Phoenix Program (33 page)

“What happened in Hue was pretty traumatic for me,” Milberg confided. “At one point, in looking through the rubble for Hubbard, I stumbled on a Marine colonel alive and well and looting bodies…. I nearly killed him, I was so angry. But I wound up drawing my pistol instead, taking him into custody and driving him, screaming and shouting, to the nearest Military Police unit. I won't give you his name, but he was court-martialed.

“Next,” said Milberg, “I confronted what the North Vietnamese had done in the city of Hue and probably elsewhere. They had lists of all the people who had collaborated with the Americans and apparently had lined a lot of these people up and summarily shot them. But the most grotesque thing was to find some of the graves where hundreds of people had been pushed in alive and were buried.” After a long period of silence Milberg added softly, “It's the kind of thing I still think about.”

When asked if he thought the lists used by the NVA and VC in Hue were any different from Phoenix blacklists, Milberg said, “I see a lot of qualitative differences.” He would not say what those qualitative differences were.

Quantitative discrepancies need explaining, too. The number of persons buried in Hue, as estimated by Police Chief Doan Cong Lap and reported by Stewart Harris in the March 27, 1968,
Times
of London, was two hundred. The mayor of Hue, according to Harris, found the bodies of three hundred local officials and prominent citizens in the mass grave. Stanley Karnow agrees with these figures but questions how many of the dead in the mass graves were civilians killed in the retaliatory U.S. bombardment “that also inflicted a heavy toll on the civilian population.”
¹¹

Journalists allowed to view the graves while they were being opened reported seeing tire tracks and scour marks around the edges. Considering that the NVA did not have bulldozers, this suggested that civilians killed in the retaliatory bombing were bulldozed into the graves. Just as disturbing is a February 1972 article in the
Washington Monthly,
by Oriana Fallaci, titled “Working Up to Killing.” Fallaci writes that more than a thousand people were killed
after
the liberation of Hue “by Saigon forces,” including VC cadres, who surfaced during Tet and were identified and killed by the secret police.

One person who knows what happened in Hue in February 1968 is PVT, the I Corps PRU and Phoenix inspector. The background of this unilaterally controlled CIA asset bears examination. Because his father was a police officer in Hue, PVT was accepted into the Sûreté Fédérale in 1954. When the Americans took over in 1955, he moved over to the Vietnamese Bureau of Investigation, rising through the ranks to become chief of Region 1 in Hue. Unfortunately for his career, his job included investigating the Buddhist immolations, and after the Diem coup PVT was jailed on suspicion of being Can Lao. Released a few months later, he and many of his tainted Catholic colleagues went to work for the CIA “because they didn't like the government” of General Nguyen Khanh.

Intelligent and tough, PVT served the CIA well as a Special Branch administrator in Nha Trang, Phan Thiet, and My Tho. In 1965, when Nguyen Cao Ky sold the CIA the right to organize Counterterror, Census Griev
ance, and Political Action franchises in the provinces, PVT went to work for CIA officer Rudy Enders in Bien Hoa, as his special assistant for pacification. A fast friendship formed between the two men, and when Enders was reassigned to I Corps as the CIA's senior paramilitary adviser, PVT tagged along and helped his patron manage the region's PRU, RD Cadre, Census Grievance, Special Branch, and Phoenix programs.

The CIA officer in charge of Hue in February 1968 was William Melton, “an older man,” according to PVT, “hard and mean,” who was angered over the death of his PRU adviser. While the battle for Hue was raging, Enders came down from Da Nang to lend Melton a hand. After a quick look around Enders decided to go after “the VCI who had surfaced at Tet. We had troop density,” Enders explained to me, “and we had all these [ICEX] files, so now we grab hold.”
¹²

Also arriving on the scene at that moment were Evan Parker, Tully Acampora, and General Loan, who a few days earlier, on February 2, 1968, had achieved notoriety when, in retaliation for the murder of several of his secret policemen, he had summarily shot a VC sapper in the head in front of a TV camera crew. Bringing the same avenging spirit to Hue, Loan officially sanctioned Vietnamese participation in Phoenix operations in I Corps when he tacked the ICEX chart to the wall of the Hue City police station.

But in order actually to “grab hold” of the VCI operating in Hue, Rudy Enders required the services of PVT, whom he brought down from Da Nang to interrogate VCI prisoners. As PVT told it, he and “a small team of five or six people” crossed the Perfume River into Hue and went directly to the interrogation center, where “Rudy left me in charge.” PVT and his team then interrogated the captured Communists and “took photos and fingerprints and made blacklists.”

Reports Karnow: “Clandestine South Vietnamese teams slipped into Hue after the Communist occupation to assassinate suspected enemy collaborators; they threw many of the bodies into common graves with the Vietcong's victims.”
¹³

On February 24, 1968, the most bitter battle of the Vietnam War ended, and out of the mass graves of Hue rose Phoenix, its success prompting Defense Secretary Clark Clifford to recommend on March 4, 1968, that “Operation Phoenix … be pursued more vigorously” and that “Vietnamese armed forces … be devoted to anti-infrastructure activities on a priority basis.”
¹⁴

One day later, on March 5, 1968, with the Pentagon, hence the Armed Forces of Vietnam, now embracing the CIA's controversial Phoenix program, Prime Minister Nguyen Van Loc ordered the activation of Phung Hoang committees at all echelons, and he appointed Dang Van Minh chief of a
special Phung Hoang Task Management Bureau. Doubling as the Special Branch representative on the Phung Hoang Central Committee, Minh immediately assigned Special Branch teams to the most important DIOCCs and PIOCCS on a twenty-four-hour basis and charged them with coordinating intelligence, the theory being that if Phoenix worked in Hue, it could work anywhere.

On March 16, 1968, the same day as the My Lai massacre, General Creighton Abrams replaced William Westmoreland as MACV commander. And by the end of the month Lyndon Johnson had pulled himself out of the upcoming presidential campaign. Warren Milberg, who was on leave in the States, recalled the mood of the country: “I remember coming back and listening to LBJ tell everybody that he wasn't going to seek reelection. That kind of reinforced in my mind the futility of the whole endeavor. It really made a big impact on me. I mean, LBJ was a casualty of the Tet offensive—among other things.”

Many dedicated American soldiers and civilians, after Tet, felt the same way. On the other hand, while demoralizing many Americans, the trauma of Tet spurred others on to greater acts of violence. For them, Phoenix would become an instrument to exact vengeance on a crippled, exposed enemy. “Up until the 1968 offensives,” Robert Slater writes, “the VCI cadre were almost untouchable. Any losses suffered prior to then were insignificant. Confident of almost certain victory during the Tet Offensives, however, they surfaced their key cadre. The results are well known; the attacks cost the Viet Cong thousands of their most valuable cadre, including irreplaceable veterans with ten to twenty years of revolutionary activity.”
¹⁵

Professor Huy concurred, writing that “many agents whom the VC had planted in the towns and cities were discovered because of their activities during the attack, and were eliminated by the Saigon government.”
¹⁶

It is a fact that Tet was a psychological victory for the VCI. But it was a Pyrrhic victory, too, for in proving itself a viable political entity, the VCI backed the GVN into a corner. Fear, and a chance to exact revenge, finally brought Phoenix to the forefront of the GVN's attention. All that remained was for Lieutenant Colonel Robert Inman to bring everyone together at the middle management level.

Having served in Vietnam with the Army Security Agency from 1963 till 1965, Robert Inman had already had, like many Phoenix officers, a tour of duty under his belt. Also like many Phoenix veterans who contributed to this book, Inman is compassionate, intelligent, and more than a little irreverent. “At the time I arrived in Saigon in early 1968,” he told me, “there was a U.S. staff but no corresponding Vietnamese staff. On the U.S. side there were about twenty people, mostly military, although the key
management-level positions at the directorate were CIA We had two read files: one for everybody and one for the CIA only. The distinction was maintained throughout my tour, but”—he chuckled—”I got to read the CIA stuff.”
¹⁷

The reason for the compartmentation, according to Inman, was that “CIA coordination with Special Branch continued at a higher level than Phoenix.” Likewise, the parallel chains of command extended into the field, with CIA province officers receiving operational direction from ROICs while at the same time, in their capacity as Phoenix coordinators and members of the CORDS province advisory team, reporting administratively to the CORDS province senior adviser. U.S. military personnel serving as Phoenix coordinators fell administratively within CORDS but received operational direction from MACV. The CIA-MACV schism was to be narrowed in some provinces, but the gap was never universally bridged.

At the time Inman arrived at the Phoenix Directorate, there were three State Department officers on staff: Lionel Rosenblatt, Bernard Picard, and their boss, John E. MacDonald. According to Inman, MacDonald's job “was never revealed.” Picard, now a prominent Washington lawyer, would not explain to me what he did. Rosenblatt merely said, “As a [twenty-two-year-old] junior officer … I was assigned to CORDS-Phoenix in December 1967 and served there till June 1969. During this time my principal duties were: (one) orientation and visits to DIOCCs, December 1967 until March 1968; (two) Cam Ranh City Phung Hoang coordinator, March 1968 through September 1968; and (three) Phung Hoang liaison officer in Saigon.”
¹⁸

Executive Director Joe Sartiano, Inman recalled, “spent a lot of time with agency officers in the provinces, trying to coordinate the RDC/P people who ran the PICs with the RDC/O people who ran the PRU under the province officer system.”

Inman himself was assigned to the operations section of the Phoenix staff, of which, he said, “There was a unilateral agency effort and a binational effort. And they were separate, too.” The Phoenix Reports Branch, under Lieutenant Colonel Lemire, was headquartered not in USAID II but in the old embassy building on the river. “Nothing was computerized,” Inman stated. “It was all pens and pencils and paper.” There were, in addition, a plans and training section under Lieutenant Colonel Ashley Ivey and an administrative section under CIA officer James Brogdon.

As for the mood of the Phoenix staff, according to Inman, “The problem on the U.S. side was that cynicism was developing. Gooks, slopes, dinks: You didn't hear those words in the Saigon office, but the attitude was there.” This racist attitude generally belonged to proponents of unilateral operations, as opposed to people, like Inman, who wanted to hand the job to the Viet
namese. “There were definitely two sides.” He sighed, adding, “A lot of people after three months said, ‘Why should I waste my time with the Vietnamese at the national level? I can get into the Special Branch files, and I can run the PRU, so what the hell?'” When asked if this was due to legitimate security concerns, Inman responded, “Lack of security was often just an excuse for incompetency.”

Inman did not blame Even Parker for the bigotry evident at the Phoenix Directorate. “Parker was not paternal,” he said. “But he had reached a point in his career where he was functioning more on a diplomatic than an operational level. And Ev had frustrations with his own people inside the CIA who viewed the RDC/P and RDC/O systems as competitive. Each side would say, ‘Yeah, talk to them, but don't tell them too much.' No one wanted to divulge his sources.”

There were other problems with Phoenix. “For example,” Inman commented, “one province in Three Corps was relatively pacified, and the province senior adviser there thought Phoenix would only stir things up. He thought his ninety-five percent HES [Hamlet Evaluation System] rating would drop if they started looking for trouble.” The problem, Inman explained, was that “The U.S. had tremendous resources, enough to fund twenty-five programs, all first priority. Bigger pigs, and better rice, and Phoenix. Now, some province senior advisors simply said, ‘There's no way to do it all,' and picked one or two to focus on—and not always Phoenix.”

The other major problem, Inman said, was that “Phoenix was used for personal vendettas.”

When Inman arrived at the Phoenix Directorate, Evan Parker's military deputy was Colonel William Greenwalt, “an administrator trapped in an office.” Inman and his best friend on the Phoenix staff, Lieutenant Colonel William Singleton, concluded that “the CIA had Greenwalt there to take the rap if anything went wrong.” What went wrong was Greenwalt's career. Greenwalt was slated to become a brigadier general, but by virtue of his association with the CIA, via Phoenix, his career jumped track, and he retired as a colonel when his Phoenix tour ended.

“Operations was run by a civilian,” Inman recalled, “a retired full colonel on contract to the CIA. His name was William Law. He'd been the military attache in Laos. Singleton and I were assigned to Law, and Law told us to review everything in the files because he didn't know what the next step was going to be. After a month it got to be a drag, so I complained to Greenwalt. I said, ‘I want another job. I'm wasting my time.'”