Phoenix Program (22 page)

The “action tools” in the attack on the VCI were primarily “ambushes by the police, PRU or Regional Forces and Special Forces elements” and “military search and destroy, hamlet search, or ‘Country Fair' type operations. For these operations,” Brickham explains in “Attack,” “the police prepare search lists from their files … and collect VC defectors and other sources to use as ‘identifiers' of VC caught in these cordon and sweep operations.” Even though William Colby later testified to Congress that Phoenix was a South Vietnamese police program, Brickham in “Attack” states: “A final and not insignificant tool are direct military operations…. For example, 175m artillery fire was directed on the reported site of a combined conference [of] COSVN representatives.” On the basis of afteraction reports, Brickham writes, “we are confident that the damage to the infrastructure, in terms of key personnel killed, is significant.”
⁶

“Attack” also mentions “A special Task Force … organized to launch a combined intelligence/police/military assault against the MR-4 (Saigon/
Cholon/Gia Dinh Special Zone Committee) headquarters and base area.”
⁷
This is the third significant point raised by “Attack.” Called Cong Tac IV by its Vietnamese creators, it is the operational model for Phoenix and as such deserves a detailed explanation.

General McChristian writes that Cong Tac IV evolved, concurrently with the joint U.S.-Vietnamese Combined Intelligence Staff, from an intensive intelligence program (Project Corral) which he initiated in the spring and early summer of 1966 and directed against MR-4. The purpose was to produce “intelligence on the identification and location of Viet Cong operating in MR-4” and “the dissemination of this intelligence to user agencies for apprehension and exploitation of enemy personnel.”
⁸

In September 1966 McChristian met with General Loan to discuss his plans for a combined intelligence staff. The idea was approved in November by Prime Minister Ky, the Vietnamese Joint General Staff, and the U.S. Mission Council. As a result—and as a substitute for Hop Tac—Operation Fairfax was begun in December, using three American and three ARVN battalions for the purpose of “searching out and destroying VC main force units, guerrillas, and infrastructure in the MR-4 area.” Operation Fairfax and the Combined Intelligence Staff (CIS) were the primary elements of Cong Tac IV.
⁹

“The initial actions of the Combined Intelligence Staff,” McChristian writes, “were to compile a blacklist of MR-4 infrastructure personalities in support of the combined US and Vietnamese military actions in this area.” In the process, the Combined Intelligence Staff compiled, by hand, more than three thousand names, which were stored in a central registry and made available to U.S. and Vietnamese units. Later “the systematic identification and location of VC and the rapid retrieval of these data in usable form was
[sic]
made possible by the use of the automated data processing system located at the Combined Intelligence Center, Vietnam.”
¹⁰

In fact, the foundation for the Combined Intelligence Staff was laid, on the American side, in 1964, when CIA security chief Robert Gambino created the Combined Security Committee inside Saigon's First Precinct headquarters. Through a secure radio network linking each of Saigon's nine precincts, the Combined Security Committee coordinated CIA and State Department security officers at the American Embassy with MACV and Vietnamese Military Security Service officers at Tan Son Nhut and with the Special Branch at National Police headquarters and alerted them of pending VC attacks. The Combined Security Committee was directed by Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Xinh, chief of staff of the Saigon police and the deputy to the Saigon police chief, Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Van Luan. By mid-1967 the Combined Security Committee's “Blue Network” covered all of CT IV.

For deeper insights into Cong Tac IV we turn to Tulius Acampora, a U.S. Army counterintelligence officer and Korean War veteran who was detached to the CIA in June 1966 as General Loan's adviser. As an officer on General James Van Fleet's staff in Korea, Acampora had had prior dealings with John Hart, who as station chief in Korea had masqueraded as an Army colonel and had interfered in military operations to the extent that General Van Fleet called him “an arrogant SOB.”
¹¹
The old grudges were carried forward in Saigon to the detriment of Phoenix.

“I
assisted
Hart.” Acampora sighed when we first met in 1986 at Ft. Myers. “He called me in and said, ‘We're dealing with an enigma. A cobra. General Loan.' Now Loan had a mandarin Dai Viet background, and his father had rescued Diem. Consequently, under Ky, Loan was very powerful; and Hart resented Loan's concentration of power. Although he was not a political animal, Loan was substantial. So Hart took away first his supervision of the Military Security Service and eventually his oversight of Central Intelligence Organization. But for a while Loan ran them both, along with the National Police.

“When I arrived in Saigon,” Acampora continued, “at the national level, the U.S. Embassy, with the agency and MACV, had decided to take over everything in order to change the
political climate
of Vietnam. Through the CIO, the agency was running all sorts of counteroperations to VC infiltration into political parties, trying to find
compatible elements
to create a counterforce to take over control from Ky, who was a peacock. This was done by intercepting VC political cadre: surveilling them, then arresting them or moving toward them, then buying them over to your side in order to destroy the integrity of the VC.” Acampora qualified this statement by noting: “The VC would always say yes, but they were usually doubles.

“It was a dual-level scheme,” Acampora went on. “We were faced with the threat of terrorism from sappers, but we also had to stop them at the political level. We stopped them at sapper level with PRU under the Special Operations Group and at the political level through the CIO—the centerpiece of which was the National Interrogation Center under [Special Branch chief Nguyen] Tien. The CIO operated over and above CT Four. It could take whatever it wanted—people or information or whatever—from any of its elements. Its job was to turn around captured VCI and preempt Loan. When it came to CT Four, however, Loan wanted control. Loan said to Hart, ‘You join us; we won't join you.' In effect, Loan told Hart to go screw himself, and so Hart wanted
me
to assuage Loan—to bring him in tow.”

But this was not to be, for General Loan, a dyed-in-the-wool nationalist, had his own agenda. In fact, the basis for CT IV derived, on the Vietnamese side, from a countersubversion program he commissioned in the summer of 1966. The thrust of the program was to prevent VC agents from infiltrating
pro-GVN political parties and to prevent sappers from entering Saigon. Called the Phung Hoang program, it was, according to Acampora, “wholly inspired and conducted by the Vietnamese.”

The man who conceived Phung Hoang at the request of General Loan was the Special Branch deputy director, Colonel Dang Van Minh, a Claude Rains type of character who, according to Acampora, was “a stoic who took the path of least resistance.” Born on Con Son Island, where his father was a nurse, Minh at age eighteen joined the accounting department of the French Sûreté. During the Ngo regime he received CIA training overseas and was then appointed chief of the Judicial Police—the only National Police branch with the power to arrest. After the coup Minh became deputy director of the Special Branch.

Insulated behind his desk at Special Branch headquarters on Vo Thanh Street, Minh weathered each successive regime by serving his bosses as “a professional intelligence officer.” Indeed, when I met Minh at his office in 1986, he attributed the fall of Saigon to “the many changes of command in Saigon, while North Vietnam had only one leader and one chain of command.”
¹²
That, plus the fact that the Vietcong had infiltrated every facet of the GVN—a fact Loan also acknowledged when he confessed to Acampora, “We're twenty percent infiltrated,
at least.”

Minh's attack against the VCI was measured, sophisticated and diametrically opposed to American policy. In contrast with Brickham, Minh viewed the VCI as village-level cadres “to be monitored, not killed.” As Minh conceived the attack on the VCI, all Vietnamese agencies receiving information on the VCI would forward their reports to the Special Branch for inclusion in its political order of battle file. The goal was the “combination of intelligence,” as Minh termed it,
phoi hop
in Vietnamese. Seeking an appropriate acronym, Minh borrowed the
Ph
from
phoi
and the
Ho
from
hop
and christened the program Phung Hoang, after the mythological Vietnamese bird of conjugal love that appears only in times of peace. In Vietnamese myth, the Phung Hoang bird holds a flute and represents virtue, grace, peace, and concord. Its song includes the five notes of the Vietnamese musical scale, and its feathers include the five basic colors.

Before long, however, Phung Hoang was transformed into Phoenix, the mythological bird that perpetually rises from its own ashes. As the Americans drew it, the bird held a blacklist in its claw. In this manifestation, Phoenix is an omnipotent, predatory bird that selectively snatches its prey—a symbol of discord rather than harmony.

Nowhere is the gap between American and Vietnamese sensibilities more apparent than in their interpretations of Phoenix and Phung Hoang, which also represent the struggle between General Loan and John Hart for control over the attack on the VCI. In this contest, Loan scored first when, for legal
reasons, Cong Tac IV was placed under his control. Loan assigned as many as fifty officers to the program from the participating Vietnamese agencies, with Major Nguyen Mau in charge of operations, assisted by Dang Van Minh. The United States provided twenty MACV counterintelligence officers, each of whom served as a desk officer in a Saigon precinct or outlying district capital. CIA officer Tom Becker supervised the headquarters staff; the Australians assigned their embassy security officer, Mike Leslie; and the Koreans provided a representative. Members of CT IV were not part of any separate unit but remained identified with their parent agencies and did not have to back-channel to bring resources to bear.

Cong Tac IV came into existence on November 1, 1966, the day Lou Lapham arrived in Saigon to take over the “second” station, as the Revolutionary Development Cadre program was sometimes called. Curiously, it was the same day that VC mortars first fell on Saigon. U.S. generals, dozing in reviewing stands only a few blocks away, were oblivious of the fact that the VC were using a nearby church spire as a triangulation point for their fire.

From November 1 onward, Tully Acampora managed CT IV with Major Mau. The program kicked in when Tom Becker, assisted by MACV officers Larry Tracy and John Ford adopted the standard American police ID kit (replete with Occidental facial features). With their ID kits in hand, CT IV desk officers ventured into the precincts and districts, accompanied by Special Branch and Military Security Service officers. They screened suspects who had been corralled by military units conducting cordon and search operations, took photographs, put together composites of suspected VCI members, then compiled the results and sent their reports to CT IV headquarters in the National Police Interrogation Center in Saigon, where it was collated, analyzed, and used to compile blacklists of the VCI.

“They called it police work,” Acampora said, “because the police had the constitutional responsibility for countersubversion. But it was paramilitary. In any event, Loan was going to bring it all together, and he did, until Komer came out in February 1967 and was briefed by Mau and Tracy.”

In a 1986 interview with the author, Tracy agreed that the demise of CT IV came from “politicking” on the part of the Americans. “It was shortlived,” he told me, “because Komer saw it as a prototype and wanted to make it nationwide before working out the methodology. Komer wanted to use CT Four as a showcase, as part of the Combined Intelligence Staff, but General Loan was reluctant to participate and had to be strong-armed by Komer in February 1967.”
¹³

By April 1967 the Combined Intelligence Staff would have entered more than sixty-five hundred names in its Cong Tac IV data base and would be adding twelve hundred per month. As the methodology was developed, a
search unit consisting of three forty-nine-man Field Police platoons began accompanying the U.S. and Vietnamese military units conducting cordon and search operations in MR-4. With the military providing a shield, the Field Police checked IDs against blacklists, arrested VCI suspects, and released innocent bystanders. According to General McChristian, “From the inception of the Combined Intelligence Staff until 1 December 1967, approximately 500 VC action agents were apprehended in Saigon and environs. The significance of these arrests—and the success of the staff—cannot be fully measured, but unquestionably contributed to the Communist failures in Saigon during the 1968 Tet offensive.”
¹⁴

Whether or not Tet was a failure for the VC will be discussed later. But once the CIA had committed itself to the attack on the VCI, it needed to find a way of coordinating its efforts with the other civilian agencies, American and Vietnamese, working independently of each other in the provinces. Considering the number of agencies involved, and their antipathy, this was no easy thing to do. To wit, at Nelson Brickham's request, the liaison officer in Gia Dinh Province, John Terjelian, did a study on the problem of coordination. “The count he made,” Brickham recalled, “was something like twenty-two separate intelligence agencies and operations in his province alone. It was a Chinese fire drill, and it didn't work because we had so many violently conflicting interests involved in this thing.”