Phoenix Program (23 page)

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 Griev
ance, 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 nick
name 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 gen
erations 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.