Phoenix Program

by Douglas Valentine

  One of the new breed was Navy Lieutenant John Wilbur, a tall, husky, sensitive Yale graduate. In April 1967 Wilbur journeyed to Vietnam as deputy commander of SEAL Team 2, a twelve-man detachment, with no combat veterans in its ranks, which was assigned to a naval riverine warfare group and quartered in a Quonset hut at the My Tho River dock facility in the middle of the Mekong Delta.

  “Frankly,” Wilbur (now an attorney in Palm Beach) told me, “the Navy didn’t know what to do with us. They didn’t know how to target us or how to operationally control us. So basically they said, ‘You guys are to go out and interdict supply lines and conduct harassing ambushes and create destruction upon the enemy however you can.’ Mostly, we were to be reactive to, and protective of, the Navy’s PBRs [river patrol boats]. That was probably our most understandable and direct mission. The PBR squadron leaders would bring us intelligence from the PBR patrols. They would report where they saw enemy troops or if there was an ambush of a PBR. Then we’d go out and get the guys who did it.”11

  Knowing what to do and doing it, however, were two vastly different things. Despite their being highly trained and disciplined, Wilbur confessed, “That first month we started out with the typical disastrous screw-up operations. In our first operation … we went out at low tide and ended up getting stuck in mud flats in broad daylight for six hours before we could be extracted…. We didn’t have any Vietnamese with us, and we didn’t understand very basic things…. We didn’t know whether it was a VC cadre or a guy trying to pick up a piece of ass late at night. The only things we had were curfews and free fire zones. And what a curfew was, and what a free fire zone was, became sort of an administrative-political decision. For all we knew, everybody there was terrible.

  “We got lost. We got hurt. People were shooting back at us, and other times we never got to a place where we could find people to shoot at…. There was a lot of frustration,” Wilbur said, “of having no assurance that the information you got was at all reliable and timely.”

  As an example, Wilbur cited the time “we raided an island across from where the U.S. Ninth Infantry Division was based. We surrounded the settlement that morning and came in with our guns blazing…. I remember crawling into a hut—which in Vietnam was a sort of shed encompassing a mud pillbox where people would hide from attacks—looking for a VC field hospital. There I was with a hand grenade with the pin pulled, my hand on my automatic, guys running around, adrenaline going crazy, people screaming—and I didn’t know who the hell was shooting at who. I can remember that I just wanted to throw the goddamned grenade in the hut, and screw whoever was in it. And all of a sudden discovering there was nothing but women and children in there. It was a very poignant experience.

  “This was during that first two-month period,” Wilbur said, shaking his head. “Then one day a SEAL Team One enlisted man who was assigned to the CIA came down to My Tho. His name was Dave, and he was one of two advisers to the PRU, whom we vaguely knew to be independent. Dave presented us with a whole new perspective. He was dressed in blue jeans and a khaki shirt, he had his own jeep, and he went where he wanted and did what he wanted to do. He had a sense of place. He gave me a fairly broad brief, which attracted the hell out of me. Then he said, ‘I’ve got some people, and I’d like to run some operations with you.’”

  In exchange, the SEAL team provided the PRU with increased firepower. Explained Wilbur: “We had all the toys: M-seventy-nines, CAR fifteens, Swedish Ks, grease guns, and grenades. Not only that, we had tremendous support capabilities through the Navy chopper squadron [the Sea Wolves] and the PBRs. And we got immediate reaction through the Navy chain of command. So it was advisable for the PRU to work with us. The Vietnamese wanted helicopter rides and that reaction requirement. In exchange, they had the skills, the intelligence, and the experience to know where the bad guys were—who to shoot at and who not to shoot at. It had the potential for a very beneficial relationship.”

  One of the attributes of the PRU was that they were required to be from the province in which they operated. “So they had relatives and friends in the area,” Wilbur explained, and “they had their own intelligence network set up. They’d go back to their hometown for a couple of days, sit around and drink tea and say, ‘What’s happening?’ And a friend would say, ‘Tran’s a buddy of mine; I’ll tell him about the VC district chief meeting.’” Tran would then tell the PRU adviser and, Wilbur said, “Dave, would come down and say, ‘My guy says there’s a VC district chief meeting. We need some helicopter gunship support. We want to be able to air-evac. You give us the Sea Wolves, we’ll give you the operation, and together we’ll score a victory.’”

  At first Dave assigned one of the PRU to Wilbur as a scout, so the SEALs could adjust to working with a Vietnamese. The teenage scout “could more or less indicate where the VC were set up, when they might come by, and where we might ambush them,” Wilbur told me. “He was the kind of person to say, ‘We aren’t going to go on a PBR into this town. We’ll take a little water taxi, and we’ll hide on the river till night, then go in at three A.M. and … go there.’

  “He helped us chart a course for the war,” Wilbur added respectfully. “He gave me a sense of confidence and made us feel that we weren’t spinning our self-destructive wheels. I was very aware of how minimally trained most Americans were. I remember being in the Sea Wolf helicopters, and people shooting at peasants on water buffaloes, or at fishermen in dugouts because they happened to be in free fire zones, or rocketing huts and burning things down. But with the PRU, I had the ability to control things better than the William Calleys did. I was a professional officer in an elite organization that had a lot of pride, and we were not going to mess up.

  “I remember one evening on an LST, right after an operation, sensing there was nothing but anarchy bordering on idiocy in how we were conducting the war.” Wilbur sighed. “I remember writing a letter in my mind to [Yale University President] Kingman Brewster, telling him how important it was for people who had some moral training and education to be on the ground to prevent the negligent cruelties that occurred. I saw myself as that person. I saw an opportunity for SEAL team assets and training to multiply exponentially by working with the PRU. I didn’t have any master plan, but I felt, when I am with this kid, I think I know where he’s going, and when he puts his hand on my arm and whispers, ‘Don’t shoot,’ I know that I shouldn’t shoot. And those were significant things. You felt he was guiding you to do something you ought to do and preventing you from doing what you ought not to do.

  “This guy proved himself to me,” Wilbur stated emphatically. “He was able to command in the field. He was at home, and I wanted to be like that. He was a very good influence. Plus which the Vietnamese are very sweet, affectionate people. You’d go to places and they’d be walking around holding hands with American sergeants. Or they’d come up behind you, put their arms around you, hug you, and offer you some cigarettes. The kid was like that. He was friendly. He reacted. He hung around and became our mascot, which he liked.”

  Wilbur was also intrigued by the CIA mystique. “Dave had this freedom and economy. He was working with intelligent people, whom I got to know, and so I indicated to him that I’d like to get into the PRU program. By coincidence, this happened just when the agency wanted to expand the PRU and develop its mission—as they envisioned it, a PRU unit in every province with a Special Forces adviser doing the daily operational control. Special Forces, including SEALs, Force Recon Marines, Green Berets, and SAS [British Special Air Service].

  “So, lo and behold, just as I became anxious to get into this area, word came down that the Navy was to suggest an officer to go up to a two-week briefing in Saigon, to develop a SEAL adviser system in this program. This was July 1967. I was sent to Navy headquarters in Saigon and told to go to a huge house with servant quarters around the walls outside. There we were organized by Bill Redel. This was his baby,” Wilbur said. “There were no Vietnamese visible, unlike the RD program. The PRU program
was American-controlled, which is absolutely essential. It was the breakdown of that control that eventually led to the destruction of the PRU concept.”

  It is also important to recall that before July 1967 PRU teams were organized and directed by CIA advisers at the province level through the province chief’s special assistant for pacification. It was only with the formation of ICEX that the PRU became a national program under CIA officer William R. Redel, a veteran of Greece and Korea who wore a Marine Corps colonel’s uniform. “He and I were old and close friends,” said Evan Parker, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, “and there again we cooperated with him and helped.”12 Collocated in USAID II, Redel and Parker worked as equal partners.

  “His program was also for going after the VCI,” according to Parker. “These were paramilitary people, mostly former Vietcong. In many instances the province chief preferred to use them as his action arm against the infrastructure, rather than regular army forces, which were not as responsive. That’s the key; the PRU were directly responsive because you were dealing with the convinced.”

  John Wilbur recalled: “Bill Redel was a good-looking guy: Nordic, blue eyes, tanned—a model type of guy. He was a good salesman, too, smooth bureaucratically and very political. He greased palms well.

  “Bill organized it like a tour,” Wilbur said of the briefing in Saigon. “There were fifteen or twenty of us; SEALs … Special Forces … Force Recon Marines, and straight-leg Army infantry types. Maybe four or five of each. The way it was set up, the Force Recon people were to be advisers in Eye Corps; by and large the Special Forces in Two Corps; the Army in Three Corps, and the SEALs in Four Corps. Most of us were officers or senior enlisted men.

  “During the first week we all stayed at the same hotel … and we were indoctrinated in what Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) was all about—Census Grievance, Revolutionary Development, et cetera. We were given a presentation indicating that we were all volunteers, then were told what the PRU mission was: to target the political infrastructure of the Vietcong, to gather and compile accurate information about it, and to react upon that information to try to destroy the political and economic infrastructure of COSVN. A lot of our briefing concerned COSVN’s political, economic, and military arms. We were told what the VCI was, how it operated, and why we were targeted against it. It was almost like learning about CORDS. It was exciting and heady, too. Coming from the military envelope, I was awakened into this whole new world. It was ‘Hey! This is a secret’ and ‘We’re the tough guys!’ I was pretty impressed with myself.

  “Then we spent two days down at the Vung Tau training camp. It was actually a short helicopter ride north, off in the dunes on the South China Sea. The training facility was a corrugated iron compound with classrooms and barracks, a chow hall, and lecture rooms. Two or three hundred people. Then there were rifle ranges and the operational course. There were American instructors, but not many, and the chief administrator was an American—one of the colorful names—baldheaded, barrel-chested, tough, marinish. It was also at Vung Tau that I met Kinloch Bull. Then we all returned to our tactical areas of responsibility. I went to Can Tho to talk further with Kinloch Bull.”

  Described by Nelson Brickham as “a strange person, devious and sly,”13 Bull was one of the few Foreign Intelligence officers to serve as a CIA region officer in charge. A confirmed bachelor, Bull worked undercover as the director of a Catholic boarding school, where he would “preside at the head of the table like a headmaster.” Tall and thin and fastidious, Bull was a gourmet cook and protege of William Colby’s. He was also an intellectual who confided to Wilbur that his ambition was to sit at a typewriter on the southern tip of the Ca Mau Peninsula and, like Camus, write existential novels.

  “We lived in Binh Se Moi,” recalled Wilbur, “the motor vehicle hub of Can Tho. Actually it was about five kilometers up the river, halfway between the city and the airport. We were down an alley surrounded by whorehouses and massage parlors where all the enlisted troops would go. There were five or six of us in the place, and I was by far the junior. The others were all in their second careers. There was Bill Dodds, a retired Army colonel with unconventional warfare experience in Korea and Africa. He was the RDC/O in charge of the paramilitary program of which the PRU was a part. Another guy living there was Wayne Johnson, the Phong Dinh province officer. The Special Branch person, the RDC/P, lived with Kinloch. They were all very paternal, very loyal, very fine people.

  “So I started working for Kinloch Bull,” Wilbur said, “but the Navy wanted me still to work for them. They wanted to make the PRU program theirs, so they could brag about it. But the CIA told me not to provide the Navy with operational reports, so the Navy tried to have me relieved. At which point Kinloch said, ‘Well, we’ll kick the Navy out of the Delta program then.’ It progressed into a tremendous bureaucratic tug-of-war. Everybody wanted to have the PRU because they inflated their statistics.”

  In describing how the PRU program was structured, Wilbur recalled, “When I got to Can Tho in July, eleven of the sixteen provinces had PRU units. By September they all did. The number of PRU varied from province to province. We had a very large detachment in Can Tho, maybe a hundred. The smallest was twenty in Kien Giang.

  “I tried to make sure my advisers were all senior enlisted men,” Wilbur continued, “from either SEAL Team One or Two. I had about half and half. We wanted them for a long period of time, but the SEAL teams wanted to rotate as many people as possible in the program, to keep it theirs. I recommended one-year billets, but it turned out to be six months.

  “The advisers were assigned to CORDS province teams and came under the direct command of the CIA’s province officer,” Wilbur explained. “They were not under my direct operational control, and much to my horror, I found myself in an administrative position. And the senior enlisted people were very political in terms of how they tried to maximize their independence. They loved wearing civilian clothes and saying they worked for the CIA, having cover names and their own private armies, and no bloody officers or bullshit with barracks. So a lot of my job was … maintaining good relations between the PRU advisers and the province officers, many of whom were retired Special Forces sergeant majors with distinguished military careers. Often there were sparks between the PRU adviser and province officer because it was a little too close to their old professions.”

  Province officers with military backgrounds often exerted more control over the PRU teams than young, college graduate-type officers who had difficulty controlling their hard-bitten PRU advisers, many of whom were veterans of OPLAN 34A and the counterterror program before it was sanitized. “So where I had the most problems,” Wilbur explained, “it was usually when the province officer had more expertise in what the PRU were doing and would run it more hands-on and, in many instances, better than the PRU adviser. And in those instances I had to relieve the PRU adviser … Also, to be honest, a lot of PRU advisers were being manipulated by their PRU people. You can’t have people go out on combat operations three times a week indefinitely. It’s like having teams in the National Football League play two games a week. It takes time to recover, and the PRU had a natural and understandable desire to bag it. So the PRU would figure out excuses to get their advisers to resist the operation. Then the PRU adviser would become the man in the middle. Sometimes he’d say, ‘Well, we can’t go out; we don’t have enough people.’

  “In other cases the PRU advisers tried to win popularity contests with their cadre,” according to Wilbur, “and then the province officer would get mad at the PRU adviser for being less responsive to him than the PRU cadre themselves. Then that would create a problem between me and the PRU adviser and in many instances between me and the province officer. Bill Redel had the same problem. He was the national PRU adviser, but he had no authority over the region officers. He would tell me to do things, and I would do exactly what my enlisted men would do. If I didn’t want to do it, I’d go to Jim War
d and say, ‘Do I have to do this?’ And he’d say, ‘No. I’m going to tell Bill Redel to go shove it.’ In the same way, my PRU advisers would hide behind their province people, so as not to do what I wanted them to do.”

  As for the quality of his PRU advisers, Wilbur said, “The original SEALs were tough guys who did a lot of training but hadn’t fought in any wars. Then they went over to Vietnam. By that time they had kids and they weren’t that aggressive. The senior guys wanted to send the PRU people out on operations and stay by the radio. Which was a problem.

  “We had one situation where we got the operational report that they went out and killed two people and captured two weapons. But they didn’t kill anyone the second time … and it was the same weapon. My PRU adviser would drop the PRU team off in his jeep, and he’d pick them up, and he’d transport them back and forth. So he never discovered that they were going out and planting weapons.

  “Other guys really rose to the occasion,” Wilbur noted, adding that because the older men played it safe, the people who started dominating the SEAL ranks “were the young tiger enlisted men. They’d go out and waste people.”

  One of those “young tiger enlisted men” was Navy SEAL Mike Beamon, who worked “on the Phoenix program in the Ben Tre and My Tho areas” from mid-1968 through February 1969. Beamon’s recollections of the PRU resemble Elton Manzione’s more than John Wilbur’s. He described the PRU as “made up by and large of guys who were doing jail time for murder, rape, theft, assault in Vietnam. The CIA would bail them out of jail under the condition that they would work in these mercenary units.”14

  Beamon spoke of the PRU using ears as evidence to prove they had assassinated a particular VCI and of PRU stealing weapons from South Vietnamese armories and selling them to the CIA. “I can remember ambushing a lot of tax collectors,” he added. “After they made all the collections, you’d hit them in the morning and rob them of the money and, of course, kill them. And then report that all the money was destroyed in the fire fight. They’d carry a thousand dollars at a time. So we’d have quite a party.”15