Phoenix Program (64 page)

To clear the way for the FBI, Colby back-channeled instructions to his friend and CIA colleague Byron Engel, the chief of Public Safety. Engel passed those instructions along to his Vietnam desk officer, John Manopoli. When Jack met with Manopoli on February 8, the latter said that AID had changed its mind and had no objections to the FBI visit. That day Jack drafted a “talking paper” for General Karhohs, which the Vietnam Task Force chief used to brief Defense Secretary Laird the next day. Jack called Sullivan “to clear the action,” and on February 12 Warren Nutter signed
the necessary letter of transmittal, which Laird sent to the White House for approval. On February 23, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover received the directive, signed by National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger.

On March 30 Jack received a copy of a White House memo directing the FBI to send two people TDY to Vietnam. Hoover approved it and sent Harold Child, the FBI's legal adviser at the Tokyo Embassy, to Saigon for four or five days on a “diagnostic” basis, to see if an investigation was warranted. “It was a perfunctory execution of a White House directive.” Jack chuckled. “There was not enough time to do a thorough review.”

Harold Child writes:

Early one morning I received a telephone call from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. [He] wanted me to go immediately to Saigon to talk with all the people concerned to help him reach a conclusion as to whether there was anything that the FBI could constructively do in South Vietnam…. John Mason turned out to be the individual in Saigon who was designated to assist me in my contacts and provide information and background that I required.

Until I landed in Saigon, I had no idea whatever as to what the Phoenix program was. In fact, even after the first two or three days, what they were doing and what they had accomplished were very confusing to me. Upon return to Tokyo, I furnished a detailed report to Mr. Hoover … [and] my recommendations were in summary: 1) No information had been presented to me to demonstrate that operations of the Phoenix Program had any direct relation to FBI internal security responsibilities; 2) There was much confusion and inconsistency inherent in the program, which had developed over a considerable period of time, making it impractical for the FBI to come in at this late stage; and 3) I recommended against the FBI becoming involved in insurgency problems or other local problems in Vietnam.
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John Mason's military deputy, Colonel Chester McCoid, has a different recollection. According to McCoid, in an interview with the author, Child was there to obtain information on Vietnamese supporters of American antiwar groups; the FBI wanted current intelligence, but the CIA would not share what it had. Mason presented “the CIA's perspective, not the CORDS perspective,” McCoid claimed.
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Citing the separate charters of the CIA and FBI, “Mason lectured Child on cognizance, arguing that overseas intelligence is the CIA's job.

“Phoenix was a creature of the embassy,” McCoid said. “The footwork
was done by uniforms, but the tone was set by the CIA—by Ted Shackley and John Mason.”
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Colby denied any shenanigans. “I just wanted FBI ideas on how to improve Phoenix,” he said to me.
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Yet while seeming to advance the process, Colby actually blunted it. On April 30, 1971, Hoover reported to Colby that FBI services were not required in Saigon. Jack terminated the action on May 24. “Colby sent a letter killing it,” he said. Instead of the FBI's advising the directorate, the Internal Security Bureau of the National Police was expanded from forty to six hundred personnel.

For a view of Phoenix in the field, we turn to a December 1970 report by the III Corps DEPCORDS, Richard Funkhouser. At the time, according to Funkhouser, the VCI were lying low, concentrating on recruiting new cadres, penetrating the GVN, and bumping off the occasional GVN official. The III Corps commander, General Do Cao Tri, had approved “a combined U.S.-GVN Phung Hoang Task Force” to inspect IOCCs and “get the horses galloping in the same direction.” General Tri (who was killed when his helicopter was shot down on February 23, 1971) had approved the task force as part of a “crash VCI program” that “Thieu kicked off … himself at a special secret meeting at Vung Tau on 31 October.”
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Funkhouser reported that PIOCCs were being integrated into police operation centers, that the VCI was stronger in urban than rural areas, and that “the leadership of the police traces itself back to the Ministry of Interior which reportedly makes assignments after the proper payoff is made.” He deemed quotas “redundant, difficult to attain and in fact not susceptible to accurate measurement,” the problem being that neutralization figures were inflated to meet goals. He said that most Vietnamese police officers were too busy to devote time to Phoenix but that targeting of the VCI had improved with the assignment of senior noncommissioned officers as deputy DIOCC advisers in thirty-five of III Corps's fifty-three districts. “Coordination with PICs ranges from good to fair,” he reported, “but advisors often conducted supplementary interrogations.” To be successful, Funkhouser noted, anti VCI operations required “the sensitive and instant use of informers and total secrecy.”

“We stayed on our own side of the fence,” said the III Corps senior Public Safety adviser Walt Burmester. “And the Vietnamese felt the same
way…. People didn't come to the police for help, because the only places attacked by the VC were government installations.” Burmester added that the National Police merely supplied Phoenix with equipment and that Phoenix itself acted more as a resource center than an action agency.
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In fact, the attack against the VCI in the early 1970's was carried out primarily by the CIA through the PRU. As reported by Funkhouser, “The increase in PRU effectiveness throughout the region has been spectacular, and is due primarily to the strong leadership of the Region PRU commander and his U.S. adviser.” That PRU adviser was Rudy Enders.

In 1965, with only nine cadres (one of whom was PVT), Rudy Enders had formed III Corps's original counterterror team in Tan Uyen. In 1970 he returned to Bien Hoa, at Ted Shackley's request, to manage the region's paramilitary forces. “Our main job was to keep rockets from raining on Saigon,” Enders said to me, although he also managed the attack on the VCI.
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However, he added, “There were simply too many party committee structures. To unscramble this, we centralized in Bien Hoa. We got access to high-level guys in the Chieu Hoi center, the PIC, or the hospital—anyone we could get our hands on. We'd take him around, watch him for two weeks, and try to win him over.

“Sam Adams was making a case that the commander of VC military subsection twenty-two, Tu Thanh, had recruited four hundred fifty penetrations in Hau Nghia,” Enders said, then told how he proved Adams wrong. The process began when “Our Long An officer and a defector from COSVN were going past the market one day.” Quite by accident, the defector spotted Tu Thanh's secretary. She was grabbed and taken to the embassy house, where, during interrogation, it was learned that she was in love with Tu Thanh's son and that Tu Thanh's family had established legal residence under aliases in Hau Nghia after the Cambodian invasion. However, because Tu Thanh had forbidden his son to see his secretary, the woman decided to defect. Blessed with a photographic memory and eager to exact revenge, she supplied the CIA with Tu Thanh's identification number, along with the real names and addresses of another two hundred VCI in Tu Thanh's network.

Having managed the Vietnam desk in 1962 and 1963, III Corps CIA region officer in charge Donald Gregg understood the importance of the secretary's information. He immediately focused everyone in the region on Tu Thanh's network, which was diagrammed on a wall map to show where his deputies and family members lived. Enders and Gregg then dispatched Special Branch surveillance teams to take pictures of the suspects; meanwhile, they tried to place a penetration agent inside the apparatus.

“We tried to recruit a district cadre from Hau Nghia,” Enders recalled. “Tu Thanh's secretary knew he had a girl friend, so we got her to narrate on a tape cassette a plea for him to work with us. The girl friend brought
the tape to the cemetery where her mother was buried, and they exchanged it there. Next we sent a three-man PRU team from Hau Nghia to make a pitch, to get the guy to defect. But they came back empty-handed. Then we got wind that the next night the VC had come in for the tape recorder, so we ran a counterintelligence operation on the PRU and found out that the PRU commander was a VC penetration agent. So we changed commanders; Mr. Nha became the PRU commander.”

It was as a result of this failure that Gregg gave up on penetrations. “Shackley was interested in penetrations,” he recalled, “and the vehicle for doing that was the Special Branch working closely with PIC advisers.” Gregg added emphatically, “This is not Phoenix.” As for the nature of Phoenix operations in III Corps, he said, “The PIOCCs and DIOCCs had a guy asleep at the desk.”
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As Gregg explained it, “Because Three Corps had hard-core VC units in heavily mined areas, I decided I couldn't penetrate. So I wound up trying to take apart the remaining elements of the VCI by putting together a chart of it from ralliers, prisoners, et cetera. I told ARVN I'd take all the POWs they couldn't handle. We'd get battered people and treat them well. In return we'd get information on caches, supply dumps, river crossings, et cetera. We'd get them to point out the location on the map. Then Felix Rodriguez would take them up in a light observation helicopter to point out the hiding places on the ground. A PRU team would follow with the First Air Cav and [Phoenix Region Coordinator] Johnny Johnson. Felix would locate the bunker by drawing fire; then he'd mark it with smoke. The First Air Cav would provide two or three Hueys for fire support and two more with the PRU. Then they'd go in.” When bigger operations were mounted, the First Air Cavalry provided troops.

“So we went after Tu Thanh during Tet of 1971,” Rudy Enders went on. “We missed him by a step but found his hiding place and brought twenty-three people hiding there to the PIC. The PIC chief in Region Three, Colonel Sinh, did the interrogations. We brought guys in from Con Son to flesh out the reports, and we had guys analyzing reports, marking photographs, putting the pictures together on the wall, and then photographing that. As a result, we learned the names of ninety-six people in the organization, only two of whom had access to ARVN or the police. One was the province chief's valet; the other was in the Hau Nghia police. But instead of four hundred fifty, like Adams said, it was only two.

“In the process of going after this organization,” Enders continued, “we got all of [III Corps Commander] General Hollingsworth's assets, and together we took photos of the houses where they lived … then took the photos back to the helicopter where we had the twenty-three people plus the woman from Long An. The twenty-three people were hooded, and they circled the
faces of the VCI. Felix Rodriguez was the guy doing this. Felix also got the choppers from Hollingsworth.”

Like Gregg, Enders claimed this was not a Phoenix operation. “Phoenix was just a record-keeping thing,” Enders said. “No organization is going to share intelligence because you didn't know who was a double.” In other words, by 1971 the CIA was carrying the attack against the VCI, while Phoenix was merely keeping score.

Phoenix as defined in official reporting also differed from Phoenix in fact. While the directorate was promoting Phung Hoang as a Vietnamese program, the commander in chief, Pacific, was saying, “The GVN has not been able to secure the cooperation of officials at hamlet, village and district level that is required for a successful Phung Hoang-Phoenix program.”
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Likewise, Pacification Attitude Analysis System results revealed that Phoenix was penetrated by the VCI and that most Vietnamese considered Phoenix a U.S. program, preferred a modus vivendi, and had “a grudging admiration for the VCI struggle.”
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“I reported to this guy in the station, who I only knew by the name George,” Ed Brady said to me. “I told him, ‘Your flow of information is through guys like Joe Sartiano and Dave West. But what does Minh Van Dang tell Dave West?' I said, ‘They know he's there for you; they tell him what you want to hear. How would you like something in context? Something that wasn't told to an American official?' And I had a good record of doing that, so I was reassigned to become special assistant to the director, John Mason.”

Unfortunately, Brady's reports did not show success and were roundly ignored. As he explained it, “I had a view that was different from the official reports. But this put the CIA in the position of having to decide, Is he right or not? Sometimes they'd go with me, but more often not. They frequently didn't want to use material I generated—they didn't want to report it to Washington—because it made them look bad.”

For another inside view of Phoenix in 1971, we turn to Colonel Chester McCoid, who in February 1971 replaced Colonel James Newman as deputy to John Mason. A veteran of four years and ten separate assignments in Vietnam, McCoid chronicled the program's major developments in letters to his wife, Dorothy. On February 18 he writes:

Yesterday afternoon … with two other Americans … from the Saigon City Advisory Group, I drove first to 6th Police Precinct Office and then on to the 7th. Our purpose was to inspect the work in progress to eliminate the enemy agents and shadow government apparatus in these critical areas.

The net result was an acute sense of distress! This was due directly to the inadequate job the American advisers were doing in both precincts. Here, in a situation where the enemy are hardcore old timers, we are employing callow young lieutenants to give advice to Vietnamese National Policemen who have been on the job for as many as 17 years. Naturally our people are far over their heads and find that they are rarely listened to by those whom, in theory, they are to give operational assistance. One of the officers, a captain, knows what should be done. He is familiar with his duties and does know a great deal about the precinct—population, size, state of the economy, ethnic breakdown, enemy strength, recent VC activity, who their supporters are, the true identity of the VC leaders, etc. His only difficulty is that he hasn't won the confidence of the National Police chief yet.