Phoenix Program (47 page)

Two days after arriving in Saigon and meeting with McChristian's replacement, General Davidson, Carver notified Helms that MACV was “stonewalling” and that “circumstantial indicators … point to inescapable conclusion that Westmoreland … has given instructions tantamount to direct order that strength total will not exceed 300,000 ceiling. Rationale seems to be that higher figure would not be sufficiently optimistic and would generate unacceptable level of criticism from the press.”
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Although the CIA knew that the estimated 120,000 VC Self-Defense Forces (which Westmoreland described as “old men, old women and children”) were the integral element of the insurgency, Carver, after being shown “evidence that I hadn't heard before,” cut a deal on September 13. He sent a cable to Helms saying: “Circle now squared We have agreed set of figures Westmoreland endorsed.”
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In November National Security Adviser Walt Rostow showed President Johnson a chart indicating that enemy strength had dropped from 285,000 in late 1966 to 242,000 in late 1967. President Johnson got the success he wanted to show, and Vietnam got Tet.

Sam Adams's claim that the agency had “misinformed policymakers of the strength of the enemy” was backed at the CBS libel trial by Carver's deputy, George W. Allen, who claimed that Westmoreland “was ultimately responsible” for “this prostitution” and that the CIA, “by going along with it,” had “sacrificed its integrity on the altar of public relations and political expediency.” Allen added that the end result of the deception was that Washington was left “essentially with an inadequate understanding of what we were up against” in Vietnam. According to Allen, the Self-Defense Forces were not old women and children but hardened guerrillas who were responsible for 40 percent of all U.S. combat casualties in Vietnam.

As a result of Adams's claims, a congressional inquiry was conducted in 1975. The investigating committee, chaired by Otis Pike, concluded that juggling of numbers “created false perceptions of the enemy U.S. forces
faced, and prevented measurement of changes over time. Second, pressure from policymaking officials to produce positive intelligence indicators reinforced erroneous assessments of allied progress and enemy capabilities.”
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Sam Adams has said that “the reason [Phoenix] did not work was that its needs, although recognized in theory, were never fulfilled in practice. The divorce between hope and reality became so wide that the program degenerated into a game of statistics, in which numbers were paramount, and the object of the exercise—the crippling of the Communist Party—was never even approached.”
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Likewise, Ralph McGehee found the CIA squaring statistical facts with ideological preconceptions in Vietnam, just as it had in Thailand. “The station's intelligence briefings on the situation in South Vietnam confirmed all my fears,” he writes. The briefers “talked only about the numbers of armed Viet Cong, the slowly increasing North Vietnamese regular army, and the occasional member of the Communist infrastructure. They made no mention of the mass-based Farmer's Liberation Association, or the Communist youth organization, all of which in some areas certainly included entire populations.”
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The reason for this deception, McGehee contends, was that “U.S. policymakers had to sell the idea that the war in the South was being fought by a small minority of Communists opposed to the majority-supported democratic government of Nguyen Van Thieu. The situation, however, was the opposite…. The U.S. was supporting Thieu's tiny oligarchy against a population largely organized, committed, and dedicated to a communist victory.”
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McGehee blames the American defeat in Vietnam on “policy being decided from the top in advance, then intelligence being selected or created to support it afterwards.” In particular, he singles out William Colby as the principal apostle of the Big Lie. A veteran of the Far East Division, McGehee at one point served as Colby's acolyte at Langley headquarters and bases his accusations on firsthand observations of Colby in action—of watching Colby deliver briefings which were “a complete hoax contrived to deceive Congress.”
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Writes McGehee of Colby: “I have watched him when I knew he was lying, and not the least flicker of emotion ever crosses his face.” But what made Colby even more dangerous, in McGehee's opinion, was his manipulation of language. “Colby emphasized the importance of selecting just the right words and charts to convey the desired impression to Congress. He regarded word usage as an art form, and he was a master at it.”
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Years later they met again in Gia Dinh Province, at which point McGehee describes Colby as “a harried, self-important, distracted bureaucrat” who “began calling for statistics. ‘How many VC killed this month? How many
captured? How many firefights?' Each unit chief answered. Colby checked the replies against the figures in his books, and questioned each chief about discrepancies or outstanding figures.” All this was a waste of time, McGehee contends. “Here the U.S. was trying to fight an enemy it only slightly acknowledged. Why? What had happened to all the idealism, all the rules of getting and reporting intelligence? Why did the agency blind itself while pretending to look for intelligence? Why did we insist on killing people instead of talking to them? How long would this insanity go on?”
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In his defense Colby said to me, “We were getting all the statistics, and if you could get them on the computer, you could play them back and forth a little better, and see things you couldn't see otherwise. It was really quite interesting. I never really believed the numbers as absolute, but they helped you think about the problems. We would use it for control of how local people were doing,” he explained, “how if one province reported they had captured a lot of category Cs, but no As, and another province said it captured 15 category As, first you'd check if there were any truth to the second story, and if it is true, you know the second province is doing better then the first one. You don't believe the numbers off-hand, you use them as a basis for questions.”
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Numbers as a basis for questions were a management tool, but they were also a way of manipulating facts. And William Colby is a scion of the gray area in between. In his autobiography,
Honorable Men,
Colby explains how his father converted to Catholicism, and how Colby himself, when he entered Princeton, was excluded from the in crowd as a result. An articulate man trained as a lawyer and spy, but with only one foot in the door, Colby embraced “the art of the possible” and cultivated his “grey man” mentality to achieve success in the CIA bureaucracy, as well as to dissolve the lines between right and wrong, enabling him to give Phoenix a clean bill of health. “I have no qualms about accepting responsibility for it,” he writes.
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So it was in Vietnam, that just as criticism of Phoenix was building within the program, the press began turning its attention toward the subject. The calamity called Tet had subsided, the elections were over, and the Paris Peace Talks were about to start. The Communist shadow government was emerging into the light of day, and U.S. efforts to deal with it became the pressing concern.

Glimpses of Phoenix began appearing in print. On June 29, 1968, in his “Letter from Saigon” column in
The New Yorker,
Robert Shaplen identified the program by its Vietnamese name, Phung Hoang, calling it the “all-seeing bird.” Shaplen rehashes the thrust of the program, citing statistics and quoting Robert Komer as saying “some 5,000 arrests have been made of alleged members of the [VC] command structure.” According to Shaplen, the program's major weakness was “a tendency on the part of the Vietnamese to
build up a massive dossier on a suspect until he gets wind of what is happening and disappears.” Shaplen notes that “district and village chiefs are sometimes loath to furnish or act on intelligence on the grounds that the war may soon be over.”

Indeed, the possibility of a negotiated settlement raised the specter of those in the VCI—the people Phoenix was arresting
and killing
—gaining legal status. And that scenario sent chills running up and down every war manager's spine. But the transition from supporter to critic of American conduct of the war did not come easily to reporters used to acting as cheerleaders. Reasons for withdrawing support had yet to be uncovered. However, sensing momentum in that direction, the information managers began to search for scapegoats. And who better to blame than the Vietnamese themselves? GVN shortcomings, which were previously swept under the carpet, were suddenly being aired. Suddenly the Vietnamese were corrupt and incompetent, and that, not any fault on the part of the Americans, explained why the insurgency was growing.

Moreover, war crimes in 1968 still went unreported. The VC were “faceless,” an abstract statistic whose scope was negotiated by the CIA and MACV.
Wall Street Journal
reporter Peter Kann, in a September 1968 article on Phoenix, called the VCI “the invisible foe.” For Kann, they were an insidious “underground” enemy who could only be eliminated “at night” in their homes.

Kann employed similar imagery in March 1969 in an article titled “The Hidden War: Elite Phoenix Forces Hunt Vietcong Chiefs in Isolated Villages.” Here Phoenix is characterized as a “systematic, sophisticated application of force.” The PRU and their U.S. advisers are “elite,” while far from having any popular support, the VCI members are outcasts in “isolated villages,” far removed from cities and civilization.

On January 6, 1969,
The New York Times
reporter Drummond Ayres gave Phoenix a favorable review, saying that “more than 15,000 of the 80,000 VC political agents thought to be in South Vietnam are said to have been captured or killed.” He also expresses the belief that “the general course of the war … now appears to favor the Government” and predicts that Phoenix would “achieve much greater success as the center's files grow.”

Despite the good reviews, the surfacing of Phoenix in the press sent the publicity-shy CIA running for cover. Under National Security Council Directive 10/2, the CIA is authorized to undertake
secret
political and paramilitary operations. As Ralph Johnson writes, “CIA was empowered to develop and test programs through its
covert
assets. If these programs were successful, and if approved, and if they supported U.S. policy objectives, then they would be turned over to appropriate
overt
U.S. agencies.” And so, in December 1968, the newly arrived CIA station chief informed DEPCORDS
William Colby “that the Agency had fulfilled its function. [Phoenix] was now functional and CIA proposed to withdraw all its management and overall responsibility.”
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Making this pivotal decision was Ted Shackley. A veteran CIA officer with experience in Germany and in Miami running operations against Cuba, Shackley had just completed a two-year tour as station chief in Vientiane, Laos, where he had acquired a detailed understanding of the situation in South Vietnam, primarily through meetings in third countries with John Hart and Lou Lapham, at which regional issues were discussed, strategy was coordinated, and briefings of deep-cover agents were held. “The big item,” according to Lapham, “was the NVA coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.”
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Tall, thin, and pale, Shackley, in an interview conducted in his Arlington office, concurred. “It was the same war in the Laotian panhandle,” he said, “although Laos, in addition, had the basic political problem of coalition.”
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No stranger to the types of programs the CIA was running in South Vietnam, Shackley reviewed them all upon arriving in Saigon in November. “It became clear to me then,” he told me, “that the pacification programs had come of age …that the agency contribution was no longer required. So my original proposal was to see about getting others to manage these…programs, to free up CIA resources to improve the quality of the intelligence product, to penetrate the Vietcong, and the NVA supporting them, and to concentrate more against the North and the VC and the NVA in Cambodia.

“So negotiations were undertaken,” Shackley continued, “and an agreement was reached to phase out the CIA. Pacification programs were to go to the GVN, and CORDS was to provide the transition. We took a mission approach. Each program was approached specifically, including Phoenix, and a certain level of top management was provided for coordination. Static Census Grievance was taken apart; some functions went to Revolutionary Development, some to the Hamlet Evaluation System, and some were dropped. By 1969, static Census Grievance was out of business. RD and Territorial Security were merged and Phil Potter and Rod Landreth saw that the GVN took over the PRU program.” And Phoenix, too, was discarded.

On December 14, 1968, MACV notified DEPCORDS William Colby of its intention to assume “responsibility for intelligence matters as they pertain to the VC infrastructure.”
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By June 1969 the transfer of Phoenix from CIA to MACV-J2 was complete.

In early December, Evan Parker recalled, “I became the author of memos back and forth from Colby to Shackley putting myself out of business.” Parker, however, was not pleased with the reorganization, his main objection being that “the military staff officers were not ready to take over.”
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“This was a difficult assignment for the military,” Shackley concurred, because there “had to be liaison with the Special Branch. You had to have
a manager to coordinate intelligence problems. For instance, leads came out of the PICs and had to be coordinated with the highest levels of CIA.”

To facilitate the process, Colby incorporated the Phoenix program as a division within CORDS, but with a senior CIA staff officer as director, functioning as the American counterpart to the secretary general of the Central Phung Hoang Permanent Office. In this way the CIA could, when necessary, direct Phoenix advisers and exercise jurisdiction over prisoners and penetration agents spun out of the program. Chairmanship of Phoenix committees at region and province became the responsibility, respectively, of the corps DEPCORDS and the province senior adviser. CIA region and province officers became deputy chairmen and ostensibly supported their new military managers with CIA intelligence.
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