Phoenix Program (15 page)

Each provincial capital would eventually have a PIC. However, regional interrogation centers were built first and were larger, holding two to three hundred prisoners each. In IV Corps's regional capital, Can Tho, where the French had built a jail capable of holding two thousand prisoners, existing facilities were renovated. In choosing where to build in the provinces, each CIA regional officer selected priority provinces. Then, according to Muldoon, it was up to the liaison officer in the province to talk to the province chief and his CIO counterpart to find a spot near the provincial capital. “ 'Cause that's where our guy lived. Some of the guys had a hell of a time getting PICs started,” Muldoon noted, “because some province chiefs wanted money under the table.”

Once the interrogation center was built, the liaison officer became its adviser, and Muldoon helped him recruit its staff. There were deadlines for each phase, and part of Muldoon's job was to travel around and monitor progress. “In one place construction would be half done,” he recalled, “and in another they'd be trying to find a piece of land. It was a very big undertaking. We even had nit-PICs, which were smaller versions for smaller provinces.” Most interrogation centers were built or under construction by the time Muldoon left Vietnam in August 1966, at which point he was transferred to Thailand to build the CIA's huge interrogation center in Udorn, “where the CIA ran the Laos war from the Air America base.” Muldoon was replaced as PIC chief in Vietnam by Bob Hill, a vice cop from Washington, D.C. Hill replaced Muldoon in Thailand in 1968.

One story high, fashioned from concrete blocks, poured cement, and wood in the shape of a hollow square, an interrogation center was four
buildings with tin roofs linked around a courtyard. In the center of the yard was a combination lookout-water tower with an electric generator under it. “You couldn't get the guards to stay out there at night if they didn't have lights,” Muldoon explained. “So we had spotlights on the corners, along the walls, and on the tower shooting out all around. We also bulldozed around it so there were no trees or bushes. Anybody coming at it could be seen crossing the open area.” People entered and exited through green, steel-plated gates, “Which were wide open every time I visited,” said Muldoon, who visited only during the day. “You didn't want to visit at night,” when attacks occurred. PICs were located on the outskirts of town, away from residential areas, so as not to endanger the people living nearby, as well as to discourage rubbernecking. “These were self-contained places,” Muldoon emphasized. Telephone lines to the PICs were tapped by the CIA.

On the left side were interrogation rooms and the cellblock—depending on the size, twenty to sixty solitary confinement cells the size of closets. Men and women were not segregated. “You could walk right down the corridor,” according to Muldoon. “It was an empty hallway with cells on both sides. Each cell had a steel door and a panel at the bottom where you could slip the food in and a slot at the top where you could look in and see what the guy was doing.” There were no toilets, just holes to squat over. “They didn't have them in their homes.” Muldoon laughed. “Why should we put them in their cells?”

Prisoners slept on concrete slabs. “Depending on how cooperative they were, you'd give them a straw mat or a blanket. It could get very cold at night in the highlands.” A system of rewards and punishments was part of the treatment. “There were little things you could give them and take away from them, not a lot, but every little bit they got they were grateful for.”

Depending on the amount of VCI activity in the province and the personality of the PIC chief, some interrogation centers were always full while others were always empty. In either case, “We didn't want them sitting there talking to each other,” Muldoon said, so “we would build up the cells gradually, until we had to put them next to each other. They were completely isolated. They didn't get time to go out and walk around the yard. They sat in their cells when they weren't being interrogated. After that they were sent to the local jail or were turned back over to the military, where they were put in POW camps or taken out and shot. That part I never got involved in,” he said, adding parenthetically, “They were treated better in the PICs than in the local jails already there for common criminals. Public Safety was advising them, working with the National Police. Sometimes they had sixty to seventy people in a cell that shouldn't have had more than ten. But they didn't care. If you're a criminal, you suffer. If you don't like it, too bad. Don't be a criminal.”

The interrogation process worked like this. “As we brought prisoners in, the first thing we did was … run them through the shower. That's on the left as you come in. After that they were checked by the doctor or nurse. That was an absolute necessity because God knows what diseases they might be carrying with them. They might need medication. They wouldn't do you much good if they died the first day they were there and you never got a chance to interrogate them. That's why the medical office was right inside the main gate. In most PICs,” Muldoon noted, “the medical staff was usually a local ARVN medic who would come out and check the prisoners coming in that day.”

After the prisoner was cleaned, examined, repaired, weighed, photographed, and fingerprinted, his biography was taken by a Special Branch officer in the debriefing room. This initial interrogation extracted “hot” information that could be immediately exploited—the whereabouts of an ongoing party committee meeting, for example—as well as the basic information needed to come up with requirements for the series of interrogations that followed. Then the prisoner was given a uniform and stuck in a cell.

The interrogation rooms were at the back of the PIC. Some had two-way mirrors and polygraph machines, although sophisticated equipment was usually reserved for regional interrogation centers, where expert interrogators could put them to better use. Most province liaison officers were not trained interrogators. “They didn't have to be,” according to Muldoon. “They were there to collect intelligence, and they had a list of what they needed in their own province. All they had to do was to make sure that whoever was running the PIC followed their orders. All they had to say was ‘This is the requirement I want.' Then they read the initial reports and went back and gave the Special Branch interrogators additional requirements, just like we did at the NIC.”

The guards—usually policemen, sometimes soldiers—lived in the PIC. As they returned from guard duty, they stacked their weapons in the first room on the right. The next room was the PIC chief's office, with a safe for classified documents, handguns, and the chief's bottle of scotch. The PIC chief's job was to
turn
those in the VCI—make them Special Branch agents—and maintain informant networks in the hamlets and villages. Farther down the corridor were offices for interrogators, collation and report writers, translator-interpreters, clerical and kitchen staff. There were file rooms with locked cabinets and map rooms for tracking the whereabouts of VCIs in the province. And there was a Chieu Hoi room where defectors were encouraged to become counterterrorists, political action cadre, or Kit Carson scouts—a play on the names Biet Kich and Kit Carson, the cavalry adviser who gave a reward for Navajo scalps. Kit Carson scouts worked exclusively for the Marines.

Once an interrogation center had been constructed and a staff assigned,
Muldoon summoned the training team from the NIC. Each member of the team was a specialist. The Army captain trained the guards. Air Force Sergeant Frank Rygalski taught report writers how to write proper reports—the tangible product of the PIC. There were standard reporting formats for tactical as opposed to strategic intelligence and for Chieu Hoi and agent reports. To compile a finished report, an interrogator's notes were reviewed by the chief interrogator, then collated, typed, copied and sent to the Special Branch, CIO, and CIA. Translations were never considered totally accurate unless read and confirmed in the original language by the same person, but that rarely happened. Likewise, interrogations conducted through interpreters were never considered totally reliable, for significant information was generally lost or misrepresented.

Another Air Force sergeant, Dick Falke, taught interrogators how to take notes and ask questions during an interrogation. “You don't just sit down with ten questions, get ten answers, then walk away,” Muldoon commented. “Some of these guys, if you gave them ten questions, would get ten answers for you, and that's it. A lot of them had to learn that you don't drop a line of questioning just because you got the answer. The answer, if it's the right one, should lead you to sixty more questions. For example,” he said, “Question one was ‘Were you ever trained in North Vietnam?' Question two was ‘Were you ever trained by people other than Vietnamese?' Well, lots of times the answer to question two is so interesting and gives you so much information you keep going for an hour and never get to question three, ‘When did you come to South Vietnam?'”

For Special Branch officers in region interrogation centers, a special interrogation training program was conducted at the NIC by experts from the CIA's Support Services Branch, most of whom had worked on Russian defectors and were brought out from Washington to handle important cases. Training of Special Branch administrative personnel was conducted at region headquarters by professional secretaries, who taught their students how to type, file, and use phones. This side of the program was run by a former professional football player with the Green Bay Packers named Gene, who chain-smoked and eventually died of emphysema. “In between puffs, he'd put this box to his mouth, squeeze it, and take a breath of oxygen,” Muldoon recalled.

On the forbidden subject of torture, according to Muldoon, the Special Branch had “the old French methods,” interrogation that included torture. “All this had to be stopped by the agency,” he said. “They had to be retaught with more sophisticated techniques.”

In Ralph Johnson's opinion, “the Vietnamese, both Communist and GVN, looked upon torture as a normal and valid method of obtaining intelligence.”
⁷
But of course, the Vietnamese did not conceive the PICs; they
were the stepchildren of Robert Thompson, whose aristocratic English ancestors perfected torture in dingy castle dungeons, on the rack and in the iron lady, with thumbscrews and branding irons.

As for the American role, according to Muldoon, “you can't have an American there all the time watching these things.” “These things” included: rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electrical shock (“the Bell Telephone Hour”) rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; “the water treatment”; “the airplane,” in which a prisoner's arms were tied behind the back and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair, after which he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; and the use of police dogs to maul prisoners. All this and more occurred in PICs.

One reason was inexperienced advisers. “A lot of guys in Vietnam were career trainees or junior officer trainees,” Muldoon explained. “Some had been in the military; some had just graduated from college. They put them through a six-month course as either intelligence or paramilitary officers, then sent them over. They were just learning, and it was a hell of a place for their baptism of fire. They sent whole classes to Vietnam in 1963 and 1964, then later brought in older guys who had experience as region advisers. … They were supposed to hit every province once a week, but some would do it over the radio in one day.

“The adviser's job was to keep the region officer informed about
real
operations mounted in the capital city or against big shots in the field,” Muldoon said, adding that advisers who wanted to do a good job ran the PICs themselves, while the others hired assistants—former cops or Green Berets—who were paid by the CIA but worked for themselves, doing a dirty job in exchange for a line on the inside track to the black market, where VC in need of cash and spies seeking names dealt in arms, drugs, prostitution, military scrip, and whatever other commodities were available.

PICs are also faulted for producing only information on low-level VCI. Whenever a VCI member with
strategic
information (for example, a cadre in Hue who knew what was happening in the Delta) was captured, he was immediately grabbed by the region interrogation center, or the NIC in Saigon, where experts could produce quality reports for Washington. The lack of feedback to the PIC for its own province operations resulted in a revolving door syndrome, wherein the PIC was reduced to picking up the same low-level VCI people month after month.

The value of a PIC, according to Muldoon, “depended on the number of people that were put in it, on the caliber of people who manned it—especially the chief—and how good they were at writing up this information. Some guys thought they were the biggest waste of time and money ever spent
because they didn't produce anything. And a lot of them didn't produce anything because the guys in the provinces didn't push them. Other people say, ‘It's not that we didn't try; it's just that it was a dumb idea in the first place, because we couldn't get the military—who were the ones capturing prisoners—to turn them over. The military weren't going to turn them over to us until they were finished with them, and by then they were washed out.'

“This,” Muldoon conceded, “was part of the overall plan: Let the military get the tactical military intelligence first. Obviously that's the most important thing going on in a war. But then we felt that after the military got what they could use tomorrow or next week, maybe the CIA should talk to this guy. That was the whole idea of having the Province Intelligence Coordination Committees and why the PICs became part of them, so we could work this stuff back and forth. And in provinces where our guys went out of their way to work with the MACV sector adviser, they were able to get something done.”