Phoenix Program (18 page)

“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.

*
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.”