Phoenix Program (65 page)

In the 7th Precinct the situation is so unsatisfactory that it is sickening. There a lazy young punk is absolutely without any influence and, unless there is a dramatic improvment in his efforts, there is little hope there ever will be. This member of the “Pepsi Generation” knows almost nothing of the area for which he is supposedly accountable. In response to questions relating to the enemy … he had no answers. He complained that the Chief of the Special Police would spend no time with him, and that he, our lieutenant, was never approached for advice. Small wonder.

What are our advisory personnel like? Well, they range from being as useless as the clod in the 7th Precinct to some who have spent years in the Counter-intelligence Corps. Most of these are majors or chief warrant officers; they know their trade and they manage to establish effective relationships with the National Police and Province S2s early on. Our best people aren't in Saigon because the need is greater out in the remote border areas where the Vietnamese dump their duds. They naturally concentrate their most competent searchers for the VCI here in the nation's capital; after all, they don't want to have the Prime Minister or the President unhappy with the program.

In an April 2 letter, McCoid discusses the Thu Duc training center, where two thousand ARVN officers were to be sent for Phoenix training in preparation for assignment as village police chiefs:

The frustrations of working with some of these little bastards are formidable. They absolutely cannot do anything requiring any in
itiative—or perhaps the term should be “will not.” The school is for their case officers, yet they rely almost exclusively on the efforts of one of our personnel to draw up the program of instruction, the lesson plans, and the schedules. The course is to commence on the 19th and they've invited the Prime Minister to attend the opening ceremony; yet the building needs repairs and there is little or nothing available in the way of furnishings. There are only four of the required 10 instructors and few of the other personnel on hand—and no steps are being taken to correct the situation. By this time, if they were Westerners, they would be in a state of emotional collapse; but the Vietnamese face the situation with perfect equanimity—in fact, Monday the 5th is a holiday and they all are taking the day off. What are they waiting for? Well, American funding for one thing. They know that we will eventually come through with about seven million piasters ($25,000) and they see no reason to get excited until our money starts to flow.

In an April 14 letter McCoid announces the transfer of power on April 25 from John Mason to the third and final Phoenix director, John Tilton.
*
A graduate of George Washington University, Tilton had served most of his career in Central and South America, where he served as operations officer in two countries. He also served as chief of station in two other Latin American countries, including Bolivia, where he mounted the successful manhunt and capture of Che Guevara. Colonel Paul Coughlin, chief of operations at the Phoenix Directorate throughout 1971, claimed that a photo taken of Che's spread-eagled corpse—which was leaked to the press and depicted the revolutionary as a crucified Christ figure—was the reason why Tilton was exiled from his area of expertise to Southeast Asia.
²⁵
Tall and thin, gaunt and gangly, Tilton, according to McCoid, was like Mason insofar as they both held Ted Shackley “in awe.”
†

Tilton served as Phoenix director from May 1971 till August 1973. From August 1972 till August 1973, he also served as deputy chief of station and senior adviser to the Special Branch in Vietnam. Under Tilton, Phoenix was reunited with its foster parent, the Special Branch.

Tilton considered himself a hands-on manager who worked closely with his region and province officers on operational matters. He inspected DIOCCs, evaluated the military officers posted to the directorate, attended Central Phung Hoang Committee meetings, and occasionally visited the Phung Hoang Office. In return, the Phung Hoang chief, Colonel Ly Trong Song, was frequently in Tilton's office and house. Song, Tilton noted, was replaced by Colonel Nguyen Van Giau.

Tilton defined Phoenix as basically committees and cited this as one of the program's faults—because committees are okay in setting broad policy, but a single agency in charge of the program would have been more effective. His other gripes were that Americans were trying to organize a country that wasn't a country, that Phoenix advisers were too dependent on their interpreters, and that most informants were working for both sides. Tilton described Phoenix as a Special Forces program run out of Fort Bragg, and he tried hard to conceal the role of his parent agency. Prior to an interview with reporter Michael Parks, Tilton told McCoid not to reveal that Tilton was with the CIA. “He was very cherry about that,” McCoid noted.

On May 30, 1971, on orders from President Thieu, Colonel Ly Trong Song assumed command of the Phung Hoang bloc, and the program began going downhill. Always late, often not appearing at work at all, Song busied himself picking up order blanks for Sears or Montgomery Ward, snatching pens and pencils from people's desks, and asking Colonel McCoid to buy him booze at the PX. A political appointee, Song had the job of preventing Phung Hoang personnel from disrupting Thieu's influence in the provinces.

Morale problems began to affect the directorate. In a June 2 letter McCoid writes that more and more Phoenix advisers were requesting early releases, which were being granted as a means of scaling down U.S. involvement. Otherwise, CORDS was not filling vacancies. McCoid mentions how one captain assigned to the directorate asked for release after five weeks and how most of the others were badly disaffected. McCoid notes that more and more enlisted men were turning to drugs and that more and more NCOs were finding solace in the bottle. “Our strength here in the Directorate is scheduled to fall steadily while our work load sky-rockets,” he says, adding that he spent one third of his time responding to flag notes from William Colby, whom he called “a monumental figure.”

In a July 3 letter, McCoid notes that Colby had gone home to testify once again before Congress about Phoenix. Colby was to remain in Washington as executive director-comptroller of the CIA until his appointment as director in August 1973. Colby's job at CORDS was taken over by George Jacobson, and CORDS, too, began its descent into oblivion. “Our supply
and funding officer,” McCoid once wrote, “theorizes that only the Americans feel strongly about the necessity of rounding up the political cadre of the VC.” Indeed, with the ineluctable withdrawal of American “advisers,” Vietnamese determination steadily deteriorated, and the war effort staggered to its dishonorable conclusion.

*
In December 1970 Hai was reassigned as commander of the XXXXIV Corps Tactical Zone, and as Komer suggested, Major General Tran Thanh Phong became National Police chief.

*
Few members of the directorate held Mason in high esteem. Walter Kolon described him as “duplistic in all of his dealings. He would be honey smooth to a man's face, then vitriolic as soon as he left the room.”
¹⁶
James Hunt said, “I was never quite sure if he was being clever or straightforward.”
¹⁷
Everyone agrees that his loyalty was to Ted Shackley and the CIA station.

*
When I interviewed Tilton in 1986, he was forthcoming and helpful. After I presented him with a magazine article that was critical of Phoenix (and which had been mailed to me by Nelson Brickham), Tilton asked not to be quoted.

†
In 1971 George French replaced Bob Dunwoodie as CIA liaison to SOG, Bob Wall was back as senior adviser to the Special Branch, and Tully Acampora had returned as adviser to Tran Si Tan, chief of the metropolitan police and, according to Acampora, “to Thieu what Loan had been to Ky.”
²⁶

CHAPTER 27

Legalities

In his aptly titled master's thesis for American University, Ralph Johnson poses the question: “The Phoenix Program: Planned Assassination or Legitimate Conflict Management?”
¹

The answer is that Phoenix was both. Insofar as the rifle shot concept was the essence of the attack against the VCI, Phoenix was “planned assassination.” At the same time, in the sense that the key to the Vietnam War was the political control of people, Phoenix was also conflict management. The question is if, under the aegis of conflict management, everything from ambush and assassination to extortion, massacre, tiger cages, terror, and torture was legitimate and justifiable? Indeed, by 1971 the legality of Phoenix was being questioned not just by antiwar activists but by the House Subcommittee on Foreign Operations and Government Information, cochaired by William Moorehead and Ogden Reid.

As usual, it was a whistle-blower who provided Congress with its ammunition. In late 1970 Bart Osborn approached an aide on Congressman Moorehead's staff with a copy of the training manual he had been issued at Fort Holabird. Said the aide, William Phillips: “It showed that Phoenix policy was not something manufactured out in field but was sanctioned by the U.S. government. This was the issue: that it is policy. So we requested, through the Army's congressional liaison officer, a copy of the Holabird
training manual, and they sent us a sanitized copy. They had renumbered the pages.”
²

This stab at disguising policy prompted Congressman Pete McCloskey to visit the Phoenix Directorate in April 1971, in preparation for hearings on Phoenix to be held that summer. His visit was recalled by Phoenix training chief James Hunt: “Colby was out of town, Jake [George Jacobson] was in charge, and Mason was there. And just as I was getting up to go to the platform to give my briefing, Mason whispered into my ear, ‘We gotta talk to them, but the less we say, the better.' Well, the first question McCloskey asked was if anyone in the program worked for the CIA. And Mason denied it. He denied any CIA involvement. Jake, too.”

Hunt recalled that McCloskey, Mason, and Jacobson immediately went into executive session. He did not know what happened there. But it bothered him that Mason “blatantly lied.” Hunt added parenthetically, “Phoenix had been under the CIA; then MACV supposedly took it over. But we didn't really understand it, and that bothered us. There was always a suspicion. My impression was that John Mason worked for Colby through Jake, but he also had a close relationship with the chief of station—a professional relationship, back-channeling messages.”

Also bothered by the lies, McCloskey returned to Washington and charged that planned assassinations under Phoenix denied due process and that Phoenix “violated several treaties and laws.”
³
The legal basis for McCloskey's charge was Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits “the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.” It also prohibits mutilation, cruel treatment, and torture.

Having agreed to the conventions, the United States government was well aware of the substance of Article 3. The problem was a letter written on December 7, 1970, by Imer Rimestead, the American ambassador to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). In his letter Rimestead says, “With respect to South Vietnamese civilians captured by U.S. forces and transferred by them to the authorities of the RVN, the U.S. Government recognizes that it has a
residual responsibility
to work with the GVN to see that all such civilians are treated in accordance with the requirements of Article 3 of the Conventions.”

To the consternation of the war managers, Rimestead's letter meant that the U.S. government could no longer dismiss the problem of civilian detainees—corralled in droves by the Phoenix dragnet—as an internal matter of the GVN. Rimestead reasoned that the U.S. government, by funding Phoenix and the GVN Directorate of Corrections, automatically assumed
“residual responsibility.” And the truth of the matter was, without U.S. aid there never would have been a Phung Hoang bloc or Directorate of Corrections.

In response to Rimestead's letter, which implied that U.S. war managers were war criminals, the Vietnam Task Force began coordinating with State Department and Pentagon lawyers in an attempt to prove that Phoenix did not violate Article 3. At the same time, the CORDS Research and Analysis staff and the U.S. Embassy in Saigon began a review of Phoenix procedures, and William Colby marched off to face his critics in Washington. However, as was so often the case, when Colby and the Phoenix controversy landed in America, a larger event grabbed the headlines. On June 13, 1971,
The New York Times
began printing lengthy excerpts from the
Pentagon Papers
—a painstakingly edited stack of documents that, even by name, deflected attention away from the CIA and Phoenix. Consequently, little public attention was paid when the
Times,
on July 15, 1971, reported: “Previously classified information read into the record of a House Government Operations subcommittee today disclosed that 26,843 non-military Vietcong insurgents and sympathizers were neutralized in 14 months through Operation Phoenix.”

So it was again, four days later, when, in regard to those 26,843 non-military insurgents, Congressman Reid asked William Colby, “Are you certain that we know a member of the VCI from a loyal member of the South Vietnamese citizenry?”
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Colby replied no but assured Congress and the American public that Phoenix did abide by the Geneva Conventions.

Read into the hearing transcript on July 19 was a memo titled “The Geneva Convention and the Phoenix Program.” Prepared by the Vietnam Task Force, it argued that the Geneva Conventions afforded no protection to civilian detainees because “nationals of a co-belligerent state are not protected persons while the state of which they are nationals has diplomatic representation in the state in whose hands they are.” It asserted that Article 3 “applies only to sentencing for crimes and does not prohibit a state from interning civilians or subjecting them to emergency detention when such measures are necessary for the security or safety of the state.” Skirting the issue of executions carried out “without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court,” it asserted that because An Tri [administrative detention] procedures involved “no criminal sentence,” they were “not violative of Article 3.”