McCollum’s feelings reflect the growing tension between people involved in police programs and those involved in Revolutionary Development. At times the two approaches to pacification seemed to cancel each other out. But they also overlapped. Said Grieves about this paradoxical situation: “We used to send Field Police squads and platoons down to Vung Tau for RD training, which was political indoctrination, and for PRU training, which was raids and ambushes. Now the RD Cadre were patterned on the Communists’ political cadre, and they paralleled the civilian government. But most were city boys who went out to the villages and just talked to the girls. On the other hand, the Vietcong had been training since they were twelve. So the CIA was trying to do in twelve weeks what the Communists did in six years.”
Phoenix eventually arose as the ultimate synthesis of these conflicting police and paramilitary programs. And with the formation of the Field Police, its component parts were set in place. The CIA was managing Census Grievance, RD Cadre, counterterror teams, and the PICs. Military intelligence was working with the MSS, ARVN intelligence, and the Regional and Popular Forces. AID was managing Chieu Hoi and Public Safety, including the Field Police. All that remained was for someone to bring them together under the Special Branch.
* The two Combat Police battalions (later called Order Police) were CIA-advised paramilitary police units used to break up demonstrations and provide security for government functions.
CHAPTER 7
Special Branch
Nelson Brickham is fiercely independent, hungry for information, and highly skilled at organizing complex systems in simple terms. “I’ve been called an organizational genius,” he said modestly, “but that’s not true. I’m just well read.”1 He is also engaging, candid, and willful, with interests ranging from yachting and bird watching to religious studies. When we met in November 1986, he had just completed a master’s thesis on the First Book of John.
His motive for speaking with me, however, had nothing to do with atonement; in his words, it was a matter of “vanity,” the chance that “maybe I’ll wind up as a footnote in history.” Said Brickham: “I feel that I, as well as a number of other people, never got recognition for some of the things we did.” Brickham also believed his analysis of the CIA’s role in the Vietnam War might help reverse what he saw as a dangerous drift to the right in American politics. “The events we’ve seen in recent years,” he told me, “are a reaction to the psychic trauma of the country following Vietnam, a reaction which, on a far more modest scale, is similar in character—and here’s where it’s dangerous—to the frustration and bitterness of the German nation after the First World War.”
Coming from a CIA officer who did everything in his power to win the war, to the extent of creating Phoenix, such a warning carries double weight. So, who is Nelson Brickham? Prior to joining the CIA in 1949, Brickham attended Yale University, from which he was graduated magna cum laude with a degree in international politics. His first CIA assignment was on the Czechoslovakian desk in the Office of Reports and Estimates. During the Korean War Brickham worked for the agency’s Special Intelligence Branch, gathering intelligence on Soviet political and foreign officers. Next came a stint in the Office of Current Intelligence, where he got involved in “depth research” on the Soviet political process and produced with several colleagues the landmark Caesar Project on the selection process of Soviet leaders after Stalin’s death. As a result of the Caesar Project, Brickham was invited to London as a guest of British intelligence—MI6. Overseas travel and liaison with foreign nationals appealed to him, and in 1955 he transferred from the sedate Directorate of Intelligence to the Soviet Russia (SR) Division in the freewheeling Directorate of Plans, where the CIA’s clandestine operations were then being hatched.
In 1958 Brickham was appointed chief of the operations research branch of the SR Division, where he planned covert operations into Soviet territory. These operations included the emplacement of photographic and signet equipment near Soviet military bases and the preparation of false documents for “black” agents. Brickham also wrote research papers on specific geographic targets.
Then the Russians sent up Sputnik, which “scared everyone,” Brickham recalled, “and so I was put in charge of a massive research project designed to develop collection targets against the Soviet missile program. Well, in 1954 I had read a report from British intelligence describing how they had developed a target plot approach to guiding espionage and other collection activities. In applying that target plot idea to the Soviet problem, it immediately occurred to me to magnify it as a systems analysis study so we could go after the whole Soviet missile program. It was the first time,” he said, “that any government agency had taken a systems approach toward a Soviet target. We wanted to pull together all information from whatever source, of whatever degree of reliability, and collect that information in terms of its geographic location. And from that effort a series of natural targets sprang up.”
A systems approach means assembling information on a weapons system from its theoretical inception, through its research and development stage, its serial production, its introduction to the armed forces, finally to its deployment. “For the first time,” Brickham said, “there was a complete view of everything known about Russian military and missile development systems. The British called this the best thing achieved by American research since the war.”
Insofar as Phoenix sought to combine all existing counterinsurgency programs in a coordinated attack on the VCI, Brickham’s notion of a systems approach served as the conceptual basis for Phoenix, although in Phoenix the targets were people, not missile silos.
With yet another feather in his cap, Brickham was posted in 1960 to Teheran, where he managed intelligence and counterintelligence operations against the Soviets in Iran. As one of only three neutral countries bordering the USSR, Iran was a plum assignment. For Brickham, however, it devolved into a personality conflict with his desk officer in Washington. Frustrated, he requested a transfer and in 1964 was sent to the Sino-Soviet Relations Branch, where he managed black propaganda operations designed to cause friction between the USSR and China. At the heart of these black operations were false flag recruitments, in which CIA case officers posed as Soviet intelligence officers and, using legitimate Soviet cipher systems and methodology, recruited Chinese diplomats, who believed they were working for the Russians, although they were actually working for the CIA. The CIA case officers, on Brickham’s instructions, then used the unsuspecting Chinese agents to create all manner of mischief. Although it was a job with “lots of room for imagination,” Brickham was unhappy with it, and when the agency had its “call-up” for Vietnam in the summer of 1965, Brickham volunteered to go.
His preparation included briefings from experts on the Vietnamese desk, reading books and newspaper articles, and reviewing reports and cable traffic produced by every government agency. Upon arriving in Saigon in September 1965, he was assigned to the station’s liaison branch as deputy chief of police Special Branch field operations. His boss was Tucker Gougleman.
The chief of station was Gordon Jorgenson, “a kindly, thoughtful person. He’d been through the bombing of the embassy the previous February. Peer DeSilva, who was hurt in the explosion, went home, and Jorgy, who had been his deputy, became station chief. But within a matter of months he went home, too, and John Hart came out as the new chief of station in January 1966.” The subject of John Hart gave Brickham pause. “I have described the intelligence service as a socially acceptable way of expressing criminal tendencies,” he said. “A guy who has strong criminal tendencies—but is too much of a coward to be one—would wind up in a place like the CIA if he had the education. I’d put John Hart in this category—a mercenary who found a socially acceptable way of doing these things and, I might add, getting very well paid for it.
“John Hart was an egomaniac,” Brickham continued, “but a little bit more under control than some of the bad ones. He was a smart one. A big, imposing gu
y over six feet tall with a very regal bearing and almost a British accent. He claims to be Norman, and he spoke fluent French and was always trying on every occasion to press people to speak French. Red Stent used to say that you could tell somebody who parades his knowledge of French by the way he uses the subjunctive, and John Hart used it properly. But John Hart had both feet on the ground. He was a bright guy, very energetic, and very heavy into tennis—he played it every day.
“When John Hart came out as chief of station, I was one of his escort officers; our job was to take him on a tour of the whole country, to visit the facilities and explain what was going on. And my job was in question at that moment because Hart had another guy—his pet, John Sherwood—slated to replace Tucker as chief of field operations …. Anyway,” Brickham said, “there’s a great division in the Foreign Service world between people who get out on the local economy and try to eat native and find out what’s going on versus the people that hole up in the American colony, the so-called golden ghetto people. So we’re sitting around, talking about Vietnamese food and about the guys who go down to the MAAG compound for dinner every night, and Hart makes this sort of sneerlike remark to me at the restaurant where we’re having dinner; he says, ‘Well, really, I would have figured you for the kind of person who would eat dinner in the MAAG compound every night.’ Well, he later found out that wasn’t true, and he was persuaded to appoint me to the position of chief of field operations. And even though I started out with that base of insecurity, Hart respected me. And later on that became quite evident.”
Perhaps as a result of his eating habits, Brickham got assigned as chief of Special Branch field operations in the spring of 1966, after Tucker Gougleman’s tour had ended and he was transferred to New Delhi. And once installed in the job, he began to initiate the organizational reforms that paved the way for Phoenix. To trace that process, it is helpful to understand the context.
“We were within the liaison branch,” Brickham explained, “because we worked with the Vietnamese nationals, dealing with the CIO and Special Branch on questions of intelligence and counterespionage. The chief of the liaison branch was Jack Stent.” Brickham’s office was in the embassy annex, while Special Branch headquarters was located in the National Police Interrogation Center. As chief of field operations Brickham had no liaison responsibilities at the national level. “I had field operations,” Brickham explained, “which meant the province officers. I managed all these liaison operations in the provinces, but not in the Saigon-Gia Dinh military district. That was handled by a separate section under Red Stent within the liaison branch.”
As for his duties, Brickham said, “In our particular case, field operations was working both positive intelligence programs and counterespionage, because police do not distinguish between the two. Within the CIA the two are separate divisions, but when you’re working with the police, you have to cover all this.” Brickham compares the Special Branch “with an intelligence division in a major city police force, bearing in mind that it is within a national police organization with national, regional, province, and district police officers. There is a vertical chain of command. But it is not comparable with FBI, not comparable with MI Five, not comparable with Sûreté. It’s the British Special Branch of police …. And with the Special Branch being concerned specifically with intelligence, it was the natural civilian agency toward which we would gravitate when the CIA got interested. Under Colby, the Special Branch became significant.”
If under Colby (who was then chief of the CIA’s Far East Division) the Special Branch became significant, then under Brickham it became effective. Brickham’s job, as he defined it, “was to bring sharpness and focus to CIA field operations.” He divided those operations into three categories: the Hamlet Informant program (HIP), which concerned low-level informants in the villages and hamlets; the Province Interrogation Center program, including Chieu Hoi and captured documents; and agent penetrations. “I did not organize these programs,” he acknowledged. “They were already in place. What I did do was to clean up the act … bureaucratize …. We had some province officers trying to build PICs, while some didn’t care. We even had police liaison people putting whistles on kites at night to scare away the VC when that wasn’t part of their job. We were not supposed to be propagandists; that’s covert operations’ job.”
As Brickham saw it, a Special Branch adviser should limit himself to his primary duties: training Vietnamese Special Branch case officers how to mount penetrations of the VCI, giving them cash for informers and for building interrogation centers, and reporting on the results. Brickham did this by imposing his management style on the organization. As developed over the years, that style was based on three principles: “Operate lean and hungry, don’t get bogged down in numbers, and figure some way to hold their feet to the fire.
“When I got there, we had about fourteen province officers who were not distributed evenly around the country but were concentrated in population centers, the major ports, and provinces of particular interest. A lot of provinces were empty, so we had to fill them up, and we eventually got our strength up to fifty.”
Training of incoming officers was done in Washington, although Brickham and his staff (including John Muldoon and an officer who handled logistics) gave them briefings on personal security, aircraft security, emergency behavior, and procedure—”what to do if your plane is shot down in VC territory or if the VC overrun a village you’re working in …. Some guys took it seriously; some did not,” Brickham noted. “We also gave them reading material—a Time magazine article on the Chinese mind and several books, the most important of which was Village in Vietnam. But we had to cut back on this because the stuff was constantly disappearing. Then, as the police advisory program expanded, Washington set up another training program for ex-police officers being brought in on contract and for military officers and enlisted men assigned to the agency …. We had a bunch of guys on contract as province officers who were not CIA officers, but who were hired by the agency and given to us.”
Not the sort of man to suffer fools, Brickham quickly began weeding out the chaff from the wheat, recommending home leave for province officers who had operational fund shortages or were not at their posts or otherwise could not cut the mustard. Brickham’s method of evaluating officers was a monthly report. “I wanted a province officer to tell me once a month every place he’d been and how long he’d been there. Normally this kind of thing wouldn’t show up in a report, but it was important to me and it was important to the Vietnamese that our people ‘show the flag’ and be there when the action was going on. Reporting makes for accountability.
“A Special Branch monthly report, as I designed it, would go up to four pages in length and would take province officers two or three days to complete. … The reports were then sent in from the province through the region officer [a position Brickham placed in the chain of command], who wrote his report on top of it. We studied them in Saigon, packaged them up, and sent them on to Washington, where they had never seen anything like it.”
To streamline the rapidly expanding Special Branch advisory program further, Brickham set up six regional offices and appointed region officers; Gordon Rothwell in Da Nang, for I Corps; Dick Akins in Nha Trang, handling the coastal provinces in II Corps; Tom Burke in Ban Me Thuot, handling Montagnard provinces; Sam Drakulich in Bien Hoa in III Corps; Bob Collier in My Tho for the northern Delta; and Kinloch Bull in Can Tho for the southern provinces. Brickham’s liaison branch was the first to have region officers; the rest of the station was not operating that way. In fact, while the liaison branch had one officer in each province, reporting to a region officer, the discombobulated covert action branch had five or six programs in each province, with an officer for each program, with more than two hundred officers coming in and out of headquarters, each operating under the direct supervision of Tom Donohue.
Donohue scoffed at Brickham’s attention to reporting. “My point, of course, was quite the oppos
ite of Brickham’s,” he said. “I felt it was better to keep those guys working and not tie them up with paper work (that can be handled elsewhere). What I did was take raw reporting and give it to an officer who was not really any good in the field, and he was responsible for doing nothing but producing finished reporting from raw reporting. That takes the problem off the guys in the field. It’s the same problem that so many sales organizations have: Do they want their people on the street or doing reports?”2
Donohue’s budget (“about twenty-eight million dollars a year”) was considerably larger than his archrival Brickham’s, which was approximately one million dollars a year. Otherwise, according to Brickham, “The main difference between Foreign Intelligence and Paramilitary was the fact that we had region officers, but the PM people worked directly out of Saigon. … And it was this situation that Hart wanted to straighten out.
“Hart’s first move was to adopt this regional officer concept from the liaison branch,” Brickham explained. “Second was to establish province officers so all CIA operations in a particular province came under one coordinated command. The fact that it operated on the other basis for as long as it did is almost unbelievable, but there was just too much money and not enough planning.
“The covert action people are a breed apart”—Brickham sighed—”especially the paramilitary types. They’ve had a sort of checkered history within the agency, and in Vietnam most of them were refugees from the Cuban failure. More than one of them said they were damned if they were going to be on the losing end of the Vietnam operation, too.” Backing away from the knuckle draggers, Brickham noted: “We had very little to do with one another. They were located across the hall from us in the embassy annex, and we knew each other, and we were friends, and we drank beer together. But we had our separate programs, theirs being the covert programs the station was conducting in the provinces. The PM shop was basically an intelligence arm under cover, getting its own intelligence through armed propaganda teams, Census Grievance, and the whole Montagnard program run out of Pleiku …. Then they had the so-called counterterror teams, which initially were exactly as leftist propaganda described them. They were teams that went into VC areas to do to them what they were doing to us. It gets sort of interesting. When the VC would come into villages, they’d leave a couple of heads sticking on fence posts as they left. That kind of thing. Up there in I Corps there was more than one occasion where U.S. advisers would be found dead with nails through their foreheads.”
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