Phoenix Program (35 page)

The people saddled with the chore of selling Phoenix to the Americans were the region Phoenix coordinators—field-grade military officers who began arriving in Vietnam in January 1968. Their role is discussed in Chapter 14. But first some statistics on Phoenix through August 1968.

No aspect of Phoenix is more significant than its impact on civilian detainees, and despite the increase in the number of CDs after the GVN's acceptance of Phoenix in July 1968, the construction of facilities capable of holding them never materialized. Instead, hard-core VCI were transported from mainland camps to Con Son Island, and four “mobile” military field courts were authorized in October 1967 to supplement the four courts authorized in 1962. Confirmed VCI were tried by province security committees, whose proceedings were closed to the public—the defendant had no right to an attorney or to review his dossier. Security committees could release a suspect or send him to prison under the An Tri (administrative detention) Laws or to a special court. Due process for CDs remained on the drawing board.

Nevertheless, in compliance with Law 280, the four Vietnamese corps commanders (General Hoang Xuam Lam in I Corps, General Vinh Loc in II Corps, General Nguyen Duc Thang in IV Corps, and General Nguyen Khanh in III Corps), formed joint Phoenix-Phung Hoang working groups and corps-level Phung Hoang committees, bringing the military and police into varying degrees of cooperation, depending on the commander's personal preferences. For example, Lieutenant Colonel Lemire reported that General Khanh “was reluctant to support police type operations with military resources.”
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Khanh assigned a mere captain as his regional Phung Hoang coordinator.

“In Eye Corps and Two Corps,” Lemire noted, “the cordon and search, using Phung Hoang blacklists, appears to get the best results. In Four Corps the PRU is still the main action arm. In Three Corps the joint PRU/Police/ RF/PF district operation seems to be most productive.”

Everywhere the degree of Vietnamese participation in Phoenix rose steadily. By August 1968 Phung Hoang committees existed in 42 provinces
and 111 districts; 190 DIOCCs had been built, at an average cost of fifteen thousand dollars each, and 140 were actually operating, along with 32 PIOCCs. A total of 155 Phoenix advisers were on the job. However, confusion still existed about the proper relationship between PIOCCs and Phung Hoang committees. In some provinces the two were merged, in others they were separate, and sometimes only one existed. Many Phung Hoang committees had no relationship at all with DIOCCs, which were often viewed as an unrelated activity. The change in name from ICEX to Phoenix to Phung Hoang added to the confusion. In Pleiku Province the ICEX Committee became the Phoenix Committee but met separately from the Phung Hoang Committee. Everywhere Americans and Vietnamese continued to conduct unilateral operations, and tension between the Special Branch and the military persisted as the biggest Phoenix-related problem.

The other major problems, cited in a May 1968 report written by CORDS inspectors Craig Johnstone and John Lybrand, were lack of trained DIOCC advisers; lack of agreement on the definition of the word “infrastructure”; inadequacy of reaction forces at district level, the exception being when PRU were sent down from province; improper use of Field Police forces; torture of prisoners
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; lack of a standardized filing system; poor source control mechanisms; lack of coordination between Phoenix and other free world forces; and Census Grievance participation in Phoenix.

To facilitate Phoenix operations nationwide, the CIA issued two handbooks in June 1968. The first, a thirty-one-page document titled
The VC Key Organization from Central Level down to Village and Hamlet Levels,
outlined the VCI for Phoenix operators. The other was the Phoenix Directorate's first manual of procedures, outlining the program from Saigon down to the DIOCCs. At this point a detailed picture of the estimated seventy thousand VCI was emerging, targeting was becoming specific and scientific, and results were improving. Lieutenant Colonel Lemire reported that “as the DIOCCs and PIOCCs have refined data bases, gained experience, and mounted more operations against targetted individuals, the neutralization rate has been well over 1000 per month for the last four months.” In Gia Dinh Province, Lemire reported, “the combination of an aggressive Province Chief and a dedicated Phoenix Coordinator has more than quadrupled the monthly rate of killed, captured, and rallied VCI.”

Much emphasis was placed on neutralization rates, which were deemed the only objective way of measuring Phoenix success. As reports poured into
the directorate from all over the country, numbers were tabulated and scores posted; by the end of June 1968, more than six thousand VCI had been “neutralized,” with exact numbers available from each DIOCC so Phoenix managers could judge performance.

As Evan Parker explained it, “You've got people. You've got some sort of structure set up, some facilities and money and resources. Then you need a record-keeping system. Unfortunately,” he added, “people lived on reporting. … In order to get brownie points, a guy would say, ‘We conducted X many Phoenix operations,' and that looks good on your record. But simply because they were ordered to conduct sweeps, they might pick up some VC, but they could just as easily have been soldiers as civilians. Whatever the results were, it was conducted in the name of Phoenix. A lot of things were done in the name of Phoenix. And this goes into your record-keeping system.”

Ralph Johnson writes: “It was this reporting weakness which for a long time attracted much of the foreign press criticism of Phung Hoang.”
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“Then”—Parker groaned—”Komer took it one step beyond and assigned goals for the number of VCI neutralized. Komer was a great one for setting objectives, then keeping score of your performance against these objectives. And this is how quotas got developed in the summer of 1968.”

Borrowing military “kills” to meet Komer's quotas was more than inflationary. John Cook, the Phoenix coordinator in Di An District in Gia Dinh Province, in his book
The Advisor
notes that switching the identity of a VC soldier killed in combat with that of a known member of the infrastructure meant that “If at a latter date the real member was captured or killed, this action could not be reported, for you can only eliminate a man once.”
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“Komer didn't understand the police nature of the attack against the VCI,” Bob Wall said scoffingly. “When LBJ put pressure on him, he invented quotas as a management tool, and this destroyed Phoenix. Quotas gave starving policemen a way to feed families. It let them bring in bodies and say they were VCI.”
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“I resisted like mad the idea of quotas,” insisted Evan Parker, “because I felt this would lead to cheating, or in innocent people being arrested, and this looking good on the quota. Or there might even be names listed on arrest reports that didn't even exist. In one area I was told they were taking names off the gravestones…. But”—he sighed—”they had quotas, and they tried to meet quotas, and that's how you get the idea that this was some sort of murder organization.”

Indeed, Phoenix was labeled an assassination program, evoking the specter of war crimes and leading many people to minimize the impact of quotas. “I think it was moot,” Warren Milberg said. “It was something I just ignored. For the most part it was coming to you from people in Saigon who were going home at night and sitting under the veranda of the Continental Hotel.
You just didn't take that stuff seriously. They couldn't relate to what you were doing, just like you couldn't relate to what they were doing. It was a different war. It was a different part of the world.”

Another Phoenix coordinator, a CIA Czechoslovakian desk officer sent to Bien Hoa Province in 1968, saw comparisons between Phoenix and Gestapo tactics in World War II. For him, “The reports I sent in from my province on the number of Communists that were neutralized reminded me of the reports Hitler's concentration camp commanders sent in on how many inmates they had exterminated, each commander lying that he had killed more than the others to please Himmler.”

Why one person remained silent and went along with Phoenix while another spoke out against it is the subject of the next chapter.

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CIA compounds in the provinces were called embassy houses, because they were extensions of the State Department's consulates.

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Decree Law 280 defined the VCI as all party members from COSVN to hamlet level and as cadre that “direct and control other parties and organizations such as … the Alliance of National Democratic and Peace Forces, or other similar organizations in the future.” The only people named as not being VCI were “VC military units” and “citizens forced to perform as laborers.” Law 280 charged the Ministry of the Interior, not the Defense Ministry, with footing the Phung Hoang bill.

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One day later Colonel Luu Kim Cuong, commander of the First Transport Group and a senior aide to Ky, was killed by border police on the outskirts of Saigon.

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Writes Johnstone: “The truncheon and electric shock methods of interrogation were in widespread use, with almost all advisors admitting to have witnessed instances of use of these methods.”

CHAPTER 13

Parallax Views

“Our PRU in Quang Tri were all victims of Communist terror,” said Bob Brewer, who, like many CIA officers in Vietnam, believed he was singled out for assassination. A dedicated anti-Communist who felt personally threatened, Brewer was motivated, and so were his PRU. “They were so red hot you had to control them,” he added with delight.
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The man with the job of controlling the PRU in Quang Tri Province was Warren Milberg. Elegant and sophisticated, Milberg today is the consummate corporate American male. His employer, the Titan Corporation, designs “Star Wars” lasers. And more than twenty years after the fact—despite a lingering resentment against cynical war managers who send idealistic young soldiers on suicidal rites of passage—Warren Milberg still embraces the cold war ideology and its corresponding Phoenix mythology.

At the core of Milberg's melancholy are two related experiences. Both happened in 1965 during his first tour in Vietnam, when he was deputy chief of security at the Da Nang air base. There Milberg's involvement with agent nets brought him into contact with local CIA operators, who liked his style and invited him to participate in the ongoing SOG operation called Prairie Fire. Milberg joined SOG without the knowledge of his Air Force superiors. He put on black pajamas and worked with a team of Nung mercenaries, leading them on long-range patrols into Laos to monitor and interdict NVA
units. Sometimes they sat on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and shot field-grade NVA officers from a thousand yards away, “so they never even heard the report.”
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“This is where things started to get exciting,” recalled Milberg, who along with his other duties, began organizing counterterror teams. “I was doing training of Vietnamese and Americans—Marines and some Army people.” As for his indigenous personnel, “The Vietnamese were gansters and thugs—mercenaries who we trained and who were in our pay…. But my perception of the role of the CT teams was to strike terror into the enemy—the NVA and VC—not the population.

“It was during this period of time,” Milberg continued, “when I started to think more about the war and my role in it. And I also began to see evidence of how the Vietcong were operating in the hamlets. I saw the messages for the tax collectors and the political officers. And what will always stand out in my mind was the terror and torture they used to strike fear and get compliance from the villagers … an event where a particular village chief's wife, who was pregnant, was disemboweled and their unborn baby's head was smashed with a rifle butt. We stumbled on this incident quite by accident within hours of it happening. I'd never seen anything like it in my life.”

Milberg would not talk about the other traumatic incident, other than to say he was asked by the CIA to parachute into North Vietnam. That he did, even though he had never jumped from an airplane before. And something terrible happened, something too painful to describe, something that made him question the motives of war managers who would ask him to do such a reckless thing. He wondered if the mission had any purpose other than testing the men involved—to see how far they could be pushed and to prepare them for equally preposterous missions in the future. He wondered if he was a guinea pig.

“This event resulted in my being afraid, which was a new experience for me. I spent a lot of time between tours thinking about it and wondering how I would react the next time. So it was almost like I needed to test it again.” In this way Warren Milberg's self-doubt compelled him to return to Vietnam in August 1967, at the request of the CIA as part of the Presidentially Directed Counter-Insurgency Program that fleshed out ICEX.

On the other hand, remorse drove Elton Manzione out of Vietnam, out of the military, and nearly out of his mind. Consider the cases of Manzione and Milberg: two men equally exposed to a blend of secrecy and terror. Enlisted man Manzione turned on his masters, renounced American imperialism, and spoke out against the misdeeds of the CIA. Officer Milberg submitted to authority and in return became one of the protected few, accepted into the cult of the phoenix, rewarded with the American dream.

Manzione and Milberg are remarkably alike. They have the same kind of build, are the same age, and come from the Greater New York Metropolitan Area. Both have dark complexions and complexes, dark curly hair, and experience in special operations. Both are thoughtful, aggressive, high-strung. Where they part company is where America, too, is divided: over the question of values.

As a SEAL in Quang Tri Province in 1964 Elton Manzione dressed like the enemy, worked with CTs who committed atrocities as standard procedure, and was told to ignore the rules of engagement. “But there was no sense of our role in the war,” he said to me forlornly. He will not talk about his comrades who died while on illegal missions into North Vietnam and Laos. But, he noted, “what annoys me is they're not on the Washington monument simply because they ended up getting greased somewhere where they weren't supposed to be.”
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