Phoenix Program (5 page)

Another Lansdale program was aimed at several thousand Vietminh stay-behind agents organizing secret cells and conducting propaganda among the people. As a way of attacking these agents, Lansdale hired the Freedom Company to activate Operation Brotherhood, a paramedical team patterned on the typical Special Forces A team. Under CIA direction, Operation Brotherhood built dispensaries that were used as cover for covert counterterror operations. Operation Brotherhood spawned the Eastern Construction Company, which provided five hundred hard-core Filipino anti-Communists who, while building roads and dispensing medicines, assisted Diem's security forces by identifying and eliminating Vietminh agents.

In January 1955, using resettled Catholic refugees trained by the Freedom Company as cadre, Lansdale began his Civic Action program, the centerpiece of Diem's National Security program. Organized and funded by the CIA in conjunction with the Defense Ministry, but administered through the Ministry of Interior by the province chiefs, Civic Action aimed to do four things: to induce enemy soldiers to defect; to organize rural people into self-defense forces to insulate their villages from VC influence; to create political cadres who would sell the idea that Diem—not the Vietminh—represented national aspirations; and to provide cover for counterterror. In doing these things, Civil Action cadres dressed in black pajamas and went into villages to dig latrines, patch roofs, dispense medicines, and deliver propaganda composed by Lansdale. In return the people were expected to inform on Vietminh guerrillas and vote for Diem in the 1956 reunification elections stipulated by the Geneva Accords. However, the middle-class northern Catholics sent to the villages did not speak the same dialect as the people they were teaching and succeeded only in alienating them. Not only did Civic Action fail to win the hearts and minds of the rural Vietnamese, but as a unilateral CIA operation it received only lip service from Diem and his Can Lao cronies, who, in Lansdale's words, “were afraid that it was some scheme of mine to flood the country with secret agents.”
¹⁵

On May 10, 1955, Diem formed a new government and banished the French (who kept eighty thousand troops in the South until 1956) to outposts along the coast. Diem then appointed Nguyen Ngoc Le as his first director general of the National Police. A longtime CIA asset, Le worked with the Freedom Company to organize the Vietnamese Veterans Legion. As a way of extending Can Lao party influence, Vietnamese veteran legion posts were established throughout Vietnam and, with advice and assistance from the U.S. Information Service, took over the distribution of all existing newspapers and magazines. The legion also sponsored the first National Congress,
held on May 29, 1955, at City Hall in Saigon. One month later the Can Lao introduced its political front, the National Revolution Movement.

On July 16, 1955, knowing the Buddhist population would vote overwhelmingly for the Vietminh, Diem renounced the reunification elections required by the Geneva Accords. Instead, he rigged a hastily called national referendum. Announced on October 6 and held on October 23, the elections, says Professor Huy, “were an absolute farce. Candidates chosen to be elected had to sign a letter of resignation in which the date was vacant. In case after the election the representative was considered undesirable, Nhu had only to put a date on the letter to have him expelled from the National Assembly.”
¹⁶

Elected president by a vast majority, Diem in 1956 issued Ordinance 57-A. Marketed by Lansdale as agrarian reform, it replaced the centuries-old custom of village self-government with councils appointed by district and province chiefs. Diem, of course, appointed the district chiefs, who appointed the village councils, which then employed local security forces to collect exorbitant rents for absentee landlords living the high life in Saigon. Universal displeasure was the response to Ordinance 57-A, the cancellation of the reunification elections, and the rigged election of 1955. Deprived of its chance to win legal representation, the Vietcong launched a campaign of its own, emphasizing social and economic awareness. Terror was not one of their tactics. Says Rand Corporation analyst J. J. Zasloff in “Origins of the Insurgency in South Vietnam 1954-1960”: “There is no evidence in our interviews that violence and sabotage were part of their assignment.” Rather, Communist cadres were told “to return to their home provinces and were instructed, it appears, to limit their activities to organizational and propaganda tasks.”
¹⁷

However, on the basis of CIA reports saying otherwise, Diem initiated the notorious Denunciation of the Communists campaign in 1956. The campaign was managed by security committees, which were chaired by CIA-advised security officers who had authority to arrest, confiscate land from, and summarily execute Communists. In determining who was a Communist, the security committees used a three-part classification system: A for dangerous party members, B for less dangerous party members, and C for loyal citizens. As happened later in Phoenix, security chiefs used the threat of an A or B classification to extort from innocent civilians, while category A and B offenders—fed by their families—were put to work without pay building houses and offices for government officials.

The military, too, had broad powers to arrest and jail suspects while on sweeps in rural areas. Non-Communists who could not afford to pay “taxes” were jailed until their families came up with the cash. Communists fared worse. Vietminh flags were burned in public ceremonies, and portable guillotines were dragged from village to village and used on active and inactive
Vietminh alike. In 1956 in the Central Highlands fourteen thousand people were arrested without evidence or trial—people were jailed simply for having visited a rebel district—and by year's end there were an estimated twenty thousand political prisoners nationwide.
¹⁸

In seeking to ensure his internal security through the denunciation campaign, Diem persecuted the Vietminh and alienated much of the rural population in the process. But “the most tragic error,” remarks Professor Huy, “was the liquidation of the Cao Dai, Hoa Hao and Binh Xuyen forces. By destroying them, Diem weakened the defense of South Vietnam against communism. In fact, the remnants … were obliged to join the Vietnamese Stalinists who were already reinforced by Diem's anti-communist struggle campaign.

“Diem's family dealt with this problem,” Huy goes on, “by a repressive policy applied through its secret service. This organ bore the very innocent name of the Political and Social Research Service. It was led by Dr. Tran Kim Tuyen, a devoted Catholic, honest and efficient, who at the beginning sought only to establish a network of intelligence agents to be used against the communists. It had in fact obtained some results in this field. But soon it became a repressive tool to liquidate any opponent.”
¹⁹

By then Ed Lansdale had served his purpose and was being unceremoniously rotated out of Vietnam, leaving behind the harried Civic Action program to his protégé, Rufus Phillips. Meanwhile, “Other Americans were working closely with the Vietnamese,” Lansdale writes, noting: “Some of the relationships led to a development which I believed could bring only eventual disaster to South Vietnam.

“This development was political,” Lansdale observes. “My first inkling came when several families appeared at my house one morning to tell me about the arrest at midnight of their men-folk, all of whom were political figures. The arrests had a strange aspect to them, having come when the city was asleep and being made by heavily armed men who were identified as ‘special police.'”
²⁰

Sensing the stupidity of such a program, Lansdale appealed to Ambassador George Reinhardt, suggesting that “Americans under his direction who were in regular liaison with Nhu, and who were advising the special branch of the police, would have to work harder at influencing the Vietnamese toward a more open and free political concept.” But, Lansdale was told, “a U.S. policy decision had been made. We Americans were to give what assistance we could to the building of a strong nationalistic party that would support Diem. Since Diem was now the elected president, he needed to have his own party.”
²¹

“Shocked” that he had been excluded from such a critical policy decision, Lansdale, to his credit, tried to persuade Diem to disband the Can Lao.
When that failed, he took his case to the Dulles brothers since they “had decisive voices in determining the US relationship with South Vietnam.” But self-described “visionary and idealist” Lansdale's views were dismissed offhandedly by the pragmatic Dulleses in favor “of the one their political experts in Saigon had recommended.” Lansdale was told he should “disengage myself from any guidance to political parties in Vietnam.”
²²

The mask of democracy would be maintained. But the ideal was discarded in exchange for internal security.

CHAPTER 2

Internal Security

In 1954, in the professed belief that it ought to extend the “American way” abroad, Michigan State University (MSU) offered to provide the government of Vietnam with a huge technical assistance program in four areas: public information, public administration, finance and economics, and police and security services. The contract was approved in early 1955, shortly after the National Security Council (NSC) had endorsed Diem, and over the next seven years MSU's Police Administration Division spent fifteen million dollars of U.S. taxpayers' money building up the GVN's internal security programs. In exchange for the lucrative contract, the Michigan State University Group (MSUG) became the vehicle through which the CIA secretly managed the South Vietnamese “special police.”

MSUG's Police Administration Division contributed to Diem's internal security primarily by reorganizing his police and security forces. First, Binh Xuyen gangsters in the Saigon police were replaced with “good cops” from the Sûreté. Next, recruits from the Sûreté were inducted into the Secret Service, Civil Guard, and Military Security Service (MSS), which was formed by Ed Lansdale in 1954 as “military coup insurance.” On administrative matters the MSS reported to the Directorate of Political Warfare in liaison with the CIA, while its operations staff reported to the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (RVNAF)'s Joint General Staff in liaison with MAAG coun
terintelligence officers. All general directors of police and security services were military officers.

The Sûreté (plainclothesmen handling investigations, customs, immigration, and revenue) was renamed the Vietnamese Bureau of Investigations (VBI) and combined with the municipal police (uniformed police in twenty-two autonomous cities and Saigon) into a General Directorate of Police and Security Services within the Ministry of the Interior. This early attempt at bureaucratic streamlining was undermined by Diem, however, who kept the various police and security agencies spying on one another. Diem was especially wary of the VBI, which as the Sûreté had faithfully served the French and which, after 1954, under CIA management, was beyond his control. As a result, Diem judged the VBI by the extent to which it attacked his domestic foes, spied on the Military Security Service, and kept province chiefs in line.

Because it managed the central records depository, the VBI was the most powerful security force and received the lion's share of American “technical” aid. While other services got rusty weapons, the VBI got riot guns, bulletproof vests, gas masks, lie detectors, a high-command school, a modern crime lab and modern interrogation centers; and the most promising VBI officers were trained by the CIA and FBI at the International Police Academy at Georgetown University in agent handling, criminal investigations, interrogation, and counterinsurgency. The VBI (the Cong An to Vietnamese) is one of the two foundation stones of Phoenix.

Whereas the majority of Michigan State's police advisers were former state troopers or big-city detectives, the men who advised the VBI and trained Diem's Secret Service were CIA officers working under cover as professors in the Michigan State University Group. Each morning myopic MSUG employees watched from their quarters across the street as senior VBI adviser Raymond Babineau and his team went to work at the National Police Interrogation Center, which, Graham Greene writes in
The Quiet American,
“seemed to smell of urine and injustice.”
¹
Later in the day the MSUG contingent watched while truckloads of political prisoners—mostly old men, women, and children arrested the night before—were handcuffed and carted off to Con Son Prison. America's first colonialists in Saigon looked, then looked away. For four years they dared not denounce the mass arrests or the fact that room P-40 in the Saigon Zoo was used as a morgue and torture chamber. No one wanted to incriminate himself or get on the wrong side of Babineau and his protégés in the “special police.”

The fear was palpable. In his book
War Comes to Long An,
Jeffrey Race quotes a province chief: “I hardly ever dared to look around in the office with all the Can Lao people there watching me, and in those days it was just impossible to resign—many others had tried—they were just led off in the middle of the night by Diem's men dressed as VC, taken to P-40 or Poulo
Condore [Con Son Prison] and never heard from again.”
²

While the VBI existed primarily to suppress Diem's domestic opponents, it also served the CIA by producing an annual
Ban Tran Liet Viet Cong
(Vietcong order of battle). Compiled for the most part from notes taken by secret agents infiltrated into VC meetings, then assembled by hand at the central records depository, the
Ban Tran Liet
was the CIA's biography of the VCI and the basis of its anti-infrastructure operations until 1964.

In 1959 Diem held another sham election. Said one Vietnamese official quoted by Race: “The 1959 election was very dishonest. Information and Civic Action Cadre went around at noon when everyone was home napping and stuffed ballot boxes. If the results didn't come out right they were adjusted at district headquarters.” When asked if anyone complained, the official replied, “Everyone was terrified of the government …. The Cong An beat people and used ‘the water treatment.' But there was nothing anyone could do. Everyone was terrified.” Said another official: “During the Diem period the people here saw the government was no good at all. That is why 80% of them followed the VC. I was the village chief then, but I had to do what the government told me. If not, the secret police [VBI] would have me picked up and tortured me to death. Thus I was the very one who rigged the elections here.”
³