Phoenix Program (44 page)

To implement his plan, Colby forged ahead with a three-month startup program dubbed the accelerated pacification campaign (APC). Begun in November 1968, APC was designed to bolster Kissinger's negotiating position in Paris by boosting the GVN presence in the hamlets, and was expected to show its effect by Tet [of 1969]. The goal was to add twelve hundred hamlets to the five thousand already classified under the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES) as “relatively secure.” Afterward APC was to be followed by an annual “full year pacification and development program.” To facilitate this process, Colby created the Central Pacification and Development Council as his personal staff and private conduit to Tran Thien Khiem, who replaced Tran Van Huong as prime minister in August 1969.

Said Evan Parker about his patron William Colby: “The interesting thing was his relationship with Khiem … they would travel around the countryside in the same plane, each sitting there with his briefcase and a stack of working papers, writing like mad, answering memoranda, writing memoranda, passing memorandum back and forth…. There's your coordination on this stuff—one of them or both would use his authority to support what I was asking the Vietnamese to do.”

To assist him on the council, Colby hired Clayton McManaway as program manager; Tony Allito for HES reports; Harry “Buzz” Johnson for territorial security; and Ev Bumgartner and Frank Scotton for political liaison. With his personal staff in tow, Colby spent two days each week canvassing the provinces, bringing pressure to bear on people in the field, and promoting the accelerated pacification campaign.

Phoenix adviser John Cook describes the accelerated pacification campaign as “an all out nationwide effort to put as many hamlets under government control as soon as possible. The Viet Cong violently opposed this action, since its primary purpose was to eliminate them and their control. It involved large military operations coupled with psychological operations, resulting in increased emphasis on the pacification program.” Insofar as the attack on the VCI strengthened Henry Kissinger's bargaining position, Cook writes, “Pressure was placed on the Intelligence and Operations Coordinating Centers to provide more valid information about the enemy's location. This required more of an effort from all of us, which meant an increase in the number of raids, ambushes and operations.”
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The hour of Phoenix was at hand. With American troops withdrawing and emphasis being shifted from military to political operations, the pressure began to mount on Phoenix advisers, who were expected to eliminate any
vestiges of revolutionary activity in South Vietnam. Reasons why they failed to accomplish this goal are offered by Jeffrey Race in his book
War Comes to Long An.

Blaming “overcentralization,” Race observes that the district, where the DIOCCs were located, “was the lowest operational level” of Phoenix, “one having no significance in terms of social or living patterns, and staffed by outsiders whose interests bore no necessary connection to the districts. By contrast, the revolutionary organization was the essence of simplicity … and intimately familiar with the local population and terrain.” Race traces the lack of “security” at the village level to the GVN's disdain for the common people and its “failure to develop a highly motivated and trained local apparatus.”
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Operational as well as organizational errors also factored into the equation. Forces under the Phoenix program, Race explains, “operated in the manner of a conventional war combat organization—independently of their environment—and so they did not have the enormous advantage enjoyed by the party apparatus of operating continuously in their home area through a personally responsive network of friends and relatives. This in turn severely handicapped their ability to locate intended targets and to recognize fortuitous ones. The program was also handicapped in developing a sympathetic environment by the use by the Saigon authorities of foreign troops and by the program's intended purpose of maintaining a distributive system perceived as unfavorable to their interests by much of the rural population.”
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Responding to the grievances of the rural population and taking steps to correct social injustices might have enabled the GVN to collect intelligence and contest the VCI in the villages. But acknowledging the nature of the conflict would have undermined the reason for fighting the war in the first place. And rather than do that, Race says, “attention was turned to the use of such new devices as starlight scopes, ground surveillance radar, and remote listening devices, as well as the previously employed infrared and radio transmission detection devices.”
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In August 1968, concurrent with Robert Komer imposing, as “a management tool,” a nationwide quota of eighteen hundred VCI neutralizations per month, the science fiction aspect of Phoenix was enhanced with the advent of the Viet Cong Infrastructure Information System. VCIIS climaxed a process begun in February 1966, when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara established the Defense Department's Southeast Asia Programs Division. The process was carried forward in Saigon in January 1967, when the Combined Intelligence Staff fed the names of three thousand VCI (assembled by hand at area coverage desks) into the IBM 1401 computer at the Combined
Intelligence Center's political order of battle section. At that point the era of the computerized blacklist began.

As the attack against the VCI exploded across South Vietnam in 1968, reports on the results poured into the Phoenix Directorate, inundating its analysts with reams of unreliable information on individual VCI and anti-VCI operations. In DIOCCs the data could be processed manually, but in Saigon it required machines. Hence, with input from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the FBI and the CIA—all of which had an interest in analyzing the finished product—VCIIS became the first of a series of computer programs designed to absolve the war effort of human error and war managers of individual responsibility.

The cerebellum of Phoenix, VCIIS compiled information gathered from all U.S. and free world field units on VCI boundaries, locations, structures, strengths, personalities, and activities. The end product, a monthly summary report, was a statistical summary of Phoenix operational results by province, region, and the country as a whole and showed the levels and methods of neutralizations at each echelon within the VC infrastructure. A monthly activity listing listed each “neutralized” VCI by name. In July 1970 the Vietnamese were invited to contribute to the program and started key punching at the National Police Interrogation Center. Until then the computerized blacklist was a unilateral American operation.

In January 1969 VCIIS was renamed the Phung Hoang Management Information System. The PHMIS file included summary data on each recorded VCI in the following categories: name and aliases; whether or not he or she was “at large”; sex, birth date, and place of birth; area of operations; party position; source of information; arrest date; how neutralized; term of sentence; where detained; release date; and other biographical and statistical information, including photographs and fingerprints, if available. All confirmed and suspected VCI members were recorded in this manner, enabling Phoenix analysts instantly to access and cross-reference data, then decide who was to be erased. All of this added up to hard times for NLF sympathizers, Thieu opponents, and those unfortunate enough to be creditors or rivals of Phoenix agents.

As a management tool PHMIS was used by Komer and Colby to measure and compare the performance of Phoenix officers—unless one believes those like Tom McCoy, who claims that Komer was a fraud who went to Vietnam “not
to do
pacification but
to prove
that it was being done.”
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In that case the numbers game was computerized prestidigitation—an Orwellian manipulation of statistics to shape public opinion.

According to McCoy's scenario, PHMIS was part of a larger hoax begun in January 1967, when Robert Komer introduced the Hamlet Evaluation
System (HES)—eighteen factors subject to computer analysis for each of South Vietnam's fifteen thousand hamlets. These factors included data on VC military activity, GVN security capabilities, the strength of the VCI, Revolutionary Development activities, etc. The data were assembled by MACV district advisers, with the computer then putting the hamlets into one of three classes: A, secure; B, contested; or C, controlled by the VC.

On the verge of Tet in December 1967, nearly half of South Vietnam's hamlets were rated A. One year later more than half were rated A. As Public Safety chief Frank Walton told me, “We would get reports of provinces being eighty-five percent pacified and ninety percent pacified, and then, when it got to the point that they were near a hundred percent, figures had to be revised downward. It was done with computers, and that's where I first heard the term ‘GIGO' for ‘garbage in; garbage out.' “
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The Hamlet Evaluation System also included input on “the known strengths of the 319 currently identified, upper-level VCI organizations at COSVN, region, province and district levels.” The HES guesstimate of VCI strength in January 1969 was 75,500.

Statistics on the VCI; definitions of the VCI; attitudes toward the VCI—all were subjective. Yet despite his own admission that “we knew there was a VCI, but we could not be said to know very much about it,” William Colby set about attacking it. Armed with technology that rendered due process obsolete, he “set up standards and procedures by which to weed out the false from the correct information.” To ensure that Phoenix operations were mounted on factual information, “The general rule was established that three separate sources must have reported a suspect before he could be put on the rolls.” Thus, the VCI was put into three classes of offenders: A, for leaders and party members; B, for holders of other responsible jobs; and C, for rank-and-file members and followers. “And the decision was taken that those in the ‘C category should be ignored, since Phoenix was directed against the VCI command and control structure and not the occasional adherent or supporter.”
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To complement these safety procedures, Phoenix advisers and their Vietnamese counterparts were issued, in July 1968, the Yellow Book, published by the CIA under cover of the RAND Corporation. Officially titled
The Modus Operandi of Selected Political Cadre,
the Yellow Book described the operational patterns and procedures of VCI cadre and suggested “possible actions” to exploit them.

In November 1968 came SOP 2, telling how to manage a DIOCC, and in December 1968 appeared the Green Book,
Current Breakdown of Executive and Significant VCI Cadre.
The bible of Phoenix advisers, the Green Book listed all VCI job titles, assigned each an A, B, or C rating, and prescribed
the duration of detention suitable for each functionary. It told how the VCI routed messages, how they constructed and hid in tunnels, who was likely to know whom in the party organization, and other tips that would allow earnest Phoenix advisers to prioritize their targets, so they could go after the big fish recorded in the Black Book kept in the situation section of each DIOCC and PIOCC.

Other publications made available to Phoenix advisers included a biweekly newsletter that enabled advisers to share their favorite interrogation, operational, and briefing techniques; MACV's monthly “Summary of VCI Activities”; Combined Document Exploitation Center and Combined Intelligence Center readouts; the PHMIS monthly report; and an eagerly awaited Phoenix End of Year Report.

Perhaps the most far-reaching innovation of 1968 was the Phoenix Coordinators Orientation Course (PCOC), which held its first classes at Vung Tau's Seminary Camp in November 1968. The PCOC represented a final recognition that, as Doug Dillard remarked, “MACV
really
had to account for it.”
¹⁴
To state it simply, military careers were now hitched to the Phoenix star.

The advent of the PCOC dovetailed neatly with the folderol of the accelerated pacification campaign and the infusion into the Phoenix Directorate of a new generation of staff officers, who brought with them new ideas and were confronted with new concerns, most concerning public relations. On the CIA side, Robert E. Haynes replaced Joe Sartiano as executive director, and Sartiano and two State Department officers began writing a plan to put Phung Hoang under the control of the National Police. On the military side, Colonel Robert E. Jones replaced William Greenwalt as deputy director.

In September, Army Security Agency officer Lieutenant Colonel Richard Bradish stepped in as the military liaison to Special Branch. Bradish “provided direct assistance” to the Phung Hoang staff in Special Branch headquarters at the NPIC. He and the sergeant assisting him were the only military personnel who had desks there. “We were very busy,” Bradish told me, “primarily advising the Special Branch in anti-infrastructure operations.”
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Bradish also advised Vietnamese inspectors visiting Phung Hoang committees on “how to bolster morale and improve record keeping on VCI neutralizations.”

Bradish noted that Parker's military deputy, Colonel Jones did not provide “close supervision,” a condition that was “characteristic of the whole thing…. I was compartmented,” Bradish said about himself and the other military personnel on the staff. “We were outsiders. When I was there, Special Branch was Phung Hoang”—meaning that the CIA still controlled Phoenix, with the military there as window dressing. Likewise, Bradish observed, the
Vietnamese at the Phung Hoang Office “were putting on a show. They were not acting like they were at war, but like it was a normal job.” In his judgment, “The North Vietnamese were more committed.”

The Central Phung Hoang Permanent Committee as of November 1968 looked like this:

Chairman: General Tran Thien Khiem