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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]

 America endured a similar bloodletting three weeks later, when President John Kennedy was caught in a crossfire of gunfire in Dallas, Texas. The assassination, curiously, came shortly after Kennedy had proposed withdrawing U.S. advisers from Vietnam. Three days after JFK's death, President Lyndon Johnson signed National Security Action Memorandum 273, authorizing planning for covert military operations against North Vietnam. Conceived in secrecy, the ensuing policy of "provoked response" paved the way for full-scale U.S. military intervention for which the CIA was laying the groundwork through its three-part covert action program in South Vietnam's provinces.

 

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 later LBJ approved OPLAN 34A, and Marine General Victor Krulak, SACSA, handed operational control to MACV. The Special Operations Group (SOG) was formed in Saigon to implement OPLAN 34A, and attacks against North Vietnam began in February from Phoenix Island off the coast of Da Nang.

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,