Phoenix Program (63 page)

And so Bill Taylor's account of Phoenix came to an end. Almost. Within a month of his return to the States, his friend's house was broken into and the incriminating evidence stolen. In a predictable postscript Taylor's service records were altered; included in the portion concerning his medical history were unflattering psychological profiles derived from sessions he never attended. He never got the Silver Star either. Yet despite his losing battle with the system, Bill Taylor still believes in right and wrong. He is proud of having brought the Phoenix assassins in for justice (never dispensed), for having torn the masks off their faces, and for putting them out of business temporarily in Da Nang.

Nor has the Phoenix controversy ended for Taylor. He has seen the fingerprints of the “old Phoenix boys” at the scene of a number of murders he has investigated, including those of American journalist Linda Frazier and Orlando Letelier. The “old Phoenix boys” Taylor referred to are a handful of Cuban contract agents the CIA hired after the Bay of Pigs fiasco to assassinate Fidel Castro. Some served in Vietnam in Phoenix, and a few operate as hired killers and drug dealers in Miami and Central America today. Taylor included the CIA case officers who manage these assassins in his definition of the “old Phoenix boys.”

*
The CIA's unilateral Vietnamese asset PVT was in charge of PRU and Phoenix operations in Da Nang.

†
The PRU and Special Forces Mike Forces were trusted because they were under CIA control, with no official Vietnamese involvement.

*
Bishop noted that the American sergeant in charge of FIC administration sold food and clothing on the black market and had to be relieved. The Da Nang City IOCC and the three district IOCCs had their own interrogation and detention facilities.

CHAPTER 26

Revisions

By 1971, as the war subsided and the emphasis shifted to police operations, it was finally understood, as General Clay had said in August 1969, “that the objective of neutralizations of the infrastructure is equal in priority to the objective of tactical operations.”
¹

Brighter than ever, the spotlight shone on the Phoenix Directorate, which boasted in its 1970 End of Year Report: “The degree of success of the RVN counter-insurgency effort is directly related to the success in accomplishing this neutralization objective.” Noting that “This
concept
[author's emphasis] will receive even more emphasis in 1971” and that “The Phung Hoang program has been given the highest priority in the GVN's pacification effort,” the report says: “Full participation of all agencies will be maintained until VCI strength is greatly reduced; then it will be feasible to transfer complete responsibility for VCI neutralizations to the Special Police.”
²

Despite the optimism, there were problems. The pending cease-fire, aka the stab in the back, meant that just as the coup de grace was about to be delivered to the VCI, Washington politicians were preparing to grant it legal status, a development which would enable its agents, the directorate warned, “to increase their activity in controlled and contested areas and, with their anonymity, be free to proselytize, terrorize and propagandize in the GVN controlled rural and urban areas.” Citing captured documents that revealed
plans for Communist subversion after the truce, the directorate said, “It is imperative that the Phung Hoang or a similar anti-VCI effort be continued, particularly during an in-place ceasefire.” Moreover, because the politicians were hastening to withdraw American troops, the directorate suggested “[c]areful and studied consideration … to ensure that the Phung Hoang Program is not adversely affected by the premature withdrawal of advisory personnel.”
³

Apart from the cease-fire and the drawdown, what the directorate feared most was the inability of the Vietnamese to manage the attack on the VCI. The pressure began to mount on December 3, 1970, when
The New York Times
quoted Robert Thompson as saying that captured documents indicated that hundreds of South Vietnamese policemen were Vietcong agents, that there were as many as thirty thousand Communist agents in the GVN, and that Phoenix was
not
doing the job and was itself infiltrated by Communists. Thompson's charge was substantiated when, in 1970, a CIA counterintelligence investigation revealed that Da Nang's PIC chief was a Communist double agent who had killed his captured comrades during the Tet offensive in order to maintain his cover.

As a result of these problems, it was suggested that further revisions in the Phoenix program be made. One of the first steps was to hire two private companies—Southeast Asia Computer Associates (managed by CIA officer Jim Smith) and the Computer Science Corporation (under CIA officer Joe Langbien)—to advise the two hundred-odd Vietnamese technicians who were scheduled to take over the MACV and CORDS computers. The Vietnamese were folded into Big Mack, and the Phung Hoang Management Information System (PHMIS) was joined with the National Police Criminal Information System, which tracked the VCI members from their identification through their capture, legal processing, detention, and (when it happened), release.

Personnel changes designed to strengthen National Police Command support of Phoenix began at the top with the promotion of Colonel Hai to brigadier general in September 1970.
*
Five months later twenty-five thousand ARVN officers and enlisted men and ten thousand RD Cadre were transferred to the National Police. Three policemen were sent to each village having at least five hundred residents, and in urban areas two cops were assigned for each thousand people. Field Police platoons were sent to the districts, and twenty-six hundred additional special policemen were hired into the force.
⁴

As a way of addressing what General Clay called “the critical shortage
of qualified Special Police case officers,” the directorate focused greater attention on the case officer training courses and seminars at the regional Phung Hoang schools, emphasizing the use of target folders.

Regarding American personnel, Phoenix inspection teams were given the authority to remove unsatisfactory Vietnamese, and more than two hundred senior enlisted men scheduled to return to the United States as part of the drawdown were transferred instead to Phoenix as deputy DIOCC advisers, mostly in the Delta. Because these men could speak Vietnamese and were counterintelligence experts, Jack called this a windfall. These counterintelligence specialists maintained target folders, reviewed agent reports, PIC reports, and Chieu Hoi debriefings, and liaisoned among PICs, PIOCCs, and Chieu Hoi centers.

September 1970 also marked the creation of the Phoenix Career Program and the Military Assistance Security Advisory (MASA) course at Fort Bragg, climaxing a process begun in 1950, when the U.S. Army had established its Psywar Division at Fort Riley. Requirements for MASA training included an “outstanding” record and Vietnamese-language “ability and aptitude.” Prior service in Vietnam was “desirable,” and military intelligence officers were given top priority. Field-grade officers were promised entry into the Command and General Staff College. Other ranks were promised, among other things, preference of next assignment; civil schooling upon completion of the tour; an invitation to join the Army's Foreign Area Specialist program; and, while in Vietnam, five vacations and a special thirty-day leave, including a round-trip ticket anywhere in the free world.

“The only bad side to that,” said Doug Dillard, “is that it didn't work. When I came from the War College to take over as chief of Military Intelligence Branch, we were getting a lot of complaints from the youngsters saying, ‘You're not living up to your promise. I wanted to go to Fort Bragg and you're sending me to Fort Lewis.' It was part of the turmoil of the drawdown, that all these jobs were not going to exist when these kids started coming out of Vietnam. I immediately did everything I could to change that program and not make any commitment to those youngsters.”
⁵

In July 1970 the Phoenix Coordinators' Orientation Course was renamed the Phung Hoang Advisory School and moved from Seminary Camp to the Driftwood Service Club on the Vung Tau Air Base. Classes began in August and were taught by CIA instructors and a team of intelligence officers assigned to Lieutenant Colonel C. J. Fulford. As the National Police assumed greater responsibility for Phoenix, more Public Safety advisers began to receive Phung Hoang training and were folded into the program as PIC and Phoenix task force advisers.

Another development in 1970 was the proliferation of Phoenix task forces. For example, in September 1970 in Quang Tin Province, a Phoenix
task force composed of 180 field policemen, 60 PRU, and 30 armed propagandists was organized and used as a private army by the Phoenix coordinator in Tam Ky. Called Hiep Dong, the force was broken down into platoons that operated independently and in combined operations with U.S. or ARVN forces. The Quang Tin province chief wrote Hiep Dong's operational orders, which were cosigned by the local U.S. and ARVN commanders. In one Hiep Dong operation, 24 Regional Force companies, 99 Popular Force platoons, and the entire 196th and 5th ARVN regiments were committed. Of the operation's 132 objectives, 116 were VCI targets, 99 of which were neutralized.

In addition, the Territorial Forces and People's Self-Defense Forces provided “intelligence and reconnaissance units” to the force. “In my hamlet,” said a resident of Quang Tin Province quoted in
Hostages of War,
“the Phoenix men come at night and rap on our doors. They are dressed in the black pajamas of the Liberation soldiers and tell people they are with the Liberation army. But they are really the secret police. If the people welcome them with joy, these policemen kill them or take them away as Viet Cong. But if they are VC soldiers and we say anything good about the Saigon government, we are taken off as rice bearers or soldiers for the Front.”
⁶

All in all, 8,191 VCI were killed in 1970—more than any year before or after; 7,745 VCI rallied and 6,405 were jailed, for a total of 22,341 VCI neutralized, all class A and B. Approximately 40 percent of all VCI kills were credited to Territorial Forces. The Field Police were still “underemployed,” according to the 1970 End of Year Report, and “Coordination of the PRU with the DIOCCs was somewhat less than ideal in some areas. The PRU, in some cases justifiably critical of the security in the DIOCCs and PIOCCs, generally did not contribute intelligence regularly to the DIOCC but instead reacted to intelligence they had gathered on their own.” PRU matters, however, were not within the directorate's bailiwick but were “addressed by the advisory elements at the Saigon level.”
⁷

In
A Systems Analysis View of the Vietnam War,
Thomas Thayer reports that the PRU in 1970 were “per man … at least ten times as effective as any other anti-VCI action force.”
⁸
He also writes: “The PRU are being incorporated into the Special Branch” and that “Hopefully [
sic
] they will serve as a nucleus around which an improved police force may be built.”
⁹
However, in March 1972 William Grieves told General Abrams, “To date … not a single application has been received from a member of the PRU for enrollment in the National Police.”
¹⁰

Thayer is far more critical of Phoenix than the revisionist directorate. According to Thayer, “Results through April 1971 indicate that Phoenix is still a fragmented effort, lacking central direction, control and priority. Most neutralizations still involve low level, relatively unimportant workers gained
as a side benefit from military operations…. Only 2% of all VCI neutralized were specifically targeted and killed by Phoenix forces, and there have been very few reports of such assassinations from the field.” He faults the judicial system for being unable to “process the 2500 or so suspected VCI captured each month,” and citing a “constant backlog” of detainees, he observes: “Significant numbers of alleged VCI wait 6 months before going to trial.”
¹¹

Meanwhile, the issues of incentives and internal security were dominating Phoenix planning. Regarding internal security, General Frank Clay, the deputy director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, blamed the CIA for the “critical shortage of qualified Special Police case officers.”
¹²
Colby, meanwhile, in a December 12, 1970, presentation to Defense Secretary Melvin Laird (titled “Internal Security in South Vietnam—Phoenix”), complained about the “continuing predominance of military leadership in the program.” Colby then made twenty-seven recommendations for “improving GVN internal security in general and Phung Hoang in particular.” Chief among his recommendations were that an FBI officer be sent to Saigon and that an incentive program be implemented.

The request for FBI assistance was initially made by General Abrams in the summer of 1970 “for the specific purpose of providing recommendations for the neutralization of important national level members of the [VCI].”
¹³
It fell to Colby to get the ball rolling. He assigned Jack, the assistant for concepts and strategy on the Vietnam Task Force, as action officer on the matter. “People in Washington, D.C., wanted Colby's scalp,” Jack explained. “Things weren't moving, Phoenix being one. What there was was tension between the CIA and the Pentagon. And so the FBI was called in.”

On February 4, 1970, through General Fritz Kramer, Jack met with FBI Internal Security Division chief William C. Sullivan, who told him “that any request for FBI assistance would have to come from the White House as a directive signed by Kissinger.” Sullivan said he would call Kissinger “on a quiet” basis and apprise him of the request. The problem, said Jack, was that “Senior people were very sensitive about the FBI screwing around in the embassy” and that AID Assistant Director Robert Nooter thought that the task being assigned to the FBI was a police function rightly belonging to AID.