Phoenix Program (56 page)

In a May 3, 1970, telegram to the secretary of state, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker explained that Phung Hoang was being transferred from Prime Minister Khiem's office to the National Police to “move it toward Vietnamization” and improve its overall operations. Noting that the “US advisory position on this question had been established through coordination between MACV/CORDS, OSA and Embassy,” Bunker concludes by stating his belief that the “most important contribution National Police can make to future Vietnam lies in vigorous and proper execution of Phung Hoang Program against Viet Cong Infrastructure.” Case closed.

As compensation for the transfer, Komer proposed getting “the best young, hard driving major general to be found—Phong or Minh of CMD—and make him Minister or Vice-Minister of Interior to give him status.” Other reforms Komer suggests: to “increase reward money,” to “go after the five best dossiers,” and to concentrate efforts “in eight provinces [where]
well over half the estimated VCI are concentrated.” The provinces were Quang Nam, Quang Tin, and Quang Ngai in I Corps; Binh Dinh in II Corps; and Kien Hoa, Vinh Long, Vinh Binh, and Dinh Tuong (where Komer found the “only … Phung Hoang program worthy of the name”) in IV Corps.

Summarizing, Komer writes, “For better or worse, CIA produced … the only experienced hands who were really good at the game…. If I couldn't think of a better solution, I'd transfer operational control over the whole business to OSA [office of special assistant, cover designation for the CIA].”

But Bunker, in his May 3, 1970 telegram, had already nixed that idea. “Integration into Special Police would complicate important public information aspects of program,” he said, “and produce
complications
to US advisory element. When VCI reduced to manageable level,” he said, turning Phoenix over to the Special Branch “could be reviewed.” In any event, the “VC turn to protracted war reemphasizes necessity of Phung Hoang effort against infrastructure during coming year … and is of higher priority in Vietnam today than civil law enforcement as contribution to Vietnamization.”

Three years into the program the Phoenix brain trust was back on square one, wondering, as Evan Parker had recommended, if it should focus its efforts not on legions of low-level VCI, but on the big fish and, as Parker had also observed, if CIA Special Branch advisers were not already doing the job. Having come full circle, Komer finally realized that the “Special Branch and its U.S. advisers seem to run an almost completely separate operation … usually when I asked why no fingerprints in dossiers, I was told they were over in the Special Branch office in the PIC.”

Komer was right. Phoenix was a fiasco, but not just because the CIA had decided to hide behind it for “public information” purposes. The notion that reporting formats and quotas as “management tools” could supplant a thousand years of culture and forty years of Communist political development at the village level was simply a false premise. Yes, Phoenix was a fiasco—it had become unmanageable, and it encouraged the most outrageous abuses—but because it had become “of higher priority … than civil law enforcement,” it was a fiasco with tragic, not comic, consequences.

By 1970 an armistice was inevitable, and Phoenix had become the vehicle by which America was going to transfer responsibility for internal security to the Vietnamese. As a result, General Abrams asked, “That it be made clear to all US and RVN agencies contributing to the Phung Hoang/Phoenix program that the objective of neutralizing the infrastructure is equal in priority to the objectives of tactical operations.” As a way of going after strategic VCI targets—the big fish running COSVN—and as a way of protecting Phoenix from penetration by enemy agents, Abrams also asked that “consultation be initiated with the Attorney General … to secure a team of two
or three FBI counter-espionage experts to be sent to the RVN for the specific purpose of providing recommendations for the neutralization of important national level members of the [VCI].”
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Meanwhile, in Washington General Clay advocated increased attention on the DIOCCs, “the cutting edge of Phoenix,” because “the district and village level infrastructure remains the key element in the enemy plan to subvert the Government … and continues to produce the major threat against GVN efforts to consolidate pacification gains made in the past 18 months.” Clay also noted that “Phung Hoang leadership is being improved by recognizing and expanding the prominence of the role of the Special Police in the functioning of the DIOCC.”
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But in order to mount an attack against the VCI, the U.S. Army needed to gain access to Special Branch files in the DIOCCs. So in February 1970 a third Standard Operating Procedure manual was issued with instructions on how to use the ultimate Phoenix “management tool,” the VCI “target folder.” As stated in the Phung Hoang Adviser Handbook, “preparation of target folders is the foundation from which successful operations can be run and sentencing be assured by Province Security Committees.”
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Target folders also served a public information function, by allowing William Colby to say that “our first step was to make sure that the intelligence we gathered on the VCI was accurate, and for this we set up standards and procedures by which to weed out the false from the correct information.”
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Target folders were specifically designed to help Phoenix advisers focus on high-level VCI. Divided in two, a target folder contained a biographical data on the left side and operational information on the right, in which the suspect's habits, contacts, schedule, and modus operandi were recorded, along with captured documents and other evidence. The folder was the responsibility of the Special Branch case handler in the DIOCC, although a source on the suspect might be handled by another agency. Each Special Branch case handler was required to maintain ten People's Intelligence Organization (PIO) cells—each consisting of three agents—in each hamlet in his area of operations. As stated in the third Standard Operating Procedure manual, the tracking of a VCI suspect began when an informant reported someone making “suspicious utterances” or “spreading false rumors.” As more and more sources informed on a suspect, he or she graduated from blacklist D to C to B, then finally to blacklist A—most wanted—at which point the VCI suspect was targeted for neutralization and an operation mounted. The folder was sent to the PIC while the suspect was being interrogated and to the Province Security Committee to assure proper sentencing.

In order to help Special Branch case handlers gather the precise evidence a security committee needed for quick convictions, training programs were
started in each corps, where the case handlers were taught how to maintain target folders, a hundred thousand copies of which the Phoenix Directorate prepared and distributed in August 1970. To assure proper target folder maintenance, the Army also assigned a counterintelligence-trained enlisted man to each DIOCC. In 1970, 185 of these counterintelligence specialists graduated from the Phoenix Coordinators Orientation Course. They acted as liaison among the PIC, DIOCC, and PIOCC. In addition, a third officer was added to each PIOCC staff to coordinate with Chieu Hoi and Field Police, and in an effort to upgrade the status of Phoenix coordinators vis-avis the CIA's Special Branch advisers, region slots were filled by full colonels, with majors in PIOCCs and captains in DIOCCs. However, cooperation between province Phoenix coordinators and CIA province officers rarely occurred.

A survey of each corps in November 1970 produced these results: I Corps reported “that certain member agencies in the DIOCCs have a wealth of knowledge and information which had hithertofore never been tapped.” II Corps reported that “professional jealousies and even distrust among agencies continue to impair progress.” III Corps reported that “support comes from only one or two of the agencies represented, while others tend to ignore results.” IV Corps reported that “each GVN intelligence agency closely guards its information, thus making dossier construction difficult.”
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The problem, not explicitly stated, was that CIA officers, extracted from Phoenix by Ted Shackley and hidden away in embassy houses, saw only liabilities in sharing their sources with “amateurish” Phoenix coordinators.

Said Ed Brady: “They had their relationship with the PIC. Many of them either participated in or observed or were close at hand during the interrogations. So they had firsthand output from it. Very few of them, however, ever went and put that in the PIOCC or in the DIOCC … which they were
required
to do by the procedures…. What they really did,” he complained, “was go out and get their own organization, the PRU, and run their own separate operations. It wasn't a Special Branch operation. It belonged to the province officer. So if he thought he had some intelligence that could be acted upon, the U.S. tendency was to act on it unilaterally. They might invite a few Special Branch people to go along, but the Special Branch might not accept the invitation. Then if they caught somebody, they brought him back and turned him over to the Special Branch. They were so caught up in the mythology themselves, they'd say, ‘Hey! I'm running a Phoenix operation.' ”
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Here Ed Brady chose to define Phoenix in its narrow organizational sense, as a division of CORDS with its own SOP, offices, and employees. But insofar as Phoenix is a symbol for the attack against the VCI and insofar
as the PICs and PRU were the foundation stones upon which Nelson Brickham built ICEX, the province officers were in fact running Phoenix operations.

What is important to remember is that in order to achieve internal security in South Vietnam, America's war managers had to create and prolong an “emergency” which justified rule by secret decree and the imposition of a military dictatorship. And in order to gain the support of the American public in this venture, it was necessary for America's information managers to disguise the military dictatorship—which supported itself through corruption and political repression—as a bastion of Christian and democratic values besieged by demonic Communists.

In this context, Phoenix is the mask for the terror of the PICs and the PRU, and for the CIA's attempts at the political level “to eliminate the opposition to us and to control the Vietnamese through our clients.”
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Phoenix in the conceptual sense is all the programs it coordinated, as well as the “public information aspects” that concealed its purpose. All other definitions are merely “intellectual jargon.”

“The point,” Ed Murphy reminded us, “is that it was used in Vietnam, it was used in the United States, and it
still
is used in the United States.”

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“I made the biggest impact of the war when I pulled John out of III Corps and sent him to IV Corps because,” Colby said to me, “that was going to be the major area of the pacification battle. He did a spectacular job.” A compulsive liar and adulterer, Vann committed statutory rape in 1959. However, his wife lied on his behalf, and after rehearsing for days and going forty-eight hours without sleep, Vann passed a lie detector test and was exonerated. Like many senior American officers in Vietnam, Vann had several mistresses in Vietnam.
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CHAPTER 23

Dissension

Soon after the Senate hearings concluded in mid-March 1970, the Phoenix controversy was again obscured by a larger event. On April 30, 1970, ten days after he had proposed withdrawing 150,000 American troops by the end of the year, Richard Nixon announced that U.S. and South Vietnamese forces had invaded Cambodia.

A deviation from the Nixon Doctrine, the Cambodian invasion was the culmination of twelve years of covert actions against the government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. The final phase began on March 12, 1970, while Sihanouk was abroad and his prime minister, Lon Nol, under instructions from the CIA, ordered all North Vietnamese out of Cambodia within seventy-two hours. That same day Deputy Prime Minister Sirik Matak canceled a trade treaty between Cambodia and the Provisional Revolutionary Government. Four days later the U.S. merchant ship
Columbia Eagle,
which was ostensibly carrying munitions for U.S. Air Force units in Thailand, was commandeered by two CIA officers, who steered it into the port of Sihanoukville. Armed with guns and ammunition from the
Columbia Eagle,
and backed by the Khmer Kampuchea Krom (Cambodian exiles trained by the CIA in South Vietnam) and the Khmer Serai (Cambodians under Son Ngoc Thanh, trained by the CIA in Thailand), Lon Nol's forces seized control of the government and moved against the Khmer Rouge (Cambodian Communists) and the Vietnamese who supported Prince Sihanouk.

The CIA had been planning the operation since August 1969, when the murder of Thai Khac Chuyen had brought about an end to Detachment B-57. The CIA plan called for the Khmer Serai to attack Khmer Rouge positions from their base in Thailand, while Lon Nol seized Phnom Penh, using deserters from Sihanouk's palace guard, backed by Khmer Kampuchea Krom (KKK) forces from South Vietnam. But the plan quickly got off track. Stanley Karnow notes: “Cambodia was convulsed by anarchy in late March 1970. Rival Cambodian gangs were hacking each other to pieces, in some instances celebrating their prowess by eating the hearts and livers of their victims. Cambodian vigilantes organized by the police and other officials were murdering local Vietnamese, including women and infants.”
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What Karnow describes is Phoenix feasting on Phnom Penh. Aided by the CIA, the Cambodian secret police fed blacklists of targeted Vietnamese to the Khmer Serai and Khmer Kampuchea Krom. The Vietnamese woman who translated the “Truth About Phoenix” article recalled what happened. “These were not VC being killed,” she said. “I remember that. These were mass killings of Vietnamese merchants and Vietnamese people in Cambodia. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah! I remember because a friend of mine told me. He was one hundred percent Vietnamese, but he didn't succeed in Vietnam, so when he was young, he became a Cambodian citizen and served in the Cambodian government. There were many many Vietnamese people who went to Cambodia to settle. They were leaders of the economy and the government. But the Vietnamese were not loved by the Cambodians—like the Chinese in Vietnam—and there was a mass execution of all those Vietnamese. They cut off their heads and threw them in the river.”
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