Phoenix Program (42 page)

Vietnamese assigned to the Go Vap DIOCC included PRU, a Regional and Popular Forces company, Census Grievance cadre, National Police, and Field Policemen. McWade's counterpart was the ARVN S2, “a weak person I put too many demands on. The only time he moved was the time a ranger brigade came to Go Vap to conduct cordon and search operations with the police. When Saigon units, which were there to prevent coups, came out to our area, things happened. Then it was a genuine Phoenix operation.”

Otherwise, said McWade, “We ran every conceivable type of operation, from night ambushes in the rural areas north of Go Vap, to Rambo-style counterintelligence operations in the city—the kind where you personally had to react.” McWade went on village sweeps with the local Regional and Popular Forces company, checking hundreds of IDs with the police. Based on tips gotten from informers, he would also surveil and target houses in Go Vap where VCI suspects lived, contact points where VCI met, and places where commo-liaison cadres crossed the river. He took photographs, submitted reports, and “fed the computer in Saigon.

“We were going out every other day, sometimes every day,” he recalled. “I worked eighteen hours a day, six or seven days a week.” And yet, he was never really in control. “I had no operational control over any units, and I
had to rely one hundred percent on my counterpart,” he said. “So every operation had to be simple,” primarily because of language. “I was at the mercy of an interpretor with a five-hundred-word vocabulary,” McWade sighed. “It was like being deaf and dumb. And I just assumed every operation was compromised, at a minimum because my interpretor was an undercover Military Security Service agent.” And even though he monitored agent nets, “No one reported directly to me; it would have been impossible to try, if you can't speak the language. There was no such thing as a secure agent, and we didn't have walk-ins because the people couldn't trust the police.” Making matters worse, there were at least a dozen intelligence agencies operating in the area, each with what it assumed were its own unilateral agents in the field. But because the various intelligence agencies refused to share their files with one another, they never realized that each agent, as McWade put it, “was selling information to everybody.”

The picture is one of total chaos. Indeed, most of McWade's initial operations were conducted—without his realizing it—by his police counterparts against common criminals or dissidents. He recalled his first day on the job, which coincided with the beginning of the second Tet offensive. “The first one in February came through Cholon,” McWade said. “This one came through Go Vap. We were out with the Regional and Popular Forces company, picking up anyone who looked like an ARVN draft dodger. Meanwhile the Vietnamese police were shaking them down, although I didn't learn about it till much later.”

There were other surprises. In an area outside Go Vap, for example, over thirty thousand refugees lived in a sprawling ghetto. McWade told me, “They were mostly prostitutes working for organized crime—meaning the police. I thought we were investigating the VCI, but actually I was used by my police counterpart to raid the madams who hadn't paid him off.” When he figured out what was really going on, McWade said, “I developed what I called ‘MeWade's Rule'; fifteen percent for graft, eighty-five percent for the program. And this was a complete reversal of what was happening when I arrived!”

But Henry McWade did not become bitter, nor was he unable to cope with Vietnamese culture. Unlike many of his colleagues, he did not interpret Vietnamese customs as insidious schemes designed to deceive him. “The Vietnamese had a different vocabulary and different goals. They were
not
interested in acquiring bodies,” he said. “They were interested in acquiring money and items on the black market.” In other words, their motives were practical, geared toward surviving in the present, while it was generally only their American advisers who were obsessed with eliminating Communists from the face of the earth.

As a means of bringing Vietnamese and American procedures into closer sync, the Phoenix Directorate in July 1968 issued its first standard operating procedures (SOP 1) manual. SOP 1 stressed the leadership role of the police and the need for paramilitary forces to support the police in the attack on the VCI. It subdivided Intelligence and Operations Coordination Centers (IOCCs) into three areas. The Plans and Operations Center devised plans and organized available forces in operations against guerrilla units and individual VCI. The Situation Center maintained files, handled agent security and operations, produced reports, and set requirements. It had a military order of battle section under the Vietnamese army intelligence officer, the S2, gathering intelligence on and targeting guerrilla units, and a political order of battle section under the Special Branch, targeting VCI. The Message Section communicated with the district or province chief, who exercised overall responsibility for any particular IOCC.

In practice, SOP 1 had little effect. “It didn't do any harm,” Henry McWade observed; but it was issued only to Americans, and the Vietnamese continued to organize the IOCCs according to their own “separate goals and missions. The double standard persisted, even after a translation (minus diacritical marks) was circulated.”

Ralph Johnson acknowledges this, noting that the GVN's instructions to its own people—by making no reference to the role of U.S. Phoenix advisers in the IOCCs—widened the gap between Americans and Vietnamese. At first only the CIA, which “controlled the salaries, training and support of critical elements in Phung Hoang,” was able to exert influence, by parceling out resources and funds. Otherwise, when Phoenix advisers received adequate funds through CORDS, they, too, “were able and willing to use monetary leverage to drive home needed advice and guidance. And a CORDS agreement with President Thieu gave CORDS the right to call attention to officials who should be replaced.”
⁶

In any event, Phoenix advisers found themselves caught in the middle of intrigues beyond their comprehension. Woefully unprepared, they stood between their Vietnamese army and police counterparts; their CIA and U.S. Army superiors; and the GVN and the sect or opposition political party in their area of operation. Everything was expected of them, but in reality, very little was possible.

Shedding light on the problems of Phoenix advisers is Ed Brady, a slender Army officer who served his first tour in Vietnam in 1965 as an adviser to the Twenty-second Ranger Battalion in Pleiku. After that, Brady volunteered for another tour and was assigned as a Regional and Popular Forces adviser in Da Lat, where he learned about the connection between politics and the black market in Vietnam. “Both the VC and the ARVN tried
to avoid military operations in Da Lat,” Brady told me, adding that as part of the modus vivendi, it was “a neutral city where you could have meetings and where financial transactions could take place, legal and illegal. It was a place where the VC could raise and wash and change money. It was sort of what Geneva was like in World War Two. There were many businesses in the province, like woodcutting, rubber and tea plantations, and the
ngoc mam
[fish sauce] industry. All were sources of money for the VC and the GVN.”
⁷

In Da Lat Brady worked with CIA Province Officer Peter Scove, who introduced him to Ted Serong, who at the time was handing over control of the Field Police to Pappy Grieves. “I was learning a lot,” Brady said. “I learned Vietnamese from the officer I was working with … the words that dealt with money and corruption. Then Serong asked me if I would be willing to go on loan to his team. They had a new kind of platoon … that they wanted to train in small-unit tactics. More like guerrilla warfare than what the police did. And would I be willing to train this platoon because he didn't think that the Australian warrant officers he had there were the right people?”

Brady agreed and spent the next few months at the Field Police center, training what turned out to be “the first experimental PRU team in Tuyen Duc Province … recruited by the CIA to be the action arm of the province officer.” The platoon had four squads, two composed of Nungs and two of Montagnards. “They couldn't speak to each other.” There were also squad leaders and a platoon commander, all of whom were South Vietnamese Special Forces officers, none of whom could speak Montagnard or Nung or English either.

“It was really the strangest thing you ever saw,” Brady said. “And I taught them small-unit tactics.”

As was generally the case, Brady's association with the CIA spelled trouble for his military career. “I had a lot of problems with my sector boss over these activities,” he told me. “He thought I should eat in the sector house with the rest of the team, not with the Aussies and CIA people. I also spent most of my off time with Vietnamese officers in their homes, in bars, doing the things they did. I rented a house on my own, lived off the economy, learned how you buy your jobs, and met a lot of general officers' mistresses who liked to come to Da Lat for the weather. The American colonel I worked for thought this was atrocious, and I got a zero on my performance report.”

Having been suborned by the CIA, enticed by the Vietnamese, and excommunicated by the Army, Brady—whose family was connected to a powerful U.S. senator and the III Corps commander—was reassigned to the Vietnamese Joint General Staff (JGS), “in their command center. We were a division of the MACV Combat Operations Center. The main purpose of this group was to collect data on Vietnamese operations and feed it to the MACV so it could be reported to Washington.

“General Cao Van Vien was commander of the Joint Staff,” Brady continued, “and these guys were his operations staff. They traveled to every major Vietnamese battle to find out what happened—they placed no reliance on any official message—and I went on every one of those trips. I met all the key commanders. Plus which I was moving in Vietnamese social circles.”

Brady became friends with General Vien's executive officer and with the JGS operations chief, Major General Tran Tran Phong. “And for some reason,” he added, “a number of the ranger officers and people I knew in Da Lat had moved into key positions in Thieu's administration. They had sort of been in exile when I met them—you didn't get assigned to a ranger outfit because you were in good graces with the administration … —but later they showed up in Saigon. And I had a great bond with them. I'd been in combat and brothels with them. But they were now full colonels. And I met many of their bosses, who were generals in powerful positions.”

When Brady's tour at the JGS ended, the CIA station asked him to capitalize on his well-placed connections and report on what he learned about GVN plans and strategies. Brady agreed, and was assigned to the Phoenix Directorate as a cover for his espionage activities. “Somebody called me up one day and said, ‘We're starting a new organization, and we'd like you to consider joining it.' This was ICEX. So I went over there … and spent a couple hours talking to Evan Parker. He said, ‘We're interested in targeted operations against the civilian part of the Communist party…. The main force war doesn't address the real problem … the shadow government.' And I was ready for that—psychologically and emotionally. Everything I knew said, ‘That's exactly right.'

“ICEX was to work with the Special Branch,” Brady continued, “which set up a separate building in the National Police compound to be the Phung Hoang Central Office. They detailed mostly Special Branch policemen to work there, but there were a few military officers and a few National Police officers to round out the staff. Their office was only two months old when I arrived. There were a couple of CIA advisers down there to be the people who worked with them. Joe Sartiano was the senior CIA guy down in the Phung Hoang Central Office. And me and Bob Inman were down there from the Phoenix operations section.”

The Phoenix assignment put Brady in close contact with Dang Van Minh, Duong Than Huu, and Lieutenant Colonel Loi Nguyen Tan. About his relationship with Tan, Brady said, “Since Colonel Tan was a military officer, we knew people in common, so there was an immediate rapport. Tan was very friendly, very easy to talk to. But he was not, from an American point of view, demanding. We would go out on inspection teams together, to operations centers, and he'd have a discussion with the chief. Meanwhile, his Vietnamese subordinate and I pored through the dossiers, looked at their
procedures and what operations they had run recently. And a lot of it was a sham—a facade that they were meeting the letter of the law. So they had a hundred dossiers. Big deal! Seventy-five had nothing in them. Fifteen of the other twenty-five had a couple of newspaper clippings from the local newspaper about the VC district chief. But they had no real intelligence, no real targeted operations that they were setting up or running. And Tan would never crack down on them or lean on them in some way that was acceptable to us from the West.

“Now in Vietnamese he would make a few remarks to them: ‘You really ought to try to do better.' And when he got back, he'd file a report that this place was not in very good shape. But he didn't say, ‘Damn it, I'm going to be back here in three weeks and you'd better have something going by then!' That's why it's difficult to say if he was effective.”

Brady, who has deep affection for the Vietnamese, explained why their approach to Phoenix was at odds with the one pressed by Evan Parker: “If you really want to get down to cases, no Vietnamese of any significance in the military or in the police didn't know who the truly high-level people were—the district chiefs and the province chiefs. Let me give you an example. Colonel Tan and Mr. Huu and I were eating in a market stall up near the border in Three Corps. The place was a hotbed of VCI support for NVA units. There was lots of money flowing there, donated by French rubber plantation owners without much coercion. They didn't like the GVN. Anyway, this woman comes in. She's got three or four kids, the youngest is maybe two, the oldest about seven. And Tan says to me, ‘You see this woman?' We're there eating soup and drinking Vietnamese coffee. She's there feeding her kids at a nearby table in the market stall.