Phoenix Program

by Douglas Valentine

  Indeed, Phoenix was labeled an assassination program, evoking the specter of war crimes and leading many people to minimize the impact of quotas. “I think it was moot,” Warren Milberg said. “It was something I just ignored. For the most part it was coming to you from people in Saigon who were going home at night and sitting under the veranda of the Continental Hotel. You just didn’t take that stuff seriously. They couldn’t relate to what you were doing, just like you couldn’t relate to what they were doing. It was a different war. It was a different part of the world.”

  Another Phoenix coordinator, a CIA Czechoslovakian desk officer sent to Bien Hoa Province in 1968, saw comparisons between Phoenix and Gestapo tactics in World War II. For him, “The reports I sent in from my province on the number of Communists that were neutralized reminded me of the reports Hitler’s concentration camp commanders sent in on how many inmates they had exterminated, each commander lying that he had killed more than the others to please Himmler.”

  Why one person remained silent and went along with Phoenix while another spoke out against it is the subject of the next chapter.

  * CIA compounds in the provinces were called embassy houses, because they were extensions of the State Department’s consulates.

  * Decree Law 280 defined the VCI as all party members from COSVN to hamlet level and as cadre that “direct and control other parties and organizations such as … the Alliance of National Democratic and Peace Forces, or other similar organizations in the future.” The only people named as not being VCI were “VC military units” and “citizens forced to perform as laborers.” Law 280 charged the Ministry of the Interior, not the Defense Ministry, with footing the Phung Hoang bill.

  * One day later Colonel Luu Kim Cuong, commander of the First Transport Group and a senior aide to Ky, was killed by border police on the outskirts of Saigon.

  * Writes Johnstone: “The truncheon and electric shock methods of interrogation were in widespread use, with almost all advisors admitting to have witnessed instances of use of these methods.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Parallax Views

  “Our PRU in Quang Tri were all victims of Communist terror,” said Bob Brewer, who, like many CIA officers in Vietnam, believed he was singled out for assassination. A dedicated anti-Communist who felt personally threatened, Brewer was motivated, and so were his PRU. “They were so red hot you had to control them,” he added with delight.1

  The man with the job of controlling the PRU in Quang Tri Province was Warren Milberg. Elegant and sophisticated, Milberg today is the consummate corporate American male. His employer, the Titan Corporation, designs “Star Wars” lasers. And more than twenty years after the fact—despite a lingering resentment against cynical war managers who send idealistic young soldiers on suicidal rites of passage—Warren Milberg still embraces the cold war ideology and its corresponding Phoenix mythology.

  At the core of Milberg’s melancholy are two related experiences. Both happened in 1965 during his first tour in Vietnam, when he was deputy chief of security at the Da Nang air base. There Milberg’s involvement with agent nets brought him into contact with local CIA operators, who liked his style and invited him to participate in the ongoing SOG operation called Prairie Fire. Milberg joined SOG without the knowledge of his Air Force superiors. He put on black pajamas and worked with a team of Nung mercenaries, leading them on long-range patrols into Laos to monitor and interdict NVA units. Sometimes they sat on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and shot field-grade NVA officers from a thousand yards away, “so they never even heard the report.”2

  “This is where things started to get exciting,” recalled Milberg, who along with his other duties, began organizing counterterror teams. “I was doing training of Vietnamese and Americans—Marines and some Army people.” As for his indigenous personnel, “The Vietnamese were gansters and thugs—mercenaries who we trained and who were in our pay…. But my perception of the role of the CT teams was to strike terror into the enemy—the NVA and VC—not the population.

  “It was during this period of time,” Milberg continued, “when I started to think more about the war and my role in it. And I also began to see evidence of how the Vietcong were operating in the hamlets. I saw the messages for the tax collectors and the political officers. And what will always stand out in my mind was the terror and torture they used to strike fear and get compliance from the villagers … an event where a particular village chief’s wife, who was pregnant, was disemboweled and their unborn baby’s head was smashed with a rifle butt. We stumbled on this incident quite by accident within hours of it happening. I’d never seen anything like it in my life.”

  Milberg would not talk about the other traumatic incident, other than to say he was asked by the CIA to parachute into North Vietnam. That he did, even though he had never jumped from an airplane before. And something terrible happened, something too painful to describe, something that made him question the motives of war managers who would ask him to do such a reckless thing. He wondered if the mission had any purpose other than testing the men involved—to see how far they could be pushed and to prepare them for equally preposterous missions in the future. He wondered if he was a guinea pig.

  “This event resulted in my being afraid, which was a new experience for me. I spent a lot of time between tours thinking about it and wondering how I would react the next time. So it was almost like I needed to test it again.” In this way Warren Milberg’s self-doubt compelled him to return to Vietnam in August 1967, at the request of the CIA as part of the Presidentially Directed Counter-Insurgency Program that fleshed out ICEX.

  On the other hand, remorse drove Elton Manzione out of Vietnam, out of the military, and nearly out of his mind. Consider the cases of Manzione and Milberg: two men equally exposed to a blend of secrecy and terror. Enlisted man Manzione turned on his masters, renounced American imperialism, and spoke out against the misdeeds of the CIA. Officer Milberg submitted to authority and in return became one of the protected few, accepted into the cult of the phoenix, rewarded with the American dream.

  Manzione and Milberg are remarkably alike. They have the same kind of build, are the same age, and come from the Greater New York Metropolitan Area. Both have dark complexions and complexes, dark curly hair, and experience in special operations. Both are thoughtful, aggressive, high-strung. Where they part company is where America, too, is divided: over the question of values.

  As a SEAL in Quang Tri Province in 1964 Elton Manzione dressed like the enemy, worked with CTs who committed atrocities as standard procedure, and was told to ignore the rules of engagement. “But there was no sense of our role in the war,” he said to me forlornly. He will not talk about his comrades who died while on illegal missions into North Vietnam and Laos. But, he noted, “what annoys me is they’re not on the Washington monument simply because they ended up getting greased somewhere where they weren’t supposed to be.”3

  Manzione’s anger went beyond any lack of recognition. He resented the fact that he was trained to kill. “In psychology it’s called cognitive dissonance—the notion that once you make a commitment, it’s impossible to go back. It’s something about the human psyche that makes a person reluctant to admit a mistake. This is what training is all about. You’ve already killed the gook. So what if it isn’t a dummy in the bed this time? So what if it’s a living, breathing human being? This is what you’re supposed to do. And once the first time comes and goes, it’s not as hard the second time. You say to yourself, ‘Well, hey, I’ve killed people before. Why should I have any compunctions about doing it now?’

  “Training is brainwashing. They destroy your identity and supply you with a new one—a uniform identity that every soldier has. That’s the reason for the uniform, for everyone having the same haircut and going to dinner together and eating the same thing…. They destroyed the street kid from Newark and created the sailor. They destroyed the sailor and created the SEAL. But people aren’t robots, and despite their training, eventu
ally they react; they turn on their trainers and confront the outside forces that have used them. That’s what happened to me.

  “I was a guinea pig,” Manzione insisted. “There is no doubt in my mind today, and there was very little doubt then, even after five months in Vietnam. All the training and all the ‘special’ programs—it eventually began to backfire on them. I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, great program you got here; you’re using me to see how I react. I’m expendable. I’m a pawn.’ And that’s kind of a heavy realization when you’re an eighteen-year-old kid.

  “It’s a paradox. You know,” Manzione continued, “they would send a guy over there to be a replacement for a specific person who was being pulled out. So what consciously came across to you was ‘I’m functioning as a part of a machine. And if I fail as a part or break down as a part … then another part will come along to replace me.’ Then you find yourself thinking, ‘The last time I looked at somebody as not a part of the machine, and I thought he was a really great guy, and he’s a friend of mine, he stepped on a land mine and came down dust, hair, teeth, and eyeballs.’

  “Then you realize, ‘I can’t afford to do that. Because I feel terrible for a month afterwards.’ And you can’t function when you feel terrible. The only thing we could deal with at any particular time was survival. ‘What do I want to do today? I want to eat, sleep, and stay alive.’ And you did it. And you related to those kinds of things. Suddenly you looked around and said, ‘Wait a minute! That’s what those little guys in black pajamas are doing, too!’ You get to a point where you begin to see these people just want to be left alone to grow their rice.

  “I’ll give you one last example of what I’m talking about. I’m sure you’ve heard about the laser-guided smart bombs we had. Well, they would drop these laser-guided smart bombs, and what the VC would do was take a bunch of old rags and tires and stuff and start a bonfire with lots of smoke. And the laser beam would hit the smoke particles, and it would scatter, and the bombs would go crazy. They’d go up, down, sideways, all over the place. And people would smile and say, ‘There goes another smart bomb!’ So smart a gook with a match and an old tire can fuck it up!

  “The whole perverse idea of putting this technological, semiantiseptic sort of warfare against these people—who didn’t have much more than a stick—was absurd. The sticks won!”

  Warren Milberg had a different point of view. He enjoyed being a member of the closed society, in which relating to the enemy in human terms was cause for expulsion. For him, the image of the disemboweled mother and her murdered fetus “formed opinions and justifications for what I was doing. It was the idea that you needed to hate the enemy. It was the beginning of my own personalization of my role in the conflict. It was what resulted in me going back to Vietnam when everybody—my parents, my friends, my wife—told me no one in his right mind would go back to Vietnam. I really believed that I was helping these people defend themselves from the bully. And sometimes that worked well, and sometimes it was horrible…. It was horrible if you made some small little village on the periphery of the universe believe they could in fact stand tall and defend themselves against this thing we understood as the enemy, then came back the next day and found them all slaughtered. It happened. And then you had to ask yourself, ‘What did I do here? I made these people believe they could do something, and now they’re all dead. Maybe it would have been better if I had just done nothing. Just left these people alone.’

  “I’m still reconciling it. I still don’t think I’ve worked it all the way through.”

  Warren Milberg stared into the distance, seeing sights that only combat veterans see. “Things that have happened since then have led me to believe that I don’t want to be an instrument of policy anymore,” he concluded. “I think the people who devise the policies and cause idealistic young men to go off to war probably need to experience some of the things I’ve experienced to temper their judgments.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Phoenix in Flight

  When his first tour in Vietnam ended in the spring of 1966, Warren Milberg returned to the United States and was assigned to an Air Force base in South Dakota. But his name and accomplishments remained on file at CIA headquarters in Washington, and one year later Milberg was one of fifty officers and enlisted men from the various military services (all Vietnam veterans) whom the Pentagon invited to join a Presidentially Directed Counter-Insurgency Program through a participating agency/service agreement. Those who volunteered were tested and, if accepted by the CIA as junior officer trainees, given extensive training and returned to Vietnam to serve at the discretion of the senior CIA officers in Saigon and the regions. Most were assigned to the provinces as RDC/P or RDC/O advisers, and many became Phoenix coordinators.

  Notably, the two other Air Force officers asked to join the program both withdrew, one “as a matter of conscience.” Jacques Kline, who is Jewish, was born and reared in France during World War II and withdrew, according to Milberg, because “he felt the means and methods that he thought were going to be used in it were similar to the means and methods used by the Nazis in World War Two.”1

  Milberg, who is also Jewish—but obviously did not agree with Kline—returned to Vietnam in July 1967 and was assigned to CIA region officer in charge Jack Horgan in Da Nang. “I wound up getting a make-work job on the staff there, as liaison to some military units in and around Da Nang, trying to coordinate an intelligence collection and analysis unit for things, like motor units, that the VC used to harass the air base and the city. It was pretty unexciting. I stayed there for maybe a month, bored out of my mind. Then the RDC/P officer in Quang Tri was relieved by Horgan, which left them with a gap. And when I heard about that, I went to him and said, ‘I’d like to take the job in Quang Tri.’ And he was surprised that I did that—that anybody would want to go to the provinces… But Quang Tri was the end of the line, and it was a way for Horgan to get rid of me.

  “So I went up to Quang Tri and was delighted to find that when I got there, somebody actually met me. This was the guy who was leaving. He had three days left in Quang Tri, and in those three days he was going to orient me as to what was going on. After spending virtually the whole day and night talking, we loaded up two jeeps, one full of Nung bodyguards, then drove around to all the districts and met all the people in the Special Branch, the CIO, and anybody else we dealt with that were part of his bilateral operations. And I remember as we crossed the Quang Tri River bridge, heading up Highway One toward Dong Ha, thinking, ‘I’m back. Now I’m really back,’ and wondering what this was all going to be like.

  “I guess we couldn’t have been driving for more than half an hour when a bus, one of those Asian buses with pigs and chickens and people hanging off the roof and out the windows, blows up about fifty yards ahead of us. The highway was just a little two-lane road, running along the coastal plain. The bomb was a land mine, constructed out of an unexploded U.S. five-hundred-pound bomb, remotely detonated, and probably meant for us. But either a faulty detonator or vibrations set it off. Whatever, here were a lot of innocent civilians either dead or wounded, and it was like déjà vu: ‘Here I am again. What am I doing here? What is this whole thing about?’ And I guess I went through a period of depression early on, thinking, ‘There’s no way to win this thing. This war is going to go on forever. All these programs and activities are just a waste of human and economic resources.’

  “All I had left—to justify why I was there—was to do the same thing I had done before, which was to personalize it. What I did while I was there in the midst of all the turmoil and pain and agony—a thing that made absolutely no sense to me—was to apply my own value system to it, which was such that I was going to keep pregnant women from being disemboweled. And it got to be a very personal war for me.”

  After taking over Quang Tri from his predecessor, Milberg “learned right away that the people you inherited, the counterparts in Special Branch or CIO, had a lot to do with the kind of tour you were going to have
. They were either good and competent people or bureaucratic, corrupt functionaries—or variations in between. And I was really fortunate to wind up working with a man named Nguyen Van Khoi, the Special Branch chief in Quang Tri…. I was there to advise and assist him, only to find he had been fighting the war his whole life. He was a pro. An incredible man … who survived my tour there, often times at great risk to himself.” (Khoi was reportedly killed by ARVN deserters in Hue in April 1975.)

  In view of Khoi’s expertise, there was little for Milberg to do in terms of advising on Special Branch operations. Apart from fighting for his life during Tet, conducting unilateral operations, and monitoring the Province Interrogation Center, Milberg worked largely in financial administration. “I had to go to Da Nang once a month to account for funds I had expended and to bring the region officer and his staff up-to-date on what was going on. And I can remember thinking that I controlled more money as a single individual, that I was sprinkling around the province in one way or another, than what the entire [CORDS] province budget was. I had conversations with the fellow who was the deputy in Da Nang about the fact that we thought that we were providing some measure of economic stability and really weren’t interested in the quality of the intelligence we were buying—that by sprinkling this money as we did, to these low-level informant nets, we were creating economic stability as opposed to engaging in intelligence operations. Interesting concept and idea.

  “Once a quarter I was called into Saigon,” Milberg continued, “and when I went to Saigon, I stayed at the Duc Hotel. And I felt like if the Vietcong ever targeted the hotel or the city, it would be a piece of cake. I was in the business of planning these kinds of things, and I knew that if I had to do it, it would be a simple thing to do. I used to say to myself, ‘My God. If this happens, what the hell am I going to do here in Saigon? They have no plans.’ People were carrying around little pistols in shoulder holsters because it was fashionable. … It was a bureaucratic war in Saigon. All these people supposedly involved in intelligence collection and analysis, planning for the use of intelligence resources and the participation of paramilitary forces—all these people were doing nothing! They lived in their villas in and around town in grand splendor. They’d come to work at eight A.M. and leave at five P.M. It was just like being in an office building, and they had no idea what was going on outside Saigon. None. And I just felt helpless and exposed when I was there. I couldn’t wait to get back to the provinces.