Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (14 page)

The ill-fated electronic fence had been born out of Secretary McNamara’s frustration at the failure to win the war by bombing the “critical node” of North Vietnamese oil tanks early in 1966. At that same time, the technocratic defense secretary had commissioned a study of means to systematize the counter-guerrilla effort in South Vietnam, eventually spawning the Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation for Attack Against the Infrastructure Program (ICEX).

Just as sensors dropped into the jungle canopy over the Ho Chi Minh Trail would relay signals to the omnivorous IBM-360 machine in Thailand, teams of American and Vietnamese intelligence officials fed dossiers into the IBM-1401 computer in the vast, air-conditioned Saigon intelligence center. Before long the list had grown to 6,000, expanding at a rate of 1,000 a month. In August of the following year, Robert “Blowtorch” Komer, the White House official who had been promoted to supervise the overall pacification effort, mandated a quota of eighteen hundred VCI “neutralizations” per month as a “management tool.” So while Igloo White measured success by the number of Vietnamese supply trucks destroyed, the sister program inside South Vietnam counted bodies.

The CIA’s neutralizers were initially known as counterterror teams. Rebranded soon after as the functionally equivalent provincial reconnaissance (PRU), they were made up of native Vietnamese who were overseen by American advisers. “Sure we got involved in assassinations,” one CIA official, Charlie Yothers, later told a reporter. “That’s what PRU was 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?” News of the program inevitably was leaked to the press, prompting eventual congressional hearings. Just as inevitable, the revelations triggered a concerted effort to portray Phoenix (only one of the successive names for the program) as something much more benign. Thus in 1969 the
New York Times
described it as an initiative to “sideline” members of the Viet Cong infrastructure.

By 1971 euphemism had been cast aside. That year, after William Colby, later head of the CIA, confirmed that 20,587 people had already been killed under the auspices of Phoenix, members of Congress were openly deriding it as “a program for the assassination of civilian leaders.” Alternatively, the program met with wholehearted approval at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, where President Richard Nixon reacted angrily to proposed cuts in the PRU program with the straightforward command, “We’ve got to have more of this. Assassinations, that’s what they, the Vietnamese communists, are doing.”

The statistics of eliminated Viet Cong “infrastructure” regurgitated by the computers, summarized in the totals solemnly recounted by Colby and other senior officials, gave the appearance of precision and progress, just as the even more powerful computers of Task Force Alpha revealed equally exact numbers of trucks accounted for on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. As with the truck war, the impression of precision cast by the Phoenix computers was misleading. Though large numbers of people were indeed being killed, they were not necessarily the bona fide Communist officials posthumously listed in the account books. Even the program’s own statistics indicate that enemy “civilian leaders” weren’t in much danger from Phoenix: officially only 150 “Senior VCI” were “neutralized” in 1969. When Komer asked a friend, Colonel Robert Gard, to be the military deputy to the Phoenix program, Gard flatly refused. As he told author Nick Turse years later, “I didn’t know a lot about it, except that it was an assassination program, subject to killing innocents.” Unsurprisingly, it was well penetrated by Viet Cong agents who could thereby use it to work through their own blacklists. One CIA officer later recalled that Saigon regime officials and even Americans used the PRU for “shaking down the Vietnamese, arresting them if they didn’t pay protection money, even taking bribes to free suspects even if they’d already been arrested.”

Vincent Okamoto, later a distinguished Los Angeles Superior Court Judge, who in 1969 was a highly decorated combat veteran assigned to a Special Forces unit, has a pungent reminiscence vividly illustrating the chasm between the computerized high-value targeting concept and the murderously haphazard reality of Phoenix in action. “I had never heard of it until they told me I was part of it. I did it for two months and didn’t like it at all … the CIA and the boys in Saigon would feed information into computers and would come up with a blacklist of Vietnamese who were aiding the enemy. The problem was, how do you find the people on the blacklist? It’s not like you had their address and telephone number. The normal procedure would be to go into a village and just grab someone and say, ‘Where’s Nguyen so-and-so?’ Half the time, the people were so afraid they would say anything. Then a Phoenix team would take the informant, put a sandbag over his head, poke out two holes so he could see, put commo wire around his neck like a long leash, and walk him through the village and say, ‘When we go by Nguyen’s house, scratch your head.’ Then that night Phoenix would come back, knock on the door and say, ‘April Fool, motherfucker.’ Whoever answered the door would get wasted.”

As America withdrew from Vietnam, the assassination program was widely deemed an embarrassment, if not a war crime, and best forgotten. But as the years passed and moral outrage receded along with guilty consciences, attitudes toward Phoenix gradually became more positive. In 2004, for example, David Kilcullen, a highly lauded and influential theorist of counterinsurgency, called for a “disaggregation strategy” targeting insurgent networks on a global scale “that would resemble the unfairly maligned (but highly effective) Vietnam-era Phoenix program.”

While the Phoenix operatives were on their killing spree, the CIA’s intelligence component was of course tasked to furnish intelligence on every aspect of the war. Thanks to studious scrutiny of captured enemy documents, Sam Adams, a brilliant and dedicated analyst, concluded in 1967 that official estimates of enemy numbers were off by 50 percent. Colleagues and immediate superiors accepted his analysis, which rebutted official pronouncements of impending victory. The military high command, however, rejected it out of hand, a conclusion that was feebly endorsed by the CIA’s own leadership. Confronted directly by an indignant Adams, CIA Director Richard Helms revealed a basic fact of life in Washington that did much to explain why the agency has traditionally devoted the bulk of its energies to activities other than intelligence. “Sam, this may sound strange from where you’re sitting,” said Helms. “But the CIA is only one voice among many in Washington. And it’s not a very big one, either, particularly compared to the Pentagon’s. What would you have me do? Take on the entire military?”

Adams suggested that that would indeed be the honorable thing to do, but Helms thought otherwise, as did prior and subsequent CIA directors. When, in the 1970s, other agency analysts began to question inflated estimates of Soviet military strength, powerful interests in Washington moved swiftly to impose a Team B composed of hawkish ideologues to reinterpret the analysts’ findings. Suitably chastened, the CIA did not veer significantly from the defense lobby’s self-interested assessment of Soviet strength and aggressive intentions right up until the final collapse of the Communist system.

It is a commonly held view that with the exit of U.S. forces from Vietnam, hard-won expertise in fighting an insurgent enemy was discarded and forgotten as the military turned with relief to the simpler task of confronting the cold war enemy on the plains of Europe. But that is not entirely the case. The automated battlefield conceived and executed by Task Force Alpha sprang back to life within a few scant years of the exit from Vietnam as Assault Breaker, with ongoing conceptual resurrections, such as JSTARS in following years, right down to the drone system in the twenty-first century.

The CIA, meanwhile, found itself under severe attack as unedifying incidents from its history, including assassination plots against high-value targets, such as the late Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961, became public thanks to zealous congressional investigators, prompting a public ban on such assassinations. The ban, first pronounced by President Gerald Ford in Executive Order 11905 in 1976 and reaffirmed by Presidents Carter and Reagan, stated straightforwardly that “No employee of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.”

It may have been the case that the CIA and the White House took these words literally for a little while, but within a few short years the ban was being creatively reinterpreted. This was made clear in 1983, when “Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare,” a CIA instructional manual distributed to the Nicaraguan Contras, surfaced in the press complete with helpful tips on how officials of the Sandinista regime could be “neutralized.” Administration officials later explained to the
Washington Post
some of the ways in which the ban might not really ban assassinations, suggesting “… the order could be revoked or simply ignored, arguing that covert action against terrorists could be defined as something other than ‘political assassination.’”

A pattern was now set: the United States would feel free to target individuals while insisting that the ban was being scrupulously observed—a contradiction in terms that press and public seemed happy to accept. So, in 1986 President Reagan sent a fleet of F-111 bombers to kill Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, along with whichever members of his family happened to be present. Spurred by deep-seated misconceptions and distorted intelligence, senior officials convinced themselves that Qaddafi, in the words of Secretary of State Alexander Haig, was “a cancer to cut out.” As would later become routine in the post-9/11 era, a state department lawyer obligingly furnished an opinion that the United States had the legal right to preemptive attacks against terrorists, thus justifying killing Qaddafi. State-sanctioned murder, however, was still a touchy subject at the time, so the small group inside the White House promoting the mission, according to an authoritative account published not long afterward, put fake targets on the official orders while simultaneously drafting other secret orders for the pilots to strike Qaddafi’s tent. Senior officials were therefore able to plausibly deny that the raid was in any sense an assassination mission. Qaddafi survived the attack.

So it was that the world at large believed that U.S.government-sponsored assassinations had been unequivocally forbidden by presidential edict. W. Hays Parks, a military lawyer working for the army’s judge advocate general, had helpfully devised a legal rationale for ignoring the edict in any foreseeable situation. Parks, a former marine colonel whose views on legal boundaries for the use of force tended to the robust, concluded that the ban was indeed intended to establish “beyond any doubt that the United States does not condone assassination as an instrument of national policy.” A public relations exercise, in other words. It did, he conceded, “preclude unilateral actions by individual agents or agencies against selected foreign public officials.” However, it all depended on what was meant by the word
assassination
. The ban was definitely not intended, stated Parks in his lengthy analysis, to limit “lawful self-defense options against legitimate threats to the national security of the United States or individual U.S. citizens.… [Any] decision by the President to employ clandestine, low visibility or overt military force would not constitute assassination if U.S. military forces were employed against the combatant forces of another nation, a guerrilla force,
or a terrorist or other organization whose actions pose a threat to the security of the United States
[author’s emphasis].” As Parks later explained to me, his memo was prompted by the increasing number of occasions in which the United States had confronted terrorists overseas. As a particular example, he cited the case of Fawaz Yunis, a Lebanese Shi’ite militiaman wanted on hijacking charges, who was kidnapped by the FBI after being lured to a boat in international waters off Cyprus.

Since the military lawyer’s definition left plenty of wiggle room for any president who wanted to murder someone—“legitimate threat” along with “terrorism” and “other” being left undefined—chief counsels at the White House, the departments of Justice and State, the CIA, and the military services signed their concurrence with Parks’ judgment, thereby carving a legal highway straight through to the drone assassination programs of Presidents Bush and Obama.

Targeting “high-value individuals” was not yet part of the official U.S. national security lexicon. As we have seen in the evolution of effects-based operations through the bombing wars of the 1990s in Iraq and Serbia, murder attempts on enemy leaders were gradually acquiring the supporting dignity of theory. Prefiguring a twenty-first century fascination with anthropology, CIA officials did advance a rudimentary rationale for the targeting of the leaders’ families. According to an authoritative account of the affair, agency officials theorized that in Bedouin culture, Qaddafi would be diminished as a leader if he could not protect his immediate family. The account indirectly quotes an agency briefing at the White House arguing “if you really get at Qaddafi’s house—and by extension, his family—you’ve destroyed an important connection for the people in terms of loyalty.” Some things had evidently not changed much since Air Vice-Marshall Ritchie’s ruminations in 1944 on the merits of assassinating Hitler.

It would not be long, however, before the CIA, in partnership with a junior but ambitious agency, would discover a whole new field of individual targeting. For once there would be someone watching to see if it worked.