Phoenix Program

by Douglas Valentine

  Bumgartner introduced Scotton to John Paul Vann, the senior adviser to the ARVN Seventh Division and a friend of Colonel Tran Ngoc Chau’s, the controversial Kien Hoa Province chief. A graduate of Fort Bragg, where he roomed with Nguyen Van Thieu, Chau was a CIA asset who in 1962 had just finished a six-year tour as chief of the GVN’s Psychological Warfare Service. Over the next ten years Chau’s relationship with Scotton, Bumgartner and Vann came to symbolize Phoenix and the duplicitous nature of U.S.-Vietnamese relations.

  Scotton, Bumgartner, and Vann are described by Ngo Vinh Long in The CIA and the Vietnam Debacle:

  Frank Scotton was the originator of the Provincial Reconnaissance Units program, the predecessor of the Phoenix program. For years he worked closely with John Paul Vann, the famous CIA operative who specialized, among other things, in black propaganda, which involved him in murder, forgery and the outright deception of the American press in order to discredit the NLF in particular and the opposition to American intervention in general. Everett Bumgartner was Colby’s deputy and used to oversee pacification efforts in the central provinces of Vietnam. Any person who has the faintest knowledge of the pacification program would know what disasters have visited the Vietnamese people as a result of such programs. Bumgartner was also in charge of the Phoenix program in that area.13

  When Scotton arrived in Vietnam, Bumgartner assigned him to the Central Highlands, the expansive area between Saigon and Qui Nhon City, the capital of Binh Dinh Province. Bumgartner thought there was “a vacuum of knowledge” in the highlands and directed Scotton “to energize the Vietnamese” in what Scotton calls “prerevolutionary development.” As Scotton likes to say, “pacification wasn’t even a term then.”14

  The emphasis at the time was on the strategic hamlet program—separating the guerrilla fish from the sea of people through forced relocations. Begun in March 1962 with Operations Sea Swallow in Ca Mau Province and Royal Phoenix in Binh Dinh Province, more than four million Vietnamese had been relocated into strategic hamlets in most of South Vietnam’s forty-four provinces by the time Scotton arrived in-country. The program was administered by CIA-advised province security officers reporting to Ngo Dinh Nhu’s confidential agent in Saigon, the notorious double agent Pham Ngoc Thao. However, because VC guerrillas had at least the tacit support of the rural population, police and security officials had difficulty conducting law enforcement and intelligence operations outside strategic hamlets or other secure, generally urban areas. In following Bumgartner’s orders to fill the vacuum of knowledge in Central Vietnam, Scotton told me, “We would take a Vietnamese employee of the Vietnam Information Service (VIS) and put him in the provincial information system and have him provide resources—leaflets, school kits, films—that sort of thing. In return we expected reporting.”

  Having placed his agent net, Scotton turned his attention to the job of “energizing” the Vietnamese. However, as a result of CIA machinations against his regime, Diem had instructed his provincial appointees to resist American influence and to blunt U.S. efforts to escalate the war against the Communists. Indeed, Diem’s brother Nhu was secretly negotiating with the North Vietnamese in hopes of reaching a settlement before the United States found a pretext to call in the Marines, as the Pentagon seemed intent on doing.

  In looking for motivated individuals to mold into political cadres, Scotton turned to the CIA’s defector program, which in April 1963 was placed under cover of the Agency for International Development and named the Chieu Hoi (Open Arms) amnesty program. There Scotton found the raw material he needed to prove the viability of political action programs. Together with Vietnamese Special Forces Captain Nguyen Tuy (a graduate of Fort Bragg’s Special Warfare Center who commanded the Fourth Special Operations Detachment) and Tuy’s case officer, U.S. Special Forces Captain Howard Walters (a Korean War veteran and psywar expert), Scotton worked through an extension of the Mountain Scout program Ralph Johnson had established in Pleiku Province.

  As part of a pilot program designed to induce defectors, Scotton, Walters, and Tuy crossed the An Lao Valley, set up an ambush deep in Vietcong territory, and waited till dark. When they spotted a VC unit, Scotton yelled through a bullhorn, “You are being misled! You are being lied to! We promise you an education!” Then, full of purpose and allegory, he shot a flare into the night sky and hollered, “Walk toward the light!” To his surprise, two defectors did walk in, convincing him and his CIA sponsors that “a determined GVN unit could contest the VC in terms of combat and propaganda.”

  Back in camp, according to Scotton, “We told the VC defectors that they had to divest themselves of untruths. We said that certainly the U.S. perpetrated war crimes, but so did the VC. We acknowledged that theirs was the stronger force, but that didn’t mean that everything they did was honorable and good and just.” In this manner, Scotton indoctrinated cadres for his political action teams.15

  But these were tumultuous times in South Vietnam, as wild as the 1955 battle for Saigon. In early 1963, two hundred lightly armed VC guerrillas routed an ARVN force of twenty-five hundred, advised by John Vann and supported by U.S. bombers and helicopters at Ap Bac, a mere forty miles from Saigon. The incident reaffirmed what everyone already suspected: that the top-heavy, bloated, corrupt ARVN was no match for the underequipped, starving, but determined Vietcong.

  Next, Diem’s brother Thuc, the archbishop of Hue, forbade the display of Buddhist flags at a ceremony in Hue commemorating the 2587th birthday of Buddha. A demonstration led by Buddhist priest Thich Tri Quang erupted on May 8, and Nhu sent the LLDB in to put it down. In doing so, they killed nine people, mostly women and children. Official communiques blamed VC “terrorists,” but the Buddhists knew better; they strengthened their alliance with the NLF and began organizing massive demonstrations. On June 11, 1963, a Buddhist monk doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire in Saigon. Soon others were doing likewise across Vietnam. “Let them burn,” Madame Nhu, the Dragon Lady, cooed, “and we shall clap our hands.”16

  Two months later, while Nhu negotiated with the North Vietnamese and the Joint-General Staff pressured Diem to declare martial law, a South Vietnamese Special Forces unit disguised as ARVN troops attacked Saigon’s Xa Loi Temple, the city’s most sacred Buddhist shrine. Buddhists immediately took up arms and began fighting the LLDB in Hue. The spectacle was repeated across Vietnam, as thousands of Buddhists were arrested, jailed, and summarily executed. In response, on August 21, 1963, the Special Group in Washington ordered the CIA to pull the financial plug on the Vietnamese Special Forces. The search for a more dependable, unilaterally controlled army began, and the nascent counterterror teams emerged as the most promising candidates.

  Meanwhile, in Saigon Diem’s downfall was originating within his own palace guard. CIA asset Tran Van Don conspired with secret police chief Dr. Tran Kim Tuyen, NVA double agent Pham Ngoc Thao, and, among others, General Duong Van Minh (known as Big Minh), who had the backing of the Dai Viets in the ARVN. Colonel Nguyen Van Thieu and Tran Thien Khiem joined the plot. In October President Kennedy suspended economic aid, and the pope ordered Thuc to leave his post in Hue, a decision “that eased the conscience of the Catholic plotters.”17

  As plotters swirled around them, Nhu and Diem instructed the Vietnamese Special Forces chief Colonel Le Quang Tung to prepare a counter-coup. But Tung was summoned to the senior officers’ club at Joint General Staff headquarters and shot dead by Big Minh’s personal bodyguard. That prompted III Corps Commander General Ton That Dinh to withdraw the Special Forces under his command from Saigon. The CIA-controlled palace guard vacated the premises, and the military began arresting Diem loyalists. Knowing the end was near, Nhu and Diem fled to a friend’s house in Cholon, then sought sanctuary in a nearby church. Soon a military convoy arrived, arrested them, and took them for a ride. When the convoy reached Hong Thap Tu Alley, between Cao Thang and Le Van Duyet streets, the brothers were shot dead. “The military men in the vehicle, who hated Nhu, stabbed his corpse many t
imes.”18

  America endured a similar bloodletting three weeks later, when President John Kennedy was caught in a crossfire of gunfire in Dallas, Texas. The assassination, curiously, came shortly after Kennedy had proposed withdrawing U.S. advisers from Vietnam. Three days after JFK’s death, President Lyndon Johnson signed National Security Action Memorandum 273, authorizing planning for covert military operations against North Vietnam. Conceived in secrecy, the ensuing policy of “provoked response” paved the way for full-scale U.S. military intervention for which the CIA was laying the groundwork through its three-part covert action program in South Vietnam’s provinces.

  On December 19, 1963, the Pentagon’s planning branch in the Pacific, CINCPAC (Commander in Chief, Pacific), presented its plans to the Special Group. Two weeks later LBJ approved OPLAN 34A, and Marine General Victor Krulak, SACSA, handed operational control to MACV. The Special Operations Group (SOG) was formed in Saigon to implement OPLAN 34A, and attacks against North Vietnam began in February from Phoenix Island off the coast of Da Nang.

  On July 31, 1964, SOG achieved its goal of creating a provoked response. That night SEALs Elton Manzione and Kenny Van Lesser led twenty South Vietnamese marines in a raid against Hon Me Island. Dropped at the wrong end of the island, Manzione and Van Lesser failed to knock out their target—an NVA radar installation—but the raid did push the North Vietnamese into attacking the USS Maddox, which was monitoring NVA electronic defenses activated by the attack. The incident was sold to the American public as a North Vietnamese “first strike” and resulted in Congress’s passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The resulting air strikes against North Vietnam are cited by many historians as the start of the Vietnam War. Tonkin Gulf also allowed LBJ to sell himself as tougher than Republican candidate Barry Goldwater and to win the 1964 presidential election.

  In Saigon, South Vietnamese armed forces Commander Duong Van Minh, who was supported by the important generals, the Dai Viets, and the CIA, surfaced as the new chief of state. Big Minh appointed General Khiem III Corps commander, and, in league with Nguyen Van Thieu, had General Ton That Dinh, the Vietnamese Military Security Service chief Mai Huu Xuan, CIO chief Nguyen Van Y, and Tran Van Don arrested. Generals Thieu and Khiem then used the unpopular arrests to undercut Big Minh, their main adversary, whom they replaced with General Duong Van Khanh. General Khanh, in the spirit of the times, called for an invasion of North Vietnam. But the plan was subverted three days later, when Air Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky—fired from Operation Haylift for smuggling opium on his “black” flights—revealed that the CIA had been sending teams into North Vietnam since July 1963. Diem’s spy chief, Dr. Tuyen, was sent into honorable exile as ambassador to Egypt. NVA double agent Pham Ngoc Thao temporarily escaped detection and was appointed Ben Tre province chief; he served until 1965, when he was killed by Thieu, who suspected Thao of working against him on behalf of Ky. Thieu, Khiem, and Ky emerged as the big three power brokers and invited Dai Viet leaders Nguyen Ton Hoan and Professor Huy to return from ten years’ exile in France to join a new but very loose coalition government.19

  In the wake of the coup, according to Frank Scotton, “administrative paralysis set in. The VC exploited that and physically dismantled the strategic hamlets as despised symbols of the GVN.” And as the grateful inmates returned to their villages, the country erupted in open revolt. Even the road leading from Saigon to John Vann’s headquarters in My Tho was unsafe, so in December 1963 Ev Bumgartner sent Scotton to Long An Province, a few miles south of Saigon. Scotton brought along his political cadre from Quang Ngai Province, Civic Action recruits were provided by the Long An province chief, and Scotton set about “seeing what was wrong and getting a fix on the hamlets.” He did this by using “small armed teams seeking information.”20

  Working with the American province adviser, Scotton organized three survey teams, which operated in three neighboring hamlets simultaneously. Each six-member team was equipped with black pajamas, pistols, a radio, and a submachine gun. Standard procedure was to regroup at the last moment before daybreak, then shift at dawn to a fourth hamlet, where the team would sleep during the day. At night they sat beside trails used by the VC cadres they had identified during visits to the hamlets. When Vietcong armed propaganda teams under their surveillance departed from a hamlet, Scotton’s cadre would move in and speak to one person from each household, so the VC “would have to punish everyone after we left. But that never happened. A woman VC leader would bring in a unit after us,” Scotton added, “but there were never any recriminations.

  “The mission of these survey teams,” according to Scotton, “was intelligence, not an attack on the VCI. But Long An proved the viability of small units. I felt confident that motivated small units could go in and displace the VC simply by their presence. Will and intent had to be primary, though; if they were, then the method generated useful reports.”

  With Diem dead, three quarters of South Vietnam’s province chiefs fired from their jobs, and no more prohibitions on taking CIA money, the time was ripe for “local initiatives.” Local officials, along with legions of Diem loyalists purged from government after the coup, were hired by the CIA and put in management positions in its covert action programs in the provinces and districts. But it was an American war now, with GVN stature at an all-time low, making it harder than ever to wage political war. And of course the situation was exploited by the North Vietnamese, who started infiltrating regular NVA troops, not just regroupees, into South Vietnam.

  Other changes were also forthcoming as a result of the coup. With Operation Switchback and the transfer of the CIDG program to MACV, Ralph Johnson launched a new covert action program in Dam Pao outside Pleiku. Called Truong Son, it organized Montagnards into small units having civic action, counterterror, and intelligence functions. Meanwhile, Stu Methven was assigned to the Delta to stimulate “local initiatives” among the new generation of province chiefs.

  Methven’s plan was to create a three-part program with separate teams for civic action, counterterror, and intelligence. However, because the fighting was less intense in the Delta than in central Vietnam, Methven advocated easily monitored teams no larger than six men each—the type Scotton was toying with in Long An. Methven also incorporated ideas developed in Kien Hoa Province by Tran Ngoc Chau, whose innovative census grievance teams were proving quite successful. Using Chau’s and Scotton’s programs as his models, Methven sold “local initiatives” to province chiefs across South Vietnam.

  Behind every province chief, of course, was a CIA paramilitary officer promoting and organizing the CIA’s three-part covert action program. Walter Mackem, who arrived in Vietnam in early 1964, was one of the first. After spending two months observing the CIDG program in Ban Me Thuot, Mackem was transferred to the Delta to institute similar programs in An Giang, Chau Doc, Sa Dec, and Vinh Long provinces. Mackem also reported directly to Washington on the political activities of the various sects and favorable ethnic minorities in his area of operations, the most important of which were the Hoa Hao (Theraveda Buddhists) and the closely related ethnic Cambodians, the Khmer.

  According to Mackem, there were no counterterror teams prior to his arrival on the scene. What did exist were private armies like the Sea Swallows, and those belonging to the sects. It was from these groups, as well as from province jails and defector programs, that Mackem got recruits for his CT teams. The composition of the teams differed from province to province depending “on what form opposition to the GVN took, and on the motives of the province chief”—as Mackem puts it, “if he wanted the CT program tidy or not.” The biggest contributors to Mackem’s CT teams were the Khmer, who “didn’t get along with the Vietnamese,” while the armed propaganda team served as “a Hoa Hao job corps.”21

  Mackem personally selected and trained his CT and political action cadres. He dressed in black pajamas and accompanied them on missions deep into enemy territory to snatch and snuff VCI cadres. “I wandered around the jungle with them,�
� Mackem admitted. “I did it myself. We were freewheeling back then. It was a combination of The Man Who Would Be King and Apocalypse Now!”

  To obtain information on individual VCI in GVN villages, according to Mackem, the CTs relied on advisers to the VBI, “the liaison types who set up an Embassy House.” Information on VCI members in their own villages, or those in dispute, was provided by undercover agents in the villages, who, because of their vulnerability, “had a more benevolent approach [toward the VCI] than the police.”

  Such was the situation following the coup. The Vietcong controlled most of the countryside, and the Vietnamese Bureau of Investigations had little role to play outside Saigon and the major cities. In the countryside counterterror and armed propaganda teams, aided by secret agents in the villages, gathered intelligence on and attacked the Vietcong infrastructure. Meanwhile, U.S. airplanes, artillery, and combat units arrived and began driving the rural population into refugee camps or underground. However, the division of labor within the CIA station, which pitted police advisers against paramilitary advisers, had to be resolved before an effective attack on the VCI could be mounted, and first, the CIA would have to incorporate its covert action programs within a cohesive strategy for political warfare. Such is the subject of the next chapter.

  CHAPTER 4

  Revolutionary Development

  In February 1964 Frank Scotton returned to Qui Nhon to work on what Ogden Williams, the senior American adviser in neighboring Quang Ngai Province, called “a Phoenix-type thing.” In developing this Phoenix-type program, Scotton teamed up with Ian Tiege, an Australian paramilitary adviser on contract to the CIA, and Major Robert Kelly, the MACV district adviser. “Kelly was the American on the spot,” Scotton recalled. “I advised on training and deployment.”1 Tiege was the professional soldier, deciding how to fight the enemy.