Phoenix Program (55 page)

C
OLBY
: “… to capture, rally or kill members of the enemy apparatus.”
⁷

G
ORE
: “AS I understand your answer, the goals are the same. You used identically the same words—capture, rally or kill. I do not quite get either a distinction or a difference… .”
⁸

C
OLBY
: “The difference … was that at the time there were these special groups which were not included in the normal government structure…. Since that time, this has been more and more integrated into the normal government structure, and correspondingly conducted under the government's rules of behavior.”
⁹

Was it really? In her article “The CIA's Hired Killers,” Georgie Anne Geyer tells how “[i]n the absence of an American or South Vietnamese ideology, it was said in the early days, why not borrow the most workable tenets of the enemy's. After all,” she quotes Frank Scotton as saying, “they stole the atomic bomb secrets and all from us.” And so, Geyer writes, “Scotton and a few other Americans … started a counter-guerrilla movement in northern Quang Ngai Province…. Terror and assassination were included in their
bag of tricks. At one point, USIS printed 50,000 leaflets showing sinister black eyes. These were left on bodies after assassination or even—‘our terrorists' are playful—nailed to doors to make people think they were marked for future efforts.

“But,” Geyer goes on, “whereas Scotton's original counter-guerrillas were both assassins in the night and goodwill organizers of the people, the PRUs are almost exclusively assassins in the night.” Their emphasis “of late,” she writes, “has been … to murder, kidnap, terrorize or otherwise forceably eliminate the civilian leadership of the other side.” In one village “a VC tax collector will be assassinated in his bed in the night. In another, wanted posters will be put up for a VC leader, offering a reward to try to persuade his friends to turn him in. The PRU may also drop down from helicopters and terrorize whole villages, in the hope that they will be frightened to deal with the VC in the future.” Furthermore, “the PRUs are excellent torturers …. Torture has now come to be so indiscriminately used that the VC warn their men to beware of any released prisoner if he has not been tortured.”

“Sometimes we have to kill one suspect to get another to talk,” Geyer quotes a PRU adviser as saying. Another PRU adviser told her that “he ate supper with his PRUs on the hearts and livers of their slain enemies.” Another one said, “I've been doing this for 22 years all over the world.” He cited Egypt when Nasser was coming to power and the Congo “when we were trying to get rid of Tshombe.” Writes Geyer about the PRU adviser: “His job, like that of many Americans in South Vietnam, was terror.” And she calls American PRU advisers “really the leaders,”
¹⁰
a view that contrasted with Colby's claim that Americans were limited to “advice and assistance.”

As for the instructors who taught Francis Reitemeyer how to manage PRU, Colby said, “[W]e have some rather direct instructions to our people as to their behavior in Vietnam.”
¹¹
Colby was referring to an October 15, 1969, memo sent to the Phoenix staff “and forwarded for inclusion in the training of Phung Hoang advisers in Vietnam and at Fort Holabird.” The memo stated that “U.S. personnel are under the same legal and moral constraints with respect to operations under the Phung Hoang program as with respect to military operations against enemy units in the field.”

The final word on Phoenix policy was contained in MACV Directive 525-36, issued on May 18, 1970. Noting the “unlawful status of members of the VCI,” MACV Directive 525-36 cites “the desirability of obtaining these targetted individuals alive and of using intelligent and lawful methods of interrogation to obtain the truth.” It says that Phoenix advisers were “specifically unauthorized to engage in assassination” and that if they were to “come in contact with activities conducted by Vietnamese (never Americans) which do not meet the standards of land warfare,” they were “[n]ot
to participate further” but were “expected to make their objections of this kind of behavior known to the Vietnamese conducting them” and “expected to report the circumstances to the next higher U.S. authority.” The directive closes by saying that “if an individual finds the police type activities of the Phoenix program repugnant to him, on his application, he can be reassigned from the program without prejudice.”

In response to the article by Geyer, which focused attention on the PRU and the issue of terror, and in defense of William Colby, his patron, John Vann
*
said, “[T]here is always a tendency to report extremes…. But when those exceptions … are used by people who are in basic disagreement with the policy in Vietnam as a means of criticizing the effort, they are taken out of context. They in no way reflect anything that is normal.”
¹³

Kentucky Senator Sherman Cooper asked Vann, “Is the Phoenix organization a counter-terror organization?”
¹⁴

Vann replied, “The counter-terrorist organization bore and bears no resemblance at all to … Phoenix.”
¹⁵

C
OOPER
: “Is the U.S. involved in any way in carrying out what can be called a “terrorist” activity?”
¹⁶

V
ANN
: “Well, the answer very shortly, sir, is no, we do not.”
¹⁷

Compare Vann's statement with that made by Charlie Yothers, the CIA's chief of operations in I Corps in 1970: “Sure we got involved in assassinations. That's what PRU were set up for—assassination. I'm sure the word never appeared in any outlines or policy directives, but what else do you call a targeted kill?”
¹⁸

According to Tully Acampora, Phoenix was a two-tiered program, with the PRU working against terrorists on the tactical level and the CIO operating above that on strategic affairs. This aspect of Phoenix was addressed by New Jersey Senator Clifford Case when he asked William Colby if Phoenix might be used “by ambitious politicians against their political opponents, not the Viet Cong at all.”
¹⁹

C
OLBY
: “… it is our impression that this is not being used substantially for internal political purposes…. I have heard the President and Prime Minister on many occasions give strong directions that the focus is on the
Vietcong … and that it is not to be used for other purposes.”
²⁰

Picking up on this line of questioning, Committee Chairman William Fulbright asked Colby: “… where is Mr. Dzu, the man who ran second in the last election?”

When Colby said, “Mr. Dzu is in Chi Hoa jail in Saigon,” Fulbright asked him to “reconcile that with your statement of the very objective view of the Prime Minister.” Colby replied that Truong Dinh Dzu “was not arrested under the Phoenix program.” Dzu was arrested under Article 4, which made it a crime to propose the formation of a coalition government with the Communists.
²¹

F
ULBRIGHT
: “But you say they are giving instructions to be so careful not to use the program for political purposes, when Thieu himself has put a man in prison for no other crime that we know of than that he ran second to him in the elections.”
²²

At that point Senator Case came to Colby's rescue, saying, “I think that just, perhaps, suggests this is a privilege reserved for higher officials.”
²³

But the point had been made: If Phoenix were to be judged by the behavior, not the stated policies, of Thieu's administration, then it
was
an instrument of political repression. Moreover, as indicated in a letter from Tran Ngoc Chau to Senator Fulbright, political repression in South Vietnam was carried out with the tacit approval of the U.S. government. In his letter to Fulbright (which was inserted into the record of the hearings), Chau claimed that his contacts with his brother had been authorized by, among others, William Colby, Ev Bumgartner, Tom Donohue, Stu Methven, John O'Reilly, Gordon Jorgenson, and John Vann, who instructed Chau not to inform Thieu of his contacts with Hien.

Chau wrote, “Present political persecution of me is consequence of combined action taken by U.S. officials and CIA and Vietnamese officials in an attempt to sabotage Vietnamese and Communist direct talks for Peace Settlement.”
²⁴

In February 1970 Chau was sentenced to twenty years in jail. In May 1970, writes Professor Huy, “the Supreme Court rendered a judgment stating that Chau's arrest and condemnation were unconstitutional. Despite this judgment, Thieu refused to free Chau.”
²⁵

What happened to Chau and Dzu proved that stated policy in South Vietnam was ignored in reality. Likewise, attempts to portray Phoenix as legal and moral were transparent public relations gimmicks meant to buy time while Thieu consolidated power before the cease-fire. To ensure Thieu's internal security, CIA officers were willing to betray their assets, and this capacity for treachery and deceit is what really defined American policy in regard to Phoenix, the PRU, and the war in general. What the Senate concluded, however, was only that diametrically opposed views on Phoenix
existed. The official line advanced by William Colby portrayed Phoenix as imperfectly executed—but legal, moral, and popular. The other view, articulated by Senator Fulbright, was that Phoenix was “a program for the assassination of civilian leaders.” But that was not proven.

“The Senate Foreign Relations Committee may have been confused by last week's testimony on Operation Phoenix,” observed Tom Buckley. “The problem,” he explained, “is one of definition.”
²⁶

Unable to decide which definition was correct, the press tended to characterize Phoenix as an absurdity. In a February 18, 1970, article in
The New York Times,
James Sterba said that “the program appears more notorious for inefficiency, corruption and bungling than for terror…. If someone decided to make a movie about Phoenix … the lead would be more a Gomer Pyle than a John Wayne.”

Playing on the notion that the Vietnamese, too, were too corrupt and too stupid to be evil, Tom Buckley wrote that the PRU “were quicker to take the money, get drunk, and go off on their own extortion and robbery operations than they were to sweep out into the dangerous boondocks”—hardly a description of what Jim Ward called “the finest fighting force in Vietnam.” But for Buckley and Sterba there was no motive behind the madness. Phoenix was a comedy of errors, dopey disguises, and mistaken identities. There was nothing tragic in their depictions; even the people directing the show were caricatures subject to ridicule.

So it was that Phoenix began sinking in a morass of contradictions which seemed to reflect the intensely human, moral ambiguity of the Vietnam War itself. Even the dead-end debate between Colby and Fulbright mocked America's babbling, hilarious schizophrenia. Whom to believe?

Twenty years later the facts speak for themselves. When Fulbright asked Colby if cash incentives were offered to Vietnamese for neutralizations, Colby said no. Six months later the deputy director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Frank Clay, sent a memo (JCSM-394-70) to Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, noting that General Abrams had recommended “an incentive program to foster greater neutralization achievement.”

One of the more significant Phoenix documents, Clay's memo enumerated the Defense Department's major concerns regarding Phoenix: the national identity and registration program, information support of Phoenix, inadequacy of prison space, surveillance of released VCI, Phung Hoang leadership, and exchange of intelligence. These six concerns, notably, derived from a survey conducted by Robert Komer in June 1970.

Upon arriving in Turkey as U.S. ambassador, Komer had been dogged by demonstrators charging him with war crimes. Consequently, he resigned his post even before his nomination was confirmed by the Senate. Seeking vindication, he hired on with RAND, returned to Saigon, and wrote a scath
ing report called “The Phung Hoang Fiasco.” In it Komer says, “[A]s the military war winds down and the conflict assumes a more politico-subversive character, a much more sophisticated and intensive effort to destroy the VCI becomes well nigh indispensable to a satisfactory outcome.”

The former champion of quotas rails against “fakery,” charging that “half the kills are falsely listed as VCI just to meet Phung Hoang goals.” He cites instances where “we may have as many as 10 or 12 dossiers on the same man,” and he complains that “each agency still keeps its own files.” Special Branch is “grossly overstaffed with poor quality results,” the Field Police are “a flop as the action arm of Phung Hoang,” and as for the PRU, Komer writes that “everywhere their effectiveness is apparently declining greatly.”

Komer is especially critical of the Vietnamese. In III Corps “fully half the province chiefs don't really support Phung Hoang,” he writes, and in II Corps Lu Lan “gives only lip service.” Komer names Lieutenant Colonel Thiep (who replaced Loi Nguyen Tan, who took command of Chi Hoa Prison) as “the senior full-time Phung Hoang officer,” then adds contemptuously that Thiep's “incompetent boss Colonel Song is apparently being kicked upstairs. As I put it bluntly to Thieu and Khiem,” Komer says, “there are 65 generals in RVNAF: how come only a LTC to run Phung Hoang?”

Basically, Komer's anger stemmed from Thieu's decision to transfer the Central Phung Hoang Permanent Office from the prime minister's office to the National Police Directorate as a separate bloc. Noting that “the Phung Hoang bloc is completely separate from the key Special Branch bloc,” Komer argues that the Central Phuong Hoang Permanent Committee had been “downgraded.” He calls the transfer “a case where one of the most crucial of all current GVN priority missions is given to one of the weakest and least effective GVN agencies, the National Police.”