have enough people or activity in
them to warrant it. I would have preferred to concentrate on the
more populated active areas where you knew that you had people to
work with and something to work against." [2]
There were too many variables, Parker
contended, to have "a uniform program." The methodology had not been
perfected, and too much depended "on the personal likes and dislikes
of the senior Vietnamese people in the field ... and their adviser
For
instance, in I Corps there was a lot of
activity, not so much concerned with the VCI as with the
machinations of rival political parties -- the Buddhists or whatever
These
are things that were hung over from the French
days
This was always the problem
with Thieu .... [it] was sort of open season on
the enemy -- of settling scores."
Tab 5 of "Action Program" prescribed ICEX staff
organization along the committee lines proposed by Brickham. In
Saigon the ICEX board of directors consisted of the DEPCORDS as
chairman, the CIA station chief, the MACV intelligence (12) and
operations (13) chiefs, and the CIA chief of Revolutionary
Development. In fact, the board met only once, and Robert Komer
quickly assumed control of Phoenix, setting policy as he saw fit,
with the directorate serving as his personal staff. "Komer or Colby
[who replaced Komer as DEPCORDS in November 1968] said, 'You'll do
it.' My job," explained Parker, "was to say, 'Okay, Colby says
you'll do this, and this is how you're gonna go about doing it.'
What I did was help people carry out what they were ordered to do.
And I firmly believe in the soft sell."
In practice, Parker's CIA kinship with Komer
and especially Colby enabled him to manage the Phoenix Directorate
without having to consult agency heads. He had merely to state his
wishes to the DEPCORDS in order to bypass the various chains of
command.
"Colby was my division chief in the field, and
in Washington also," Parker explained. "I served with him in World
War Two when I was in England. I met him when we were both in a
program known as the Jedburghs. He went into the field in Europe,
and I went into the field in the Far East.
"Colby is a fine gentleman, I'll tell you. He
was tremendously helpful to me. So was Komer. But their
personalities were very different. Komer was essentially a rasping,
grating sort of voice ... but he was consistently staunch in his
support of the program
.... He may have given orders, he may have been
sarcastic -- all those things -- but at the same time he was not one
to stand on ceremony, not one to do things because that's the way
it's always been done. He didn't give a damn about that. He'd say,
'I want Parker's organization to get four trucks! I don't give a
good goddamn where they come from, just give him four trucks!'
"Colby was quieter, more soft-spoken, but just
as firm in terms of getting things done.
He would suddenly say, 'Let's go visit so-and-so,' in a
province or region. That
meant you would call up and get a helicopter or
a plane, with no notice, and he would just go there and see them.
That made it a whole lot more secure because we traveled without
bodyguards."
Case in point: While serving as Phoenix
coordinator in Quang Tri Province, Warren Milberg was visited by
Colby, who was on an inspection tour. As Milberg recalled it, Colby
decided to spend the night, so Milberg assigned a Nung guard to
watch over him. That night there was a mortar attack. The Nung guard
grabbed Colby by the scruff of the neck, dragged him backward down
the stairs (Milberg arrived in time to see Colby's heels bouncing on
the steps) into the basement of the building, threw him on a cot,
and threw himself on top of the future director of Central
Intelligence.
Somewhat dismayed at the treatment the Nung had
afforded the DEPCORDS, Milberg half expected the ax to fall when
Colby and his entourage assembled for breakfast the following
morning. But Colby merely thanked the earnest Nung for the gesture
of concern.
The consummate insider, Colby would win many
friends with his "just folks" management style, while using his
considerable influence to refine and redirect the broad policies put
in place by Komer -- the outside agitator who rode roughshod over
everyone. Together, Komer and Colby were the perfect one-two
combination required to jump-start Phoenix and keep it running for
five years.
As of August 15, 1967, Parker's part-time staff
had been replaced by three permanent CIA officers: Joe Sartiano as
executive director; William Law as chief of operations; and James
Brogdon as administrative officer; Colonel William J. Greenwalt had
replaced Junichi Buhto as deputy director, and
six MACV officers were assigned as full- time employees, along with
a smattering of AID and State Department people.
"We set up a working organization built around
agency people," Parker said, "with other individuals made available
from the different agencies, but still paid for by the agencies they
belonged to." By then there were American women serving as
secretaries, MACV and CIA officers advising the Vietnamese, and
others in the office keeping records. "There were probably three or
four people I counted on more than anyone else," Parker remarked,
but "in order to make this work, I would say that the core people
were the agency people in charge of the special police -- the senior
agency advisers."
***
Tab 6 provided for military augmentation of
ICEX field units. As Parker put it, "Then you realize you're going
to have a nationwide organization as well as a headquarters staff,
and that you're going to need a lot more people than you envisioned.
So the Army becomes the principal.
"In due course a table of organization was set
up which assigned people to region, then to province, and most of
them were Army. You'd have a captain at province and a major or
[lieutenant colonel] at region with assistants -- corporals and
sergeants and so forth. MACV took the bodies at first as they came
in-country and assigned them regardless of the fact that they may
have been intended for something else. For example, my deputy was
going to a military unit but found himself in ICEX instead. Another
fellow who was going to be assigned to MACV counterintelligence
instead was assigned to an intelligence function in ICEX. That's
where the first people came from."
The first MACV allotment to Phoenix was for 126
military officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs), all
counterintelligence specialists. One officer, one NCO, and one
clerk-typist had been sent to each corps by September 15, and one
officer and/or NCO to each province. By the end of 1967 one NCO had
been assigned to each of the 103 DIOCCs then in existence. All
military officers and enlisted men assigned to the Phoenix program
in 1967 took orders from the CIA.
Tab 7 provided for briefing and coordination
with senior GVN officials. While the groundwork was being laid on
the American side of the program, Parker said, "we were working with
the Vietnamese to sell them the idea. Although they were militarily
assisting, the Vietnamese police had the major role because after
all, you're dealing primarily with civilians. So the person who
worked most closely with us was the director general of the National
Police."
But General Nguyen Ngoc Loan was wary of the
CIA, which was supporting Nguyen Van Thieu -- not Nguyen Cao Ky --
in the campaign leading up to the October 1967 presidential
elections. And even though Ky was persuaded to run as Thieu's vice-
president (they joined forces against "peace" candidate Tran Van
Dzu), the two were bitter enemies. As Ky's enforcer General Loan
opposed Phoenix not only because it infringed on Vietnamese
sovereignty but because he believed it was being used to promote
Thieu. Their opposition to Phoenix was to spell trouble for General
Loan and his patron, Ky.
General Loan's opposition to Phoenix, however,
did not mean that he refused to work with Americans on an equal
basis. His support for CT IV disproves that. And Cong Tac IV "was a
program that was doing well, too," said Tully Acampora, "until
February 1967. Then Robert Komer arrived, grabbed the political
implications, and, after returning to Washington and conferring with
his boss, Walt Rostow, purloined it from the Vietnamese." [3]
CT IV differed, fundamentally, from Phoenix in
that the U.S. military units it employed were not empowered to
arrest Vietnamese civilians. Phoenix, on the other hand, relied
primarily on the PRU, which operated under the exclusive
jurisdiction of the CIA and thus were beyond General Loan's control.
General Loan naturally preferred to work with General McChristian's
Combined Intelligence Staff. But when McChristian left Vietnam in
July 1967, Komer immediately exploited the situation. At Komer's
direction, MACV officers assigned to CT IV were gradually withdrawn
by McChristian's replacement, General Phillip Davidson, whom Tully
Acampora described as "beholden" to Komer for his job.
"Komer was disastrous," Acampora stressed. "He
more than anyone politicized MACV. He was forcing for a treaty,
promoting Phoenix and promising Westmoreland the job of Army chief
of staff, if he went along. In mid-1967 it was a completely
political situation."
Indeed, by deducting more than a hundred
thousand Self-Defense Forces and "political cadre" from the enemy
order of battle, Westmoreland, Komer, and Hart were able to show
success and in the process convince President Johnson that "the
light" really was at the end of the tunnel. Meanwhile, having backed
themselves into a corner, they decided to do the job themselves. So
what if General Loan was resistant? As Nelson Brickham had said,
"That's okay 'cause we're gonna do it anyway!"
Symbolizing this "get tough" policy was
Phoenix, rising from the devastation of two years of a stalemated
war. Phoenix in this hawkish manifestation represented the final
solution to the problem of distinguishing between a covert Communist
enemy and an
inscrutable ally. Uninhibited by family ties,
Americans in charge of irregular forces, or by themselves, began
hunting the VCI in its villages, doing what the Vietnamese were
reluctant to do -- even though they were never quite sure of whom
they were stalking.
This desperate policy was not without its
American detractors. Tempestuous Tully Acampora called it
"detrimental and contradictory." Ed Brady, the Army captain assigned
to the Phoenix Directorate as a cover for his CIA activities,
concurs. "It's very hard to carry out secret covert operations and
repressive kinds of things in order to separate guerrillas from
people -- and then make a speech to them about how their individual
rights are so important," Brady said in an interview with Al
Santoli. [4]
But while Acampora and Brady believed the
United States had no business preempting the Vietnamese when it came
to the attack against the VCI, other Americans thought that the time
for patience and cooperation had come and gone. From Evan Parker's
perspective, the problem was competition between the Special Branch
and the ARVN. "It involved one Vietnamese agency saying, 'Well, we
can't give [information] to them, because they're penetrated by the
VC.' That sort of thing. And in some cases undoubted it was true."
Parker raised a legitimate point. In order for
an intelligence coordination and exploitation program like Phoenix
to work, institutional mistrust between the police and the military
had to be overcome. But, Parker explained, "Having the Special
Branch have such an active role made it difficult in many provinces
and many of the more rural areas, because the special policeman was
probably the equivalent of a sergeant. So ... he doesn't have much
clout And the
[outgunned, outmanned] police
are pretty subordinate to the military, so you
have all this business of army versus police. It's a wonder it
worked at all."
Moreover, frustration with Vietnamese security
leaks gave Americans yet another reason not to wait for the
Vietnamese to throw their support behind Phoenix. As Evan Parker
said, "One of the great problems with the Vietnamese in getting this
started was that the classification of the directive was so high --
in order to prevent it from falling into enemy hands -- that it was
very difficult to handle these documents in the field
and tell people what they were supposed to do."
Typically, Tully Acampora refuted Parker's
explanation and interpreted the emphasis on secrecy in political
terms. According to Acampora, for whom the switch from CT IV to
Phoenix meant a loss in status, Parker "always envisioned Phoenix as
a wholly U.S.-promoted, -managed, and -supported program." Moreover,
"Hart's one mission was to undermine Loan's influence, to reduce his
power base, and to superimpose
Phoenix on CT Four. They bought off the head of
Special Branch, Major Nguyen Tien. Then Parker started suborning
guys on the MACV intelligence staff. He seduced Colonel Junichi
Buhto [MACV's chief of counterintelligence] by promising to make him
a GS-nineteen if he went along with the CIA
Davidson's mission was to
destroy CT Four, and in August, Davidson and
the CIA began withdrawing Americans from the Combined Intelligence
Staff. This involves the election of 1967."
There is no doubt that Phoenix, in its
fledgling stage, was conceived and implemented by the CIA.
Furthermore, Ralph Johnson writes, "The results obtained by ICEX by
the end of 1967 were primarily, if not totally, stimulated and
supported by the Americans." [5] There was early acceptance of
Phoenix by the Vietnamese in I Corps, but as Parker himself noted,
much of that activity was directed against Thieu's non- Communist
political opponents. Otherwise, the majority of Vietnamese hesitated
to embrace a program as politically explosive as Phoenix. As Johnson
observes, "most province chiefs were waiting for instructions from
the Central Government." [6]
The first step in that direction was taken in
late December 1967, two months after Thieu had been elected
president and Ky had begun to lose influence. On December 20, 1967,
Prime Minister Nguyen Van Loc signed Directive 89-Th. T/VP/M,
legalizing Phung Hoang, the Vietnamese clone of Phoenix. However,
the directive was not signed by President Thieu and thus carried
little weight with cautious province chiefs hedging their bets while
Thieu established himself more solidly.
It is also important to note that Prime
Minister Loc's reasons for authorizing Phung Hoang were directly
related to Robert Komer's attempt to undermine General Loan and
Nguyen Cao Ky by ending support for CT IV. After December 1, 1967,
when Komer managed to terminate Operation Fairfax, Loc had no choice
but to support Phoenix. And, according to Tully Acampora, by
withdrawing the U.S. units that shielded CT IV's Field Police,
"Komer opened up all the avenues which led to Tet." Making matters
worse, in an attempt to stimulate the South Vietnamese economy and,
in the process, allow Thieu to reap the political rewards, Komer
went so far as to remove police roadblocks and checkpoints around
Saigon.
Meanwhile, Tully Acampora was pleading with as
many American generals as he could find, asking them not to withdraw
American forces from CT IV. "Loan was saying that there was a
massive influx of VC into Saigon," Acampora recalled, "but Komer was
calling it light, and Hart backed him. They wouldn't listen to Loan,
who was trying to convince them for sixty days prior to Tet."
Nelson Brickham, for one, admitted to having
been fooled. "The VC had pulled their good people out and sent them
up North in 1966. We knew that. Then, in the summer and fall of
1967, they came back. But I misinterpreted it. In October 1967 I
told Colby
that we were in a position that no NVA or VC
unit could move without us knowing it. We saw Loan's warnings as
crying wolf." [7]
"We were picking up massive numbers of
infiltrators," Acampora told me, "so Loan countermanded the Joint
General Staff's orders to withdraw; he refused to pull out all of
his people. He kept a paratroop unit and a marine unit in Saigon and
canceled all police leaves. Those units, with the police, met the
first assault in Tet. Then, of course, Loan was resurrected." But by
then it was too late. In Acampora's judgment, Komer's machinations
brought about Tet. "The fact is," he said, "that Parker contributed
to that disaster, too. Parker said Phoenix was the only impediment,
that it turned defeat into victory. But the embassy was attacked!
How could that happen? The fact is, Phoenix was a failure, and it
was only because of Loan that the VC suffered a setback."
"In any event, the prime minister said, 'Do
it.' He gave the order," Evan Parker said, "and he wrote the letters
to empower them to do it, and Phung Hoang came into being on the
Vietnamese side
A Phung Hoang staff was set up by the Vietnamese
consisting primarily of people from Special
Branch. Then they set up quarters for them " at the National Police
Interrogation Center. "The two organizations had separate quarters,"
Parker added, "because we wanted the Vietnamese to feel that Phoenix
was a Vietnamese program and that the Americans were simply
advisers."
"So anyway" -- Parker sighed -- "we went
through this organizational phase. The Vietnamese went through the
same thing, pulling together the police and whatever, trying to set
up staffs, finding places for them to sit, providing them with
pencils and paper, and trying to get them to actually conduct some
sort of operations. And here you come to the nitty-gritty."
***
Tab 8 of "Action Program" called for review of
VCI intelligence collection requirements and programs, especially
Project Corral, a unilateral American operation started in October
1966 solely to collect information on the VCI at province level.
After completing their review, CIA officers on
the Phoenix staff began to prepare a standard briefing on the VCI
for incoming officers and interested officials. They also began
compiling handbooks, interrogation guides, and "related materials"
like most wanted lists.
Especially effective against the VCI, most
wanted lists had been used for years by Special Forces when, in
April 1967, Renz Hoeksema's deputy, Robert Brewer, initiated a Most
Wanted program in Saigon and expanded it nationwide. "Every province
was directed to examine its files for a list of ten," [8] Brewer
explained
noting that the object of the exercise was to
show that the enemy was not "faceless." Soon most wanted "posters,"
replete with composite drawings (prepared by Special Branch officers
using New York City Police Department makeup kits, of VCI suspects
were being nailed to trees, DIOCC walls, and market stalls
throughout Vietnam. The posters offered cash rewards and had a
picture of the phoenix to catch people's attention. (See enclosure.)
In the spring of 1967 Komer appointed Brewer as
senior adviser in Quang Tri Province. "When I got there, I got all
the intelligence-gathering outfits together," Brewer recalled, "and
we wrote up a list of the twenty-one most wanted VCI. One guy on my
list, Bui Tu, had killed a district adviser's sergeant, and I wanted
to get him. So I went to the high school and found his picture in
the yearbook. That really paid off.
On a sleepy afternoon in July the word came in
from Special Branch that Bui Tu was in the area. The DIOCC notified
district, district notified village, and the Marine combined action
patrol went after him.
"Bui Tu had been spotted in a shelter on a rice
paddy. Three guys jumped up and ran, and the Popular Force team and
the Marines mowed them down. Bui Tu was number one. The top. He had
captain's bars and a briefcase full of notes, with a quarter inch of
papers on me! They knew where I slept in the compound and they were
planning to kill me." Thanks to Bui Tu's documents and information
provided by the defector, Brewer said, "We blew the VCI apart."
What Brewer described is a typical Phoenix
operation: A most wanted poster led to a high-ranking VCI suspect's
being spotted and killed, while his captured documents revealed the
whereabouts and identities of many of his VCI comrades. Most wanted
posters also served to inhibit the VCI. As Jim Ward explained to me,
"All of a sudden this guy who used to travel from place to place
begins to wonder who is going to turn him in! It begins to prey on
him. We found out later that this really had a significant
psychological impact on these guys, making them hide and becoming
less effective." Said Ward: "It suppresses them." [9]
By the end of 1967 thirty-five provinces were
compiling blacklists of VCI members, and twenty-two more had most
wanted lists. [10]
Tab 9 of "Action Program" called for review and
recommendations for action programs to exploit infrastructure
intelligence. In theory this meant the training, direction, and
coordination, by U.S. personnel, of Field Police and PRU in anti-VCI
operations. Between the two, the PRU were more effective, accounting
for 98 percent of all anti-VCI operations in I Corps alone. In
November 1967, Ralph Johnson writes, "II Corps and III Corps
reported that 236 significant VCI were eliminated by the PRU, which
continued as the main action arm of the 'rifle shot' approach." [11]
"Basically the PRU were effective," Parker
stated. "In some cases the police were effective. And in many areas
more got done in capturing VCI in military operations. But I was
interested in getting key people. You can arrest the little ones,
but the operation goes on and on, and you haven't really hurt them.
But it's very hard to get a really important man.
"I personally wasn't involved in any
operations," Parker stressed. "Operational control was exercised at
whatever level it was happening at, by the so-called action
agencies. The idea was to use resources wherever they were
If there needed to be
cooperation, the Vietnamese would consult
if they trusted the head of the other
agency. Unfortunately the Americans would
conduct operations without telling the Vietnamese. And vice versa."
By the end of 1967 the Field Police were
conducting anti-VCI operations in twenty- six provinces; thirty-nine
provinces were using systems taught by Phoenix staffers on how
properly to "debrief" defectors, who were used as spotters, PRU, and
interrogators. Included in the Phoenix arsenal were joint
military-police search and destroy and cordon and search operations,
population and resources control, and riverine and maritime
operations.
Tab 10 charged the Phoenix program with
improving the civilian detention system. About this subject Nelson
Brickham remarked, "The one major element left out of all this was
the civilian detainee problem. It starts with the Province
Interrogation Centers, but the larger problem is, How do you screen
detainees, and then what do you do with identified VCI?
"When you'd go through these village sweeps,
you'd have whole corrals filled full with Vietnamese just sitting
there looking at you all day long. In rural provinces you'd wind up
with barbed-wire cages with tin roofs packed with people. It was a
major problem basically because we were running a revolving-door
operation.
We'd capture VC; then a week later we'd capture
them again
assuming they
were VC. The Vietcong always knew about these
sweeps several days beforehand and always pulled out before we hit.
In a lot of sweeps all you would get were the old men and women and
kids. There were VC in there, too
but nobody knows
really who they are.
"There were legal questions. Do we
reindoctrinate them? Do we shoot them? Do we put them back on the
farm? It was just out of control. So one of John Hart's tasks on the
original ICEX charge was, What to do with these civilian detainees?
Do they have prisoner of war status? Remember, there's no war going
on! But in Geneva Americans were saying, 'We're treating these
people like POWs.' The Swiss were saying, 'Okay. We want a look into
the prison system.' So Hart became
concerned with the problem, and the reason it
shows up in the ICEX proposal is at John Hart's insistence.
"It went 'round and 'round, and the long and
short of it was, nobody wanted to get the name of the Jailer of
Vietnam attached to them. USAID didn't want to touch the problem
with a ten-foot pole
Same with the military. Their attitude was 'He's a
POW. Forget him. When the war's over, we'll
ship him back to the farm.' And so one of our tasks was to
investigate the problem and recommend a solution to it. But we never
did. What we did was to beg the question. We tasked the problem over
to the new plans and programs element of the ICEX staff. What they
did, I don't know."
What the ICEX staff did was state the problem.
As listed in Tab 10, the major issues were: (1) overcrowding,
substandard living conditions, and indiscriminate crowding of POWs,
common criminals, VC suspects, and innocent bystanders in ramshackle
detention facilities; (2) lack of an adequate screening mechanism to
determine who should be interrogated, jailed, or released; and (3) a
judicial system (lacking due process, habeas corpus, arrest
warrants, and lawyers, that might delay someone's trial for two
years while he languished in a detention camp or else might release
him if he could afford the bribe.
In seeking solutions to these problems, Tab 10
proposed: (1) the construction of permanent detention facilities;
(2) a registration system, coordinated with refugee and Chieu Hoi
programs, to eliminate the revolving-door syndrome; and (3) judicial
reform aimed at the rapid disposal of pending cases, as devised by
Robert Harper, a lawyer on contract to the CIA. In addition, a study
team from the CORDS Research and Analysis Division (where Phoenix
operational results were sent along with a weekly summary of
significant activities, conducted "a comprehensive and definitive
study of all aspects of the problems of judicial handling and
detention of civilian infrastructure." [12] This three-man study
team (John Lybrand, Craig Johnstone, and Do Minh Nhat) reported on
apprehension and interrogation methods; the condition and number of
jails, prisons, and stockades; and graft and corruption.
Regarding overcrowding, by early 1966 there was
no more space available in the GVN's prison system for "Communist
offenders." And as more and more people were captured and placed in
PICs, jails, and detention camps, a large percentage was necessarily
squeezed out. Hence the revolving door.
In the fall of 1967 the forty-two province
jails where most VCI suspects were imprisoned had a total capacity
of 14,000. Of the four national jails, Con Son Prison held about
3,550 VCI members; Chi Hoa Prison in Saigon held just over 4,000;
Tan Hiep Prison outside Bien Hoa held nearly 1,000; and Thu Duc held
about 675 VCI, all
women. Approximately 35,000 POWs were held in
six MACV camps scattered around South Vietnam. VC and NVA prisoners
fell under U.S. military supervision while ARVN camps handled ARVN
deserters and war criminals. [13]
***
As attorney Harper wrestled with the problem of
judicial reform, a mild-mannered, medium-built, retired Marine Corps
colonel, Randolph Berkeley, tackled the detention camp problem.
Before retiring in 1965, Berkeley had been the corps's assistant
chief of staff for intelligence. In 1966 he was hired by the Human
Sciences Research Corporation to do a study in Vietnam on civil
affairs in military operations, and in early 1967 he briefed Komer
in the White House on the subject. Komer liked what he heard and
hired Berkeley (who had no corrections experience) as his senior
adviser on corrections and detentions) in which capacity Berkeley
returned to Saigon in July 1967 as a member of the ICEX staff.
Upon arriving in Saigon in July 1967, Berkeley
was assigned by Evan Parker to manage the SIDE (screening,
interrogation, and detention of the enemy) program. Berkeley and
five assistants -- all experienced corrections officers -- were
listed on paper as employees of Public Safety's Department of
Corrections.
"Shortly after my arrival," Berkeley recalled
in a letter to the author, "I was called to report to General
Westmoreland. I found him with staff members and Ambassador Komer,
and it was explained to me that I needed to draft a plan, within a
few weeks, which would make the prisons secure from attacks, as
valuable lives were being lost in capturing VC who would then be
sprung quickly to fight again
The
Westmoreland meeting turned me into an operator
so busy with his requirements," Berkeley explained, "that my focus
was more on prisons than detentions. [14]
"The CIA provided me space in one of their
offices at MACV headquarters, and for several weeks I flew about in
an Air America plane, scouting locations for attackproof detention
facilities and prisons, taking aerial photographs myself, and
developing the plan." While doing this, Berkeley learned: "There
were over forty prisons nationwide, detention facilities [usually
'just a barracks surrounded by barbed wire'] in every province, and
the GVN had neglected all of them in nearly every aspect, including
protection from attack by the enemy.
"When my plan was presented on schedule,
General Westmoreland approved it and directed that I execute it. In
the next few months the prisons were provided defensive weapons and
guards trained to use them, and
attacks on prisons quickly lost their
popularity. One other device we used was to fly
VC prisoners to Con Son Island, which was secure from any enemy
attack."
Having satisfied Westmoreland's requirement for
prison security, Berkeley turned to the issue of detention
facilities. "I visited Singapore and Malaya to look at prefab
construction for possible use in detention camp construction but
decided it was cheaper to do the job with local resources available
in Vietnam. Meaning the detention problem was dropped like a hot
potato, this time into the hands of the GVN." ICEX Memo No. 5, dated
November 2, 1967, handed responsibility for the operation and
security of detention camps to the province chiefs, with advice and
some resources provided by MACV through Berkeley and the Department
of Corrections.
On December 27, 1967, MACV issued Directive
381-46, creating Combined Tactical Screening Centers and stating:
"The sole responsibility for determining the status of persons
detained by U.S. forces rests with the representatives of the U.S.
Armed Forces." Case closed. In every Combined Tactical Screening
Center, the detaining unit did the screening, interrogating, and
classifying of rows and civilian detainees, sending enemy soldiers
to POW camps or to Saigon if they had strategic intelligence, to
provincial jails if they were common criminals, or to PICs if they
were deemed to be VCI.
"There were, in effect," Evan Parker explained,
"two prison systems: "the civil one under USAID and the military one
for POWs. PICs were separate and staffed as an agency program ...
but there had to be a lot of understanding between us in order not
to waste money." For example, the CIA would provide PICs with vans
but not gas or oil or mechanics. The Phoenix coordinator would then
have to persuade the Public Safety adviser to persuade the
Vietnamese police chief to provide these materials and services to
the Special Branch, which, considering the ongoing rivalries, got
done grudgingly, if at all.
"The problem Phoenix dealt with," Evan Parker
added, "was making sure that when a knowledgeable person got picked
up, the right person got to talk to him and he just didn't disappear
in the system." This weeding-out process happened in the PICs
"because there you had the Vietnamese whose salaries were paid by
the agency. They weren't beholden to the military or AID."
Ultimately Phoenix did nothing to alleviate the
problems of civilian detainees. Rather, as Phoenix threw its dragnet
across South Vietnam, tens of thousands of new prisoners poured into
the already overcrowded system, and the revolving door syndrome was
simply converted by province chiefs into a moneymaking proposition.
Meanwhile, ICEX lawyers tried to paper over the problem by compiling
a handbook on national security laws and procedures, which legalized
the attack against the VCI by permitting the administrative
detention of VCI
suspects for up to two years without trial. No
steps were taken to establish due process for civilian detainees.
***
Tab 11 called for the Phoenix Directorate "to
conduct an on the ground review of interrogation facilities,
practices and procedures, including coordination, exploitation, and
follow through, with a view to optimum support to the attack on the
infrastructure." The object was to focus interrogations on
intelligence concerning the VCI at province and district levels and
to improve coordination with other agencies. No report was required
from the CIA compartment within the Phoenix Directorate on this
sensitive subject.
Regarding the "practices" of the PIC program,
what is known of official policy comes from Nelson Brickham. "I had
an absolute prohibition in field operations activities toward
conducting or sanctioning or witnessing any acts of torture," he
said. "I said the same thing to my province officers from the third
day I was in- country. My statement [which he never put in writing]
simply was 'Any of you guys get caught in this stuff, I'll have you
going home within twenty-four hours.' And there never was such a
case that came into existence, although it's possible that there was
and the reports never got to me."
Brickham also directed his province officers
"to run the PICs from a distance. It's a Special Branch operation;
Americans are not to be identified with the program. These guys were
not to go near the PICs on a day-to-day basis. They were not to
participate in interrogations there or anything like that."
Brickham's directive was ignored. Warren
Milberg, for example, spent "15 percent" of his time in the Quang
Tri PIC, supervising interrogations and advising on questions and
topics to pursue. His experience is typical; an earnest Phoenix
officer had to be at the interrogation center to obtain intelligence
quickly. Indeed, in the final analysis, interrogation practices were
judged on the quality of the reports they produced, not on their
humanity. "Phoenix advisers who took an interest in PIC operations,"
Milberg writes, "normally attempted to improve the quality of
interrogation techniques by carefully going over reports and
pointing out leads that were missed and other items which should
have been explored in greater detail." [15]
As for torture, "While the brutalization of
prisoners did occur, interested Phoenix personnel could curtail
support for the PIC unless such unauthorized activities ceased."
However, Milberg adds, "Since most advisers were neither
intelligence nor interrogation experts, the tendency existed to
provide passive support and not to try and improve PIC operations."
[16]
According to Robert Slater, director of the
Province Interrogation Center program from July 1967 until April
1969, "The first thing the Vietnamese wanted to do was tie the guy
up to a Double E-eight." As advisers, however, there was little he
and his training team could do to prevent this use of an electric
generator, other than to try to raise the professional standards of
PIC personnel. Slater and his team (augmented and eventually
replaced by a Vietnamese team) taught Special Branch employees how
to track VCI suspects on maps, how to keep files and statistics on
suspects, and how to take and process photos properly. They did not
teach agent handling; that was done in Saigon by CIA experts
imported from Washington. "The whole concept of the PIC," according
to Slater, "was to get them in and turn them around. Make them our
agents. It didn't work for us, though, because we didn't reward them
well enough." [17]
The major "procedural" problem in the Phoenix
interrogation program concerned the disposition of high-ranking VCI
suspects. According to Parker, "High-level prisoners and Hoi Chanhs
were invariably taken to higher headquarters and never heard from
again." Milberg agrees: "People [at region or in Saigon] grabbed our
best detainees on a regular basis, so you tended not to report that
you had one. You'd keep him for two or three days," to get whatever
intelligence he had on other VCI agents in the province, then report
that you had him in custody." Milberg writes that when "prisoners of
high position in the VCI were removed from local PICs for
exploitation at other levels, morale of PIC personnel decreased.
Often the result was that the PICs became auxiliary jails and were
used to house common criminals." [18]
For Robert Slater, the transfer of important
VCI prisoners to higher headquarters was merely standard operating
procedure. "We trained Special Branch people how to properly keep
statistics and files, how to use a board in the office to track
cases, but most important, to send hot prospects from province to
region to the National Police Interrogation Center [NPIC]." In other
words, Phoenix interrogation procedures at the province (tactical)
level were superseded by interrogation procedures at the national
level -- the political-level Phoenix seeking strategic intelligence.
Having been the CIA's senior adviser at the
National Police Interrogation Center, Slater had valuable insights
into the interrogation system at its summit. His story began at Camp
Pendleton in early 1967, when he was asked to join a presidentially
directed counterinsurgency program that trained and sent fifty
Vietnam veterans from the various military services back to Vietnam
to serve as province officers and Phoenix coordinators. "But I was a
separate entity," he noted in a conversation with the author, "...
although we went over at the same time." A Vietnamese linguist with
three years of interrogation experience in-country, Slater was
assigned to the NPIC "on the basis of a decision made in Saigon.
Dave West said he won me in the lottery,
when the station people sat around and reviewed
the resumes of the people coming over."
Slater's cover desk was in USAID II, where he
sat beside his boss, a tall, muscular, blond CIA officer named Ron
Radda, who served as an adviser to Dang Van Minh. Slater attended
briefings given by Minh every morning at the NPIC on Vo Thanh
Street, where he had his covert office. "When a prisoner came in
from, say, Da Nang,"
Slater explained, "the reports would come over
to my section. I'd put them on an eight-foot-long blackboard and
report anything hot to Ron." At that point Radda and Minh's
interrogators went to work.
Headquarters for both the Special Branch and
the National Police, the NPIC was "a monstrous French compound with
a separate, restricted wing for the Special Branch. We cleaned it
up," Stater said. "Actually whitewashed it." After Tet, the CIA also
built the Special Branch social club, the Co Lac Bo, on the
gravesite of the VC killed during Tet. The NPIC held between three
and four hundred prisoners, most of whom, Slater says, "were packed
forty or fifty in little black holes of Calcutta."
The fact is that prison conditions and
interrogation practices in Vietnam were brutal -- especially those
taken out of sight. Case in point: "At a quarter after twelve on
June 16, 1967, I was driving home from work to have lunch with my
wife," writes Tran Van Truong in A Vietcong Memoir. Suddenly a car
cut him off. Two men jumped out, pushed their way into his car, and
told him that General Loan had "invited him to come in for a talk."
Instead of going to the NPIC, however, Truong's captors took him to
the old Binh Xuyen headquarters in Cholon. As he was led into the
reception room, he found himself "face to face with a burly,
uniformed man whose slit eyes and brutal expression were fixed on me
in concentrated hatred ... a professional torturer who had
personally done in many people." The interrogator said to Truong, "I
have the right to beat you to death. You and all the other Vietcong
they bring in here. There aren't any laws here to protect you. In
this place you are mine." [19]
Truong describes this secret interrogation
center. "Sprawled out on the floor the whole length of the corridor
were people chained together by the ankles. Many of their faces were
bloody and swollen; here and there, limbs jutted out at unnatural
angles. Some writhed in agony, others just lay and stared dully.
From the tangle of bodies came groans and the sound of weeping, and
the air was filled with a low, continuous wail. My heart began to
race. On one side of the hallway were the doors that apparently led
to the interrogation rooms. From behind these came curses and
spasmodic screams of pain." [20]
Later Truong was invited inside one of these
rooms; it "looked like a medieval torture chamber," he writes. "Iron
hooks and ropes hung from the ceiling, as did chains with ankle and
wrist rings. These latter devices were well known among the
activists and Front prisoners, who called them the Airplane. In one
corner was a dynamo. Several tables and benches stood in the middle
of the floor or were pushed up against the walls." What happened
next, you can imagine.
The last tab of "Action Program," Tab 12,
directed Evan Parker and his staff to establish "requisite"
reporting systems, "for purposes of program management and
evaluation, and for support to field collection and collation
activities and operations against infrastructure." [21] At first,
each agency used its existing system. Province officers gathered
information on the VCI from the collation sections of PICs. They
then sent this information to region officers, who used liaison
branch reporting formats to relay the information to RDC
headquarters in Saigon. There it was analyzed and plugged into a
data base "against which future developments and progress may be
measured." MACV sector personnel sent their reports on the VCI
through military channels to the MACV Joint Operations Office in
Saigon, which then coordinated with ICEX.
As MACV and CIA Phoenix personnel were
gradually incorporated within CORDS province advisory teams and
assigned to PIOCCs and DIOCCs, monthly narrative reports were sent
directly to the Phoenix staff in Saigon; meanwhile, the Vietnamese
used their own parallel, uncoordinated reporting systems.
Standardized reporting was fully authorized on
November 25, 1967, and focused on three things: (1) the number of
significant VCI agents eliminated; (2) the names of those
eliminated; and (3) significant acquisition, utilization, and other
remarks. Until mid-1968 reports about the DIOCCs would occupy as
much time as reports generated by the 103 DIOCCs in business at the
time. Ultimately information gathered on individual VCI suspects in
the DIOCCs became the grist of the Phoenix paper mill.
CHAPTER 11: PRU
In early 1967 Frank Scotton left his post in
Taiwan and returned to Saigon to help set up CORDS. Upon arriving
in-country, Scotton found Colonel Nguyen Be, who was investigating
corruption within RD units, "in Qui Nhon being set up for
assassination. While the hit team [dispatched by General Lu Lam, the
II Corps commander] was hunting him down," Scotton told me, "I flew
him to safety in Pleiku." [1] In the
meantime, Ed Lansdale arranged with the RD
minister, General Nguyen Duc Thang, for Be to assume control of Vung
Tau from Tran Ngoc Chau. Chau went on to campaign for a seat in the
National Assembly, itself recently instituted under South Vietnam's
new constitution.
Soon after this changing of the guard, Tom
Donohue (then George Carver's deputy at SAVA), paid a visit to Vung
Tau. Robert Eschbach had replaced Ace Ellis as director of the
National Training Center; Jean Sauvageot had taken over the
Revolutionary Development Cadre training program; and Tucker
Gougleman managed the PRU. On the Vietnamese side, Donohue told me,
"Be was in charge. But he wasn't in the same league as Mai," who
"was in the Saigon office cutting paper dolls." [2]
Under the tutelage of Nguyen Be, according to
Jim Ward, "the RD teams no longer had a security mission." [3] In
order to foster a democratic society, Be had transformed RD from the
"intelligence and displacement" program Frank Scotton had started
three years earlier in Quang Ngai Province into one that emphasized
"nation building." But with little success. Of South Vietnam's
fifteen thousand-odd villages, only a few hundred were secure enough
to hold elections in 1967. And where elections were held, they were
typically a sham. The RD teams had nominated all the "elected"
village chiefs after the chiefs had been recruited by the CIA and
trained at Vung Tau. Nevertheless, the village chiefs really didn't
know what they were supposed to do or represent, and, as a matter of
practicality, their top priority often was accommodating the local
VC. And so with the Revolutionary Development teams on the
defensive, the attack against the VCI fell to Phoenix or was
contracted out. For example, in order to ferret out the VCI in
critical Tay Ninh Province, President Johnson hired, at the cost of
thirty-nine million dollars, the services of a Filipino Civic Action
team. [4]
Meanwhile, in Saigon fantastic amounts of money
were being spent (seventy-five million dollars in 1967) in support
of RD. But corruption was rife, and much of the money was diverted
into people's pockets. For example, while inspecting Quang Ngai
Province in mid-1967, RDC/O chief Renz Hoeksema found eight hundred
"ghost" employees out of a total of thirteen hundred cadres on the
province RD Cadre payroll. Hoeksema set up a fingerprinting system
to prevent further abuses, which, considering that each cadre was
paid the equivalent of ten dollars a month, continued unabated.
Despite the problems of corruption and
accommodation, the RD program continued to have "intelligence
potential," mainly through its static and mobile Census Grievance
elements. According to Robert Peartt, who in late 1967 replaced Renz
Hoeksema, the RD program's primary mission was still to "put eyes
and ears in districts where there were none before." [5] To this
end, Peartt managed 284 paramilitary officers in the
provinces, each of whom fed information on the
VCI into DIOCCs and PIOCCs, while passing information gotten from
unilateral sources to the CIA station in Saigon through secure
agency channels. On the Vietnamese side, information on the VCI was
fed to the province chiefs, who, according to Jim Ward, "may or may
not turn this over to Phoenix."
In any event, the political war was not going
well in late 1967, and with the shift in emphasis to "nation
building," Phoenix emerged from the RD matrix as the CIA's main
weapon against the VCI. Its two major action arms, as stated in MACV
Directive 381 and Action Program Tab 9, were the PRU and Field
Police. Of the two, the PRU were "by far the most effective and
suffered the lowest casualties," according to the 1966 Combined
Campaign Plan, which also noted that "the type of target attacked by
the PRU was strategically most significant." [6]
This chapter focuses on the PRU, which more
than any other program is associated with Phoenix. But first a quick
review of the Field Police, which at the behest of Robert Komer was
to be "redirected" against the infrastructure, ''as its main
function."
Naturally Colonel William "Pappy" Grieves did
not respond favorably to this "redirection" of the Field Police,
calling it "a misreading of its mission" and calling Phoenix "a
phase that set us back." [7] As an example of the proper use of
Field Police, Grieves, in a briefing for General Abrams, cited
Operation Dragnet in Binh Dinh Province, "in which three companies
of Field Police at a time, for two four- month cycles, worked with
the 1st Cavalry Division in Cordon and Search operations." As
another example of the proper use of Field Police, Grieves cited CT
IV and Operation Fairfax, in which Field Police "search" teams
operated under the protection of security squads provided by the
199th Light Infantry Brigade. Working in six-man teams, the Field
Police searched hooches for hidden documents and weapons and set up
screening centers for suspects, where they checked names against
blacklists and faces against photos obtained from the Family Census
program. Field policemen also checked ID, voter registration, and
draft cards. Such were the functions Grieves believed were
appropriate for a law enforcement organization dedicated to
providing police services to the public. He complained to Abrams:
Then Phoenix was upon us. At the direction and
insistence of Ambassador Komer, the Field Police SOP was drastically
reoriented and reworded, with new emphasis on the anti-subversive
mission, which was the only mission which was spelled out, and which
was emphasized as the first priority mission.
This mission statement resulted in the
tremendous under-utilization of the Field Police. Proper Field
Police missions, other than anti-
subversive, were ignored. Police commanders,
local officials, and US advisors considered the job done when a
Field Police platoon was given carte blanche to a DIOCC, completely
ignoring the fact that Phoenix agencies were not producing enough
real targets to keep any of the multiplicity of reaction forces
available to them fully occupied on this single mission.
Perfectly appropriate and suitable missions
assigned to Field Police units, not fully in use by Phoenix were
constantly reported by US advisers and observers, including Komer,
as misuse of Field Police.
In other words, in the rush to destroy the VCI,
a successful police program was derailed. Likewise, with the
redirection of the Field Police against the VCI, much to Grieves's
dismay, Public Safety advisers like Doug McCollum found themselves
working more closely than ever with the Special Branch and its CIA
advisers. In accordance with procedures instituted by Robert Komer,
McCollum began receiving Aid-in-Kind funds through the province
senior adviser. "I was given twenty thousand dollars a month," he
recalled, "which I had to spend, to develop agent networks in Darlac
Province." [8]
McCollum developed three nets, comprised 90
percent of Montagnards, and presented the intelligence these nets
produced at weekly meetings among himself, the CIA's province
officer, and the MACV sector intelligence officer. These meetings
compared notes on enemy troop movements, VCI suspects, double
agents, and double dippers -- agents who were working for more than
one U.S. agency. The CIA's province officer, according to McCollum,
got his intelligence from the PRU and the Truong Son Montagnard RD
program. When VCI members were identified, individual or joint
operations were mounted. When called upon to contribute, McCollum
dispatched his Field Police company under former Special Forces
Sergeant Babe Ruth Anderson.
The PRU adviser, Roger, was a mercenary hired
by and reporting only to the province officer.
"It was two halves of the apple," McCollum
recalled. "Collection and operations. We would get blacklists from
the province officer with names of people in villages or hamlets.
The Field Police went out with ARVN units or elements of the U.S.
Fourth Division, usually on cordon and search operations. We'd
select a target. The day before we were going to hit it, we'd get
picked up in the morning by white Air America choppers. I'd take
twenty-five or thirty Field Police, and we'd land about ten miles
away and set up a base camp with elements of the Fourth Division.
"We'd get up at three A.M., surround the
village, and at daybreak send in a squad to check for booby traps.
Then we'd go in, search the place, segregate women and
children from men, check people against the
blacklist, and take them into custody. We'd get money, boots, and
medicine and sometimes NVA. If the VCI were classified A or B, hard
core, they were sent to the PIC. At that point it was out of my
hands.
We'd take the other prisoners back to Ban Me
Thuot in police custody; we did not give them to the military.
Coming back to camp, the U.S. Fourth Division would use the Field
Police as point men."
As McCollum described them, the Field Police
were used (as Grieves intended) as roving patrols outside Ban Me
Thuot more often than they were used against the VCI. However,
because they did on occasion go after the VCI, by 1967 the Field
Police were being compared with the PRU. In an October 1967 article
in Ramparts, David Welch quotes the Khanh Hoa Province psychological
warfare officer as saying that the Field Police "work just like the
PRU boys. Their main job is to zap the in-betweeners -- you know,
the people who aren't all the way with the government and aren't all
the way with the Viet Cong either. They figure if you zap enough
in-betweeners, people will begin to get the idea." [9]
"Just like the PRU boys"? Unlikely. On February
18,1967, Chalmers Roberts, reporting for the Washington Post on the
subject of counterterror, wrote that "one form of psychological
pressure on the guerrillas which the Americans do not advertise is
the PRU. The PRU work on the theory of giving back what the Viet
Cong deals out -- assassination and butchery. Accordingly, a Viet
Cong unit on occasion will find the disemboweled remains of its
fellows along a well trod canal bank path, an effective message to
guerrillas and to non-committed Vietnamese that two can play the
same bloody game."
Komer may have wished that the Field Police
would operate like the PRU, and in some cases it did, but the PRU
had counterterror and intelligence collection missions which the
Field Police never had, even under Phoenix. Moreover, the PRU were
not a law enforcement organization; in fact, as CIA assets they
operated outside the law and had no legal powers of arrest. The PRU
were the personification of the Special Forces' behind-the-lines
mentality, which in a counterinsurgency meant getting the VCI in its
own villages.
Jim Ward put it this way: "To get a guy in
enemy territory, you've got to get an armed intelligence collection
unit where the guy's got the balls to go into an area to perform the
mission. You're not going to get police officers who are walking a
beat in town or the Special Branch guy who deals with agents.
Generally, the PRU is the outfit that's best equipped."
The problem with the PRU, writes Warren
Milberg, was that "the idea of going out after one particular
individual was generally not very appealing, since even if the
individual was captured, the headlines would
not be very great in terms of body counts, weapons captured, or some
other measure of success." As Milberg observes, "careers were at
stake ... and impressive results were expected." [10]
***
In view of these conflicting pressures -- the
official call for small-unit operations against the VCI and the
dirth of "impressive results" the job afforded -- by 1967 a new
breed of officer was being introduced to the Vietnam War. While
conventional warriors continued to search for big battles, highly
trained and motivated unconventional warfare officers, with an
abiding appreciation for public relations, were called upon to
manage the counterinsurgency.
One of the new breed was Navy Lieutenant John
Wilbur, a tall, husky, sensitive Yale graduate. In April 1967 Wilbur
journeyed to Vietnam as deputy commander of SEAL Team 2, a
twelve-man detachment, with no combat veterans in its ranks, which
was assigned to a naval riverine warfare group and quartered in a
Quonset hut at the My Tho River dock facility in the middle of the
Mekong Delta.
"Frankly," Wilbur (now an attorney in Palm
Beach) told me, "the Navy didn't know what to do with us. They
didn't know how to target us or how to operationally control us. So
basically they said, 'You guys are to go out and interdict supply
lines and conduct harassing ambushes and create destruction upon the
enemy however you can.' Mostly, we were to be reactive to, and
protective of, the Navy's PBRs [river patrol boats]. That was
probably our most understandable and direct mission. The PBR
squadron leaders would bring us intelligence from the PBR patrols.
They would report where they saw enemy troops or if there was an
ambush of a PBR. Then we'd go out and get the guys who did it." [11]
Knowing what to do and doing it, however, were
two vastly different things. Despite their being highly trained and
disciplined, Wilbur confessed, "That first month we started out with
the typical disastrous screw-up operations. In our first operation
... we went out at low tide and ended up
getting stuck in mud flats in broad daylight for six hours before we
could be extracted
We didn't have any
Vietnamese with us, and we didn't understand
very basic things We didn't
know whether it was a VC cadre or a guy trying
to pick up a piece of ass late at night. The only things we had were
curfews and free fire zones. And what a curfew was, and what a free
fire zone was, became sort of an administrative- political decision.
For all we knew, everybody there was terrible.
"We got lost. We got hurt. People were shooting
back at us, and other times we never got to a place where we could
find people to shoot at
There was a lot of
frustration," Wilbur said, "of having no
assurance that the information you got was at all reliable and
timely."
As an example, Wilbur cited the time "we raided
an island across from where the U.S. Ninth Infantry Division was
based. We surrounded the settlement that morning and came in with
our guns blazing I
remember crawling into a hut -- which in
Vietnam was a sort of shed encompassing a mud
pillbox where people would hide from attacks -- looking for a VC
field hospital. There I was with a hand grenade with the pin pulled,
my hand on my automatic, guys running around, adrenaline going
crazy, people screaming -- and I didn't know who the hell was
shooting at who. I can remember that I just wanted to throw the
goddamned grenade in the hut, and screw whoever was in it. And all
of a sudden discovering there was nothing but women and children in
there. It was a very poignant experience.
"This was during that first two-month period,"
Wilbur said, shaking his head. "Then one day a SEAL Team One
enlisted man who was assigned to the CIA came down to My Tho. His
name was Dave, and he was one of two advisers to the PRU, whom we
vaguely knew to be independent. Dave presented us with a whole new
perspective. He was dressed in blue jeans and a khaki shirt, he had
his own jeep, and he went where he wanted and did what he wanted to
do. He had a sense of place. He gave me a fairly broad brief, which
attracted the hell out of me. Then he said, 'I've got some people,
and I'd like to run some operations with you.'"
In exchange, the SEAL team provided the PRU
with increased firepower. Explained Wilbur: "We had all the toys:
M-seventy-nines, CAR fifteens, Swedish Ks, grease guns, and
grenades. Not only that, we had tremendous support capabilities
through the Navy chopper squadron [the Sea Wolves] and the PBRs. And
we got immediate reaction through the Navy chain of command. So it
was advisable for the PRU to work with us. The Vietnamese wanted
helicopter rides and that reaction requirement. In exchange, they
had the skills, the intelligence, and the experience to know where
the bad guys were -- who to shoot at and who not to shoot at. It had
the potential for a very beneficial relationship."
One of the attributes of the PRU was that they
were required to be from the province in which they operated. "So
they had relatives and friends in the area," Wilbur explained, and
"they had their own intelligence network set up. They'd go back to
their hometown for a couple of days, sit around and drink tea and
say, 'What's happening?' And a friend would say, 'Tran's a buddy of
mine; I'll tell him about the VC district chief meeting.'" Tran
would then tell the PRU adviser and, Wilbur said, "Dave, would come
down and say, 'My guy says there's a VC district chief meeting. We
need some helicopter gunship support. We want to be able to
air-evac. You give us the Sea Wolves, we'll give you the operation,
and together we'll score a victory.'"
At first Dave assigned one of the PRU to Wilbur
as a scout, so the the SEALs could adjust to working with a
Vietnamese. The teenage scout "could more or less indicate where the
VC were set up, when they might come by, and where we might ambush
them," Wilbur told me. "He was the kind of person to say, 'We aren't
going to go on a PBR into this town. We'll take a little water taxi,
and we'll hide on the river till night, then go in at three A.M. and
... go there.'"
"He helped us chart a course for the war,"
Wilbur added respectfully. "He gave me a sense of confidence and
made us feel that we weren't spinning our self-destructive wheels. I
was very aware of how minimally trained most Americans were. I
remember being in the Sea Wolf helicopters, and people shooting at
peasants on water buffaloes, or at fishermen in dugouts because they
happened to be in free fire zones, or rocketing huts and burning
things down. But with the PRU, I had the ability to control things
better than the William Calleys did. I was a professional officer in
an elite organization that had a lot of pride, and we were not going
to mess up.
"I remember one evening on an LST, right after
an operation, sensing there was nothing but anarchy bordering on
idiocy in how we were conducting the war." Wilbur sighed. "I
remember writing a letter in my mind to [Yale University President]
Kingman Brewster, telling him how important it was for people who
had some moral training and education to be on the ground to prevent
the negligent cruelties that occurred. I saw myself as that person.
I saw an opportunity for SEAL team assets and training to multiply
exponentially by working with the PRU. I didn't have any master
plan, but I felt, when I am with this kid, I think I know where he's
going, and when he puts his hand on my arm and whispers, 'Don't
shoot,' I know that I shouldn't shoot. And those were significant
things. You felt he was guiding you to do something you ought to do
and preventing you from doing what you ought not to do.
"This guy proved himself to me," Wilbur stated
emphatically. "He was able to command in the field. He was at home,
and I wanted to be like that. He was a very good influence: Plus
which the Vietnamese are very sweet, affectionate people. You'd go
to places and they'd be walking around holding hands with American
sergeants. Or they'd come up behind you, put their arms around you,
hug you, and offer you some cigarettes. The kid was like that. He
was friendly. He reacted. He hung around and became our mascot,
which he liked."
Wilbur was also intrigued by the CIA mystique.
"Dave had this freedom and economy. He was working with intelligent
people, whom I got to know, and so I indicated to him that I'd like
to get into the PRU program. By coincidence, this happened just when
the agency wanted to expand the PRU and develop its mission --
as they envisioned it, a PRU unit in every
province with a Special Forces adviser doing the daily operational
control. Special Forces, including SEALs, Force Recon Marines, Green
Berets, and SAS (British Special Air Service].
"So, lo and behold, just as I became anxious to
get into this area, word came down that the Navy was to suggest an
officer to go up to a two-week briefing in Saigon, to develop a SEAL
adviser system in this program. This was July 1967. I was sent to
Navy headquarters in Saigon and told to go to a huge house with
servant quarters around the walls outside. There we were organized
by Bill Redel. This was his baby," Wilbur said. "There were no
Vietnamese visible, unlike the RD program. The PRU program was
American-controlled, which is absolutely essential. It was the
breakdown of that control that eventually led to the destruction of
the PRU concept."
It is also important to recall that before July
1967 PRU teams were organized and directed by CIA advisers at the
province level through the province chief's special assistant for
pacification. It was only with the formation of ICEX that the PRU
became a national program under CIA officer William R. Redel, a
veteran of Greece and Korea who wore a Marine Corps colonel's
uniform. "He and I were old and close friends," said Evan Parker, a
lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, "and there again we
cooperated with him and helped." [12] Collocated in USAID II, Redel
and Parker worked as equal partners.
"His program was also for going after the VCI,"
according to Parker. "These were paramilitary people, mostly former
Vietcong. In many instances the province chief preferred to use them
as his action arm against the infrastructure, rather than regular
army forces, which were not as responsive. That's the key; the PRU
were directly responsive because you were dealing with the
convinced."
John Wilbur recalled: "Bill Redel was a
good-looking guy: Nordic, blue eyes, tanned -
- a model type of guy. He was a good salesman,
too, smooth bureaucratically and very political. He greased palms
well.
"Bill organized it like a tour," Wilbur said of
the briefing in Saigon. "There were fifteen or twenty of us; SEALs
... Special Forces ... Force Recon Marines, and straight-leg Army
infantry types. Maybe four or five of each. The way it was set up,
the Force Recon people were to be advisers in Eye Corps; by and
large the Special Forces in Two Corps; the Army in Three Corps, and
the SEALs in Four Corps. Most of us were officers or senior enlisted
men.
"During the first week we all stayed at the
same hotel ... and we were indoctrinated in what Civil Operations
and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) was all
about -- Census Grievance, Revolutionary
Development, et cetera. We were given a presentation indicating that
we were all volunteers, then were told what the PRU mission was to
target the political infrastructure of the Vietcong, to gather and
compile accurate information about it, and to react upon that
information to try to destroy the political and economic
infrastructure of COSVN. A lot of our briefing concerned COSVN's
political, economic, and military arms. We were told what the VCI
was, how it operated, and why we were targeted against it. It was
almost like learning about CORDS. It was exciting and heady, too.
Coming from the military envelope, I was awakened into this whole
new world. It was 'Hey! This is a secret' and 'We're the tough
guys!' I was pretty impressed with myself.
"Then we spent two days down at the Vung Tau
training camp. It was actually a short helicopter ride north, off in
the dunes on the South China Sea. The training facility was a
corrugated iron compound with classrooms and barracks, a chow hall,
and lecture rooms. Two or three hundred people. Then there were
rifle ranges and the operational course. There were American
instructors, but not many, and the chief administrator was an
American -- one of the colorful names -- baldheaded, barrel-
chested, tough, marinish. It was also at Vung Tau that I met Kinloch
Bull. Then we all returned to our tactical areas of responsibility.
I went to Can Tho to talk further with Kinloch Bull."
Described by Nelson Brickham as "a strange
person, devious and sly," [13] Bull was one of the few Foreign
Intelligence officers to serve as a CIA region officer in charge. A
confirmed bachelor, Bull worked undercover as the director of a
Catholic boarding school, where he would "preside at the head of the
table like a headmaster." Tall and thin and fastidious, Bull was a
gourmet cook and protege of William Colby's. He was also an
intellectual who confided to Wilbur that his ambition was to sit at
a typewriter on the southern tip of the Ca Mau Peninsula and, like
Camus, write existential novels.
"We lived in Binh Se Moi," recalled Wilbur,
"the motor vehicle hub of Can Tho. Actually it was about five
kilometers up the river, halfway between the city and the airport.
We were down an alley surrounded by whorehouses and massage parlors
where all the enlisted troops would go. There were five or six of us
in the place, and I was by far the junior. The others were all in
their second careers. There was Bill Dodds, a retired Army colonel
with unconventional warfare experience in Korea and Africa. He was
the RDC/O in charge of the paramilitary program of which the PRU was
a part. Another guy living there was Wayne Johnson, the Phong Dinh
province officer. The Special Branch person, the RDC/P, lived with
Kinloch. They were all very paternal, very loyal, very fine people.
"So I started working for Kinloch Bull," Wilbur
said, "but the Navy wanted me still to work for them. They wanted to
make the PRU program theirs, so they could brag about it. But the
CIA told me not to provide the Navy with operational reports, so the
Navy tried to have me relieved. At which point Kinloch said, 'Well,
we'll kick the Navy out of the Delta program then.' It progressed
into a tremendous bureaucratic tug-of-war. Everybody wanted to have
the PRU because they inflated their statistics."
In describing how the PRU program was
structured, Wilbur recalled, "When I got to Can Tho in July, eleven
of the sixteen provinces had PRU units. By September they all did.
The number of PRU varied from province to province. We had a very
large detachment in Can Tho, maybe a hundred. The smallest was
twenty in Kien Giang.
"I tried to make sure my advisers were all
senior enlisted men," Wilbur continued, "from either SEAL Team One
or Two. I had about half and half. We wanted them for a long period
of time, but the SEAL teams wanted to rotate as many people as
possible in the program, to keep it theirs. I recommended one-year
billets, but it turned out to be six months.
"The advisers were assigned to CORDS province
teams and came under the direct command of the CIA's province
officer," Wilbur explained. "They were not under my direct
operational control, and much to my horror, I found myself in an
administrative position. And the senior enlisted people were very
political in terms of how they tried to maximize their independence.
They loved wearing civilian clothes and saying they worked for the
CIA, having cover names and their own private armies, and no bloody
officers or bullshit with barracks. So a lot of my job was ...
maintaining good relations between the PRU advisers and the province
officers, many of whom were retired Special Forces sergeant majors
with distinguished military careers. Often there were sparks between
the PRU adviser and province officer because it was a little too
close to their old professions."
Province officers with military backgrounds
often exerted more control over the PRU teams than young, college
graduate-type officers who had difficulty controlling their
hard-bitten PRU advisers, many of whom were veterans of OPLAN 34A
and the counterterror program before it was sanitized. "So where I
had the most problems," Wilbur explained, "it was usually when the
province officer had more expertise in what the PRU were doing and
would run it more hands-on and, in many instances, better than the
PRU adviser. And in those instances I had to relieve the PRU adviser
... Also, to be honest, a tot of PRU advisers were being manipulated
by their PRU people. You can't have people go out on combat
operations three times a week indefinitely. It's like having teams
in the National Football League play two games a week. It takes time
to recover, and the PRU had a natural and understandable desire to
bag it. So the PRU would figure out excuses to
get their advisers to resist the operation. Then the PRU adviser
would become the man in the middle. Sometimes he'd say, 'Well, we
can't go out; we don't have enough people.'
"In other cases the PRU advisers tried to win
popularity contests with their cadre," according to Wilbur, "and
then the province officer would get mad at the PRU adviser for being
less responsive to him than the PRU cadre themselves. Then that
would create a problem between me and the PRU adviser and in many
instances between me and the province officer. Bill Redel had the
same problem. He was the national PRU adviser, but he had no
authority over the region officers. He would tell me to do things,
and I would do exactly what my enlisted men would do. If I didn't
want to do it, I'd go to Jim Ward and say, 'Do I have to do this?'
And he'd say, 'No. I'm going to tell Bill Redel to go shove it.' In
the same way, my PRU advisers would hide behind their province
people, so as not to do what I wanted them to do."
As for the quality of his PRU advisers, Wilbur
said, "The original SEALs were tough guys who did a lot of training
but hadn't fought in any wars. Then they went over to Vietnam. By
that time they had kids and they weren't that aggressive. The senior
guys wanted to send the PRU people out on operations and stay by the
radio. Which was a problem.
"We had one situation where we got the
operational report that they went out and killed two people and
captured two weapons. But they didn't kill anyone the second time
... and it was the same weapon. My PRU adviser would drop the PRU
team off in his jeep, and he'd pick them up, and he'd transport them
back and forth. So he never discovered that they were going out and
planting weapons.
"Other guys really rose to the occasion,"
Wilbur noted, adding that because the older men played it safe, the
people who started dominating the SEAL ranks "were the young tiger
enlisted men. They'd go out and waste people."
***
One of those "young tiger enlisted men" was
Navy SEAL Mike Beamon, who worked "on the Phoenix program in the Ben
Tre and My Tho areas" from mid-1968 through February 1969. Beamon's
recollections of the PRU resemble Elton Manzione's more than John
Wilbur's. He described the PRU as "made up by and large of guys who
were doing jail time for murder, rape, theft, assault in Vietnam.
The CIA would bail them out of jail under the condition that they
would work in these mercenary units." [14]
Beamon spoke of the PRU using ears as evidence
to prove they had assassinated a particular VCI and of PRU stealing
weapons from South Vietnamese armories and selling them to the CIA.
"I can remember ambushing a lot of tax collectors," he added. "After
they made all the collections, you'd hit them in the morning and rob
them of the money and, of course, kill them. And then report that
all the money was destroyed in the fire fight. They'd carry a
thousand dollars at a time. So we'd have quite a party." [15]
From Beamon's perspective, Phoenix was a
"carefully designed program to disrupt the infrastructure of the
Viet Cong village systems. And apparently on some occasions the plan
was to come in and assassinate a village chief and make it look like
the Viet Cong did it." The idea, he explained, was to "break down
the entire Viet Cong system in that area
" -- a plan which did not work because "the Viet Cong
didn't organize in hierarchies. [16]
"If you organize in a big hierarchy," Beamon
explained, "and have one king at the top and you wipe out the king,
that is going to disrupt the leadership. On the other hand, if you
organize in small guerrilla units, you'll have to wipe out every
single leader. Plus if you organize in small units, you have
communication across units and everybody can assume leadership
It is my feeling," he said, "that
later on we were hitting people that the Viet
Cong wanted us to hit, because they would feed information through
us and other intelligence sources to the CIA and set up a target
that maybe wasn't a Viet Cong, but some person they wanted wiped
out. It might even have been a South Vietnamese leader. I didn't
understand Vietnamese. The guy could've said he was President for
all I knew.
He wasn't talking with me. I had a knife on
him. It was just absolute chaos out there. Here we are, their top
unit. It was absolutely insane." [17]
"From that you can perceive what my job was,"
Wilbur told me, referring to the dichotomy between the theoretical
goals of administrative officers and the operational realities
endured by enlisted men trying to achieve I those goals. "It was
quality control," he said. "I spent a lot of time traveling between
the provinces, doing inspections and field checks on the efficiency
of these groups. My objective was to go out on operations with all
the units so I could report from firsthand knowledge on what their
capabilities and problems were. I was constantly on the road, except
when Dodds would make me sit in the office and handle the reports
which were sent to me from the PRU advisers in the field. The
biggest problem was the thousands of reports. Everybody became
deskbound just trying to supply the paper that fed Saigon and
Washington."
They were not only deskbound but oblivious as
well. "Intelligence people operate in a closet a great deal,"
according to Wilbur. "It got so the guy, literally didn't
know what was happening on the street corner
where he was, fifteen feet away from him, when he could find the
answer by asking someone over coffee."
"Operationally our biggest grapple was the
demand to go out and capture VC cadre," Wilbur continued. "Word
would come down from Saigon: 'We want a province-level cadre,'"
Wilbur said. "Well, very rarely did we even hear of one of those.
Then Colby would say, 'We're out here to get the infrastructure! Who
have you got in the infrastructure?' 'Well, we don't have anyone in
the infrastructure. We got a village guy and a hamlet chief.' So
Colby would say, 'I want some district people, goddammit! Get
district people!' But operationally there's nothing more difficult
to do than to capture somebody who's got a gun and doesn't want to
be captured. It's a nightmare out there, and you don't just say,
'Put up your hands, you're under arrest!'
"First of all," Wilbur explained, "the targets
in many cases were illusionary and elusive. Illusionary in that we
never really knew who the VC district chief was. In some cases there
wasn't any district there. And even if there was someone there, to
find out where he was going to be tomorrow and get the machinery
there before him -- that's the elusive part. Operationally, in order
to do that, you have to work very comprehensively on a target to the
exclusion of all other demands.
To get a district chief, you may have to
isolate an agent out there and set in motion an operation that may
not culminate for six months. It was much easier to go out and shoot
people -- to set up an ambush.
"So what happened, the American demand for
immediate results to justify this new program, ICEX, started to
swamp our operational capabilities. Also at this particular
juncture, the province chiefs started seeing the PRU as their only
effective combat reaction force, and they ultimately were not guys
you could say no to all the time. So the province adviser had to
spend a tremendous amount of time trying to keep the province chief
from using the PRU as his personal bodyguards, to guard his house or
bridges or to go fight VC battalions. We literally had times when
the province chiefs ordered the PRU to go engage a battalion, and
therein was the daily tension of trying to keep the PRU on track, to
respond to the demand for high-level cadre-type targets."
The value of pursuing such an illusionary and
elusive policy was, of course, debated within the CIA itself, with
Jim Ward and Kinloch Bull personifying the CIA's schizophrenia on
the subject. "Kinloch was a plans-oriented person," Wilbur stated.
"He saw the problems of the inability to control a PRU-type
operation. It was the battle of the bulge. Less staff people ...
more contract people
... and less quality among the contract people.
More and more programs. More involvement in overt paramilitary
activities. Paying for Revolutionary Development and things other
than classic intelligence functions."
But whereas Bull tried to stem the tide, his
replacement, Jim Ward, hastened the inevitable. "PRU was Jim Ward's
baby," Wilbur remarked. "That was his love."
"PRU in the Delta," said Ward, "were the finest
fighting force in the country."
How does Ward know? "I went out with the PRU,"
he answered, "but just to see how they were operating." And Ward
expected his province officers to do likewise. "We encouraged the
province officers to go on enough of these operations to make sure
they're properly connected. But the SEAL guy had to go on more," he
added. "Doc Sells down in Bac Lieu Province used to go on three-man
operations. He went out at night dressed in black pajamas, his face
darkened with root juices
They'd go deep
into enemy territory. They'd grab some figure
and they'd bring him back."
On the subject of terror, Ward said, "The PRU
started off as a counterterror program, but that wasn't too well
received in certain areas. That wasn't the basic mission anyway.
They were to get at the guys who were ordering the assassinations of
schoolteachers and the village headmen. They were trying to
'counter' terror. Their basic mission was as an armed intelligence
collection unit -- to capture prisoners and bring back documents."
RDC chief Lou Lapham agreed, when I spoke with
him in 1986, saying that he directed that the PRU capture VCI
members and take them to PICs for interrogation. "But none of us
were so naive," he added, ''as to think that we could stop every PRU
team from carrying out the assassination mission they had as CTs
We
lived in the real world. You just cannot
control the people fighting the war" --
[18] as Phoenix attempted to do.
"Jim Ward wanted ICEX to work," Wilbur said
apologetically. "ICEX was something that Jim came in and
proselytized. Committees were set up. But since ICEX was a broad
term that assumed coordination of multi-agencies, I perceived it as
something that was going to make the intelligence-gathering
capabilities more efficient and that we in the PRU program were
simply going to continue doing what we were doing.
The idea of ICEX was to give us better and more
timely information on the VCI, and we were to be the reaction arm of
ICEX. The Field Police were the reaction arm of the plans people.
We're on call; ICEX comes in with a hot number, and we go out with
the ambulance. ICEX was a name and appeared to create a process, but
the process was informally in place anyway."
As for the viability of the Phoenix-PRU
program, Wilbur commented, "People didn't recognize the practical
difficulties of achieving what its academic objective was to be,
which somehow was to be an ambulance squad that went out and
anesthetized the district people and brought them in [to the DIOCC
or PIOCC or the PIC], where
they were mentally dissected and all this
information would come in. It was a rhetorical approach that just
didn't work out there."
In any event, Wilbur said, "Tet put all that in
abatement. Tet happens and it's 'Don't give me all this ICEX crap.
Go out and get the guys with the guns.' Tet propelled the PRU into
conventional-type small-unit infantry tactics, which, really, they
felt more comfortable with than this sophisticated mission, which
was elusive and illusionary. 'There's a VC squad in the woods! Let's
go get 'em!' It was a more tangible and interesting thing to do.
It's easier to go on an ambush."
This dissolution of the PRU, according to
Wilbur, marked the beginning of the end of the program. "People
began perceiving them as a strike force, a shock troop sort of
thing," he said, adding, "With Tet, the PRU got visible. They
produced staggering statistics, which became attractive for
manipulation and distraction. The objectives started becoming
slogans."
CHAPTER 12: Tet
In September 1967 John Hart developed detached
retinas ("From playing too much tennis," Nelson Brickham quipped)
[1] and was medevaced to the States for treatment. At William
Colby's request, RDC chief Lou Lapham stepped in as acting station
chief, juggling both jobs until late November, when Hart returned to
Saigon, at which point, according to Tully Acampora, "Hart fell out
of bed" [2] and detached his retinas again. Three weeks later,
fearing for his sight, would-be soldier of fortune John Hart left
Vietnam forever. In January 1968 Lewis Lapham was officially
appointed Saigon chief of station.
Unlike his "dynamic" predecessor, scholarly Lou
Lapham favored classic intelligence rather than paramilitary
operations. His priorities, as he articulated them to the author,
were: the political stability of the GVN, understanding the GVN's
plans and intentions, unilateral penetrations of the VCI and COSVN,
and RD programs, including Phoenix.
Lapham assured GVN stability, his number one
priority, by lending to President Thieu whatever support was
necessary to keep him in power, while steering him toward U.S.
objectives through the use of "compatible left" parties managed by
CIA assets like Senator Tran Van Don. As for priority two, Lapham's
senior aides secretly recruited Vietnamese civilians and military
officers "with something to tell us about GVN plans and strategies."
[3]
Vietnamese nationals working for the CIA did so
without the knowledge of their bosses. Their motive, for the most
part, was money.
Unilateral penetrations of the VCI, Lapham's
third priority, were managed by Rocky Stone's special unit.
According to Lapham, "This was the toughest thing, getting an agent
out in Tay Ninh into COSVN, to learn about VC and NVA plans and
strategies. But we thought we did. The operation was a valid one
when I left [in December 1968]." [4]
Lapham described his first three priorities as
"strategic" intelligence. Phoenix, the other RD programs, and SOG
were "tactical." "Phoenix was designed to identify and harass VCI,"
Lapham said, while "the station kept its strategic penetrations and
operations secret." And even though tactical intelligence was not as
desirable as the strategic sort, Lapham was careful to point out
that it was not always easy to delineate between them. "What you get
at a low level often reflects a high-level directive. That's why the
station has analysts reading captured documents, intelligence
reports from region officers, and briefings from interrogators. They
put it all together for us, with bits and pieces adding up to
reflect guidelines from Hanoi. That's how you do it, unless you can
read Ho's reports."
When put in the proper context,
Phoenix-generated intelligence on occasion had strategic
implications. So CIA officers on the Phoenix staff also briefed
station officers in liaison with the CIO, and Evan Parker himself
attended station meetings thrice weekly. In these ways the station
kept abreast of strategic intelligence Phoenix stumbled on while
coordinating its sapper-level programs.
Despite its strategic potential, Phoenix was
designed primarily to sharpen the attack against the sapper-level
VCI. Renz Hoeksema explained how: "With the PRU you didn't have
controlled sources, and so the information wasn't reliable
That's why I
didn't mind Phoenix. It was a way to
corroborate low-level intelligence. For instance, if Special Branch
has an informer, say, a ricksha driver, who falls into something and
passes the information back, then we've got to check on it. But
otherwise, everybody was too busy with their own operations to
check. Phoenix steps in to do coordinating." [5]
"That's why," Lapham said, "the relationship
between Special Branch and the PRU is so important. The PRU was the
only station means to respond in an operational way to the VCI. When
we got hot information through a DIOCC or PIOCC, we could mount an
attack."
Clearly, in its fledgling stage, when the
majority of Phoenix coordinators were CIA officers operating under
cover of CORDS, the program was designed primarily to
improve coordination between the station's
liaison and coven action branches. It also provided Phoenix
coordinators with American and Vietnamese military augmentation and
intended to redirect them, by example, against the VCI. However, as
John Wilbur explained, "Tet put all that in abatement." [6]
And Tet was a result of Robert Komer's desire
to show success, which prompted him to withdraw U.S. forces from
Cong Tac IV -- even though General Loan was predicting a major
assault against Saigon -- and to realign South Vietnam's political
forces behind Thieu. This is the strategic "political" aspect of
Phoenix -- alluded to earlier by Vietnam's Diogenes, Tulius Acampora
-- as conducted by the CIO. The CIO, according to Lou Lapham,
"didn't trust the police and wouldn't leave high-level penetrations
to the Special Branch." And because "Thieu and Ky were just as
concerned with suppressing dissidents as Diem," Lapham explained,
"There was an element in the police under the CIO for this purpose."
Liaison with the CIO, an organization Lapham
described as "basically military intelligence," was handled by the
special unit created by Rocky Stone, which met with the CIA's region
and province officers and absconded with their best penetrations.
"The CIA is strategic intelligence," Howard
"Rocky" Stone asserted when we spoke in 1987. "We were more
interested in talking than in killing
So in 1967 I set up an
intelligence division at the National
Interrogation Center with the Military Security Service and with
McChristian." Within this division, Stone revealed, "I set up a
separate unit to select targets -- to recruit people with something
to tell us. This is the precursor to Phoenix. But when I described
Phoenix to [Director of Central Intelligence Richard] Helms, he
said, 'Give it to the military.' And the military broadened it into
something else." [7]
Short, moonfaced, and a member of the CIA's
Vince Lombardi clique, Stone said solemnly, "This has never been
told, but we thought that by contacting North Vietnamese and South
Vietnamese Communists and giving them secure communications, we
could initiate a dialogue toward a settlement. We began negotiating
with powerful people. It was only after [Senator Eugene] McCarthy
entered the [U.S. presidential] race [on November 30, 1967] that
problems developed."
What those problems were, Stone would not
divulge, but he did refer obliquely to "lines of communication being
compromised." He would also like to have the record show that "we
were close in terms of timing and political considerations. There
were potential avenues for political negotiations in late 1967, but
when those collapsed, the Vietnamese thought we were delaying.
Negotiations became impossible in 1968, and that resulted in Tet."
Stone's revelation flies in the face of
contemporary wisdom. Stanley Karnow, for one, writes that a
settlement was impossible in late 1967 because the Communists "had
been planning a major offensive since the summer ... that would
throw the Americans and the Saigon regime into utmost confusion."
[8]
Regardless of why it happened, Tet surely did
throw the GVN into utmost chaos. On January 31, 1968, thousands of
VC simultaneously attacked hundreds of South Vietnam's cities and
towns and in the process destroyed the credibility of the American
war managers who had pointed to "the light at the end of the
tunnel." Not only did Tet pour gasoline on the smoldering antiwar
movement, hastening the American withdrawal, but it also prompted
the war managers to ponder how the VCI could mount such a massive
campaign without being detected.
CIA analyst Sam Adams suggests that by lulling
people into a false sense of security, imprecise estimates of VCI
strength precipitated Tet. That opinion is backed by Tom McCoy, the
CIA's chief of East Asian political and psychological operations,
who quit the agency in November 1967 to join McCarthy's campaign.
Said McCoy: "LBJ was the victim of a military snow job. Three
members of the CIA were back- channeling information, contravening
the advice of McNamara, the State Department, and the Joint Chiefs
of Staff." But "the directive from the field was to report
positively," and "the CIA was outdistanced by regular channels of
communication." [9]
In any event, Tet proved to the world that the
VCI shadow government not only existed but was capable of mobilizing
masses of people. From the moment it erupted, Tet revealed, for all
the world to see, the intrinsically political nature of the Vietnam
War. Even if the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments found it
impossible to admit that the outlawed VCI was a legitimate political
entity, they could not deny that it had, during Tet, dictated the
course of events in South Vietnam. And that fact pushed Phoenix into
the limelight. For while operations against the VCI were
overshadowed by the military crisis during Tet, in many areas the
DIOCCs were the only places where intelligence on VC military units
could be found.
***
At 3:00 A.M. on January 31, 1968, John Wilbur
dragged himself out of bed, grabbed his weapons, strapped on his
gear, straddled his Lambretta, and put-putted from Bien Se Moi to
Can Tho airport. The trip was uneventful, the road empty of traffic,
and Wilbur's thoughts were on the dawn raid the PRU were planning to
conduct that morning in Kien Tuong Province. But when he stepped
into the operations center in the CIA's command post, "It was like
walking into pandemonium. People were going crazy. Everybody was on
radios, and all the big Special Forces sergeants who had
finally graduated to the C Team were walking
around with flak jackets and guns. I asked, 'What's going on?'
"One of the sergeants said, 'Eye Corps, Two
Corps, Three Corps, and twelve province capitals in the Delta are
under simultaneous attack.' All the calls coming in were from
province officers saying, 'We're under attack. We're under attack!'
"So," Wilbur recalled, "I ran out to the
helicopter pad, and here come these helicopters. I think, 'This must
be my operation.' So I literally ran out to this helicopter, and the
closer I got to it, the closer it got to me! And the helicopter
starts landing right on top of me! I was yelling -- and you can
imagine the noise -- 'Is this the PRU operation to Kien Tuong?'
"And the guy said, 'PRU operation? Bullshit!
We've just evacuated from Vinh Long! The airport at Vinh Long is
under VC control!' And that," said Wilbur with a shake of his head,
"was the commencement of Tet."
It was the same all over South Vietnam, but
particularly bad in Quang Tri, where the province capital was under
siege for five days and everybody had been reported killed. "The
first twenty-four hours were pretty much run on adrenaline," Warren
Milberg remarked when we met in 1986. "Then the fighting tailed off,
and I began to realize that we had very little chance of surviving
any kind of massed assault. This is when I began to burn files and
make preparations for my death." [10]
But Milberg decided to stick it out, even
though the province chief climbed on a helicopter and left. "I knew
if I left the province, which I had the option to do, I could never
come back and be effective," he said. "So I stayed for five days.
And somehow I survived.
"When the Tet offensive was over," Milberg went
on, "the month of February was one of cleaning up and trying to
resurrect whatever kinds of agent networks you had -- of finding out
who survived." For Milberg, this meant traveling to Hue to look for
Bob Hubbard, one of several CIA province officers killed during the
first hours of Tet, when the VC aimed their attacks at the CIA's
interrogation centers and embassy houses. [i] Milberg described Hue
as "a scene of what Germany must have been like during the Allied
bombings. I'd never seen anything like it. Fighting was still going
on. You heard shots here and there. Some armor units were still in a
pitched battle against the NVA in the citadel.
"What happened in Hue was pretty traumatic for
me," Milberg confided. "At one point, in looking through the rubble
for Hubbard, I stumbled on a Marine
colonel alive and well and looting bodies
I nearly killed him, I was so angry.
But I wound up drawing my pistol instead,
taking him into custody and driving him, screaming and shouting, to
the nearest Military Police unit. I won't give you his name, but he
was court-martialed.
"Next," said Milberg, "I confronted what the
North Vietnamese had done in the city of Hue and probably elsewhere.
They had lists of all the people who had collaborated with the
Americans and apparently had lined a lot of these people up and
summarily shot them. But the most grotesque thing was to find some
of the graves where hundreds of people had been pushed in alive and
were buried." After a long period of silence Milberg added softly,
"It's the kind of thing I still think about."
When asked if he thought the lists used by the
NVA and VC in Hue were any different from Phoenix blacklists,
Milberg said, "I see a lot of qualitative differences." He would not
say what those qualitative differences were.
Quantitative discrepancies need explaining,
too. The number of persons buried in Hue, as estimated by Police
Chief Doan Cong Lap and reported by Stewart Harris in the March 27,
1968, Times of London, was two hundred. The mayor of Hue, according
to Harris, found the bodies of three hundred local officials and
prominent citizens in the mass grave. Stanley Karnow agrees with
these figures but questions how many of the dead in the mass graves
were civilians killed in the retaliatory U.S. bombardment "that also
inflicted a heavy toll on the civilian population." [11]
Journalists allowed to view the graves while
they were being opened reported seeing tire tracks and scour marks
around the edges. Considering that the NVA did not have bulldozers,
this suggested that civilians killed in the retaliatory bombing were
bulldozed into the graves. Just as disturbing is a February 1972
article in the Washington Monthly, by Oriana Fallaci, titled
"Working Up to Killing." Fallaci writes that more than a thousand
people were killed after the liberation of Hue "by Saigon forces,"
including VCI cadres, who surfaced during Tet and were identified
and killed by the secret police.
One person who knows what happened in Hue in
February 1968 is PVT, the I Corps PRU and Phoenix inspector. The
background of this unilaterally controlled CIA asset bears
examination. Because his father was a police officer in Hue, PVT was
accepted into the Surete Federale in 1954. When the Americans took
over in 1955, he moved over to the Vietnamese Bureau of
Investigation, rising through the ranks to become chief of Region 1
in Hue. Unfortunately for his career, his job included investigating
the Buddhist immolations, and after the Diem coup PVT was jailed on
suspicion of being Can Lao. Released a few months later, he and many
of his tainted Catholic
colleagues went to work for the CIA "because
they didn't like the government" of General Nguyen Khanh.
Intelligent and tough, PVT served the CIA well
as a Special Branch administrator in Nha Trang, Phan Thiet, and My
Tho. In 1965, when Nguyen Cao Ky sold the CIA the right to organize
Counterterror, Census Grievance, and Political Action franchises in
the provinces, PVT went to work for CIA officer Rudy Enders in Bien
Hoa, as his special assistant for pacification. A fast friendship
formed between the two men, and when Enders was reassigned to I
Corps as the CIA's senior paramilitary adviser, PVT tagged along and
helped his patron manage the region's PRU, RD Cadre, Census
Grievance, Special Branch, and Phoenix programs.
The CIA officer in charge of Hue in February
1968 was William Melton, "an older man," according to PVT, "hard and
mean," who was angered over the death of his PRU adviser. While the
battle for Hue was raging, Enders came down from Da Nang to lend
Melton a hand. After a quick look around Enders decided to go after
"the VCI who had surfaced at Tet. We had troop density," Enders
explained to me, "and we had all these [ICEX] files, so now we grab
hold." [12]
Also arriving on the scene at that moment were
Evan Parker, Tully Acampora, and General Loan, who a few days
earlier, on February 2, 1968, had achieved notoriety when, in
retaliation for the murder of several of his secret policemen, he
had summarily shot a VC sapper in the head in front of a TV camera
crew. Bringing the same avenging spirit to Hue, Loan officially
sanctioned Vietnamese participation in Phoenix operations in I Corps
when he tacked the ICEX chart to the wall of the Hue City police
station.
But in order actually to "grab hold" of the VCI
operating in Hue, Rudy Enders required the services of PVT, whom he
brought down from Da Nang to interrogate VCI prisoners. As PVT told
it, he and "a small team of five or six people" crossed the Perfume
River into Hue and went directly to the interrogation center, where
"Rudy left me in charge." PVT and his team then interrogated the
captured Communists and "took photos and fingerprints and made
blacklists."
Reports Karnow: "Clandestine South Vietnamese
teams slipped into Hue after the Communist occupation to assassinate
suspected enemy collaborators; they threw many of the bodies into
common graves with the Vietcong's victims." [13]
On February 24, 1968, the most bitter battle of
the Vietnam War ended, and out of the mass graves of Hue rose
Phoenix, its success prompting Defense Secretary Clark Clifford to
recommend on March 4, 1968, that "Operation Phoenix ... be pursued
more vigorously" and that "Vietnamese armed
forces ... be devoted to anti- infrastructure activities on a
priority basis." [14]
One day later, on March 5, 1968, with the
Pentagon, hence the Armed Forces of Vietnam, now embracing the CIA's
controversial Phoenix program, Prime Minister Nguyen Van Loc ordered
the activation of Phung Hoang committees at all echelons, and he
appointed Dang Van Minh chief of a special Phung Hoang Task
Management Bureau. Doubling as the Special Branch representative on
the Phung Hoang Central Committee, Minh immediately assigned Special
Branch teams to the most important DIOCCs and PIOCCS on a
twenty-four-hour basis and charged them with coordinating
intelligence, the theory being that if Phoenix worked in Hue, it
could work anywhere.
On March 16, 1968, the same day as the My Lai
massacre, General Creighton Abrams replaced William Westmoreland as
MACV commander. And by the end of the month Lyndon Johnson had
pulled himself out of the upcoming presidential campaign.
Warren Milberg, who was on leave in the States,
recalled the mood of the country: "I remember coming back and
listening to LBJ tell everybody that he wasn't going to seek
reelection. That kind of reinforced in my mind the futility of the
whole endeavor. It really made a big impact on me. I mean, LBJ was a
casualty of the Tet offensive -
- among other things."
Many dedicated American soldiers and civilians,
after Tet, felt the same way. On the other hand, while demoralizing
many Americans, the trauma of Tet spurred others on to greater acts
of violence. For them, Phoenix would become an instrument to exact
vengeance on a crippled, exposed enemy. "Up until the 1968
offensives," Robert Stater writes, "the VCI cadre were almost
untouchable. Any losses suffered prior to then were insignificant.
Confident of almost certain victory during the Tet Offensives,
however, they surfaced their key cadre. The results are well known;
the attacks cost the Viet Cong thousands of their most valuable
cadre, including irreplaceable veterans with ten to twenty years of
revolutionary activity." [15]
Professor Huy concurred, writing that "many
agents whom the VC had planted in the towns and cities were
discovered because of their activities during the attack, and were
eliminated by the Saigon government." [16]
It is a fact that Tet was a psychological
victory for the VCI. But it was a pyrrhic victory, too, for in
proving itself a viable political entity, the VCI backed the GVN
into a corner. Fear, and a chance to exact revenge, finally brought
Phoenix to the forefront of the GVN's attention. All that remained
was for Lieutenant Colonel Robert Inman to bring everyone together
at the middle management level.
***
Having served in Vietnam with the Army Security
Agency from 1963 till 1965, Robert Inman had already had, like many
Phoenix officers, a tour of duty under his belt. Also like many
Phoenix veterans who contributed to this book, Inman is
compassionate, intelligent, and more than a little irreverent. "At
the time I arrived in Saigon in early 1968," he told me, "there was
a U.S. staff but no corresponding Vietnamese staff. On the U.S. side
there were about twenty people, mostly military, although the key
management-level positions at the directorate were CIA
We had
two read files: one for everybody and one for
the CIA only. The distinction was maintained throughout my tour,
but" -- he chuckled -- "I got to read the CIA stuff." [17]
The reason for the compartmentation, according
to Inman, was that "CIA coordination with Special Branch continued
at a higher level than Phoenix." Likewise, the parallel chains of
command extended into the field, with CIA province officers
receiving operational direction from ROICs while at the same time,
in their capacity as Phoenix coordinators and members of the CORDS
province advisory team, reporting administratively to the CORDS
province senior adviser. U.S. military personnel serving as Phoenix
coordinators fell administratively within CORDS but received
operational direction from MACV. The CIA-MACV schism was to be
narrowed in some provinces, but the gap was never universally
bridged.
At the time Inman arrived at the Phoenix
Directorate, there were three State Department officers on staff:
Lionel Rosenblatt, Bernard Picard, and their boss, John E.
MacDonald. According to Inman, MacDonald's job "was never revealed."
Picard, now a prominent Washington lawyer, would not explain to me
what he did. Rosenblatt merely said, "As a [twenty-two-year- old]
junior officer
I
was assigned to CORDS-Phoenix in December 1967
and served there till June 1969. During this time my principal
duties were: (one) orientation and visits to DIOCCs, December 1967
until March 1968; (two) Cam Ranh City Phung Hoang coordinator, March
1968 through September 1968; and (three) Phung Hoang liaison officer
in Saigon." [18]
Executive Director Joe Sartiano, Inman
recalled, "spent a lot of time with agency officers in the
provinces, trying to coordinate the RDC/P people who ran the PICs
with the RDC/O people who ran the PRU under the province officer
system."
Inman himself was assigned to the operations
section of the Phoenix staff, of which, he said, "There was a
unilateral agency effort and a binational effort. And they were
separate, too." The Phoenix Reports Branch, under Lieutenant Colonel
Lemire, was headquartered not in USAID II but in the old embassy
building on the river.
"Nothing was computerized," Inman stated. "It
was all pens and pencils and paper." There were, in addition, a
plans and training section under Lieutenant Colonel Ashley Ivey and
an administrative section under CIA officer James Brogdon.
As for the mood of the Phoenix staff, according
to Inman, "The problem on the U.S. side was that cynicism was
developing. Gooks, slopes, dinks: You didn't hear those words in the
Saigon office, but the attitude was there." This racist attitude
generally belonged to proponents of unilateral operations, as
opposed to people, like Inman, who wanted to hand the job to the
Vietnamese. "There were definitely two sides." He sighed, adding, "A
lot of people after three months said, 'Why should I waste my time
with the Vietnamese at the national level? I can get into the
Special Branch files, and I can run the PRU, so what the hell?'"
When asked if this was due to legitimate security concerns, Inman
responded, "Lack of security was often just an excuse for
incompetency."
Inman did not blame Even Parker for the bigotry
evident at the Phoenix Directorate. "Parker was not paternal," he
said. "But he had reached a point in his career where he was
functioning more on a diplomatic than an operational level. And Ev
had frustrations with his own people inside the CIA who viewed the
RDC/P and RDC/O systems as competitive. Each side would say, 'Yeah,
talk to them, but don't tell them too much.' No one wanted to
divulge his sources."
There were other problems with Phoenix. "For
example," Inman commented, "one province in Three Corps was
relatively pacified, and the province senior adviser there thought
Phoenix would only stir things up. He thought his ninety-five
percent HES [Hamlet Evaluation System] rating would drop if they
started looking for trouble." The problem, Inman explained, was that
"The U.S. had tremendous resources, enough to fund twenty-five
programs, all first priority. Bigger pigs, and better rice, and
Phoenix. Now, some province senior advisors simply said, 'There's no
way to do it all,' and picked one or two to focus on -- and not
always Phoenix."
The other major problem, Inman said, was that
"Phoenix was used for personal vendettas."
When Inman arrived at the Phoenix Directorate,
Evan Parker's military deputy was Colonel William Greenwalt, "an
administrator trapped in an office." Inman and his best friend on
the Phoenix staff, Lieutenant Colonel William Singleton, concluded
that "the CIA had Greenwalt there to take the rap if anything went
wrong." What went wrong was Greenwalt's career. Greenwalt was slated
to become a brigadier general, but by virtue of his association with
the CIA, via Phoenix, his career jumped track, and he retired as a
colonel when his Phoenix tour ended.
"Operations was run by a civilian," Inman
recalled, "a retired full colonel on contract to the CIA. His name
was William Law. He'd been the military attache in Laos.
Singleton and I were assigned to Law, and Law
told us to review everything in the files because he didn't know
what the next step was going to be. After a month it got to be a
drag, so I complained to Greenwalt. I said, 'I want another job. I'm
wasting my time.'"
Greenwalt relented. "He gave me and Singleton
three or four actions, which we resolved in about an hour," Inman
recalled, and shortly thereafter "Law was sent down to the Delta to
be the CIA's contact with the Hoa Hao." Law was replaced by George
French, "a very personable, very experienced CIA officer who had
done some very dramatic things in his career, from the OSS to Cuba."
George French's first job was as a demolitions
expert in an Arizona lead mine, in the years before World War II.
For that reason he was recruited into the OSS's Underwater
Demolitions Unit in 1943 and assigned to Detachment 404 in Ceylon.
Over the course of his CIA career, French did
tours in Korea, Turkey, Pakistan, and Saipan and, as a member of the
CIA's Special Operations Division, in Laos, Cambodia, and elsewhere.
In the summer of 1967 French was assigned to III Corps as Bob Wall's
deputy in charge of PRU, even though he actually outranked Wall. Nor
did he appreciate that Wall acted "like a dictator." So he asked for
a transfer and was assigned to the Phoenix Directorate, replacing
William Law as operations chief.
French described the job as mostly traveling to
the provinces to see what was going on and asking, "How's your body
count?" The rest of the job, he told me, "was just paper shuffling:
compiling information and passing it on up to MACV." [19]
In March 1968 the Phoenix-Phung Hoang program
began to gel. Passing up the opportunity to manage the Soviet/Russia
Division (with Rocky Stone as his deputy), William Colby instead had
returned to Vietnam, at the request of Richard Helms, to serve as
acting chief of staff of CORDS. Because he was too overbearing to
communicate effectively with the Vietnamese, Robert Komer needed
Colby to work with Interior Minister Tran Thien Khiem in formulating
counterinsurgency policy and procedure at the national level. Colby
understood Vietnamese sensibilities and knew enough about the
country to select and assign CORDS advisers where they were needed
most. He also understood the dynamics of the attack on the VCI: that
Phoenix advisers were needed specifically to help local authorities
develop card files and dossiers modeled on the Diem-era ABC system.
In the process Colby was to achieve infamy as the man most closely
associated with Phoenix and as its principal apologist.
"At the time I arrived," Inman recalled,
"Parker was meeting with Colby and Khiem, developing proposed action
programs, writing documents, and sending them down. Khiem was saying
yes to everything, but nothing was happening on the Vietnamese
side. So I went to Greenwalt and asked
permission to contact some lieutenant colonels and majors in the
Vietnamese Ministry of the Interior. Greenwalt said okay, and I
approached Phan Huu Nhon, my counterpart during my first tour and
the J-seven special intelligence officer to the Joint General Staff.
Nhon sent me to see Lieutenant Colonel Loi Nguyen Tan, the action
officer for Phoenix at the Interior Ministry, where he had a desk,
but nothing coming in."
Here it is worthwhile to pause and realize that
one reason the Vietnamese were slow in creating their own version of
the Phoenix Directorate was their difficulty in finding a suitable
translation for the word "infrastructure." To solve the problem,
President Thieu appointed a commission consisting of senior American
and Vietnamese intelligence officials. Attending as an
interpreter-translator was Robert Slater.
"After five lengthy and rather hot (both in
temperature and temperament) sessions," Slater writes, "a decision
was reached that the term that was presently in use would be
retained. The Vietnamese term was ha tang co so ... meaning 'the
lower layer of an installation' or 'the underlying foundation.'"
According to Slater, this misinterpretation was the "crux of the
problem in the Allied attack against the VCI. If the South
Vietnamese government cannot get across to the South Vietnamese
people the danger of the VCI through an adequately descriptive word,
then how can they hope to combat them?" [20]
The "crux" of the problem, of course, was not a
lack of understanding on the part of the Vietnamese but the fact
that the Americans insisted on defining the VCI in terms that
conformed to their ideological preconceptions. Ed Brady put the
problem in perspective when he explained that for the Vietnamese,
"Committees at lower levels are the infrastructure of any
higher-level committee." In other words, village committees are the
infrastructure of district committees, district committees of
province committees, and so on ad nauseam. According to Brady, "The
word 'infrastructure' drew no distinctions at all, and whatever
level the VCI existed at depended solely on each individual's own
semantic interpretation." [21]
"They were writing documents," Inman said, "and
sending them down for translations, but no one understood what the
word 'infrastructure' meant, and no one dared go back to Khiem and
say, 'I don't understand.' Tan said to me, 'What is this
infrastructure?' They were looking it up in the dictionary and
coming up with highways and electrical systems and such
I said, 'It's their leaders.'
"And Tan said, 'Oh. Can bo. "Cadre." That's
what we call them."'
What Thieu's national commission could not
resolve in five days, two lieutenant colonels resolved in five
minutes. Next, Inman said, "Tan introduced me to a major
who was Thieu's personal chief of staff. Tan,
this major, and I sat down and wrote up Thieu's Presidential
Directive. [ii] Then this major got the papers to Thieu. The papers
were issued in July, and Tan moved into the National Police
Interrogation Center, with about ten senior people from Special
Branch, as Khiem's man in charge of Phung Hoang. Duong Tan Huu [a
former precinct chief in Saigon and, before that, Nha Trang police
chief] was assigned as the senior National Police officer. Major
Pham Van Cao became the day-to-day manager of the Phung Hoang
Office, and I spent the next eight months there as liaison to the
Vietnamese national-level staff."
A self-proclaimed "true believer" in the right
of the Vietnamese to settle their own affairs, Inman had little to
do with the U.S. side of Phoenix. "I was mostly at NPIC
headquarters," he stated. "My role was as salesman. I'd check in
with George French for thirty minutes in the morning, sometimes only
once or twice a week. I'd get input through him from a lot of
people; he'd say, 'Sell this to the Vietnamese.' I'd channel
policies and directives and manuals from French -- all in English --
over to the Phung Hoang Office, and they translated them. Then I'd
spend time getting everybody to read and understand and sign off on
them. I'd run them past Census Grievance and RD, Field Police and
Special Branch, the Interior Ministry and ARVN , and everybody would
sign off." And that is how the Vietnamese Phung Hoang Office got its
marching orders from Colby and the Phoenix Directorate.
The other reason why the Vietnamese were slow
in creating the Phung Hoang Office concerned the struggle between
President Thieu and Vice President Ky, a struggle that in 1968
reflected changes in the relationship between America and South
Vietnam brought about by Tet. The first signs of realignment
appeared when President Johnson withdrew from the presidential
campaign, at which point his influence in Saigon began to wane.
Johnson, however, remained committed to a negotiated settlement
because success at the bargaining table was the Democratic party's
only chance of getting Hubert Humphrey elected.
But Republican candidate Richard Nixon seized
the issue and used it to subvert the Democrats. The darling of the
Kuomintang-financed China Lobby, Nixon, through intermediaries in
Saigon, persuaded Thieu to postpone negotiations until after the
elections, assuring himself the presidency of the United States, at
the expense of prolonging the Vietnam War.
Reflecting those developments in Washington, a
similar political realignment began in Saigon in May 1968, when the
VC initiated a second wave of attacks on Saigon, and Thieu, writes
Professor Huy, ''as usual had no quick response." But Ky did react
decisively. "He tried to mobilize young people for the defense of
Saigon and received a favorable response." [22]
"With Tet," said Tully Acampora, "Loan made a
comeback. Thieu was in another camp, watching and waiting. Through
February the attacks increased, and by May, with the second
offensive, Loan thinks he can walk on water. Then he gets shot
outside of MSS headquarters, and that's the beginning of the end.
It's all downhill after that."
On May 5, 1968 [iii] General Nguyen Ngoc Loan
was seriously wounded and quickly replaced as director general of
the National Police by Interior Minister Khiem, who appointed his
own man, Colonel Tran Van Pham. Next, writes Professor Huy, Thieu
"began his plan to weaken Ky." [23] His first move was to dismiss
Prime Minister Loc and replace him with Tran Van Huong, a former
mayor of Saigon and a bitter enemy of Ky's. During the 1967
elections Ky had coerced "peace" candidate Truong Dinh Dzu into
pressing blackmail charges against Huong. And so, as soon as he was
appointed prime minister, Huong tasted sweet revenge by dismissing
most of Ky's backers in the administration.
"Then," writes Huy, "Ky received a new blow
when several officers loyal to him and serving in the Saigon police
were killed at the beginning of June in Cholon during their campaign
against the second attack of the Communists. They were killed by a
rocket launched from an American helicopter. Apparently this was a
mistake, but many people thought it was due to the American decision
to help Thieu against Ky." [24]
The incident occurred on June 2, 1968, when a
rocket fired from a U.S. Marine helicopter gunship "malfunctioned"
and slammed into a wall in a schoolyard on Kuong To Street. The wall
collapsed, killing seven high-ranking officials who had been invited
by the Americans to the battlefront in the belief that the VCI
leadership was hiding in the home of the Buddhist leader Tri Quang.
Killed were Pho Quoc Chu, Loan's brother-in-law and chief of the
Port Authority; Lieutenant Colonel Dao Ba Phouc, commander of the
Fifth Ranger Battalion; Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Van Luan, Saigon
police chief; Major Le Ngoc Tru, Cholon police chief and Loan's
personal aide; Major Nguyen Ngoc Xinh, Combined Security Committee
and First Precinct police chief; and Major Nguyen Bao Thuy, chief of
staff to Lieutenant Colonel Van Van Cua, Loan's brother-in-law and
the mayor of Saigon.
***
Four days later President Thieu appointed
Colonel Tran Van Hai director general of the National Police. On the
same day that he took office, Hai dismissed Ky's eight remaining
police chiefs in Saigon and replaced Special Branch chief Nguyen
Tien with his friend Major Nguyen Mau, who refused to accept Phoenix
within the Special
Branch and instead incorporated the Combined
Intelligence Staff within a new Capital Military District Command
(CMDC).
A by-product of Tet, the Capital Military
District was formed for two reasons: to organize better the
resources against the VCI cadres that had aided VC sapper units
during Tet and to regulate the half million refugees produced during
Tet and pouring into Saigon. It was also with the creation of the
Capital Military District that Thieu and Khiem wrenched control away
from Ky and Loan once and for all. Encompassing Saigon's nine
precincts and Gia Dinh Province, the CMD had as its American
counterparts MACV's Capital Military Assistance Command and a Phung
Hoang committee in First Precinct Headquarters. Prior to the CMD,
Phoenix personnel from Gia Dinh Province had patrolled Saigon's
precincts on a circuit rider basis; as of June 1968, Phoenix
advisers were placed in DIOCCs in each of the precincts. Phoenix
precinct advisers reported to Lieutenant Colonel William Singleton
through his deputy, Major Danny L. Pierce, whom Robert Inman
describes as "an active Mormon who traveled all over the country on
Sundays holding services." In this capacity, Inman informs us,
"Singleton and Pierce were involved directly in intelligence and
reaction operations in the back alleys of Saigon."
CIA operations in the Capital Military District
-- aka Region Five -- were managed by a series of veteran CIA
officers under their cover boss, Hatcher James, the senior USAID
adviser to the mayor of Saigon. Headquartered behind City Hall, the
Region Five officer in charge monitored all Phoenix operations in
the Capital Military District.
A few days after the CMD was created, General
Nguyen Khac Binh was appointed director of the CIO and quickly
conferred upon station chief Lou Lapham "a charge from Thieu to run
intelligence operations anywhere in the country, going after the big
ones."
With Ky's people in the grave or the hospital,
President Thieu began to shape the government of Vietnam in his own
image, appointing ministers, police and province chiefs, and
military commanders who would do his bidding. Also, by issuing Law
280, Thieu lifted the monkey off the U.S. Embassy's back, and in
return, the Americans looked away when he began persecuting domestic
opponents whose "compatible left" political organizations fell under
Law 280's definition of VCI "cadre." From July 1968 onward the task
of ensuring the GVN's internal security fell to General Tran Thien
Khiem, who, according to Dang Van Minh, was "the real boss of
administration and intelligence." CIA asset Khiem -- serving as
interior minister, deputy prime minister for pacification, and
chairman of the Phung Hoang Central Committee -- thereafter worked
hand in hand with William Colby in steering Phoenix into infamy.
With the promulgation of Law 280 -- which
compelled Vietnamese corps commanders and province chiefs to
organize Phung Hoang committees -- and, one week later, MACV
Directive 381-41, which ordered U.S. military and civilian
organizations to support Phung Hoang -- Phoenix was ready to run on
both its American and Vietnamese cylinders.
All that remained was for Lieutenant Colonel
Inman to spread the word. "One of my principal functions," he said,
"was to take Tan ['polished' and 'above it all'] and Cao ['blunt and
offensive'] to visit the PIOCCs and DIOCCs and give a pep talk. I
probably visited every district in my last eight months." But, he
added, "It was not my job to sell Phoenix to the U.S., so we didn't
announce our arrival; the district senior adviser wouldn't even know
I was there. My job was to sell Phung Hoang to the Vietnamese, and I
stayed on the Vietnamese side."
The people saddled with the chore of selling
Phoenix to the Americans were the region Phoenix coordinators --
field-grade military officers who began arriving in Vietnam in
January 1968. Their role is discussed in Chapter 14. But first some
statistics on Phoenix through August 1968.
No aspect of Phoenix is more significant than
its impact on civilian detainees, and despite the increase in the
number of CDs after the GVN's acceptance of Phoenix in July 1968,
the construction of facilities capable of holding them never
materialized. Instead, hard-core VCI were transported from mainland
camps to Con Son Island, and four "mobile" military field courts
were authorized in October 1967 to supplement the four courts
authorized in 1962. Confirmed VCI were tried by province security
committees, whose proceedings were closed to the public -- the
defendant had no right to an attorney or to review his dossier.
Security committees could release a suspect or send him to prison
under the An Tri (administrative detention) Laws or to a special
court. Due process for CDs remained on the drawing board.
Nevertheless, in compliance with Law 280, the
four Vietnamese corps commanders (General Hoang Xuam Lam in I Corps,
General Vinh Loc in II Corps, General Nguyen Duc Thang in IV Corps,
and General Nguyen Khanh in III Corps), formed joint Phoenix-Phung
Hoang working groups and corps-level Phung Hoang committees,
bringing the military and police into varying degrees of
cooperation, depending on the commander's personal preferences. For
example, Lieutenant Colonel Lemire reported that General Khanh "was
reluctant to support police type operations with military
resources." [25] Khanh assigned a mere captain as his regional Phung
Hoang coordinator.
"In Eye Corps and Two Corps," Lemire noted,
"the cordon and search, using Phung Hoang blacklists, appears to get
the best results. In Four Corps the PRU is still the
main action arm. In Three Corps the joint
PRU/Police/RF/PF district operation seems to be most productive."
Everywhere the degree of Vietnamese
participation in Phoenix rose steadily. By August 1968 Phung Hoang
committees existed in 42 provinces and 111 districts; 190 DIOCCs had
been built, at an average cost of fifteen thousand dollars each, and
140 were actually operating, along with 32 PIOCCs. A total of 155
Phoenix advisers were on the job. However, confusion still existed
about the proper relationship between PIOCCs and Phung Hoang
committees. In some provinces the two were merged, in others they
were separate, and sometimes only one existed. Many Phung Hoang
committees had no relationship at all with DIOCCs, which were often
viewed as an unrelated activity. The change in name from ICEX to
Phoenix to Phung Hoang added to the confusion. In Pleiku Province
the ICEX Committee became the Phoenix Committee but met separately
from the Phung Hoang Committee. Everywhere Americans and Vietnamese
continued to conduct unilateral operations, and tension between the
Special Branch and the military persisted as the biggest
Phoenix-related problem.
The other major problems, cited in a May 1968
report written by CORDS inspectors Craig Johnstone and John Lybrand,
were lack of trained DIOCC advisers; lack of agreement on the
definition of the word "infrastructure"; inadequacy of reaction
forces at district level, the exception being when PRU were sent
down from province; improper use of Field Police forces; torture of
prisoners; [iv] lack of a standardized filing system; poor source
control mechanisms; lack of coordination between Phoenix and other
free world forces; and Census Grievance participation in Phoenix.
To facilitate Phoenix operations nationwide,
the CIA issued two handbooks in June 1968. The first, a
thirty-one-page document titled The VC Key Organization from Central
Level down to Village and Hamlet Levels, outlined the VCI for
Phoenix operators. The other was the Phoenix Directorate's first
manual of procedures, outlining the program from Saigon down to the
DIOCCs. At this point a detailed picture of the estimated seventy
thousand VCI was emerging, targeting was becoming specific and
scientific, and results were improving. Lieutenant Colonel Lemire
reported that ''as the DIOCCs and PIOCCs have refined data bases,
gained experience, and mounted more operations against targetted
individuals, the neutralization rate has been well over 1000 per
month for the last four months." In Gia Dinh Province, Lemire
reported, "the combination of an aggressive Province Chief and a
dedicated Phoenix Coordinator has more than quadrupled the monthly
rate of killed, captured, and rallied VCI."
Much emphasis was placed on neutralization
rates, which were deemed the only objective way of measuring Phoenix
success. As reports poured into the directorate from all over the
country, numbers were tabulated and scores posted; by the end of
June 1968, more than six thousand VCI had been "neutralized," with
exact numbers available from each DIOCC so Phoenix managers could
judge performance.
As Evan Parker explained it, "You've got
people. You've got some sort of structure set up, some facilities
and money and resources. Then you need a record-keeping system.
Unfortunately," he added, "people lived on reporting
In order to get brownie
points, a guy would say, 'We conducted X many
Phoenix operations,' and that looks good on your record. But simply
because they were ordered to conduct sweeps, they might pick up some
VC, but they could just as easily have been soldiers as civilians.
Whatever the results were, it was conducted in the name of Phoenix.
A lot of things were done in the name of Phoenix. And this goes into
your record-keeping system."
Ralph Johnson writes: "It was this reporting
weakness which for a long time attracted much of the foreign press
criticism of Phung Hoang." [26]
"Then" -- Parker groaned -- "Komer took it one
step beyond and assigned goals for the number of VCI neutralized.
Komer was a great one for setting objectives, then keeping score of
your performance against these objectives. And this is how quotas
got developed in the summer of 1968."
Borrowing military "kills" to meet Komer's
quotas was more than inflationary. John Cook, the Phoenix
coordinator in Di An District in Gia Dinh Province, in his book The
Advisor notes that switching the identity of a VC soldier killed in
combat with that of a known member of the infrastructure meant that
"If at a latter date the real member was captured or killed, this
action could not be reported, for you can only eliminate a man
once." [27] "Komer didn't understand the police nature of the attack
against the VCI," Bob Wall said scoffingly. "When LBJ put pressure
on him, he invented quotas as a management tool, and this destroyed
Phoenix. Quotas gave starving policemen a way to feed families. It
let them bring in bodies and say they were VCI." [28]
"I resisted like mad the idea of quotas,"
insisted Evan Parker, "because I felt this would lead to cheating,
or in innocent people being arrested, and this looking good on the
quota. Or there might even be names listed on arrest reports that
didn't even exist. In one area I was told they were taking names off
the gravestones .... But" -- he sighed
-- "they had quotas, and they tried to meet
quotas, and that's how you get the idea that this was some sort of
murder organization."
Indeed, Phoenix was labeled an assassination
program, evoking the specter of war crimes and leading many people
to minimize the impact of quotas. "I think it was moot," Warren
Milberg said. "It was something I just ignored. For the most part it
was coming to you from people in Saigon who were going home at night
and sitting under the veranda of the Continental Hotel. You just
didn't take that stuff seriously. They couldn't relate to what you
were doing, just like you couldn't relate to what they were doing.
It was a different war. It was a different part of the world."
Another Phoenix coordinator, a CIA
Czechoslovakian desk officer sent to Bien Hoa Province in 1968, saw
comparisons between Phoenix and Gestapo tactics in World War II. For
him, "The reports I sent in from my province on the number of
Communists that were neutralized reminded me of the reports Hitler's
concentration camp commanders sent in on how many inmates they had
exterminated, each commander lying that he had killed more than the
others to please Himmler."
Why one person remained silent and went along
with Phoenix while another spoke out against it is the subject of
the next chapter.
Notes:
i.
CIA compounds in the provinces were called embassy houses,
because they were extensions of the State Department's consulates.
ii.
Decree Law 280 defined the VCI as all party members from
COSVN to hamlet level and as cadre that "direct and control other
parties and organizations such as ... the Alliance of National
Democratic and Peace Forces, or other similar organizations in the
future." The only people named as not being VCI were "VC military
units" and "citizens forced to perform as laborers." Law 280 charged
the Ministry of the Interior, not the Defense Ministry, with footing
the Phung Hoang bill.
iii.
One day later Colonel Luu Kim Cuong, commander of the First
Transport Group and a senior aide to Ky, was killed by border police
on the outskirts of Saigon.
iv.
Writes Johnstone: "The truncheon and electric shock methods
of interrogation were in widespread use, with almost all advisors
admitting to have witnessed instances of use of these methods."
CHAPTER 13: Parallax Views
"Our PRU in Quang Tri were all victims of
Communist terror," said Bob Brewer, who, like many CIA officers in
Vietnam, believed he was singled out for assassination. A dedicated
anti-Communist who felt personally threatened, Brewer was motivated,
and so were his PRU. "They were so red hot you had to control them,"
he added with delight. [1]
The man with the job of controlling the PRU in
Quang Tri Province was Warren Milberg. Elegant and sophisticated,
Milberg today is the consummate corporate American male. His
employer, the Titan Corporation, designs "Star Wars" lasers. And
more than twenty years after the fact -- despite a lingering
resentment against cynical war managers who send idealistic young
soldiers on suicidal rites of passage -- Warren Milberg still
embraces the cold war ideology and its corresponding Phoenix
mythology.
At the core of Milberg's melancholy are two
related experiences. Both happened in 1965 during his first tour in
Vietnam, when he was deputy chief of security at the Da Nang air
base. There Milberg's involvement with agent nets brought him into
contact with local CIA operators, who liked his style and invited
him to participate in the ongoing SOG operation called Prairie Fire.
Milberg joined SOG without the knowledge of his Air Force superiors.
He put on black pajamas and worked with a team of Nung mercenaries,
leading them on long-range patrols into Laos to monitor and
interdict NVA units. Sometimes they sat on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and
shot field- grade NVA officers from a thousand yards away, "so they
never even heard the report." [2]
"This is where things started to get exciting,"
recalled Milberg, who along with his other duties, began organizing
counterterror teams. "I was doing training of Vietnamese and
Americans -- Marines and some Army people." As for his indigenous
personnel, "The Vietnamese were gangsters and thugs -- mercenaries
who we trained and who were in our pay
But my perception of the role of the
CT teams was to strike terror into the enemy --
the NVA and VC -- not the population."
"It was during this period of time," Milberg
continued, "when I started to think more about the war and my role
in it. And I also began to see evidence of how the Vietcong were
operating in the hamlets. I saw the messages for the tax collectors
and the political officers. And what will always stand out in my
mind was the terror and torture they used to strike fear and get
compliance from the villagers
an event
where a particular village chief's wife, who
was pregnant, was disemboweled and their unborn baby's head was
smashed with a rifle butt. We stumbled on this
incident quite by accident within hours of it
happening. I'd never seen anything like it in my life."
Milberg would not talk about the other
traumatic incident, other than to say he was asked by the CIA to
parachute into North Vietnam. That he did, even though he had never
jumped from an airplane before. And something terrible happened,
something too painful to describe, something that made him question
the motives of war managers who would ask him to do such a reckless
thing. He wondered if the mission had any purpose other than testing
the men involved -- to see how far they could be pushed and to
prepare them for equally preposterous missions in the future. He
wondered if he was a guinea pig.
"This event resulted in my being afraid, which
was a new experience for me. I spent a lot of time between tours
thinking about it and wondering how I would react the next time. So
it was almost like I needed to test it again." In this way Warren
Milberg's self-doubt compelled him to return to Vietnam in August
1967, at the request of the CIA as part of the Presidentially
Directed Counter-Insurgency Program that fleshed out ICEX.
On the other hand, remorse drove Elton Manzione
out of Vietnam, out of the military, and nearly out of his mind.
Consider the cases of Manzione and Milberg: two men equally exposed
to a blend of secrecy and terror. Enlisted man Manzione turned on
his masters, renounced American imperialism, and spoke out against
the misdeeds of the CIA. Officer Milberg submitted to authority and
in return became one of the protected few, accepted into the cult of
the phoenix, rewarded with the American dream.
Manzione and Milberg are remarkably alike. They
have the same kind of build, are the same age, and come from the
Greater New York Metropolitan Area. Both have dark complexions and
complexes, dark curly hair, and experience in special operations.
Both are thoughtful, aggressive, high-strung. Where they part
company is where America, too, is divided: over the question of
values.
As a SEAL in Quang Tri Province in 1964 Elton
Manzione dressed like the enemy, worked with CTs who committed
atrocities as standard procedure, and was told to ignore the rules
of engagement. "But there was no sense of our role in the war," he
said to me forlornly. He will not talk about his comrades who died
while on illegal missions into North Vietnam and Laos. But, he
noted, "what annoys me is they're not on the Washington monument
simply because they ended up getting greased somewhere where they
weren't supposed to be." [3]
Manzione's anger went beyond any lack of
recognition. He resented the fact that he was trained to kill. "In
psychology it's called cognitive dissonance -- the notion
that once you make a commitment, it's
impossible to go back. It's something about the human psyche that
makes a person reluctant to admit a mistake. This is what training
is all about. You've already killed the gook. So what if it isn't a
dummy in the bed this time? So what if it's a living, breathing
human being?
This is what you're supposed to do. And once
the first time comes and goes, it's not as hard the second time. You
say to yourself, 'Well, hey, I've killed people before. Why should I
have any compunctions about doing it now?'"
"Training is brainwashing. They destroy your
identity and supply you with a new one -- a uniform identity that
every soldier has. That's the reason for the uniform, for everyone
having the same haircut and going to dinner together and eating the
same thing
They destroyed the street kid from Newark and created
the sailor. They destroyed the sailor and
created the SEAL. But people aren't robots, and despite their
training, eventually they react; they turn on their trainers and
confront the outside forces that have used them. That's what
happened to me.
"I was a guinea pig," Manzione insisted. "There
is no doubt in my mind today, and there was very little doubt then,
even after five months in Vietnam. All the training and all the
'special' programs -- it eventually began to backfire on them. I
thought, 'Oh, yeah, great program you got here; you're using me to
see how I react. I'm expendable. I'm a pawn.' And that's kind of a
heavy realization when you're an eighteen-year-old kid.
"It's a paradox. You know," Manzione continued,
"they would send a guy over there to be a replacement for a specific
person who was being pulled out. So what consciously came across to
you was 'I'm functioning as a part of a machine. And if I fail as a
part or break down as a part
then another part will come along to replace me.' Then you
find yourself thinking, 'The last time I looked at somebody as not a
part of the machine, and I thought he was a really great guy, and
he's a friend of mine, he stepped on a land mine and came down dust,
hair, teeth, and eyeballs.'
"Then you realize, 'I can't afford to do that.
Because I feel terrible for a month afterwards.' And you can't
function when you feel terrible. The only thing we could deal with
at any particular time was survival. 'What do I want to do today? I
want to eat, sleep, and stay alive.' And you did it. And you related
to those kinds of things. Suddenly you looked around and said, 'Wait
a minute!
That's what those little guys in black pajamas
are doing, too!" You get to a point where you begin to see these
people just want to be left alone to grow their rice.
"I'll give you one last example of what I'm
talking about. I'm sure you've heard about the laser-guided smart
bombs we had. Well, they would drop these laser- guided smart bombs,
and what the VC would do was take a bunch of old rags and tires and
stuff and start a bonfire with lots of smoke. And the laser beam
would hit the smoke particles, and it would scatter, and the bombs
would go crazy. They'd go up, down, sideways, all over the place.
And people would smile and say, 'There goes another smart bomb!' So
smart a gook with a match and an old tire can fuck it up!
"The whole perverse idea of putting this
technological, semiantiseptic sort of warfare against these people
-- who didn't have much more than a stick -- was absurd. The sticks
won!"
Warren Milberg had a different point of view.
He enjoyed being a member of the closed society, in which relating
to the enemy in human terms was cause for expulsion. For him, the
image of the disemboweled mother and her murdered fetus "formed
opinions and justifications for what I was doing. It was the idea
that you needed to hate the enemy. It was the beginning of my own
personalization of my role in the conflict. It was what resulted in
me going back to Vietnam when everybody -- my parents, my friends,
my wife -- told me no one in his right mind would go back to
Vietnam. I really believed that I was helping these people defend
themselves from the bully. And sometimes that worked well, and
sometimes it was horrible
It was
horrible if you made some small little village
on the periphery of the universe believe they could in fact stand
tall and defend themselves against this thing we understood as the
enemy, then came back the next day and found them all slaughtered.
It happened. And then you had to ask yourself, 'What did I do here?
I made these people believe they could do something, and now they're
all dead. Maybe it would have been better if I had just done
nothing. Just left these people alone.'
"I'm still reconciling it. I still don't think
I've worked it all the way through."
Warren Milberg stared into the distance, seeing
sights that only combat veterans see. "Things that have happened
since then have led me to believe that I don't want to be an
instrument of policy anymore," he concluded. "I think the people who
devise the policies and cause idealistic young men to go off to war
probably need to experience some of the things I've experienced to
temper their judgments."
CHAPTER 14: Phoenix in Flight
When his first tour in Vietnam ended in the
spring of 1966, Warren Milberg returned to the United States and was
assigned to an Air Force base in South Dakota. But his name and
accomplishments remained on file at CIA headquarters in Washington,
and one year later Milberg was one of fifty officers and enlisted
men from the various military services (all Vietnam veterans) whom
the Pentagon invited to join a Presidentially Directed
Counter-insurgency Program through a participating agency/service
agreement. Those who volunteered were tested and, if accepted by the
CIA as junior officer trainees, given extensive training and
returned to Vietnam to serve at the discretion of the senior CIA
officers in Saigon and the regions. Most were assigned to the
provinces as RDC/P or RDC/O advisers, and many became Phoenix
coordinators.
Notably, the two other Air Force officers asked
to join the program both withdrew, one ''as a matter of conscience."
Jacques Kline, who is Jewish, was born and reared in France during
World War II and withdrew, according to Milberg, because "he felt
the means and methods that he thought were going to be used in it
were similar to the means and methods used by the Nazis in World War
Two." [1]
Milberg, who is also Jewish -- but obviously
did not agree with Kline -- returned to Vietnam in July 1967 and was
assigned to CIA region officer in charge Jack Horgan in Da Nang. "I
wound up getting a make-work job on the staff there, as liaison to
some military units in and around Da Nang, trying to coordinate an
intelligence collection and analysis unit for things, like motor
units, that the VC used to harass the air base and the city. It was
pretty unexciting. I stayed there for maybe a month, bored out of my
mind. Then the RDC/P officer in Quang Tri was relieved by Horgan,
which left them with a gap. And when I heard about that, I went to
him and said, 'I'd like to take the job in Quang Tri.' And he was
surprised that I did that -- that anybody would want to go to the
provinces
But Quang Tri was the end of the line, and it was a way
for Horgan to get rid of me.
"So I went up to Quang Tri and was delighted to
find that when I got there, somebody actually met me. This was the
guy who was leaving. He had three days left in Quang Tri, and in
those three days he was going to orient me as to what was going on.
After spending virtually the whole day and night talking, we loaded
up two jeeps, one full of Nung bodyguards, then drove around to all
the districts and met all the people in the Special Branch, the CIO,
and anybody else we dealt with that were part of his bilateral
operations. And I remember as we crossed the Quang Tri River bridge,
heading up Highway One toward Dong Ha, thinking, 'I'm back. Now I'm
really back,' and wondering what this was all going to be like.
"I guess we couldn't have been driving for more
than half an hour when a bus, one of those Asian buses with pigs and
chickens and people hanging off the roof and out the windows, blows
up about fifty yards ahead of us. The highway was just a little two-
lane road, running along the coastal plain. The bomb was a land
mine, constructed out of an unexploded U.S. five-hundred-pound bomb,
remotely detonated, and probably meant for us. But either a faulty
detonator or vibrations set it off. Whatever, here were a lot of
innocent civilians either dead or wounded, and it was like deja vu:
'Here I am again. What am I doing here? What is this whole thing
about?' And I guess I went through a period of depression early on,
thinking, 'There's no way to win this thing. This war is going to go
on forever. All these programs and activities are just a waste of
human and economic resources.'
"All I had left -- to justify why I was there
-- was to do the same thing I had done before, which was to
personalize it. What I did while I was there in the midst of all the
turmoil and pain and agony -- a thing that made absolutely no sense
to me -- was to apply my own value system to it, which was such that
I was going to keep pregnant women from being disemboweled. And it
got to be a very personal war for me."
After taking over Quang Tri from his
predecessor, Milberg "learned right away that the people you
inherited, the counterparts in Special Branch or CIO, had a lot to
do with the kind of tour you were going to have. They were either
good and competent people or bureaucratic, corrupt functionaries --
or variations in between. And I was really fortunate to wind up
working with a man named Nguyen Van Khoi, the Special Branch chief
in Quang Tri
I was there to advise and assist him, only to find he had
been fighting the war his whole life. He was a
pro. An incredible man
who survived
my tour there, often times at great risk to
himself." (Khoi was reportedly killed by ARVN deserters in Hue in
April 1975.)
In view of Khoi's expertise, there was little
for Milberg to do in terms of advising on Special Branch operations.
Apart from fighting for his life during Tet, conducting unilateral
operations, and monitoring the Province Interrogation Center,
Milberg worked largely in financial administration. "I had to go to
Da Nang once a month to account for funds I had expended and to
bring the region officer and his staff up-to- date on what was going
on. And I can remember thinking that I controlled more money as a
single individual, that I was sprinkling around the province in one
way or another, than what the entire [CORDS] province budget was. I
had conversations with the fellow who was the deputy in Da Nang
about the fact that we thought that we were providing some measure
of economic stability and really weren't interested in the quality
of the intelligence we were buying -- that by sprinkling this money
as we did, to these low-level informant nets, we were creating
economic stability as opposed to engaging in intelligence
operations. Interesting concept and idea.
"Once a quarter I was called into Saigon,"
Milberg continued, "and when I went to Saigon, I stayed at the Duc
Hotel. And I felt like if the Vietcong ever targeted the hotel or
the city, it would be a piece of cake. I was in the business of
planning these kinds of things, and I knew that if I had to do it,
it would be a simple thing to do. I used to say to myself, 'My God.
If this happens, what the hell am I going to do here in Saigon? They
have no plans.' People were carrying around little pistols in
shoulder holsters because it was fashionable
It was a bureaucratic war in Saigon. All
these people supposedly involved in
intelligence collection and analysis, planning for the use of
intelligence resources and the participation of paramilitary forces
-
- all these people were doing nothing! They
lived in their villas in and around town in grand splendor. They'd
come to work at eight A.M. and leave at five p.m. It was just like
being in an office building, and they had no idea what was going on
outside Saigon. None. And I just felt helpless and exposed when I
was there. I couldn't wait to get back to the provinces.
"This probably sounds strange," Milberg
confessed, "but I felt very much at home in Quang Tri, which was
really nothing more than a sleepy province capital consisting of two
cross streets and a population between fifteen to twenty thousand
people. When I got to Saigon, with its teeming millions, I felt in
more danger than I did up-country in my little rural compound in
Quang Tri.
"Of course, I wasn't out on operations in the
jungle all the time, like I was on my first tour. But whenever we
did go out, we were required to send in little spot reports on what
we did and why we did it and what the result was. Everybody was
manic about body counts -- all that kind of crap. In any event, I
kept getting warned by the guy [Jack Horgan's replacement, Harry
Mustakos] who was in the region office not to go out on operations.
That wasn't my job. And this was a guy who was totally paranoid
about being in Vietnam. He was living in Da Nang in relative comfort
next to the police station, and he could never understand why there
was a need to go out on operations when your counterpart was going
on those operations, that there was no way you were going to stay
home and still maintain credibility with that counterpart. And I
remember getting direct orders from him not to do that. Which I
ignored.
"I had a compound that was relatively
comfortable as things go," Milberg said "and a personal guard force
of Nung mercenaries whose only job was to keep me alive. I had
virtually unlimited resources to pay for a staff that translated and
produced intelligence reports, which I disseminated to anybody in
the province, U.S. military or otherwise, that I thought could take
action on those reports. And I owned and operated a forty-man PRU
force [see photo] which was my personal army. I wound up having a
marine working for me who I think was a psychopath. I never saw or
participated in what he did, but I was aware of it." (In "The Future
Applicability of the Phoenix Program," Milberg called "those abuses
that did occur ... the 'normal' aberrations which result in any form
of warfare." [2])
"PRU belonged to the RDC/O side of the province
organization until the consolidation," Milberg told me. "I started
out as the plans officer, but toward the end of 1967 I was appointed
the province officer in charge of both programs. This is where I
actually control and direct the PRU myself. Prior to this, if I had
need of the PRU, because of some intelligence I had developed, what
I did was go and see the RDC/O people -- which was a relatively
large program, five or six Americans involved -- whereas RDC/P was
only me. I lived by myself away from them. But I'm not sure if
that's the way it was in every province."
In regard to Phoenix, Milberg said, "I'm not
sure how you bound Phoenix, but it certainly falls right in the
middle. But at this point the agency was beginning to turn the reins
of the program over to the U.S. Army, as advisers to the Vietnamese,
and going through whatever Orwellian mind-set was necessary to make
believe this was a Vietnamese program."
Phoenix operations in Quang Tri Province were
different from Phoenix operations in other provinces, Milberg
explained, in that "a lot of military activity was going on, as
opposed to the Vietcong insurgency. Clearly, both things were going
on, but it was a heavily militarily oriented province. So there was
a lot of action there."
In "The Future Applicability of the Phoenix
Program," Milberg describes a typical Phoenix operation.
Capitalizing on their assets in the CIO, PRU, and Special Branch,
Milberg and Quang Tri Province Senior Adviser Bob Brewer mounted a
Phoenix operation in the village of Thuong Xa, fourteen miles south
of the DMZ. As Elton Manzione noted earlier, in this area it was
hard to determine anyone's political affiliations, and the tendency
was to consider everyone a Vietcong sympathizer. Indeed, Thuong Xa
had served as a staging area for the Vietminh in the First Indochina
War, and in 1968 its inhabitants were supporting the Vietcong in the
same manner against the Americans. Milberg writes this was because
"the people were afraid to offer information since they feared VC
reprisals." [3]
A decision to conduct a Phoenix operation of
"massive proportions" against Thuong Xa was made by Quang Tri's
Province Security Council at Brewer's urging. Once permission had
been granted, "Only the barest essential information was given to
the various Vietnamese agencies in Quang Tri," Milberg writes. In
this way, it was thought, those Vietnamese officials who had been
coerced by the VC could not interfere with the "planning process."
To ensure security, "The actual name of the targeted village was not
released to the Vietnamese until the day before the operation." [4]
In preparing the Thuong Xa operation,
information from Special Branch informers and PIC reports was fed
into DIOCCs in and around Thuong Xa -- a phenomenon rarely observed
in provinces where the Phoenix coordinator was an MACV officer, not
a CIA employee. As a blacklist of suspected VCI was compiled in
Quang Tri's Province Intelligence and Operations Coordination
Center, it was cross-checked with neighboring Quang Tin's PIOCC and
"against master Phoenix lists" in Saigon (to ensure that penetration
agents were crossed off the list), then fed to Quang Tri's DIOCCs.
Next, PRU teams were sent to locate and surveil
targeted VCI. Escape routes were studied for ambush sites, and "the
[province senior adviser] personally arranged" for local U.S. Army
and Marine units to act as a "blocking force" to seal off the entire
town. [5] At dawn on the day of the operation MACV psywar planes
dropped leaflets on Thuong Xa urging identified VCI to surrender and
offering rewards and Chieu Hoi status to informers.
No one took advantage of the deal. Instead, the
residents of Thuong Xa braced for the shock. In the early morning
hours twenty-five-man PRU teams -- accompanied by Special Branch
interrogators and CIA advisers -- began searching hooches for booby
traps, weapons, documents, food caches, and VCI suspects. They
"compared the names and descriptions on the blacklists with every
man, woman, and child in Thuong Xa." [6] Suspects were sent to
screening zones, where innocent bystanders were fed and
"entertained" by RD teams. The hard-core VCI, meanwhile, were
systematically driven into the northeast corner of town, where they
were cornered, then killed or captured as they tried to escape
through Brewer's "ring of steel."
The result was two VCI captured. One was the
district party chief; the other was the chief of the local NLF
farmers' association. Both were sent to the interrogation center in
Da Nang. Eight other targeted VCI were killed or escaped. Two
fifty-nine-member Revolutionary Development teams stayed behind to
assert the GVN's presence, but within a month they were driven out
of town and Thuong Xa reverted to Vietcong control. As Milberg
observes, "Even with this unusual amount of coordination, the fact
that the village reverted to communist control and known members of
the VCI escaped strongly suggests that the operation failed as a
future model for counterinsurgency operations." [7]
Perhaps the inhabitants of Thuong Xa resisted
the intrusion into their village because they feared Vietcong
reprisals. Or maybe they really did support the Vietcong. In either
case, the point is the same. Even under ideal conditions Phoenix
operations failed where the Vietnamese were determined to resist.
Where ideal conditions did not exist -- where Vietnamese officials
were included in the planning of operations and where U.S. military
officers replaced CIA officers as Phoenix coordinators -- the
program failed to an even greater degree.
***
In early 1968 each of the CIA's region officers
in charge was assigned a military intelligence officer, either a
major or a lieutenant colonel, to serve as his Phoenix coordinator.
In IV Corps the job was given to Lieutenant Colonel Doug Dillard, an
easygoing Georgian who, at sixteen, lied about his age, enlisted in
the Eighty-second Airborne Brigade, and fought in World War II.
After the war Dillard became a commissioned officer, and in Korea he
served in the Combined Command for Reconnaissance Activity, which,
under CIA auspices, coordinated special operations behind enemy
lines. Dillard gained further espionage experience in the late
1950's as a case officer in Germany running agent operations in
conjunction with the Army's attache office and the CIA. After a
stint teaching airborne and amphibious "offensive"
counterintelligence operations at Fort Holabird, Dillard was made
deputy chief of intelligence at the Continental Army Command, where
he trained and deployed "practically every army intelligence unit
that went to Vietnam." [8]
Speaking in a drawl, Dillard told me, "I went
over to Vietnam in February 1968 as the Phoenix coordinator for Four
Corps, reporting to the CIA's region officer in charge.
Branch called me and said, 'We have what we
consider a critical requirement. We can't discuss it over the phone
-- it's classified -- but you'll find out what it is when you get
there.'
"So," Dillard continued, "when I arrived in
Saigon, I immediately contacted several of my friends. One, Colonel
Russ Conger, the senior adviser in Phong Dinh Province, gave me some
tips on getting different agencies to cooperate and on overcoming
the terrorist psychology in the villages and hamlets. He also
informed me that there were many people around who felt Phoenix was
a threat to them -- to their power base. " In other words, military
officers commanding units in the field "considered Phoenix, on
occasion, as getting in their way and inhibiting resources they
could otherwise use for their own operations."
Right away Dillard understood that his job
would be to bridge the gap, so that conventional military forces
could be made available for unconventional Phoenix operations
planned by the CIA. But he also sensed another problem festering
beneath the surface. "It's kind of in conflict to our culture and
experience over the years," he explained, "to take a U.S. Army
element -- whatever it may be -- and direct it not only toward the
military and paramilitary enemy forces but also toward the civilians
that cooperate with them."
General Bruce Palmer, commander of the U.S.
Ninth Infantry Division in 1968, put it more bluntly. "My objection
to the program," he wrote in a letter to the author, "was the
involuntary assignment of U.S. Army officers to the program. I don't
believe that people in uniform, who are pledged to abide by the
Geneva Conventions, should be put in the position of having to break
those laws of warfare." [9]
Most military officers, however, resented
Phoenix on other than legal grounds. The notion of attacking an
elusive and illusionary civilian infrastructure was anathema to
conventional warriors looking for spectacular main force battles.
For an ambitious officer assigned to Phoenix, "the headlines would
not be very impressive in terms of body counts, weapons captured, or
some other measure of success," as Warren Milberg notes. In
addition, Phoenix coordinators were merely advisers to their
counterparts, not commanders in the field.
After being informally briefed by his friends,
Dillard reported to the Phoenix Directorate, which "represented the
program at the national level, ensuring that we got the kind of
personnel and logistical support we felt we needed." However,
because of the staff's "very narrow administrative type of
intelligence background," it did not "understand how the program was
going to develop. As the ICEX program," Dillard explained, "it was
run directly at the province level, principally by the agency. But
Parker's staff didn't grasp that when MACV took over and fleshed out
Phoenix with hundreds of military officers and money, it really was
a joint operation -- that CIA was a supporter and partial sponsor,
but really MACV had to account for it. This is how it evolved."
While the Saigon staff was content to view
Phoenix as a CIA subsidiary, Dillard set about asserting MACV's
presence in Phoenix operations in the Delta -- a task made easier by
the relative absence of regular military units and by Dillard's
engaging personality and wide experience in command, staff, and
operational positions.
Ultimately, though, Dillard's leverage was
logistics.
"As a matter of protocol between itself and the
CIA," Dillard explained, "MACV assumed half of the agency's
operational expenses in support of Phoenix. For example, every time
the agency's aircraft were used to support a Phoenix activity,
technically it should have been charged against the fund allocation
MACV had given to the Phoenix program. So when I found out about
that, I contacted the Air America operations people in Four Corps
and said, 'Just to keep everybody honest, I want a record of what
you're charging for aircraft support against the Phoenix program.'
And thereafter I tried to get air support from U.S. Army region
headquarters at Can Tho, so I didn't have to squander MACV
operational funds reimbursing the agency for use of its aircraft."
By protecting MACV's financial interests,
Dillard won the support of IV Corps commander, General George
Eckhardt. "Most of my work with the MACV staff was either with
General Eckhardt directly, or with the intelligence chief, Colonel
Ted Greyman," Dillard recalled. "Ted and I worked hand in hand
coordinating the activity, and it paid off
General Eckhardt and Colonel Greyman set aside for me a light
gun
platoon and six helicopter gunships to run
Phoenix operations throughout the region." This contingent became "a
regional reaction force to haul troops and provide fire support."
With it, Dillard was able to provide the PRU with air mobility and
thus get access to CIA intelligence in exchange.
Jim Ward spoke highly of Doug Dillard, saying,
"He was assigned to me because they wanted the best man they could
get down in the Delta." [10] The admiration was mutual. About Ward
and his deputy, Andy Rogers, Dillard said, "They were great guys to
work with. There was an immediate acceptance of my credentials."
That was not always the case. But Dillard and Ward agreed on what
constituted a legitimate Phoenix operation -- be it an ambush
dreamed up at a DIOCC or a multiprovince operation concocted by the
CIA -- and together they would push Phoenix beyond the narrow rifle
shot parameters advocated by Robert Komer.
Dillard's liberal interpretation of Phoenix is
partially the result of his perception of the "terrorist psychology"
in Vietnam. "I arrived in Can Tho on a Friday afternoon," he
recalled. "The two army sergeants that had come in to be my
administrative assistants met me at the airport and took me over to
the compound and settled me in the CIA's regional house, which was
also being used by the local Phong Dinh Province CIA personnel.
There was a vacant room, so I took it, and the next morning I
reported in to Andy Rogers. I was given a little office with the two
enlisted men [who] handled reports and requests from the field. I
was also assigned a deputy, Major Keith Ogden.
"Anyway, I found out there was a helicopter
going up to Chau Doc Province on the Cambodian border on Sunday
morning, so I went up there. It was my first introduction to the
real war
It was right after Tet, and there was still a lot of
activity. The young sergeant there, Drew Dix,
had been in a little village early that morning
The VC had come in and got a couple out that were accused of
collaborating with the government, and they'd
shot them in the ears. Their bodies were lying out on a cart. We
drove out there, and I looked at that
and I had my first
awareness of what those natives were up
against. Because during the night, the damn VC team would come in,
gather all those villagers together, warn them about cooperating,
and present an example of what happened to collaborators. They shot
them in the ears on the spot.
"So I knew what my job was. I realized there
was a tremendous psychological problem to overcome in getting that
specific group of villagers to cooperate in the
program. Because to me the Phoenix program was
one requiring adequate, timely, and detailed information so we could
intercept, make to defect, kill, maim, or capture the Vietcong
guerrilla forces operating in our area. Or put a strike on them. If
either through intercepting messages or capturing VCI, you could get
information on some of the main force guerrilla battalion activity,
you could put a B-fifty-two strike on them, which we did in Four
Corps."
For Jim Ward, "intelligence was the most
important part of Phoenix." Handling that task for Ward was "a
regular staffer with the agency who worked full time on intelligence
-- the real sensitive, important operations" -- meaning unilateral
penetrations into the VCI and GVN. The staffer "had military people
assigned to him," working as liaison officers in the provinces, as
well as CIA, State Department, and USIS officers and policemen from
the United States. His job was "making sure they were properly
supervised." Of course, the station's special unit could abscond
with any penetrations that had national significance.
At the other end of the spectrum, "the first
and most important purpose of the DIOCC," according to Ward, "the
one that got General Thanh behind Phoenix," was getting tactical
military intelligence. When managed by a military officer, as they
usually were, DIOCCs focused on this area, while the PIOCCs, where
the CIA exerted greater influence, focused on the VCI.
According to Ward, when information generally
obtained from interrogation centers or hamlet informants indicated
that a person was a VCI, the CIA's liaison officer started a
three-by-five card file on that person at the Province Intelligence
and Operations Coordination Center, which was often located in the
embassy house.
When a second piece of information came in --
from the provincial reconnaissance units or the Regional and Popular
Forces -- a folder was opened. After a third source had incriminated
the suspect, he or she was targeted for penetration, defection, or
capture and interrogation at the PIC, then turned over to the
Province Security Committee with evidence for sentencing.
This was the rifle shot approach. But where
large concentrations of people or security teams surrounded the
targeted VCI, Jim Ward favored a variation on the cordon and search
method employed by Brewer and Milberg in Quang Tri, "where you move
in at three A.M., surround the entire area, and block everybody
off." However, because Ward lacked the "troop density" enjoyed in I
Corps, in his Phoenix operations he used light observation
helicopters "to buzz the paddy fields to keep people from running
off. You don't have enough men to cordon off an entire village when
you have only a hundred PRU and two Americans," he said, the two
Americans being the PRU adviser and the Phoenix coordinator.
Using this approach, which relied on surprise,
Ward would conduct five operations in a day. "They would go in on
one side of the village. The first outfit would jump off a
helicopter with one adviser and set up a block. Then another
helicopter would land a hundred yards further down. Then a third and
a fourth, with the other U.S. adviser.
These guys would branch out in a skirmish line
and start moving into town. They would catch everybody with rifles
stacked, unprepared. When a helicopter is coming in low," Ward
explained, "you don't even hear it coming in your direction. All of
a sudden there's a tremendous roar, and they see people landing in
different places.
"The PRU knew exactly what to do," Ward
continued. "They'd get all these people [VCI suspects] out in a
larger helicopter and take them back to where the province chief
could put them in a special stockade. Then they'd get Special Branch
people going through identifying each one. Meanwhile, the PRU would
reequip with more ammo and go to the next drop."
Ward's method closely resembled the
hunter-killer technique developed in 1962 and detailed by Elton
Manzione. Omitted from Ward's sanitized account, however, was what
happened before the arrival of the killer team, when the hunter team
"snatches and/or snuffs" the cadre. Ward also neglected to describe
the conduct of the PRU.
"Sometimes we'd go out with a whole pack of
mercenaries," recalled Mike Beamon. "They were very good going in,
but once we got there and made our target, they would completely
pillage the place .... It was a complete carnival
"
[11]
***
In balancing MACV's and the CIA's interests in
Phoenix, Colonel Doug Dillard was destined to rain on somebody's
parade. In IV Corps the man who got soaked was the regional Public
Safety adviser, Del Spiers.
Dillard as the regional Phoenix coordinator had
the job of bringing police resources to bear against the VCI. The
idea was to prevent region officers in charge like Jim Ward and Bob
Wall from using PRU as blocking forces during Phoenix operations, so
the PRU would be available to conduct rifle shot operations. "Our
concept," Dillard said, "was to put the Field Police in a location
as a blocking force and let the PRUs do the dirty work."
In 1968, however, most province chiefs were
still feeling the aftershocks of Tet and preferred to use the Field
Police as bodyguards in the province capital. "Unless you had an
effective Regional and Popular Forces organization at the district
level,"
Dillard explained, "the only thing you had ...
was the Field Police, and hell, he was guarding the province chief's
house, not out trying to run operations in support of your
activity."
Compounding the problem were the Public Safety
advisers themselves, whom Dillard described as "principally
responsible for getting new jeeps and radios and supplies and funds
for the National Police. And that was about it. Their proclivity was
to support the Field Police, as opposed to trying to see that force
engaged in operations.
"As I began to get out in the provinces,"
Dillard continued, "it seemed the Public Safety adviser was never
there. He was either en route to Saigon or coming back from Saigon.
When I talked to the U.S. people in the province, they would say,
'Well, this guy is either drunk or shacked up with his girl friend.'
... Many of them were former policemen or policemen on leave,"
Dillard grumbled, "or they came from some law enforcement activity
and were plunged into that environment ... [and] based on my
experience, there was almost a total incompetence."
Nor was the problem alleviated when "after Tet,
they brought in a group of enlisted men out of the Military Police.
They were going to be advisers to the Field Police, but many of them
were inept, too. I know from talking to them that they had never
been in combat, and their experience was analogous to Shore Patrol,"
Dillard said. "They were principally experienced as physical
security guards, and many of them had drinking problems.
"Anyway, we just wrote the Field Police off.
When it came to trying to get their resources on the ground, to put
them in helicopters and move them around, we began to find that the
province chief had one problem after another: Either the Field
Police weren't available, or the Public Safety advisers weren't
aware of the nature of Phoenix operations, or [the operations
weren't] cleared with the province chief. And the Public Safety
adviser would be running against the grain if he took the province
chief's resources or even tried to influence him to free up the
Field Police to run our operations.
"So the senior CORDS advisor, 'Coal Bin' Willie
Wilson, came down to Four Corps, and he called me over and asked,
'What can we do to improve the Phoenix program?' And I complained
about the lack of use of Field Police. I said I wanted to use it as
a light infantry strike force, which would give us, if you added in
the PRU, about a four- thousand-man strike force in the Delta. 'We
know the PRU are damn good,' I said, 'but we can't get them all
killed trying to do everybody's job.'
"What I proposed is that there be some kind of
central control set up that would give us the capability to use
police in the Delta to support Phoenix I operations. I added
that with the kind of people there were out
advising in the provinces, 'that ain't ever gonna get done.'"
When confronted by Coal Bin Willie, Doug
Dillard recalled, Del Spiers said, "I can't fire the province senior
adviser. I have to put up with the people he assigns to me. It's not
like the military," where an officer can transfer an unsatisfactory
subordinate.
Said Dillard: "Well, I am a military man, and I
have a job to get done." And from that day on the Field Police and
their Public Safety advisers were the Phoenix program's scapegoats
in the Delta. At their expense Dillard achieved peace between the
CIA and MACV in the Delta. He convinced the CIA that by sharing its
information, military resources could be used against the VCI. In
exchange for supporting the CIA's attack on the VCI, the military
benefited from CIA intelligence on the location of main force enemy
units. That translated into higher body counts and brighter careers.
"I could do what I wanted within the guidelines
of the Phoenix program," Doug Dillard said with satisfaction, "which
to me was the overall coordination of the units that existed in the
Delta to destroy the infrastructure." With his regional reaction
force ready and raring to go, Dillard mounted regional Phoenix
operations on the Ward mini-cordon and search technique.
"At the province level we had almost daily
involvement with the CIA's province adviser and SEAL team PRU
adviser," Dillard explained. "This was either trying to help them
get resources or going over the potential for operations. A good
example is the time we got good intelligence on the VC staff on
sampans in the U Minh Forest. The idea was to work in coordination
with the U.S. Ninth Infantry Division in Chuong Thien Province. It
was good timing because they had troops and could expand their
artillery fire into An Xuyen, where the U Minh Forest was. We
decided to use the PRU team from Kien Giang, with their SEAL
adviser, and Major Leroy Suddath [the Phong Dinh paramilitary
adviser, who as a major general in 1986 commanded the First Special
Operations Command at Fort Bragg]."
As in the Milberg-Brewer operation in Quang
Tri, the Vietnamese were cut out of the planning. "We decided we
should lift out without a lot of notice," Dillard said. "So the SEAL
adviser put his PRU on alert. But we didn't want to spook them, so
they were told they were going on an operation in their province
We took the PRU team out
of Kien Giang with Leroy in the lead, and with
the Ninth Division helicopters and artillery support to cover our
infiltration and exfiltration. This way we could put the PRU on the
canal, capture those people, and get in and out during daylight.
"We went over to Cbuong Thien and loaded out of
there. I flew out of there in the command and control helicopter. We
went up to Kien Giang, and Leroy had the PRU team ready
We loaded up early that morning, flew down, and inserted the
team on
the canal. Then the chopper went back to Chuong
Thien; I stayed over there with the radio and talked to Leroy to get
a progress report. Leroy went in with the PRU-SEAL team. There were
two Americans, and the rest were Vietnamese. They scarfed up twelve
people almost immediately but couldn't find the sampan they were
looking for. We think the damn operation got leaked, and they got
spooked."
As in the Thuong Xa operation, despite
elaborate planning and security precautions, a large-scale Phoenix
operation failed to accomplish its mission. However, by showing that
military assets could be used in support of Province Reconnaissance
Units and that CIA intelligence could generate a sizable operation,
the U Minh Forest operation did prove to MACV that Phoenix was a
viable coordinating mechanism.
***
"In working with Ted Greyman in the Can Tho
Advisory Group," Dillard said, "we were trying to piece together
patterns of the main force guerrilla battalions, which constituted
the single greatest danger to a district or even a province. Ted
very closely coordinated with us in our Phoenix activities, plotting
information where VC attacks had occurred, in what force, when, and
so forth. When these facts came together, he would coordinate a
B-fifty-two strike in that area."
In particular, Dillard was concerned with the
movements of the Muoi Tu Battalion, which periodically emerged from
its sanctuary in Cambodia and conducted operations in Chau Doc, Kien
Phong, and Kien Tuong provinces. "Annually they'd come down and cut
a wide swath through these three provinces, then go back into
Cambodia," Dillard explained. "That's where Ted Greyman and I began
to work very closely to try to plot every piece of information that
we could get on the Muoi Tu Battalion."
The job of finding the Muoi Tu in Cambodia
belonged to the Special Operations Group and its Vietnamese assets,
which ran agent nets and reconnaissance missions into Cambodia. But,
explained Dillard, "Quite often there was a lot of clumsy, heavy-
handed type of activity, and I don't think [Special Forces] were
appreciative of the nuances of being supercautious in collecting and
evaluating intelligence before running operations. I think it was in
Kien Phong on the border; the sun rose one morning, and they went
into position there, and every man on the line had been shot through
the back of the head. This was the Vietnamese Special Forces. They
were infiltrated constantly by the VC."
Dispersed along South Vietnam's borders since
1962, the Fifth Special Forces A teams, augmented by the 403d
Special Operations Detachment and an unnumbered intelligence group,
routinely fed intelligence to MACV and the CIA. "The sophistication
of the intelligence apparatus," General McChristian writes, "allowed
for operations against the infrastructure." [12]
However, by September 1967 it was clear, as
Doug Dillard noted, that the Vietnamese Special Forces were too
heavily infiltrated to be trusted. So concurrent with the creation
of ICEX and the reorganization of SOG, the CIA commissioned Project
Gamma. Also known as Detachment B-57, Gamma was charged with the
mission of organizing cross-border counter-intelligence operations
to find out who within the Cambodian government was helping the NVA
and VC infiltrate and attack Special Forces A camps, recon teams,
and agent nets. While posing as medical and agricultural specialists
in a "dummy" civil affairs unit, Gamma personnel coordinated
intelligence from A teams, identifying the key VCI cadres that were
mounting penetration operations against them. Detachment B-57
coordinated its activities with SOG and the various Special Forces
projects, including Delta, Sigma, Omega, and Blackjack out of Tay
Ninh. In defense of its A camps, Special Forces mounted its own
attack on the VCI through a combination of agent nets, "specialized
patrolling," mobile strike forces, and a "kill on sight" rewards
program. In this way, SOG and Phoenix were united.
As for the "heavy-handedness" cited by Dillard,
on November 27, 1967, Fifth Special Forces Captain John McCarthy was
sitting beside his principal agent, Inchin Hai Lam (a Cambodian
working for B-57 out of Quang Loi), in the front seat of a car
parked on a street in Tay Ninh. A suspected double agent, Lam was a
member of the Khmer Serai, a dissident Cambodian political party
created by the CIA to overthrow Cambodia's Prince Sihanouk. Without
warning, McCarthy turned and put a bullet between Lam's eyes.
McCarthy was tried for Lam's murder, and the
ensuing scandal raised questions about the legality of "terminating
with extreme prejudice" suspected double agents. The issue would
surface again in regard to Phoenix.
Regardless of where the VCI were -- in South
Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, or North Vietnam -- "the idea," said
Dillard, "was that if we knew their pattern and if we could put the
fear of God in them, then we could influence their movements so they
could never assemble as a battalion. Our forces could resist any
company-sized attacks, and that pretty much cut back their
capabilities by preventing them from operating at a battalion-level
force."
MACV "could do a fifty-two strike pretty
easily," Dillard explained. And once MACV began using B-52 strikes
as a way of harassing VC guerrilla units, "Thereafter we had pretty
good evidence that the VC were doing just what we wanted them to do.
They were not assembling in large battalion-sized forces, and we
could route them around. We continued to try to do that from the
summer of 1968 on, and we started getting in some pretty good
defectors because of that pressure. The overall coordination was
working."
Indeed, when B-52 strikes were mounted,
coordination was essential. For example, the CIA could not run a PRU
operation in enemy territory without first consulting MACV, because,
as Dillard put it, "it's conceivable that the operations people have
scheduled a strike in that area. " Yet everyone mounted unilateral
operations anyway. "An element of the five-twenty-fifth" -- Dillard
sighed -- "their collection and special security unit, was trying to
get the VCI to defect -- this was in the summer of 1968. They had a
lead to a VCI cadre meeting, and they ran the operation, and there
was nothing there. We were all called into General Eckhardt's office
to find out who the hell had approved this special operation without
Ted Greyman knowing it.
"There's always that problem," Dillard
contended, "when some outfit perceives that they're going to pull
off a coup. Then it backfires. The damn thing was a total
embarrassment. Just like the sale of arms to Iran."
As long as unilateral operations persisted,
Phoenix could never fly. "It was kind of hard at times to determine
just who was operating in that environment," Dillard remarked.
"Quite often the main mission of the Special Branch guy may have
been to keep tabs on the ARVN people. In the case of the Military
Security Service, if I was able to get to the guy through [his
counterpart, MSS Colonel] Phuoc or through the Army security unit in
the Delta ... I would try to push an operation or try to find out
what they knew that we were not being informed of. But in the whole
time I was there, I was convinced that there was a lot of unilateral
reporting that did not get into the U.S. system, whether it was
Phoenix or something else. It had to do with the different axes
people had to grind."
CHAPTER 15: Modus Vivendi
The inclusion of the Vietnamese in Phoenix in
the summer of 1968 was not welcomed by meticulous CIA security
officers. These professional paranoids, Doug Dillard said with a
sigh, "did not realize you cannot become so secretive that you can't
even run an operation. We were always aware of the need for secrecy,
and where we suspected there was a leak we tried to hold everything
as close as possible. But sometimes you just couldn't do it. You had
to plan and coordinate with the Vietnamese to run operations." [1]
On the other hand, from the Presidential Palace
to the most decrepit DIOCC, VC agents were everywhere. It was a fact
that was factored into every equation, it was the reason why Phoenix
began as a unilateral operation, and it was why the program failed,
for Phoenix was not a counterintelligence program meant to uncover
enemy agents but a positive intelligence program designed to
neutralize the people managing the insurgency.
The job of counterintelligence was shared by
the Special Branch and the Military Security Service, with the
Special Branch protecting the government and the MSS protecting the
South Vietnamese armed forces, at times at cross purposes. For
example, like many of his MSS colleagues, Colonel Nguyen Van Phuoc
was placed under house arrest and accused of being implicated when
Diem and Nhu were assassinated. Afterward Phuoc was "tainted" but
was resuscitated by the CIA, which valued him for his contacts,
according to Dillard, in "the Catholic intelligence network that
extended into Cambodia. As a matter of fact, he offered to bring
them into the fold because of the sanctuary that main force
guerrilla battalions enjoyed in Cambodia."
With CIA sponsorship, Phuoc was to enjoy a
number of prominent positions, not least as deputy IV Corps
commander and counterpart to Doug Dillard and Andy Rogers. But Phuoc
lived on the edge and, like Generals Do Cao Tri and Tran Thanh
Phong, eventually perished in a mysterious plane accident.
"Colonel Phuoc's problems on the Vietnamese
side were greater than ours because the province chiefs were
appointed by the president," Dillard explained. "There were all
kinds of rumors about 'some bought their jobs,' and there were other
kinds of arrangements, too. There were businesses that flourished
and were never bothered by the VC in the provinces, so it was
obvious that someone was being paid off."
In fairness to the Vietnamese, a point should
be made about cultural values. For what Americans define as
corruption, the Vietnamese consider perfectly proper behavior.
Accepting gifts and returning favors -- taking bribes and making
payoffs -- were how, after generations of colonial oppression,
Vietnamese officials supplemented measly salaries and supported
extended families. The system was a form of prebend, the same right
ministers have to a portion of the Sunday offering as a stipend. And
rather than fight the system, the CIA compensated for it by paying
its Phung Hoang, secret police, and PRU assets exorbitant salaries.
Conversely, for the average Vietnamese citizen
caught in a war-torn economy, dealing with the Vietcong was a matter
of survival. And while this modus vivendi provided American
intelligence officers with a line of communication to the enemy, it
also gave them migraine headaches.
"For example," Dillard said, "in Bac Lieu there
was a great suspicion that the province chief was on the take from
the VC tax collector. The PRU team leader in Bac Lieu, Doc Sells,
had firsthand evidence of that. But the VC tax collector, who lived
in Ba Xuyen Province, was a wealthy businessman, and the way he
stayed wealthy was by paying extortion and ransom
Now Doc knew, based on the way the province chief
had acted in the past, that never in the world
would they [the PRU] be allowed to coordinate an operation in Ba
Xuyen without compromising it. So the Bac Lieu PRU ran an operation
over into Ba Xuyen and kidnapped this guy. It caused all kinds of
grief between the two provinces, and when it surfaced at our level,
they had to release him. Then there were threats that 'Well, next
time he won't survive.' They put a price on Doc's head. I remember a
kid came into the restaurant where Doc was eating and put a
cigarette lighter on the table. It was a booby trap that exploded
but luckily didn't hurt him."
All this means that if the VCI was a criminal
conspiracy, then its partners in crime were government officials --
particularly province chiefs, police, and security officials. Robert
Slater writes: "During the period 1964-1967, it was fairly common to
read of a hand grenade being thrown into a bar. This was normally
attributed by the press to terrorism, but police investigations
usually showed that the owner had refused to pay taxes to the VC. It
is uncommon to read or even hear of this now [in 1970]; undoubtedly
the bar owners have agreed to pay their taxes." Likewise, "From 1965
to 1969," Slater knew "of no American oil company trucks being
ambushed. On one occasion a VC road block let an American oil
company truck pass by, then fifteen minutes later stopped a South
Vietnamese bus, disembarked all the passengers, collected 'tax'
money, and then shot two ARVN soldiers who were in uniform." [2]
This modus vivendi between the VCI and GVN
officials frustrated many Phoenix coordinators who were trying to
distinguish one from the other. Some simply threw up their hands,
held their breaths, and marked time. Others were spurred to
indiscriminate acts of violence. Those who took the hard line, like
III Corps DEPCORDS John Vann, believed that it was not enough for
the Vietnamese simply to be pro-Phoenix. According to Vann's deputy
for plans and programs, who shall hereafter be known as Jack, Vann
insisted that in order for Phoenix to succeed, the Vietnamese had to
fight actively against the VCI. But that was impossible, Jack
explained, because "the Vietnamese were protected in the day by the
GVN, but were left to the VC at night. So the little guy in the
village survived day to day knowing when to say yes and when to say
no. The wrong answer could cost him his life." [3]
Unfortunately for the Vietnamese who preferred
to remain neutral, it was the most highly motivated Americans --
those who were most avidly anti-Communist
-- who were listened to in Washington and who
ipso facto determined policy.
As hard as it was to involve province chiefs in
the attack on the VCI, the rural population was even harder to
incite. Earnest Phoenix coordinators like Doug Dillard tried "to get
the people in the villages to tell you when the VC were coming, so
you could put the PRU on them or a B-fifty-two strike." However, why
the Vietnamese would not cooperate is understandable, especially in
the case of B-52 strikes, "one of which," Dillard recalled,
"occurred right between Kien Hoa and Dinh Tuong. There was pretty
good evidence that a VC battalion had assembled in that area,"
Dillard said, "and Ted put a strike on it. They went in later to
assess the damage, and said it looked like a butcher shop."
For that reason, damage assessment was not a
popular job in Vietnam and was a task often assigned to PRU units or
unpopular American soldiers like Air Force Captain Brian Willson
who, with the 823d Combat Security Police Squadron, commanded a
mobile security unit at Binh Thuy Air Base four miles west of Can
Tho. As punishment for fraternizing with enlisted men, Willson was
given the job of damage assessment in areas bombed by B-52's.
"In the Delta," Willson told me, "the villages
were very small, like a mound in a swamp. There were no names for
some of them. The people in these villages had been told to go to
relocation camps, because this was all a free fire zone, and
technically anyone there could be killed. But they wouldn't leave
their animals or burial grounds. At the same time, the U.S. Air
Force had spotters looking for muzzle flashes, and if that flash
came from that dot, they'd wipe out the village.
It was that simple. [4]
"It was the epitome of immorality," Willson
suggested. "One of the times I counted bodies after an air strike --
which always ended with two napalm bombs which would just fry
everything that was left -- I counted sixty-two bodies. In my report
I described them as so many women between fifteen and twenty-five
and so many children -- usually in their mothers' arms or very close
to them -- and so many old people. When I went to Tan Son Nhut a few
days later, I happened to see an afteraction report from this
village. A guy I knew showed me where to look. The report said one
hundred-thirty VC dead.
"Another time I was driving up near Sa Dec. It
was a coincidence. I didn't even know it was happening. There was an
air strike, and I was very near this village where it was happening.
I'd never seen a localized air strike on a village before. I was
stunned. The ground shook like an earthquake, and that was scary.
But there I was, watching as
the last sweep came in and dropped some napalm,
sending up balls of fire that finally wiped everything out. And I
was standing in my jeep, kind of in shock, and this old man came
running out of the village. I was about one hundred fifty feet from
him, and our eyes met for like two seconds. Then he turned and ran
away.
"I remember driving down this little lane ...
thinking I'd wake up and not be there. I drove for three or four
miles like that. Then I saw this old Vietnamese woman with a yoke on
her back, holding a couple of pails of water. Then I saw this water
buffalo just kind of meandering through a rice paddy. I remember
stopping and thinking, 'Man, I am here. I'm still in Vietnam.' I'd
been there three months. After that I wanted to desert."
***
Why would the inhabitants of a Vietnamese
village voluntarily announce to U.S. or GVN authorities the presence
of VC guerrillas or political cadres, if doing so meant a bath in
five-hundred-pound bombs or a pack of plundering PRU? This question
reaches to the heart of Phoenix and the "collateral damage" it
caused.
One explanation was offered in a series of
articles written in late 1970 and early 1971 for the liberal
Catholic newspaper Tin Sang (Morning News). Published in Saigon by
Ngo Cong Duc, a nationalist in the Vietnamese legislature, half of
all its issues were confiscated by the police on orders from the
minister of information, Truong Buu Diem, a long-standing CIA asset.
Nearly all issues, however, are preserved in the Yen Ching Library
at Harvard University.
Translated by a Vietnamese woman at the
University of Massachusetts, this series of articles, titled "The
Truth About Phoenix," provides rare insights into the Vietnamese
perspective on Phoenix.
The author of "The Truth About Phoenix" used
the alias Dinh Tuong An, but his true identity is known to CIA
officer Clyde Bauer, who claims An was a Communist sympathizer.
Red-baiting, of course, requires no substantiation. But it is a
fact, as corroborated by Phoenix adviser Richard Ide, that An was a
translator for Major Oscar L. Jenkins, the CIA's Special Branch
adviser in the Trung Giang inner-Mekong area, running Phoenix
operations in Sa Dec, Vinh Long, and Vinh Binh provinces in 1968 and
1969.
"Phoenix," writes An, "is a series of big
continuous operations which, because of the bombing, destroy the
countryside and put innocent people to death
In the
sky are armed helicopters, but on the ground
are the black uniforms, doing what they want where the helicopters
and B-52's do not reach
Americans in black
uniforms," according to An, "are the most
terrible." [5]
Also according to An, the CIA always sent PRU
teams in the day before cordon and search operations, to capture
people targeted for interrogation. The next day, An notes, the PRU
would return in U.S. Navy helicopters with ARVN troops. "When they
go back to their base at Dong Tam [the sprawling PRU facility near
My Tho], they bring people's bleeding ears. But," asks An
rhetorically, "are these the ears of the VC?" [6]
The purpose of Phoenix, An contends, was "to
avenge what the VC did during Tet. Which is why Thieu did not
hesitate to sign Phoenix into law. But," he adds, "local officials
knew nothing about the program except the decree. The central
government didn't explain anything. Furthermore, the CIA and their
assistants had a hard time trying to explain to province chiefs
about operations to pacify the countryside and destroy the VCI." [7]
Indeed, the Vietnamese were confused by
contradictory American programs. For example, B-52 strikes and Agent
Orange dustings served only to impoverish rural villagers, prompting
them to deduce that these operations, were directed against them,
not the VCI. Making matters worse, province chiefs reported the
damage, ostensibly to get compensation for those hurt by the
attacks, but kept the money for themselves. Then Revolutionary
Development Cadre appeared, promising to offset the damage with
economic development. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army was pursuing a
scorched-earth policy and the Agency for International Development
was withdrawing support for RD reconstruction projects -- a reversal
in policy, An contends, that stemmed from the CIA's belief that
reconstruction projects only helped the wives and families of VC who
returned from their jungle hideouts when the projects were done. [8]
All that led most Vietnamese to agree with An that "Revolutionary
Development only teaches the American line."
The end result of the contradictory programs
and double-talk was a lack of trust in the GVN, not in the VCI,
which rarely failed to make good on promises.
Likewise, the Vietnamese interpreted Phoenix,
the program designed to provide security to the rural population, as
an attempt by the Americans to prolong the war. Like B-52 strikes
and Agent Orange, Phoenix only made people's lives more difficult.
People wondered, An informs us, how Phoenix could turn things
around. [9]
In responding to these concerns, An writes, the
CIA argued that Phoenix was needed because B-52 strikes and
defoliation operations did not destroy "the VC lower structure." But
in attacking the VCI, the CIA never considered the human concerns of
the Vietnamese, declares An. For example, many rice fields were
owned by Vietcong, and as more and more fields were destroyed by
Agent
Orange, people had no choice but to buy rice
from these VC. This included wealthy merchants who were subsequently
accused by security forces of collaborating with the enemy and were
forced to pay bribes to keep from being arrested. In this way GVN
officials extorted from people caught in between them and the
Vietcong.
Nor, An adds, did the CIA care that many
Vietnamese during Tet -- including policemen and soldiers -- visited
their families in areas controlled by the Vietcong, thus becoming
VCI suspects themselves. Or that Vietnamese civil servants,
especially schoolteachers with families living in VC areas, became
informants simply as a way of getting advance notice of Phoenix
operations, so they could warn their relatives of pending attacks.
In return for protecting their families, these Vietnamese were
surveilled and extorted by government security forces.
Nor did the CIA take steps to protect people
from false accusations. An cites the case of five teachers working
for a Catholic priest in Vinh Long Province. These women refused to
attend a VC indoctrination session. When the VC were later captured
by PRU, they named these teachers as VC cadres. The teachers were
arrested and jailed without trial or evidence. "That's why people
feared Phoenix," An explains. "The biggest fear is being falsely
accused -- from which there is no protection. That's why Phoenix
doesn't bring peace or security. That's why it destroys trust in the
GVN, not the VCI." [10]
Adding to this mistrust was the fact that the
CIA rewarded security officials who extorted the people. "The CIA,"
An writes, "spends money like water." As a result, MSS and Special
Branch operators preferred to sell information to the CIA rather
than "give" it to their Vietnamese employers. And even though the
CIA had no way of corroborating the information, it was used to
build cases against VCI suspects. The CIA also passed quantities of
cash to the various religious sects. "Many priests in the
inner-Mekong," An reports, "have relations with the CIA, so people
in the provinces refuse to have contact with them. [11]
"Many agents from the different police in IV
Corps receive money from the CIA," An reports, "in the form of merit
pay." Money was spent beautifying Special Branch offices -- buying
telephones, generators, air conditioners, Lambrettas, and Xerox
machines for dutiful policemen and pretty secretaries. Big bucks
were lavished on local officials, particularly those sitting on
Phoenix committees. "Conveniences" given to committee members,
writes An, made it easier for them "to explore information from
agents," leading to the arrest of suspected VCI. [12]
Recall what Warren Milberg said: "I had
virtually unlimited resources to develop agent operations, to pay
for a staff that translated and produced intelligence reports ...
more money ... than what the province budget was." [13] But while
Milberg saw this as "creating economic stability," the incentive to
sell information had the side effect of tearing apart Vietnamese
society.
Perhaps the most disturbing charge made by An
is that CIA operators encouraged the illegal activities of Phoenix
personnel. He cites as an example the time Military Security Service
agents in Sa Dec observed Special Branch agents taking payoffs from
the local VC tax collector. Naturally, the MSS agents sold this
information to the CIA, which took no action -- because payoffs were
a vehicle for penetration operations. Writes An: "The CIA works to
keep some Communist areas intact so they can get information." [14]
This, of course, was in direct opposition to the Phoenix mission.
As an example of the intelligence potential of
the modus vivendi, An notes that unilateral CIA penetration agents
into the VCI often posed as pharmacists and were supplied with
desperately needed antibiotics, which they would smuggle into
Vietcong jungle hideouts in Cambodia in exchange for information.
"Phoenix," explains An, "was watching and talking to the VC while at
the same time working to prevent the NLF from reorganizing the VCI."
[15]
All this leads An to conclude that America was
never interested in ending the war. Instead, he thinks the goal was
to show success, "even if many lives must be lost." For An, Phoenix
was not a mechanism to end the war quickly, but a means to extend it
indefinitely, with a minimum of American casualties. The nature of
Phoenix, he suggests, was to pit the Vietnamese against each other,
to undermine their efforts at rapprochement while fueling the
conflict with money and lies and psychological operations designed
to destabilize the culture. [16]
In conclusion, An contends that the Vietnamese
neutralists wanted only for the United States to grant South Vietnam
the same status it granted Taiwan and Israel. But this was not to
be, for in South Vietnam advocating peace with the Communists was
punishable by death or imprisonment without trial for two years
under the An Tri (administrative detention) Laws. And like Phoenix,
An Tri was a boondoggle for corrupt GVN officials. Persons arrested
as VCI suspects or sympathizers could be held indefinitely and were
released only when their families scraped together enough money to
bribe the local Security Committee chairman. That is why, An
suggests, the roundup was the worst of all the hardships Phoenix
imposed on the Vietnamese people.
The practice of extorting ransoms from VCI
suspects served CIA interests however, by elevating security
personnel into a privileged class that was utterly dependent on the
CIA, in the process, thoroughly destabilizing the society.
Through the ICEX screening, interrogation, and
detention program, the CIA expanded this psywar tactic into the
districts, enabling every minor official to get a piece of the
action.
As Colonel Dillard remarked, "I became a major
construction tycoon in the Delta as a sideline to my Phoenix
business." As well as giving fifteen thousand dollars to every
district chief to build a DIOCC, he worked with the CIA in building
"those little jails, as I call them, which really were interrogation
centers." Dillard recalled: "The agency sent down an elderly
gentleman from Maryland who was a contractor. His job in the Delta,
one of many, was to get these interrogation centers constructed
Pacific
Architects and Engineers did the work, but this
guy was an agency employee. [17]
"What you needed in a lot of these little
derelict-type districts in the Delta where they really didn't have
any facilities," said Dillard, "was a place to secure and
interrogate prisoners .... They were for anyone
I remember going into one we'd built in
Chau Duc that had several monks inside. They
had a steel chain chained to their legs so they wouldn't run off.
"We pretty much constructed them throughout the
Delta. Those that went up quickest were in the districts that were
most accessible. But as fast as they went up, the VC knocked them
down with satchel charges." That did not disturb the district
chiefs, for whom each new construction project meant another
lucrative rake-off. Indeed, the Phoenix program offered a wide range
of financial opportunities.
"Phoenix in Sa Dec," An writes, "was an
occasion for many nationalists to get rich illegally. Many innocent
people were chased away from their homes to the district hall where
they were extorted or confined in the interrogation center behind
the town hall. Even water buffalo guardians were taken to the
district hall, and their parents had to pay for their release or
else they would be sent to Vinh Long Prison." [18]
Writes An: "One visiting U.S. congressman said
our province was lucky because we had no prison. But actually this
is unfortunate, because innocent people -- and the Police Special
Branch know who is innocent -- are confined in the town hall.
There is no room to lie down there. The people
suffocate. They are put in an empty pool without water." [19]
As a result of Phoenix placing interrogation
centers in the districts, the GVN soon gained the reputation as a
prison regime. The catchphrase of its jailers was khong, dank cko co
(if they're innocent, beat them until they're guilty), bringing
to mind the Salem witch trials. But whereas in
Salem the motive for torture was an ingrown libido, the motive for
torture in Vietnam was an ingrown ideology. Tran Van Truong,
mentioned in Chapter 10, explains: "It was part of the regime's
ideology that anyone who opposed them must be a Communist. They
could not accept the fact that there might be people who hated them
for the travesty they had made of the country's life, for their
intolerance and corruption and cold indifference to the lot of their
countrymen." [20]
Truong writes from experience. By bribing "a
high National Police official for the information," Truong's wife
discovered that her husband was being held in a secret prison.
Fearing her husband would be killed there, "and nobody would ever
know," she persuaded Truong to sign a full confession. "About ten
days later," Truong writes "I was bundled into a car and driven to
National Police headquarters. My wife had indeed found someone else
to bribe. I found out later it was the butcher himself. His price
had been $6,000." [21]
Truong's wife paid two bribes -- one to locate
him, and one to have him transferred from the secret jail to the
NPIC.
Truong adds ruefully, "Had she known about
conditions at the [NPIC], it isn't likely that my wife would have
paid anything to anyone." He describes six months of solitary
confinement and "sensory deprivation" in a pitch-dark cement cell
with a steel door and no windows. "I was like an animal in a cave
I thought of my cell as my
coffin." [22]
The CIA treated its prisoners at the National
Interrogation Center no better. In Decent Interval, former CIA
officer Frank Snepp cites the case of Nguyen Van Tai, the Cuc Nghien
Cuu agent who organized the attack on the U.S. Embassy during Tet.
Tai was captured in 1970 and, "With American help the South
Vietnamese built him his own prison cell and interrogation room,
both totally white, totally bare except for a table, chair, an open
hole for a toilet -- and ubiquitous hidden television cameras and
microphones to record his every waking and sleeping moment. His
jailers soon discovered one essential psychic-physical flaw in him.
Like many Vietnamese, he believed his blood vessels contracted when
he was exposed to frigid air. His quarters and interrogation room
were thus outfitted with heavy-duty air conditioners and kept
thoroughly chilled." [23]
In April 1975, Snepp notes, "Tai was loaded
onto an airplane and thrown out at ten thousand feet over the South
China Sea. At that point he had spent over four years in solitary
confinement, in a snow-white cell, without ever having fully
admitted who he was." [24] As perverse as anything done in Salem,
Tai was disposed of like a bag of garbage simply because he would
not confess.
But unlike Truong and Tai, most Vietnamese
jailed under Phoenix were anonymous pawns whose only value was the
small bribe their families offered for their release. Anyone
confined in a PIC or province or district prison was in the belly of
the beast. The range and extent of torture are beyond the
comprehension of the average middle-class American but are well
documented, as is the fact that American advisers rarely intervened
to reduce the level of abuse.
So the question then becomes, Who were these
American advisers?
CHAPTER 16: Advisers
By 1968, half a million American soldiers were
in South Vietnam, supported by sailors on aircraft carriers in the
South China Sea, airmen maintaining B-52's on Guam, and free world
forces from Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and Thailand. Many
thousand more civilians were advising the GVN on every conceivable
facet of its operations, from police and public administration to
engineering and agriculture. All were joined with the government and
the Armed Forces of South Vietnam in a war against a well-organized,
well-disciplined insurgency supported by North Vietnam and other
nonaligned third world, socialist, and Communist nations.
With nearly one thousand NVA and VC soldiers
dying each week, and no one keeping count of civilian deaths, the
undeclared war in Vietnam had reached epic proportions, but its
meaning was shrouded in ambiguities and contradictions. The
insurgency was said to be managed along a single chain of command
emanating from Hanoi, but the insurgent leadership was elusive, its
numbers impossible to gauge. And while the enemy was unified but
illusory, the allied effort was clearly defined but hopelessly
discombobulated. Something had to be done, and that something fell
to several hundred Phoenix advisers, each serving a one- year tour.
"This was moving so fast in early 1968," Doug
Dillard recalled, "that young lieutenants and captains coming
through the MACV advisory assignment system began arriving
in-country, receiving orders, and going right out to the district or
province. People didn't even know they were getting a Phoenix
assignment at this stage of the game. But the program had one of the
highest priorities in MACV for personnel, and as fast as they
arrived in-country, they were assigned out directly to the province
and district. In Four Corps we tried to intercept them, if I could
find out about it in time and coordinate earlier with Saigon. Others
we had to pull back from the field. We' d arrange to have them stay
in Can Tho from two to three days so we could give them an
orientation and tell them what we expected of them as Phoenix
coordinators." [1]
At this orientation, according to Dillard, "We
outlined their mission, which was to be aware of the entities
operating in their area of responsibility, to establish contact with
the personalities, to develop a rapport ... and to try to convince
them that the only thing we were trying to do in Phoenix was to
focus all our resources on the VCI. And to report directly to me any
obstacles they were encountering, to see if there was anything we
could do about it. I made an effort to establish direct one-to-one
relationships with them so they knew ... that I was their friend and
truly meant what I said in trying to help them. And time and time
again it paid off. They would come in demoralized, and I'd find out
about it and work it out with the district adviser to let the guy
come in to Can Tho. We'd put him up in our own facility and take him
over to the club so he could have a decent meal."
Nor did Doug Dillard sit in Can Tho and wait
for problems to come to him. "Phuoc and I tried very hard to breathe
some life into the coordination process," he said. "We tried to hit
one or two districts every day. I would get the U.S. people together
and really give them the hard sell on making Phoenix work. 'What are
the problems? Do they have resources? How can I help?' And while I
was doing that, Phuoc would get the Vietnamese district people
together out in the district compound and give them a patriotic
lecture. We did that day after day.
"I remember going to Phong Hiep District."
Dillard cited as an example. "That was a bad district for VC
activity, and Colonel Phuoc and I went down there, and we were
walking from the helicopter pad toward the district compound when
this kid came out shouting, 'He's just no good!' and 'I almost
killed him myself!'
"I said, 'Calm down, Captain. Let's go have a
drink and you tell me what happened.'
"Well, they'd been out on an operation that
morning to zap some VCI, and as I recall, one of the VCI was the
leader of the communications cadre, and they ran into him on the
canal and had a fire fight and captured this guy. They were trying
to subdue him, but he kept on resisting, violently, so the
Vietnamese S-two pulled out his pistol and shot him. My captain
almost went out of his mind. He said, 'For Christ's sake, you just
killed the best source of information for VC activity in the
district. Why'd you do that?' And the S-two said, 'Well, he
obviously wanted to die, the way he was resisting.'
"So, you see" -- Dillard sighed -- "you had a
mentality problem."
But there was another side of the "mentality
problem." "Down in Bac Lieu," Dillard said, "one of the district
chiefs had a group, and they went out and ran an ambush. The
district chief stepped on a land mine and had a leg blown off and
bled to death before the medevac chopper got there. So I got a
report on this and told Jim Ward, and we
got it into the system so the corps commander
could address the problem, the problem being if these guys see
they're not going to be medevaced when they're seriously wounded,
they're not going to go out."
To show success to his evaluators in the Saigon
Directorate, a Phoenix adviser needed a competent Vietnamese
counterpart. But it is wrong to blame the failure of the program
solely on the Vietnamese "mentality." To do so is to assume that
Phoenix advisers understood the purpose of the program and the
intelligence process and that all were mature enough to work with
interpreters in a foreign culture. Many were not. As Jim Ward noted,
"Very few had the proper training or experience for their work
" [2]
Ward did not blame any one individual. "The
effectiveness of a Province or District Intelligence and Operations
Coordination Center," he said, "generally depended on three people:
the American adviser and the senior South Vietnamese army and police
official assigned to the center. When all three were good and had a
harmonious working relationship, the DIOCC functioned effectively."
But harmony was the exception, and as in most groups, the strongest
personality dominated the others. If it was the Vietnamese army
intelligence officer, then DIOCC operations focused on gathering
tactical military intelligence. If the Vietnamese policeman was
dominant, then the DIOCC concentrated on the VCI. But because the
ARVN S2 generally prevailed, the overall impact of Phoenix in the
Delta, according to Ward, "was spotty. Really effective in some
districts, partially successful in half, and ineffective in the
rest."
Contributing to the misdirection of Phoenix
operations away from the VCI toward military targets was the
widening gap between Province and District Intelligence and
Operations Coordination Centers. Explained Ward: "Because most
Phoenix-Phung Hoang planning took place at province [where the CIA
Special Branch adviser was based], and because the DIOCC was run by
the ARVN S2 advised by U.S. Army officers as part of the MACV
district advisory team, the CIA Special Branch adviser was not going
to share his intelligence or dossiers with these people." This lack
of cooperation reinforced the tendency on the part of military
intelligence officers to do what they could: to gather information
on impending guerrilla attacks, not the VCI.
For this reason, said Colonel George Dexter,
who organized Special Forces A teams in Vietnam in the early 1960's
and served as the CORDS assistant chief of staff in IV Corps in
1972, "It would seem that Army Intelligence Corps officers were not
a good choice for this role since they were basically oriented
toward combat intelligence rather than police intelligence. However,
U.S. civilians [meaning CIA officers] were almost never assigned at
district level because the risk of combat was too high." [3]
Warren Milberg suggests that "the biggest
deficiency in the advisory program was the lack of an 'institutional
memory.' Phoenix advisers did not know the history of their
provinces [or] how the insurgents operated there." Moreover,
"Nothing was done to improve the situation
Not being able to speak the language of their
counterparts, and knowing they were only going
to stay in Vietnam for a relatively short period of time, most
advisers tended to neglect the political and social aspects of the
situation in which they found themselves. Unable to cope with, or
accept, the people of the RVN, many advisers became ineffective, and
the overall result was the degradation of the Phoenix-Phung Hoang
program." [4]
Colonel Dexter was more forgiving: "The
lieutenant spent his whole tour in Vietnam as a member of a five or
six-man district advisory team in a small town in the middle of
nowhere, 'advising' a Vietnamese counterpart (who was probably
several years older and surely many more years experienced in the
war) and holding down any number of additional duties within the
advisory team." Said Dexter: "His success depended primarily on the
competence of his counterpart and, to a lesser degree, on his own
energy and imagination. His major handicap was the inability to
speak Vietnamese with any degree of fluency."
A difficult language and an inscrutable
culture; lack of training and experience; institutional rivalries
and personal vendettas; isolation and alienation: all were obstacles
the typical Phoenix district adviser had to face. All in all, it was
not an enviable job.
***
Colonel Dillard's fatherly concern for his
young district advisers, "fresh out of college and through the basic
course at Fort Holabird," was as exceptional as the harmony he had
achieved with the CIA in the Delta. More often than not, Phoenix
advisers received little guidance or support from cynical region and
province officers. Nor were the first Phoenix advisers even
minimally prepared for the intrigues they encountered. The first
batch of junior officers sent to Vietnam in February 1968 --
specifically as Phoenix advisers -- consisted of forty second
lieutenants trained in the art of air defense artillery -- of which
there was no need in South Vietnam insofar as the Viet cong had no
aircraft. In addition, most were Reserve Officer Training Corps
graduates who had been called upon to meet the unanticipated
personnel requirements imposed on the Army Intelligence Corps after
the deeply resented troop limit had been imposed on the Joint Chiefs
of Staff.
Such was the case with Henry McWade. A 1965
graduate of East Tennessee State, McWade was commissioned a second
lieutenant in 1966 and called to active duty in
1967. In December 1967 he attended Fort
Holabird, where, in his words, "we were trained in European methods
for the cold war." [5] In May 1968 McWade and twenty-one other
second lieutenants, a group he referred to as "the last idealists,"
were sent to South Vietnam as Phoenix district advisers. Now a
realist, McWade told me wearily, "They needed seven-year captains."
Following a week's orientation at the Combined
Intelligence Center, McWade was assigned to Go Vap District in Gia
Dinh Province as part of CORDS Advisory Team
44. He resided in a prefab facility with other
members of the district team, while the province Phoenix
coordinator, Major James K. Damron, lived in opulent splendor in the
CIA's lavish embassy house, "a cathedral" complete with a helicopter
landing pad on the roof and a contingent of PRU bodyguards -- a
"goon squad" whom "the Vietnamese feared and considered criminals."
"He gave us no direction at all," McWade said
of Damron. "The people at the PIOCC ... located five miles away in
the old Special Branch headquarters ... kept us at arm's length. The
few times we drove up there, they gave us no guidance or advice at
all. Only money." For McWade, this was a big disappointment. "As a
green second lieutenant I needed that operational guidance. But I
didn't get it And
the Company man, the Special Branch adviser,
just didn't deal with us at all.
They had their own advisory system
compartmented away from Phoenix.
"The program had been more autonomous,
flexible, and experimental under the agency," McWade continued. "But
as Army advisers -- whom CIA officers consider amateurs -- filtered
in at every level, the program shifted under the CORDS province
senior advisers or their deputies. And if the CIA can't control it,"
McWade explained, "they get rid of it."
From his DIOCC in Go Vap, McWade observed that
Major Damron was "an empire builder. The life-styles were
incredible. Damron contracted with an American construction company
to build safe houses, where he entertained and kept women. He had
civilian identification that allowed him to go anywhere. He carried
a CAR-15 until the Uzi became fashionable. Then he carried that. And
Damron was shrewd. When the province senior adviser or his deputy
was around, he talked intelligence jargon. He had files and
computers. But when they were gone" -- McWade winked -- "the
conversation was all construction. Damron was the best at building
buildings. He built great DIOCCs and safe houses. But he couldn't
catch any VCI."
The Phoenix program had begun in 1967 under the
management of CIA province officers, but as junior grade army
officers like Henry McWade mounted the Phoenix ramparts in 1968, the
CIA instructed its officers to retreat to the safety
and seclusion of the embassy houses." And once
they found out I was against physical torture," McWade added, "they
preferred that I stay away from the province interrogation center
altogether." Thereafter, whenever the Go Vap DIOCC produced a VCI
suspect, "they removed the prisoner from our sight. They solved the
problem by taking it out of sight."
Complicating matters, McWade said, was the fact
that "the Special Branch was playing us against the CIA." In other
words, in order to meet Phoenix quotas, the Vietnamese Special
Branch would arrest common criminals and present them as VCI, while
behind the scenes they were extorting money from genuine VCI in
exchange for not arresting them." And the CIA," McWade sighed, "was
stretched too thin to know."
As for oversight from the Phoenix Directorate,
McWade said it was negligible. "They'd send down a computer printout
[containing biographical information on known VCI]. We got them
sporadically. Fifty names per page, six inches thick.
But we couldn't use them because they lacked
the diacritical marks which were necessary for proper
identification." And that pretty much left McWade on his own to
manage Phoenix operations in Go Vap.
Vietnamese assigned to the Go Vap DIOCC
included PRU, a Regional and Popular Forces company, Census
Grievance cadre, National Police, and Field Policemen.
McWade's counterpart was the ARVN S2, "a weak
person I put too many demands on. The only time he moved was the
time a ranger brigade came to Go Vap to conduct cordon and search
operations with the police. When Saigon units, which were there to
prevent coups, came out to our area, things happened. Then it was a
genuine Phoenix operation."
Otherwise, said McWade, "We ran every
conceivable type of operation, from night ambushes in the rural
areas north of Go Vap, to Rambo-style counterintelligence operations
in the city -- the kind where you personally had to react." McWade
went on village sweeps with the local Regional and Popular Forces
company, checking
.hundreds of IDs with the police. Based on tips
gotten from informers, he would also surveil and target houses in Go
Vap where VCI suspects lived, contact points where VCI met, and
places where commo-liaison cadres crossed the river. He took
photographs, submitted reports, and "fed the computer in Saigon."
"We were going out every other day, sometimes
every day," he recalled. "I worked eighteen hours a day, six or
seven days a week." And yet, he was never really in control. "I had
no operational control over any units, and I had to rely one hundred
percent on my counterpart," he said. "So every operation had to be
simple," primarily because of language. "I was at the mercy of an
interpreter with a five-hundred-word vocabulary," McWade sighed. "It
was like being deaf
and dumb. And I just assumed every operation
was compromised, at a minimum because my interpreter was an
undercover Military Security Service agent." And even though he
monitored agent nets, "No one reported directly to me; it would have
been impossible to try, if you can't speak the language. There was
no such thing as a secure agent, and we didn't have walk-ins because
the people couldn't trust the police." Making matters worse, there
were at least a dozen intelligence agencies operating in the area,
each with what it assumed were its own unilateral agents in the
field. But because the various intelligence agencies refused to
share their files with one another, they never realized that each
agent, as McWade put it, "was selling information to everybody."
The picture is one of total chaos. Indeed, most
of McWade's initial operations were conducted -- without his
realizing it -- by his police counterparts against common criminals
or dissidents. He recalled his first day on the job, which coincided
with the beginning of the second Tet offensive. "The first one in
February came through Cholon," McWade said. "This one came through
Go Vap. We were out with the Regional and Popular Forces company,
picking up anyone who looked like an ARVN draft dodger. Meanwhile
the Vietnamese police were shaking them down, although I didn't
learn about it till much later."
There were other surprises. In an area outside
Go Vap, for example, over thirty thousand refugees lived in a
sprawling ghetto. McWade told me, "They were mostly prostitutes
working for organized crime -- meaning the police. I thought we were
investigating the VCI, but actually I was used by my police
counterpart to raid the madams who hadn't paid him off." When he
figured out what was really going on, McWade said, "I developed what
I called 'McWade's Rule'; fifteen percent for graft, eighty-five
percent for the program. And this was a complete reversal of what
was happening when I arrived!"
But Henry McWade did not become bitter, nor was
he unable to cope with Vietnamese culture. Unlike many of his
colleagues, he did not interpret Vietnamese customs as insidious
schemes designed to deceive him. "The Vietnamese had a different
vocabulary and different goals. They were not interested in
acquiring bodies," he said. "They were interested in acquiring money
and items on the black market." In other words, their motives were
practical, geared toward surviving in the present, while it was
generally only their American advisers who were obsessed with
eliminating Communists from the face of the earth.
***
As a means of bringing Vietnamese and American
procedures into closer sync, the Phoenix Directorate in July 1968
issued its first standard operating procedures (SOP
1) manual. SOP 1 stressed the leadership role
of the police and the need for paramilitary forces to support the
police in the attack on the VCI. It subdivided Intelligence and
Operations Coordination Centers (IOCCs) into three areas. The Plans
and Operations Center devised plans and organized available forces
in operations against guerrilla units and individual VCI. The
Situation Center maintained files, handled agent security and
operations, produced reports, and set requirements. It had a
military order of battle section under the Vietnamese army
intelligence officer, the S2, gathering intelligence on and
targeting guerrilla units, and a political order of battle section
under the Special Branch, targeting VCI. The Message Section
communicated with the district or province chief, who exercised
overall responsibility for any particular IOCC.
In practice, SOP 1 had little effect. "It
didn't do any harm," Henry McWade observed; but it was issued only
to Americans, and the Vietnamese continued to organize the IOCCs
according to their own "separate goals and missions. The double
standard persisted, even after a translation (minus diacritical
marks) was circulated."
Ralph Johnson acknowledges this, noting that
the GVN's instructions to its own people -- by making no reference
to the role of U.S. Phoenix advisers in the IOCCs -- widened the gap
between Americans and Vietnamese. At first only the CIA, which
"controlled the salaries, training and support of critical elements
in Phung Hoang," was able to exert influence, by parceling out
resources and funds. Otherwise, when Phoenix advisers received
adequate funds through CORDS, they, too, "were able and willing to
use monetary leverage to drive home needed advice and guidance. And
a CORDS agreement with President Thieu gave CORDS the right to call
attention to officials who should be replaced." [6]
In any event, Phoenix advisers found themselves
caught in the middle of intrigues beyond their comprehension.
Woefully unprepared, they stood between their Vietnamese army and
police counterparts; their CIA and U.S. Army superiors; and the GVN
and the sect or opposition political party in their area of
operation. Everything was expected of them, but in reality, very
little was possible.
Shedding light on the problems of Phoenix
advisers is Ed Brady, a slender Army officer who served his first
tour in Vietnam in 1965 as an adviser to the Twenty- second Ranger
Battalion in Pleiku. After that, Brady volunteered for another tour
and was assigned as a Regional and Popular Forces adviser in Da Lat,
where he learned about the connection between politics and the black
market in Vietnam. "Both the VC and the ARVN tried to avoid military
operations in Da Lat," Brady told me, adding that as part of the
modus vivendi, it was "a neutral city where you could have meetings
and where financial transactions could take place, legal and
illegal. It was a place where the VC could
raise and wash and change money. It was sort of what Geneva was like
in World War Two. There were many businesses in the province, like
woodcutting, rubber and tea plantations, and the ngoc mom [fish
sauce] industry. All were sources of money for the VC and the GVN."
[7]
In Da Lat Brady worked with CIA Province
Officer Peter Scove, who introduced him to Ted Serong, who at the
time was handing over control of the Field Police to Pappy Grieves.
"I was learning a lot," Brady said. "I learned Vietnamese from the
officer I was working with ... the words that dealt with money and
corruption. Then Serong asked me if I would be willing to go on loan
to his team. They had a new kind of platoon ... that they wanted to
train in small-unit tactics. More like guerrilla warfare than what
the police did. And would I be willing to train this platoon because
he didn't think that the Australian warrant officers he had there
were the right people?"
Brady agreed and spent the next few months at
the Field Police center, training what turned out to be "the first
experimental PRU team in Tuyen Duc Province ... recruited by the CIA
to be the action arm of the province officer." The platoon had four
squads, two composed of Nungs and two of Montagnards. "They couldn't
speak to each other." There were also squad leaders and a platoon
commander, all of whom were South Vietnamese Special Forces
officers, none of whom could speak Montagnard or Nung or English
either.
"It was really the strangest thing you ever
saw," Brady said. "And I taught them small- unit tactics."
As was generally the case, Brady's association
with the CIA spelled trouble for his military career. "I had a lot
of problems with my sector boss over these activities," he told me.
"He thought I should eat in the sector house with the rest of the
team, not with the Aussies and CIA people. I also spent most of my
off time with Vietnamese officers in their homes, in bars, doing the
things they did. I rented a house on my own, lived off the economy,
learned how you buy your jobs, and met a lot of general officers'
mistresses who liked to come to Da Lat for the weather. The American
colonel I worked for thought this was atrocious, and I got a zero on
my performance report."
Having been suborned by the CIA, enticed by the
Vietnamese, and excommunicated by the Army, Brady -- whose family
was connected to a powerful U.S. senator and the III Corps commander
-- was reassigned to the Vietnamese Joint General Staff (JGS), "in
their command center. We were a division of the MACV Combat
Operations Center. The main purpose of this group was to collect
data on Vietnamese operations and feed it to the MACV so it could be
reported to Washington."
"General Cao Van Vien was commander of the
Joint Staff," Brady continued, "and these guys were his operations
staff. They traveled to every major Vietnamese battle to find out
what happened -- they placed no reliance on any official message --
and I went on every one of those trips. I met all the key
commanders. Plus which I was moving in Vietnamese social circles."
Brady became friends with General Vien's
executive officer and with the JGS operations chief, Major General
Tran Tran Phong. "And for some reason," he added, "a number of the
ranger officers and people I knew in Da Lat had moved into key
positions in Thieu's administration. They had sort of been in exile
when I met them -- you didn't get assigned to a ranger outfit
because you were in good graces with the administration ... -- but
later they showed up in Saigon. And I had a great bond with them.
I'd been in combat and brothels with them. But they were now full
colonels.
And I met many of their bosses, who were
generals in powerful positions."
When Brady's tour at the JGS ended, the CIA
station asked him to capitalize on his well-placed connections and
report on what he learned about GVN plans and strategies. Brady
agreed, and was assigned to the Phoenix Directorate as a cover for
his espionage activities. "Somebody called me up one day and said,
'We're starting a new organization, and we'd like you to consider
joining it.' This was ICEX. So I went over there ... and spent a
couple hours talking to Evan Parker. He said, 'We're interested in
targeted operations against the civilian part of the Communist
party. The main force war doesn't address the real problem ... the
shadow government.' And I was ready for that -- psychologically and
emotionally.
Everything I knew said, 'That's exactly right.'
"ICEX was to work with the Special Branch,"
Brady continued, "which set up a separate building in the National
Police compound to be the Phung Hoang Central Office. They detailed
mostly Special Branch policemen to work there, but there were a few
military officers and a few National Police officers to round out
the staff. Their office was only two months old when I arrived.
There were a couple of CIA advisers down there to be the people who
worked with them. Joe Sartiano was the senior CIA guy down in the
Phung Hoang Central Office. And me and Bob Inman were down there
from the Phoenix operations section."
The Phoenix assignment put Brady in close
contact with Dang Van Minh, Duong Than Huu, and Lieutenant Colonel
Loi Nguyen Tan. About his relationship with Tan, Brady said, "Since
Colonel Tan was a military officer, we knew people in common, so
there was an immediate rapport. Tan was very friendly, very easy to
talk to. But he was not, from an American point of view, demanding.
We would go out on inspection teams together, to operations centers,
and he'd have a discussion with the chief.
Meanwhile, his Vietnamese subordinate and I
pored through the dossiers, looked
at their procedures and what operations they
had run recently. And a lot of it was a sham -- a facade that they
were meeting the letter of the law. So they had a hundred dossiers.
Big deal! Seventy-five had nothing in them. Fifteen of the other
twenty-five had a couple of newspaper clippings from the local
newspaper about the VC district chief. But they had no real
intelligence, no real targeted operations that they were setting up
or running. And Tan would never crack down on them or lean on them
in some way that was acceptable to us from the West.
"Now in Vietnamese he would make a few remarks
to them: 'You really ought to try to do better.' And when he got
back, he'd file a report that this place was not in very good shape.
But he didn't say, 'Damn it, I'm going to be back here in three
weeks and you'd better have something going by then!' That's why
it's difficult to say if he was effective."
Brady, who has deep affection for the
Vietnamese, explained why their approach to Phoenix was at odds with
the one pressed by Evan Parker: "If you really want to get down to
cases, no Vietnamese of any significance in the military or in the
police didn't know who the truly high-level people were -- the
district chiefs and the province chiefs. Let me give you an example.
Colonel Tan and Mr. Huu and I were eating in a market stall up near
the border in Three Corps. The place was a hotbed of VCI support for
NVA units. There was lots of money flowing there, donated by French
rubber plantation owners without much coercion. They didn't like the
GVN. Anyway, this woman comes in. She's got three or four kids, the
youngest is maybe two, the oldest about seven. And Tan says to me,
'You see this woman?' We're there eating soup and drinking
Vietnamese coffee. She's there feeding her kids at a nearby table in
the market stall.
"I say, 'Yeah.'
"He says, 'You know who she is? She's the
province chief's wife.'
"I looked around and said, 'I don't see the
province chief. You're telling me there's an honest province chief,
and his wife doesn't own a jeep and go around collecting money all
day?'
"No, no," he says. "The VC province chief."
"So, being young and naive, I say, 'Well, look
at how many young kids she has. She either goes to see him, or he
comes to see her. Or she's got a lover.'
"He says, 'Right.' But they are his kids. They
even look like him.
"So I say, 'Well, he must come in to see her,
then, or she goes to see him.' I'm really excited. I say, 'This is
something we can really work with.'
"He says, 'You don't understand. You don't live
the way we live. You don't have any family here. You're going to go
home when this operation is over with. You don't think like you're
going to live here forever. But I have a home and a family and kids
that go to school. I have a wife that has to go to market
And you
want me to go kill his wife? You want me to set
a trap for him and kill him when he comes in to see his wife? If we
do that, what are they going to do to our wives?'
"How many wives were ever killed?" Brady asked
rhetorically. "Zero -- unless they happened to drive over a land
mine, and then it was a random death. The VC didn't run targeted
operations against them either. There were set rules that you played
by. If you went out and conducted a military operation and you
chased them down fair and square in the jungle and you had a fight,
that was okay. If they ambushed you on the way back from a military
operation, that was fair. But to conduct these clandestine police
operations and really get at the heart of things, that was kind of
immoral to them. That was not cricket. And the Vietnamese were very,
very leery of upsetting that."
Likewise, as Tran Van Truong notes in A
Vietcong Memoir: "Thieu's chief of psywar hid in his own house a
sister-in-law who was the Vietcong cadre in charge of the Hue
People's Uprising Committee. Neither had any particular love for
their enemies, but family loyalty they considered sacrosanct." [8]
"Atrocities happened," Brady said. "Those
things happened by individual province officers or people who worked
for them and the PRUs
It happened in the U.S.
units. My Lai happened. No matter what anybody
says about 'it didn't happen,' it did happen. I've watched people
torch Montagnard villages for no real reason except they were
frustrated by not being able to catch the VC. And the Montagnards
must have known about the VC, which I believe they did. But we
didn't have to burn their houses."
When asked if Phoenix encouraged atrocities,
Brady answered that it depended on whether or not the PRU and the
PICs were defined as part of Phoenix. "If you want to say that all
the intelligence activities that were supposed to be coordinated by
Phoenix are a part of Phoenix, then yes," Brady said. "But if you
want to say, 'Did Phoenix go do these things?,' then my answer is
no. Because Phoenix was too inactive, too incompetent, and too
passive. Now, Phoenix should have been doing many more things
directly, and if it had, then my belief is that Phoenix would have
perpetrated some atrocities, because they would have been
in the position these other people were in,
where they were frustrated, they were angry, and they would have
done some things.
"Furthermore," Brady added, "you can make the
case that Phoenix was helping to repress the loyal opposition
political parties and prevented a neutral Vietnam from occurring.
The Vietnamese said that, because the Special Branch guy who planned
the operation to nullify their political operations was also running
Phoenix operations .... So it depends on how you want to interpret
the data and how you want to say things were connected together
I'd say either of those interpretations are valid.
"I think the director of Phoenix never planned
such things," Brady concluded in defense of Evan Parker and American
policy in general. But he also said, "Yes, people assigned to
Phoenix did such things."
CHAPTER 17: Accelerated Pacification
The election of Richard Nixon in November 1968
signaled a shift in U.S. policy in Vietnam. Reflecting the desire of
most Americans, in the wake of Tet, for an honorable withdrawal, the
policy balanced negotiations with the bombing of North Vietnam.
Called the Nixon Doctrine, the policy had as its premise that the
United States has a moral obligation to support foreign governments
fighting Communist insurgents, on the condition that those
governments supply their own cannon fodder.
Shortly after taking office, Nixon instructed
his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, to start negotiating
with the North Vietnamese in Paris. On the assumptions that Tet had
dealt the VCI a deathblow and that the Thieu regime was firmly in
control of the country, Nixon began planning for troop reductions.
Following in the footsteps of the French, U.S. forces began a
gradual retreat to coastal enclaves. And MACV, under General William
Westmoreland's replacement, General Creighton Abrams, prepared to
fight a sanctuary war based on CIA estimates that forty thousand NVA
soldiers hunkered down in Cambodia constituted the major outside
threat to the Thieu regime. The bombing of these potential invaders
began in February 1969, with the consent of Cambodia's Prince
Norodom Sihanouk, whose agents provided the Special Operations Group
(SOG) with information on the location of enemy forces, many of
which were located in densely populated areas. Conducted in secret,
the illegal raids into Cambodia were revealed in May 1969 and
resulted in increased opposition to U.S. government conduct in
Southeast Asia.
The Nixon Doctrine as applied in Vietnam was
called Vietnamization, and the man upon whom the mantle of
Vietnamization fell was William Colby, godfather
of the Covert Action program that had set the
stage for American intervention ten years earlier. In November 1968
Colby was appointed DEPCORDS, replacing Democratic party loyalist
Robert Komer, whom President Johnson had named U.S. ambassador to
Turkey. Colby reported to Henry Kissinger, who supported Colby's
ambitious pacification program, geared to facilitate Vietnamization.
Colby subdivided his pacification plan into
three main categories, beginning with military security, which he
called "the first step in the pacification and development process"
-- in other words, borrowed from Nelson Brickham, "shielding the
population from the Communist main forces," a job which "is the task
of the Vietnamese regular forces." [1]
Often generated by Phoenix intelligence, the
resulting air raids, artillery barrages, and search and destroy
operations were an integral part of pacification, insofar as they
created defectors, prevented guerrillas from assembling in large
concentrations, and, by creating refugees, separated the fish from
the water.
Part II of Colby's strategy was territorial
security, the 1969 manifestation of Revolutionary Development, in
which the Regional and Popular Forces -- thereafter called
Territorial Security Forces -- were advised by U.S. Army mobile
advisory teams (MATs) under the auspices of CORDS. In combating C
guerrilla units and the VCI, Territorial Security Forces were
assisted by the People's Self-Defense Forces.
In a Defense Department report titled A Systems
Analysis of the Vietnam War 1965- 1972, Thomas Thayer says that as
of 1968, "The Revolutionary Development program had significant
problems in recruiting and retaining high quality personnel." The RD
Cadre desertion rate was over 20 percent, "higher than for any GVN
military force, perhaps because they have a 30% better chance of
being killed than the military forces." Thayer notes that in
response, the RD ministry had directed its cadre "to concentrate on
building hamlet security and to defer, at least temporarily, the
hamlet development projects which formerly constituted six of the
teams' eleven RD tasks." [2]
Under these revised guidelines, providing
intelligence to Phoenix replaced "nation building" as the RD
program's top priority. Reflecting this change, the RD Cadre program
was incorporated within the CORDS Pacification Security Coordination
Division in November 1968, at which point MACV officers and USAID
employees moved in to manage the program, bringing about, according
to Robert Peartt and Jim Ward, a decline in performance and morale.
In line with Lou Lapham's redirection of the station away from
paramilitary operations back toward classic intelligence functions,
the CIA's role in RD diminished, although it
continued to skim off whatever strategic
intelligence was produced. As Peartt noted, the station was
"interested in going after region people, and would get involved at
that point in RDC/O operations." [3] To a lesser degree, the CIA's
PRU program was also affected.
"The agency made a decision," John Wilbur said,
"to get their ass out of Vietnam as fast as they could, for all the
reasons Kinloch Bull foretold. It was losing control ... diluting
its cadre ... being misdirected. It had become the sponsoring agency
for a hodgepodge thing, and Phoenix was going to be the mechanism by
which it was going to withdraw its control and sponsorship ... and
transition it over to the military. And that ... meant that the PRU
were no longer going to be the CIA's exclusive boys, which foretold
a real human crisis in the units." [4] Their "elan and morale had
been carefully nurtured," Wilbur explained. "We protected them from
the dilution of control ... from the province chiefs and battalion
commanders. We insulated them from being used for whatever multiple
good and bad reasons other people wanted to use them for. We would
pay them a little better, we would take care of their dependents,
and we would provide them with the best military support there was."
That, according to Wilbur, motivated them to "go out and do the
things they did."
But, he added, "they had incurred a lot of
resentment by the Vietnamese to whom they had previously been
untouchable
The leadership levels were marked men among
many Vietnamese political forces." And as soon
as the Vietnamese got control in the summer of 1968, "everybody
started messing with them." The PRU began to be used as bagmen.
"I was hurt in the last attack on Can Tho,"
Wilbur continued, "and when I got back [from the hospital], my
replacement had already arrived
and I spent most of the
next six weeks introducing Chuck [Lieutenant
Commander Charles Lemoyne] to the provinces, to all the hundreds of
people he would have to deal with." At that point Wilbur went home,
where he remained until May 1968, when the CIA asked him to return
to Vietnam to help Bill Redel "develop a national PRU unit which was
targeted to recover American POWs in South Vietnam. It was the only
thing that seemed worth fighting for," Wilbur said, so he accepted
the job. He was transferred to a naval security group, assigned to
MACV, given an office (formerly occupied by Joe Vacarro) on the
second floor of USAID II, and went to work for Redel.
"We were going to set up a unit that would go
around the provinces and try to collate whatever extant information
there was, and in the event there was something that indicated [a
POW camp] was there, we would try to put an in-place person, or try
to develop
somebody to deal with an agent in place, and then gather the
intelligence
sufficiently to mount some sort of rescue
operation."
But the rescue program was scuttled, and Wilbur
instead got the job of transferring management of the PRU to the
Vietnamese. He was introduced to Special Forces Mayor Nguyen Van
Lang, [i] the first PRU national commander, and they began traveling
around the country together. " And it became very apparent when I
showed up with a Vietnamese colonel ... what was going to happen. It
meant the military, and that meant that the leadership elements of
the PRU were in jeopardy of maintaining allegiance -- they weren't
colonels and majors and captains."
Wilbur sighed and said forlornly, "The fact
that there was no national overlay allowed the CIA to maintain
autonomy over the PRU program longer than they would have
otherwise." But by the summer of 1968 "The official word had to go
out that the PRU was becoming part of the Phoenix program: 'We're
going to lose control. Get ready for the transition.'
"It was the dissolution of American protection
of the units that was mandated in our withdrawal," Wilbur explained,
"that corrupted the quality of control, which in turn allowed the
PRU to be turned into a department store. And I became an agent of
that. I was going to try to convince people to give up control of
the PRU, after I had spent all this time arguing for its insulation
and control and independence."
***
To effect territorial security, Colby intended
"to get weapons into the hands of the Vietnamese villagers, so they
could participate in their own defense" and to provide "funds to the
elected village leaders to carry out local development programs."
[5] The mechanism for this was Ralph Johnson's village chief program
at Vung Tau, about which Professor Huy writes: "[A]fter 1968, when
Thieu succeeded to restore security in the countryside, several
province and district chiefs used fraud and threats to put their men
in the village and hamlet councils. These men were often the
children of rich people living in cities. They needed the title of
'elected representatives of the population' to enjoy a temporary
exemption from military service, and their parents were ready to pay
a high price for their selection as village councilors. Thus, even
the fiercely anti-Communist groups became bitter and resentful
against Thieu." [6]
That brings us to Part III of Colby's plan,
internal security, otherwise known as Phoenix, the two-track CIA
program to destroy the VCI and ensure the political stability of the
Thieu regime by insulating him from the backlash of his repressive
policies. As it was in the beginning, the pacification purpose of
Phoenix was to weaken the link between the "people" and the VCI,
while the political-level Phoenix was designed to exploit that link.
To implement his plan, Colby forged ahead with
a three-month stand-up program dubbed the accelerated pacification
campaign (APC). Begun in November 1968, APC was designed to bolster
Kissinger's negotiating position in Paris by boosting the GVN
presence in the hamlets, and was expected to show its effect by Tet
[of 1969]. The goal was to add twelve hundred hamlets to the five
thousand already classified under the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES)
as "relatively secure." Afterward APC was to be followed by an
annual "full year pacification and development program." To
facilitate this process, Colby created the Central Pacification and
Development Council as his personal staff and private conduit to
Tran Thien Khiem, who replaced Tran Van Huong as prime minister in
August 1969.
Said Evan Parker about his patron William
Colby: "The interesting thing was his relationship with Khiem ...
they would travel around the countryside in the same plane, each
sitting there with his briefcase and a stack of working papers,
writing like mad, answering memoranda, writing memoranda, passing
memorandum back and forth
There's your coordination on this stuff -- one of them or
both would use his
authority to support what I was asking the
Vietnamese to do."
To assist him on the council, Colby hired
Clayton McManaway as program manager; Tony Allito for HES reports;
Harry "Buzz" Johnson for territorial security; and Ev Bumgartner and
Frank Scotton for political liaison. With his personal staff in tow,
Colby spent two days each week canvassing the provinces, bringing
pressure to bear on people in the field, and promoting the
accelerated pacification campaign.
Phoenix adviser John Cook describes the
accelerated pacification campaign as "an all out nationwide effort
to put as many hamlets under government control as soon as possible.
The Viet Cong violently opposed this action, since its primary
purpose was to eliminate them and their control. It involved large
military operations coupled with psychological operations, resulting
in increased emphasis on the pacification program." Insofar as the
attack on the VCI strengthened Henry Kissinger's bargaining
position, Cook writes, "Pressure was placed on the Intelligence and
Operations Coordinating Centers to provide more valid information
about the enemy's location. This required more of an effort from all
of us, which meant an increase in the number of raids, ambushes and
operations." [7]
The hour of Phoenix was at hand. With American
troops withdrawing and emphasis being shifted from military to
political operations, the pressure began to mount on Phoenix
advisers, who were expected to eliminate any vestiges of
revolutionary activity in South Vietnam. Reasons why they failed to
accomplish this goal are offered by Jeffrey Race in his book War
Comes to Long An.
Blaming "overcentralization," Race observes
that the district, where the DIOCCs were located, "was the lowest
operational level" of Phoenix, "one having no significance in terms
of social or living patterns, and staffed by outsiders whose
interests bore no necessary connection to the districts. By
contrast, the revolutionary organization was the essence of
simplicity ... and intimately familiar with the local population and
terrain." Race traces the lack of "security" at the village level to
the GVN's disdain for the common people and its "failure to develop
a highly motivated and trained local apparatus." [8]
Operational as well as organizational errors
also factored into the equation. Forces under the Phoenix program,
Race explains, "operated in the manner of a conventional war combat
organization -- independently of their environment -- and so they
did not have the enormous advantage enjoyed by the party apparatus
of operating continuously in their home area through a personally
responsive network of friends and relatives. This in turn severely
handicapped their ability to locate intended targets and to
recognize fortuitous ones. The program was also handicapped in
developing a sympathetic environment by the use by the Saigon
authorities of foreign troops and by the program's intended purpose
of maintaining a distributive system perceived as unfavorable to
their interests by much of the rural population." [9]
Responding to the grievances of the rural
population and taking steps to correct social injustices might have
enabled the GVN to collect intelligence and contest the VCI in the
villages. But acknowledging the nature of the conflict would have
undermined the reason for fighting the war in the first place. And
rather than do that, Race says, "attention was turned to the use of
such new devices as starlight scopes, ground surveillance radar, and
remote listening devices, as well as the previously employed
infrared and radio transmission detection devices." [10]
***
In August 1968, concurrent with Robert Komer
imposing, as "a management tool," a nationwide quota of eighteen
hundred VCI neutralizations per month, the science fiction aspect of
Phoenix was enhanced with the advent of the Viet Cong Infrastructure
Information System. VCIIS climaxed a process begun in February 1966,
when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara established the Defense
Department's Southeast Asia Programs Division. The process was
carried forward in Saigon in January 1967, when the Combined
Intelligence Staff fed the names of three thousand VCI (assembled by
hand at area coverage desks) into the IBM 1401 computer at the
Combined Intelligence Center's political order of battle section. At
that point the era of the computerized blacklist began.
As the attack against the VCI exploded across
South Vietnam in 1968, reports on the results poured into the
Phoenix Directorate, inundating its analysts with reams of
unreliable information on individual VCI and anti-VCI operations. In
DIOCCs the data could be processed manually, but in Saigon it
required machines. Hence, with input from the Defense Intelligence
Agency, the FBI and the CIA -- all of which had an interest in
analyzing the finished product -- VCIIS became the first of a series
of computer programs designed to absolve the war effort of human
error and war managers of individual responsibility.
The cerebellum of Phoenix, VCIIS compiled
information gathered from all U.S. and free world field units on VCI
boundaries, locations, structures, strengths, personalities, and
activities. The end product, a monthly summary report, was a
statistical summary of Phoenix operational results by province,
region, and the country as a whole and showed the levels and methods
of neutralizations at each echelon within the VC infrastructure. A
monthly activity listing listed each "neutralized" VCI by name. In
July 1970 the Vietnamese were invited to contribute to the program
and started key punching at the National Police Interrogation
Center. Until then the computerized blacklist was a unilateral
American operation.
In January 1969 VCIIS was renamed the Phung
Hoang Management Information System. The PHMIS file included summary
data on each recorded VCI in the following categories: name and
aliases; whether or not he or she was "at large"; sex, birth date,
and place of birth; area of operations; party position; source of
information; arrest date; how neutralized; term of sentence; where
detained; release date; and other biographical and statistical
information, including photographs and fingerprints, if available.
All confirmed and suspected VCI members were recorded in this
manner, enabling Phoenix analysts instantly to access and
cross-reference data, then decide who was to be erased. All of this
added up to hard times for NLF sympathizers, Thieu opponents, and
those unfortunate enough to be creditors or rivals of Phoenix
agents.
As a management tool PHMIS was used by Komer
and Colby to measure and compare the performance of Phoenix officers
-- unless one believes those like Tom McCoy, who claims that Komer
was a fraud who went to Vietnam "not to do pacification but to prove
that it was being done." [11] In that case the numbers game was
computerized prestidigitation -- an Orwellian manipulation of
statistics to shape public opinion.
According to McCoy's scenario, PHMIS was part
of a larger hoax begun in January 1967, when Robert Komer introduced
the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES) -- eighteen factors subject to
computer analysis for each of South Vietnam's fifteen
thousand hamlets. These factors included data
on VC military activity, GVN security capabilities, the strength of
the VCI, Revolutionary Development activities, etc. The data were
assembled by MACV district advisers, with the computer then putting
the hamlets into one of three classes: A, secure; B, contested; or
C, controlled by the VC.
On the verge of Tet in December 1967, nearly
half of South Vietnam's hamlets were rated A. One year later more
than half were rated A. As Public Safety chief Frank Walton told me,
"We would get reports of provinces being eighty-five percent
pacified and ninety percent pacified, and then, when it got to the
point that they were near a hundred percent, figures had to be
revised downward. It was done with computers, and that's where I
first heard the term 'GIGO' for 'garbage in; garbage out.'" [12]
The Hamlet Evaluation System also included
input on "the known strengths of the 319 currently identified,
upper-level VCI organizations at COSVN region, province and district
levels." The HES guesstimate of VCI strength in January 1969 was
75,500.
Statistics on the VCI; definitions of the VCI;
attitudes toward the VCI -- all were subjective. Yet despite his own
admission that "we knew there was a VCI, but we could not be said to
know very much about it," William Colby set about attacking it.
Armed with technology that rendered due process obsolete, he "set up
standards and procedures by which to weed out the false from the
correct information." To ensure that Phoenix operations were mounted
on factual information, "The general rule was established that three
separate sources must have reported a suspect before he could be put
on the rolls." Thus, the VCI was put into three classes of
offenders: A, for leaders and party members; B, for holders of other
responsible jobs; and C, for rank. and-file members and followers.
"And the decision was taken that those in the 'C' category should be
ignored, since Phoenix was directed against the VCI command and
control structure and not the occasional adherent or supporter."
[13]
To complement these safety procedures, Phoenix
advisers and their Vietnamese counterparts were issued, in July
1968, the Yellow Book, published by the CIA under cover of the RAND
Corporation. Officially titled The Modus Operandi of Selected
Political Cadre, the Yellow Book described the operational patterns
and procedures of VCI cadre and suggested "possible actions" to
exploit them.
In November 1968 came SOP 2, telling how to
manage a DIOCC, and in December 1968 appeared the Green Book,
Current Breakdown of Executive and Significant VCI Cadre. The bible
of Phoenix advisers, the Green Book listed all VCI job titles,
assigned each an A, B, or C rating, and prescribed the duration of
detention suitable for each functionary. It told how the VCI routed
messages, how they constructed and
hid in tunnels, who was likely to know whom in
the party organization, and other tips that would allow earnest
Phoenix advisers to prioritize their targets, so they could go after
the big fish recorded in the Black Book kept in the situation
section of each DIOCC and PIOCC.
Other publications made available to Phoenix
advisers included a bi-weekly newsletter that enabled advisers to
share their favorite interrogation, operational, and briefing
techniques; MACV's monthly "Summary of VCI Activities"; Combined
Document Exploitation Center and Combined Intelligence Center
readouts; the PHMIS monthly report; and an eagerly awaited Phoenix
End of Year Report.
Perhaps the most far-reaching innovation of
1968 was the Phoenix Coordinators Orientation Course (PCOC), which
held its first classes at Vung Tau's Seminary Camp in November 1968.
The PCOC represented a final recognition that, as Doug Dillard
remarked, "MACV really had to account for it." [14] To state it
simply, military careers were now hitched to the Phoenix star.
The advent of the PCOC dovetailed neatly with
the folderol of the accelerated pacification campaign and the
infusion into the Phoenix Directorate of a new generation of staff
officers, who brought with them new ideas and were confronted with
new concerns, most concerning public relations. On the CIA side,
Robert E. Haynes replaced Joe Sartiano as executive director, and
Sartiano and two State Department officers began writing a plan to
put Phung Hoang under the control of the National Police. On the
military side, Colonel Robert E. Jones replaced William Greenwalt as
deputy director.
In September, Army Security Agency officer
Lieutenant Colonel Richard Bradish stepped in as the military
liaison to Special Branch. Bradish "provided direct assistance" to
the Phung Hoang staff in Special Branch headquarters at the NPIC. He
and the sergeant assisting him were the only military personnel who
had desks there. "We were very busy," Bradish told me, "primarily
advising the Special Branch in anti- infrastructure operations."
[15] Bradish also advised Vietnamese inspectors visiting Phung Hoang
committees on "how to bolster morale and improve record keeping on
VCI neutralizations."
Bradish noted that Parker's military deputy,
Colonel Jones, did not provide "close supervision," a condition that
was "characteristic of the whole thing
I
was compartmented," Bradish said about himself
and the other military personnel on the staff. "We were outsiders.
When I was there, Special Branch was Phung Hoang" -- meaning that
the CIA still controlled Phoenix, with the military there as window
dressing. Likewise, Bradish observed, the Vietnamese at the Phung
Hoang Office "were putting on a show. They were not acting like
they were at war, but like it was a normal
job." In his judgment, "The North Vietnamese were more committed."
The Central Phung Hoang Permanent Committee as
of November 1968 looked like this:
Chairman: General Tran Thien Khiem Assistant
Chairman: Colonel Ly Trong Song
Phung Hoang Plan: Lieutenant Colonel Loi Nguyen
Tan Planning Bureau: Mr. Duong Than Huu
Intelligence Operations: Mr. Ha Van Tien Action
Programs: Mr. Mai Viet Dich Inspections Bureau: Mr. Nguyen Van Hong
Chieu Hoi Representative: Mr. Le Doan Hung
Statistics Bureau: Military Security Service
Captain Dinh Xuan Mai
Also arriving at the Phoenix directorate in
September 1968, concurrent with its reorganization into separate
branches for plans and training, was Lieutenant Colonel Walter
Kolon. Put in charge of training, Kolon's job was "to prepare
incoming personnel at Seminary Camp at Vung Tau," [16] which in 1969
was still the private property of the CIA; only Air America was
authorized to fly in and out. Having worked with the agency at
various stages in his career, including his first tour in Vietnam in
1965 with the Special Military Intelligence Advisory Team (SMIAT),
Phoenix was a program that Walter Kolon was well suited for.
Assembled by CIA officer William Tidwell within MACV's Technical
Intelligence Branch, SMIAT was a deep cover for sophisticated
"black" operations against the VCI before Phoenix. "The premise and
charter of SMIAT," said Kolon, "laid the groundwork conceptually for
Phoenix."
When Kolon arrived on the scene, CIA contract
officers like Bob Slater and veteran Phoenix coordinators like Doug
Dillard and Henry McWade were teaching classes at Vung Tau. Recalled
Dillard: "There was a compound and classrooms and different kinds of
training facilities out on the grounds. Colonel Be was there with
his RD Cadre training school, although they kept them separate. And
of course, I was involved only with American personnel. They had
agency people who had been with ICEX as instructors. The U.S. cadre
down there were all agency people; later they began to get some Army
personnel in."
Phoenix personnel assigned to Seminary Camp
shared their mess hall with PRU advisers. "We had two elements,"
Walter Kolon recalled. "One was the Phoenix school; the other was
PRU. Those were the only two there. The RDC training area was
separate. But the people being assigned were neither fish nor fowl;
counterintelligence and intelligence people had
no understanding of police or judicial procedures, and former
policemen were not the solution either," he added, noting that they
and people from other agencies sometimes had no intelligence
training at all. "What was needed was a new breed of cat, a person
who understood collection, analysis, and response units like the
National Police Field Force, and how all that jibed with gathering
evidence and building a case."
So, Kolon continued, "We made recommendations
to Colby to get a new program under way in the States. Then I went
back to brief the people at SACSA, CIA, Fort Holabird, and the
Continental Army Command at Fort Lee as to what our needs were, not
just immediately, but into the foreseeable future as well -- always
remembering that Phoenix was a coordinative function. As a result,
the military intelligence branch of the Army, on instructions from
the acting chief of staff for intelligence, actively began
identifying in the United States people to volunteer as Phoenix
advisers, on the understanding that they would be able to choose
their next assignment after Vietnam. This would eventually develop
into what was called the Phoenix Career Program."
Phoenix curriculum was soon introduced to the
Foreign Service Institute; the Defense Intelligence School; the Army
Intelligence School; the Institute for Military Assistance at Fort
Bragg; the Civil Affairs School at Fort Gordon (home of the Military
Police); the Army Intelligence School in Okinawa; and Joint U.S.
Military Advisory Group in Thailand. Walter Kolon then returned to
Vung Tau, where he supervised the creation of the ten-day bimonthly
Phoenix Coordinators' Orientation Course. The staff was "originally
about a dozen people. Some were former DIOCC advisers, and the CIA
also supplied a number of guest lecturers."
About his experience as a Phoenix facilitator,
Henry McWade said, "I gave two classes. The first class was how the
DIOCC should be, as set forth in SOP One and SOP Two. In the second
class I said, 'Forget the first class; this is how it really is.'
Then I explained how they had to adjust to the Vietnamese, how they
would get money for expenditures but no money for bodies, and how
sometimes they would get money for agents."
Kolon and his deputy, Major Kelly Stewart, also
provided advice and support to Special Branch training courses begun
in Bien Hoa in December 1968, then expanded to the other corps. In
this capacity Kolon traveled with Ed Brady and Loi Nguyen Tan. By
the end of 1969 corps centers had trained eighteen hundred students,
primarily in how to be case officers. Beginning in February 1969,
American advisers to ARVN ranger battalions, along with police
advisers and Free World Military Assistance Forces, were also given
Phoenix instruction.
In addition to classes at Vung Tau, the CIA
gave instruction to Phoenix advisers at the Vietnamese Central
Intelligence School. John Cook attended one of the sessions. He
writes:
There were forty of us in the class, half
American, half Vietnamese. The first day at the school was devoted
to lectures by American experts in the insurgency business. Using a
smooth, slick delivery, they reviewed all the popular theories
concerning communist- oriented revolutions
Like so many machines programmed to
perform at a higher level than necessary, they
dealt with platitudes and theories far above our dirty little war.
They spoke in impersonal tones about what had to be done and how we
should do it, as if we were in the business of selling life
insurance, with a bonus going to the man who sold the most policies.
Those districts that were performing well with the quota system were
praised; the poor performers were admonished. And it all fitted
together nicely with all the charts and figures they offered as
support of their ideas. [17]
Like many of his colleagues, Cook resented "the
pretentious men in high position" who gave him unattainable goals,
then complained when he did not reach them. In particular, as a
result of mounting criticism in the American press, Phoenix advisers
were called to task for their failure to capture rather than kill
VCI. The problem stemmed from the press's equating Phoenix with the
PRU teams it employed. For example, in December 1967 the Minneapolis
Tribune described the PRU as "specially trained Vietnamese
assassins" who "slip silently by night into sleeping hamlets to
carry out their deadly function." The Tribune noted: "This aspect of
ICEX has a tradition that goes back far beyond the Vietnam conflict,
and its methods are those of hired killers everywhere."
The "hired killer" label was to stick to
Phoenix, with hapless DIOCC advisers taking the heat for PRU
advisers conducting their business with impunity. Writing for the
Wall Street Journal on September 5, 1968, reporter Peter Kann
described the VCI as "the invisible foe," adding that "the target is
assassinated, sometimes brutally as an object lesson to others."
In this way Phoenix developed a reputation as
an assassination program. That is why it became imperative that the
CIA disassociate itself from the program through public statements
building a case for plausible denial. Such was the tack William
Colby took at a press conference held for thirty news correspondents
on December 28, 1968, in response to mounting public queries about
Phoenix. In his opening statement Colby called Phoenix "a Vietnamese
program" in which Americans were involved "only as part of military
operations." The MACV
information officer assisting Colby added that
no American units were allocated to Phoenix. Colby stressed that the
goal was to capture, not to kill, VCI. Nothing was said about wanted
dead or alive posters, the PRU, or the Army's combined
reconnaissance and intelligence platoons (CRIPS), which Jeffrey Race
calls "Far more effective than even the PRU at eliminating members
of the VCI." [18]
When asked how advisers prevented people from
using Phoenix as a cover for political assassination, Colby cited
systematic record keeping as the fail-safe mechanism, producing
charts and graphs to show statistics backing his claims. He did not
mention the massacre of Ky's people on June 2, 1968, or Tran Van
Don's claim that Phoenix helped Truong Dinh Dzu in the 1967
election, or the station's special unit, whose victims' names never
appeared on Phoenix rolls.
Colby made no reference to the CIA's having
built the province interrogation centers and said that advisers were
"seldom" present at interrogations. He then outlined
American-conceived legal procedures for detaining suspects.
The essence of Colby's dissembling was his
definition of Phoenix as an organization rather than a concept. As
stated in the previous chapter, when Ed Brady was asked if Phoenix
generated atrocities, his answer was that it depended on whether or
not the PRU and the PICs were defined as part of Phoenix. The reason
for Colby's ignoring these two foundation stones of Phoenix was to
conceal CIA involvement in the program, as well as to protect
unilateral CIA penetrations, what Nelson Brickham called "the most
important program in terms of gathering intelligence on the enemy.
"What Jim Ward called "the real sensitive, important operations."
[19] And, according to Colby, it worked: "We were getting more and
more accurate reports from inside VCI provincial committees and
regional Party headquarters from brave Vietnamese holding high ranks
in such groups. " [20]
"CORDS provided an umbrella," said John Vann's
deputy, Jack. "But people, especially the CIA, were always
back-channeling through their own agencies to undermine it
Komer insisted that CIA people would run Phoenix through
regular
channels. But on highly sensitive matters, like
tracking high penetrations, it wasn't reported in CORDS."
In a conversation with the author, Jack noted
that the informal lines of command are more important than formal
lines, that, as he put it, "real power gravitates off the
organizational charts. The way it gets organized isn't critical; it
had to be done some way, and it can adapt. For example, in Hau Nghia
it was military, while in Gia Dinh it was Special Branch. It has to
be flexible to account for HES A and B hamlets as opposed to C and D
hamlets. Military or police, depending on the
environment. In any event the CIA advised
Special Branch had cognizance over Phoenix." [21] And Phoenix was a
concept, not an organization.
Notes:
i. Lang's sister had married Tucker Gougleman
when Gougleman was managing SOG operations in Da Nang in 1964.
CHAPTER 18: Transitions
Saigon has been called a wicked city. It is
said that the pungent smell of opium permeated its back alleys, that
its casinos never closed, that its brothels occupied entire city
blocks, and that a man could sell his soul for a hundred dollars,
then use the money to hire an assassin to kill his lover, his boss,
his enemy.
Anything was possible in Saigon. And given the
massive infusion of American soldiers, dollars, and materiel that
began in 1965, criminally minded individuals had the chance to make
fortunes. This could be done in all the usual ways: by selling
military supplies and equipment on the black market, by taking
kickbacks for arranging service and construction contracts, and
through extortion, gambling, prostitution, narcotics, and money
changing. The dimensions of the black market were limitless and
included corrupt officials, spies seeking untraceable funds and
contact with the enemy, and mafiosi in league with military officers
and businessmen out to make a fast buck. By late 1968, with the
psychological defeat brought about by Tet, the crime wave was
cresting, and the transition from a quest for military victory to
making a profit had begun in earnest.
As one CIA officer recalled, "When the
so-called Vietnamization of the war began, everyone knew that even
though the Company would still be running CORDS, it was the
beginning of the end. The contract employees began getting laid off,
especially those running operations in Laos. The others, mostly
ex-Army types, knew their turn was coming, so they began trying to
make as much money as they could. Air America pilots doubled the
amount of opium they carried. [i] The Americans in CORDS, with the
help of the PRU, began shaking down the Vietnamese, arresting them
if they didn't pay protection money, even taking bribes to free
suspects they'd already arrested. Everyone went crazy for a buck."
"Here you have a very corrupt environment, a
culture that tolerates corruption," Ed Brady observed, "and now
you're going to run covert operations." [1]
Considering that the Special Branch -- which
had cognizance over Phoenix -- was responsible for investigating
corruption, it was inevitable that some Phoenix coordinators would
abuse the system. Much of that abuse occurred in Saigon under the
nose of John O'Keefe, the CIA officer in charge of the Capital
Military District. Described by Nelson Brickham as a "very capable
officer" [2] and a "raconteur" who spoke excellent Parisian French,
O'Keefe was a veteran case officer with years of experience in
Europe. In Vietnam he had served as the officer in charge of Chau
Doc Province and Hue before being transferred to Saigon in September
1968.
Headquartered on the second floor of the
three-story building behind City Hall on Nguyen Hue Boulevard,
O'Keefe on paper reported to Hatcher James, the senior USAID adviser
to Saigon Mayor Do Kin Nhieu, whose deputy "really ran things"
(foremost among those things being the loan and default payments the
GVN owed the "five communes," the principal Chinese families in
Cholon who served as South Vietnam's major moneylenders). Tall, with
sandy hair and a fondness for drinking scotch with the CIA's
notorious finance officer, alias General Monopoly, at the Cosmos,
O'Keefe supervised Special Branch and Phoenix operations in Saigon
beginning in September 1968.
Also arriving in Saigon in September 1968 was
Captain Shelby Roberts. In 1965 Roberts had been a warrant officer
flying photoreconnaissance missions for MACV's Target Research and
Analysis Division, locating targets for B-52 strikes. Another
creation of Bill Tidwell's, TRAC was used by General McChristian as
the nucleus for the Combined Intelligence Center . In 1966 Roberts
was commissioned an officer and, after completing the military
adviser training program at Fort Bragg, returned to Vietnam and was
assigned as Phoenix coordinator to Saigon's high-rent neighborhood,
Precinct 1. Snuggled on the east side of Saigon, far from the
squalor of Cholon and Tan Son Nhut's sprawling shantytowns, Precinct
1 had been the private domain of the French colonialists. By 1969
many of those rambling villas were occupied by Americans, including
John O'Keefe, Hatcher James, and William Colby, who lived on
tree-lined Hong Tap Thu Street.
Abutting Precinct 1 on the east was Gia Dinh
Province, fiefdom of Major James K. Damron, whom Roberts described
in an interview with the author as "the agency's man in Gia Dinh"
and "a warlord who went overboard and built a tremendous building.
But he played from a position of power," Roberts said. "He demanded
total loyalty from his people, and the Vietnamese respected that and
were terribly loyal to him." Majors James Damron and Danny Pierce --
who served as deputy coordinator of the Capital Phung Hoang
Committee -- were "business partners." [3]
Roberts described Danny Pierce as "an operator"
who "abused the system." An officer in the Mormon Church, Pierce was
linked to the black-market supply and
service industry through a secret "ring-knock"
identification system. Pierce was allegedly fired for possession of
a stolen jeep traced to the SOG motor pool located at 10 Hoang Hoa
Tam Street, where the Army Counterintelligence Corps had originally
set up shop in Vietnam in 1962.
In early 1969 Captain Roberts replaced Major
Danny Pierce as the Capital Phung Hoang Committee deputy
coordinator. Thereafter once a month Roberts visited the Gia Dinh
Province embassy house to exchange information with warlord Damron,
until Damron himself was reassigned by William Colby in early 1969
to an administrative post in the IV Corps Phoenix program.
Unlike his freewheeling predecessor, who had
fallen under the influence of the CIA, Shelby Roberts was not a
member of the Phoenix Directorate. In an effort to achieve greater
control over the program, MACV had Roberts report to John O'Keefe on
operational matters, while reporting administratively to the chief
of MACV's Saigon Capital Advisory Group (SCAG). As a result, Roberts
was not as closely involved in CIA operations in Saigon as Pierce
had been. But he was collocated with O'Keefe, and he did have
insights into the CIA side of Phoenix operations in Saigon.
"My office was behind City Hall, on the floor
below O'Keefe's office," Roberts recalled. "We had about twenty
Vietnamese employees, eight in the translation section, the rest
doing clerical work." The officer representing the Phoenix
Directorate in Saigon was Lieutenant Colonel William Singleton, whom
Roberts described as "working on the operations side, in covert
activities. He had safe houses and a plantation house with a small
staff." A tall man from Tennessee, Singleton was "particularly
interested in Cholon." The Special Branch officer running Phoenix
operations in Saigon was Captain Pham Quat Tan, a former ARVN
intelligence and psywar officer featured in a January 12, 1968, Life
magazine article.
According to Roberts, Phoenix in the Capital
Military District was entirely a CIA operation run out of Special
Branch headquarters. "We fed nothing to the Phoenix Directorate,"
Roberts said. "The reports all went back to the Combined
Intelligence Center, or I would give a briefing to O'Keefe, and he'd
go to the embassy, to the sixth floor" -- here analysts in the
station's special unit sifted through names and chose candidates for
penetration.
Anti-infrastructure operations in Saigon were
difficult at best. The city had ten precincts, with those outside
downtown Saigon resembling the suburbs in Go Vap District, as
described by Henry McWade. Security in outlying precincts was
maintained not by the Metropolitan Police but by the paramilitary
Order Police patrolling in armored cars, American infantry brigades,
and ranger battalions. There was a strict curfew, and in the
aftermath of Tet new interrogation centers were built in
all of Saigon's precincts. In Precinct 1 a
large interrogation center was built by Pacific Architects and
Engineers directly behind the U.S. Embassy. In other precincts
interrogation centers were constructed "under existing roofs." In
either case Roberts tended to avoid them. "I was reluctant to get
involved because the Special Branch tried to use me during
interrogations. They'd say, 'If you think we're bad, he'll cook you
and eat you!' So I didn't care to participate."
Each precinct had wards called phung, which
were further subdivided into khung, a group of families, usually
ten, which the Special Branch monitored through "family books"
maintained by the Metropolitan Police. The finished product of the
Family Census program, family books contained biographical
information and a photograph of every family member. One of the
khung families was responsible for keeping track of visitors to the
other families, and on the basis of these family books, the Special
Branch compiled blacklists of suspected VCI members."
In discussing the tactics of the Special
Branch, Shelby Roberts said, "They ran all their operations at
night. They'd turn the floodlights on, tear down entire
neighborhoods ... and arrest entire families. They were mainly
interested in shakedowns. The 'Send your daughter to my office'-type
harassment. And making money on the side. Everyone," Roberts added,
"was in the black market."
There were other intrigues. "We chased
commo-liaison people," Roberts explained, "and if we caught them,
the police would get reward money and money for their captured
weapons. This led to the same weapons being turned in over and over
again. Over half a million were paid for, but there were less than a
quarter million at the armory." Meanwhile, "The Special Branch hid
information from us so it wouldn't go up to O'Keefe and the CIA. It
was common knowledge that if you gave good information to Phoenix,
you wouldn't get the reward money." And that, according to Roberts,
"was the death of the program."
Despite its heavy-handed methods, "The Special
Branch was considered a white- collar job," Roberts explained,
"whereas the Saigon Metropolitan Police ... were looked down upon."
So out of spite the Metropolitan Police turned from law enforcement
to graft. Precinct chiefs sold licenses for every conceivable
enterprise, from market stalls to restaurants and hotels, and
managed prostitution, gambling, and narcotics rackets. The police
were paid off by the crooks and the Vietcong alike. As a result,
according to Roberts, "They "got no respect. They were so corrupt
they tried to corrupt the Phoenix coordinators."
Making matters worse, Roberts said, was the
fact that when information on suspected VCI members was forthcoming,
Phoenix coordinators -- reflecting the
CIA's desire to have total control over sources
that might generate strategic intelligence -- were told to ignore
it. This prohibition and the frustration it caused, plus the fact
that the police tried to bribe the precinct coordinators, resulted
in more than twenty Phoenix advisers passing through Saigon's ten
precincts in 1969. Most lasted only a few weeks, although those who
were suborned by the CIA held their jobs for years. For example,
Captain Keith Lange, who replaced Roberts in Precinct 1, was
"pulling off national-level operations" for two and a half years. On
the other hand, Roberts put Captain Daniel Moynihan in Precinct 2,
"so I could watch him, because he had trouble with finance."
Indeed, money was the answer to, and cause of,
all problems in Saigon. Insofar as AID withdrew its Public Safety
advisers from Saigon after Tet, Roberts said, "We, the Phoenix
coordinators, were the only Americans in the precincts. Some guys
were so busy they slept in their offices." And because the CIA was
no longer disbursing funds through AID, Phoenix coordinators by
default became the conduit of monetary aid to the National Police
and the Special Branch. "So the police chiefs really liked us a
lot," Roberts added.
Phoenix coordinators also became the conduit
for AID funds ostensibly destined for community development,
refugee, and health programs. In reality, the money bought
information and influence. Roberts recalled one housing project in
an area of Cholon that had been leveled during Tet. The cost was
$150,000. Roberts got the money from CIA finance officer General
Monopoly at the embassy annex. "Short, potbellied, and in his
sixties," General Monopoly "sat in the same seat every night at the
Cosmos. He was there at three o'clock every day drinking scotches
with Damron, Singleton, and O'Keefe."
As the pursuit of money began to rival the
pursuit of intelligence, a new twist was added to The Game, as the
competition for intelligence sources was called. "Especially in
Precinct Five [which encompassed Cholon]," Roberts said, "we'd get
U.S. deserters working with the VCI through the
black market. They were dealing arms and supplies from the PX. We
knew of five deserters in Cholon. Each one was operating with
several IDs. The MPs and CID ran a number of operations to get one
guy in particular. He would sneak past guards, masquerading as an
enlisted man. And he was actually detained several times. But
because he had phony ID, he was always released."
There may be another reason why this traitor
was never caught. It has to do with the CIA's practice of nurturing
deviant communities as a source of assassins.
John Berry quotes one such "contractor" in his
book Those Gallant Men on Trial in Vietnam: "Well, I walk behind
this screen and I don't see this guy's face, but he
give me 5,000 piasters and a picture and an
address, and I go kill the dude and then go get my other 5,000." [4]
***
With Vietnamization, Phoenix came under closer
scrutiny. The repercussions were evident everywhere. Toward the end
of 1968, Henry McWade recalled, "Major Damron got into a power play
for intelligence resources" [5] and Damron's bosses reached the
conclusion that he was all smoke and mirrors.
"Damron was losing control," McWade explained.
"So he put the blame on us, the DIOCC advisers, to gain time and
space for himself. We were sacrificed." A few days later McWade and
a group of scapegoats (not including John Cook) were transferred out
of Gia Dinh to other provinces. McWade landed in Hau Nghia in III
Corps as deputy to the province Phoenix coordinator, Captain Daniel
L. Smith.
Back in Gia Dinh, Damron and his loyalists were
hunkering down, But Colby was intent on cleaning house, and Damron
was transferred out of Gia Dinh. Doug Dillard recalled the scandal
precipitated by Damron's infamous excesses: "I'll never forget
Colby's admonition to us on one of his visits down in the Delta. Up
in Three Corps there was an agency guy who had built a magnificent
building with a helicopter landing pad on the roof. And Colby said,
'There ain't gonna be any more monuments built in Vietnam. I'm glad
to see you guys have a conservative program for just getting the job
done.'" [6]
Ironically, the new Gia Dinh province officer
in charge proved more troublesome for Colby than Damron. For whereas
Damron was guilty of mere greed, the new province officer was prey
to a far more dangerous master: his conscience. A veteran CIA
paramilitary officer, Ralph McGehee had already spent fifteen years
fighting the Holy War in a number of Asian countries when he arrived
in Vietnam in October 1968. His biggest success had been in
Thailand, where he had developed survey teams for rooting out the
Communist infrastructure. McGehee's survey teams consisted of
police, military, and security officials who entered Thai border
towns to "interrogate anyone over ten years old" [7] about Communist
efforts to organize secret political cells. However, in a cruel
twist of fate which engendered his crisis of faith and his fall from
grace, McGehee naively relayed information uncovered by his survey
teams indicating that the Communist insurgency had overwhelming
popular support. Although accurate in their assessment of the
situation, his reports defied policy and were summarily dismissed by
his bosses in Washington. Feeling rejected, McGehee arrived in
Saigon teetering on the brink of heresy. What he saw of Phoenix
pushed him over the edge.
As the CIA's Gia Dinh province officer in
charge, McGehee reported to the CIA's III Corps ROIC; as the Gia
Dinh Province Phoenix coordinator, he reported to the CORDS province
senior adviser. In his book Deadly Deceits, he writes that "the
primary CORDS program was the Phoenix operation" and that "CIA money
was the catalyst." [8] But McGehee's problem with Phoenix had
nothing to do with the attack on the infrastructure; in an interview
for this book, he said the PRU program "was admirable." McGehee's
gripe was that "the agency was not allowed to report the truth."
Writes McGehee: "The assignment to Gia Dinh
gave me the opportunity to see how the agency's intelligence program
worked, or more accurately how it did not work at that level. One or
two sentence intelligence reports poured in, were translated, and
were filed or thrown away. A typical report, one of hundreds like it
received each week, said: 'Two armed VC were seen moving south of
the village of ... this morning.' A massive agency/CORDS/Phoenix
file system processed this daily flow of nonsense. Collation and
analysis never applied. I wondered how this intelligence effort
could possibly give our leaders and generals anything even
approaching an accurate picture of what was going on. [9]
"Our policy," McGehee deduced, "was based on
'intelligence' reports of the numbers of communists in Vietnam that
had nothing to do with reality. Either they were the result of
unbelievable incompetence or they were deliberate lies created to
dupe the American people." [10]
McGehee settled on the second explanation, a
belief he shares with Sam Adams, the controversial CIA analyst who
quit the agency in 1973 in protest over what he claimed was "the
sloppy and often dishonest way U.S. intelligence conducted research
on the struggle in Indochina." [11] A member of George Carver's SAVA
staff, Adams wrote the CIA's handbook on the VCI and for five years
taught a class on the VCI to CIA case officers bound for Vietnam.
After quitting the agency, Adams claimed that the CIA had falsified
statistics, and in 1982 in a CBS documentary called The Uncounted
Enemy: A Vietnam Deception, he accused General William Westmoreland
of a deliberate cover-up. Humiliated, Westmoreland filed his famous
$120 million libel suit against CBS.
The origins of the "Vietnam deception" date
back to January 11, 1967, when SAVA director Carver wrote a memo,
introduced as evidence at the Westmoreland trial, indicating that
the number of confirmed Vietcong, put at over a quarter of a million
by MACV, was "far too low and should be raised, perhaps doubled."
Despite indications presented by General McChristian substantiating
the CIA estimate, MACV rejected it and instead, by excluding
Vietcong Self-Defense Forces from its order of battle, contrived a
lower number. CIA
analysts persisted in arguing for an estimate
approaching half a million, and a stalemate ensued until August 30,
1967, when Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms,
describing the issue as "charged with political and public relations
overtones," [12] arranged for Carver to lead a delegation of senior
intelligence officers to Saigon to negotiate an agreement on the
exact size of NVA and VC forces.
Two days after arriving in Saigon and meeting
with McChristian's replacement, General Davidson, Carver notified
Helms that MACV was "stonewalling" and that "circumstantial
indicators ... point to inescapable conclusion that Westmoreland
... has given instructions tantamount to direct
order that strength total will not exceed 300,000 ceiling. Rationale
seems to be that higher figure would not be sufficiently optimistic
and would generate unacceptable level of criticism from the press."
[13]
Although the CIA knew that the estimated
120,000 VC Self-Defense Forces (which Westmoreland described as "old
men, old women and children") were the integral element of the
insurgency, Carver, after being shown "evidence that I hadn't heard
before," cut a deal on September 13. He sent a cable to Helms
saying: "Circle now squared We
have agreed set of figures Westmoreland endorsed." [14] In
November National Security Adviser Walt Rostow
showed President Johnson a chart indicating that enemy strength had
dropped from 285,000 in late 1966 to 242,000 in late 1967. President
Johnson got the success he wanted to show, and Vietnam got Tet.
succeeded in carrying out practically the
meaning of this symbol has become one with the father; he is
virtually an adept, because he has succeeded in squaring the circle
and circling the square. All of this proves that Paracelsus has
brought the root of his occult ideas from the East.
-- The Life of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast
of Hohenheim Known by the Name of Paracelsus and the Substance of
his Teachings, by Franz Hartmann, M.D.
***
Our scientific procedure is obviously the
negation of the Absolute. That was an acute and happy remark of
Goethe's: "He who devotes himself to nature attempts to find the
squaring of the circle."
-- The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century,
by Houston Stewart Chamberlain
***
The geometrician does not know the square of
the circle.
-- De Monarchia of Dante Alighieri
***
It is impossible to square the circle perfectly
because of its arc.
-- The Convivio, by Dante Alighieri
Sam Adams's claim that the agency had
"misinformed policymakers of the strength of the enemy" was backed
at the CBS libel trial by Carver's deputy, George W. Allen, who
claimed that Westmoreland "was ultimately responsible" for "this
prostitution" and that the CIA, "by going along with it," had
"sacrificed its integrity on the altar of public relations and
political expediency." Allen added that the end result of the
deception was that Washington was left "essentially with an
inadequate understanding of what we were up against" in Vietnam.
According to Allen, the Self-Defense Forces were not old women and
children but hardened guerrillas who were responsible for 40 percent
of all U.S. combat casualties in Vietnam.
As a result of Adams's claims, a congressional
inquiry was conducted in 1975. The investigating committee, chaired
by Otis Pike, concluded that juggling of numbers "created false
perceptions of the enemy U.S. forces faced, and prevented
measurement
of changes over time. Second, pressure from
policymaking officials to produce positive intelligence indicators
reinforced erroneous assessments of allied progress and enemy
capabilities." [15]
***
Sam Adams has said that "the reason [Phoenix]
did not work was that its needs, although recognized in theory, were
never fulfilled in practice. The divorce between hope and reality
became so wide that the program degenerated into a game of
statistics, in which numbers were paramount, and the object of the
exercise -- the crippling of the Communist Party -- was never even
approached." [16]
Likewise, Ralph McGehee found the CIA squaring
statistical facts with ideological preconceptions in Vietnam, just
as it had in Thailand. "The station's intelligence briefings on the
situation in South Vietnam confirmed all my fears," he writes. The
briefers "talked only about the numbers of armed Viet Cong, the
slowly increasing North Vietnamese regular army, and the occasional
member of the Communist infrastructure. They made no mention of the
mass-based Farmer's Liberation Association, or the Communist youth
organization, all of which in some areas certainly included entire
populations." [17]
The reason for this deception, McGehee
contends, was that "U.S. policymakers had to sell the idea that the
war in the South was being fought by a small minority of Communists
opposed to the majority-supported democratic government of Nguyen
Van Thieu. The situation, however, was the opposite .... The U.S.
was supporting Thieu's tiny oligarchy against a population largely
organized, committed, and dedicated to a communist victory." [18]
McGehee blames the American defeat in Vietnam
on "policy being decided from the top in advance, then intelligence
being selected or created to support it afterwards." In particular,
he singles out William Colby as the principal apostle of the Big
Lie. A veteran of the Far East Division, McGehee at one point served
as Colby's acolyte at Langley headquarters and bases his accusations
on firsthand observations of Colby in action -- of watching Colby
deliver briefings which were "a complete hoax contrived to deceive
Congress." [19] Writes McGehee of Colby: "I have watched him when I
knew he was lying, and not the least flicker of emotion ever crosses
his face." But what made Colby even more dangerous, in McGehee's
opinion, was his manipulation of language. "Colby emphasized the
importance of selecting just the right words and charts to convey
the desired impression to Congress. He regarded word usage as an art
form, and he was a master at it." [20]
Years later they met again in Gia Dinh
Province, at which point McGehee describes Colby as "a harried,
self-important, distracted bureaucrat" who "began calling for
statistics. 'How many VC killed this month? How many captured? How
many firefights?' Each unit chief answered. Colby checked the
replies against the figures in his books, and questioned each chief
about discrepancies or outstanding figures." All this was a waste of
time, McGehee contends. "Here the U.S. was trying to fight an enemy
it only slightly acknowledged. Why? What had happened to all the
idealism, all the rules of getting and reporting intelligence? Why
did the agency blind itself while pretending to look for
intelligence? Why did we insist on killing people instead of talking
to them? How long would this insanity go on?" [21]
In his defense Colby said to me, "We were
getting all the statistics, and if you could get them on the
computer, you could play them back and forth a little better, and
see things you couldn't see otherwise. It was really quite
interesting. I never really believed the numbers as absolute, but
they helped you think about the problems. We would use it for
control of how local people were doing," he explained, "how if one
province reported they had captured a lot of category Cs, but no As,
and another province said it captured 15 category As, first you'd
check if there were any truth to the second story, and if it is
true, you know the second province is doing better then the first
one. You don't believe the numbers off-hand, you use them as a basis
for questions." [22]
Numbers as a basis for questions were a
management tool, but they were also a way of manipulating facts. And
William Colby is a scion of the gray area in between. In his
autobiography, Honorable Men, Colby explains how his father
converted to Catholicism, and how Colby himself, when he entered
Princeton, was excluded from the in crowd as a result. An articulate
man trained as a lawyer and spy, but with only one foot in the door,
Colby embraced "the art of the possible" and cultivated his "grey
man" mentality to achieve success in the CIA bureaucracy, as well as
to dissolve the lines between right and wrong, enabling him to give
Phoenix a clean bill of health. "I have no qualms about accepting
responsibility for it," he writes. [23]
So it was in Vietnam, that just as criticism of
Phoenix was building, within the program, the press began turning
its attention toward the subject. The calamity called Tet had
subsided, the elections were over, and the Paris-Peace Talks were
about to start. The Communist shadow government was emerging into
the light of day, and U.S. efforts to deal with it became the
pressing concern.
Glimpses of Phoenix began appearing in print.
On June 29, 1968, in his "Letter from Saigon" column in The New
Yorker, Robert Shaplen identified the program by its Vietnamese
name, Phung Hoang, calling it the "all-seeing bird." Shaplen
rehashes the thrust of the program, citing statistics and quoting
Robert Komer as
saying "some 5,000 arrests have been made of
alleged members of the [VC] command structure." According to
Shaplen, the program's major weakness was "a tendency on the part of
the Vietnamese to build up a massive dossier on a suspect until he
gets wind of what is happening and disappears." Shaplen notes that
"district and village chiefs are sometimes loath to furnish or act
on intelligence on the grounds that the war may soon be over."
Indeed, the possibility of a negotiated
settlement raised the specter of those in the VCI
-- the people Phoenix was arresting and killing
-- gaining legal status. And that scenario sent chills running up
and down every war manager's spine. But the transition from
supporter to critic of American conduct of the war did not come
easily to reporters used to acting as cheerleaders. Reasons for
withdrawing support had yet to be uncovered. However, sensing
momentum in that direction, the information managers began to search
for scapegoats. And who better to blame than the Vietnamese
themselves? GVN shortcomings, which were previously swept under the
carpet, were suddenly being aired. Suddenly the Vietnamese were
corrupt and incompetent, and that, not any fault on the part of the
Americans, explained why the insurgency was growing.
Moreover, war crimes in 1968 still went
unreported. The VC were "faceless," an abstract statistic whose
scope was negotiated by the CIA and MACV. Wall Street Journal
reporter Peter Kann, in a September 1968 article on Phoenix, called
the VCI "the invisible foe." For Kann, they were an insidious
"underground" enemy who could only be eliminated "at night" in their
homes.
Kann employed similar imagery in March 1969 in
an article titled "The Hidden War: Elite Phoenix Forces Hunt
Vietcong Chiefs in Isolated Villages." Here Phoenix is characterized
as a "systematic, sophisticated application of force." The PRU and
their U.S. advisers are "elite," while far from having any popular
support, the VCI members are outcasts in "isolated villages," far
removed from cities and civilization.
On January 6, 1969, The New York Times reporter
Drummond Ayres gave Phoenix a favorable review, saying that "more
than 15,000 of the 80,000 VC political agents thought to be in South
Vietnam are said to have been captured or killed." He also expresses
the belief that "the general course of the war ... now appears to
favor the Government" and predicts that Phoenix would "achieve much
greater success as the center's files grow."
Despite the good reviews, the surfacing of
Phoenix in the press sent the publicity-shy CIA running for cover.
Under National Security Council Directive 10/2, the CIA is
authorized to undertake secret political and paramilitary
operations. As Ralph Johnson
writes, "CIA was empowered to develop and test
programs through its covert assets. If these programs were
successful, and if approved, and if they supported U.S. policy
objectives, then they would be turned over to appropriate overt U.S.
agencies." And so, in December 1968, the newly arrived CIA station
chief informed DEPCORDS William Colby "that the Agency had fulfilled
its function. [Phoenix] was now functional and CIA proposed to
withdraw all its management and overall responsibility." [24]
Making this pivotal decision was Ted Shackley.
A veteran CIA officer with experience in Germany and in Miami
running operations against Cuba, Shackley had just completed a
two-year tour as station chief in Vientiane, Laos, where he had
acquired a detailed understanding of the situation in South Vietnam,
primarily through meetings in third countries with John Hart and Lou
Lapham, at which regional issues were discussed, strategy was
coordinated, and briefings of deep-cover agents were held. "The big
item," according to Lapham, "was the NVA coming down the Ho Chi Minh
Trail." [25]
Tall, thin, and pale, Shackley, in an interview
conducted in his Arlington office, concurred. "It was the same war
in the Laotian panhandle," he said, "although Laos, in addition, had
the basic political problem of coalition." [26]
No stranger to the types of programs the CIA
was running in South Vietnam, Shackley reviewed them all upon
arriving in Saigon in November. "It became clear to me then," he
told me, "that the pacification programs had come of age ... that
the agency contribution was no longer required. So my original
proposal was to see about getting others to manage these ...
programs, to free up CIA resources to improve the quality of the
intelligence product, to penetrate the Vietcong, and the NVA
supporting them, and to concentrate more against the North and the
VC and the NVA in Cambodia.
"So negotiations were undertaken," Shackley
continued, "and an agreement was reached to phase out the CIA.
Pacification programs were to go to the GVN, and CORDS was to
provide the transition. We took a mission approach. Each program was
approached specifically, including Phoenix, and a certain level of
top management was provided for coordination. Static Census
Grievance was taken apart; some functions went to Revolutionary
Development, some to the Hamlet Evaluation System, and some were
dropped. By 1969, static Census Grievance was out of business. RD
and Territorial Security were merged and Phil Potter and Rod
Landreth saw that the GVN took over the PRU program." And Phoenix,
too, was discarded.
On December 14, 1968, MACV notified DEPCORDS
William Colby of its intention to assume "responsibility for
intelligence matters as they pertain to the VC
infrastructure." [27] By June 1969 the transfer
of Phoenix from CIA to MACV-J2 was complete.
In early December, Evan Parker recalled, "I
became the author of memos back and forth from Colby to Shackley
putting myself out of business." Parker, however, was not pleased
with the reorganization, his main objection being that "the military
staff officers were not ready to take over." [28]
"This was a difficult assignment for the
military," Shackley concurred, because there "had to be liaison with
the Special Branch. You had to have a manager to coordinate
intelligence problems. For instance, leads came out of the PICs and
had to be coordinated with the highest levels of CIA."
To facilitate the process, Colby incorporated
the Phoenix program as a division within CORDS, but with a senior
CIA staff officer as director, functioning as the American
counterpart to the secretary general of the Central Phung Hoang
Permanent Office. In this way the CIA could, when necessary, direct
Phoenix advisers and exercise jurisdiction over prisoners and
penetration agents spun out of the program. Chairmanship of Phoenix
committees at region and province became the responsibility,
respectively, of the corps DEPCORDS and the province senior adviser.
CIA region and province officers became deputy chairmen and
ostensibly supported their new military managers with CIA
intelligence. [29]
"The idea," according to Shackley, "was that
Evan Parker, and three or four others, would slowly peel back people
as the military marched in." Thereafter the role of the Phoenix
director was to meet "once or twice a week with the [Vietnamese] to
iron out problems. Was there a province chief not willing to
cooperate with the PIC? Was he funneling people to the Military
Security Service, rather than to the Special Branch? Maybe there was
overcrowding in a PIC that province or region couldn't resolve. What
to do? Well, the Phoenix director would go to the secretary- general
and cite specific cases. There might be a knowledgeable source in a
PIC who needed to be brought to Saigon. Were the line managers
looking at the dossiers? Yes or no?"
Despite the fact that the Phoenix director, a
senior CIA staff officer, had cognizance over the PIC program,
"Phoenix," insisted Shackley, "had nothing to do with intelligence
operations. It was completely separate from Special Branch trying to
penetrate the Vietcong. Any guy who could be used as a penetration
agent was spun out of Phoenix." That was the job in 1969 of special
unit analysts under the management of CIA officer George Weisz. In
this way, Phoenix evolved into a massive screening operation, with
its parent organization, the Special Branch, having, in the words of
Ralph Johnson, the "intelligence coordination mission" of "keying
important VCI political leaders and activists
so as not to clog up the system with volumes of low level VCI cadre
or front members." [30]
And so, in June 1969, the CIA receded into the
dark corners of CORDS. Evan Parker, having brought the Phoenix
program to fruition, was appointed deputy chief of the CIA's Special
Operations Division and was replaced as Phoenix director by veteran
CIA officer John Mason. Described by Shackley as "a highly decorated
World War Two Army colonel who served with the agency mostly in
Europe (and with George French in Turkey)," Mason was a personal
friend of General Creighton Abrams. "He followed Abrams's tanks
through Europe with an infantry battalion," said Jim Ward, who, as
the CIA's Vietnam desk officer in 1969, asked Mason to take the job.
At first he refused, but eventually Mason succumbed to Ward's
supplications -
- to his eternal regret.
"Mason caught all the Phoenix flak." Ward
sighed. "The last time I spoke with him, the only thing he said to
me was 'You bastard.'"
Notes:
i. Drugs were also smuggled on CIA/SOG black
flights, which were exempt from customs checks. Likewise, SOG
personnel carried military assistance adviser "Get out of Jail Free"
cards, exempting them from search and seizure by their adversaries
in the Military Police and Criminal Investigation Division.
CHAPTER 19: Psyops
The fabric of South Vietnamese society, always
loosely knit, began to unravel in 1969. As prospects for a clear-cut
military victory for either side slipped away, psychological
operations became the weapon of choice in what was an increasingly
political war. Both sides played the psywar game. Its only rule:
Post your own score.
The insurgents scored the first points in June
1969, when they formed the Provisional Revolutionary Government
(PRG) to represent them in South Vietnam and at the negotiating
table in Paris. The PRG was immediately recognized by thirteen
Communist bloc and ten nonaligned nations -- mostly Arab. Support
was expressed as well by Scandinavian, African, and Latin American
countries. One month later COSVN issued Resolution 9 directing its
officers "to prepare political cadre to insure a capability to
govern in anticipation of a coalition government in South Vietnam."
[1] Liberation Committees were made subordinate to the PRG and were
renamed
Revolutionary Committees. At the village and
hamlet level the insurgency was reinvigorated.
Back at CIA headquarters in Washington, it was
recognized that: "There were sufficient communist forces to keep the
war going, and progress depended on the morale and determination of
the communists." [2] Morale, however, is intangible, so CIA
propagandists cited irrefutable statistical evidence as proof that
the VCI was losing, not gaining -- as was the reality [3] -- support
in the villages. In April 1969 HES reports indicated that more than
three quarters of all Vietnamese were living in "secure" villages.
The purported success was attributed to VCI
manpower shortages caused by aerial and artillery bombardment,
defoliation campaigns, forced relocations, and mass arrests. The VCI
was said to be collecting less tax money as a result of Phoenix and,
out of desperation, to be using as cadre children who were too young
to be issued IDs. But "the bulk of manpower shortages," the Phoenix
1969 End of Year Report claimed, "were caused by deserters who
rallied to the GVN." In Vinh Long and Sa Dec provinces, it said,
"manpower shortages at district, village and hamlet levels ranged
from 45 to 100 percent during 1969.
Unable to cope with the GVN accelerated
pacification campaign, VCI members by late November 1969 had fled to
areas of sparse population and even Cambodia where they could exert
little influence over the population." [4]
From the language of the Phoenix report, one
could easily think that the few VCI members who had not defected
were hiding in Cambodia. But the author of "The Truth About
Phoenix," whose area of operations included Sa Dec and Vinh Long
provinces, claims that most Chieu Hois simply regurgitated the
American line in order to win amnesty, make a quick visit to their
families, enjoy a few home-cooked meals, then return to the fray,
fat and rested. Legitimate Chieu Hois, An writes, were pariahs who
were not accepted back in their villages, while other Chieu Hois
were trained by the VC to infiltrate the program and become spies.
[5]
In any event, from 1967 onwards, all "rallied"
VCI members were included in Phoenix neutralization statistics, and
by 1969 more than a hundred thousand defectors had been processed
through fifty-one Chieu Hoi centers. The Chieu Hoi program was
managed from 1966 until March 1969 by Ogden Williams, then turned
over to Eugene
P. Bable, a career CIA officer who had served
with Ralph Johnson in the Flying Tigers.
Evan Parker stated that Chieu Hoi offered more
satisfaction than Phoenix, and "Chieu Hoi," said Jim Ward, "was a
great program. Well done." Ward explained that most Chieu Hoi
advisers were from the U.S. Information Service, although some were
State Department or military officers. "But
they wouldn't have more than one American adviser in a province
and," Ward added, "it was usually the Vietnamese operating at
district level." [6]
Upon arriving at the Chieu Hoi center, the
defector was "interviewed" and, if he had information on the VCI,
was sent to the PIC; if he had tactical information, he was sent to
military interrogators. Next came political indoctrination, lasting
from forty to sixty days, depending on the individual. "They had a
formal course," said Ward. "They were shown movies and given
lectures on democracy." Upon graduation each was given an ID card, a
meal, some money, and a chance to repent. Political indoctrination
was handled by defectors who said they had been well treated by the
Americans and had decided it was better to live for a free Vietnam
than to die for the totalitarian North Vietnamese. "Chieu Hoi had
lots of guys who had been with the enemy before," Ward continued,
"who knew how to talk to these people and would persuade them to
join the Territorial Forces or the PRU." Others joined armed
propaganda teams, which went back into VC territory to contact
Vietcong families and recruit more Vietcong defectors.
"The great thing about the Chieu Hoi program,"
Ward noted, "is that we didn't have to put people in jails or
process them through the judicial system, which was already
overcrowded. You could talk to the Chieu Hois when you brought them
in -- talk to them about what the government was doing for the
people.
"They'd say, 'But it's a crooked government.'
"You'd say, 'Wait a minute. The government's
providing seeds for rice. This enables us to grow three to four
times as much rice in the Delta as in the past. Now that's good.'
"The guy'd say, 'I didn't know that.' All
they'd hear from the communists were the contradictions they'd
devise, if they didn't already exist. But now he was getting the
picture from our side. And a lot of them would flip-flop because of
it. Now some guys would come in, Chieu Hoi, spend time with their
families, then go back out in the field again. That happened, but
not to the extent that you might think. I'd say less than ten
percent."
Despite his praise for the Chieu Hoi program,
Jim Ward said that "Americans should have been targeted only against
the North Vietnamese and left the South Vietnamese forces to handle
the insurgency," even though such a strategy would have precluded
Phoenix. However, having made the mistake of military intervention,
Americans looked for psychological ploys, other than an appeal to
nationalism, to win people over to the GVN. High on the list were
bounty programs. The Phoenix
1969 End of Year Report cites as an example
Kien Phong Province, where the Phung Hoang Committee printed and had
distributed a wanted poster featuring photographs of eight members
of the Cao Lanh City sapper unit. "While a RD Cadreman was tacking
up a poster he saw one of the members passing by," the report says.
"He called the police who arrested the suspect. Two other members
were later arrested.
Three were induced to rally claiming they were
rendered ineffective having their names and faces known." [7]
In Phong Dinh Province the Vietnam Information
Service (VIS) broadcast the names of VCI through loudspeakers
mounted on sampans while traveling through the canals of Phung Hiep
District. "While the team was conducting the operation, a village
level VCI cadre walked into the Phung Thuan DIOCC," saying he had to
rally, "because Phung Hoang must know about him if the members of
the District Revolutionary Committee were known to Phung Hoang, as
broadcast by VIS." [8]
No one wanted to find his name on a Phoenix
blacklist; it meant the PRU would creep into his hooch some night,
or black helicopters would swoop down on his village. And because
fear of Phoenix was an effective means of creating informers and
defectors, an intensive publicity campaign called the Popular
Information Program began in October 1969. Under the banner of
"Protecting the People from Terrorism," U.S. and GVN psywar teams
crisscrossed the countryside, using Phoenix-supplied radios,
leaflets, posters, TV shows, movies, banners, and loudspeakers
mounted on trucks and sampans to spread the word. Using the eye of
God technique, taped broadcasts were pitched at specific VCI
members. A typical broadcast would say, "We know you, Nguyen Van
Nguyen; we know where you live! We know you are a communist traitor,
a lackey of Hanoi, who illegally collects taxes in Vinh Thanh
Hamlet. Soon the soldiers and police are coming for you. Rally now,
Nguyen Van Nguyen; rally now while there is still time!" [9]
So important were psyops that the Phoenix
Directorate produced a thirty-minute movie explaining how Phoenix
"Helps Protect the People from Terrorism." A copy of the film was
sent to each province for use on local TV stations and in movie
theaters. Writes Phoenix Coordinator John Cook: "[T]he concept was
simple; in practice it was suicidal." [10] Suicidal, he explains,
because the VC found the lightly armed psyops teams easy targets.
Cook therefore used the psyops team as bait to flush out the VC,
whom he then ambushed with his Phoenix task force. In this way
psyops were transposed into combat operations, turning psychological
defeat into military victory, with a body count to boot.
In addition to the Phoenix movie, hundreds of
thousands of copies of "an illustrated booklet describing the Phung
Hoang Program in cartoon [i] format" were also distributed
throughout Vietnam (in Montagnard and Cambodian dialects as well),
"with the goal of placing ten to fifteen in each hamlet. Culture-
drama teams used the booklet as a scenario for skits." [11]
On January 22, 1970, thirty-eight thousand of
these leaflets were dropped over three villages in Go Vap District.
Addressed to specific VCI members, they read: "Since you have joined
the NLF, what have you done for your 'family or your village and
hamlet? Or have you just broken up the happiness of many families
and destroyed houses and land? Some people among you have been
awakened recently, they have deserted the Communist ranks and were
received by the GVN and the people with open arms and family
affection. You should be ready for the end if you remain in the
Communist ranks. You will be dealing with difficulties bigger from
day to day and will suffer serious failure when the ARVN expand
strongly. You had better return to your family where you will be
guaranteed safety and helped to establish a new life." [12]
Psyops leaflets stressed traditional Confucian
values of obedience to authority and family and portrayed the
Communists as a socially disruptive force that could be stopped only
by Phoenix. But the fact that the GVN could reach the "people" only
through "media" like leaflets and loudspeakers indicates how far
removed it was from the reality of life in rural villages. As An
notes in "Truth About Phoenix" while the GVN relied upon cartoon
books to sell itself to a largely illiterate people, "The VC goes
from person to person talking to ears," proving that technology was
no substitute for human contact. [13]
Consequently, in 1969, the Phoenix Directorate
directed Phung Hoang Province committees to expand the Hamlet
Informant program (HIP) drastically. District chiefs were instructed
to conduct classes "on GVN programs, progress, potential and
ideology for residents who had VC/VCI relatives or leanings." There
was a one-week course "with extensions for problem individuals." Day
care and lunch were made available in "vacated" homes. Chieu Hoi was
emphasized, "counseling" was provided, and insofar as the goal was
the neutralization of VCI, "the populace was encouraged to report
the activities of the VCI by dropping a note addressed to the police
in local mailboxes." This method "was credited with approximately
40% of the information used in Phung Hoang operations" in Dinh Tuong
Province. [14]
Psyops in support of Phoenix became such a
potent weapon in the attack on the VCI that in August 1970 SACSA
described Phoenix as "the number one MACV PSYOPS priority." [15]
Four months later John Mason reported: "There have been more than
twelve million leaflets, posters, banners and
booklets printed and distributed throughout Vietnam in support of
the program." [16]
Despite the emphasis on psyops, combat
operations were still preferred by the military officers managing
the Phoenix program in the field. Such operations most often began
at the hamlet level when paid informers reported to Vung Tau-trained
village chiefs, who then mobilized Territorial Forces under their
command, and advised by American military officers, against VCI
suspects. Likewise, unilateral American Phoenix operations usually
began with informants' feeding names to a DIOCC, whose adviser then
informed the counterintelligence section of the nearest American
outfit. An operation was then mounted. In the wee hours of the
morning a unit of infantrymen would be deployed around the village
to provide security, and a team of commandos would snatch the VCI
suspect and bring him or her to the military intelligence
interrogation center. Such was the standard procedure which involved
the average American soldier in Phoenix operations.
CIA paramilitary officers also continued to
mount unilateral Phoenix operations via their PRU advisers. As
reported in the December 1986 issue of Soldier of Fortune magazine,
Long An PRU adviser Captain Frank Thornton circumvented orders not
to accompany his PRU into the field by putting his name on the SEAL
Detachment Alpha roster "for administrative purposes," and "Saigon
never knew the difference." A combat enthusiast, Thornton obtained
intelligence on the location of VCI members from a PRU agent net
comprised of "old women, kids and former ARVN soldiers who'd lost
arms and legs fighting the VC. To ensure security, he rarely passed
along his intel products other than to SEALs."
On October 11, 1969, Thornton's agents reported
a district-level VCI meeting in Can Giuoc district. Putting two
SEALs and four PRU in a Cobra "killer" helicopter for backup,
Thornton climbed into a light observation "hunter" chopper, flew to
a point near the target area, got out, and alone (just as Elton
Manzione had done five years earlier) slipped into the VCI's hooch,
grabbed him, and radioed for extraction. The man he snatched, Pham
Van Kinh, was the commanding officer of four VC battalions. The
mission garnered Thornton a Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, awarded
by Rung Sat Special Zone PRU commander Major Nguyen Hiop.
Thornton's heroic deed was the exception,
however, not the rule. In "The Phoenix Murders" Joseph Treaster
quotes an Army captain who spent three years advising PRU teams:
"Unless somebody made a mistake, you're not going to find a guy
alone. And if you go in and try to tangle with a whole village,
you're in deep If the
guy is
important, it's very hard to extract him." [11]
This captain recalled only one case when the
PRU targeted a specific individual, a VC district official in a
province on the Cambodia border. It was the man's wedding day -- he
was marrying the daughter of a GVN village official -- and the PRU
burst into the room, yelling for everyone to freeze. "But," the
captain told Treaster, "some VC in the wedding party goes for his
gun and our guy opens up. The next two or three guys through the
door open up, too, and the first thing you know, there's a lot of
blood on the sand. So that didn't work too well. We didn't lose
anybody, but there were 22 people in the wedding party and 20 were
killed."
***
A typical district-level Phoenix operation,
cited in the 1969 year-end report, began when Deputy Party Secretary
Dang was caught in a tunnel. During interrogation, Dang informed on
his comrades, who were captured along with incriminating documents.
One of them revealed during his interrogation that the district
party chairman, Nguyen Van Kia, was a horse cart driver. PRU teams
were stationed at the main traffic intersection in Kia's area of
operations. He was caught the same day without a fight. Four other
cadre members were snatched in their homes. "The next target was
Nguyen Thi Bah, the message section chief; a description of her
route of travel was furnished by the DIOCC. The PRU posed as VC and
setup an ambush along her usual route. On the second evening of the
trail watch, Bah was captured." [18]
Province-level Phoenix operations, like the
following one in Long Khanh, tended to be more elaborate. In this
case the operation developed when the province chief assigned the
job of resources control to the Phoenix coordinator and his Phoenix
task force. In response, the Phoenix coordinator mounted three
concurrent long-term operations lasting two months. [19]
Part I was the establishment of "mobile
resource control checkpoints." Three six-man teams -- two national
and two field policemen and two PRU -- were assigned to checkpoints.
The National Police provided trucks; blacklists came from the
Special Branch. Roadblocks were set up, and while the National
Police checked IDs and the Field Police stood guard, the PRU
searched and detained suspects, who were carted off to the PIC for
interrogation.
Part II occurred in three phases. First, a
special airmobile resource control (SARC) team was formed to
interdict VCI commerce. Next, under the command of the Phoenix
coordinator and his interpreter, a search element consisting of two
PRU, three Special Branch and one national policeman, was formed. A
security element was formed of two squads from the U.S. First
Cavalry. Thirdly, the cavalry provided a command and control
chopper, a light observation helicopter (LOCH), and a Cobra
gunship -- the traditional hunter-killer team
with an added "eye in the sky." SARC operations were mounted on the
basis of intelligence reports providing "targets of opportunity."
When a target of opportunity presented itself, the SARC force would
galvanize into action, swoop down from the sky, cordon off areas,
send in search teams, stop vehicles, and capture and kill VCI
members.
Part III, Operation Cutoff, was designed to
capture suspects who could produce leads to the VCI. To this end,
DIOCCs sent lists to the PIOCC, where priority targets were
selected. After two months of preparation, thirty-eight hamlets were
targeted. Special Branch provided lists of relatives of the
suspects. Territorial Forces and the U.S. 199th Infantry Brigade
provided security forces to cordon off each hamlet. Operations began
at 4:00 A.M. with National and Field Police and PRU searching
hooches while a psywar team broadcast names and instructions over
loudspeakers. People were gathered together at a Special Branch
"processing station," where IDs were checked against blacklists. RD
Cadre drama teams entertained the innocent while various agencies
interrogated suspects, who were then sent to the Province
Interrogation Center.
By the end of the Long Khanh Phoenix campaign,
168 VCI "sympathizers" had been caught and confined. Although
suppliers and supporters were category C, not genuine VCI, they did
inform on their authentic A- and B-grade comrades. Over the next
three months VCI neutralizations in Long Khanh soared to their
highest levels ever. There was a corresponding rise in Hoi Chanhs.
[20]
***
A typical Saigon operation began in March 1969,
when a People's Intelligence Organization agent submitted a report
on Nguyen Nuoi to the First Precinct Special Police. Suspecting Nuoi
of being VCI, the Phoenix coordinator assigned a six-man
surveillance team to watch him. The six special policemen worked in
two-man teams, one on foot, one on a bike. In this way they learned
where Nuoi lived and worked and where his "contact points" were. The
Special Branch set up agents in business in a soup shop one block
away from Nuoi's house and established a bicycle repair shop near
his favorite cafe. Two agents continued to follow him. Three houses
Nuoi frequented were also placed under surveillance.
Three weeks later Nuoi was arrested along with
several comrades in the safe houses who had leaflets produced by the
Saigon Women's Revolutionary Association. During interrogation Nuoi
informed on his bosses in the party. His testimony led to more
arrests, including several cadres in the district party committee.
One member was "enticed to work for the police" and went back to the
party committee as a penetration
agent. He stayed there three months in his
former position, secretly channeling information to the Special
Branch which led to more arrests.
As the 1969 Phoenix End of Year Report notes,
"Before allowing their penetration agent to be freed, Special Police
personnel took photos of the agent enjoying himself in the company
of other Special Police agents and required him to sign a sworn
statement that he was in fact working for the GVN. These documents
would find their way back to the VC if the agent did not cooperate
with the police in the future. A surveillance team was assigned to
watch the agent's activities as an added precautionary measure."
[21]
***
So successful was Phoenix in 1969 that the
directorate boasted in its End of Year Report that "the first
generation" of COSVN military proselytizers has been reduced to
seven personnel." In supporting its claims of success at every
level, the report quotes a high-ranking VCI who described COSVN
Resolution 9 as "a desperate VC plan, written in an attempt to save
an otherwise hopeless political and military situation. He said that
the Phung Hoang (Phoenix) program has been given top priority for
destruction by the VC." [22]
One could deduce from this that the GVN stood
on the verge of a great victory. But the view from the field was not
so rosy. As Phoenix adviser Wayne Cooper said to Joseph Treaster,
A typical DIOCC would have an impossible
clutter, with wheat and chaff filed together. The alphabetical files
we insisted they keep would not be cross-referenced by alias, family
location, or any other useful designation. The dossiers so vital to
province security committee prosecution would contain poor sketchy
information; perhaps enough for an operation but not enough for
prosecution. Other files -- Most Wanted lists, potential guide
files, mug shots, and so on -- were maintained so poorly as to be
useless, or never kept at all. There would be no intelligence
collection plan, and agents received little direction. [23]
Ralph Johnson agrees with Cooper's dismal
assessment of Special Branch capabilities. "DIOCC files on VCI
personalities did not reflect much progress toward Phung Hoang
intelligence objectives," he writes. He also contradicts Colby's
statement that "We were getting more and more accurate reports from
inside VCI provincial committees and Regional Party headquarters
from brave Vietnamese holding high ranks in such groups." [24] Says
Johnson: "The Special Branch
rarely if ever managed to recruit agents who
had access to high-level VCI planning." He adds that "the GVN
arrested suspected agents and attempted to destroy VCI organizations
instead of surveilling or recruiting agents in place for long term
exploitation." The result was that "most VCI captured were low-level
in the province or below," and "most intelligence was generated and
exploited from counter-guerrilla operations, casual walk- in
informants, captured VCI, VCI caught in Resource Control operations,
captured documents, cordon and search operations, and especially
Chieu Hoi defectors from VCI." [25]
With the transition of Phoenix to CORDS, a new
and improved means of judging, evaluating, and proving success was
needed. Hence, Big Mack, "An instructive type document that directs
the territorial intelligence system to quantitatively and
qualitatively evaluate the VCI and lower level military units." [26]
Big Mack reported on the number of identified and unidentified VCI
members, their influence in the area, and their identity by position
for inclusion in the Green Book. Compiled monthly by
U.S. military advisers without Vietnamese
input, Big Mack reflected the military's emphasis on operations
against enemy military units, the type that resulted in big body
counts.
"It was a reporting requirement that could
choke a mule," recalled Colonel Doug Dillard, "to the point of
designing data entry sheets to feed the computer in Saigon .... I
met with Ted Greyman, and we coordinated with other staff members,
and we came to the conclusion that if we implemented Big Mack, we
would stop pursuing the war and start reporting on it." But the
Saigon bureaucracy prevailed, and -- Dillard sighed
-- "we began implementing portions of Big
Mack." [27] By the end of 1969 Big Mack reports were pouring into
Saigon from South Vietnam's 250 districts. A comparison with the
statistics from 1968 shows the number of captured VCI decreased,
while the number of VCI killed more than doubled. [28]
1968
1969
Captured
11,288 8,515
Killed
2,229
4,832
Rallied
2,259
6,187
Total
15,776 19,534
Within this total, 4,007 VCI security agents
were cited as having been neutralized: 3 COSVN level VCI; 64
regional VCI; 226 from provinces, 881 from districts, 235
from cities, 2,081 from villages, and 511 from
hamlets. An estimated 74,000 VCI were still "at large"; but overall,
neutralizations were up, and the directorate boasted that 60 percent
were A and B priority targets. Meanwhile, the VCI in 1969 had
"murdered" 6,000 GVN officials and "ordinary citizens," had
"kidnapped" 6,000 people, and had wounded 15,000 more. [29]
Statistical evidence of success so pleased the
Washington brain trust that additional computer systems were quickly
introduced. In March 1969 the National Police Evaluation System went
on-line, recording "police assignment data" for analysis and
"counter-measures." In 1970 Big Mack's bilingual replacement, the
Big Mack Special Collection Program, shifted the burden of reporting
and accountability to the RVN Territorial Intelligence System. In
January 1970 the VCI Neutralization Information System was
inaugurated to record all anti VCI operations. The National Police
Criminal Information System (NPCIS) was implemented in April 1970 to
track VCI who were held beyond "statutory limitations." Designed to
"interface" with a Chieu Hoi "tracking system," which aided province
security committees in the "post- apprehension monitoring of
released VCI," NPCIS was also compatible with the VCI Neutralization
and Identification Information System, which stored in its
classified files "a history of the VCI member from the time of his
identification to his neutralization." [30]
Complementing these "tracking systems" was the
National ID Registration Program System. Within twenty-four hours of
arrest, detainees were booked. A report was then sent to the proper
Province Intelligence and Operations Coordination Center, and a
fingerprint card sent to the National Identity Records Center in
Saigon, where a data sheet was plugged into the computer. In the
field, nearly two thousand policemen worked in two shifts, seven
days a week, sending twenty thousand documents from the provinces to
Saigon every day. By November 1970 more than seven million laminated
fingerprint cards had been classified, searched, and placed in the
fingerprint bank for instant access.
Climaxing the computer process in January 1971
was the National Police Infrastructure Analysis Sub-System-II
(NPIASS-II), which was used to plan "countermeasures" against the
73,731 confirmed and suspected VCI still "at large" (and called
"logical records" in its files). NPIASS-II functioned until March
1973, when, with the assistance of technicians from the Computer
Science Corporation, it was transferred to the Vietnamese along with
PHMIS and the National Police Identification Follow-up Sub-System
(NPIFUSS). Yet another "tracking system," NPIFUSS "provided a means
of determining the action taken on wanted person notices and
statistics on the disposition of wanted person cases." There was
even a National Police Directory Table Sub-System on National Police
units and correction centers. However, the reliance on computer
systems was a poor substitute for a
judicial system based on due process. As Public
Safety officer L. M. Rosen wrote on November 27, 1970, "The NPCIS
will not of itself improve the administration of justice or the
processing of detainees." [31] Further reforms remained to be made.
Notes:
i. See Addendum 1 in Appendix.
CHAPTER 20: Reforms
Caught between its stated goal of building
democratic institutions and its operational goal of ensuring
internal security, the South Vietnamese government, in order to
improve its public image vis-a-vis the Provisional Revolutionary
Government, began instituting in 1969 a series of cosmetic "reforms"
designed to square its security needs with the civil rights of its
citizens. In essence it was an attempt to resolve the problem posed
by Nelson Brickham back in 1967, when he asked, "What do you do with
identified VCI?"
The "reform" process got off to a feeble start
on March 24, 1969, with Ministry of Interior Circular 757,
"Classification and Rehabilitation Guidelines for Proper Processing
of VCI." Signed by Interior Minister Tran Thien Khiem, it was
created by William Colby specifically to enable province security
committees to ensure faster prosecution and sentencing of VCI
suspects. However, as Ralph Johnson notes, "there was a general
recognition that the circular was neither understood nor properly
applied throughout the country." [1]
Circular 757 reiterated who was a class A, B,
or C Communist offender, how long each could be detained, and who
decided. It directed the coordination of "All local National Police
Services ... with the Phung Hoang Committee and the Correction
Center involved." As for the status of VCI held in detention
centers, 757 reasoned circularly that "The method of classification
and the detention period for these Communist Offenders shall be
carried out like that for those who are captured under the Phung
Hoang Plan." [2]
In addition, Circular 757 directed the National
Police to establish "PsyWar Groups" to "carry out the rehabilitation
of offenders." PsyWar Groups were to teach Communist offenders how
to recognize and abide by constitutional government. Circular 757
also ordered GVN's Directorate of Corrections to form five Mobile
Corrections Groups and to include in them "Corrections Cadre
qualified in culture and propaganda indoctrination." Cadres came
from the
ministries of Information and Chieu Hoi and the
CIA-advised Directorate of Political Warfare, which had cognizance
over the Military Security Service. One mobile group was assigned to
each corps, and the fifth handled Con Son, Chi Hoa, Thu Duc, and Tan
Hiep prisons. Mobile Correction Groups supported PsyWar Groups in
the "rehabilitation" of Communist offenders and provided cover for
CIA "talent scouts" who recruited convicts into the PRU and armed
propaganda teams, and as prison informers.
To oversee psywar and intelligence operations
inside correctional facilities, in September 1969 the CIA created
the GVN's Central Security Committee, chaired by General Khiem and
including Director of Corrections Colonel Nguyen Psu Sanh (advised
by Donald Bordenkircher), the director general of the National
Police, and the prison wardens. More important, the Central Security
Committee reviewed cases of Communist offenders considered for
conditional or early release from the five national correction
centers, recommending further detention if the offender was deemed
dangerous, as was universally the case. The Vietnamese National
Assembly tried unsuccessfully to abolish the Central Security
Committee in December 1970.
Province Security Committees were reorganized
to include a province prosecutor as legal adviser, although the
deputy chief for security -- the CIA asset on the province chief's
staff -- secretly managed the affairs of the Committee. Pressure for
more meaningful reforms was brought, however, when the lower house
of the National Assembly interpellated the ministers of justice,
defense, and the interior on June 20, 1969, concerning alleged
abuses by officials in the Vinh Binh Province Phoenix program. This
action came after a delegation composed of the Interior, RD, and
Anticorruption committee chairmen returned from Vinh Binh Province
with reports of illegal arrests, torture, corruption, and abuses of
authority. The interpellation resulted from a petition signed by
eighty-six deputies asking for an explanation of the no longer
secret Phoenix program.
Justice Minister Le Van Thu outlined the stated
goals of the program, noting that the Province Security Committees
had the power to sentence VCI members for up to two years without
accusing or convicting them of any specific crime. His explanation
that the practical difficulties of amassing solid evidence made it
necessary to arrest everyone suspected of complicity for further
interrogation and investigation was not well received. A cross
section of legislators bitterly cited examples of abuses in their
own provinces.
Tin Sang publisher and Anticorruption Committee
Chairman Ngo Cong Duc charged the Vinh Binh police chief with
"knowingly" arresting innocent people for the purpose of extortion.
A Buddhist legislator from Thua Thien Province alleged that suspects
were often detained for six to eight months (instead of the
one-month maximum cited
by Justice Minister Thu) before their cases
were heard and that suspects were frequently tortured to extract
confessions. She said the people "hated" the government for starting
the Phoenix program. Other deputies were incensed that American
troops forcefully and illegally detained suspects during military
operations. Deputy Ho Ngoc Nhuan, a Saigon Catholic, charged that
village chiefs were not consulted before VCI suspects were arrested
during military operations, contrary to what Thu and Khiem claimed.
Khiem responded by promising further reforms.
He said the Joint General Staff had already moved to prevent further
detentions by American forces, with the exception of the VCI caught
flagrante delicto. His conciliatory tone assuaged the deputies, and
an improved circular was issued.
As a remedy for what Ralph Johnson calls
"various deficiencies" in the judicial system, Colby and Khiem, in
August 1969, issued Circular 2212, "Improvements of the Methods of
Resolving the Status of Offenders." [3] As a result of Circular
2212, a Political Security Office was formed to provide policy
guidance for the three GVN agencies -- the Central Phung Hoang
Committee, the National Police, and the Directorate of Corrections
-- that were involved in processing Communist offenders. Plans were
made to send more prosecutors to the provinces to assist "in the
proper legal handling of such cases" and "to ensure the proper
functioning of Province Security Committees." [4] However, in a
nation with fewer lawyers than warlords, establishing due process
was like tilting at windmills.
As a way of reducing prison overcrowding and
ending the revolving-door syndrome, Circular 2212 provided for the
"mandatory" sentencing and transfer of class A and B VCI from the
mainland to Con Son Prison. Province Security Committees were given
thirty days to open an offender dossier on each VCI detainee,
scrutinize the evidence therein, and pass judgment. To speed the
process, a short-form offender dossier (on which the detainee signed
a confession) highlighted the incriminating evidence which the
Security Committee needed for a quick conviction. To reduce backlog,
Circular 2212 required security committees to meet at least once a
month and to submit transcripts to the Political Security Office for
review before passing judgment. Such was the judicial system in
South Vietnam.
***
In response to the charges leveled by the lower
house deputies in June, Annex II of Colby's 1970 pacification and
development plan, "Protection of the People from Terrorism," called
for "notification to village chiefs of planned Phoenix operations in
their villages." However, notifying village chiefs was tantamount to
notifying the VCI, and again, the operational goal of security was
at odds with
the stated goal of notification, which in
practice rarely occurred. So a few more Phoenix reforms were
crafted, including an improved quota system stipulating that VCI be
identified before they were neutralized, rather than "revealed"
after being captured or killed. Under this proposal, suspected VCI
were to be counted as "captured" only after being convicted and
sentenced, rather than upon apprehension.
The other significant and related "reform" of
1969 was Decree 044, dated March 12, 1969, placing the PRU under the
jurisdiction of the director general of the National Police.
Canceling out this decree was a long-standing law, never rescinded,
that prohibited PRU from serving in the Vietnamese Army or
government in any capacity. Operational control in each province
remained with the province chief in conjunction with a PRU province
commander, and even though, as of September 1969, Americans were
prohibited from venturing out on PRU operations, they did (see Frank
Thornton in the previous chapter). Americans continued to advise and
assist in the planning of operations.
Prior to June 1968, when President Thieu
embraced Phoenix, the PRU operated only at province level under the
direction of the CIA. After June 1968 the national PRU commander,
Major Nguyen Van Lang occupied himself primarily by selling "PRU-
ships" to the highest bidders at the province and region levels.
The CIA staff officers who managed the PRU
program at the national level along with Lang's brother-in-law
Tucker Gougleman were Phil Potter and Rod Landreth.
Harvard graduate Phil "Potts" Potter was an old
Vietnam hand who in the early 1950's had been case officer to
Emperor Bao Dai and had hired some of the CIA's first assets in the
Surete. During the battle for Saigon Potter had served as acting
chief of station, as liaison to Ngo Dinh Nhu and Dr. Tran Kim Tuyen,
and as control of the station's ten or twelve intelligence officers
running agents in the field.
During his stint as acting chief of station,
while Saigon was in turmoil and the piaster was nearly worthless,
Potter had purchased property -- safe houses and such -- for the CIA
at 10 to 15 percent of its real value. His efforts in this respect
laid the groundwork for a generation of spooks to come.
Potter also served as station chief in Tanzania
and Greece and as consul general in Norway and Hong Kong. But his
heart was in Vietnam, where he formed close friendships with Ralph
Johnson and Tucker Gougleman. "During his years in Saigon Potter
developed personal and professional relationships with the most
influential Vietnamese, including the CIO chief, General Nguyen Khac
Binh, and President Thieu. First and foremost, though, Potter was an
intelligence officer actively engaged in recruiting and running
agents in the field. [5]
The other PRU manager, Rodney Landreth,
described by a colleague, Harry "Buzz" Johnson, as "the kind of guy
you'd like to have as an uncle," arrived in Saigon in 1967 and
served as a deputy to Ted Shackley. Station Chief Shackley,
described by Buzz Johnson as "a cold pale fish," [6] relied on
likable Rod Landreth to represent him at diplomatic functions and on
the interagency committees formed to investigate GVN corruption and
drug dealing. While Potter was case officer to CIO Chief Binh,
Landreth was case officer to General Dang Van Quang, Thieu's
national security chief. Potter and Gougleman are credited with
having organized the Special Branch, while Ralph Johnson and
Landreth worked more closely with the CIO. All four were intimately
involved in formulating CIA policy regarding Phoenix, the Special
Police, and the PRU.
Opinions vary on the impact Potter, Johnson,
Gougleman, and Landreth had on the course of events in South
Vietnam. To some people they were the consummate insiders; to others
they were tired old men who were totally out of touch with the war
in the villages and who, like clones of the colonialists they had
displaced, gathered every evening at the Circle Sportif to drink by
the pool and bask in the adoration of beautiful Vietnamese women.
Likewise, the inner circle of Landreth,
Johnson, Gougleman, and Potter had little patience with the
ambitious technocrats Langley sent out to Saigon to play at being
station chief, or with their corrupt GVN lackeys. In private they
ridiculed Ted Shackley, calling him Tran Van Shackley for his
reliance on Senator Tran Van Don. Tom Polgar, who replaced Shackley
in 1972, fared even worse and was described as "rigid" and "a
bureaucrat" who "was not well versed in intelligence field work."
[7]
For his part, Tom Polgar called Landreth and
Potter "fine officers" who were "past their prime." [8] Ed Brady
concurred: "These people had their jobs
But they
weren't trying to achieve anything. They had no
objectives." [9]
Brady gave an example of how the Washington
bureaucrats shamed "old Vietnam hand" Potter into submission.
"Potter lived with a Vietnamese woman whom he wanted to marry,"
Brady recalled. "He was near retirement, but the agency, citing
operational security, said, 'No. If you marry her, you're through.
But it's okay if you live with her.' It was the height of
hypocrisy."
Perhaps the "old Vietnam hands" do symbolize
the proprietary, but essentially moribund, American policy in
Vietnam after 1969; those who had understanding were subordinated to
the ideologues and functionaries. Living in splendid sand castles,
they alternately cursed and ignored the rising tide of corruption
and deception that was engulfing South Vietnam. For example,
Landreth's main job was chairing the
interagency committee charged with
investigating the black market, an inquiry he deflected away from
the CIA. Likewise, the interagency narcotics committee chaired by
Landreth focused entirely on the North Vietnamese, studiously
avoiding General Dang Van Quang, who Stanley Karnow notes was
"accorded the rice and opium franchise in his region" while
commander in the Delta. Writes Karnow: "Among those allegedly
involved in the trade were Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky and his
successor, General Tran Thien Khiem, said to have funneled the
proceeds from the business into their political machines." [10]
Although Rod Landreth was the agency's liaison
to General Quang, who on behalf of President Thieu set PRU policy,
the day-to-day business of the PRU was handled by CIA officers Ben
Mandich and William Buckley, both of whom are deceased, as are
Potter, Landreth, Gougleman, and Johnson. Of those who were involved
in PRU matters, only Ralph Johnson has left behind statements for
the record. "The impact of the GVN on the PRU was negative," Johnson
writes, because of "the failure of PRU commanders to work closely
with the PIOCCs. The PRU commanders, supported by the Province
chiefs, excused this failure by citing poor security in the PIOCCs,
as a result of which the PRU were failing to report intelligence to
the Coordinating Centers." Furthermore, says Johnson, "when the ARVN
and the RF/PF absorbed the tactics of the PRU during 1968-1969, then
the PRU probably should have been disbanded and their members
integrated into one of the nation-building programs which
constituted the major portion of the Pacification Program. Or, the
PRU should have been returned to their native villages as part of
the Refugee Program, to bolster the People's Self-Defense Forces."
[11]
Veteran CIA paramilitary officer Rudy Enders
disagreed when we met and insisted that the PRU operated effectively
at least until the cease-fire, when they were put under control of
the Special Branch. [12] In any case, the March 1969 decree putting
the PRU under the National Police facilitated plausible denial. It
enabled William Colby to swear on a stack of Bibles that the CIA was
not operationally involved. The GVN became accountable as the CIA
maneuvered to scapegoat its oblivious client. But the GVN could not
afford (even with CIA-sanctioned corruption and drug trafficking) to
support the PRU on its own, nor was the CIA willing to abandon the
rifle shot approach at the moment it said it had the VCI on the
ropes. But resources channeled through the Phoenix program could not
compensate for the reduction in CIA support and supervision, so the
PRU turned to shakedowns of lucrative targets in the private sector
to keep their organization intact. Phoenix and the PRU became
captive to criminal enterprises and the subject of increasing
controversy.
Always inextricably linked, the Phoenix and PRU
programs were simultaneously brought under military review in 1969.
On October 20, 1969, in a secret memo to
Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, Army Secretary
Stanley Resor referred to "the social and moral costs and the
desirability of a selective attack" and expressed "concern over
these programs." [13] Later that day Laird conveyed his concern over
"lack of progress in the Phoenix/Phung Hoang Program" to General
Earle Weaver, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. [14] One month
later Laird, referring to the My Lai massacre and the Green Beret
murder case, informed Wheeler of his "growing anxiety over the PRU
[sic] program in view of recent events concerning U.S. military
conduct in South Vietnam." [15]
In response to Defense Secretary Laird's
concerns about the Phoenix program, MACV Commander Abrams assured
Washington that "Statistically [sic] the program has made
significant progress in recent months." Abrams recounted the
"reforms" cited on the preceding pages but then offered a candid and
somewhat ominous appraisal, saying, "[I]t is clear to me and to the
commanders in the field that the program does not yet have the
degree of sophistication and depth necessary to combat the highly
developed and long experienced VC infrastructure (VCI) in South
Vietnam." Abrams noted that Ambassador Bunker had agreed to talk to
President Thieu about Phoenix, "especially with respect to improving
GVN local official attitudes." Abrams closed by promising "a
separate report ... on the PRU." [16]
At this point the Pentagon had three elements
interested in Phoenix: The Joint Chiefs were involved through SACSA,
the Defense Department was involved through its office of
International Security Assistance (ISA), and MACV was involved
through CORDS.
For its part, SACSA was not in any chain of
command but served the Joint Chiefs by bringing together
representatives from the State Department, CIA, U.S. Information
Agency, Agency for International Development, and the Department of
Defense. Broad policies came down to SACSA from the White House
through the National Security Council, while specific ideas
regarding psywar and counterinsurgency came up from MACV or the
individual services. SACSA assigned staff members to present
recommendations for consideration by the Joint Chiefs.
When the chiefs reached a decision on how a
policy was to be implemented, the service responsible for
implementing that policy was directed to provide manpower, materiel,
and money. The Army Intelligence Corps had responsibility over
Phoenix.
SACSA itself was divided into three parts: for
special operations in South Vietnam; for special operations
elsewhere; and for Revolutionary Development programs in Vietnam,
including Phoenix. MACV reported data on Phoenix to SACSA only when
solicited. SACSA's Revolutionary Development component did studies
and drafted papers on Phoenix for the Joint Chiefs' signature.
From the inception of Phoenix until January 1969,