Phoenix Program (13 page)

Be's fifty-nine-man RD teams had group leaders and psywar, intelligence, and medical specialists in staff positions. There were three elevenman teams constituting an “action element” and having a counterterror mission, and there was a Rural Construction leader with a six-man Civic Action team; a six-man “mobile” Census Grievance team under the intelligence office; and a six-man economic unit. Be's teams were called Purple People Eaters by American soldiers, in reference to their clothes and terror tactics. To the rural Vietnamese they were simply “idiot birds.”

Said Scotton: “Be was trying to create a climate to make the VC blunder into ambushes and fear the unpredictable.” His goal was to neutralize the VC, but his style was “be nice to VC agents, give them gifts, smother them with affection, and then let them try to explain that to their superiors.” It was a style Scotton did not approve of, although he loved Be himself. “Be was like an older brother to me and an uncle to my children,” Scotton said. “He lived with us from 1976 until he died in summer of 1981.”

Despite Scotton's compunctions, by mid-1965 the CIA was using Be's fifty-nine-man model as its standard team, at which point the Rural Construction Cadre program was renamed the Revolutionary Development Cadre program. With larger teams and standardization came the need for more advisers, so Donohue began recruiting military men like Joe Vacarro, a Special Forces sergeant working as a Public Safety adviser in Quang Nam Province. “I met Joe and chatted with him,” Donohue said, “and he looked
interesting, so I went to AID, and he was sort of seconded to me; although he still worked for AID, I wrote his fitness reports. Then I worked out a direct hire for him, and he came back here to D.C., did some formal Vietnamese training, then went back out for another tour.” Vaccaro was to become heavily involved in the Provincial Reconnaissance Unit training program at Vung Tau. Donohue also hired Jean Sauvageot out of the Army. Sauvageot was to become the scion of Vung Tau and a close aide to Frank Scotton, his mentor, and William Colby.

“We get to the point,” according to Donohue, “where the CIA was running a political program in a sovereign country where they didn't know what the hell we were teaching. So I had Thieu and Ky down to Vung Tau, and I did all the right things. But what kind of program could it be that had only one sponsor, the CIA, that says it was doing good? It had to be sinister. Any red-blooded American could understand that. What the hell is the CIA doing running a program on political action?

“So I went out to try to get some cosponsors for the record. They weren't easy to come by. I went to [USIS chief] Barry Zorthian. I said, ‘Barry, how about giving us someone?' I talked to MACV about getting an officer assigned. I had AID give me a guy.” But most of it, Donohue said, “was window dressing. We had the funds; we had the logistics; we had the transportation.”

The CIA also had the approbation of Ky and Thieu. “Ky and Thieu saw the wisdom of it,” Donohue said, “so they offered up (as their liaison to the program) General Nguyen Duc Thang. And he was indefatigable. He went everyplace.” There was, however, one catch. As a way of monitoring the Saigon station, in August 1965 the Special Group assigned Ed Lansdale as senior liaison to General Thang, who instantly advocated transferring the entire Revolutionary Development program to the Defense Ministry.

“Ed Lansdale was an invention of Hubert Humphrey's,” Donohue grumbled. “The idea was ‘We did it before, we can do it again.' So Lansdale came out two years too late. He brought a lot of his old cohorts; some were agency guys that he'd suborned. He had some Army people and some retired folks, but there was really nothing,” Donohue said wearily, “for them to do.”

“My boss [Gordon Jorgenson, who replaced Peer DeSilva in February 1965] said, ‘Tell them everything.' I said okay, and I spent two and a half hours briefing his full group about a week after they arrived. And they said, ‘Let's have a joint office.' So we had our logistics people put in offices and all the right things. Then I had to get somebody to run the office. Thang said, ‘Who do you want?' And I said, ‘Chau.'”

Tran Ngoc Chau, according to Donohue, “was a farsighted, bright guy with an ability to keep meaningful statistics—which is not very Vietnamese. He'd been the apple of Diem's eye during the strategic hamlet program, and he had a special phone to the palace—Diem was on the horn to him con
stantly. Because he had that kind of sponsorship, he was able to do an awful lot of experimentation. So we used Kien Hoa as a proving ground. I spent a lot of time between Mai and Chau looking at programs,” Donohue recalled, “trying to introduce refinements.”

By having Chau transferred to Vung Tau, Donohue also got greater control over his pet project. “We took Census Grievance and expanded it,” he said. “I got a villa in Gia Dinh and set up a training school for Census Grievance people. We would bring people in that had been spotted in various villages and run them through the training; then they would go back to their provinces. I had a French gent, Matisse, who ran the school. We trained in small groups, and it was a much faster process than the PATs; but these were literate people, so they were quick on the uptake. And it was very pleasant surroundings. It was a well-handled program.” To it Donohue assigned John O'Reilly, John Woodsman, Dick Fortin, and Jean Sauvageot.

“But I had forced the transfer,” Donohue confessed, “and Chau was so damn mad that he was in a permanent pout. So he decided to go down to Vung Tau and shape the place up. Which we really didn't need. ‘Cause here you have two dynamic personalities [Mai and Chau] who couldn't stand each other.”

The conflict was resolved in 1966, when Mai was reassigned to the Joint General Staff, while Chau took over the Vung Tau training program. Donohue minimized the effect. “I couldn't really do much business out there anyway,” he noted, “because I needed our own system to talk to people. But at least for the record it looked pretty good. We had a MAVC guy, an AID guy, and a USIS guy down at Vung Tau, so all the bases had been touched. You see,” he added, “at this point all we were trying to do was expand the thing and say that there's at least plausible denial that the agency is solely responsible.”

Indeed, with the creation of Vung Tau and the synthetic Revolutionary Development Cadre program, South Vietnam began slouching toward democracy. But it was an empty gesture. The rule in South Vietnam was one step forward followed by two steps back.

CHAPTER 5

PICs

“A census, if properly made and exploited, is a basic source of intelligence. It would show, for instance, who is related to whom, an important piece of information in counterinsurgency warfare because insurgent recruiting at the village level is generally based initially on family ties.”
¹

As counterinsurgency expert David Galula notes above, a census is an effective way of controlling large numbers of persons. Thus, while CIA paramilitary officers used Census Grievance to gather intelligence in VC-controlled villages, CIA police advisers were conducting a census program of their own. Its origins are traced to Robert Thompson, a British counterinsurgency expert hired in 1961 by Roger Hilsman, director of the State Department's Office of Research and Intelligence, to advise the United States and GVN on police operations in South Vietnam. Basing it on a system he had used in Malaya, Thompson proposed a three-pronged approach that coordinated military, civilian intelligence, and police agencies in a concerted attack on the VCI.

On Thompson's advice, the National Police in 1962 initiated the Family Census program, in which a name list was made and a group photo taken of every family in South Vietnam. The portrait was filed in a police dossier along with each person's political affiliations, fingerprints, income, savings, and other relevant information, such as who owned property or had relatives
outside the village and thus had a legitimate reason to travel. This program was also instrumental in leading to the identification of former sect members and
supplétifs,
who were then blackmailed by VBI case officers into working in their villages as informers. By 1965 there were 7,453 registered families.

Through the Family Census, the CIA learned the names of Communist cell members in GVN-controlled villages. Apprehending the cadre that ran the cells was then a matter of arresting all minor suspects and working them over until they informed. This system weakened the insurgency insofar as it forced political cadres to flee to guerrilla units enduring the hardships of the jungle, depriving the VCI of its leadership in GVN areas. This was no small success, for, as Nguyen Van Thieu once observed, “Ho Chi Minh values his two cadres in every hamlet more highly than ten military divisions.”
²

Thompson's method was successful, but only up to a point. Because many VCI cadres were former Vietminh heroes, it was counterproductive for Political Action Teams and counterterrorists to hunt them down in their own villages. Many VCI were not terrorists but, as Galula writes, “men whose motivations, even if the counterinsurgent disapproves of them, may be perfectly honorable. They do not participate directly, as a rule, in direct terrorism or guerrilla action and, technically, have no blood on their hands.”
³

Thompson's dragnet technique engendered other problems. Mistakes were made, and innocent people were routinely tortured or subject to extortion by crooked cops. On other occasions VCI agents deliberately led Political Action Teams into arresting people hostile to the insurgency. Recognizing these facts, Thompson suggested that the CIA organize a police special branch of professional interrogators who would not be confused with PATs working to win hearts and minds. In 1964, at Thompson's suggestion, the Police Special Branch was formed from the Vietnam Bureau of Investigation and plans were made to center it in Province Intelligence Coordinating Committees (PICCs) in South Vietnam's provinces.

Creation of the police Special Branch coincided with the reorganization of the “Special Branch” of the Vietnamese Special Forces into the Special Exploitation Service (SES), the GVN's counterpart to the Special Operations Group. SOG and SES intelligence operations were coordinated with those of the Special Branch through the CIO, though only at the regional and national level, an inadequacy the PICCs were designed to overcome.

The birth of the police Special Branch also coincided with the Hop Tac (Pacification Intensive Capital Area) program, activated in July 1964 to bring security to the besieged capital. A variation on the oil spot technique, Hop Tac introduced twenty-five hundred national policemen into seven provinces surrounding Saigon. In October 1964 the National Identification and Family Census programs were combined in the Resources Control Bureau in the National Police Directorate, and a Public Safety adviser was placed in each
region specifically to manage these programs. By December 1964 thirteen thousand policemen were participating in Hop Tac, seven thousand cops were manning seven hundred checkpoints, more than six thousand arrests had been made, and ABC-TV had done a documentary on the program. In the provinces, Public Safety advised policemen-enforced curfews and regulations on the movement of persons and goods under the Resources Control program.

Also in September 1964, as part of the effort to combine police and paramilitary programs, Frank Scotton was directed to apply his motivational indoctrination program to Hop Tac. Assisted by cadres from his Quang Ngai PAT team, Scotton formed paramilitary reaction forces in seven key districts surrounding Saigon. Scotton's cadres were trained at the Ho Ngoc Tau Special Forces camp where SOG based its C5 program for operations inside Cambodia. Equipment, supplies, and training for Scotton's teams were provided by the CIA, while MACV and Special Forces provided personnel. Lists of defectors, criminals, and other potential recruits, as well as targets, came from Special Branch files.

The aim of the motivational indoctrination program, according to Scotton, was to “develop improved combat skills—increased commitment to close combat—for South Vietnamese. This is not psywar against civilians or VC. This is taking the most highly motivated people, saying they deserted, typing up a contract, and using them in these units. Our problem,” Scotton said, “was finding smart Vietnamese and Cambodians who were willing to die.”
⁴

The first district Scotton entered in search of recruits was Tan Binh, between Saigon and Tan Son Nhut airport, where he extracted cadres from a Popular Force platoon guarding Vinh Loc village. These cadres were trained to keep moving, to sleep in the jungle by day and attack VC patrols at night. Next, Scotton trained teams in Nha Be, Go Vap, and Thu Duc districts. He recalled going two weeks at a time without a shower, “subliminating the risk and danger,” and participating in operations. “We had a cheap rucksack, a submachine gun, and good friends. We weren't interested in making history in the early days.”

So successful was the motivational indoctrination program in support of Hop Tac that MACV decided to use it nationwide. In early 1965 Scotton was asked to introduce his program in SOG's regional camps, in support of Project Delta, the successor to Leaping Lena. Recruits for SOG projects were profit-motivated people whom Scotton persuaded to desert from U.S. Special Forces A camps, which were strung out along South Vietnam's borders. On a portable typewriter he typed a single-page contract, which each recruit signed, acknowledging that although listed as a deserter, he was actually employed by the CIA in “a sensitive project” for which he received substantially higher pay than before.

The most valuable quality possessed by defectors, deserters, and criminals serving in “sensitive” CIA projects was their expendability. Take, for example, Project 24, which employed NVA officers and senior enlisted men. Candidates for Project 24 were vetted and, if selected, taken out for dinner and drinks, to a brothel, where they were photographed, then blackmailed into joining special reconnaissance teams. Trained in Saigon, outfitted with captured NVA or VC equipment, then given a “one-way ticket to Cambodia,” they were sent to locate enemy sanctuaries. When they radioed back their position and that of the sanctuary, the CIA would “arc-light” (bomb with B52's) them along with the target. No Project 24 special reconnaissance team ever returned to South Vietnam.