The Phoenix Program
America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam
Douglas Valentine
With a New Introduction by the Author
CONTENTS
Series Introduction
Introduction: The Phoenix Has Landed
Introduction, 1990
Chapter 1: Infrastructure
Chapter 2: Internal Security
Chapter 3: Covert Action
Chapter 4: Revolutionary Development
Chapter 5: PICs
Chapter 6: Field Police
Chapter 7: Special Branch
Chapter 8: Attack on the VCI
Chapter 9: ICEX
Chapter 10: Action Programs
Chapter 11: PRU
Chapter 12: Tet
Chapter 13: Parallax Views
Chapter 14: Phoenix in Flight
Chapter 15: Modus Vivendi
Chapter 16: Advisers
Chapter 17: Accelerated Pacification
Chapter 18: Transitions
Chapter 19: Psyops
Chapter 20: Reforms
Chapter 21: Decay
Chapter 22: Hearings
Chapter 23: Dissension
Chapter 24: Transgressions
Chapter 25: Da Nang
Chapter 26: Revisions
Chapter 27: Legalities
Chapter 28: Technicalities
Chapter 29: Phoenix in Flames
Epilogue
Appendix
Glossary
Notes
Index
About the Author
Series Introduction
I
We the people seem to have the freest book trade in the world. Certainly we have the biggest. Cruise the mighty Amazon, and you will see so many books for sale in the United States today as would require more than four hundred miles of shelving to display them—a bookshelf that would stretch from Boston’s Old North Church to Fort McHenry in South Baltimore.
Surely that huge catalog is proof of our extraordinary freedom of expression: The US government does not ban books, because the First Amendment won’t allow it. While books are widely banned in states like China and Iran, no book may be forbidden by the US government at any level (although the CIA censors books by former officers). Where books are banned in the United States, the censors tend to be private organizations-church groups, school boards, and other local (busy)bodies roused to purify the public schools or libraries nearby.
Despite such local prohibitions, we can surely find any book we want. After all, it’s easy to locate those hot works that once were banned by the government as too “obscene” to sell, or mail, until the courts ruled otherwise on First Amendment grounds—Fanny Hill, Howl, Naked Lunch. We also have no trouble finding books banned here and there as “antifamily,” “Satanic,” “racist,” and/or “filthy,” from Huckleberry Finn to Heather Has Two Mommies to the Harry Potter series, just to name a few.
II
And yet, the fact that those bold books are all in print, and widely read, does not mean that we have the freest book trade in the world. On the contrary: For over half a century, America’s vast literary culture has been disparately policed, and imperceptibly contained, by state and corporate entities well placed and perfectly equipped to wipe out wayward writings. Their ad hoc suppressions through the years have been far more effectual than those quixotic bans imposed on classics like The Catcher in the Rye and Fahrenheit 451. For every one of those bestsellers scandalously purged from some provincial school curriculum, there are many others (we can’t know how many) that have been so thoroughly erased that few of us, if any, can remember them, or have ever heard of them.
How have all those books (to quote George Orwell) “dropped into the memory hole” in these United States? As America does not ban books, other means—less evident, and so less controversial—have been deployed to vaporize them. Some almost never made it into print, as publishers were privately warned off them from on high, either on the grounds of “national security” or with blunt threats of endless corporate litigation. Other books were signed enthusiastically—then “dumped,” as their own publishers mysteriously failed to market them, or even properly distribute them. But it has mainly been the press that stamps out inconvenient books, either by ignoring them, or—most often—laughing them off as “conspiracy theory,” despite their soundness (or because of it).
Once out of print, those books are gone. Even if some few of us have not forgotten them, and one might find used copies here and there, these books have disappeared. Missing from the shelves and never mentioned in the press (and seldom mentioned even in our schools), each book thus neutralized might just as well have been destroyed en masse—or never written in the first place, for all their contribution to the public good.
III
The purpose of this series is to bring such vanished books to life—first life for those that never saw the light of day, or barely did, and second life for those that got some notice, or even made a splash, then slipped too quickly out of print, and out of mind.
These books, by and large, were made to disappear, or were hastily forgotten, not because they were too lewd, heretical, or unpatriotic for some touchy group of citizens. These books sank without a trace, or faded fast, because they tell the sort of truths that Madison and Jefferson believed our Constitution should protect—truths that the people have the right to know, and needs to know, about our government and other powers that keep us in the dark.
Thus the works on our Forbidden Bookshelf shed new light—for most of us, it’s still new light—on the most troubling trends and episodes in US history, especially since World War II: America’s broad use of former Nazis and ex-Fascists in the Cold War; the Kennedy assassinations, and the murders of Martin Luther King Jr., Orlando Letelier, George Polk, and Paul Wellstone; Ronald Reagan’s Mafia connections, Richard Nixon’s close relationship with Jimmy Hoffa, and the mob’s grip on the NFL; America’s terroristic Phoenix Program in Vietnam, US support for South America’s most brutal tyrannies, and CIA involvement in the Middle East; the secret histories of DuPont, ITT, and other giant US corporations; and the long war waged by Wall Street and its allies in real estate on New York City’s poor and middle class.
The many vanished books on these forbidden subjects (among others) altogether constitute a shadow history of America—a history that We the People need to know at last, our country having now become a land with billionaires in charge, and millions not allowed to vote, and everybody under full surveillance. Through this series, we intend to pull that necessary history from the shadows at long last—to shed some light on how America got here, and how we might now take it somewhere else.
Mark Crispin Miller
Introduction: The Phoenix Has Landed
Tens year after the publication of The Phoenix Program, I wrote a series of articles on the subject for Counterpunch magazine. The Clinton administration had popularized neoliberalism, hammered labor through NAFTA, and dismantled welfare. Conservatives were speaking of a “new American century” based on belligerent nationalism. The time seemed right to warn of the dangers.
The first of these articles, “Rob Simmons, the CIA, and the Issue of War Crimes in Vietnam: The Spook Who Would Be a Congressman,” appeared in November 2000.
As a CIA advisor to the Special Branch of the South Vietnamese Police, Simmons managed a secret interrogation center and a vast informant network in order to identify and locate members of the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI).Simmons then mounted paramilitary and psychological warfare operations against suspected “secret agents” who were administering the revolution in Phú Yên Province.
The people Simmons spied on, harassed, kidnapped, interrogated, and ass
assinated were civilians protected under the Geneva Conventions. He worked with the Phoenix program and what he did, in my opinion, amounted to war crimes.
Simmons, however, represented the nation’s renewed, aggressive spirit, and longing to rid itself of the Vietnam Syndrome. He was elected to Congress in November 2000 and quickly became a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, as well as chairman of the Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing, and Terrorism Risk Assessment.
My second article, “Fragging Bob: Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, and the Need for a War Crimes Trial,” appeared in May 2001.The piece followed revelations that former Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey, as a member of a Navy SEAL team on a Phoenix mission in South Vietnam in 1969, participated in the killing of a dozen women and children in Thanh Phong village. Kerrey claimed the civilians were caught in a crossfire, but their bodies were found grouped together, as if they had been rounded up and executed.
Kerrey told the New York Times, “Standard operating procedure was to dispose of the people we made contact with. Kill the people we made contact with, or we have to abort the mission.”
According to the rules of land warfare, what Kerrey and his SEAL did was unlawful and amounted to a war crime. But again, in the spirit of the times, his crimes were rationalized away.
The articles about CIA officer Simmons and Navy SEAL Kerrey contrasted the stated purpose of the Phoenix program, which was to protect the people from terrorism, with its operational reality—the pacification of the South Vietnamese population through terrorism, through the same tactics employed by the Gestapo and Einsatsgruppen in the Second World War.
Created by the CIA in 1967 and headquartered in Saigon, the Phoenix program coordinated all military, police, and intelligence agencies in South Vietnam in pursuit of civilian members of the VCI. To this end the CIA created Intelligence and Operations Coordinating Centers (IOCCs) at region, province, and district levels. A particular IOCC would amass data on suspects in its area of operations, through informants and the CIA’s brutal interrogation centers, and then mount targeted operations using police, regular military, and special operations forces, as well as the CIA’s notorious counterterror teams.
To facilitate this sweeping method of population control, every citizen’s biographical data was fed into a computer at the Phoenix Directorate in Saigon. The Directorate was managed by a senior CIA officer whose job was to funnel information on top-ranking members of the VCI to the CIA station, where the staff attempted to turn these people into penetration agents who could report on the enemy’s strategies, plans, and allies in North Vietnam.
Any South Vietnamese citizen could become a VCI suspect based on the word of an anonymous informant. The suspect was then arrested, indefinitely detained in a CIA interrogation center like the one that Congressman Rob Simmons managed, and tortured until he or she (in some cases children as young as twelve) confessed, informed on others, died, or was brought before a military tribunal for disposition.
At the height of the program, Phoenix managers imposed quotas of eighteen hundred “neutralizations” per month on the CIA officers and soldiers in the field. The unstated intention was to corrupt the system, and the CIA succeeded in this effort. Crooked security officers, policemen, politicians, and racketeers began to extort loyal civilians as well as enemy agents. As one CIA officer put it, Phoenix was “a very good blackmail scheme for the central government. ‘If you don’t do what I want, you’re VC.’”
Warning: America’s democratic institutions are on the brink of being similarly corrupted, and for the same insidious purpose: the political control of its citizens through terrorism, on behalf of the rich military-industrial-political elite who rule our society.
Indeed, America’s security forces were always aware of the domestic applications of the Phoenix, and the program has not only come to define modern American warfare, it is the model for our internal “homeland security” apparatus as well. It is with the Phoenix program that we find the genesis of the paramilitarization of American police forces in their role as adjuncts to military and political security forces engaged in population control and suppression of dissent.
In the wake of September 11, 2001, my articles about the Phoenix program became more relevant than ever before. The third, “Homeland Insecurity,” appeared on October 1, 2001, and predicted that the government would establish Phoenix-style “extra-legal military tribunals that can try suspected terrorists without the ordinary legal constraints of American justice.”
The United States soon established detention centers at Guantánamo in Cuba, Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, and at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. And the CIA established “black sites” around the world. But I was referring to plans by the Bush administration to rob American citizens of their right to due process. And that is exactly what happened in January 2013 when President Obama signed a National Defense Authorization Act that provides for the indefinite detention of Americans.
These developments were easy to predict, given my background in Phoenix. In the October 2001 article, for example, I explained that Phoenix would become the bureaucratic model for the “homeland security” programthat now envelops America and subjects its citizens to the same blanket surveillance that the Phoenix program imposed on the people of South Vietnam. Almost ten years later, in July 2011, the Washington Post published its “Top Secret America” exposé, which outlined America’s “heavily privatized military-corporate-intelligence establishment.” Lead reporter Dana Priest calls it the “vast and hidden apparatus of the war on terror.”
This Phoenix-style network constitutes America’s internal security apparatus, and it is targeting you, under the guise of protecting you from terrorism. And that is why, more than ever, people need to understand what Phoenix is really all about.
When the CIA created Phoenix in June 1967, it was called ICEX-SIDE: Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation—Screening, Interrogation and Detention of the Enemy. The SIDE function is often ignored as journalists and propagandists focus on the sensational aspect that involves the targeted assassination of terrorists and their sympathizers, often by remote-controlled drones.
But in the first instance, Phoenix was a massive dragnet that packed South Vietnam’s prisons, jails, and detention centers to overflowing. The foundation stone of this network was a jerry-rigged judicial system based on Stalinist security courts that did not require evidence to convict a person. People charged with national security violations had no right to legal representation, due process, or habeas corpus.
As Johan Galtung taught us, “Personal violence is for the amateur in dominance, structural violence is the tool of the professional. The amateur who wants to dominate uses guns; the professional uses social structure.”
It was perfectly clear, following the terror attacks of 9/11, that America’s elite were creating exactly this kind of criminally legal social structure. Climate change, overpopulation, income inequality, dwindling resources, and other geopolitical factors are pushing the rich into gated communities in every nation in the world. The establishment is preparing for the dystopian future that lies ahead.
The 9/11 terror attacks lifted all the moral prohibitions on militaristic America, unleashing on liberalism the anger and frustrations that the country had cultivated since the Vietnam War. The government, backed by industry and the corporate media, launched the largest psychological warfare campaign ever mounted. Extralegal Phoenix-style programs cropped up everywhere, seen as necessary for protecting the American people from terrorism, and the terrorized public gratefully received them all.
My article “An Open Letter to Maj. Gen. Bruce Lawlor” appeared in August 2002 and spoke to this imminent threat of fascism. As a CIA officer in South Vietnam in the early 1970s, Bruce Lawlor ran a counterterror team in one of the northern provinces. In 2002 Lawlor became the Office of Homeland Security’s senior director for protection and prevention. The Office of Homeland Security would soon evolve into the
Department of Homeland Security, with its Orwellian “fusion centers,” which are replicas of the Phoenix IOCCs and serve the same “intelligence” function.
After 9/11, the influence of Phoenix proponents like Simmons, Kerrey, and Lawlor was crucial in reshaping America’s attitude in regard to conducting murderous, illegal Phoenix-style operations against civilians in foreign nations, and against dissidents at home. Such men and women are everywhere in positions of authority, threatening the democratic institutions we hold dear.
I had warned against this development in the introduction to The Phoenix Program. As I said in 1990, “This book is about terror and its role in political warfare. It will show how, as successive American governments sink deeper and deeper into the vortex of covert operations—ostensibly to combat terrorism and Communist insurgencies—the American people gradually lose touch with the democratic ideals that once defined their national self-concept. This book asks what happens when Phoenix comes home to roost.”
The Phoenix has landed. The ultimate fusion of bureaucracy and psychological warfare, it serves as the model for America’s homeland security apparatus, as well as its global war on terror. That is not a theory. In his strategy paper “Countering Global Insurgency” published in Small Wars Journal in September–November 2004, Lt. Col. David Kilcullen called for a “global Phoenix program.” Kilcullen would become one of the government’s top counterinsurgency advisors.
Phoenix terms like high-values target and neutralization are now as common as Phoenix strategies and tactics. And the process of institutionalizing the Phoenix program, conceptually and programmatically, is just beginning.
Douglas Valentine, February 2014
INTRODUCTION, 1990
It was well after midnight. Elton Manzione, his wife, Lynn, and I sat at their kitchen table, drinking steaming cups of coffee. Rock ’n’ roll music throbbed from the living room. A lean, dark man with large Mediterranean features, Elton was chain-smoking Pall Malls and telling me about his experiences as a twenty-year-old U.S. Navy SEAL in Vietnam in 1964. It was hot and humid that sultry Georgia night, and we were exhausted; but I pressed him for more specific information. “What was your most memorable experience?” I asked.
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