Phoenix Program (19 page)

Perhaps as a result of his eating habits, Brickham got assigned as chief of Special Branch field operations in the spring of 1966, after Tucker Gougleman's tour had ended and he was transferred to New Delhi. And once installed in the job, he began to initiate the organizational reforms that paved the way for Phoenix. To trace that process, it is helpful to understand the context.

“We were within the liaison branch,” Brickham explained, “because we worked with the Vietnamese nationals, dealing with the CIO and Special Branch on questions of intelligence and counterespionage. The chief of the liaison branch was Jack Stent.” Brickham's office was in the embassy annex, while Special Branch headquarters was located in the National Police Interrogation Center. As chief of field operations Brickham had no liaison responsibilities at the national level. “I had field operations,” Brickham explained, “which meant the province officers. I managed all these liaison operations in the provinces, but not in the Saigon-Gia Dinh military district. That was handled by a separate section under Red Stent within the liaison branch.”

As for his duties, Brickham said, “In our particular case, field operations was working both positive intelligence programs and counterespionage, because police do not distinguish between the two. Within the CIA the two are separate divisions, but when you're working with the police, you have
to cover all this.” Brickham compares the Special Branch “with an intelligence division in a major city police force, bearing in mind that it is within a national police organization with national, regional, province, and district police officers. There is a vertical chain of command. But it is not comparable with FBI, not comparable with MI Five, not comparable with Sûreté. It's the British Special Branch of police …. And with the Special Branch being concerned specifically with intelligence, it was the natural civilian agency toward which we would gravitate when the CIA got interested. Under Colby, the Special Branch became significant.”

If under Colby (who was then chief of the CIA's Far East Division) the Special Branch became significant, then under Brickham it became effective. Brickham's job, as he defined it, “was to bring sharpness and focus to CIA field operations.” He divided those operations into three categories: the Hamlet Informant program (HIP), which concerned low-level informants in the villages and hamlets; the Province Interrogation Center program, including Chieu Hoi and captured documents; and agent penetrations. “I did not organize these programs,” he acknowledged. “They were already in place. What I did do was to clean up the act …
bureaucratize …
. We had some province officers trying to build PICs, while some didn't care. We even had police liaison people putting whistles on kites at night to scare away the VC when that wasn't part of their job. We were not supposed to be propagandists; that's covert operations' job.”

As Brickham saw it, a Special Branch adviser should limit himself to his primary duties: training Vietnamese Special Branch case officers how to mount penetrations of the VCI, giving them cash for informers and for building interrogation centers, and reporting on the results. Brickham did this by imposing his management style on the organization. As developed over the years, that style was based on three principles: “Operate lean and hungry, don't get bogged down in numbers, and figure some way to hold their feet to the fire.

“When I got there, we had about fourteen province officers who were not distributed evenly around the country but were concentrated in population centers, the major ports, and provinces of particular interest. A lot of provinces were empty, so we had to fill them up, and we eventually got our strength up to fifty.”

Training of incoming officers was done in Washington, although Brickham and his staff (including John Muldoon and an officer who handled logistics) gave them briefings on personal security, aircraft security, emergency behavior, and procedure—”what to do if your plane is shot down in VC territory or if the VC overrun a village you're working in …. Some guys took it seriously; some did not,” Brickham noted. “We also gave them reading material—a
Time
magazine article on the Chinese mind and several books,
the most important of which was
Village in Vietnam.
But we had to cut back on this because the stuff was constantly disappearing. Then, as the police advisory program expanded, Washington set up another training program for ex-police officers being brought in on contract and for military officers and enlisted men assigned to the agency …. We had a bunch of guys on contract as province officers who were not CIA officers, but who were hired by the agency and given to us.”

Not the sort of man to suffer fools, Brickham quickly began weeding out the chaff from the wheat, recommending home leave for province officers who had operational fund shortages or were not at their posts or otherwise could not cut the mustard. Brickham's method of evaluating officers was a monthly report. “I wanted a province officer to tell me once a month every place he'd been and how long he'd been there. Normally this kind of thing wouldn't show up in a report, but it was important to me and it was important to the Vietnamese that our people ‘show the flag' and be there when the action was going on. Reporting makes for accountability.

“A Special Branch monthly report, as I designed it, would go up to four pages in length and would take province officers two or three days to complete. … The reports were then sent in from the province through the region officer [a position Brickham placed in the chain of command], who wrote his report on top of it. We studied them in Saigon, packaged them up, and sent them on to Washington, where they had never seen anything like it.”

To streamline the rapidly expanding Special Branch advisory program further, Brickham set up six regional offices and appointed region officers; Gordon Rothwell in Da Nang, for I Corps; Dick Akins in Nha Trang, handling the coastal provinces in II Corps; Tom Burke in Ban Me Thuot, handling Montagnard provinces; Sam Drakulich in Bien Hoa in III Corps; Bob Collier in My Tho for the northern Delta; and Kinloch Bull in Can Tho for the southern provinces. Brickham's liaison branch was the first to have region officers; the rest of the station was not operating that way. In fact, while the liaison branch had one officer in each province, reporting to a region officer, the discombobulated covert action branch had five or six programs in each province, with an officer for each program, with more than two hundred officers coming in and out of headquarters, each operating under the direct supervision of Tom Donohue.

Donohue scoffed at Brickham's attention to reporting. “My point, of course, was quite the opposite of Brickham's,” he said. “I felt it was better to keep those guys working and not tie them up with paper work (that can be handled elsewhere). What I did was take
raw
reporting and give it to an officer who was not really any good in the field, and he was responsible for doing nothing but producing finished reporting from raw reporting. That takes the problem off the guys in the field. It's the same problem that so
many sales organizations have: Do they want their people on the street or doing reports?”
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Donohue's budget (“about twenty-eight million dollars a year”) was considerably larger than his archrival Brickham's, which was approximately one million dollars a year. Otherwise, according to Brickham, “The main difference between Foreign Intelligence and Paramilitary was the fact that we had region officers, but the PM people worked directly out of Saigon. … And it was this situation that Hart wanted to straighten out.

“Hart's first move was to adopt this regional officer concept from the liaison branch,” Brickham explained. “Second was to establish province officers so all CIA operations in a particular province came under one coordinated command. The fact that it operated on the other basis for as long as it did is almost unbelievable, but there was just too much money and not enough planning.

“The covert action people are a breed apart”—Brickham sighed—”especially the paramilitary types. They've had a sort of checkered history within the agency, and in Vietnam most of them were refugees from the Cuban failure. More than one of them said they were damned if they were going to be on the losing end of the Vietnam operation, too.” Backing away from the knuckle draggers, Brickham noted: “We had very little to do with one another. They were located across the hall from us in the embassy annex, and we knew each other, and we were friends, and we drank beer together. But we had our separate programs, theirs being the covert programs the station was conducting in the provinces. The PM shop was basically an intelligence arm under cover, getting its own intelligence through armed propaganda teams, Census Grievance, and the whole Montagnard program run out of Pleiku …. Then they had the so-called counterterror teams, which initially were exactly as leftist propaganda described them. They were teams that went into VC areas to do to them what they were doing to us. It gets sort of interesting. When the VC would come into villages, they'd leave a couple of heads sticking on fence posts as they left. That kind of thing. Up there in I Corps there was more than one occasion where U.S. advisers would be found dead with nails through their foreheads.”

As for the Census Grievance program, managed by John Woodsman, Brickham said, “We wanted access to its intelligence because they could get intelligence we didn't have access to. But because we were more compartmented within ourselves than we should have been, the police could not necessarily absorb this stuff …. The basic contract with the Vietnamese peasant,” Brickham explained, “was that anything that was learned through Census Grievance would not be turned over to the police authorities. This was to get the confidence of the rural population. So we had almost nothing to do with it. It was for the province chief's advice and guidance. They took
Census Grievance stuff and turned around and used it in the counterterror teams, although on occasion they might turn something over to the military.”

Brickham cited Chieu Hoi as “one of the few areas where police and paramilitary advisers cooperated.”

Regarding his own programs, Brickham said, “All counterinsurgency depends in the first instance on informants; without them you're dead, and with them you can do all sorts of things. This is something that can only be a local operation. It's a family affair. A few piasters change hands.”

In “The Future Applicability of the Phoenix Program,” written for the Air University in 1974, CIA Province Officer Warren Milberg calls the Hamlet Informant program the focus of the Special Branch's “bread-and-butter” activities, designed specifically “to gain information from and on the people who lived in rural hamlets …. The problem,” he writes, “was in recruiting informants in as many hamlets as possible.” This task was made difficult by the fact that informing is dangerous work, so “it became necessary to do detailed studies of various motivational factors.” Consequently, at the top of Special Branch recruitment lists were “people who had been victims of Viet Cong atrocities and acts of terrorism.”
³

Recruiting victims of VC terror as informers was a condition that dovetailed neatly with counterterror and the doctrine of Contre Coup. For, as David Galula explains, “pseudo insurgents are another way to get intelligence and to sow suspicion at the same time between the real guerrillas and the population.”
⁴

By 1965 defectors who joined counterterror teams had the words
Sat Cong
(Kill Communist) tattooed on their chests as part of the initiation ceremony to keep them from returning to former VC and NVA units. Their unit insignia was a machete with wings, while their unofficial emblem was the Jolly Roger skull and crossbones. When working, CTs dispensed with the regalia, donned black pajamas, and plundered nationalist as well as Communist villages. This was not a fact reported only by the leftist press. In October 1965, upon returning from a fact-finding mission to Vietnam, Ohio Senator Stephen Young charged that the CIA hired mercenaries to disguise themselves as Vietcong and discredit Communists by committing atrocities. “It was alleged to me that several of them executed two village leaders and raped some women,” the
Herald Tribune
reported Young as saying.
⁵

Indeed, CT teams disguised as the enemy, killing and otherwise abusing nationalist Vietnamese, were the ultimate form of psywar. It reinforced negative stereotypes of the Vietcong, while at the same time supplying Special Branch with recruits for its informant program.

In his autobiography,
Soldier,
Anthony Herbert tells how he reported for duty with SOG in Saigon in November 1965 and was asked to join a top-secret psywar program. “What they wanted me to do was to take charge of
execution teams that wiped out entire families and tried to make it look as though the VC themselves had done the killing. The rationale was that other Vietnamese would see that the VC had killed another VC and would be frightened away from becoming VC themselves. Of course, the villagers would then be inclined to some sort of allegiance to our side.
⁶

“I was told,” writes Herbert, “that there were Vietnamese people in the villages who were being paid to point the finger.” Intrigued, he asked how they knew for certain that the informer might not have ulterior motives for leading the death squads to a particular family. “I suggested that some of their informers might be motivated, for instance, by revenge or personal monetary gain, and that some of their stool-pigeons could be double or triple agents.”
⁷

Milberg concedes the point, noting that the Special Branch recruited informants who “clearly fabricated information which they thought their Special Branch case officers wanted to hear” and that when “this information was compiled and produced in the form of blacklists, a distinct possibility existed that the names on such lists had little relation to actual persons or that the people so named were not, in fact, members of the VCI.”
⁸