Phoenix Program

by Douglas Valentine

  Formal relations between MACV and CIA officers at the district level had begun only one month earlier, when General William Westmoreland arrived in Saigon as MACV commander and, in an effort to strengthen the American hand, assigned MACV advisers to each of South Vietnam’s 250 districts. Military intelligence advisers assigned to the Fifth Special Forces also entered the districts at this point. However, coordination among MACV advisers, CIA officers, and their Vietnamese counterparts depended primarily on personal relationships and varied from place to place.

  Notably, the impetus for Scotton’s Phoenix-type program on the Vietnamese side came from the Tu Nghia District police chief, Colonel Pham Tuong. A long-standing CIA asset, Tuong anted up a platoon of volunteers, all of whom had been victimized by the VC, in exchange for equipment, money, and advice. “They wanted to fight,” Scotton said, “but they didn’t want to lose.” Money and supplies were provided by Ralph Johnson. A fifteen-day “accelerated” training cycle was set up using what Scotton called his motivational indoctrination program. Modeled on Communist techniques, the process began on “a confessional basis. On the first day,” according to Scotton, “everyone would fill out a form and write an essay on why they had joined.” The district’s Vietnam Information Service representative “would study their answers and explain the next day why they were involved in a special unit. The instructors would lead them to stand up and talk about themselves.” This motivational function was handled by the unit’s morale officer, chosen by his peers through what Scotton referred to “as the only honest elections held in South Vietnam.” The morale officer’s job, he said, “was to keep people honest and have them admit mistakes.”

  Not only did Scotton co-opt Communist organizational and motivational techniques, but he also relied on Communist defectors as his cadre. “We felt ex-Vietminh had unique communication skills. They could communicate doctrine, and they were people who would shoot,” he explained, adding, “It wasn’t necessary for everyone in the unit to be ex-Vietminh, just the leadership.”

  In copying the Communists, Scotton was selective. “People from the other side knew the value of motivation, but they confessed too much. So we refined the technique based on what the Vietminh disliked the most: that the party set itself up as the sole authority. We didn’t have the party as number one. We had the group as the major motivational factor.”

  Key to Scotton’s motivational indoctrinational program was the notion of a “special” unit. To enhance this esprit de corps, Scotton’s units were better equipped and better paid than regular ARVN units. Carbines were replaced with submachine guns, and instead of wearing uniforms, the cadres wore black pajamas—just like the average Vietnamese. Scotton’s teams were also special insofar as they reported directly to the province security chief and, ipso facto, the CIA.

  “Tuong’s original group was thirty-four,” Scotton said, noting that Quang Ngai was a more heavily contested province than Long An and that the teams required more men and greater firepower, “so we bumped it up to forty and started a second group in an adjacent district. That’s three teams of twelve men each, strictly armed. The control element was four men: a commander and his deputy, a morale officer, and a radioman. These are commando teams,” Scotton stressed, “displacement teams. The idea was to go into contested areas and spend a few nights. But it was a local responsibility so they had to do it on their own.”

  Scotton named his special unit the Trung-doi biet kich Nham dou (people’s commando teams). “Two functions split out of this,” Scotton said. “First was pacification under Nguyen Be. Second was the anti-VCI function taken out to form the Provincial Reconnaissance Units. The PRU thing directly evolves from this.” Indeed, the phrase “Biet Kich,” meaning “commando,” is the name the Vietnamese applied to counterterrorists and later the PRU.

  Concurrent with the creation of the people’s action teams (PATs), as Scotton’s teams were renamed by station chief Peer DeSilva, there began a synthesis of White House policies and police and paramilitary programs that culminated three years later in Phoenix. It was, in effect, a blueprint for political warfare, conceptualized by Ralph Johnson, adapted to Vietnamese sensibilities by Le Xuan Mai, and formalized by Frank Scotton, Bob Kelly, Ian Tiege, and Stu Methven. At its heart was the doctrine of Contre Coup, particularly the notion of counterterror, which more than any other factor seized the imagination of station chief DeSilva, under whose direction the synthesis began.

  In his autobiography, Sub Rosa, DeSilva describes arriving in Vietnam in December 1963 and being introduced to VC terror by one of his CIA officers. Two VC cadres had impaled a young boy, a village chief, and his pregnant wife on sharp poles. “To make sure this horrible sight would remain with the villagers, one of the terror squad used his machete to disembowel the woman, spilling the fetus onto the ground.” Having arrived on the scene moments after the atrocity had occurred, DeSilva writes, “I saw them, the three impaled bodies and the unborn child lying in the dirt. A Catholic member of the village was making the sign of the cross over each body, murmuring a prayer in Vietnamese.”2

  A white-collar intelligence officer who put agent work above political warfare, DeSilva was shocked by what he saw. “The Vietcong,” he writes, “were monstrous in their application of torture and murder to achieve the political and psychological [author’s emphasis] impact they wanted.” But DeSilva also recognized that “This implacable use of terror in its own way served an intelligence purpose,” that “A bloody act of terror in a populated area would immobilize the population nearby, make the local inhabitants responsive to the Vietcong and, in return, unresponsive to the government element requests for cooperation.”3

  So DeSilva authorized the extraction of counterterror teams from Scotton’s Political Action Teams. He describes this “radically different form of activity” as “a counterterror program consisting of small teams,” dressed in black pajamas, armed with folding stock carbines which could be hidden under their black tunics, and with grenades carried in the pockets of their loose-fitting shorts.4

  The idea, DeSilva continues, was “to bring danger and death to the Vietcong functionaries themselves, especially in the areas where they felt secure. We had obtained descriptions and photographs of known cadres who were functioning as committee chiefs, recruiters, province representatives and heads of raiding parties. Based on these photographs and their known areas of operation, we had recruited really tough groups of individuals, organized in teams of three or four, who were willing and able by virtue of prior residence to go into the areas in which we knew the Vietcong senior cadres were active and to see what could be done to eliminate them.”5

  Here DeSilva is describing Phoenix, the attack on the VCI on its own turf, using intelligence provided by commandos and selective terror conducted by counterterrorists. One of the soldiers who participated in DeSilva’s counterterror program was Elton Manzione. A self-described “supersoldier,” Manzione received extensive training in hand-to-hand combat, combat swimming, sniping, parachuting, and demolition. When his schooling was completed, Manzione was dropped in the jungles of Panama with a knife and a compass and told to find his way out, and he did. “By then,” he noted with no small degree of understatement, “I was fairly competent.”

  In December 1964 Manzione left California aboard an oil tanker and, ten days later, crossed over to a guided missile destroyer, the USS Lawrence, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. To ensure plausible denial, Manzione’s service records were “sheep-dipped” and indicate that he never got off the Lawrence.

  Manzione stepped ashore in Cam Ranh Bay in January 1964 and was met by a Special Forces colonel who briefed him on his mission. Manzione was told he would be working for the Special Operations Group under a number of directives called OPLANS which had been drawn up to accomplish specific goals. Insofar as SOG had absorbed the Combined Studies Group, he would be working for U.S. Army and civilian personnel, as well as the U.S. Navy. He was sent to the Hoa Cam Training Center near Da
Nang, where in 1961 Ralph Johnson had based the Mountain Scout training camp and where in 1964 the CIA trained its special operations personnel in long-range reconnaissance patrols.

  At Hoa Cam Manzione completed an intensive orientation course. He was taught advanced tracking and camouflage techniques, made familiar with Soviet and Chinese weapons, put on a steady diet of Oriental food, told not to bathe and not to shave. And he was briefed on the various OPLAN directives and goals. “The actual goals were to stop the infiltration from the North of arms and supplies,” he recalled. “How did they phrase it? ‘Undermining the enemy’s ability to fight in the South.’ Another goal was to deal with enemy violations of the international accords—I’m assuming the 1962 Geneva Accords. It meant taking out command centers in Laos. And there was anti-infrastructure stuff, too.”

  Manzione was next assigned to Nam Dong in the Central Highlands, where he and two other SEALs were quartered inside a U.S. Special Forces camp. “Basically what they said was, ‘Welcome to Nam Dong. This is the town you’ll work out of. You’re gonna get orders to do something, and the orders are going to be verbal.’ The orders were always verbal and never said, ‘Do this specifically.’ It was always ‘Go there and do what you think you ought to do.’ It was so free-form it was hard to connect being in the military, let alone the Navy.”

  In March the SEALs started running “over-the-fence” missions as part of SOG’s Leaping Lena program. Three quarters of the missions were in Laos, the demilitarized zone, and North Vietnam. At times the SEALs sat along the Ho Chi Minh Trail counting enemy troops and trucks. Other times they moved from one set of coordinates to another, reconnoitering. They also shot field-grade NVA officers, kidnapped prisoners, escorted defectors from the North to the South, demolished downed U.S. aircraft, and engaged in counterterror.

  In regard to this last function, the SEALs worked with CTs, whom Manzione described as “a combination of ARVN deserters, VC turncoats, and bad motherfucker criminals the South Vietnamese couldn’t deal with in prison, so they turned them over to us. Often they’d been pardoned to fight Communists. Some actually had an incentive plan: If they killed X number of Commies, they got X number of years off their prison terms.” The CTs taught Manzione and his SEAL comrades the secrets of the psywar campaign, which in practice meant exploiting the superstitions, myths, and religious beliefs of the Vietnamese. One technique was based on the Buddhist belief that a person cannot enter heaven unless his liver is intact. So Manzione would snatch an NVA courier off the Ho Chi Minh Trail or sneak into a VCI’s hooch at night, crush the man’s larynx, then use his dagger to remove the man’s liver. Some of the CTs would actually devour their enemies’ vital organs.

  In the summer of 1964 Manzione was assigned to SOG’s northern headquarters in Dong Ha. “Back then,” he said, “being as close to the DMZ as we were, it was hard to tell where any particular Vietnamese civilian came from.” Here he referred to the fact that the demilitarized zone separated families and communities without regard for their political affiliations. In light of this ambiguity, counterterror was one way of co-opting uncommitted civilians. To facilitate their political awakening, according to Manzione, “We left our calling card nailed to the forehead of the corpses we left behind. They were playing card size with a light green skull with red eyes and red teeth dripping blood, set against a black background. We hammered them into the third eye, the pituitary gland, with our pistol butts. The third eye is the seat of consciousness for Buddhists, and this was a form of mutilation that had a powerful psychological effect.”

  Curiously, terror tactics often involve mutilating the third eye (the seat of insight and secret thoughts) and playing on fears of an “all-seeing” cosmic eye of God. Used by morale officers in World War I, the eye of God trick called for pilots in small aircraft to fly over enemy camps and call out the names of individual soldiers. Ed Lansdale applied the technique in the Philippines. “At night, when the town was asleep, a psywar team would creep into town and paint an eye (copied from the Egyptian eye that appears atop the pyramid in the Great Seal of the United States) on a wall facing the house of each suspect,” Lansdale writes. “The mysterious presence of these malevolent eyes the next morning had a sharply sobering effect.”6

  To appreciate the “sobering effects” of the “malevolent” and “mysterious” eye of God, it helps to know something of the archetype’s mythological origins. In ancient Egypt, the eye of God was plucked from Horus, an anthropomorphic sun-god with a falcon’s head. Pictured as the morning sun cresting a pyramid, the eye of God represents the dawn of self-awareness, when the ego emerged from the id and no longer required human sacrifice to overcome its primeval anxiety. Awed by the falcon’s superlative sight, talons, and flight, the Egyptians endowed Horus with the bird’s predatory prowess, so he could avenge the murder his father, Osiris, whose name means “seat of the eye.” Set on high, scanning the earth for the forces of darkness, the falcon as sun-god—as the manifestation of enlightenment—carries out the work of organization and pacification, imposing moral order on earth.

  The eye of God assumes its mysterious “counterespionage” qualities through this myth of the eternal cycle—the battle between good and evil—in which, if the perfidious gods of darkness can guess the sun-god’s secret name, they can rob him of his powers and trap him forever in the underworld. Thus a falcon emblem was placed above the gates of all Egyptian temples, scanning for the sun-god’s enemies, while the sun-god relied on code names to conceal his identity.

  Oddly enough, the eye of God was the symbol of the Cao Dai sect, whose gallery of saints include Confucius, Buddha, Joan of Arc, Jesus, and Victor Hugo. Inside the Cao Dai cathedral in Tay Ninh City, the Cao Dai pope divined upon his planchette the secrets of the Great Pyramid; over the temple door loomed a huge blue “all-seeing” eye surrounded by snakes and trees. For this reason, some people suggest that the Cao Dai eye of God endowed Phoenix, the all-seeing bird of prey that selectively snatched its prey, with its ubiquity.

  In South Vietnam the eye of God trick took a ghastly twist. CIA officer Pat McGarvey recalled to Seymour Hersh that “some psychological warfare guy in Washington thought of a way to scare the hell out of villagers. When we killed a VC there, they wanted us to spread eagle the guy, put out his eye, cut a hole in the back [of his head] and put his eye in there. The idea was that fear was a good weapon.”7 Likewise, ears were cut off corpses and nailed to houses to let the people know that Big Brother was listening as well. nailed to houses to let the people know that Big Brother was listening as well.

  The subliminal purpose of terror tactics was to drive people into a state of infantile dependence. In this sense, CIA psywar experts were not exorcists come to heal Vietnam and free it from Communist demons; their spells were meant to break up the society and project its repressed homicidal impulses onto the Communists—cast as carrion and snakes.

  “It was all part of the counterterror doctrine developed by the Ugly American to beat the enemy at his own game,” Elton Manzione said. In beating the VC at their own game, the SEALs were told to ignore the rules of engagement. “Our camp was always separate,” he explained. “Just CTs and us. Sometimes a Special Forces colonel would walk in, but rarely. Nam Dong was not populated by the spooky hunter-killer type folks you associate with the Green Berets. A lot of them were medical specialists, or agricultural specialists, or language specialists that worked with the villagers on different things. So the great majority of this particular Special Forces camp were not hit team types. We were, however, and our camp was separated by wire and a gate.

  “Now everyone knows about the airborne interrogation—taking three people up in a chopper, taking one guy and saying, ‘Talk,’ then throwing him out before he even gets the chance to open his mouth. Well, we wrapped det [detonator] cord around their necks and wired them to the detonator box. And basically what it did was blow their heads off. The interrogator would tell the translator, usually a South Vietnamese intelligence officer, �
��Ask him this.’ He’d ask him, ‘Who gave you the gun?’ And the guy would start to answer, or maybe he wouldn’t—maybe he’d resist—but the general idea was to waste the first two. They planned the snatches that way. Pick up this guy because we’re pretty sure he’s VC cadre—these other two guys just run errands for him. Or maybe they’re nobody; Tran, the farmer, and his brother Nguyen. But bring in two. Put them in a row. By the time you get to your man, he’s talking so fast you got to pop the weasel just to shut him up.” After a moment’s silence he added, “I guess you could say that we wrote the book on terror.”

  Having seen the intelligence potential in Scotton’s PATs and CTs, DeSilva, according to Stu Methven, “decided he wanted a version in each province in South Vietnam.” The job of standardizing the political action teams, along with the counterterrorists and Chau’s Census Grievance program, was given to Methven, whose first step was to find them a permanent home on the Vung Tau Peninsula. Methven did this with the help of Tran Quoc Buu, a wealthy Vietnamese warlord and founding member of the Can Lao party who in 1954 had headed the CIA-funded Vietnamese Federation of Labor. Buu had been charged by Diem with laundering Can Lao rake-offs through the federation’s foreign accounts. Buu, however, pocketed the money and used it to buy huge parcels of land, including a portion of Vung Tau.

  After the coup the tables turned on Buu, whose association with Diem led to his imprisonment; in need of cash to buy his way out of jail, he sold Methven a choice piece of property on the Vung Tau Peninsula. Located at Cat Lo, Buu’s estate had been used by the French as a transshipment point in their lucrative opium trade and as a training camp for their Montagnard maquis. Buu himself had used Cat Lo as a training camp for his private army of resettled Catholic refugees. Called the Shrimp and Cinnamon Soldiers, for their civilian jobs, Buu’s troops were highly motivated and, according to Methven, were admired by Nguyen Van Thieu because “unlike the ARVN, they stayed at their posts at night.” With Thieu’s consent, Methven arranged for CIA contract employees to start training counterterror, census grievance, and political action cadres at Buu’s Vung Tau facility. This was a unilateral CIA operation, extralegal, with no GVN oversight. Isolated and accessible only by Air America, Vung Tau was the perfect place for such a covert action undertaking.