Phoenix Program

by Douglas Valentine

  The main reason for not scrapping Phoenix, Carver writes, was the “crucial” need to destroy the VCI. However, he suggests that the titles Phoenix and Phung Hoang adviser be dropped, and he warns against withdrawing advisers in provinces where the VCI presence was heavy. “The minimum staffing level appears to be about thirty positions which would provide coverage of the program at national, regional and a few key provincial echelons,” Carver writes, adding, “Plans should be drawn up to have the normal U.S. advisory structure absorb anti-VCI advisory duties beyond the transitional period of the drawdown.” He envisioned the complete withdrawal of Phoenix advisers by the end of 1972, but only in a way that would provide the United States with “a capability to monitor not only the GVN program but also to develop some semblance of an independent estimative capability.” That job would fall, after 1973, to the 500th Military Intelligence Group as well as the CIA.

  As ever, the CIA got its way. On December 28, 1971, State Department officer Lars Hydle, in response to Carver’s paper, wrote “that Phung Hoang should be handled by the Special Branch within the National Police Command … that Phung Hoang Committees should continue in existence,” and that province and district chiefs should assume responsibility “beginning with the most secure areas where there are few RVNAF main forces. Perhaps U.S. military advisors will continue to be needed as long as RVNAF retains action responsibilities for Phung Hoang, but as action is transferred to the Special Branch, the advisory role should be taken over by the Special Branch advisor, the CIA man” (author’s emphasis).

  This is the “reprise” John Tilton imagined: the return of the Special Branch to prominence in anti-VCI operations. By 1972 it was policy, as articulated by Bob Wall: “I was really pushing Special Branch to support Phoenix during the Easter offensive, while the VC were overrunning Hue. [The National Police commander Major General] Phong had the chief of police in Hue on the phone. I told him what to do, and he relayed the message … Where the Special Branch contributed,” Wall said, “was in Hue in April 1972; there was success.”7

  As soon as the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) attacked, the VCI in Hue were to begin sabotage and terror attacks within the city, direct NVA artillery fire, and guide assault columns. However, reports Robert Condon, the Phoenix coordinator on the scene, “Before the enemy agents could be activated, about 1000 of them who had been long identified by the PIOCC were arrested. Our intelligence indicated that the NVA commanders were blind in Hue, due to this timely Phung Hoang operation.”8

  “Phoenix,” Bob Wall insisted, “represented the strategy that could have won the war.” But, he lamented, “Ted Shackley stuck to the traditional route of only collecting intelligence and gave Phoenix away.” Removing the Special Branch in 1969, Wall contended, “kicked the teeth out of the program.

  “The Special Branch was up to the job,” Wall added. “Mau had instituted a training program in 1970, but Khiem prevented them from getting good-quality people because Mau had demonstrated the operational capabilities necessary to pull off a coup. Not that he was close to trying it, but when Thieu listed the possibilities, Mau was at the top: He was smart, charismatic, courageous, cold-blooded, politically minded, and he had access to the agency and troops who could pull it off.”

  A Catholic and central Vietnamese with Can Lao connections, Mau was good at his job. But he was a consultant to PA&E, and he had given the CIA access to the accounting records of the Special Branch, and he had organized his own political party, the Nationalist Students, all of which combined to make him a liability. So after Thieu had won reelection in October 1971, Mau was replaced as chief of the Special Branch by Brigadier General Huynh Thoi Tay; Colonel Song was replaced as the chief of Phoenix by Nguyen Van Giau; and General Phong* was replaced as the director general of the National Police by CIO chief Nguyen Khac Binh, even though, according to Tom Polgar, it was a mistake to have one man in both positions. Polgar added that Rod Landreth and Phil Potter negotiated the transfer of Phoenix and the PRU to the GVN with Generals Binh and Dang Van Quang.9

  Meanwhile, the CIA was distancing itself from the PRU. III Corps adviser Rudy Enders noted that PRU national commander Major Nguyen Van Lang was fired for selling positions and shaking down his region commanders and that “by the time 1972 rolls around, Ho Chau Tuan [former commander of the Eighth Airborne Battalion at Tan Son Nhut] had taken over in Saigon.”10

  Michael Drosnin quotes Ho Chau Tuan as saying, “The main mission of PRU was assassination. I received orders from the Phoenix office, the Vietnamese and Americans there, to assassinate high-level VCI. We worked closely with Saigon with the CIA from the Embassy, and in the provinces with the CIA at the consulates, to decide who to kill.” Writes Drosnin: “Tuan offered to name names of high-level Americans who directly ordered assassination strikes, but then he backed off. ‘I have enough experience in this profession to be afraid,’ he explained. ‘I know the CIA. I might be killed’ ” (New Times, 1975).11†

  In 1972 the PRU were advised in I Corps by Patry Loomis, in II Corps by Jack Harrell and Bob Gilardo, in III Corps by Rudy Enders and Felix Rodriguez, and in IV Corps by John Morrison and Gary Maddox.

  Phoenix operations in the field in 1972 varied from region to region. Rudy Enders told me he had the VCI on the run in III Corps. And in IV Corps, where the PRU were most active, success was reported against the VCI. But in I Corps and II Corps, where the NVA concentrated its attacks in 1972, the situation was much harder to handle. Quang Tri fell in April, and in early May the NVA captured Quang Ngai City, which it held until September. In Binh Dinh Province, forty thousand Koreans refused to fight, several thousand unpaid ARVN soldiers threw down their rifles and ran away, and the NVA seized three district capitals. With the ARVN and Territorial Forces in retreat, Thieu turned to Phoenix.

  In May 1972, writes Michael Klare, “Thieu declared martial law and launched a savage attack on the remaining pockets of neutralism in the big cities. Government forces reportedly cordoned off entire districts in Hue, Danang and Saigon and arrested everyone on the police blacklists. The reputable Far Eastern Economic Review reported on July 8, 1972, that 50,000 people had been arrested throughout Vietnam during the first two months of the offensive, and Time magazine reported on 10 July that arrests were continuing at a rate of 14,000 per month.”12

  For an eyewitness account of Phoenix operations in II Corps in 1972, we turn first to Lieutenant Colonel Connie O’Shea, who in January 1972 was transferred from Saigon to Phoenix headquarters in Nha Trang, as deputy to II Corps Phoenix Coordinator Colonel Lew Millett.

  “The problem with the program,” according to O’Shea, “was that people were being rotated out, but replacements were not being made. And as the intelligence officers went home, the Phoenix guy took over that job, but not the reverse. It was a one-way street, and Phoenix fell to the wayside.

  “Millett was trying to keep Phoenix people doing their Phoenix job,” O’Shea continued, “and he spent a lot of time going around to the province chiefs, trying to keep them focused on the VCI. But it was hard during the spring offensive. So Millett and [Region II Phung Hoang chief] Dam went around trying to keep the organization in place, telling the Phoenix coordinators that if they had to do S-two work, not to forget their anti-VCI job. That was number one. Our other job was making ourselves visible with Colonel Dam, so the Vietnamese would not get the sense that we were pulling out. We kept a high profile. We were missing a couple of province guys, and an awful lot of DIOCCs were missing advisers. The district senior advisers were not taking over but were trying to get the Vietnamese to take over. So we spent a lot of time touring and helping the Phung Hoang Committees and DIOCCs collect intelligence and prepare operational plans.

  “Thirdly,” O’Shea said, “Millett was an operator, trying to conduct as many missions as possible himself.” Millett’s biggest success was “turning” the Montagnard battalion that had led the attack on Hue during Tet of 1968.

  Fifty-two years old in 1972, Medal of Honor winn
er Lew Millett—who in 1961 had helped create the Vietnamese rangers and later did likewise in Laos—was known as a wild man who participated in ambushes and raids against VCI camps with Connie O’Shea and some of the more aggressive Phoenix coordinators.

  According to Millett, “Phoenix was coordinated at corps level by the CIA, and I had to back-channel to get around them.”13

  According to O’Shea, “The Phoenix program had gotten to the point where the region office was a manager’s office. Millett was trying to coordinate provinces and districts, and where we did run operations, it was in a province where the PIOCC was not doing much. We as senior officers did not theoretically coordinate with the CIA’s province officer in charge; that was the job of the major at the PIOCC.”

  One such major at a PIOCC in 1972 was Stan Fulcher, the Phoenix coordinator in Binh Dinh Province. “Stan had taken over all the programs,” O’Shea noted. “He was running the whole show. He kept taking on everything, including the PRU, which was true in many cases.”

  The son of an Air Force officer, Stan Fulcher was brought up in various military posts around the world, but he brands as “hypocritical” the closed society into which he was born. “The military sees itself as the conqueror of the world”—Fulcher sighed, “but the military is socialism in its purest form. People in the military lead a life of privilege in which the state meets each and every one of their needs.”14

  Having served in the special security unit at Can Tho Air Base in 1968—where he led a unit of forty riflemen against the VCI—Fulcher fully understood the realities of Vietnam. He told me of the Military Security Service killing a Jesuit priest who advocated land reform, of GVN officials trading with the National Liberation Front while trying to destroy religious sects, and of the tremendous U.S. cartels—RMK-BRJ, Sealand, Holiday Inns, Pan Am, Bechtel, and Vinnell—that prospered from the war.

  “The military has the political power and the means of production,” Fulcher explained, “and so it enjoys all the benefits of society … Well, it was the same thing in Vietnam, where the U.S. military and a small number of politicians supported the Vietnamese Catholic establishment against the masses…. Greedy Americans,” Fulcher contended, “were the cause of the war. The supply side economists—these are the emergent groups during Vietnam.”

  During a tour in London from 1968 to 1971, in which he saw British businessmen trading with the North Vietnamese, Fulcher learned there are “no permanent allies.” During his tour in Phoenix, he became totally disenchanted. “When I arrived in Saigon,” he recalled, “an Air America plane was waiting and took me to Nha Trang. That night I talked with Millett. The next day I got in a chopper and went to Qui Nhon, the capital city of Binh Dinh Province, where I met the S-two, Gary Hacker, who took me to my quarters in a hotel by the ocean.” Hacker then took Fulcher to meet the province senior adviser, “a young political appointee who lived in a beautiful house on the ocean. When I walked into the room, he was standing there with his arms around two Vietnamese girls. The tops of their ao dais were down, and he was cupping their breasts.”

  Next, Fulcher met Larry Jackson, the CIA province officer in Binh Dinh. Jackson had “about twenty contract workers, USIS types who thought they were Special Forces. They all had Vietnamese girl friends and important dads. They were all somewhat deranged and did nothing but play volleyball all day.” Fulcher described the CORDS advisory team as “a sieve.”

  As the Binh Dinh Province Phoenix coordinator, Stan Fulcher supervised nearly a thousand U.S. technicians and Vietnamese nationals, including a Special Forces sergeant who ran Binh Dinh’s PRU. The PRU adviser reported both to the CIA and to Fulcher. “His Vietnamese wife had been cut open,” Fulcher said. “He was a dangerous man who went out by himself and killed VC left and right.” Fulcher mistrusted the PRU because they did not take orders and because they played him against the CIA.

  Fulcher’s Vietnamese counterpart was MSS Major Nguyen Van Vinh. “The Vietnamese with the MSS,” Fulcher contended, “were the worst. They kept track of what the Americans were doing, they had friends in the VCI, and they would deal with Phoenix before the police.” The National Police had its own adviser, “a former cop from Virginia who ran the Field Police.” The PIC “was terribly disgusting,” and there was an interrogation center behind the Province Operations Center, Fulcher said, “right behind the province senior adviser’s house. Our barracks were next door.”

  Mr. Vinh was paid by Fulcher, who also had an interpreter and seven other Vietnamese on his Phoenix staff. “I could influence each one,” he stated, noting that with no replacements coming in, the advisory vacuum was easily filled by an aggressive person such as he. “As more and more Americans left,” Fulcher explained, “more Vietnamese came under my control. They needed consolidation. The structure was so corrupt, with everyone power grabbing, that independent units couldn’t do a job. And that meant added jobs for me.”

  For example, Fulcher inherited Binh Dinh’s Civic Action program—including the fifty-nine-man RD teams—which had been getting one million dollars annually in U.S. aid. “Then the well dried up, and funds were cut off,” Fulcher explained, “which caused much bitterness. Like the contras or, before them, the Cubans. Everyone was turning against the government.” As the province psywar officer, Fulcher also controlled the Qui Nhon TV station, where he spent one day a week working with the actors and staff, organizing parades, producing broadcasts and puppet shows, printing leaflets, and distributing radios tuned in to the GVN station. According to Fulcher, the embittered Vietnamese psywar officer absconded with the TV money and sold the radios on the black market.

  Fulcher also managed the Chieu Hoi program. During the spring offensive, he recalled, “We gave them rifles and sent them up to the front lines…. I sat on top of a knoll and watched while they threw down their guns and ran away.”

  Territorial security was a job that involved “checking villages every two weeks for a day or so. The Territorial Forces,” he pointed out, “were a motley crew, mostly old men and women and little kids.” Fulcher also liaisoned with the Korean White Horse Division, “which would steal anything it could get its hands on.” According to Fulcher Americans were involved with the Koreans in drug dealing, and he said that the Koreans were “sadistic and corrupt.”

  In explaining the meaning of Phoenix, Stan Fulcher said, “You can’t understand it by creating a web. There were several lines of communication, which skipped echelons, and I could go to whatever side—military or Phoenix—that I wanted to…. Phoenix was more of a political program, like what the Germans had on the eastern front—Gestapo/SS, but half assed.” For that reason, Fulcher explained, “The regular military didn’t like Phoenix, and the province senior advisers [PSAs] hated it, too.

  “Twice a week I’d brief the PSA at the TOC [tactical operations center]. Each member of the province team would brief through his deputy. The operations officer was the main guy, then the G-two, then Phoenix, PRU and the CIA rep. The Province Phung Hoang Committee met twice a month, at which point the MSS would exercise whatever influence it had with the province chief, who’d say, ‘We need fifty VCI this week.’ Then the Special Branch would go out and get old ladies and little kids and take them to the PIC. They’d send us on special operations missions into the hamlets, and the village chiefs would take the old and maimed and give them to us as VCI. ‘If you don’t give me rice, you’re VCI.’ It was perverted.

  “The ARVN supplied us with cards on everyone they didn’t like,” Fulcher went on, “but we could never find them. On night operations during curfew hours, we’d seal off the exits and go after a specific guy. We’d be running through houses, one guy lifting up a lamp, another guy holding pictures of the suspect and taking fingerprints. But everyone had the same name, so we’d search for weapons, maps, documents. It was just impossible”—Fulcher sighed—”so after two months I started to find ways to let people go—to get their names off the list. You see, Binh Dinh had something like thirty-seven poli
tical parties, and no one could say who was VC. By 1972 most district chiefs were NLF, and even though they were appointed by Saigon, most were from the North and were kept off hit lists due to friendships.”

  What finally convinced Fulcher to work against Phoenix was the “disappearing” of thirty thousand civilians in the aftermath of the spring offensive. Rocking back and forth in his chair, his head buried in his hands, sobbing, Fulcher described what happened: “Two NVA regiments hit Binh Dinh in the north, mainly at Hoi An. We went through a pass in the valley to meet them, but a whole ARVN regiment was destroyed. Four hundred were killed and sixteen hundred escaped down Highway Thirty-one. I could see the ARVN soldiers running away and the NVA soldiers running after them, shooting them in the back of their heads with pistols so as not to waste ammunition…. I could see our helicopters being shot down…. We called in close air support and long-range artillery and stopped them at Phu Mi. There were pitched battles. The NVA attacked on two ridges. Then [II Corps Commander John] Vann was killed up in Kontum, and [Special Forces Colonel Michael] Healy took over. Healy came in with his Shermanesque tactics in August.”

  The disappearance of the thirty thousand occurred over a two-month period beginning in June, Fulcher said, “mainly through roundups like in the Ukraine. The MSS was putting people in camps around Lane Field outside Qui Nhon, or in the PIC. Everyone was turning against the GVN, and anyone born in Binh Dinh was considered VC. There were My Lais by the score—from aerial bombardments and artillery…. Phoenix coordinated it. Me and Jackson and four or five of his contractors. The National Police had lists of people. Out of the thirty thousand, the Special Branch was interested in particular in about a hundred. The MSS put everyone else in camps, and the Vietnamese Air Force loaded them up, flew away, and came back empty. They dumped whole families into the Gulf of Tonkin. This was not happening elsewhere.”