Phoenix Program (25 page)

“Well, he may not like it”—Parker smiled—”but he has to do it, because the chief of station tells him to. So he does it. But that doesn't make the pill
any easier to swallow. In effect he's getting another layer of command or, I should say, coordination, over him.”

Ed Brady, an Army officer on contract to the CIA and assigned to the ICEX Directorate, elaborated when we met in his office in 1987. “There certainly was a conflict going on,” Brady said.
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“Dave West [Nelson Brickham's replacement] didn't want to share his prerogatives with another powerful CIA guy …. Why should there be two organizations working with the Special Branch? It wasn't proposed that [ICEX] be under his control. It was proposed that it interact with the Special Branch on a separate basis and that separate Special Branch officers would be assigned over there to do that. And West wouldn't have any control or influence over it.

“The Special Branch,” Brady explained, “was supposed to be carrying out internal surveillance and operations against subversives. That's its job. The problem … was that the vast majority of Special Branch energy went into surveilling, reporting on, and thwarting opposition political parties. Non-Communists. Every now and then they did something about a VC—if he was in Saigon. But they didn't have any systematic program against the Communists. Their main activity was to keep the existing regime in power, and the political threat to the existing regime was not the Communist party, ‘cause the Communist party was outlawed! What the Special Branch was doing was keeping track of the so-called loyal opposition—keeping track of what Tran Van Don or what Co Minh Tang or what the Vietnam Quoc Dan Dang was doing.

“Phoenix,” Brady explained, “at an absolute minimum caused a focus to be brought to bear on anti-Communist activities.”

Having pulled rank to get MACV and the liaison branch in line, John Hart then assigned four CIA officers to Evan Parker on a temporary basis, as well as the services of “key CIA personnel stationed outside of Saigon” and “integrated and CIA-funded programs such as Census Grievance Teams, PRU, RD Cadre, and Special Police.”
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Parker was then told to select a military deputy, and he asked for an old friend from OSS Detachment 101, Colonel Junichi Buhto, then the MACV chief of counterintelligence.

“Junichi agreed to assist,” Parker said when we met at his home, “even though he had plenty to do in his own job. It was agreed he would keep his regular job and be my assistant on a part-time basis as another duty. And with his assistance we found a bunch of Army officers, all of whom were near the end of their tours but who could be spared from whatever they were doing. And so it went. That's the ICEX staff.

“Then the police were brought into it,” Parker added, referring to the National Police. “Leaving aside the agency people, the key people are John Manopoli and myself because he was head of the National Police.”

A retired New York State Police lieutenant, Manopoli had served as a police adviser in Vietnam from 1956 through 1959 and had returned to Saigon as chief of Public Safety in 1966. Although he had no authority over Special Branch, as senior adviser to the National Police, Manopoli was responsible for meeting its, as well as ICEX's, logistical and administrative needs.

“Manopoli,” Parker pointed out, “was actually the senior police adviser in-country. I didn't have that kind of responsibility. Mine was a staff responsibility. We in Phoenix were not put over the police or military; we simply gave a directive in the name of MACV or Komer or Colby. The idea was to come up with an organization that would pool intelligence on the infrastructure and try to get these people to use that intelligence to go out and arrest them. This is so easily said and so difficult to do because all these agencies have their own jobs and they existed long before Phoenix.”

Manopoli also got the job of kicking Tully Acampora out of his office and moving Parker's staff in. “They found some space for us in USAID Two,” Parker said. “We were squeezed in.” He was given some part-time secretarial help, and with the officers lent from Hart, “what we did first was come out with a MACV staff paper which described what this program was, what we were going to do, and what this coordinated program—this ICEX—was going to be.”

This staff paper, titled “Intelligence, Intelligence Coordination, and Exploitation for Attack on VC Infrastructure (C),” short title: ICEX (U), commonly known as MACV 381-41, was promulgated on July 9, 1967, and marked the birth of ICEX as a formal entity. It also signaled the end to the escalation of the Vietnam War. Five days later the Defense Department imposed a 523,000-man troop limit on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

One of the authors of MACV 381-41 was CIA officer Jim Ward, who was then preparing to replace Kinloch Bull as region officer in charge of IV Corps. “The first meeting back in those days,” Ward recalled, “was between Evan, me, and Junichi Buhto. That's early July 1967. I had known Juni from Germany and OSS Detachment One-oh-one. Just by chance all three of us had been in Detachment One-oh-one of OSS in World War Two. In fact, Evan and I were together at Camp David, where the Jedburghs were trained.”
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A paramilitary expert who had commanded a unit of Kachin guerrillas operating behind Japanese lines, Ward—whose CIA career began in 1948 in Malaya, where he was schooled by Claude Fenner—was well aware of the prominence of the Special Branch in counterinsurgency warfare. According to Ward, “The key to the Vietnam War … was the political control of people. And the Communists were doing a better job of this than we were, and the best way to stop this was to get at the infrastructure. Not the people who
were sympathizers or supporters in any way of the VC. They didn't count. The people who counted were the key members of the People's Revolutionary party. These were the people behind the NLF.

“Anyway, Evan set up this meeting. He wanted input from someone with field operations experience and know-how, and what we talked about was concepts: what we had to do to bring everybody together who was collecting intelligence and that everybody should be channeling intelligence into the DIOCC. There intelligence would be collated, analyzed, interpreted, and then reaction operations could be undertaken almost immediately. And new intelligence directives would be drafted. Whoever was in charge was supposed to be doing that all the time—that is, letting people know that a particular piece of information [needed to mount an operation against a particular VCI] was missing, or asking, ‘What's the pattern of this guy's movements every day?' Then you decide who should get these directives—the police if you're talking about an infrastructure guy or the military if you're talking about a battalion of VC. Anyway, the guy who runs the DIOCC—be it Special Branch or MSS or S-two or whoever—usually does the laying of requirements.

“First we talked about the coordination of intelligence. For instance, in the Delta there were approximately ten thousand intelligence reports a month coming in from different levels … a few hundred were coming up through police channels, some through ARVN and American battalions, and others through the Green Berets and their [Vietnamese] counterparts. All of them were sending information through their own chains of command, rather than using it laterally and exploiting it locally. And we wanted them, at the reaction level [the DIOCC], to collate the information and exploit it. That's the first objective.

“The second objective—assuming the military intelligence gets exploited by the military units—is making sure the infrastructure intelligence gets exploited by whoever appears to be the most appropriate unit to coordinate it. If it's the kind of thing that can be handled only by a large military organization, fine. Even the largest of the American outfits get involved in this, like the First Air Cavalry and the Hundred First Airborne, which was especially good at cordon and search operations. They would take PRU or Field Police units along with them and Special Branch units to do the interrogating. But generally the outfit that's best equipped to get a single guy in a remote place is the PRU.”

These concepts of intelligence collection and exploitation, as outlined by Ward, were incorporated in MACV 381-41 along with Brickham's organizational concepts. Timetables were set for the region officers in charge to draft missions and functions statements, to determine in which districts the
first DIOCCs were to be built, and to prepare guidelines for DIOCC operations. All this was to be done by the end of July. MACV 381-41 also charged the CIA's region officers in charge with briefing their Vietnamese counterparts as soon as possible.

With MACV 381-41 in hand, Evan Parker and John Hart visited each ROIC. “We told them what we had in mind,” Parker recalled, “what the objective was and what their function was. Briefly stated, they were to be the nucleus to get it going. This was all done orally …. They were simply told, ‘You've now heard what Ev's in charge of—you'll get it done here; you'll pass the word to your people.' Then we briefed the senior military people in the four regions.”

Parker attributed his success in co-opting the ROICs to the fact that “in addition to being the Phoenix fellow, I was also a senior CIA officer wearing my other hat.” In that capacity he attended CIA station meetings three times each week. In July 1967 the ROICS, who may be thought of as Phoenix's first field generals, were Jack Horgan in I Corps, Dean Almy in II Corps, Kinloch Bull in IV Corps, and Bob Wall in III Corps.

Each region was unique, geographically and politically, and Phoenix in flight conformed to those contours. As Parker explains, “Four Corps was different because there weren't as many Americans there.” The Delta was also the breadbasket and population center of Vietnam, thus the locus of the counterinsurgency and Phoenix. I Corps was distinct by virtue of its proximity to North Vietnam and the extent to which Phoenix was directed against Thieu's domestic political opponents. Headquartered in Nha Trang under the shadow of Fifth Special Forces, II Corps was an admixture of SOG and Phoenix operations. And as the region encompassing Saigon and the Central Office of South Vietnam, III Corps was perhaps the most critical region—although one in which, according to Nelson Brickham, there was little success against the VCI.

In June 1967 Robert Komer sent a cable to Richard Helms commending Nelson Brickham for “an outstanding job in helping design new attack on infrastructure” and asking that Brickham be made available for occasional temporary duty in Vietnam “if critical problems arise.” Three weeks after arriving back in Langley, with yet another feather in his cap, Brickham was transferred from the Vietnamese desk to the office of the special assistant for Vietnamese affairs (SAVA).

“SAVA was up at the DCI level,” Brickham noted, “as a coordination point for all agency and interagency activities relating to Vietnam. The reason I was brought up there was that [SAVA Director George] Carver was obliged to brief [the secretary of defense] and other people on ICEX/Phoenix, and
he didn't have a clue. He couldn't understand. Nobody in Washington could understand what we had done out there in the station. So Carver called me in and asked me to write a memorandum.”

Brickham described Yale graduate Carver as the person who “provided the theoretical basis for U.S. intervention in Vietnam in an article he wrote for
Foreign Affairs
magazine [“The Faceless Viet Cong”] on the nature of the Vietnam insurgency and American interests there.

“I stayed in SAVA for two months,” Brickham continued. “Then I went back out to Vietnam TDY to work with Ev Parker … to assist him in the reporting formats, the requirements, and this and that and to implement the philosophy I explained earlier. And it was at this point that we ran into problems with Bob Wall.

“Bob Wall was a paramilitary type.” Brickham sighed. “He was first assigned as a province officer, then as deputy in I Corps, and in that capacity he was instrumental in creating the first DIOCCs. He invited some Brits from Kuala Lumpur to explain what they had done there, and he was always hustling papers around the station. He was not a regional officer before the reorganization, but he ended up as our ROIC in Third Corps, in Bien Hoa. Now that was shortly before I left country, and I had very little to concern myself with that situation. It was when I came back TDY to help Evan Parker in the fall of 1967 that it became evident that Bob Wall was one of our less satisfactory region officers.

“One of our problems in Vietnam,” Brickham philosophized, “is that that part of the world seems to generate the warlord. It's the damnation of the Far East and a disease that infects the white man when he goes there. … And the upshot in Vietnam, before someone came out with the sledgehammer to knock heads together, was that you had forty-four different wars in forty-four different provinces and forty-four different warlords … and American region advisers often would fall victim to this same virus. Bob Wall is a prime example. So I recommended disciplinary action and relief from duty.

“Ev Parker, of course, was in charge of it, and he didn't do that. I'd never known Ev Parker before that, but just a finer gentleman you'll never know; he's what the Russians would call a cultured individual. Now Ev Parker is less abrasive than I am; he would see a problem and seek a diplomatic solution. Whereas I would rock a boat and sometimes sink it, Ev Parker would steer it in a different course, so it wouldn't take the waves. Ev Parker has a Chinese mind, and he chose a different way to soften Wall's position.”

That position, according to Brickham, was that “Bob Wall was permitting the military people in Third Corps to turn the entire intelligence operation into a military support adjunct, ignoring the infrastructure. Even though he was pushing the DIOCCs like crazy, he and his military counterpart
in Region Three were using the PRU as blocking forces for military operations. He was not following policy. He was pursuing his own war out there in the region. This became the issue between Bob Wall and myself in Third Corps.”