Phoenix Program (59 page)

Indeed, without the complicity of the media, the government could not
have implemented Phoenix, in either Vietnam or America. A full disclosure of the Province Interrogation Centers and the Provincial Reconnaissance Units would have resulted in its demise. But the relationship between the media and the government is symbiotic, not adversarial. The extent to which this practice existed was revealed in 1975, when William Colby informed a congressional committee that more than five hundred CIA officers were operating under cover as corporate executives and that forty CIA officers were posing as journalists. Case in point: reactionary columnist and TV talk-show host William Buckley, Jr., the millionaire creator of the Young Americans for Freedom and cohort of Howard Hunt's in Mexico in the 1950's.

When it comes to the CIA and the press, one hand washes the other. In order to have access to informed officials, reporters frequently suppress or distort stories. In return, officials leak stories to reporters to whom they owe favors. At its most incestuous, reporters and government officials are actually related—for example, Delta PRU commander Charles Lemoyne and his
New York Times
reporter brother, James. Likewise, if Ed Lansdale had not had Joseph Alsop to print his black propaganda in the United States, there probably would have been no Vietnam War.

In a democratic society the media ought to investigate and report objectively on the government, which is under no obligation to inform the public of its activities and which, when it does, puts a positive “spin” on the news. As part of the deal, when those activities are conducted in secret, illegally, reporters tend to look away rather than jeopardize profitable relationships. The price of success is compromise of principles. This is invariably the case; the public is always the last to know, and what it does learn are at best half-truths, squeezed into five-hundred-word columns or thirty-second TV bites, themselves easily ignored or forgotten.

So it was with Phoenix.

*
PIRLs were provided with incentives from the black market, including narcotics that CIA contractors brought in from Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia.

CHAPTER 24

Transgressions

In the introduction to this book, Elton Manzione described the counterterror campaign he joined in 1964. He told how as a U.S. Navy SEAL working in a hunter-killer team, he broke down from the strain of having to kill not just enemy soldiers but their families, supporters, and innocent bystanders as well. In September 1964 Manzione's crisis of faith compelled him to go AWOL in France. His military records show he was never even in South Vietnam.

The tragedy of the Vietnam War is that with the arrival of regular American units in 1965, the attack on the elusive and illusory VCI became everyone's job, not just that of elite units. And once the license to kill was granted carte blanche to all American soldiers, a corresponding moral turpitude spread like an infectious disease through their ranks. The effects were evident in fragmentation grenades thrown into officers' tents, crippled Vietnamese orphans selling vials of heroin to addicted GIs, Confederate flags unfurled in honor of Martin Luther King's assassination, companies refusing to go out on patrol, and thousands of deserters fleeing to Canada, France, and Sweden.

The problem was one of using means which were antithetical to the desired end, of denying due process in order to create a democracy, of using terror and repression to foster freedom. When put into practice by soldiers taught to think in conventional military and moral terms, Contre Coup en
gendered transgressions on a massive scale. However, for those pressing the attack on the VCI, the bloodbath was constructive, for indiscriminate air raids and artillery barrages obscured the shadow war being fought in urban back alleys and anonymous rural hamlets. The military shield allowed a CIA officer to sit behind a steel door in a room in the U.S. Embassy, insulated from human concern, skimming the Phoenix blacklist, selecting targets for assassination, distilling power from tragedy. As the plaque on Ted Shackley's desk says, “Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune—but great minds rise above it.”

Others, meanwhile, sought to prevent the “negligent cruelties” they witnessed. William Grieves, for one, is proud of the fact that his Field Police were able to protect civilians from marauding Vietnamese Ranger units. And as Doug McCollum recounted, on one occasion they even held their own against a U.S. Army unit.

The military and the police, McCollum explained, divided Vietnam into areas of responsibility. In white areas, considered safe, and gray areas, considered up for grabs, the police had jurisdiction, but in red areas, considered war zones, the military could do whatever it wanted. It was in red areas that “the military shenanigans I reported” took place, McCollum recalled.
¹

McCollum told how, in 1968, in a joint operation with elements of the U.S. Fourth Division, he and his Field Police platoon entered a “red” Montagnard village in search of VC. But “there were only women and children and old men. That was generally the case,” he said. What happened next was no aberration either. A military intelligence captain called in armed personnel carriers and loaded the women and children in them. Everyone was taken out to a field, several miles from the village. The armed personnel carriers formed a semicircle with their backs toward the people. Soldiers manned the machine guns, and the people, knowing what was about to happen, started crying. The frantic Field Police platoon leader asked McCollum, “What are they doing?”

McCollum in turn asked the captain, “Who's doing this?”

“Higher headquarters,” he was told.

“Well then, you'll have to kill my Field Police and me,” McCollum said, deploying his forces in a line in front of Montagnards. “So the military drove away,” he told me, shaking his head. “They just left everyone there. And the next morning, when I told the police chief what happened, the only thing he said was, ‘Well, now you've got to transport everyone back to the village.' That was what he was upset about.”

About the massacring of civilians by U.S. infantry troops, Doug McCollum stated, “There wasn't too much of that. It was mostly raising skirts and chopping off fingers.” However, as more and more soldiers succumbed to anger and frustration, more and more incidents occurred.

The My Lai massacre was first reported in March 1969, one full year after the event. In April 1969, because of congressional queries, the case was given to the Army inspector general, and in August Army Chief of Staff William Westmoreland turned the case over to the Army's Criminal Investigation Division (CID). In November 1969 Seymour Hersh broke the story, telling how 504 Vietnamese civilians were massacred by members of a U.S. infantry company attached to a special battalion called Task Force Barker.

Ten days after Hersh broke the story, Westmoreland ordered General William Peers to conduct an official inquiry. Evan Parker contended to me that Peers got the job because he was not a West Point graduate.
²
However, Peers's close ties to the CIA may also have been a factor. In World War II, Peers had commanded OSS Detachment 101, in which capacity he had been Evan Parker's boss. In the early 1950's he had been the CIA's chief of training and its station chief in Taiwan, and as SACSA in 1966 Peers had worked with the CIA in formulating pacification policy. Having had several commands in Vietnam, he was well aware of how the war was being conducted. But the most conclusive evidence linking Peers to the CIA is the report he submitted in March 1970, which was not made available to the public until 1974 and which carefully avoided implicating the CIA.

The perfunctory trials that followed the Peers inquiry amounted to slaps on the wrist for the defendants and fueled rumors of a cover-up. Of the thirty people named in the report, charges were brought against sixteen, four were tried, and one was convicted. William Calley's sentence was quickly reduced, and in conservative quarters he was venerated as a hero and scapegoat. Likewise, the men in Calley's platoon were excused as victims of VC terror and good soldiers acting under orders. Of nearly two thousand Americans surveyed by
Time
magazine, 65 percent denied being upset.

Yet, if most Americans were willing to accept the massacre as necessary to ensure their security, why the cover-up? Why was the massacre portrayed as an isolated incident?

On August 25, 1970, an article appeared in
The New York Times
hinting that the CIA, through Phoenix, was responsible for My Lai. The story line was advanced on October 14, when defense attorneys for David Mitchell—a sergeant accused and later cleared of machine-gunning scores of Vietnamese in a drainage ditch in My Lai—citing Phoenix as the CIA's “systematic program of assassination,” named Evan Parker as the CIA officer who “signed documents, certain blacklists,” of Vietnamese to be assassinated in My Lai.
³
When we spoke, Parker denied the charge.

A defense request to subpoena Parker was denied, as was a request to view the My Lai blacklist. Outside the courtroom CIA lawyer John Greaney insisted that the agency was “absolutely not” involved in My Lai. When
asked if the CIA had
ever
operated in My Lai, Greaney replied, “I don't know.”

But as has been established in this book, the CIA had one of its largest contingents in Quang Ngai Province. Especially active were its Census Grievance cadre, directed by the Son Tinh District RD Cadre intelligence chief, Ho Ngoc Hui, whose VNQDD cadres were in My Lai on the day prior to the massacre. A Catholic from North Vietnam, Hui reportedly called the massacre “a small matter.”
⁴

To understand why the massacre occurred, it helps to know that in March 1968 cordon and search operations of the type Task Force Barker conducted in My Lai were how RD Cadre intelligence officers contacted their secret agents. The Peers report does not mention that, or that in March 1968 the forty-one RD teams operating in Quang Ngai were channeling information on VCI through Hui to the CIA's paramilitary adviser, who shared it with the province Phoenix coordinator.

The Phoenix coordinator in Quang Ngai Province at the time of the My Lai massacre was Robert B. Ramsdell, a seventeen-year veteran of the Army CID who subsequently worked for ten years as a private investigator in Florida. Ramsdell was hired by the CIA in 1967. He was trained in the United States and sent to Vietnam on February 4, 1968, as the Special Branch adviser in Quang Ngai Province. Ramsdell, who appeared incognito before the Peers panel, told newsmen that he worked for the Agency for International Development.

In
Cover-up,
Seymour Hersh tells how in February 1968 Ramsdell began “rounding up residents of Quang Ngai City whose names appeared on Phoenix blacklists.”
⁵
Explained Ramsdell: “After Tet we knew who many of these people were, but we let them continue to function because we were controlling them. They led us to the VC security officer for the district. We wiped them out after Tet and then went ahead and picked up the small fish.”
⁶
The people who were “wiped out,” Hersh explains, were “put to death by the Phoenix Special Police.”
⁷

Ramsdell “simply eliminated everyone who was on those lists,” said Gerald Stout, an Army intelligence officer who fed Ramsdell names. “It was recrimination.”
*
⁸
Recrimination for Tet, at a minimum.

Unfortunately, according to Randolph Lane—the Quang Ngai Province MACV intelligence adviser—Ramsdell's victims “were not Vietcong.”
⁹
This fact is corroborated by Jeffrey Stein, a corporal working undercover for the
525th MIG, running agent nets in Quang Nam and southern Thua Thien provinces. According to Stein, the VNQDD was a Vietnamese militarist party that had a “world fascist allegiance and wanted to overthrow the Vietnamese government from the right! The people they were naming as Communists were left-wing Buddhists, and that information was going to the Phoenix program. We were being used to assassinate their political rivals.”
¹⁰

Through the Son Tinh DIOCC, Phoenix Coordinator Ramsdell passed Census Grievance-generated intelligence to Task Force Barker, estimating “the 48th Battalion at a strength of 450 men.” The Peers report, however, said that 40 VC at most were in My Lai on the day prior to March 16 and that they had left before Task Force Barker arrived on the scene.
¹¹

Ramsdell told the Peers panel, “Very frankly, anyone that was in that area was considered a VCS [Vietcong suspect], because they couldn't survive in that area unless they were sympathizers.”
¹²

On the basis of Ramsdell's information, Task Force Barker's intelligence officer, Captain Kotouc, told Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker that “only VC and active VC sympathizers were living [in My Lai and My Khe].” But, Kotouc said, because leaflets were to be dropped, “civilians would be out of the hamlets … by 0700 hours.”
¹³

Phoenix Coordinator Ramsdell then provided Kotouc with a blacklist of VCI suspects in My Lai, along with the ludicrous notion that all “sympathizers” would be gone from the hamlet by early morning, leaving 450 hard-core VC guerrillas behind. Yet “the link between Ramsdell and the poor intelligence for the 16 March operation was never explored by the Peers Panel.”
¹⁴

As in any large-scale Phoenix operation, two of Task Force Barker's companies cordoned off the hamlet while a third one—Calley's—moved in, clearing the way for Kotouc and Special Branch officers who were “brought to the field to identify VC from among the detained inhabitants.”
¹⁵

As Hersh notes parenthetically, “Shortly after the My Lai 4 operation, the number of VCI on the Phoenix blacklist was sharply reduced.”
¹⁶