Phoenix Program (69 page)

“Thirdly,” O'Shea said, “Millett was an operator, trying to conduct as many missions as possible himself.” Millett's biggest success was “turning” the Montagnard battalion that had led the attack on Hue during Tet of 1968.

Fifty-two years old in 1972, Medal of Honor winner Lew Millett—who in 1961 had helped create the Vietnamese rangers and later did likewise in Laos—was known as a wild man who participated in ambushes and raids against VCI camps with Connie O'Shea and some of the more aggressive Phoenix coordinators.

According to Millett, “Phoenix was coordinated at corps level by the CIA, and I had to back-channel to get around them.”
¹³

According to O'Shea, “The Phoenix program had gotten to the point where the region office was a manager's office. Millett was trying to coordinate provinces and districts, and where we did run operations, it was in a province
where the PIOCC was not doing much. We as senior officers did not theoretically coordinate with the CIA's province officer in charge; that was the job of the major at the PIOCC.”

One such major at a PIOCC in 1972 was Stan Fulcher, the Phoenix coordinator in Binh Dinh Province. “Stan had taken over all the programs,” O'Shea noted. “He was running the whole show. He kept taking on everything, including the PRU, which was true in many cases.”

The son of an Air Force officer, Stan Fulcher was brought up in various military posts around the world, but he brands as “hypocritical” the closed society into which he was born. “The military sees itself as the conqueror of the world”—Fulcher sighed, “but the military is socialism in its purest form. People in the military lead a life of privilege in which the state meets each and every one of their needs.”
¹⁴

Having served in the special security unit at Can Tho Air Base in 1968—where he led a unit of forty riflemen against the VCI—Fulcher fully understood the realities of Vietnam. He told me of the Military Security Service killing a Jesuit priest who advocated land reform, of GVN officials trading with the National Liberation Front while trying to destroy religious sects, and of the tremendous U.S. cartels—RMK-BRJ, Sealand, Holiday Inns, Pan Am, Bechtel, and Vinnell—that prospered from the war.

“The military has the political power and the means of production,” Fulcher explained, “and so it enjoys all the benefits of society … Well, it was the same thing in Vietnam, where the U.S. military and a small number of politicians supported the Vietnamese Catholic establishment against the masses…. Greedy Americans,” Fulcher contended, “were the cause of the war. The supply side economists—these are the emergent groups during Vietnam.”

During a tour in London from 1968 to 1971, in which he saw British businessmen trading with the North Vietnamese, Fulcher learned there are “no permanent allies.” During his tour in Phoenix, he became totally disenchanted. “When I arrived in Saigon,” he recalled, “an Air America plane was waiting and took me to Nha Trang. That night I talked with Millett. The next day I got in a chopper and went to Qui Nhon, the capital city of Binh Dinh Province, where I met the S-two, Gary Hacker, who took me to my quarters in a hotel by the ocean.” Hacker then took Fulcher to meet the province senior adviser, “a young political appointee who lived in a beautiful house on the ocean. When I walked into the room, he was standing there with his arms around two Vietnamese girls. The tops of their ao dais were down, and he was cupping their breasts.”

Next, Fulcher met Larry Jackson, the CIA province officer in Binh Dinh. Jackson had “about twenty contract workers, USIS types who thought they were Special Forces. They all had Vietnamese girl friends and important
dads. They were all somewhat deranged and did nothing but play volleyball all day.” Fulcher described the CORDS advisory team as “a sieve.”

As the Binh Dinh Province Phoenix coordinator, Stan Fulcher supervised nearly a thousand U.S. technicians and Vietnamese nationals, including a Special Forces sergeant who ran Binh Dinh's PRU. The PRU adviser reported both to the CIA and to Fulcher. “His Vietnamese wife had been cut open,” Fulcher said. “He was a dangerous man who went out by himself and killed VC left and right.” Fulcher mistrusted the PRU because they did not take orders and because they played him against the CIA.

Fulcher's Vietnamese counterpart was MSS Major Nguyen Van Vinh. “The Vietnamese with the MSS,” Fulcher contended, “were the worst. They kept track of what the Americans were doing, they had friends in the VCI, and they would deal with Phoenix before the police.” The National Police had its own adviser, “a former cop from Virginia who ran the Field Police.” The PIC “was terribly disgusting,” and there was an interrogation center behind the Province Operations Center, Fulcher said, “right behind the province senior adviser's house. Our barracks were next door.”

Mr. Vinh was paid by Fulcher, who also had an interpreter and seven other Vietnamese on his Phoenix staff. “I could influence each one,” he stated, noting that with no replacements coming in, the advisory vacuum was easily filled by an aggressive person such as he. “As more and more Americans left,” Fulcher explained, “more Vietnamese came under my control. They needed consolidation. The structure was so corrupt, with everyone power grabbing, that independent units couldn't do a job. And that meant added jobs for me.”

For example, Fulcher inherited Binh Dinh's Civic Action program—including the fifty-nine-man RD teams—which had been getting one million dollars annually in U.S. aid. “Then the well dried up, and funds were cut off,” Fulcher explained, “which caused much bitterness. Like the contras or, before them, the Cubans. Everyone was turning against the government.” As the province psywar officer, Fulcher also controlled the Qui Nhon TV station, where he spent one day a week working with the actors and staff, organizing parades, producing broadcasts and puppet shows, printing leaflets, and distributing radios tuned in to the GVN station. According to Fulcher, the embittered Vietnamese psywar officer absconded with the TV money and sold the radios on the black market.

Fulcher also managed the Chieu Hoi program. During the spring offensive, he recalled, “We gave them rifles and sent them up to the front lines…. I sat on top of a knoll and watched while they threw down their guns and ran away.”

Territorial security was a job that involved “checking villages every two weeks for a day or so. The Territorial Forces,” he pointed out, “were a
motley crew, mostly old men and women and little kids.” Fulcher also liaisoned with the Korean White Horse Division, “which would steal anything it could get its hands on.” According to Fulcher Americans were involved with the Koreans in drug dealing, and he said that the Koreans were “sadistic and corrupt.”

In explaining the meaning of Phoenix, Stan Fulcher said, “You can't understand it by creating a web. There were several lines of communication, which skipped echelons, and I could go to whatever side—military or Phoenix—that I wanted to…. Phoenix was more of a political program, like what the Germans had on the eastern front—Gestapo/SS, but half assed.” For that reason, Fulcher explained, “The regular military didn't like Phoenix, and the province senior advisers [PSAs] hated it, too.

“Twice a week I'd brief the PSA at the TOC [tactical operations center]. Each member of the province team would brief through his deputy. The operations officer was the main guy, then the G-two, then Phoenix, PRU and the CIA rep. The Province Phung Hoang Committee met twice a month, at which point the MSS would exercise whatever influence it had with the province chief, who'd say, ‘We need fifty VCI this week.' Then the Special Branch would go out and get old ladies and little kids and take them to the PIC. They'd send us on special operations missions into the hamlets, and the village chiefs would take the old and maimed and give them to us as VCI. ‘If you don't give me rice, you're VCI.' It was perverted.

“The ARVN supplied us with cards on everyone they didn't like,” Fulcher went on, “but we could never find them. On night operations during curfew hours, we'd seal off the exits and go after a specific guy. We'd be running through houses, one guy lifting up a lamp, another guy holding pictures of the suspect and taking fingerprints. But everyone had the same name, so we'd search for weapons, maps, documents. It was just impossible”—Fulcher sighed—”so after two months I started to find ways to let people go—to get their names off the list. You see, Binh Dinh had something like thirty-seven political parties, and
no one
could say who was VC. By 1972 most district chiefs were NLF, and even though they were appointed by Saigon, most were from the North and were kept off hit lists due to friendships.”

What finally convinced Fulcher to work against Phoenix was the “disappearing” of thirty thousand civilians in the aftermath of the spring offensive. Rocking back and forth in his chair, his head buried in his hands, sobbing, Fulcher described what happened: “Two NVA regiments hit Binh Dinh in the north, mainly at Hoi An. We went through a pass in the valley to meet them, but a whole ARVN regiment was destroyed. Four hundred were killed and sixteen hundred escaped down Highway Thirty-one. I could see the ARVN soldiers running away and the NVA soldiers running after
them, shooting them in the back of their heads with pistols so as not to waste ammunition…. I could see our helicopters being shot down…. We called in close air support and long-range artillery and stopped them at Phu Mi. There were pitched battles. The NVA attacked on two ridges. Then [II Corps Commander John] Vann was killed up in Kontum, and [Special Forces Colonel Michael] Healy took over. Healy came in with his Shermanesque tactics in August.”

The disappearance of the thirty thousand occurred over a two-month period beginning in June, Fulcher said, “mainly through roundups like in the Ukraine. The MSS was putting people in camps around Lane Field outside Qui Nhon, or in the PIC. Everyone was turning against the GVN, and anyone born in Binh Dinh was considered VC. There were My Lais by the score—from aerial bombardments and artillery…. Phoenix coordinated it. Me and Jackson and four or five of his contractors. The National Police had lists of people. Out of the thirty thousand, the Special Branch was interested in particular in about a hundred. The MSS put everyone else in camps, and the Vietnamese Air Force loaded them up, flew away, and came back empty. They dumped whole families into the Gulf of Tonkin. This was not happening elsewhere.”

How could this happen? “You're a shadow,” Fulcher explained, his face contorted with anguish. “You're a bureaucrat. You only
think
things, so you don't investigate.”

After the disappearances, Fulcher complained to a State Department officer. As a result, two things happened. First, in addition to his job as province Phoenix coordinator, Fulcher was made senior adviser in the three districts—Hoi An, Hoi Nan, and Binh Khe—that the NVA had seized. Next, an attempt was made on his life.

“Jackson was unhappy with the PRU,” Fulcher explained. “He couldn't pay them anymore, so they moved in with Binh Khe district team. I was scheduled to go up there to pay them [from the Intelligence Contingency Fund], but a West Pointer, Major Pelton, the Phoenix guy from Phu Cat, went instead. And the PRU shot him in the helicopter right after it landed. Pelton was killed, and the Phu Cat district senior adviser, Colonel Rose, was wounded. The incident was blamed on the VC, but Mr. Vinh and I went to the landing zone and found Swedish K rounds (which only the PRU used) in the chopper. First I went to [the PSA], then Millett at Nha Trang, then Healy in Pleiku. But nothing ever happened.”

In explaining how such tensions might occur, Connie O'Shea (who replaced Lew Millett as II Corps Phoenix coordinator in August 1972) points to the inclusion of key military leaders as well as civilians in the definition of VCI. “Vann put pressure on to get these guys,” O'Shea explained, “but Special Branch would not give their names for security reasons…. And as
a result … military advisers started going after the commo-liaison links—those VCI that were more military than political. And when you got very strong personalities like Stan Fulcher in there, that situation became explosive. Stan wanted access, and his solution,” O'Shea said, “was to force it back up to Vann or Healy, who would say, ‘I can't force them to open up files.' So it was kept at the local level, where it went back and forth between Stan and Jackson. And I had to go down there and try to mediate between them. But we just had to accept that this was not the period of time to be arguing with the CIA that to run an effective PIOCC, we had to have their dossiers. The time to do that was four years prior. But Stan was insisting … that he was going to get at them. Well, the CIA would give other stuff—Revolutionary Development or Census Grievance—but not Special Branch.”

When asked why he and Millett could not exert influence, O'Shea replied, “This is why Phoenix was not as effective as it should have been.”

In March 1972 Ambassador Bunker sent a telegram (040611Z) to the State Department saying, “We question whether the USG should concede failure of an An Tri system to meet test of Article 3.” Because he thought that An Tri probably did violate the Geneva Conventions, Bunker asked that a decision be put off until completion of a study written by CORDS legal adviser Ray Meyers. In the study, entitled “An Tri Observations and Recommendations,” Meyers suggested, among other things, opening An Tri hearings to the public. On April 11, John Tilton advised against doing that, saying it would “result in the compromise of sources…. Under Executive Order 10460,” Tilton wrote, “the American public is not allowed to attend U.S. administrative security proceedings nor are transcripts of the proceedings releasable to the public. It is difficult to justify why a nation which is seriously threatened by internal subversion should institute a procedure that is not even allowed in a nation which has no such threat.”
¹⁵