Phoenix Program (28 page)

“There were legal questions. Do we reindoctrinate them? Do we shoot them? Do we put them back on the farm? It was just out of control. So one of John Hart's tasks on the original ICEX charge was, What to do with these civilian detainees? Do they have prisoner of war status? Remember, there's no war going on! But in Geneva Americans were saying, ‘We're treating these people like POWs.' The Swiss were saying, ‘Okay. We want a look into the prison system.' So Hart became concerned with the problem, and the reason it shows up in the ICEX proposal is at John Hart's insistence.

“It went ‘round and ‘round, and the long and short of it was, nobody wanted to get the name of the Jailer of Vietnam attached to them. USAID didn't want to touch the problem with a ten-foot pole…. Same with the military. Their attitude was ‘He's a POW. Forget him. When the war's over, we'll ship him back to the farm.' And so one of our tasks was to investigate the problem and recommend a solution to it. But we never did. What we did was to beg the question. We tasked the problem over to the new plans and programs element of the ICEX staff. What they did, I don't know.”

What the ICEX staff did was state the problem. As listed in Tab 10, the major issues were: (1) overcrowding, substandard living conditions, and indiscriminate crowding of POWs, common criminals, VC suspects, and innocent bystanders in ramshackle detention facilities; (2) lack of an adequate screening mechanism to determine who should be interrogated, jailed, or released; and (3) a judicial system (lacking due process, habeas corpus, arrest warrants, and lawyers) that might delay someone's trial for two years while he languished in a detention camp or else might release him if he could afford the bribe.

In seeking solutions to these problems, Tab 10 proposed: (1) the construction of permanent detention facilities; (2) a registration system, coordinated with refugee and Chieu Hoi programs, to eliminate the revolving-door syndrome; and (3) judicial reform aimed at the rapid disposal of pending cases, as devised by Robert Harper, a lawyer on contract to the CIA. In addition, a study team from the CORDS Research and Analysis Division (where Phoenix operational results were sent along with a weekly summary of significant activities) conducted “a comprehensive and definitive study of all aspects of the problems of judicial handling and detention of civilian infrastructure.”
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This three-man study team (John Lybrand, Craig Johnstone, and Do Minh Nhat) reported on apprehension and interrogation methods; the condition and number of jails, prisons, and stockades; and graft and corruption.

Regarding overcrowding, by early 1966 there was no more space available in the GVN's prison system for “Communist offenders.” And as more and more people were captured and placed in PICs, jails, and detention camps, a large percentage was necessarily squeezed out. Hence the revolving door.

In the fall of 1967 the forty-two province jails where most VCI suspects were imprisoned had a total capacity of 14,000. Of the four national jails, Con Son Prison held about 3,550 VCI members; Chi Hoa Prison in Saigon held just over 4,000; Tan Hiep Prison outside Bien Hoa held nearly 1,000; and Thu Duc held about 675 VCI, all women. Approximately 35,000 POWs were held in six MACV camps scattered around South Vietnam. VC and NVA prisoners fell under U.S. military supervision while ARVN camps handled ARVN deserters and war criminals.
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As attorney Harper wrestled with the problem of judicial reform, a mild-mannered, medium-built, retired Marine Corps colonel, Randolph Berkeley, tackled the detention camp problem. Before retiring in 1965, Berkeley had been the corps's assistant chief of staff for intelligence. In 1966 he was hired by the Human Sciences Research Corporation to do a study in Vietnam on civil affairs in military operations, and in early 1967 he briefed Komer in the White House on the subject. Komer liked what he heard and hired Berkeley (who had no corrections experience) as his senior adviser on corrections and detentions, in which capacity Berkeley returned to Saigon in July 1967 as a member of the ICEX staff.

Upon arriving in Saigon in July 1967, Berkeley was assigned by Evan Parker to manage the SIDE (screening, interrogation, and detention of the enemy) program. Berkeley and five assistants—all experienced corrections officers—were listed on paper as employees of Public Safety's Department of Corrections.

“Shortly after my arrival,” Berkeley recalled in a letter to the author, “I was called to report to General Westmoreland. I found him with staff
members and Ambassador Komer, and it was explained to me that I needed to draft a plan, within a few weeks, which would make the prisons secure from attacks, as valuable lives were being lost in capturing VC who would then be sprung quickly to fight again…. The Westmoreland meeting turned me into an operator so busy with his requirements,” Berkeley explained, “that my focus was more on prisons than detentions.
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“The CIA provided me space in one of their offices at MACV headquarters, and for several weeks I flew about in an Air America plane, scouting locations for attackproof detention facilities and prisons, taking aerial photographs myself, and developing the plan.” While doing this, Berkeley learned: “There were over forty prisons nationwide, detention facilities [usually ‘just a barracks surrounded by barbed wire'] in every province, and the GVN had neglected all of them in nearly every aspect, including protection from attack by the enemy.

“When my plan was presented on schedule, General Westmoreland approved it and directed that I execute it. In the next few months the prisons were provided defensive weapons and guards trained to use them, and… attacks on prisons quickly lost their popularity. One other device we used was to fly VC prisoners to Con Son Island, which was secure from
any
enemy attack.”

Having satisfied Westmoreland's requirement for prison security, Berkeley turned to the issue of detention facilities. “I visited Singapore and Malaya to look at prefab construction for possible use in detention camp construction but decided it was cheaper to do the job with local resources available in Vietnam. Meaning the detention problem was dropped like a hot potato, this time into the hands of the GVN.” ICEX Memo No. 5, dated November 2, 1967, handed responsibility for the operation and security of detention camps to the province chiefs, with advice and some resources provided by MACV through Berkeley and the Department of Corrections.

On December 27, 1967, MACV issued Directive 381-46, creating Combined Tactical Screening Centers and stating: “The sole responsibility for determining the status of persons detained by U.S. forces rests with the representatives of the U.S. Armed Forces.” Case closed. In every Combined Tactical Screening Center, the detaining unit did the screening, interrogating, and classifying of POWs and civilian detainees, sending enemy soldiers to POW camps or to Saigon if they had strategic intelligence, to provincial jails if they were common criminals, or to PICs if they were deemed to be VCI.

“There were, in effect,” Evan Parker explained, “two prison systems: “the civil one under USAID and the military one for POWs. PICs were separate and staffed as an agency program … but there had to be a lot of understanding between us in order not to waste money.” For example, the CIA would provide PICs with vans but not gas or oil or mechanics. The
Phoenix coordinator would then have to persuade the Public Safety adviser to persuade the Vietnamese police chief to provide these materials and services to the Special Branch, which, considering the ongoing rivalries, got done grudgingly, if at all.

“The problem Phoenix dealt with,” Evan Parker added, “was making sure that when a knowledgeable person got picked up, the right person got to talk to him and he just didn't disappear in the system.” This weedingout process happened in the PICs “because there you had the Vietnamese whose salaries were paid by the agency. They weren't beholden to the military or AID.”

Ultimately Phoenix did nothing to alleviate the problems of civilian detainees. Rather, as Phoenix threw its dragnet across South Vietnam, tens of thousands of new prisoners poured into the already overcrowded system, and the revolving door syndrome was simply converted by province chiefs into a moneymaking proposition. Meanwhile, ICEX lawyers tried to paper over the problem by compiling a handbook on national security laws and procedures, which legalized the attack against the VCI by permitting the administrative detention of VCI suspects for up to two years without trial. No steps were taken to establish due process for civilian detainees.

Tab 11 called for the Phoenix Directorate “to conduct an on the ground review of interrogation facilities, practices and procedures, including coordination, exploitation, and follow through, with a view to optimum support to the attack on the infrastructure.” The object was to focus interrogations on intelligence concerning the VCI at province and district levels and to improve coordination with other agencies. No report was required from the CIA compartment within the Phoenix Directorate on this sensitive subject.

Regarding the “practices” of the PIC program, what is known of official policy comes from Nelson Brickham. “I had an absolute prohibition in field operations activities toward conducting or sanctioning or witnessing any acts of torture,” he said. “I said the same thing to my province officers from the third day I was in-country…. My statement [which he never put in writing] simply was ‘Any of you guys get caught in this stuff, I'll have you going home within twenty-four hours.' And there never was such a case that came into existence, although it's possible that there was and the reports never got to me.”

Brickham also directed his province officers “to run the PICs from a distance. It's a Special Branch operation; Americans are not to be identified with the program. These guys were not to go near the PICs on a day-to-day basis. They were not to participate in interrogations there or anything like that.”

Brickham's directive was ignored. Warren Milberg, for example, spent
“15 percent” of his time in the Quang Tri PIC, supervising interrogations and advising on questions and topics to pursue. His experience is typical; an earnest Phoenix officer
had
to be at the interrogation center to obtain intelligence quickly. Indeed, in the final analysis, interrogation practices were judged on the quality of the reports they produced, not on their humanity. “Phoenix advisers who took an interest in PIC operations,” Mil-berg writes, “normally attempted to improve the quality of interrogation techniques by carefully going over reports and pointing out leads that were missed and other items which should have been explored in greater detail.”
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As for torture, “While the brutalization of prisoners did occur, interested Phoenix personnel could curtail support for the PIC unless such unauthorized activities ceased.” However, Milberg adds, “Since most advisers were neither intelligence nor interrogation experts, the tendency existed to provide passive support and not to try and improve PIC operations.”
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According to Robert Slater, director of the Province Interrogation Center program from July 1967 until April 1969, “The first thing the Vietnamese wanted to do was tie the guy up to a Double E-eight.” As advisers, however, there was little he and his training team could do to prevent this use of an electric generator, other than to try to raise the professional standards of PIC personnel. Slater and his team (augmented and eventually replaced by a Vietnamese team) taught Special Branch employees how to track VCI suspects on maps, how to keep files and statistics on suspects, and how to take and process photos properly. They did not teach agent handling; that was done in Saigon by CIA experts imported from Washington. “The whole concept of the PIC,” according to Slater, “was to get them in and turn them around. Make them our agents. It didn't work for us, though, because we didn't reward them well enough.”
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The major “procedural” problem in the Phoenix interrogation program concerned the disposition of high-ranking VCI suspects. According to Parker, “High-level prisoners and Hoi Chanhs were invariably taken to higher headquarters and never heard from again.” Milberg agrees: “People [at region or in Saigon] grabbed our best detainees on a regular basis, so you tended not to report that you had one. You'd keep him for two or three days,” to get whatever intelligence he had on other VCI agents in the province,
then
report that you had him in custody.” Milberg writes that when “prisoners of high position in the VCI were removed from local PICs for exploitation at other levels, morale of PIC personnel decreased. Often the result was that the PICs became auxiliary jails and were used to house common criminals.”
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For Robert Slater, the transfer of important VCI prisoners to higher headquarters was merely standard operating procedure. “We trained Special
Branch people how to properly keep statistics and files, how to use a board in the office to track cases, but most important, to send hot prospects from province to region to the National Police Interrogation Center [NPIC].” In other words, Phoenix interrogation procedures at the province (tactical) level were superseded by interrogation procedures at the national level—the political-level Phoenix seeking strategic intelligence.

Having been the CIA's senior adviser at the National Police Interrogation Center, Slater had valuable insights into the interrogation system at its summit. His story began at Camp Pendleton in early 1967, when he was asked to join a presidentially directed counterinsurgency program that trained and sent fifty Vietnam veterans from the various military services back to Vietnam to serve as province officers and Phoenix coordinators. “But I was a separate entity,” he noted in a conversation with the author, “… although we went over at the same time.” A Vietnamese linguist with three years of interrogation experience in-country, Slater was assigned to the NPIC “on the basis of a decision made in Saigon. Dave West said he won me in the lottery, when the station people sat around and reviewed the résumés of the people coming over.”