Phoenix Program (49 page)

Psyops in support of Phoenix became such a potent weapon in the attack on the VCI that in August 1970 SACSA described Phoenix as “the number one MACV PSYOPS priority.”
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Four months later John Mason reported: “There have been more than twelve million leaflets, posters, banners and booklets printed and distributed throughout Vietnam in support of the program.”
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Despite the emphasis on psyops, combat operations were still preferred by the military officers managing the Phoenix program in the field. Such operations most often began at the hamlet level when paid informers reported to Vung Tau-trained village chiefs, who then mobilized Territorial Forces under their command, and advised by American military officers, against VCI suspects. Likewise, unilateral American Phoenix operations usually began with informants' feeding names to a DIOCC, whose adviser then informed the counterintelligence section of the nearest American outfit. An operation was then mounted. In the wee hours of the morning a unit of infantrymen would be deployed around the village to provide security, and a team of commandos would snatch the VCI suspect and bring him or her to the military intelligence interrogation center. Such was the standard procedure which involved the average American soldier in Phoenix operations.

CIA paramilitary officers also continued to mount unilateral Phoenix operations via their PRU advisers. As reported in the December 1986 issue of
Soldier of Fortune
magazine, Long An PRU adviser Captain Frank Thornton circumvented orders not to accompany his PRU into the field by putting his name on the SEAL Detachment Alpha roster “for administrative purposes,” and “Saigon never knew the difference.” A combat enthusiast, Thornton obtained intelligence on the location of VCI members from a PRU agent net comprised of “old women, kids and former ARVN soldiers who'd lost arms and legs fighting the VC. To ensure security, he rarely passed along his intel products other than to SEALs.”

On October 11, 1969, Thornton's agents reported a district-level VCI meeting in Can Giuoc district. Putting two SEALs and four PRU in a Cobra “killer” helicopter for backup, Thornton climbed into a light observation “hunter” chopper, flew to a point near the target area, got out, and alone (just as Elton Manzione had done five years earlier) slipped into the VCI's hooch, grabbed him, and radioed for extraction. The man he snatched, Pham Van Kinh, was the commanding officer of four VC battalions. The mission garnered Thornton a Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, awarded by Rung Sat Special Zone PRU commander Major Nguyen Hiop.

Thornton's heroic deed was the exception, however, not the rule. In “The Phoenix Murders” Joseph Treaster quotes an Army captain who spent three years advising PRU teams: “Unless somebody made a mistake, you're not going to find a guy alone. And if you go in and try to tangle with a whole village, you're in deep…. If the guy is important, it's very hard to extract him.”
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This captain recalled only one case when the PRU targeted a specific individual, a VC district official in a province on the Cambodia border. It was the man's wedding day—he was marrying the daughter of a GVN village official—and the PRU burst into the room, yelling for everyone to freeze. “But,” the captain told Treaster, “some VC in the wedding party goes for his gun and our guy opens up. The next two or three guys through the door open up, too, and the first thing you know, there's a lot of blood on the sand. So that didn't work too well. We didn't lose anybody, but there were 22 people in the wedding party and 20 were killed.”

A typical district-level Phoenix operation, cited in the 1969 year-end report, began when Deputy Party Secretary Dang was caught in a tunnel. During interrogation, Dang informed on his comrades, who were captured along with incriminating documents. One of them revealed during his interrogation that the district party chairman, Nguyen Van Kia, was a horse cart driver. PRU teams were stationed at the main traffic intersection in Kia's area of operations. He was caught the same day without a fight. Four other
cadre members were snatched in their homes. “The next target was Nguyen Thi Bah, the message section chief; a description of her route of travel was furnished by the DIOCC. The PRU posed as VC and set up an ambush along her usual route. On the second evening of the trail watch, Bah was captured.”
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Province-level Phoenix operations, like the following one in Long Khanh, tended to be more elaborate. In this case the operation developed when the province chief assigned the job of resources control to the Phoenix coordinator and his Phoenix task force. In response, the Phoenix coordinator mounted three concurrent long-term operations lasting two months.
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Part I was the establishment of “mobile resource control checkpoints.” Three six-man teams—two national and two field policemen and two PRU—were assigned to checkpoints. The National Police provided trucks; blacklists came from the Special Branch. Roadblocks were set up, and while the National Police checked IDs and the Field Police stood guard, the PRU searched and detained suspects, who were carted off to the PIC for interrogation.

Part II occurred in three phases. First, a special airmobile resource control (SARC) team was formed to interdict VCI commerce. Next, under the command of the Phoenix coordinator and his interpreter, a search element consisting of two PRU, three Special Branch and one national policeman, was formed. A security element was formed of two squads from the U.S. First Cavalry. Thirdly, the cavalry provided a command and control chopper, a light observation helicopter (LOCH), and a Cobra gunship—the traditional hunter-killer team with an added “eye in the sky.” SARC operations were mounted on the basis of intelligence reports providing “targets of opportunity.” When a target of opportunity presented itself, the SARC force would galvanize into action, swoop down from the sky, cordon off areas, send in search teams, stop vehicles, and capture and kill VCI members.

Part III, Operation Cutoff, was designed to capture suspects who could produce leads to the VCI. To this end, DIOCCs sent lists to the PIOCC, where priority targets were selected. After two months of preparation, thirty-eight hamlets were targeted. Special Branch provided lists of relatives of the suspects. Territorial Forces and the U.S. 199th Infantry Brigade provided security forces to cordon off each hamlet. Operations began at 4:00
A.M.
with National and Field Police and PRU searching hooches while a psywar team broadcast names and instructions over loudspeakers. People were gathered together at a Special Branch “processing station,” where IDs were checked against blacklists. RD Cadre drama teams entertained the innocent while various agencies interrogated suspects, who were then sent to the Province Interrogation Center.

By the end of the Long Khanh Phoenix campaign, 168 VCI “sympa
thizers” had been caught and confined. Although suppliers and supporters were category C, not genuine VCI, they did inform on their authentic A-and B-grade comrades. Over the next three months VCI neutralizations in Long Khanh soared to their highest levels ever. There was a corresponding rise in Hoi Chanhs.
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A typical Saigon operation began in March 1969, when a People's Intelligence Organization agent submitted a report on Nguyen Nuoi to the First Precinct Special Police. Suspecting Nuoi of being VCI, the Phoenix coordinator assigned a six-man surveillance team to watch him. The six special policemen worked in two-man teams, one on foot, one on a bike. In this way they learned where Nuoi lived and worked and where his “contact points” were. The Special Branch set up agents in business in a soup shop one block away from Nuoi's house and established a bicycle repair shop near his favorite cafe. Two agents continued to follow him. Three houses Nuoi frequented were also placed under surveillance.

Three weeks later Nuoi was arrested along with several comrades in the safe houses who had leaflets produced by the Saigon Women's Revolutionary Association. During interrogation Nuoi informed on his bosses in the party. His testimony led to more arrests, including several cadres in the district party committee. One member was “enticed to work for the police” and went back to the party committee as a penetration agent. He stayed there three months in his former position, secretly channeling information to the Special Branch which led to more arrests.

As the 1969 Phoenix End of Year Report notes, “Before allowing their penetration agent to be freed, Special Police personnel took photos of the agent enjoying himself in the company of other Special Police agents and required him to sign a sworn statement that he was in fact working for the GVN. These documents would find their way back to the VC if the agent did not cooperate with the police in the future. A surveillance team was assigned to watch the agent's activities as an added precautionary measure.”
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So successful was Phoenix in 1969 that the directorate boasted in its End of Year Report that “the first generation” of COSVN military proselytizers has been reduced to seven personnel.” In supporting its claims of success at every level, the report quotes a high-ranking VCI who described COSVN Resolution 9 as “a desperate VC plan, written in an attempt to save an otherwise hopeless political and military situation. He said that the Phung Hoang (Phoenix) program has been given top priority for destruction by the VC.”
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One could deduce from this that the GVN stood on the verge of a great
victory. But the view from the field was not so rosy. As Phoenix adviser Wayne Cooper said to Joseph Treaster,

A typical DIOCC would have an impossible clutter, with wheat and chaff filed together. The alphabetical files we insisted they keep would not be cross-referenced by alias, family location, or any other useful designation. The dossiers so vital to province security committee prosecution would contain poor sketchy information; perhaps enough for an operation but not enough for prosecution. Other files—Most Wanted lists, potential guide files, mug shots, and so on—were maintained so poorly as to be useless, or never kept at all. There would be no intelligence collection plan, and agents received little direction.
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Ralph Johnson agrees with Cooper's dismal assessment of Special Branch capabilities. “DIOCC files on VCI personalities did not reflect much progress toward Phung Hoang intelligence objectives,” he writes. He also contradicts Colby's statement that “We were getting more and more accurate reports from inside VCI provincial committees and Regional Party headquarters from brave Vietnamese holding high ranks in such groups.”
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Says Johnson: “The Special Branch rarely if ever managed to recruit agents who had access to high-level VCI planning.” He adds that “the GVN arrested suspected agents and attempted to destroy VCI organizations instead of surveilling or recruiting agents in place for long term exploitation.” The result was that “most VCI captured were low-level in the province or below,” and “most intelligence was generated and exploited from counter-guerrilla operations, casual walk-in informants, captured VCI, VCI caught in Resource Control operations, captured documents, cordon and search operations, and especially Chieu Hoi defectors from VCI.”
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With the transition of Phoenix to CORDS, a new and improved means of judging, evaluating, and proving success was needed. Hence, Big Mack, “An instructive type document that directs the territorial intelligence system to quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the VCI and lower level military units.”
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Big Mack reported on the number of identified and unidentified VCI members, their influence in the area, and their identity by position for inclusion in the Green Book. Compiled monthly by U.S. military advisers without Vietnamese input, Big Mack reflected the military's emphasis on operations against enemy military units, the type that resulted in big body counts.

“It was a reporting requirement that could choke a mule,” recalled Colonel Doug Dillard, “to the point of designing data entry sheets to feed the computer in Saigon …. I met with Ted Greyman, and we coordinated
with other staff members, and we came to the conclusion that if we implemented Big Mack, we would stop pursuing the war and start reporting on it.” But the Saigon bureaucracy prevailed, and—Dillard sighed—”we began implementing portions of Big Mack.”
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By the end of 1969 Big Mack reports were pouring into Saigon from South Vietnam's 250 districts. A comparison with the statistics from 1968 shows the number of captured VCI decreased, while the number of VCI killed more than doubled.
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Within this total, 4,007 VCI security agents were cited as having been neutralized: 3 COSVN level VCI; 64 regional VCI; 226 from provinces, 881 from districts, 235 from cities, 2,081 from villages, and 511 from hamlets. An estimated 74,000 VCI were still “at large”; but overall, neutralizations were up, and the directorate boasted that 60 percent were A and B priority targets. Meanwhile, the VCI in 1969 had “murdered” 6,000 GVN officials and, “ordinary citizens,” had “kidnapped” 6,000 people, and had wounded 15,000 more.
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Statistical evidence of success so pleased the Washington brain trust that additional computer systems were quickly introduced. In March 1969 the National Police Evaluation System went on-line, recording “police assignment data” for analysis and “counter-measures.” In 1970 Big Mack's bilingual replacement, the Big Mack Special Collection Program, shifted the burden of reporting and accountability to the RVN Territorial Intelligence System. In January 1970 the VCI Neutralization Information System was inaugurated to record all anti-VCI operations. The National Police Criminal Information System (NPCIS) was implemented in April 1970 to track VCI who were held beyond “statutory limitations.” Designed to “interface” with a Chieu Hoi “tracking system,” which aided province security committees in the “post-apprehension monitoring of released VCI,” NPCIS was also compatible with the VCI Neutralization and Identification Information System, which stored in its classified files “a history of the VCI member from the time of his identification to his neutralization.”
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