Phoenix Program

by Douglas Valentine

  As for the instructors who taught Francis Reitemeyer how to manage PRU, Colby said, “[W]e have some rather direct instructions to our people as to their behavior in Vietnam.”11 Colby was referring to an October 15, 1969, memo sent to the Phoenix staff “and forwarded for inclusion in the training of Phung Hoang advisers in Vietnam and at Fort Holabird.” The memo stated that “U.S. personnel are under the same legal and moral constraints with respect to operations under the Phung Hoang program as with respect to military operations against enemy units in the field.”

  The final word on Phoenix policy was contained in MACV Directive 525-36, issued on May 18, 1970. Noting the “unlawful status of members of the VCI,” MACV Directive 525-36 cites “the desirability of obtaining these targetted individuals alive and of using intelligent and lawful methods of interrogation to obtain the truth.” It says that Phoenix advisers were “specifically unauthorized to engage in assassination” and that if they were to “come in contact with activities conducted by Vietnamese (never Americans) which do not meet the standards of land warfare,” they were “[n]ot to participate further” but were “expected to make their objections of this kind of behavior known to the Vietnamese conducting them” and “expected to report the circumstances to the next higher U.S. authority.” The directive closes by saying that “if an individual finds the police type activities of the Phoenix program repugnant to him, on his application, he can be reassigned from the program without prejudice.”

  In response to the article by Geyer, which focused attention on the PRU and the issue of terror, and in defense of William Colby, his patron, John Vann* said, “[T]here is always a tendency to report extremes…. But when those exceptions … are used by people who are in basic disagreement with the policy in Vietnam as a means of criticizing the effort, they are taken out of context. They in no way reflect anything that is normal.”13

  Kentucky Senator Sherman Cooper asked Vann, “Is the Phoenix organization a counter-terror organization?”14

  Vann replied, “The counter-terrorist organization bore and bears no resemblance at all to … Phoenix.”15

  COOPER: “Is the U.S. involved in any way in carrying out what can be called a “terrorist” activity?”16

  VANN: “Well, the answer very shortly, sir, is no, we do not.”17

  Compare Vann’s statement with that made by Charlie Yothers, the CIA’s chief of operations in I Corps in 1970: “Sure we got involved in assassinations. That’s what PRU were set up for—assassination. I’m sure the word never appeared in any outlines or policy directives, but what else do you call a targeted kill?”18

  According to Tully Acampora, Phoenix was a two-tiered program, with the PRU working against terrorists on the tactical level and the CIO operating above that on strategic affairs. This aspect of Phoenix was addressed by New Jersey Senator Clifford Case when he asked William Colby if Phoenix might be used “by ambitious politicians against their political opponents, not the Viet Cong at all.”19

  COLBY: “… it is our impression that this is not being used substantially for internal political purposes…. I have heard the President and Prime Minister on many occasions give strong directions that the focus is on the Vietcong … and that it is not to be used for other purposes.”20

  Picking up on this line of questioning, Committee Chairman William Fulbright asked Colby: “… where is Mr. Dzu, the man who ran second in the last election?”

  When Colby said, “Mr. Dzu is in Chi Hoa jail in Saigon,” Fulbright asked him to “reconcile that with your statement of the very objective view of the Prime Minister.” Colby replied that Truong Dinh Dzu “was not arrested under the Phoenix program.” Dzu was arrested under Article 4, which made it a crime to propose the formation of a coalition government with the Communists.21

  FULBRIGHT: “But you say they are giving instructions to be so careful not to use the program for political purposes, when Thieu himself has put a man in prison for no other crime that we know of than that he ran second to him in the elections.”22

  At that point Senator Case came to Colby’s rescue, saying, “I think that just, perhaps, suggests this is a privilege reserved for higher officials.”23

  But the point had been made: If Phoenix were to be judged by the behavior, not the stated policies, of Thieu’s administration, then it was an instrument of political repression. Moreover, as indicated in a letter from Tran Ngoc Chau to Senator Fulbright, political repression in South Vietnam was carried out with the tacit approval of the U.S. government. In his letter to Fulbright (which was inserted into the record of the hearings), Chau claimed that his contacts with his brother had been authorized by, among others, William Colby, Ev Bumgartner, Tom Donohue, Stu Methven, John O’Reilly, Gordon Jorgenson, and John Vann, who instructed Chau not to inform Thieu of his contacts with Hien.

  Chau wrote, “Present political persecution of me is consequence of combined action taken by U.S. officials and CIA and Vietnamese officials in an attempt to sabotage Vietnamese and Communist direct talks for Peace Settlement.”24

  In February 1970 Chau was sentenced to twenty years in jail. In May 1970, writes Professor Huy, “the Supreme Court rendered a judgment stating that Chau’s arrest and condemnation were unconstitutional. Despite this judgment, Thieu refused to free Chau.”25

  What happened to Chau and Dzu proved that stated policy in South Vietnam was ignored in reality. Likewise, attempts to portray Phoenix as legal and moral were transparent public relations gimmicks meant to buy time while Thieu consolidated power before the cease-fire. To ensure Thieu’s internal security, CIA officers were willing to betray their assets, and this capacity for treachery and deceit is what really defined American policy in regard to Phoenix, the PRU, and the war in general. What the Senate concluded, however, was only that diametrically opposed views on Phoenix existed. The official line advanced by William Colby portrayed Phoenix as imperfectly executed—but legal, moral, and popular. The other view, articulated by Senator Fulbright, was that Phoenix was “a program for the assassination of civilian leaders.” But that was not proven.

  “The Senate Foreign Relations Committee may have been confused by last week’s testimony on Operation Phoenix,” observed Tom Buckley. “The problem,” he explained, “is one of definition.”26

  Unable to decide which definition was correct, the press tended to characterize Phoenix as an absurdity. In a February 18, 1970, article in The New York Times, James Sterba said that “the program appears more notorious for inefficiency, corruption and bungling than for terror…. If someone decided to make a movie about Phoenix … the lead would be more a Gomer Pyle than a John Wayne.”

  Playing on the notion that the Vietnamese, too, were too corrupt and too stupid to be evil, Tom Buckley wrote that the PRU “were quicker to take the money, get drunk, and go off on their own extortion and robbery operations than they were to sweep out into the dangerous boondocks”—hardly a description of what Jim Ward called “the finest fighting force in Vietnam.” But for Buckley and Sterba there was no motive behind the madness. Phoenix was a comedy of errors, dopey disguises, and mistaken identities. There was nothing tragic in their depictions; even the people directing the show were caricatures subject to ridicule.

  So it was that Phoenix began sinking in a morass of contradictions which seemed to reflect the intensely human, moral ambiguity of the Vietnam War itself. Even the dead-end debate between Colby and Fulbright mocked America’s babbling, hilarious schizophrenia. Whom to believe?

  Twenty years later the facts speak for themselves. When Fulbright asked Colby if cash incentives were offered to Vietnamese for neutralizations, Colby said no. Six months later the deputy director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Frank Clay, sent a memo (JCSM-394-70) to Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, noting that General Abrams had recommended “an incentive program to foster greater neutralization achievement.”

  One of the more significant Phoenix documents, Clay’s memo enumerated the Defense Department’s major co
ncerns regarding Phoenix: the national identity and registration program, information support of Phoenix, inadequacy of prison space, surveillance of released VCI, Phung Hoang leadership, and exchange of intelligence. These six concerns, notably, derived from a survey conducted by Robert Komer in June 1970.

  Upon arriving in Turkey as U.S. ambassador, Komer had been dogged by demonstrators charging him with war crimes. Consequently, he resigned his post even before his nomination was confirmed by the Senate. Seeking vindication, he hired on with RAND, returned to Saigon, and wrote a scathing report called “The Phung Hoang Fiasco.” In it Komer says, “[A]s the military war winds down and the conflict assumes a more politico-subversive character, a much more sophisticated and intensive effort to destroy the VCI becomes well nigh indispensable to a satisfactory outcome.”

  The former champion of quotas rails against “fakery,” charging that “half the kills are falsely listed as VCI just to meet Phung Hoang goals.” He cites instances where “we may have as many as 10 or 12 dossiers on the same man,” and he complains that “each agency still keeps its own files.” Special Branch is “grossly overstaffed with poor quality results,” the Field Police are “a flop as the action arm of Phung Hoang,” and as for the PRU, Komer writes that “everywhere their effectiveness is apparently declining greatly.”

  Komer is especially critical of the Vietnamese. In III Corps “fully half the province chiefs don’t really support Phung Hoang,” he writes, and in II Corps Lu Lan “gives only lip service.” Komer names Lieutenant Colonel Thiep (who replaced Loi Nguyen Tan, who took command of Chi Hoa Prison) as “the senior full-time Phung Hoang officer,” then adds contemptuously that Thiep’s “incompetent boss Colonel Song is apparently being kicked upstairs. As I put it bluntly to Thieu and Khiem,” Komer says, “there are 65 generals in RVNAF: how come only a LTC to run Phung Hoang?”

  Basically, Komer’s anger stemmed from Thieu’s decision to transfer the Central Phung Hoang Permanent Office from the prime minister’s office to the National Police Directorate as a separate bloc. Noting that “the Phung Hoang bloc is completely separate from the key Special Branch bloc,” Komer argues that the Central Phuong Hoang Permanent Committee had been “downgraded.” He calls the transfer “a case where one of the most crucial of all current GVN priority missions is given to one of the weakest and least effective GVN agencies, the National Police.”

  In a May 3, 1970, telegram to the secretary of state, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker explained that Phung Hoang was being transferred from Prime Minister Khiem’s office to the National Police to “move it toward Vietnamization” and improve its overall operations. Noting that the “US advisory position on this question had been established through coordination between MACV/CORDS, OSA and Embassy,” Bunker concludes by stating his belief that the “most important contribution National Police can make to future Vietnam lies in vigorous and proper execution of Phung Hoang Program against Viet Cong Infrastructure.” Case closed.

  As compensation for the transfer, Komer proposed getting “the best young, hard driving major general to be found—Phong or Minh of CMD—and make him Minister or Vice-Minister of Interior to give him status.” Other reforms Komer suggests: to “increase reward money,” to “go after the five best dossiers,” and to concentrate efforts “in eight provinces [where] well over half the estimated VCI are concentrated.” The provinces were Quang Nam, Quang Tin, and Quang Ngai in I Corps; Binh Dinh in II Corps; and Kien Hoa, Vinh Long, Vinh Binh, and Dinh Tuong (where Komer found the “only … Phung Hoang program worthy of the name”) in IV Corps.

  Summarizing, Komer writes, “For better or worse, CIA produced … the only experienced hands who were really good at the game…. If I couldn’t think of a better solution, I’d transfer operational control over the whole business to OSA [office of special assistant, cover designation for the CIA].”

  But Bunker, in his May 3, 1970 telegram, had already nixed that idea. “Integration into Special Police would complicate important public information aspects of program,” he said, “and produce complications to US advisory element. When VCI reduced to manageable level,” he said, turning Phoenix over to the Special Branch “could be reviewed.” In any event, the “VC turn to protracted war reemphasizes necessity of Phung Hoang effort against infrastructure during coming year … and is of higher priority in Vietnam today than civil law enforcement as contribution to Vietnamization.”

  Three years into the program the Phoenix brain trust was back on square one, wondering, as Evan Parker had recommended, if it should focus its efforts not on legions of low-level VCI, but on the big fish and, as Parker had also observed, if CIA Special Branch advisers were not already doing the job. Having come full circle, Komer finally realized that the “Special Branch and its U.S. advisers seem to run an almost completely separate operation … usually when I asked why no fingerprints in dossiers, I was told they were over in the Special Branch office in the PIC.”

  Komer was right. Phoenix was a fiasco, but not just because the CIA had decided to hide behind it for “public information” purposes. The notion that reporting formats and quotas as “management tools” could supplant a thousand years of culture and forty years of Communist political development at the village level was simply a false premise. Yes, Phoenix was a fiasco—it had become unmanageable, and it encouraged the most outrageous abuses—but because it had become “of higher priority … than civil law enforcement,” it was a fiasco with tragic, not comic, consequences.

  By 1970 an armistice was inevitable, and Phoenix had become the vehicle by which America was going to transfer responsibility for internal security to the Vietnamese. As a result, General Abrams asked, “That it be made clear to all US and RVN agencies contributing to the Phung Hoang/Phoenix program that the objective of neutralizing the infrastructure is equal in priority to the objectives of tactical operations.” As a way of going after strategic VCI targets—the big fish running COSVN—and as a way of protecting Phoenix from penetration by enemy agents, Abrams also asked that “consultation be initiated with the Attorney General … to secure a team of two or three FBI counter-espionage experts to be sent to the RVN for the specific purpose of providing recommendations for the neutralization of important national level members of the [VCI].”27

  Meanwhile, in Washington General Clay advocated increased attention on the DIOCCs, “the cutting edge of Phoenix,” because “the district and village level infrastructure remains the key element in the enemy plan to subvert the Government … and continues to produce the major threat against GVN efforts to consolidate pacification gains made in the past 18 months.” Clay also noted that “Phung Hoang leadership is being improved by recognizing and expanding the prominence of the role of the Special Police in the functioning of the DIOCC.”28

  But in order to mount an attack against the VCI, the U.S. Army needed to gain access to Special Branch files in the DIOCCs. So in February 1970 a third Standard Operating Procedure manual was issued with instructions on how to use the ultimate Phoenix “management tool,” the VCI “target folder.” As stated in the Phung Hoang Adviser Handbook, “preparation of target folders is the foundation from which successful operations can be run and sentencing be assured by Province Security Committees.”29

  Target folders also served a public information function, by allowing William Colby to say that “our first step was to make sure that the intelligence we gathered on the VCI was accurate, and for this we set up standards and procedures by which to weed out the false from the correct information.”30

  Target folders were specifically designed to help Phoenix advisers focus on high-level VCI. Divided in two, a target folder contained a biographical data on the left side and operational information on the right, in which the suspect’s habits, contacts, schedule, and modus operandi were recorded, along with captured documents and other evidence. The folder was the responsibility of the Special Branch case handler in the DIOCC, although a source on the suspect might be handled by anoth
er agency. Each Special Branch case handler was required to maintain ten People’s Intelligence Organization (PIO) cells—each consisting of three agents—in each hamlet in his area of operations. As stated in the third Standard Operating Procedure manual, the tracking of a VCI suspect began when an informant reported someone making “suspicious utterances” or “spreading false rumors.” As more and more sources informed on a suspect, he or she graduated from blacklist D to C to B, then finally to blacklist A—most wanted—at which point the VCI suspect was targeted for neutralization and an operation mounted. The folder was sent to the PIC while the suspect was being interrogated and to the Province Security Committee to assure proper sentencing.

  In order to help Special Branch case handlers gather the precise evidence a security committee needed for quick convictions, training programs were started in each corps, where the case handlers were taught how to maintain target folders, a hundred thousand copies of which the Phoenix Directorate prepared and distributed in August 1970. To assure proper target folder maintenance, the Army also assigned a counterintelligence-trained enlisted man to each DIOCC. In 1970, 185 of these counterintelligence specialists graduated from the Phoenix Coordinators Orientation Course. They acted as liaison among the PIC, DIOCC, and PIOCC. In addition, a third officer was added to each PIOCC staff to coordinate with Chieu Hoi and Field Police, and in an effort to upgrade the status of Phoenix coordinators vis-avis the CIA’s Special Branch advisers, region slots were filled by full colonels, with majors in PIOCCs and captains in DIOCCs. However, cooperation between province Phoenix coordinators and CIA province officers rarely occurred.

  A survey of each corps in November 1970 produced these results: I Corps reported “that certain member agencies in the DIOCCs have a wealth of knowledge and information which had hithertofore never been tapped.” II Corps reported that “professional jealousies and even distrust among agencies continue to impair progress.” III Corps reported that “support comes from only one or two of the agencies represented, while others tend to ignore results.” IV Corps reported that “each GVN intelligence agency closely guards its information, thus making dossier construction difficult.”31