Phoenix Program (43 page)

“I say, ‘Yeah.'

“He says, ‘You know who she is? She's the province chief's wife.'

“I looked around and said, ‘I don't see the province chief. You're telling me there's an honest province chief, and his wife doesn't own a jeep and go around collecting money all day?'

“No, no,” he says. “The
VC
province chief.”

“So, being young and naive, I say, ‘Well, look at how many young kids she has. She either goes to see him, or he comes to see her. Or she's got a lover.'

“He says, ‘Right.' But they are his kids. They even look like him.

“So I say, ‘Well, he must come in to see her, then, or she goes to see him.' I'm really excited. I say, ‘This is something we can really work with.'

“He says, ‘You don't understand. You don't live the way we live. You don't have any family here. You're going to go home when this operation is over with. You don't think like you're going to live here forever. But I have a home and a family and kids that go to school. I have a wife that has to go
to market…. And you want me to go kill his wife? You want me to set a trap for him and kill him when he comes in to see his wife? If we do that, what are they going to do to our wives?'

“How many wives were ever killed?” Brady asked rhetorically. “Zero— unless they happened to drive over a land mine, and then it was a random death. The VC didn't run targeted operations against them either. There were set rules that you played by. If you went out and conducted a military operation and you chased them down fair and square in the jungle and you had a fight, that was okay. If they ambushed you on the way back from a military operation, that was fair. But to conduct these clandestine police operations and really get at the heart of things, that was kind of immoral to them. That was not cricket. And the Vietnamese were very, very leery of upsetting that.”

Likewise, as Tran Van Truong notes in
A Vietcong Memoir:
“Thieu's chief of psywar hid in his own house a sister-in-law who was the Vietcong cadre in charge of the Hue People's Uprising Committee. Neither had any particular love for their enemies, but family loyalty they considered sacrosanct.”
⁸

“Atrocities happened,” Brady said. “Those things happened by individual province officers or people who worked for them and the PRUs…. It happened in the U.S. units. My Lai happened. No matter what anybody says about ‘it didn't happen,' it did happen. I've watched people torch Montagnard villages for no real reason except they were frustrated by not being able to catch the VC. And the Montagnards must have known about the VC, which I believe they did. But we didn't have to burn their houses.”

When asked if Phoenix encouraged atrocities, Brady answered that it depended on whether or not the PRU and the PICs were defined as part of Phoenix. “If you want to say that all the intelligence activities that were
supposed
to be coordinated by Phoenix
are
a part of Phoenix, then yes,” Brady said. “But if you want to say, ‘Did Phoenix go do these things?,' then my answer is no. Because Phoenix was too inactive, too incompetent, and too passive. Now, Phoenix should have been doing many more things directly, and if it had, then my belief is that Phoenix would have perpetrated some atrocities, because they would have been in the position these other people were in, where they were frustrated, they were angry, and they would have done some things.

“Furthermore,” Brady added, “you can make the case that Phoenix was helping to repress the loyal opposition political parties and prevented a neutral Vietnam from occurring. The Vietnamese said that, because the Special Branch guy who planned the operation to nullify their political operations was also running Phoenix operations…. So it depends on how you want to
interpret the data and how you want to say things were connected together. … I'd say either of those interpretations are valid.

“I think the director of Phoenix never planned such things,” Brady concluded in defense of Evan Parker and American policy in general. But he also said, “Yes, people assigned to Phoenix did such things.”

CHAPTER 17

Accelerated Pacification

The election of Richard Nixon in November 1968 signaled a shift in U.S. policy in Vietnam. Reflecting the desire of most Americans, in the wake of Tet, for an honorable withdrawal, the policy balanced negotiations with the bombing of North Vietnam. Called the Nixon Doctrine, the policy had as its premise that the United States has a moral obligation to support foreign governments fighting Communist insurgents, on the condition that those governments supply their own cannon fodder.

Shortly after taking office, Nixon instructed his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, to start negotiating with the North Vietnamese in Paris. On the assumptions that Tet had dealt the VCI a deathblow and that the Thieu regime was firmly in control of the country, Nixon began planning for troop reductions. Following in the footsteps of the French, U.S. forces began a gradual retreat to coastal enclaves. And MACV, under General William Westmoreland's replacement, General Creighton Abrams, prepared to fight a sanctuary war based on CIA estimates that forty thousand NVA soldiers hunkered down in Cambodia constituted the major outside threat to the Thieu regime. The bombing of these potential invaders began in February 1969, with the consent of Cambodia's Prince Norodom Sihanouk, whose agents provided the Special Operations Group (SOG) with information on the location of enemy forces, many of which were located in densely populated
areas. Conducted in secret, the illegal raids into Cambodia were revealed in May 1969 and resulted in increased opposition to U.S. government conduct in Southeast Asia.

The Nixon Doctrine as applied in Vietnam was called Vietnamization, and the man upon whom the mantle of Vietnamization fell was William Colby, godfather of the Covert Action program that had set the stage for American intervention ten years earlier. In November 1968 Colby was appointed DEPCORDS, replacing Democratic party loyalist Robert Komer, whom President Johnson had named U.S. ambassador to Turkey. Colby reported to Henry Kissinger, who supported Colby's ambitious pacification program, geared to facilitate Vietnamization.

Colby subdivided his pacification plan into three main categories, beginning with military security, which he called “the first step in the pacification and development process”—in other words, borrowed from Nelson Brickham, “shielding the population from the Communist main forces,” a job which “is the task of the Vietnamese regular forces.”
¹

Often generated by Phoenix intelligence, the resulting air raids, artillery barrages, and search and destroy operations were an integral part of pacification, insofar as they created defectors, prevented guerrillas from assembling in large concentrations, and, by creating refugees, separated the fish from the water.

Part II of Colby's strategy was territorial security, the 1969 manifestation of Revolutionary Development, in which the Regional and Popular Forces—thereafter called Territorial Security Forces—were advised by U.S. Army mobile advisory teams (MATs) under the auspices of CORDS. In combating VC guerrilla units and the VCI, Territorial Security Forces were assisted by the People's Self-Defense Forces.

In a Defense Department report titled
A Systems Analysis of the Vietnam War 1965-1972,
Thomas Thayer says that as of 1968, “The Revolutionary Development program had significant problems in recruiting and retaining high quality personnel.” The RD Cadre desertion rate was over 20 percent, “higher than for any GVN military force, perhaps because they have a 30% better chance of being killed than the military forces.” Thayer notes that in response, the RD ministry had directed its cadre “to concentrate on building hamlet security and to defer, at least temporarily, the hamlet development projects which formerly constituted six of the teams' eleven RD tasks.”
²

Under these revised guidelines, providing intelligence to Phoenix replaced “nation building” as the RD program's top priority. Reflecting this change, the RD Cadre program was incorporated within the CORDS Pacification Security Coordination Division in November 1968, at which point MACV officers and USAID employees moved in to manage the program, bringing about, according to Robert Peartt and Jim Ward, a decline in per
formance and morale. In line with Lou Lapham's redirection of the station away from paramilitary operations back toward classic intelligence functions, the CIA's role in RD diminished, although it continued to skim off whatever strategic intelligence was produced. As Peartt noted, the station was “interested in going after region people, and would get involved at that point in RDC/O operations.”
³
To a lesser degree, the CIA's PRU program was also affected.

“The agency made a decision,” John Wilbur said, “to get their ass out of Vietnam as fast as they could, for all the reasons Kinloch Bull foretold. It was losing control … diluting its cadre … being misdirected. It had become the sponsoring agency for a hodgepodge thing, and Phoenix was going to be the mechanism by which it was going to withdraw its control and sponsorship … and transition it over to the military. And that … meant that the PRU were no longer going to be the CIA's exclusive boys, which foretold a real human crisis in the units.”
⁴
Their “elan and morale had been carefully nurtured,” Wilbur explained. “We protected them from the dilution of control … from the province chiefs and battalion commanders. We insulated them from being used for whatever multiple good and bad reasons other people wanted to use them for. We would pay them a little better, we would take care of their dependents, and we would provide them with the best military support there was.” That, according to Wilbur, motivated them to “go out and do the things they did.”

But, he added, “they had incurred a lot of resentment by the Vietnamese to whom they had previously been untouchable…. The leadership levels were marked men among many Vietnamese political forces.” And as soon as the Vietnamese got control in the summer of 1968, “everybody started messing with them.” The PRU began to be used as bagmen.

“I was hurt in the last attack on Can Tho,” Wilbur continued, “and when I got back [from the hospital], my replacement had already arrived … and I spent most of the next six weeks introducing Chuck [Lieutenant Commander Charles Lemoyne] to the provinces, to all the hundreds of people he would have to deal with.” At that point Wilbur went home, where he remained until May 1968, when the CIA asked him to return to Vietnam to help Bill Redel “develop a national PRU unit which was targeted to recover American POWs in South Vietnam. It was the only thing that seemed worth fighting for,” Wilbur said, so he accepted the job. He was transferred to a naval security group, assigned to MACV, given an office (formerly occupied by Joe Vacarro) on the second floor of USAID II, and went to work for Redel.

“We were going to set up a unit that would go around the provinces and try to collate whatever extant information there was, and in the event there was something that indicated [a POW camp] was there, we would try
to put an in-place person, or try to develop … somebody to deal with an agent in place, and then gather the intelligence sufficiently to mount some sort of rescue operation.”

But the rescue program was scuttled, and Wilbur instead got the job of transferring management of the PRU to the Vietnamese. He was introduced to Special Forces Mayor Nguyen Van Lang,
*
the first PRU national commander, and they began traveling around the country together. “And it became very apparent when I showed up with a Vietnamese colonel … what was going to happen. It meant the military, and that meant that the leadership elements of the PRU were in jeopardy of maintaining allegiance—they weren't colonels and majors and captains.”

Wilbur sighed and said forlornly, “The fact that there was no national overlay allowed the CIA to maintain autonomy over the PRU program longer than they would have otherwise.” But by the summer of 1968 “The official word had to go out that the PRU was becoming part of the Phoenix program: ‘We're going to lose control. Get ready for the transition.'

“It was the dissolution of American protection of the units that was mandated in our withdrawal,” Wilbur explained, “that corrupted the quality of control, which in turn allowed the PRU to be turned into a department store. And I became an agent of that. I was going to try to convince people to give up control of the PRU, after I had spent all this time arguing for its insulation and control and independence.”

To effect territorial security, Colby intended “to get weapons into the hands of the Vietnamese villagers, so they could participate in their own defense” and to provide “funds to the elected village leaders to carry out local development programs.”
⁵
The mechanism for this was Ralph Johnson's village chief program at Vung Tau, about which Professor Huy writes: “[A]fter 1968, when Thieu succeeded to restore security in the countryside, several province and district chiefs used fraud and threats to put their men in the village and hamlet councils. These men were often the children of rich people living in cities. They needed the title of ‘elected representatives of the population' to enjoy a temporary exemption from military service, and their parents were ready to pay a high price for their selection as village councilors. Thus, even the fiercely anti-Communist groups became bitter and resentful against Thieu.”
⁶

That brings us to Part III of Colby's plan, internal security, otherwise known as Phoenix, the two-track CIA program to destroy the VCI and ensure
the political stability of the Thieu regime by insulating him from the backlash of his repressive policies. As it was in the beginning, the pacification purpose of Phoenix was to weaken the link between the “people” and the VCI, while the political-level Phoenix was designed to exploit that link.