Phoenix Program (40 page)

“Phoenix,” writes An, “is a series of big continuous operations which, because of the bombing, destroy the countryside and put innocent people to death…. In the sky are armed helicopters, but on the ground are the black uniforms, doing what they want where the helicopters and B-52's do not reach…. Americans in black uniforms,” according to An, “are the most terrible.”
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Also according to An, the CIA always sent PRU teams in the day before cordon and search operations, to capture people targeted for interrogation. The next day, An notes, the PRU would return in U.S. Navy helicopters with ARVN troops. “When they go back to their base at Dong Tam [the sprawling PRU facility near My Tho], they bring people's bleeding ears. But,” asks An rhetorically, “are these the ears of the VC?”
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The purpose of Phoenix, An contends, was “to avenge what the VC did during Tet. Which is why Thieu did not hesitate to sign Phoenix into law. But,” he adds, “local officials knew nothing about the program except the decree. The central government didn't explain anything. Furthermore, the CIA and their assistants had a hard time trying to explain to province chiefs about operations to pacify the countryside and destroy the VCI.”
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Indeed, the Vietnamese were confused by contradictory American programs. For example, B-52 strikes and Agent Orange dustings served only to impoverish rural villagers, prompting them to deduce that these operations were directed against
them,
not the VCI. Making matters worse, province chiefs reported the damage, ostensibly to get compensation for those hurt by the attacks, but kept the money for themselves. Then Revolutionary Development Cadre appeared, promising to offset the damage with economic development. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army was pursuing a scorched-earth policy and the Agency for International Development was withdrawing sup
port for RD reconstruction projects—a reversal in policy, An contends, that stemmed from the CIA's belief that reconstruction projects only helped the wives and families of VC who returned from their jungle hideouts when the projects were done.
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All that led most Vietnamese to agree with An that “Revolutionary Development only teaches the American line.”

The end result of the contradictory programs and double-talk was a lack of trust in the GVN, not in the VCI, which rarely failed to make good on promises. Likewise, the Vietnamese interpreted Phoenix, the program designed to provide security to the rural population, as an attempt by the Americans to prolong the war. Like B-52 strikes and Agent Orange, Phoenix only made people's lives more difficult. People wondered, An informs us, how Phoenix could turn things around.
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In responding to these concerns, An writes, the CIA argued that Phoenix was needed because B-52 strikes and defoliation operations did not destroy “the VC lower structure.” But in attacking the VCI, the CIA never considered the human concerns of the Vietnamese, declares An. For example, many rice fields were owned by Vietcong, and as more and more fields were destroyed by Agent Orange, people had no choice but to buy rice from these VC. This included wealthy merchants who were subsequently accused by security forces of collaborating with the enemy and were forced to pay bribes to keep from being arrested. In this way GVN officials extorted from people caught in between them and the Vietcong.

Nor, An adds, did the CIA care that many Vietnamese during Tet—including policemen and soldiers—visited their families in areas controlled by the Vietcong, thus becoming VCI suspects themselves. Or that Vietnamese civil servants, especially schoolteachers with families living in VC areas, became informants simply as a way of getting advance notice of Phoenix operations, so they could warn their relatives of pending attacks. In return for protecting their families, these Vietnamese were surveilled and extorted by government security forces.

Nor did the CIA take steps to protect people from false accusations. An cites the case of five teachers working for a Catholic priest in Vinh Long Province. These women refused to attend a VC indoctrination session. When the VC were later captured by PRU, they named these teachers as VC cadres. The teachers were arrested and jailed without trial or evidence. “That's why people feared Phoenix,” An explains. “The biggest fear is being falsely accused—from which there is no protection. That's why Phoenix doesn't bring peace or security. That's why it destroys trust in the GVN, not the VCI.”
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Adding to this mistrust was the fact that the CIA rewarded security officials who extorted the people. “The CIA,” An writes, “spends money like water.” As a result, MSS and Special Branch operators preferred to sell information to the CIA rather than “give” it to their Vietnamese employers.
And even though the CIA had no way of corroborating the information, it was used to build cases against VCI suspects. The CIA also passed quantities of cash to the various religious sects. “Many priests in the inner-Mekong,” An reports, “have relations with the CIA, so people in the provinces refuse to have contact with them.
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“Many agents from the different police in IV Corps receive money from the CIA,” An reports, “in the form of merit pay.” Money was spent beautifying Special Branch offices—buying telephones, generators, air conditioners, Lambrettas, and Xerox machines for dutiful policemen and pretty secretaries. Big bucks were lavished on local officials, particularly those sitting on Phoenix committees. “Conveniences” given to committee members, writes An, made it easier for them “to explore information from agents,” leading to the arrest of suspected VCI.
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Recall what Warren Milberg said: “I had virtually unlimited resources to develop agent operations, to pay for a staff that translated and produced intelligence reports… more money… than what the province budget was.”
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But while Milberg saw this as “creating economic stability,” the incentive to sell information had the side effect of tearing apart Vietnamese society.

Perhaps the most disturbing charge made by An is that CIA operators encouraged the illegal activities of Phoenix personnel. He cites as an example the time Military Security Service agents in Sa Dec observed Special Branch agents taking payoffs from the local VC tax collector. Naturally, the MSS agents sold this information to the CIA, which took no action—because payoffs were a vehicle for penetration operations. Writes An: “The CIA works to keep some Communist areas intact so they can get information.”
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This, of course, was in direct opposition to the Phoenix mission.

As an example of the intelligence potential of the modus vivendi, An notes that unilateral CIA penetration agents into the VCI often posed as pharmacists and were supplied with desperately needed antibiotics, which they would smuggle into Vietcong jungle hideouts in Cambodia in exchange for information. “Phoenix,” explains An, “was watching and talking to the VC while at the same time working to prevent the NLF from reorganizing the VCI.”
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All this leads An to conclude that America was never interested in ending the war. Instead, he thinks the goal was to show success, “even if many lives must be lost.” For An, Phoenix was not a mechanism to end the war quickly, but a means to extend it indefinitely, with a minimum of American casualties. The nature of Phoenix, he suggests, was to pit the Vietnamese against each other, to undermine their efforts at rapprochement while fueling the conflict with money and lies and psychological operations designed to destabilize the culture.
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In conclusion, An contends that the Vietnamese neutralists wanted only for the United States to grant South Vietnam the same status it granted Taiwan and Israel. But this was not to be, for in South Vietnam advocating peace with the Communists was punishable by death or imprisonment without trial for two years under the An Tri (administrative detention) Laws. And like Phoenix, An Tri was a boondoggle for corrupt GVN officials. Persons arrested as VCI suspects or sympathizers could be held indefinitely and were released only when their families scraped together enough money to bribe the local Security Committee chairman. That is why, An suggests, the roundup was the worst of all the hardships Phoenix imposed on the Vietnamese people.

The practice of extorting ransoms from VCI suspects served CIA interests however, by elevating security personnel into a privileged class that was utterly dependent on the CIA, in the process, thoroughly destabilizing the society. Through the ICEX screening, interrogation, and detention program, the CIA expanded this psywar tactic into the districts, enabling every minor official to get a piece of the action.

As Colonel Dillard remarked, “I became a major construction tycoon in the Delta as a sideline to my Phoenix business.” As well as giving fifteen thousand dollars to every district chief to build a DIOCC, he worked with the CIA in building “those little jails, as I call them, which really were interrogation centers.” Dillard recalled: “The agency sent down an elderly gentleman from Maryland who was a contractor. His job in the Delta, one of many, was to get these interrogation centers constructed…. Pacific Architects and Engineers did the work, but this guy was an agency employee.
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“What you needed in a lot of these little derelict-type districts in the Delta where they really didn't have any facilities,” said Dillard, “was a place to secure and interrogate prisoners…. They were for anyone…. I remember going into one we'd built in Chau Duc that had several monks inside. They had a steel chain chained to their legs so they wouldn't run off.

“We pretty much constructed them throughout the Delta. Those that went up quickest were in the districts that were most accessible. But as fast as they went up, the VC knocked them down with satchel charges.” That did not disturb the district chiefs, for whom each new construction project meant another lucrative rake-off. Indeed, the Phoenix program offered a wide range of financial opportunities.

“Phoenix in Sa Dec,” An writes, “was an occasion for many nationalists to get rich illegally. Many innocent people were chased away from their homes to the district hall where they were extorted or confined in the interrogation center behind the town hall. Even water buffalo guardians were
taken to the district hall, and their parents had to pay for their release or else they would be sent to Vinh Long Prison.”
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Writes An: “One visiting U.S. congressman said our province was lucky because we had no prison. But actually this is unfortunate, because innocent people—and the Police Special Branch know who is innocent—are confined in the town hall. There is no room to lie down there. The people suffocate. They are put in an empty pool without water.”
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As a result of Phoenix placing interrogation centers in the districts, the GVN soon gained the reputation as a prison regime. The catchphrase of its jailers was
khong, danh cho co
(if they're innocent, beat them until they're guilty), bringing to mind the Salem witch trials. But whereas in Salem the motive for torture was an ingrown libido, the motive for torture in Vietnam was an ingrown ideology. Tran Van Truong, mentioned in Chapter 10, explains: “It was part of the regime's ideology that anyone who opposed them must be a Communist. They could not accept the fact that there might be people who hated them for the travesty they had made of the country's life, for their intolerance and corruption and cold indifference to the lot of their countrymen.”
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Truong writes from experience. By bribing “a high National Police official for the information,” Truong's wife discovered that her husband was being held in a secret prison. Fearing her husband would be killed there, “and nobody would ever know,” she persuaded Truong to sign a full confession. “About ten days later,” Truong writes “I was bundled into a car and driven to National Police headquarters. My wife had indeed found someone else to bribe. I found out later it was the butcher himself. His price had been $6,000.”
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Truong's wife paid two bribes—one to locate him, and one to have him transferred from the secret jail to the NPIC.

Truong adds ruefully, “Had she known about conditions at the [NPIC], it isn't likely that my wife would have paid anything to anyone.” He describes six months of solitary confinement and “sensory deprivation” in a pitch-dark cement cell with a steel door and no windows. “I was like an animal in a cave…. I thought of my cell as my coffin.”
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The CIA treated its prisoners at the National Interrogation Center no better. In
Decent Interval,
former CIA officer Frank Snepp cites the case of Nguyen Van Tai, the Cuc Nghien Cuu agent who organized the attack on the U.S. Embassy during Tet. Tai was captured in 1970 and, “With American help the South Vietnamese built him his own prison cell and interrogation room, both totally white, totally bare except for a table, chair, an open hole for a toilet—and ubiquitous hidden television cameras and microphones to record his every waking and sleeping moment. His jailers soon discovered
one essential psychic-physical flaw in him. Like many Vietnamese, he believed his blood vessels contracted when he was exposed to frigid air. His quarters and interrogation room were thus outfitted with heavy-duty air conditioners and kept thoroughly chilled.”
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In April 1975, Snepp notes, “Tai was loaded onto an airplane and thrown out at ten thousand feet over the South China Sea. At that point he had spent over four years in solitary confinement, in a snow-white cell, without ever having fully admitted who he was.”
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As perverse as anything done in Salem, Tai was disposed of like a bag of garbage simply because he would not confess.

But unlike Truong and Tai, most Vietnamese jailed under Phoenix were anonymous pawns whose only value was the small bribe their families offered for their release. Anyone confined in a PIC or province or district prison was in the belly of the beast. The range and extent of torture are beyond the comprehension of the average middle-class American but are well documented, as is the fact that American advisers rarely intervened to reduce the level of abuse.