Phoenix Program

by Douglas Valentine

  Hien was arrested, Chau went into hiding, and on orders from Washington, Ambassador Bunker ordered Chau’s case officer, John Vann, to break off contact. At that point Vann, in June 1969, summoned Frank Scotton from Taiwan and arranged for him and Chau to meet in a safe house in Gia Dinh. The conversation, according to Scotton, went like this: “I said to Chau, ‘Sergeant Johnson is standing by near the Cambodian border with some of his Special Forces friends. They’re dependable, and they’ll help you get out. But it’s now or never.’5

  “Chau was very emotional that night in Gia Dinh,” Scotton continued. “He said, ‘To run now would be the same as admitting I’m a Communist. And I’m not. So I will not run.’ ” And so Chau remained in hiding until captured in late 1969.

  Ironically, while Thieu was using Phoenix to repress his domestic opponents, his own cabinet was crawling with Communist agents. But in order to perpetuate the myth of GVN stability, the CIA was reluctant to publicize this fact. Consequently, says renegade CIA officer Sam Adams, in May 1969 station chief Ted Shackley “indicated on a visit to Washington his belief that the Vietcong had only 200 agents in the South Vietnamese Government. He spoke from ignorance. An in-depth research study going on at that time suggested the real number of such agents was more like 30,000.”6

  Although thirty thousand sounds improbably high, the extent to which the GVN was infiltrated was revealed in a counterintelligence operation mounted by CIA officer Ralph McGehee in 1969. Begun in 1962, Operation Projectile relied on a penetration agent inside what the 1969 Phoenix End of Year Report called “a COSVN level intelligence net directed against the office of the President of South Vietnam and other ministries of the GVN.” The leader of the spy ring was Vu Nhoc Nha, President Thieu’s friend and chief adviser on Catholic affairs. Nha, a Catholic, had resettled in South Vietnam during the 1954 Lansdale-inspired exodus from North Vietnam. The spy ring’s highest-ranking member was Huynh Van Trong, Thieu’s special assistant for political affairs and director of the Central Intelligence School, a position that placed him at the top of the CIO.

  McGehee inherited Projectile in 1969, when, after six weeks as Gia Dinh province officer in charge, he became the CIA’s liaison to the Special Branch in Region V. “In this capacity,” he explained, “I supervised [six] other agency case officers working with specific elements of the Special Police in and around Saigon.”7

  The principal Vietnamese player in the drive against the Cuc Nghien Cuu’s strategic intelligence networks was Special Branch chief Nguyen Mau. Born in Ninh Thuan Province (where Thieu was born and reared), Mau was graduated from the Da Lat Military Academy in 1954. In 1963 Diem appointed him sector commander and province chief of Thua Thien Province and mayor of Hue, in which capacity he put down the Buddhist crisis leading up to the coup. In the reorganization after the coup, Mau was made a Montagnard task force commander with the ARVN Twenty-second Division, a job he held until 1967, when he was put in charge of Cong Tac IV. The following year he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and made director of the Special Branch of the National Police.

  Soft-spoken and smart, Mau wanted nothing to do with Phoenix. In a letter to the author, he says his “great concern in taking command of the Special Branch was the unjustified arrest, false accusation and arbitrary detention. Those bad manipulations couldn’t be stopped since the province chiefs, police chiefs and other officials would do anything to make Phoenix score, which assured them job security and higher regard. They knew that Phoenix was under the supervision of an American Ambassador, and that President Nguyen Van Thieu always listened to this powerful personage. They kept the Special Branch in the provinces too busy with arrest in village, confession worksheet and charge procedure at the Provincial Security Committee, while I wanted to direct the Special Branch into professional activities: organizational penetration gathering information relating to policies and campaign plans, spotting the key leaders for neutralization. But I did not argue with them. I felt so alone I kept my mouth shut.”

  Mouth shut, Mau concentrated on smashing the Cuc Nghien Cuu’s strategic intelligence networks within the GVN. When McGehee gathered enough evidence to convince Shackley to let him roll up Nha’s net, Mau galvanized his forces, and the Special Branch sprang into action. Mau’s “small secret police cadre prepared individual files on each person to be arrested,” McGehee writes. “Late one afternoon he called a task force in to his office, then cut them off from outside contact: He briefed each three-man arrest team separately then passed them copies of the file on their target individual. At midnight the police fanned out through Saigon and pulled in the net.”8

  The operation was a smashing success. House searches turned up “microfilm of secret documents, document copying cameras, one-time radiop encoding and decoding pads, radios, secret ink”9 and other tools of the trade. The Special Branch also had the good fortune of arresting a visitor of one of the targets, who “turned out to be the head of a military intelligence net”10 in the MSS. All in all, fifty people were arrested and forty-one spies were tried and convicted. The group included businessmen, military officers, teachers, students, and two top-ranking Chieu Hoi officials.

  However, showing that the GVN was “so riddled by enemy spies that they were able to operate under the nose of the President,” McGehee laments, was “not the kind of success that the CIA’s top officials wanted to see.” That reinforced his suspicion that the CIA was unwilling to admit either the strength of the enemy or the weakness of its ally. To McGehee “it was obvious that we were bolstering a hopelessly corrupt government that had neither the support nor respect of the Vietnamese people.”11

  Meanwhile, other CIA officers were reaching the same conclusion. When Frank Snepp arrived in Saigon in 1969, he was assigned the task of putting together background profiles on targets for assassination by “plowing through documents” and conducting interrogations at the National Interrogation Center. “I would put together a list and I would turn it over to Mr. Colby’s people,” Snepp says in The Ten Thousand Day War. “He would feed this list out to the strike teams, and they would go to work…. And that is how you become a collaborator in the worst of the terrorist programs, in the most atrocious excesses of the US government.”12

  Others became involved in other ways. Consider the case of Bart Osborn, a Phoenix critic who enlisted in the Army in October 1966, was trained at Fort Bragg and Fort Holabird, and was classified an intelligence area specialist. “My training was designed to prepare me as an agent handler and consisted of classes designed to teach recruitment and training of agents and management of agent networks,” Osborn testified before Congress in 1973. He added that his training included a session concerning the termination of agents through various methods, including assassination.13

  A corporal with no knowledge of Vietnamese language, history, or culture, Osborn arrived in Da Nang in September 1967 and was assigned to the 525th Military Intelligence Group. His area of operations was south of Da Nang, outside a Marine air base in Quang Nam Province. Having been assigned to the unilateral branch of the military intelligence team, whose activities were “extra-legal,” Osborn used an alias and, for plausible denial, was provided with false identification indicating he was a civilian employee with the CORDS refugee program. Osborn slipped into his military uniform when it was necessary for him to see military maps or documents.

  Osborn’s team leader put him in touch with a principal agent who was running six subagents in a single cell. The subagents were political specialists, gathering positive intelligence on VC cadres. Eager to expand his network, Osborn hired as additional agents people whose names he got from the employment files of a local American construction company. He sent his intelligence reports to the 1st Marine Division, the 3d Marine Amphibious Force, the 525th MIG, the American Division, and, unknown to him, the Da Nang Phoenix coordinator.

  Osborn’s association with Phoenix was cemented when, to his surprise, he was told that the 525th’s Intelligence Contingency Fund was em
pty and that he would henceforth be unable to pay his agents. At this point Osborn had two principal agents, forty subagents in five cells, and operating expenses averaging half a million piasters per month—lack of which prompted him to check his list of users for new sources of revenue. Recalled Osborn: “I was able to ascertain that the Phoenix program was receiving and utilizing my information…. I visited the Phoenix Coordinator, a US Army major, and talked to him about the information that was laterally disseminated to him. He … told me that any information I gathered would be used in the context of the Phoenix program. In return I was guaranteed financial remuneration for my agents, use of various ‘safe houses’ for clandestine meetings, and access to Air America transportation.”14

  Osborn also obtained drugs, draft deferments for his agents through phony enrollment in the Civilian Irregular Defense Group program, and fifteen thousand dollars quarterly for bribing the local police. The Phoenix coordinator also offered a bonus of a hundred thousand piasters for high-ranking VCI members. In this way, regular military personnel across South Vietnam became involved in Phoenix abuses.

  When asked to explain why Phoenix abuses occurred, Snepp says the program was “jerry-built” because of “the CIA’s concern that the VC had penetrated the Special Branch and Military Security Service. The more fragmentation, the better the security. They didn’t want it central so it could be exploited.”15

  Unfortunately, writes Snepp, “For lack of finite guidance the Phoenix strike teams opted for a scattershot approach, picking up anyone who might be a suspect, and eventually, when the jails were packed to overflowing, they began simply taking the law, such as it was, into their own hands.”16

  Explanations for why Phoenix was open to abuse depend on a person’s politics. Snepp, who harbors a grudge against the CIA, says his former employer “jerry-rigged” Phoenix for its own security. Others say Phoenix was handed to the military as a cover for CIA negotiations with the VCI in Tay Ninh and Saigon. From Phoenix director John Mason’s perspective, accommodation was the root cause of all Phoenix woes. In an August 19, 1969, New York Times article, Terrence Smith quotes Mason as saying, “Favoritism is a part of it. Sometimes family relationships are involved. We know very well that if one of our units picks up the district chief’s brother-in-law, he’s going to be released.”

  For Nguyen Mau, Phoenix was subject to “bad manipulations” by officials seeking job security and high regard. Likewise, South Vietnamese nationalists pointed to corrupt officials as the evil inherent in Phoenix, as was made clear in June 1969, when legislators complained that the police used Phoenix to extort money from wealthy citizens and that VCI agents supplied names of loyal citizens to the police, getting around the Colby failsafe cross-check system by reporting through several different agencies. In this way, innocent people found their names on the dreaded Phoenix blacklist.

  Mismanagement by design, ineptitude, accommodation, corruption, and double agents were reasons why Phoenix abuses occurred. However, the actual reporting of abuses fell to Third Force Vietnamese and noncareer American military personnel. It is to this aspect of the Phoenix story that we now turn.

  One of the first people to criticize Phoenix publicly was Ed Murphy, a native of Staten Island, New York, who spent nine months in a Catholic seminary before enlisting in the U.S. Army. Following his tour in Vietnam, Murphy, from June 1969 through January 1970, was stationed in Washing ton, D.C., doing background investigations and security checks for the 116th Military Intelligence Group. At the time he was one of a growing number of Vietnam veterans, almost exclusively enlisted men, who were publicly demonstrating against the war. In October 1969 Ed Murphy was also one of the few Americans acquainted with Phoenix.

  Murphy’s determination to make Phoenix a political issue in the United States began on October 15, while he was participating in the March Against Death outside the Pentagon. There he encountered colleagues from the 116th MIG. “I was being surveilled,” he told me. “I know, because the people doing it told me so. ‘I’ve been reading about you,’ one of the officers said.”17

  Having fought for his country in defense of its liberties, Murphy was angry to find that military intelligence was being used against American citizens who were exercising their constitutional rights. To him, this represented “the Phoenix mentality in the United States.” Just how serious Murphy considered this threat is made clear by his definition of the program. “Phoenix,” he said, “was a bounty-hunting program—an attempt to eliminate the opposition. By which I mean the opposition to us, the Americans, getting what we wanted. Which was to control the Vietnamese through our clients—the Diems, the Kys, the Thieus.” For Murphy, all other definitions of Phoenix are merely “intellectual jargon.”

  Murphy is a man of conscience, a former novitiate at a seminary in Baltimore whose deep-seated patriotism prompted him to enlist, despite his compunctions about the morality of the Vietnam War. After basic training, Murphy was sent to Fort Holabird, where he was trained as a counterintelligence specialist, then to the Defense Language Institute in Texas for Vietnamese-language training. From there he was assigned to Fort Lewis. “On the plane from Fort Lewis to Cam Ranh Bay,” he recalled, “I was given an article to read. It was a study by the American Medical Association on … interrogation methods used in the Soviet Union. It showed how to do things without laying a hand on a person—how you could torture a person just by having them stand there.” That manual was his introduction to the doctrine of Contre Coup.

  Upon his arrival in Vietnam on May 12, 1968, Murphy was assigned to Fourth Division headquarters outside Pleiku City, where his understanding of counterinsurgency warfare rapidly evolved from theory to reality. There were five enlisted men in his counterintelligence team, each with a sector, each sector having ten agents. Murphy’s job was to conduct sabotage investigations and to run undercover agents, furnished by the MSS, who acted as day workers on the military base. Murphy also inherited agents eleven miles away in Pleiku City and acted as the Fourth Division’s liaison to the local Phoenix coordinator, a CIA contract officer named Ron who was posing as a Public Safety adviser conducting currency investigations.

  Once a week Murphy went to the local CIA compound, along with various civilian and military intelligence people in the vicinity, to submit to the Phoenix Committee the names of VCI suspects their agents had fingered. Surrounded by a concrete wall, its gate manned by a Montagnard Provincial Reconnaissance Unit, the embassy house was located in a remote corner of Pleiku. Inside the compound was a barbed-wire “cow cage” for prisoners. The cage, according to Murphy, was too small for prisoners to stand up in. Murphy was not permitted in the PIC, which “sat on a hill and looked like a U-shaped school.”

  As for the identity of the people his agents surveilled and targeted, Murphy said, “I would never see a North Vietnamese or Vietcong soldier. This is post-Tet, and those people are all dead. What we’re talking about are civilian infrastructure people supporting the NVA and VC. It could be anybody. It could be somebody who works in a movie theater … somebody sweeping up.”

  When asked what kind of information he needed before he could have a suspect arrested, Murphy answered, “None. Whatever you wanted.” When asked what sort of criteria he used to classify VCI suspects, Murphy replied, “Nothing. One of my agents says somebody’s a spy. If I had reason to believe … that he was telling the truth, and if I wanted to bring somebody in for interrogation, I could do it. It was that easy. I had an agreement with the team leader that I could do anything I wanted. I even wore civilian clothes. My cover identity was as a construction worker with Pacific Architects and Engineers.”

  Murphy called his agents “hustlers—entrepreneurs making money off intelligence.” After noting the difficulty of verifying information submitted by agents at Phoenix Committee meetings, “the lack of files and things like that,” Murphy told how one suspect was raped and tortured simply because she refused to sleep with an agent.

  “Phoenix,” said E
d Murphy, “was far worse than the things attributed to it. It was heinous, but no worse than the bombing. And I don’t apologize. But it was a watershed for me. It focused things. I realized it wasn’t just a war, but that based on the assumption that nothing is worse than communism, the government of Vietnam, backed by the U.S., felt justified in suppressing all opposition while extending its control throughout the country.” That control, Murphy explained, served an economic, not an idealistic, purpose. “Phil Lapitosa [an employee at Pacific Architects and Engineers] told me about two million dollars in materiel and cash being unaccounted for at PA and E … that goods being sold on the black market didn’t come from the Vietnamese, but from the Americans.

  “In order to get into military intelligence school,” Murphy continued, “I and the other candidates had to write an essay on the debate about the Vietnam War. And the thrust of my paper was ‘What we do in Vietnam will come back to us.’ It was a one world thesis. Well, I go to Vietnam and I see the bullshit going down. Then I come back to the United States and see the exact same thing going on here. I’m at the Hundred Sixteenth MI unit, and as you leave the room, they have nine slots for pictures, eight of them filled: Rennie Davis, Abbie Hoffman, Ben Spock, Jerry Rubin. And I’m being sent out to spot and identify these people. This is Phoenix. This is Phoenix,” he repeated, then added for emphasis, “This is Phoenix!”

  “In Nam I had composite descriptions,” Murphy acknowledged. “But then I wasn’t in a place where we had technology. It doesn’t make any difference. The point is that it was used in Vietnam, it was used in the U.S., and it still is used in the United States.”