Phoenix Program (67 page)

The gunner asked Towle, “Should I?”

Towle said no.

“That was the beginning of the end,” he reported. “Ahearne called me on the carpet. He told me the province chief was angry because I had caused the district chief to lose face.”

There were other reasons why Towle did not enjoy working in Phoenix. According to Towle, Ahearne (who was taken hostage while serving as CIA station chief in Teheran in 1979) and the province senior adviser, Colonel
D. Duncan Joy, initiated a bounty program in the province, in which cash prizes were offered to the Vietnamese as an incentive. Ahearne and Joy even arranged a contest between the Phoenix advisers to see who could rack up the biggest body count. Disgusted, the advisers got together and decided not to participate.

That was in June 1971. A few days later John Vann arrived in his private helicopter. “He flew right into the DIOCC,” Towle recalled. “He was very critical. He asked where the bodies and weapons were, then sent me into a funeral in progress. He had me open the casket to identify the body. I hated Vann,” Towle said. “He was really into body counts.”

On another occasion, while Towle was eating his dinner in the CORDS villa, the district chief stormed into the room with the PRU team and dumped a dirty bag on the table. Eleven bloody ears spilled out. The district chief told Towle to give the ears to Joy as proof of six VCI neutralized. “It made me sick,” Towle said. “I couldn't go on with the meal.

“After the ear thing,” Towle explained, “I went to Vinh Long and joined up with the air rescue team on one of its missions. I was promoted to captain while I was there and received a message from the district senior adviser saying, ‘Don't come back.' So I went to see a friend in the judge advocate general's office in Can Tho, and he reported the incident to General Cushman. The general went down in a chopper and handed Joy a letter of reprimand. After that I knew I could never go back, so I had one of my friends in Vung Liem bring my bags up to Can Tho.”

Captain Sid Towle was officially removed as the Vung Liem Phoenix coordinator on July 20, 1971. While awaiting reassignment, he worked at the Combined Document Exploitation Center, reading reports on NVA infiltration along the Ho Chi Minh Trail and giving briefings to senior MACV officers. Then, on August 1, he received orders reassigning him to Kien Phong Province. “It was the proverbial one-way ticket to Cambodia.” He sighed. “The last two guys sent out there as Phoenix coordinators were killed by their own PRU. So I went back to see the major running Phoenix administration in Can Tho [James Damron], and he said he would not reassign me. So from there I went to the JAG [judge advocate general] office, where my friend and I drafted a letter to the Phoenix Directorate in Saigon.”

In his letter to Tilton, Towle said that “War crimes as designated by the Geneva Conventions were not uncommon” in Phoenix and that he “had expressed my negative feelings on the program to the province Phung Hoang Coordinator and had given much thought to applying for release under MACV 525-36.” He then requested “immediate release” from Phoenix.

The next day Major Damron, with the approval of the IV Corps Phoenix adviser, Lieutenant Colonel Efram E. Waller, reassigned Towle to the Tuyen Binh DIOCC—the same DIOCC where the previous two “triple sixers” had
been killed in action. Damron noted that General Cushman was aware of the move, as was the JAG. Meanwhile, Towle's request for release was in the pipeline. So, taking two weeks' vacation, he hid at a friend's house in Can Tho until August 10, when the new CORDS chief of staff, General Frank Smith, approved his release. (Postscript: Referring to “the case that appalled us all,” Wilbur Wilson wrote to George Jacobson, at the request of John Tilton, suggesting: “A records check in Saigon before an officer or enlisted man is assigned to a Phung Hoang position in Vietnam could reduce chances of assignment of unsuitable personnel.”)

While William Colby was assuring Congress that no Phoenix adviser had resigned on moral grounds, or through MACV 525-36, and that incentive programs were not policy, John Tilton was organizing, with the National Police Command, a High Value Rewards Program (HVRP). In explaining the program to his wife, Colonel McCoid writes, “A very substantial reward is placed on highly placed VC political leaders, as much as $8,000 at the rate on the blackmarket or twice that amount on the official rate of exchange. Our idea is to induce the lower-grade VCI to turn their bosses in for the bounty money.” Sadly, says McCoid, “our original proposal … was watered down by the bleeding hearts, who think placing a price on your enemy's head is excessively cruel! This despite Colby's support.”

A conference of police and CORDS personnel, including Tilton, was scheduled for July 23, to select a list of VCI whose names were to be passed down to Phoenix officers in four pilot provinces (Binh Dinh, Quang Nam, Bien Hoa, and Vinh Binh) crucial to Thieu's election in October. Selected VCI were to be district rank or higher, dangerous, and confirmed with enough evidence to convict. Province chiefs, in their role as Phoenix committee chairmen, were to select dossiers and coordinate with the PIOCC. The list was to be approved by the region's military commander, and as stated in Interior Ministry Directive 1223, the “Phung Hoang Bloc of the National Police Command, acting for the Central Phung Hoang Committee, will review and make final selection of the VCI to be placed on the rewards list and will be submitted to the Major General Commander of the National Police, Vice Chairman concurrently Secretary General of the Central Phung Hoang Committee for final approval.”

The HVRP, which was to be expanded into all provinces and administered by Phoenix advisers, was tentatively approved on July 31 by Josiah Bennett, director of the Vietnam Working Group; Henry Sizer at the Saigon Embassy's Internal Unit; the State Department's Vietnam desk officer, Lars Hydle; MACV; and the Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO). However, the conference to select HVRP targets was indefinitely postponed as a result of Decree 1042. Promulgated in secret by General Khiem on August 2, 1971, its provisions known only to the Central Security Committee, the
decree granted VCI suspects the right to an attorney and the right to appear in person at their trials. As a result, “public action” on the HVRP was deferred until after the election.

On October 3, 1971, Thieu was reelected with nearly 90 percent of the vote. The next day
The New York Times
reported that more than twenty thousand innocent civilians had been killed under the Phoenix program and that a congressional subcommittee had criticized the Pentagon for not investigating war crimes. A few days later the High Values Reward Program was scrapped by Ambassador Bunker, and plans to phase out American involvement in Phoenix were begun in earnest.

The process had begun on August 11, 1971, when Gage McAfee, a legal adviser to William Colby, submitted his end of tour report. Citing reports that the VCI was actually growing in number, McAfee writes, “There is doubt that the Phung Hoang Program is achieving its desired goal of eliminating the infrastructure. It can be argued that its resources and energy are actually being diverted to other undesirable activities that are … counterproductive in the context of supporting a viable and responsive government which will provide an effective alternative to the insurgent government.” He adds that “some if not the majority of the war results from the social grievances of the part of the population, separate and distinct from the military aggression of the North,” and that “No really responsive government should ever need such a program at all.”

McAfee notes that An Tri “lacks a legislative base, there being no specific statute enacted by the National Assembly which empowers the Executive in time of war or emergency to administratively detain.” He cites the legislature's opposition to Province Security Committees, which, he adds, “were generally acknowledged to be extra-constitutional if not unconstitutional.” He rejects as “irrelevant” the argument that no residual responsibility for civilian detainees exists, citing
Nuremberg and Vietnam,
in which Telford Taylor says that if the GVN did not abide by the Geneva Conventions, “then the original captor power [the United States] must take effective steps to correct the situation, or shall request the return of the prisoners.”
²⁶

McAfee emphasizes that Province Security Committees were not “regularly constituted courts” and that support for them was “a departure from the standards” of Article 3. “From a strictly legal standpoint,” he concludes, the Rimestead letter required that the United States either demand the elimination of security committees or take steps to insure that no prisoners captured by U.S. forces were sentenced by them. “Not only are we now in the difficult position of having supported these committees in the past,” he writes, “but many Vietnamese now think that Security Committees are as American as apple pie and baseball. The Phung Hoang program itself has always been associated with the Americans and of course the CIA. If the U.S. decides
… to recommend the elimination of these Committees, it might be useful for the Vietnamese … to blame it all on the U.S. So with the Phung Hoang program in general. If it fades into and is totally absorbed by the Special Police, it might help the Vietnamese to eliminate the bad aftertaste by blaming the entire program on their misguided benefactors.” The only alternative, McAfee suggests, was “to force the GVN to make necessary improvements.”

But the U.S. government would not go along with McAfee's recommendations that the Stalinist security committees “should die,” that trials be made public, or that “The kill quota be eliminated as the ultimate misuse of the body count.” Instead, it stalled until the problem could be sloughed off on the GVN. The Defense Department denied any “residual responsibility” whatsoever, and the Saigon Embassy minimized the problem, saying that only “between 1500 and 2500 individuals out of a VCI correction population of about 17,000 are the subject of that responsibility.”
²⁷

The final word on U.S. policy regarding civilian detainees was stated on November 12, 1971, in State Department telegram 220774, which directed the Saigon Embassy to work with the Directorate of Political Security to guarantee “humanitarian treatment of detainees” and to ensure that An Tri was implemented “in terms of fundamental concepts of due process and to improve conditions of internment.” This, despite State Department attorney Robert Starr's admission that “We cannot justify secrecy of procedural reforms in Circular 1042,” which failed to provide for judicial review, “meaningful” appeal, “free choice” of an attorney, or the right to cross-examine witnesses. Noting that confessions alone were enough to convict a suspected VCI, Starr urged that “there should be a requirement of corroborating evidence.” He cautioned Bunker that An Tri “is subject to attack on grounds it does not simply provide for emergency detention, but involves actual findings of guilt or innocence and sentencing of persons,” and he suggested that Bunker work to implement “new legislation establishing a clear and detailed basis for program.”

What Starr envisioned was legislation transferring security committee responsibilities to regularly constituted courts. But that never happened. Until the fall of Saigon, only the CIA-advised Directorate of Political Security could reverse Province Security Committee recommendations to extend detention. In November the GVN did withdraw from security committees the power to recommend An Tri detention against Communist offenders whose sentences had expired, VCI suspects who were released before trial for lack of evidence, and VCI suspects who were referred and had been acquitted. Unless “new factors” were specified. In December Prime Minister Khiem announced a parole and conditional release program “to release selected prisoners and also provide a system for post-release surveillance.”

On December 13, 1971, Robert Starr reported to William H. Sullivan:
“These reforms are another welcome step in the right direction but fall short of effectively dealing with the underlying problems.”
²⁸
The next day the Washington
Post
printed an article by Peter Osnos headlined us
PLAN FAILS TO WIPE OUT vc CADRE.
The year 1971 closed without a resolution of An Tri or Phoenix.

CHAPTER 28

Technicalities

In early October 1971 Lieutenant Colonel Connie O'Shea arrived at the Phoenix Directorate and was assigned by John Tilton as liaison officer to Colonel Song at the Phung Hoang bloc office in the National Police Interrogation Center. His job, he told me, “was to tell Tilton what Song was thinking.”
¹

A veteran intelligence officer who had served in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967, O'Shea described the directorate in late 1971 as “Sleepy Hollow …. There were ongoing discussions between U.S. and Vietnamese police officials,” he recalled, “as to how to get the program transferred. Tilton and [operations chief Paul] Coughlin were doing their PHREEX [Phung Hoang reexamination] report, and coming down from Washington was a proposed list of things we should back away from. They were going to turn the dossiers over to the Vietnamese, and the Special Branch was apprehensive; they didn't want to turn their files over to anybody…. The other big thing was PHMIS [Phung Hoang Management Information System], but it was not ready to be used yet by the Vietnamese.”

Coauthored by the CORDS Research and Analysis Division, PHREEX, according to Phoenix operations chief Paul Coughlin, “came from John Tilton,” who initially wanted to call it Phung Hoang Reprise.
²
“It involved four months of depth research and included slides and graphs,” explained Coughlin, “and basically outlined how to transfer Phoenix to the Vietnamese and
how to deal with lessening assets [in 1972 the directorate had at most fifteen staffers]. But it also addressed what activities U.S. forces should be involved in, and to what degree; the whole idea of Revolutionary Development support and CORDS, which was the program's Achilles' heel, because everyone was answering to a different master…. Detention was not a PHREEX issue,” Coughlin added, “but military justice and the moral aspects of the program were, as were our concerns over Vietnamese loyalty. After all of these things were considered together, we decided not to let the program die on the vine, but just to let the dead areas go.” Otherwise, Coughlin noted, “Our concern in the directorate was that people in the field got what they needed—jeeps, communications equipment, et cetera—which we learned about through reports.”