Phoenix Program (31 page)

Described by Nelson Brickham as “a strange person, devious and sly,”
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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 lot 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.”
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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.”
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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.
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“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.”
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“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 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”—
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as Phoenix attempted to do.