Phoenix Program (32 page)

“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 multiagencies, 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 covert 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.
*
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.