Phoenix Program

by Douglas Valentine

  The CIA’s region officer in charge in 1969, Roger McCarthy, and his deputy, Walter Snowden, retreated from sight, leaving Renneisen and Bishop to fend for themselves. But MACV was not providing sufficient funds to maintain either the Da Nang PRU or existing agent nets, and so Bishop began issuing special passes to the Special Forces team in Da Nang in exchange for captured weapons, which he traded to the Air Force for office supplies, which he gave to Thiep for his Phung Hoang headquarters. When Bishop learned, through PVT, that the Navy Civic Action center was in possession of stolen jeeps, he confiscated the jeeps, painted them green and white at the PRU motor pool, forged legal papers, and gave them to Thiep. One of Bishop’s confrontations with the local MPs occurred when Marine investigators tried to recover the stolen vehicles but found they now belonged to Thiep and the National Police. Tension between the Da Nang Phoenix contingent and Marine investigators mounted because, according to Bishop, “People got corrupted by Phoenix.”

  With the loss of CIA funding, the Phoenix program in Da Nang suffered other setbacks. The Da Nang City PRU were suddenly on their own. PVT, the indispensable link between the Americans and Vietnamese, began to worry, so Bishop was forced to take action. “We heard through PVT what really went on,” Bishop said. But in order to keep PVT as an asset and carry out the attack against the VCI, it was necessary to maintain the PRU in Da Nang. “Our PRU were English-speaking and could translate documents and act as interpreters for us,” Bishop explained. “We couldn’t get along without them.” Knowing that the Da Nang Phoenix program was on the verge of collapse, Bishop wrote a letter to Prime Minister Khiem, asking that the PRU be retained as draft-exempt employees of the Da Nang City Phung Hoang program, working as auto mechanics in the motor pool, paid through the MACV Intelligence Contingency Fund.

  The letter was not well received by PRU commander Lang in Saigon. Nor was the 525th MIG thrilled at the prospect of shelling out money for a program that was coming under increasing criticism. “The PRU were hated by everyone,” Bishop explained. “They were considered worse than the MSS Gestapo.”

  Colonel Renneisen did not want to get involved either, “But we needed interpreters,” Bishop said, “and the letter was signed by Thiep, and Thiep arranged for PVT to meet with Colonel Pham Van Cao at the Phung Hoang Office in Saigon. Cao wrote a letter to the director general of the National Police, who approved it, as did General Lam after prodding from Renneisen. And so on the condition that they be directed only against the VCI, the PRU were allowed to stay in Da Nang.”

  The establishment of the Da Nang PRU as an official arm of the city’s Phung Hoang program coincided with the transfer of PRU national headquarters to the National Police Interrogation Center in Saigon, and the transfer of PRU logistical support was transferred to Colonel Dai and the National Police. While the PRU had been paid directly by the CIA before, as of 1969, funds were channeled through intermediaries—usually Phoenix—while uniforms and equipment came through the Field Police.

  Having profaned the sacred chain of command with his letter to Khiem, Bishop soon found himself in hot water. “A red-haired guy from Saigon, a young kid, came up to Da Nang and replaced me at the Da Nang City IOCC with a major from the Third Marine Amphibious Force,” Bishop recalled. “I was kicked upstairs and became Renneisen’s full-time deputy, and the major—responding to General Cushman, who was upset because vehicles kept disappearing—decided to get rid of all renegade vehicles in the PRU motor pool. The last I heard, the steering wheel fell off his jeep while he was driving around the city.”

  Jerry Bishop left Vietnam in March 1970 and returned to college, badly disillusioned. Colonel Renneisen was transferred to Saigon as operations chief at the Phoenix Directorate. A new I Corps Phoenix coordinator settled into the job. In Quang Nam Province, the Phoenix adviser was Lieutenant Bill Cowey; Captain Yoonchul Mo was the Korean liaison; and the PRU, under Major Liem, were advised by Special Forces Sergeant Patry Loomis. The Da Nang City PRU continued to be advised by PVT. Major Thompson ran the Da Nang City IOCC, and the Da Nang PIC was advised by Vance Vincent.

  The question this book has tried to answer is, Was Phoenix a legal, moral, and popular program that occasionally engendered abuses or was it an instrument of unspeakable evil—a manifestation of everything wicked and cruel? Consider the case of William J. Taylor. A former Marine Corps investigator and veteran of three tours in Vietnam, Taylor now owns his own detective agency, one of the foremost in the country. He served as chief investigator and consultant in the Karen Silkwood, Three Mile Island, and Greensboro murder cases. He was also involved in the investigations into the My Lai massacre, the Atlanta missing and murdered children case, and the Orlando Letelier assassination. A man who has been shot and stabbed in the course of his work, Taylor is tough as nails, but when we met in the fall of 1986, it was in an attorney’s office, in the presence of a witness; for what he had to say lent credence to all the horror stories ever told about Phoenix.

  Bill Taylor enlisted in the Marines in 1963. He did his first tour in Vietnam in 1966 as a member of a unit guarding a mountaintop radio relay station that monitored enemy and allied radio traffic in the valley below. When the post was attacked and overrun by an NVA unit, Taylor was nominated for a Silver Star for his gallantry in action.

  Taylor returned to Vietnam in 1968 as an investigator with the Marine Corps Criminal Investigation Division (CID). His duties involved investigating robberies, arsons, murders, rapes, fraggings, race riots, and other serious crimes committed by American military personnel. Taylor transported dangerous prisoners, acted as a courier for classified messages, and maintained a network of informers in Da Nang. In 1969 Taylor returned to Da Nang as a CID investigator with the Third Marine Amphibious Force. He resided at the Paris Hotel and worked, half a mile away, with a team of Marines in the Army’s CID headquarters. Taylor’s supervisor was Master Sergeant Peter Koslowski.

  “Pete liked me.” Taylor laughed. “He was always mad at me, but he liked me.”

  It was through Koslowski that Taylor first heard about Phoenix. “Koslowski said Phoenix was a great organization and that it would right a lot of wrongs over there,” Taylor recalled. “He said it was necessary, sometimes, to cut throats and that it was also important, for psychological reasons, that some times it be made to look like the Communists had done it. That included terrorist activities in Da Nang and Saigon, which were Phoenix projects.”

  Expressing his own disgust with such a policy, Taylor said, “I was young and didn’t understand political realities. That’s what Koslowski said. Well, now that I’m mature, I understand them less.”

  Taylor’s account of Phoenix is set in Da Nang in July 1970. The incident occurred on a Sunday morning. As was his habit, Taylor was rummaging through the garbage cans in the alley behind the White Elephant restaurant near the Da Nang Hotel, loading the back of his jeep with discarded fruit, vegetables, and bread, which he gave to Vietnamese members of his informer network who were having a hard time making ends meet. Some of these people worked at Camp Horn; others, for the mayor of Da Nang. Most he had known since 1968.

  While poking around in the trash, Taylor saw a U.S. Army intelligence officer, accompanied by a Korean intelligence officer, pass by in a jeep. Taylor had been investigating the American for several months, so he quickly dropped what he was doing and followed them. Taylor had opened the case when a number of his Vietnamese sources began complaining to him that an American military officer, in cahoots with the Koreans, was murdering Vietnamese civilians for the CIA. The American officer was regularly seen at the Da Nang Interrogation Center, assaulting women prisoners and forcing them to perform perverse acts. He had a reputation as a sadist who enjoyed torturing and killing prisoners. A psychopath with no compunctions about killing people or causing them pain, he was the ideal contract killer.

  That the CIA should recruit such a man was not unusual. Taylor himself had investigated a racial incident in which four blacks threw grenades into the Da Nang enl
isted men’s club while a movie was being shown. One of the blacks told Taylor that a CIA “talent scout” had offered to get him and his comrades off the hook if they would agree to perform hits for the CIA on a contract basis, not just in Vietnam but in other countries as well.

  Taylor’s principal source was a Vietnamese woman who knew where the American assassin lived. Together they watched the house, and when the man emerged, Taylor recognized him immediately. The man was the Da Nang Phoenix adviser, in which capacity he periodically appeared at the CID compound dressed in the uniform of a U.S. Army intelligence officer.

  “The guy was crazy,” Taylor explained. “He was my height, slightly taller. He had dark hair and a runner’s build. He had three or four names and eyes you’d never forget—like he was acting at throwing a tantrum. Like Jim in Taxi. He was angry all the time,” Taylor continued. “When he walked through a crowd of Vietnamese, he just pushed people aside. The first time I saw him, as a matter of fact, was outside Koslowski’s office. A Vietnamese sentry blocked his way, so he slammed the guy up against the guardhouse. Right then and there I knew that someday we were going to fight.

  “He didn’t look or act like a military officer,” Taylor added. “That’s why I started watching him.”

  Over the next few months Taylor compiled a comprehensive dossier on the man, with more than a hundred pages of notes and twenty rolls of film, including pictures of the Koreans and American civilians with whom he met. When Koslowski discovered what Taylor was doing, he tried to dissuade him. But Taylor persisted. He continued to surveil the Phoenix agent, noting that much of his contact with other Americans occurred at the Naval Claims Investigation building, a “gorgeous mansion” that served as a “CIA front.” Known to Jerry Bishop as the Civic Action center, it was the place where Vietnamese went to collect indemnities when their relatives were accidentally killed in U.S. military operations or by U.S. military vehicles. Although there were only six claims adjusters, the building had dozens of spacious rooms and doubled as a beer hall on Saturday nights. Taylor and his colleagues would party there with the intelligence crowd, local American construction workers, and reporters from the Da Nang Press Club. At these parties Taylor watched while the Phoenix agent met and took instructions from civilians working undercover with the Da Nang Press Club.

  Sensing he was on to something unusual, Taylor wrote to L. Mendel Rivers, a congressman in South Carolina. “A few weeks later,” he noted, “Koslowski hinted that maybe I shouldn’t be writing to politicians.”

  Taylor began to feel uncomfortable. Thinking there was an informer in Rivers’s office, he began mailing copies of his reports and photographs to a friend in Florida, who concealed the evidence in his house. What the evidence suggested was that Phoenix murders in Da Nang were directed not at the VCI but at private businessmen on the wrong side of contractual disputes. In one case documented by Taylor, Pepsi was trying to move in on Coke, so the Coke distributor used his influence to have his rival’s name put on the Phoenix hit list.

  Taylor’s investigation climaxed that Sunday morning outside the White Elephant restaurant. He followed the Phoenix adviser and his Korean accomplice as they drove in smaller and smaller circles around the northwest section of Da Nang. Satisfied they weren’t being tailed, the two parked their jeep, then proceeded on foot down a series of back alleys until they reached an open-air café packed with upper-middle-class Vietnamese, including women and children. Taylor arrived on the scene as the two assassins pulled hand grenades from a briefcase, hiked up the bamboo skirting around the café, rolled the grenades inside, turned, and briskly walked away.

  Taylor watched in horror as the cafe exploded. “I saw nothing but body parts come blasting out. I drove around the burning building and the bodies, hoping to cut them off before they reached their jeep. But they got to it before I did, and they started to drive away. They passed directly in front of me,” Taylor recalled, “so I rammed my jeep into theirs, knocking it off the road.

  “After the initial shock,” he continued, “they reached for their weapons, but I got to them first. I wanted to blow them away, but instead I used my airweight Smith and Wesson to disable them. Then I took their weapons and handcuffed them to the roll bar in the back of my jeep. I drove them back to the CID building and proceeded to drag them into Koslowski’s office. I got them down on the floor and told Ski they’d killed several people. I said that I’d watched the whole thing and that there were witnesses. In fact, the crowd would have torn them apart if I hadn’t brought them back fast.

  “Meanwhile, the American was screaming, so I stepped on him. I’d taken the cuffs off the Korean, who was trying to karate-chop everything in sight, so I cuffed him again. Then Ski told me to go back to my office to write up my report. Ski said he’d handle it. He was mad at me.”

  It was soon apparent why Koslowski was upset.

  “While I was in my office across the courtyard, in another wing of the CID building,” Taylor said, “one of the other CID agents came in and asked me if I had a death wish. ‘No,’ I replied, ‘I have a sense of duty.’

  “ ‘Well,’ ” he said, “ ‘nothing’s gonna get done.’” By this time reports describing the incident as an act of Vietcong terrorism were streaming into the office. Fourteen people had been killed; about thirty had been injured.

  “Then,” Taylor said, “a second CID agent came in and said, ‘Ski’s letting them go!’ I charged back to the main building and saw the American Phoenix agent walking down the hall, so I started bouncing him off the walls. At this point Koslowski started screaming at me to let him go. A Vietnamese guard came running inside, frantic, because there was a lynch mob of Koreans from the Phoenix task force forming outside. One of the CID guys grabbed me, and the Phoenix agent screamed that I was a dead man. Then he took his bloody head and left.

  “I really didn’t care.” Taylor sighed. “Sanctioning of enemy spies is one thing, but mass murder… I told Ski, ‘If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to get those guys.’ ”

  Shortly thereafter Koslowski received a phone call and informed Taylor that “for his own safety” he was being restricted to his room in the Paris Hotel. Two marines were posted outside his door and stood guard over him through the night. The following morning Taylor was taken under custody to the Third MP Battalion and put in a room in the prisoner of war camp. Now a captive himself, he sat there for two days in utter isolation. When the Koreans learned of his whereabouts, and word got out that they were planning an attack, he was choppered to a Marine base on Hill 37 near Dai Loc on Route 14. Taylor stayed there for two more days, while arrangements were made for his transfer back to the States. Eventually he was flown back to Da Nang and from there to Cam Ranh, Yokohama, Anchorage, and Seattle. In Seattle he was relieved of his gun and escorted by civilians posing as personal security—one was disguised as a Navy chaplain—to Orlando, Florida.

  “When I got to Orlando, where my family was waiting,” Taylor recalled, “there was still mud on my boots. I had five days’ growth of beard, and I was filthy. I cleaned up, contacted Marine headquarters, and was told to stand down. Nothing happened for about forty-five days, at which time I was ordered to Camp Lejeune, where I was debriefed by a bunch of military intelligence officers. I was told not to tell anyone about what had happened. They said I could go to jail if I did.”

  And so Bill Taylor’s account of Phoenix came to an end. Almost. Within a month of his return to the States, his friend’s house was broken into and the incriminating evidence stolen. In a predictable postscript Taylor’s service records were altered; included in the portion concerning his medical history were unflattering psychological profiles derived from sessions he never attended. He never got the Silver Star either. Yet despite his losing battle with the system, Bill Taylor still believes in right and wrong. He is proud of having brought the Phoenix assassins in for justice (never dispensed), for having torn the masks off their faces, and for putting them out of business temporarily in Da Nang
.

  Nor has the Phoenix controversy ended for Taylor. He has seen the fingerprints of the “old Phoenix boys” at the scene of a number of murders he has investigated, including those of American journalist Linda Frazier and Orlando Letelier. The “old Phoenix boys” Taylor referred to are a handful of Cuban contract agents the CIA hired after the Bay of Pigs fiasco to assassinate Fidel Castro. Some served in Vietnam in Phoenix, and a few operate as hired killers and drug dealers in Miami and Central America today. Taylor included the CIA case officers who manage these assassins in his definition of the “old Phoenix boys.”

  * The CIA’s unilateral Vietnamese asset PVT was in charge of PRU and Phoenix operations in Da Nang.

  † The PRU and Special Forces Mike Forces were trusted because they were under CIA control, with no official Vietnamese involvement.

  * Bishop noted that the American sergeant in charge of FIC administration sold food and clothing on the black market and had to be relieved. The Da Nang City IOCC and the three district IOCCs had their own interrogation and detention facilities.

  CHAPTER 26

  Revisions

  By 1971, as the war subsided and the emphasis shifted to police operations, it was finally understood, as General Clay had said in August 1969, “that the objective of neutralizations of the infrastructure is equal in priority to the objective of tactical operations.”1

  Brighter than ever, the spotlight shone on the Phoenix Directorate, which boasted in its 1970 End of Year Report: “The degree of success of the RVN counter-insurgency effort is directly related to the success in accomplishing this neutralization objective.” Noting that “This concept [author’s emphasis] will receive even more emphasis in 1971” and that “The Phung Hoang program has been given the highest priority in the GVN’s pacification effort,” the report says: “Full participation of all agencies will be maintained until VCI strength is greatly reduced; then it will be feasible to transfer complete responsibility for VCI neutralizations to the Special Police.”2