Phoenix Program

by Douglas Valentine

  Forged letters are a CIA specialty. Writes former CIA officer Philip Agee:

  I would say our most successful operation in Ecuador was the framing of Antonio Flores Benitez, a key member of the Communist revolutionary movement. By bugging Flores’ phone, we found out a lot of what he was doing. His wife was a blabbermouth. He made a secret trip to Havana and we decided to do a job on him when he landed back in Ecuador. With another officer, I worked all one weekend to compose a “report” from Flores to the Cubans. It was a masterpiece. The report implied that Flores’ group had already received funds from Cuba and was now asking for more money in order to launch guerrilla operations in Ecuador. My Quito station chief, Warren Dean, approved the report—in fact, he loved it so much he just had to get into the act. So he dropped the report on the floor and walked on it awhile to make it look pocket-worn. Then he folded it and stuffed it into a toothpaste tube—from which he had spent three hours carefully squeezing out all the toothpaste. He was like a kid with a new toy. So then I took the tube out to the minister of the treasury, who gave it to his customs inspector. When Flores came through customs, the inspector pretended to go rummaging through one of his suitcases. What he really did, of course, was slip the toothpaste tube into the bag and then pretend to find it there. When he opened the tube, he of course “discovered” the report. Flores was arrested and there was a tremendous scandal. This was one of a series of sensational events that we had a hand in during the first six months of 1963. By late July of that year, the climate of anti-Communist fear was so great that the military seized a pretext and took over the government, jailed all the Communists it could find and outlawed the Communist Party.8

  Likewise, according to Donald Freed in Death in Washington, the catalyst for the 1973 coup in Chile was a forged document—detailing a leftist plot to start a reign of terror—which was “discovered” by the enemies of President Salvador Allende Gossens. The result was a violent military coup, which the CIA officers (who had set it in motion through disinformation in the press) sat back and watched from a safe distance.

  Compromise and discreditation operations are a tried-and-true method used in America, too. For example, CIA officer Howard Hunt forged State Department documents showing that President John Kennedy ordered the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem. And the FBI discredited, through the use of forged documents, Martin Luther King, Daniel Ellsberg, and Jean Seberg. Among others.

  When genuine, however, captured documents provide valuable insights into the enemy’s plans and strategies. Indeed, said Jack from the Vietnam Task Force, “Colby proved Phoenix effectiveness through captured documents.”

  For example, in its 1970 End of Year Report, the Phoenix Directorate quoted captured documents signed by the deputy secretary of COSVN as saying that Phoenix and the accelerated pacification campaign “were the most dangerous and effective measures used by the GVN against the insurgency.” Another captured document, quoted in the report, stated that “personnel of the Phung Hoang intelligence organization are the most dangerous enemies of the Revolution in suburban and rural areas. Judging by information from captured documents, interrogations of captured personnel and Hoi Chanh debriefings,” the directorate concluded that “Phung Hoang is an effective program.”9

  Captured documents, when genuine, also serve as something of a double-edged sword, revealing U.S. plans and strategies, including those pertaining to Phoenix, that might otherwise remain secret. Consider, for example, a circular titled “On the Establishment of the Enemy Phung Hoang Intelligence Organization in Villages.” Issued by the Vietcong Security Service in Region 6 on March 29, 1970, captured on May 15, 1970, and cited as Document 05-3344-70 by the Combined Document Exploitation Center (CDEC), it describes how the VCI viewed and planned to combat Phoenix.

  As stated in the circular, “the most wicked maneuvers” of Phoenix “have been to seek out every means by which to terrorize revolutionary families and force the people to disclose the location of our agents and join the People’s Self-Defense Force. They also spread false rumors … and make love with our cadres wives and daughters. Their main purpose is to jeopardize the prestige of the revolutionary families, create dissension between them and the people, and destroy the people’s confidence in the revolution. In addition, they also try to bribe poor and miserable revolutionary families into working for them.”

  Phoenix agents are described as “village or hamlet administrative personnel, policemen and landowners,” who set up the People’s Intelligence Organization and work with “pacification personnel and intelligence agents” to organize “family cadre, issue ID cards, and classify the people.” Phoenix agents were said to have made a list of the cadre to be eliminated when the cease-fire took place. “Their prescribed criteria are to kill five cadre in each village in order to change the balance between enemy and friendly forces in the village.”

  According to the circular, the primary task of GVN village chiefs is to “assign Phoenix intelligence organization and security assistants to develop and take charge of the PSDF [and] select a number of tyrants in this force to activate ‘invisible’ armed teams which are composed of three to six well trained members each. These teams are to assassinate our key cadre, as in Vinh Long Province.”

  What the circular is describing is the culmination of Ralph Johnson’s Contre Coup process, in which counterterrorists were extracted from People’s Self-Defense Forces by Vung Tau-trained village chiefs under the aegis of the Phung Hoang program.

  By 1970 political warfare was also being managed through Phoenix. The 1970 End of Year Report cites an experimental program in which “Armed Propaganda Teams of seven men were placed under the operational control of the DIOCCs. On a day to day basis, the DIOCC provided targeting information on specific VCI or VCI families to the APT [which] would then contact them in an effort to induce them to rally.” Ralliers were interrogated immediately, “thereby achieving a snow-ball effect … in the targeting subsequent neutralization process.” Defectors were dubbed “Phoenix Returnees.”10

  By 1970 Phoenix was also sponsoring indoctrination courses. In May Phung Hoang agents in Dien Ban district organized the “People’s Training Course to Denounce Communist Crimes.” This training course—its name evoking memories of Diem’s denunciation campaign—was attended by 280 local residents.

  The problem was that Contre Coup had no corresponding ideology. Ralph Johnson could turn the enemy’s tactics against him, but not his beliefs. On this point the captured circular reads, “[A]s a result of the victories of the Revolution, the enemy has been forced to accept serious failures and to de-escalate the war. In the face of the situation, the U.S. imperialists have been forced into withdrawing their troops. This fact has caused great confusion and dissension within the enemy ranks. The people have developed great hatred for the enemy … In addition, there is dissension among the Phoenix intelligence members, pacification personnel, policemen, and espionage agents due to internal conflict.”

  Fanning this dissension was the ability of the VCI to penetrate IOCCs. A captured Vietcong document, dated July 1, 1970, and issued by the Dien Ban District Security Service (An Ninh), instructs its agents to penetrate all Phung Hoang Hanh Quan (intelligence operations coordination centers), to establish blacklists of personnel (especially Special Branch and PSDF), and to report on their activities for elimination.

  Da Nang City and Quang Nam Province were particularly well penetrated. A Combined Document Exploitation Center (CDEC) report dated November 23, 1970, cites three messages “pertaining to Phoenix and the PSDF committee in Danang City, and the location and activities of the GVN intelligence service in Danang City”; a blank release slip from the Dien Ban DIOCC “copied by an unidentified individual”; and an undated note regarding a Phung Hoang meeting at the Quang Nam PIOCC at Hoi An.

  According to another captured document provided by the Combined Document Exploitation Center on October 21, 1970, a member of the Da Nang military interrogation center escaped after th
e MSS had discovered he was a double agent. Still another captured document notes that “an agent of the Phung Hoang organization in the 2nd Precinct, Da Nang City,” who was the son of the secretary of the VNQDD (Vietnamese Kuomintang) in Vinh Phuoc Village, “provided detailed information on a Phung Hoang training course he attended on 15 June 1970 and the assignment of the trainees upon completion of the course”—meaning the VCI in Da Nang knew every move Phoenix was making.

  Nelson Brickham viewed Vietnam as a war that would be “won or lost on the basis of intelligence,” and he created Phoenix as the vanguard in that battle. Unfortunately the Phoenix front line unraveled faster than the VCI’s; dissension between the Americans and Vietnamese, and the CIA and the military, doomed the program to failure. And while the insurgents held tight, mistrust of U.S. government policy in Southeast Asia, born during Tet 1968 and brought to a boil by the Cambodian invasion, began to unravel American society.

  Immediately following the Cambodian invasion, massive antiwar demonstrations erupted across the country. In Ohio Governor James Rhodes reacted violently, vowing to “eradicate” the protesters. On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard responded to his exhortations, firing into a crowd of demonstrators at Kent State College, killing four people.

  The spectacle of American soldiers killing American citizens had a chilling effect on many people, many of whom suddenly realized that dissent was as dangerous in the United States as it was in South Vietnam. To many Americans, the underlying tragedy of the Vietnam War, symbolized by Phoenix, was finally felt at home. Nixon himself articulated those murderous impulses when he told his staff, “Don’t worry about decisiveness. Having drawn the sword, stick it in hard. Hit ’em in the gut. No defensiveness.”11

  Nixon backed his words with actions. He ordered one of his aides, a former Army intelligence specialist and president of the Young Americans for Freedom, Tom Huston, to devise a plan to surveil, compromise, and discredit his domestic critics. The Huston Plan was called evidence of a “Gestapo mentality” by Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina.12

  What Ervin meant by the “Gestapo mentality” was Phoenix in its conceptual sense—the use of terror to stifle dissent. Reflecting Nixon’s “Gestapo mentality,” offensive counterintelligence operations were directed against dissenters in America: blacks, leftists, pacifists, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), and American Indians. The most famous example may have been mounted by the CIA’s domestic operations branch against the Black Liberation Movement; as in Chile, it provoked a violent reaction by security forces and served to justify repression.

  Colston Westbrook, according to Mae Brussell in a July 1974 article in The Realist, was a CIA psywar expert. An adviser to the Korean CIA and Lon Nol in Cambodia, Westbrook from 1966 until 1969 reportedly worked (undercover as an employee of Pacific Architects and Engineers) as an adviser to the Vietnamese Police Special Branch. In 1970 Westbrook allegedly returned to the United States and was gotten a job at the University of California at Berkeley. According to Brussell, Westbrook’s control officer was William Herrmann, who was connected to the Stanford Research Institute, RAND Corporation, and Hoover Center on Violence. In his capacity as an adviser to Governor Ronald Reagan, Herrmann put together a pacification plan for California at the UCLA Center for Study and Prevention of Violence. As part of this pacification plan Westbrook, a black man, was assigned the task of forming a black cultural association at the Vacaville Medical Facility. Although ostensibly fostering black pride, Westbrook was in truth conducting an experimental behavior modification program. Westbrook’s job, claims Brussell, was to program unstable persons, drawn from California prisons, to assassinate black community leaders. His most successful client was Donald DeFreeze, chief of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). It was Westbrook who designed the SLA’s logo (a seven-headed cobra), who gave DeFreeze his African name (Cinque), and who set Cinque and his gang on their Phoenix flight to cremation, care of the Los Angeles SWAT Team, the FBI, and U.S. Treasury agents.

  In 1971 Nixon was to direct his domestic affairs officer, John Erhlichman, to form a special White House internal security unit called the Plumbers. Chosen to head the Plumbers were certified psychopath Gordon Liddy and “false document preparation” expert Howard Hunt. In charge of “controls” was Egil Krogh, who once said, “Anyone who opposes us, we’ll destroy. As a matter of fact, anyone who doesn’t support us, we’ll destroy.”13

  Just as Thieu’s domestic political opponents were targets on Phoenix blacklists in Vietnam, so the Plumbers’ “enemies list” included critics of Nixon—people like Gregory Peck, Joe Namath, and Stanley Karnow. And just as illegal methods were used to discredit and compromise “neutralists” in Vietnam, so, too, the Plumbers turned to crime in their attack against “anyone who doesn’t support us.” Along with Hunt and several other government officials, Krogh (a devout Mormon) was to be convicted of breaking into the home of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.

  Offensive counterintelligence operations directed against the antiwar movement were mounted by the Plumbers; the CIA through its Operation Chaos; the FBI through its COINTELPROS under William C. Sullivan, whose favorite trick was issuing Kafkaesque “secret” subpoenas; the National Security Agency, which used satellites to spy on dissenters; and the Defense Intelligence Agency, servicing the Joint Chiefs and working with the Army chief of staff for intelligence, General William Yarborough, through Operation Shamrock, headquartered at Fort Holabird. Shamrock’s main targets were former military intelligence personnel like Ed Murphy and special operations veterans like Elton Manzione, both of whom, by then, were members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Allegedly as part of Shamrock, the 111th Military Intelligence Group (MIG) in Memphis kept Martin Luther King, Jr., under twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance and reportedly watched and took photos while King’s assassin moved into position, took aim, fired, and walked away. As a result, some VVAW members contend that the murders of King, and other less notable victims, were the work of a domestic-variety Phoenix hit team. Some say it still exists.

  Be that as it may, it is a fact that during the Vietnam War the government sought to neutralize its domestic opponents, using illegal means, in the name of national security. The fear of surveillance being as effective as surveillance itself, the result was that many Americans refrained from writing letters to their representatives or otherwise participating in the democratic process, knowing that to do so was to risk wiretaps on their phones, FBI agents’ reading their mail, being blackmailed for past indiscretions, made victims of vicious rumor campaigns, losing their jobs, or worse.

  Moreover, the suppression of dissent in America was championed by the same people who advocated war in Vietnam. And when it became apparent that America had been defeated in Vietnam, these reactionaries—like the Germans after World War I—vented their bitterness and anger on the disparate groups that formed the antiwar movement. Using Phoenix “offensive counterintelligence” tactics, the security forces in America splintered the antiwar movement into single-issue groups, which were isolated and suppressed during the backlash of the Reagan era. Today the threat of terrorism alone remains, pounded into the national consciousness, at the bequest of big business, by abiding media.

  Indeed, without the complicity of the media, the government could not have implemented Phoenix, in either Vietnam or America. A full disclosure of the Province Interrogation Centers and the Provincial Reconnaissance Units would have resulted in its demise. But the relationship between the media and the government is symbiotic, not adversarial. The extent to which this practice existed was revealed in 1975, when William Colby informed a congressional committee that more than five hundred CIA officers were operating under cover as corporate executives and that forty CIA officers were posing as journalists. Case in point: reactionary columnist and TV talk-show host William Buckley, Jr., the millionaire creator of the Young Americans for Freedom and cohort of Howard Hunt’s in Mexico in the 1950’s.

  When it comes
to the CIA and the press, one hand washes the other. In order to have access to informed officials, reporters frequently suppress or distort stories. In return, officials leak stories to reporters to whom they owe favors. At its most incestuous, reporters and government officials are actually related—for example, Delta PRU commander Charles Lemoyne and his New York Times reporter brother, James. Likewise, if Ed Lansdale had not had Joseph Alsop to print his black propaganda in the United States, there probably would have been no Vietnam War.

  In a democratic society the media ought to investigate and report objectively on the government, which is under no obligation to inform the public of its activities and which, when it does, puts a positive “spin” on the news. As part of the deal, when those activities are conducted in secret, illegally, reporters tend to look away rather than jeopardize profitable relationships. The price of success is compromise of principles. This is invariably the case; the public is always the last to know, and what it does learn are at best half-truths, squeezed into five-hundred-word columns or thirty-second TV bites, themselves easily ignored or forgotten.

  So it was with Phoenix.

  * PIRLs were provided with incentives from the black market, including narcotics that CIA contractors brought in from Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia.

  CHAPTER 24

  Transgressions

  In the introduction to this book, Elton Manzione described the counterterror campaign he joined in 1964. He told how as a U.S. Navy SEAL working in a hunter-killer team, he broke down from the strain of having to kill not just enemy soldiers but their families, supporters, and innocent bystanders as well. In September 1964 Manzione’s crisis of faith compelled him to go AWOL in France. His military records show he was never even in South Vietnam.