Phoenix Program (34 page)

Greenwalt relented. “He gave me and Singleton three or four actions, which we resolved in about an hour,” Inman recalled, and shortly thereafter “Law was sent down to the Delta to be the CIA's contact with the Hoa
Hao.” Law was replaced by George French, “a very personable, very experienced CIA officer who had done some very dramatic things in his career, from the OSS to Cuba.”

George French's first job was as a demolitions expert in an Arizona lead mine, in the years before World War II. For that reason he was recruited into the OSS's Underwater Demolitions Unit in 1943 and assigned to Detachment 404 in Ceylon. Over the course of his CIA career, French did tours in Korea, Turkey, Pakistan, and Saipan and, as a member of the CIA's Special Operations Division, in Laos, Cambodia, and elsewhere. In the summer of 1967 French was assigned to III Corps as Bob Wall's deputy in charge of PRU, even though he actually outranked Wall. Nor did he appreciate that Wall acted “like a dictator.” So he asked for a transfer and was assigned to the Phoenix Directorate, replacing William Law as operations chief. French described the job as mostly traveling to the provinces to see what was going on and asking, “How's your body count?” The rest of the job, he told me, “was just paper shuffling: compiling information and passing it on up to MACV.”
¹⁹

In March 1968 the Phoenix-Phung Hoang program began to gel. Passing up the opportunity to manage the Soviet/Russia Division (with Rocky Stone as his deputy), William Colby instead had returned to Vietnam, at the request of Richard Helms, to serve as acting chief of staff of CORDS. Because he was too overbearing to communicate effectively with the Vietnamese, Robert Komer needed Colby to work with Interior Minister Tran Thien Khiem in formulating counterinsurgency policy and procedure at the national level. Colby understood Vietnamese sensibilities and knew enough about the country to select and assign CORDS advisers where they were needed most. He also understood the dynamics of the attack on the VCI: that Phoenix advisers were needed specifically to help local authorities develop card files and dossiers modeled on the Diem-era ABC system. In the process Colby was to achieve infamy as the man most closely associated with Phoenix and as its principal apologist.

“At the time I arrived,” Inman recalled, “Parker was meeting with Colby and Khiem, developing proposed action programs, writing documents, and sending them down. Khiem was saying yes to everything, but nothing was happening on the Vietnamese side. So I went to Greenwalt and asked permission to contact some lieutenant colonels and majors in the Vietnamese Ministry of the Interior. Greenwalt said okay, and I approached Phan Huu Nhon, my counterpart during my first tour and the J-seven special intelligence officer to the Joint General Staff. Nhon sent me to see Lieutenant Colonel Loi Nguyen Tan, the action officer for Phoenix at the Interior Ministry, where he had a desk, but nothing coming in.”

Here it is worthwhile to pause and realize that one reason the Vietnamese
were slow in creating their own version of the Phoenix Directorate was their difficulty in finding a suitable translation for the word “infrastructure.” To solve the problem, President Thieu appointed a commission consisting of senior American and Vietnamese intelligence officials. Attending as an interpreter-translator was Robert Slater.

“After five lengthy and rather hot (both in temperature and temperament) sessions,” Slater writes, “a decision was reached that the term that was presently in use would be retained. The Vietnamese term was
ha tang co so…
meaning ‘the lower layer of an installation' or ‘the underlying foundation.'” According to Slater, this misinterpretation was the “crux of the problem in the Allied attack against the VCI. If the South Vietnamese government cannot get across to the South Vietnamese people the danger of the VCI through an adequately descriptive word, then how can they hope to combat them?”
²⁰

The “crux” of the problem, of course, was not a lack of understanding on the part of the Vietnamese but the fact that the Americans insisted on defining the VCI in terms that conformed to their ideological preconceptions. Ed Brady put the problem in perspective when he explained that for the Vietnamese, “Committees at lower levels are the infrastructure of any higher-level committee.” In other words, village committees are the infrastructure of district committees, district committees of province committees, and so on ad nauseam. According to Brady, “The word ‘infrastructure' drew no distinctions at all, and whatever level the VCI existed at depended solely on each individual's own semantic interpretation.”
²¹

“They were writing documents,” Inman said, “and sending them down for translations, but no one understood what the word ‘infrastructure' meant, and no one dared go back to Khiem and say, ‘I don't understand.' Tan said to me, ‘What is this infrastructure?' They were looking it up in the dictionary and coming up with highways and electrical systems and such…. I said, ‘It's their leaders.'

“And Tan said, ‘Oh.
Can bo.
“Cadre.” That's what we call them.'”

What Thieu's national commission could not resolve in five days, two lieutenant colonels resolved in five minutes. Next, Inman said, “Tan introduced me to a major who was Thieu's personal chief of staff. Tan, this major, and I sat down and wrote up Thieu's Presidential Directive.
*
Then this major
got the papers to Thieu. The papers were issued in July, and Tan moved into the National Police Interrogation Center, with about ten senior people from Special Branch, as Khiem's man in charge of Phung Hoang. Duong Tan Huu [a former precinct chief in Saigon and, before that, Nha Trang police chief] was assigned as the senior National Police officer. Major Pham Van Cao became the day-to-day manager of the Phung Hoang Office, and I spent the next eight months there as liaison to the Vietnamese national-level staff.”

A self-proclaimed “true believer” in the right of the Vietnamese to settle their own affairs, Inman had little to do with the U.S. side of Phoenix. “I was mostly at NPIC headquarters,” he stated. “My role was as salesman. I'd check in with George French for thirty minutes in the morning, sometimes only once or twice a week. I'd get input through him from a lot of people; he'd say, ‘Sell this to the Vietnamese.' I'd channel policies and directives and manuals from French—all in English—over to the Phung Hoang Office, and they translated them. Then I'd spend time getting everybody to read and understand and sign off on them. I'd run them past Census Grievance and RD, Field Police and Special Branch, the Interior Ministry and ARVN, and everybody would sign off.” And that is how the Vietnamese Phung Hoang Office got its marching orders from Colby and the Phoenix Directorate.

The other reason why the Vietnamese were slow in creating the Phung Hoang Office concerned the struggle between President Thieu and Vice President Ky, a struggle that in 1968 reflected changes in the relationship between America and South Vietnam brought about by Tet. The first signs of realignment appeared when President Johnson withdrew from the presidential campaign, at which point his influence in Saigon began to wane. Johnson, however, remained committed to a negotiated settlement because success at the bargaining table was the Democratic party's only chance of getting Hubert Humphrey elected.

But Republican candidate Richard Nixon seized the issue and used it to subvert the Democrats. The darling of the Kuomintang-financed China Lobby, Nixon, through intermediaries in Saigon, persuaded Thieu to postpone negotiations until after the elections, assuring himself the presidency of the United States, at the expense of prolonging the Vietnam War.

Reflecting those developments in Washington, a similar political realignment began in Saigon in May 1968, when the VC initiated a second wave of attacks on Saigon, and Thieu, writes Professor Huy, “as usual had no quick response.” But Ky did react decisively. “He tried to mobilize young people for the defense of Saigon and received a favorable response.”
²²

“With Tet,” said Tully Acampora, “Loan made a comeback. Thieu was in another camp, watching and waiting. Through February the attacks increased, and by May, with the second offensive, Loan thinks he can walk
on water. Then he gets shot outside of MSS headquarters, and that's the beginning of the end. It's all downhill after that.”

On May 5, 1968
*
General Nguyen Ngoc Loan was seriously wounded and quickly replaced as director general of the National Police by Interior Minister Khiem, who appointed his own man, Colonel Tran Van Pham. Next, writes Professor Huy, Thieu “began his plan to weaken Ky.”
²³
His first move was to dismiss Prime Minister Loc and replace him with Tran Van Huong, a former mayor of Saigon and a bitter enemy of Ky's. During the 1967 elections Ky had coerced “peace” candidate Truong Dinh Dzu into pressing blackmail charges against Huong. And so, as soon as he was appointed prime minister, Huong tasted sweet revenge by dismissing most of Ky's backers in the administration.

“Then,” writes Huy, “Ky received a new blow when several officers loyal to him and serving in the Saigon police were killed at the beginning of June in Cholon during their campaign against the second attack of the Communists. They were killed by a rocket launched from an American helicopter. Apparently this was a mistake, but many people thought it was due to the American decision to help Thieu against Ky.”
²⁴

The incident occurred on June 2, 1968, when a rocket fired from a U.S. Marine helicopter gunship “malfunctioned” and slammed into a wall in a schoolyard on Kuong To Street. The wall collapsed, killing seven high-ranking officials who had been invited by the Americans to the battlefront in the belief that the VCI leadership was hiding in the home of the Buddhist leader Tri Quang. Killed were Pho Quoc Chu, Loan's brother-in-law and chief of the Port Authority; Lieutenant Colonel Dao Ba Phouc, commander of the Fifth Ranger Battalion; Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Van Luan, Saigon police chief; Major Le Ngoc Tru, Cholon police chief and Loan's personal aide; Major Nguyen Ngoc Xinh, Combined Security Committee and First Precinct police chief; and Major Nguyen Bao Thuy, chief of staff to Lieutenant Colonel Van Van Cua, Loan's brother-in-law and the mayor of Saigon,

Four days later President Thieu appointed Colonel Tran Van Hai director general of the National Police. On the same day that he took office, Hai dismissed Ky's eight remaining police chiefs in Saigon and replaced Special Branch chief Nguyen Tien with his friend Major Nguyen Mau, who refused to accept Phoenix within the Special Branch and instead incorporated the Combined Intelligence Staff within a new Capital Military District Command (CMDC).

A by-product of Tet, the Capital Military District was formed for two reasons: to organize better the resources against the VCI cadres that had aided VC sapper units during Tet and to regulate the half million refugees produced during Tet and pouring into Saigon. It was also with the creation of the Capital Military District that Thieu and Khiem wrenched control away from Ky and Loan once and for all. Encompassing Saigon's nine precincts and Gia Dinh Province, the CMD had as its American counterparts MACV's Capital Military Assistance Command and a Phung Hoang committee in First Precinct Headquarters. Prior to the CMD, Phoenix personnel from Gia Dinh Province had patrolled Saigon's precincts on a circuit rider basis; as of June 1968, Phoenix advisers were placed in DIOCCs in each of the precincts. Phoenix precinct advisers reported to Lieutenant Colonel William Singleton through his deputy, Major Danny L. Pierce, whom Robert Inman describes as “an active Mormon who traveled all over the country on Sundays holding services.” In this capacity, Inman informs us, “Singleton and Pierce were involved directly in intelligence and reaction operations in the back alleys of Saigon.”

CIA operations in the Capital Military District—aka Region Five—were managed by a series of veteran CIA officers under their cover boss, Hatcher James, the senior USAID adviser to the mayor of Saigon. Headquartered behind City Hall, the Region Five officer in charge monitored all Phoenix operations in the Capital Military District.

A few days after the CMD was created, General Nguyen Khac Binh was appointed director of the CIO and quickly conferred upon station chief Lou Lapham “a charge from Thieu to run intelligence operations anywhere in the country, going after the big ones.”

With Ky's people in the grave or the hospital, President Thieu began to shape the government of Vietnam in his own image, appointing ministers, police and province chiefs, and military commanders who would do his bidding. Also, by issuing Law 280, Thieu lifted the monkey off the U.S. Embassy's back, and in return, the Americans looked away when he began persecuting domestic opponents whose “compatible left” political organizations fell under Law 280's definition of VCI “cadre.” From July 1968 onward the task of ensuring the GVN's internal security fell to General Tran Thien Khiem, who, according to Dang Van Minh, was “the real boss of administration and intelligence.” CIA asset Khiem—serving as interior minister, deputy prime minister for pacification, and chairman of the Phung Hoang Central Committee—thereafter worked hand in hand with William Colby in steering Phoenix into infamy.

With the promulgation of Law 280—which compelled Vietnamese corps commanders and province chiefs to organize Phung Hoang committees—and, one week later, MACV Directive 381-41, which ordered U.S. military
and civilian organizations to support Phung Hoang—Phoenix was ready to run on both its American and Vietnamese cylinders.

All that remained was for Lieutenant Colonel Inman to spread the word. “One of my principal functions,” he said, “was to take Tan [‘polished' and ‘above it all'] and Cao [‘blunt and offensive'] to visit the PIOCCs and DIOCCs and give a pep talk. I probably visited every district in my last eight months.” But, he added, “It was not my job to sell Phoenix to the U.S., so we didn't announce our arrival; the district senior adviser wouldn't even know I was there. My job was to sell Phung Hoang to the Vietnamese, and I stayed on the Vietnamese side.”