Phoenix Program

by Douglas Valentine

  “My point,” Brickham emphasized, “was not to change anything, just do it better. We didn’t need more intelligence; we needed better intelligence, properly analyzed and collated. That’s the strategy.

  “Next, the structure, which, of course, was interagency in nature and encompassed MACV, CIA, CORDS, Revolutionary Development, and the embassy. Now when you start fooling around with other agencies, you’re in trouble. Each one has its own legislative mandate, meaning its job prescribed by Congress or as defined in the Constitution. Then there is legislative funding, funds allocations, accounting procedures, and the question of who is going to pay for something. Those legislative givens have to be respected. I as a CIA officer cannot set up an organizational arrangement where I’m going to spend Pentagon money unless the Pentagon gives it. And even if they give it to me, it still has to be within the framework of the congressional appropriation. Then there are the bureaucratic empires, in both Saigon and Washington, all deeply committed to these things. You have overlap, contradictory programs, ill-conceived ventures which receive hearings; time is wasted, and you get corruption, embezzlement, and low morale. And yet somehow you have to pull all these different agencies together.”

  In looking for a solution, Brickham seized on the personality and presidential mandate of Robert Komer. “Komer had already acquired the nickname Blowtorch,” Brickham said, “and his position was a bureaucratic anomaly. He was a deputy ambassador on a par with General [Creighton] Abrams … but actually he was reporting to Lyndon Johnson, and everyone knew that. So my idea was to set up a board of directors in which each agency head or his deputy was a member, then establish a reporting system that would allow a guy like Komer to hold their feet to the fire—to make each agency responsive, to give it goals and targets, and to criticize its failures in performance, whether deliberately or inadvertently through sloppiness.

  “Remember, the strategy was to sharpen up intelligence collection and analysis and to speed up the reaction time in responding to intelligence, whether on a military or a police level. So the idea was to set up a structure in which agencies had to participate and had to bring their own resources and funds to bear, without interfering with their legislative mandate or financial procedures.”

  In determining how to do this, Brickham borrowed an organizational model from the Ford Motor Company, which, he said, had “set up a command post to run their operations, with the policy of the corporation coming from the chief executive officer and a board of directors. Call it the operating committee at the top, supported by a statistical reporting unit that put everything together for the chief executive and the board of directors, giving management the bottom line for them to consider and make decisions …. This became the basic structure for the general staff, which Hart was calling ICEX—intelligence coordination and exploitation. I wrote it so the different agencies would provide their own money, personnel, and direction, but as part of a machinery by which they would be directed to a specific purpose.”

  Having formulated a strategy and structure, Brickham turned to management, which for him boiled down to two things: the bottom line, telling management only what it needed to know; and using reporting as a tool to shape behavior, as articulated by Rensis Likert in New Patterns of Management.

  “Basically,” Brickham explained, “a reporting format fosters self-improvement, if the people reporting know what they are expected to do, and are provided with objective measurements of performance in terms of those expectations …. So we designed the reporting structure to provide critical types of information to the ICEX board of directors, primarily Komer. But also, by focusing attention in the regions and the provinces on the things we felt were important, we tried to guarantee that those things worked properly.”

  In particular, Brickham hoped to correct “the grave problem of distortion and cover-up which a reporting system must address.” In explaining this problem to Komer, Brickham quoted a CIA officer who had criticized “the current system of reporting statistics that prove … that successive generations of American officials in Vietnam are more successful than their predecessors.” The officer observed that “Americans in the field, the majority of whom serve a one-year tour … go through a honeymoon phase in which they try to see everything good about their counterpart and about the situation and report it thus. Then they go through a period of disillusionment in which they realize that nothing has been accomplished, but by this time they have become the victims of their own past reports and they have to maintain the fiction. Ultimately they go out of there very discouraged and probably very unhappy with their own performance because about the same time they become knowledgeable enough to really do something they are on their way home and have no desire to hurt their own professional career.”

  Explained Brickham: “The key to ICEX was decentralization”—in other words, forcing field officers to do their jobs by putting responsibility on the scene, while at the same time trying to deliver to these officers the kinds and amounts of information they needed, fast. “This means feedback,” Brickham stressed, “which reflects and recognizes the province officer’s own activities, tells him what other people are doing, identifies to him the important and reportable activities, and induces a competitive and emulative spirit.”

  Keyed to Special Branch reporting cycles, the initial ICEX reporting format was submitted monthly and contained narrative and statistical data responding to requirements from Washington, Saigon, and the regions. It reflected the activities, understanding, and writing abilities of field officers, enabling managers like Komer to judge performance. It also revealed program progress and functioning of related systems. Meanwhile, John Hansen was developing a comprehensive input sheet capable of listing every piece of biographical information on VCI individuals, operations, and organization in general. He was also designing collated printouts on the VCI, which were to be sent to region, province, and district ICEX officers plugged into the ICEX computer system.

  “Anyway,” said Brickham, “those were the ideas that involved this statistical reporting unit for the ICEX staff, which was to pull everything together and analyze it. The statistical reporting unit was the guts, with a plans and programs unit and a special investigations unit tacked onto it.”

  On May 22, 1967, Nelson Brickham and John Hansen delivered to Komer a three-page memo titled “A Concept for Organization for Attack on VC Infrastructure.” Hurriedly prepared, it recommended four things. First was the creation of a board of directors chaired by the DEPCORDS and including the senior intelligence and operations officers from MACV, CIA, and CORDS—a general staff for pacification under Robert Komer. Next, it recommended the creation of a command post in Saigon and ICEX committees in the regions and provinces. Thirdly, it recommended that the Americans “coordinate and focus” the attack on the VCI and that they “stimulate” their Vietnamese counterparts. Lastly, it recommended that province officers create DIOCCs, which Brickham called “the essential ingredient in the Phoenix [as ICEX would eventually be renamed] stew.”

  The concept paper was approved by the CIA station, then sent to Komer, who turned it down. As Brickham recalled, “Komer said, ‘A concept paper is not what I want. I want a missions and functions paper—something in military style that the military can understand.’”

  “At this point,” Brickham said, “I was seconded over to Komer’s office. He was buying everything that we proposed to him, but he wanted to develop ‘action papers.’ He kept repeating, over and over again, that he wanted a ‘rifle shot’ approach—a sniper’s attack, not a shotgun approach—against the VCI. And Komer is a stickler. He was constantly throwing papers back at me to rewrite over and over again until they satisfied him in those terms.”

  In response to Komer’s demands, Brickham and Hansen incorporated the major themes of the concept paper into a detailed missions and functions paper titled “A Proposal for the Coordination and Management of Intelligence Programs and Attack on the VC Infrastructure and Local Irreg
ular Forces.” What resulted, according to Brickham, “was not a general staff planning body, but an executive action organization that was focused on getting the job done, not thinking about it, by taking advantage of Komer’s dynamic personality.”

  Eleven pages long (plus annexes on interrogation, data processing, and sceening and detention of VCI), “A Proposal” was accepted by Komer in early June 1967. Its stated purpose was: “to undertake the integration of efforts of all US and GVN organizations, both in intelligence collection and processing and in operations directed against the elimination of the VC Infrastructure and irregular forces” and “to insure that basic programs conducted by different organizations and components, as they relate to the elimination of the VCI, are made mutually compatible, continuous, and fully effective.”2

  ICEX as the embodiment of executive action had emerged as the solution to the problem posed by the VCI. It was a “machine” composed of joint committees at national, corps, province, and district levels. At the top sat Robert Komer as chairman of the board, setting policy with the approval of the ambassador and MACV commander. Serving as Komer’s command post was the ICEX Directorate in Saigon, to be headed by “the senior U.S. coordinator for organizing the overall attack on the VCI.”3

  The ICEX Directorate was to be subdivided into three units. The intelligence unit was to be composed of two senior liaison officers—one from MACV and one from the CIA—who were to prepare briefings, conduct special investigations, and evaluate the effectiveness of the attack on the VCI.

  The operations (aka the plans and programs) unit was to be composed of three program managers who planned activities, set requirements, managed funds, and were responsible for three specific problem areas: (1) intelligence collection programs and their coordination and reaction operations; (2) screening, detention, and judicial processing of VC civil defendants; and (3) the interrogation exploitation of VC captives and defectors. How ICEX handled these problem areas will be discussed at length in Chapter 10.

  The reports management unit was to refine the attack on the VCI through the science fiction of statistical analysis. Reports officers were to help program managers “in developing reports to be required from Region and Province” and to analyze those reports. The reports dealt with province staffing; prisoner and defector accession and disposition; RD team locations, actions, and casualties; quantitative and qualitative descriptions of intelligence reports and PRU operations; and province inspection reports, among other things. The reporting unit included an inspections team because, as Brickham observed, “Everybody lies …. These guys are supposed to be on the road most of the time, dropping in unexpectedly to look at your files and to verify what was being reported to us in writing was true.”

  ICEX field operations were to be grafted onto the CIA’s liaison and covert action programs, with the region and province officers in charge continuing to manage those programs and in most cases assuming the added job of ICEX coordinator. The ICEX Province Committee was to be “the center of gravity of intelligence operations against the VCI.” The ICEX province coordinator in turn was to establish and supervise DIOCCs (usually seven or eight per province), “where the bulk of the attack on the low level infrastructure and local guerrilla forces must be generated and carried out.” ICEX committees at each level were to be composed of the senior intelligence, operations, and pacification officers. And the ICEX coordinator was to “recommend and generate operations for the attack on infrastructure” and “stimulate Vietnamese interagency cooperation and coordination.”4

  “I’m a great advocate of committee meetings,” Brickham told me, “provided they’re properly run. That’s why Phoenix wound up as a committee structure at nation, region, province, and district levels. A joint staff at every level down to district is the essence of Phoenix. We hoped the committee structure would be a nonoperative kind of thing, but we had to have some machinery for bringing together everybody involved in these programs.”

  Added Brickham: “Some Phoenix coordinators were from the Agency for International Development or the military. They didn’t have to be CIA. Same with the province officer in charge; the POIC would be a member of the Phoenix committee, whether or not he was the coordinator.” However, insofar as the PICs and the PRU were the foundation stones of Phoenix, if someone other than the CIA province officer in charge was the ICEX Province Committee chairman or its coordinator, that person was totally dependent on the POIC for access to information on, and reaction forces for use against, the VCI. In addition, the committee structure allowed the CIA to deny plausibly that it had anyone operating in the DIOCCs.

  “I was opposed to the DIOCCs at the beginning,” Brickham admitted, “but after I visited three places up north and wrote the early June paper, I had converted into believing in them as important …. And then Komer said we could have as many men as we asked for, and at that point we tried to get district officers.” In any event, according to Brickham, “ICEX institutionalizes the thing.”

  “Okay,” said Brickham. “Komer approved this, and we sent a cable to Washington headquarters outlining the situation and requesting approval. And we got a cable back from Colby which basically said, ‘Well, we don’t know what you’re going to do.’ And as I recall, they suggested that we sort of pull in our horns.”

  “Well, we said, ‘This is the only way to do it, so we’ll just go ahead and do it.’ We came up with the ambassador’s approval out there in the field, so back in Washington they were left with a fait accompli. And the irony is, Colby had nothing to do with ICEX or Phoenix. He had to go along with it. It was approved by Komer and the ambassador and the White House, so we implemented it.” At that point Nelson Brickham returned to Washington for a job on the Vietnamese desk, and a new personality appeared on the scene, willing and ready to pick up where Brickham had left off.

  Having chatted with Roger Trinquier in Vung Tau in 1952, Evan Parker, Jr., was no stranger to Vietnam. As the son of an American pilot who had served in King George’s Royal Flying Corps in the First World War, Parker was also well connected. Upon graduating from Cornell University in 1943, Parker, who was fluent in French, was invited to join the fashionable OSS. Trained with the jaunty Jedburghs,* he was slated to parachute into France but instead was sent to Burma, where he served in Detachment 101, as an interrogation and logistics officer fighting with Kachin hill tribes behind the Japanese lines. Parker later served as Detachment 101’s liaison officer to Merrill’s Marauders and the British Thirty-sixth Division. His service with the OSS (followed by a brief stint as a traveling salesman) led to a career in the CIA’s clandestine services and to personal relationships with many of the major Vietnamese, French, and American players in Vietnam.

  Parker began his CIA career as a courier in the Far East, then was graduated to case officer, operating mostly in Hong Kong and China. Over the ensuing years, he told me when we met in 1986, he made “four or five” trips to Vietnam and, when he arrived again in Saigon in June 1967, was slated to become the station’s executive director, its third-highest-ranking position. However, Robert Komer and John Hart thought that Parker could better serve “the cause” as ICEX’s first director.

  Parker was chosen to manage ICEX, first and foremost, because Komer needed a senior CIA officer in that position. The CIA alone had the expertise in covert paramilitary and intelligence operations, the CIA alone was in liaison with the Special Branch and the CIO, and the CIA alone could supply money and resources on a moment’s notice, without the red tape that strapped the military and the State Department. As a GS-16 with the equivalent rank of a brigadier general, Evan Parker, Jr., had the status and the security clearances that would allow him access to all these things.

  Parker’s persona and professional record also made him the perfect candidate for the job. Having just completed a tour as the CIA officer assigned to the Pentagon’s Pacific Command, Parker had helped draw up the military’s strategic plan for Vietnam and was well aware of how Vietnam fitted into th
e “big picture.” Possessing the persuasive skills and political connections of a seasoned diplomat, Parker also enjoyed the status and the style necessary to soothe the monumental egos of obstinate military officers and bureaucrats. And “as the expert on unconventional warfare,” which was how Tully Acampora facetiously referred to him, Evan Parker had the tradecraft qualifications required to launch a top secret, highly sensitive, coordinated attack on the VCI.

  Upon arriving in Saigon, Parker prepared himself by reading Brickham’s papers and reviewing “the fifty to sixty” programs we already had in place to deal with the “infrastructure,” a word Parker described to me as “hideous.”5* At an informal conference in Da Nang called to discuss the attack on the VCI, Parker learned that Brickham “and his partners in crime” wanted to concentrate their efforts initially on the Americans, then on the Vietnamese, but that Komer first had to ram ICEX through the impervious Saigon bureaucracy.

  This was not hard to do, considering that President Johnson had given Komer a mandate that encompassed not only the formulation of an integrated attack on the VCI but also the reorganization of the Republic of Vietnam’s armed forces, management of the October 1967 Vietnamese presidential elections, and revitalizing South Vietnam’s economy. When faced with the irresistible force called Robert “Blowtorch” Komer, the immovable Saigon bureaucracy gave way quickly, if not altogether voluntarily.

  Flanked by John Hart and General George Forsythe, MACV’s chief of Revolutionary Development, Komer on June 14, 1967, presented MACV’s chiefs of staff with Brickham’s “Proposal.” Komer made a forceful presentation, writes Ralph Johnson, but Generals Phillip B. Davidson Jr., Walter Kerwin, and William Pearson balked, “because MACV personnel requirements were not included.”6

  But it did not matter that the majority of DIOCC advisers were slated to be military men. Komer, backed by Hart, simply took his case to MACV commander Westmoreland, who, having been informed of President Johnson’s wishes in the matter by Ambassador Bunker, overruled his staff on June 16. A few days later the White House Coordinating Committee (Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Earle Wheeler, and Chairman William Sullivan) nodded their final approval. And so it was that ICEX—soon to be Phoenix—was born. And not without resentment. General McChristian recalled, “On my last day in Vietnam, I became aware that a new plan for attacking the VCI was to be implemented. It was to be called ICEX. To put it mildly, I was amazed and dismayed.”7 McChristian was amazed that he had not been told earlier, and was dismayed because ICEX was going to replace Cong Tac IV.