Phoenix Program (27 page)

Indeed, by deducting more than a hundred thousand Self-Defense Forces and “political cadre” from the enemy order of battle, Westmoreland, Komer, and Hart were able to show success and in the process convince President Johnson that “the light” really was at the end of the tunnel. Meanwhile, having backed themselves into a corner, they decided to do the job themselves. So what if General Loan was resistant? As Nelson Brickham had said, “That's okay ‘cause we're gonna do it anyway!”

Symbolizing this “get tough” policy was Phoenix, rising from the devastation of two years of a stalemated war. Phoenix in this hawkish manifestation represented the final solution to the problem of distinguishing between a covert Communist enemy and an inscrutable ally. Uninhibited by family ties, Americans in charge of irregular forces, or by themselves, began hunting the VCI in its villages, doing what the Vietnamese were reluctant to do—even though they were never quite sure of whom they were stalking.

This desperate policy was not without its American detractors. Tempestuous Tully Acampora called it “detrimental and contradictory.” Ed Brady, the Army captain assigned to the Phoenix Directorate as a cover for his CIA activities, concurs. “It's very hard to carry out secret covert operations and repressive kinds of things in order to separate guerrillas from people—and then make a speech to them about how their individual rights are so important,” Brady said in an interview with Al Santoli.
⁴

But while Acampora and Brady believed the United States had no busi
ness preempting the Vietnamese when it came to the attack against the VCI, other Americans thought that the time for patience and cooperation had come and gone. From Evan Parker's perspective, the problem was competition between the Special Branch and the ARVN. “It involved one Vietnamese agency saying, ‘Well, we can't give [information] to them, because they're penetrated by the VC.' That sort of thing. And in some cases undoubted it was true.”

Parker raised a legitimate point. In order for an intelligence coordination and exploitation program like Phoenix to work, institutional mistrust between the police and the military had to be overcome. But, Parker explained, “Having the Special Branch have such an active role made it difficult in many provinces and many of the more rural areas, because the special policeman was probably the equivalent of a sergeant. So … he doesn't have much clout. … And the [outgunned, outmanned] police are pretty subordinate to the military, so you have all this business of army versus police. It's a wonder it worked at all.”

Moreover, frustration with Vietnamese security leaks gave Americans yet another reason
not
to wait for the Vietnamese to throw their support behind Phoenix. As Evan Parker said, “One of the great problems with the Vietnamese in getting this started was that the classification of the directive was so high—in order to prevent it from falling into enemy hands—that it was very difficult to handle these documents in the field … and tell people what they were supposed to do.”

Typically, Tully Acampora refuted Parker's explanation and interpreted the emphasis on secrecy in political terms. According to Acampora, for whom the switch from CT IV to Phoenix meant a loss in status, Parker “always envisioned Phoenix as a wholly U.S.-promoted, -managed, and -supported program.” Moreover, “Hart's one mission was to undermine Loan's influence, to reduce his power base, and to superimpose Phoenix on CT Four. They bought off the head of Special Branch, Major Nguyen Tien. Then Parker started suborning guys on the MACV intelligence staff. He seduced Colonel Junichi Buhto [MACV's chief of counterintelligence] by promising to make him a GS-nineteen if he went along with the CIA…. Davidson's mission was to destroy CT Four, and in August, Davidson and the CIA began withdrawing Americans from the Combined Intelligence Staff. This involves the election of 1967.”

There is no doubt that Phoenix, in its fledgling stage, was conceived and implemented by the CIA. Furthermore, Ralph Johnson writes, “The results obtained by ICEX by the end of 1967 were primarily, if not totally, stimulated and supported by the Americans.”
⁵
There was early acceptance of Phoenix by the Vietnamese in I Corps, but as Parker himself noted, much of that activity was directed against Thieu's non-Communist political op
ponents. Otherwise, the majority of Vietnamese hesitated to embrace a program as politically explosive as Phoenix. As Johnson observes, “most province chiefs were waiting for instructions from the Central Government.”
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The first step in that direction was taken in late December 1967, two months after Thieu had been elected president and Ky had begun to lose influence. On December 20, 1967, Prime Minister Nguyen Van Loc signed Directive 89-Th. T/VP/M, legalizing Phung Hoang, the Vietnamese clone of Phoenix. However, the directive was not signed by President Thieu and thus carried little weight with cautious province chiefs hedging their bets while Thieu established himself more solidly.

It is also important to note that Prime Minister Loc's reasons for authorizing Phung Hoang were directly related to Robert Komer's attempt to undermine General Loan and Nguyen Cao Ky by ending support for CT IV. After December 1, 1967, when Komer managed to terminate Operation Fairfax, Loc had no choice but to support Phoenix. And, according to Tully Acampora, by withdrawing the U.S. units that shielded CT IV's Field Police, “Komer opened up all the avenues which led to Tet.” Making matters worse, in an attempt to stimulate the South Vietnamese economy and, in the process, allow Thieu to reap the political rewards, Komer went so far as to remove police roadblocks and checkpoints around Saigon.

Meanwhile, Tully Acampora was pleading with as many American generals as he could find, asking them not to withdraw American forces from CT IV. “Loan was saying that there was a massive influx of VC into Saigon,” Acampora recalled, “but Komer was calling it light, and Hart backed him. They wouldn't listen to Loan, who was trying to convince them for sixty days prior to Tet.”

Nelson Brickham, for one, admitted to having been fooled. “The VC had pulled their good people out and sent them up North in 1966. We knew that. Then, in the summer and fall of 1967, they came back. But I misinterpreted it. In October 1967 I told Colby that we were in a position that no NVA or VC unit could move without us knowing it. We saw Loan's warnings as crying wolf.”
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“We were picking up massive numbers of infiltrators,” Acampora told me, “so Loan countermanded the Joint General Staff's orders to withdraw; he refused to pull out all of his people. He kept a paratroop unit and a marine unit in Saigon and canceled all police leaves. Those units, with the police, met the first assault in Tet. Then, of course, Loan was resurrected.”

But by then it was too late. In Acampora's judgment, Komer's machinations brought about Tet. “The fact is,” he said, “that Parker contributed to that disaster, too. Parker said Phoenix was the only impediment, that it turned defeat into victory. But the embassy was attacked! How could that
happen? The fact is, Phoenix was a failure, and it was only because of Loan that the VC suffered a setback.”

“In any event, the prime minister said, ‘Do it.' He gave the order,” Evan Parker said, “and he wrote the letters to empower them to do it, and Phung Hoang came into being on the Vietnamese side …. A Phung Hoang staff was set up by the Vietnamese consisting primarily of people from Special Branch. Then they set up quarters for them” at the National Police Interrogation Center. “The two organizations had separate quarters,” Parker added, “because we wanted the Vietnamese to feel that Phoenix was a Vietnamese program and that the Americans were simply advisers.”

“So anyway”—Parker sighed—”we went through this organizational phase. The Vietnamese went through the same thing, pulling together the police and whatever, trying to set up staffs, finding places for them to sit, providing them with pencils and paper, and trying to get them to actually conduct some sort of operations. And here you come to the nitty-gritty.”

Tab 8 of “Action Program” called for review of VCI intelligence collection requirements and programs, especially Project Corral, a unilateral American operation started in October 1966 solely to collect information on the VCI at province level. After completing their review, CIA officers on the Phoenix staff began to prepare a standard briefing on the VCI for incoming officers and interested officials. They also began compiling handbooks, interrogation guides, and “related materials” like most wanted lists.

Especially effective against the VCI, most wanted lists had been used for years by Special Forces when, in April 1967, Renz Hoeksema's deputy, Robert Brewer, initiated a Most Wanted program in Saigon and expanded it nationwide. “Every province was directed to examine its files for a list of ten,”
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Brewer explained noting that the object of the exercise was to show that the enemy was not “faceless.” Soon most wanted “posters,” replete with composite drawings (prepared by Special Branch officers using New York City Police Department makeup kits) of VCI suspects were being nailed to trees, DIOCC walls, and market stalls throughout Vietnam. The posters offered cash rewards and had a picture of the phoenix to catch people's attention. (See enclosure.)

In the spring of 1967 Komer appointed Brewer as senior adviser in Quang Tri Province. “When I got there, I got all the intelligence-gathering outfits together,” Brewer recalled, “and we wrote up a list of the twenty-one most wanted VCI. One guy on my list, Bui Tu, had killed a district adviser's sergeant, and I wanted to get him. So I went to the high school and found his picture in the yearbook. That really paid off. On a sleepy afternoon in July the word came in from Special Branch that Bui Tu was in the area. The
DIOCC notified district, district notified village, and the Marine combined action patrol went after him.

“Bui Tu had been spotted in a shelter on a rice paddy. Three guys jumped up and ran, and the Popular Force team and the Marines mowed them down. Bui Tu was number one. The top. He had captain's bars and a briefcase full of notes, with a quarter inch of papers on me! They knew where I slept in the compound and they were planning to kill me.” Thanks to Bui Tu's documents and information provided by the defector, Brewer said, “We blew the VCI apart.”

What Brewer described is a typical Phoenix operation: A most wanted poster led to a high-ranking VCI suspect's being spotted and killed, while his captured documents revealed the whereabouts and identities of many of his VCI comrades. Most wanted posters also served to inhibit the VCI. As Jim Ward explained to me, “All of a sudden this guy who used to travel from place to place begins to wonder who is going to turn him in! It begins to prey on him. We found out later that this really had a significant psychological impact on these guys, making them hide and becoming less effective.” Said Ward: “It
suppresses
them.”
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By the end of 1967 thirty-five provinces were compiling blacklists of VCI members, and twenty-two more had most wanted lists.
¹⁰

Tab 9 of “Action Program” called for review and recommendations for action programs to exploit infrastructure intelligence. In theory this meant the training, direction, and coordination, by U.S. personnel, of Field Police and PRU in anti-VCI operations. Between the two, the PRU were more effective, accounting for 98 percent of all anti-VCI operations in I Corps alone. In November 1967, Ralph Johnson writes, “II Corps and III Corps reported that 236 significant VCI were eliminated by the PRU, which continued as the main action arm of the ‘rifle shot' approach.”
¹¹

“Basically the PRU were effective,” Parker stated. “In some cases the police were effective. And in many areas more got done in capturing VCI in military operations. But I was interested in getting key people. You can arrest the little ones, but the operation goes on and on, and you haven't really hurt them. But it's very hard to get a really important man.

“I personally wasn't involved in any operations,” Parker stressed. “Operational control was exercised at whatever level it was happening at, by the so-called action agencies. The idea was to use resources wherever they were. … If there needed to be cooperation, the Vietnamese would consult … if they trusted the head of the other agency. Unfortunately the Americans would conduct operations without telling the Vietnamese. And vice versa.”

By the end of 1967 the Field Police were conducting anti-VCI operations in twenty-six provinces; thirty-nine provinces were using systems taught by Phoenix staffers on how properly to “debrief” defectors, who were used as
spotters, PRU, and interrogators. Included in the Phoenix arsenal were joint military-police search and destroy and cordon and search operations, population and resources control, and riverine and maritime operations.

Tab 10 charged the Phoenix program with improving the civilian detention system. About this subject Nelson Brickham remarked, “The one major element left out of all this was the civilian detainee problem. It starts with the Province Interrogation Centers, but the larger problem is, How do you screen detainees, and then what do you do with identified VCI?

“When you'd go through these village sweeps, you'd have whole
corrals
filled full with Vietnamese just sitting there looking at you all day long. In rural provinces you'd wind up with barbed-wire cages with tin roofs packed with people. It was a major problem basically because we were running a revolving-door operation. We'd capture VC; then a week later we'd capture them again … assuming they were VC. The Vietcong always knew about these sweeps several days beforehand and always pulled out before we hit. In a lot of sweeps all you would get were the old men and women and kids. There were VC in there, too … but nobody knows
really
who they are.