Phoenix Program

by Douglas Valentine

  “We get to the point,” according to Donohue, “where the CIA was running a political program in a sovereign country where they didn’t know what the hell we were teaching. So I had Thieu and Ky down to Vung Tau, and I did all the right things. But what kind of program could it be that had only one sponsor, the CIA, that says it was doing good? It had to be sinister. Any red-blooded American could understand that. What the hell is the CIA doing running a program on political action?

  “So I went out to try to get some cosponsors for the record. They weren’t easy to come by. I went to [USIS chief] Barry Zorthian. I said, ‘Barry, how about giving us someone?’ I talked to MACV about getting an officer assigned. I had AID give me a guy.” But most of it, Donohue said, “was window dressing. We had the funds; we had the logistics; we had the transportation.”

  The CIA also had the approbation of Ky and Thieu. “Ky and Thieu saw the wisdom of it,” Donohue said, “so they offered up (as their liaison to the program) General Nguyen Duc Thang. And he was indefatigable. He went everyplace.” There was, however, one catch. As a way of monitoring the Saigon station, in August 1965 the Special Group assigned Ed Lansdale as senior liaison to General Thang, who instantly advocated transferring the entire Revolutionary Development program to the Defense Ministry.

  “Ed Lansdale was an invention of Hubert Humphrey’s,” Donohue grumbled. “The idea was ‘We did it before, we can do it again.’ So Lansdale came out two years too late. He brought a lot of his old cohorts; some were agency guys that he’d suborned. He had some Army people and some retired folks, but there was really nothing,” Donohue said wearily, “for them to do.”

  “My boss [Gordon Jorgenson, who replaced Peer DeSilva in February 1965] said, ‘Tell them everything.’ I said okay, and I spent two and a half hours briefing his full group about a week after they arrived. And they said, ‘Let’s have a joint office.’ So we had our logistics people put in offices and all the right things. Then I had to get somebody to run the office. Thang said, ‘Who do you want?’ And I said, ‘Chau.’”

  Tran Ngoc Chau, according to Donohue, “was a farsighted, bright guy with an ability to keep meaningful statistics—which is not very Vietnamese. He’d been the apple of Diem’s eye during the strategic hamlet program, and he had a special phone to the palace—Diem was on the horn to him constantly. Because he had that kind of sponsorship, he was able to do an awful lot of experimentation. So we used Kien Hoa as a proving ground. I spent a lot of time between Mai and Chau looking at programs,” Donohue recalled, “trying to introduce refinements.”

  By having Chau transferred to Vung Tau, Donohue also got greater control over his pet project. “We took Census Grievance and expanded it,” he said. “I got a villa in Gia Dinh and set up a training school for Census Grievance people. We would bring people in that had been spotted in various villages and run them through the training; then they would go back to their provinces. I had a French gent, Matisse, who ran the school. We trained in small groups, and it was a much faster process than the PATs; but these were literate people, so they were quick on the uptake. And it was very pleasant surroundings. It was a well-handled program.” To it Donohue assigned John O’Reilly, John Woodsman, Dick Fortin, and Jean Sauvageot.

  “But I had forced the transfer,” Donohue confessed, “and Chau was so damn mad that he was in a permanent pout. So he decided to go down to Vung Tau and shape the place up. Which we really didn’t need. ‘Cause here you have two dynamic personalities [Mai and Chau] who couldn’t stand each other.”

  The conflict was resolved in 1966, when Mai was reassigned to the Joint General Staff, while Chau took over the Vung Tau training program. Donohue minimized the effect. “I couldn’t really do much business out there anyway,” he noted, “because I needed our own system to talk to people. But at least for the record it looked pretty good. We had a MAVC guy, an AID guy, and a USIS guy down at Vung Tau, so all the bases had been touched. You see,” he added, “at this point all we were trying to do was expand the thing and say that there’s at least plausible denial that the agency is solely responsible.”

  Indeed, with the creation of Vung Tau and the synthetic Revolutionary Development Cadre program, South Vietnam began slouching toward democracy. But it was an empty gesture. The rule in South Vietnam was one step forward followed by two steps back.

  CHAPTER 5

  PICs

  “A census, if properly made and exploited, is a basic source of intelligence. It would show, for instance, who is related to whom, an important piece of information in counterinsurgency warfare because insurgent recruiting at the village level is generally based initially on family ties.”1

  As counterinsurgency expert David Galula notes above, a census is an effective way of controlling large numbers of persons. Thus, while CIA paramilitary officers used Census Grievance to gather intelligence in VC-controlled villages, CIA police advisers were conducting a census program of their own. Its origins are traced to Robert Thompson, a British counterinsurgency expert hired in 1961 by Roger Hilsman, director of the State Department’s Office of Research and Intelligence, to advise the United States and GVN on police operations in South Vietnam. Basing it on a system he had used in Malaya, Thompson proposed a three-pronged approach that coordinated military, civilian intelligence, and police agencies in a concerted attack on the VCI.

  On Thompson’s advice, the National Police in 1962 initiated the Family Census program, in which a name list was made and a group photo taken of every family in South Vietnam. The portrait was filed in a police dossier along with each person’s political affiliations, fingerprints, income, savings, and other relevant information, such as who owned property or had relatives outside the village and thus had a legitimate reason to travel. This program was also instrumental in leading to the identification of former sect members and supplétifs, who were then blackmailed by VBI case officers into working in their villages as informers. By 1965 there were 7,453 registered families.

  Through the Family Census, the CIA learned the names of Communist cell members in GVN-controlled villages. Apprehending the cadre that ran the cells was then a matter of arresting all minor suspects and working them over until they informed. This system weakened the insurgency insofar as it forced political cadres to flee to guerrilla units enduring the hardships of the jungle, depriving the VCI of its leadership in GVN areas. This was no small success, for, as Nguyen Van Thieu once observed, “Ho Chi Minh values his two cadres in every hamlet more highly than ten military divisions.”2

  Thompson’s method was successful, but only up to a point. Because many VCI cadres were former Vietminh heroes, it was counterproductive for Political Action Teams and counterterrorists to hunt them down in their own villages. Many VCI were not terrorists but, as Galula writes, “men whose motivations, even if the counterinsurgent disapproves of them, may be perfectly honorable. They do not participate directly, as a rule, in direct terrorism or guerrilla action and, technically, have no blood on their hands.”3

  Thompson’s dragnet technique engendered other problems. Mistakes were made, and innocent people were routinely tortured or subject to extortion by crooked cops. On other occasions VCI agents deliberately led Political Action Teams into arresting people hostile to the insurgency. Recognizing these facts, Thompson suggested that the CIA organize a police special branch of professional interrogators who would not be confused with PATs working to win hearts and minds. In 1964, at Thompson’s suggestion, the Police Special Branch was formed from the Vietnam Bureau of Investigation and plans were made to center it in Province Intelligence Coordinating Committees (PICCs) in South Vietnam’s provinces.

  Creation of the police Special Branch coincided with the reorganization of the “Special Branch” of the Vietnamese Special Forces into the Special Exploitation Service (SES), the GVN’s counterpart to the Special Operations Group. SOG and SES intelligence operations were coordinated with those of the Special Branch through the CIO, though only at the regional and n
ational level, an inadequacy the PICCs were designed to overcome.

  The birth of the police Special Branch also coincided with the Hop Tac (Pacification Intensive Capital Area) program, activated in July 1964 to bring security to the besieged capital. A variation on the oil spot technique, Hop Tac introduced twenty-five hundred national policemen into seven provinces surrounding Saigon. In October 1964 the National Identification and Family Census programs were combined in the Resources Control Bureau in the National Police Directorate, and a Public Safety adviser was placed in each region specifically to manage these programs. By December 1964 thirteen thousand policemen were participating in Hop Tac, seven thousand cops were manning seven hundred checkpoints, more than six thousand arrests had been made, and ABC-TV had done a documentary on the program. In the provinces, Public Safety advised policemen-enforced curfews and regulations on the movement of persons and goods under the Resources Control program.

  Also in September 1964, as part of the effort to combine police and paramilitary programs, Frank Scotton was directed to apply his motivational indoctrination program to Hop Tac. Assisted by cadres from his Quang Ngai PAT team, Scotton formed paramilitary reaction forces in seven key districts surrounding Saigon. Scotton’s cadres were trained at the Ho Ngoc Tau Special Forces camp where SOG based its C5 program for operations inside Cambodia. Equipment, supplies, and training for Scotton’s teams were provided by the CIA, while MACV and Special Forces provided personnel. Lists of defectors, criminals, and other potential recruits, as well as targets, came from Special Branch files.

  The aim of the motivational indoctrination program, according to Scotton, was to “develop improved combat skills—increased commitment to close combat—for South Vietnamese. This is not psywar against civilians or VC. This is taking the most highly motivated people, saying they deserted, typing up a contract, and using them in these units. Our problem,” Scotton said, “was finding smart Vietnamese and Cambodians who were willing to die.”4

  The first district Scotton entered in search of recruits was Tan Binh, between Saigon and Tan Son Nhut airport, where he extracted cadres from a Popular Force platoon guarding Vinh Loc village. These cadres were trained to keep moving, to sleep in the jungle by day and attack VC patrols at night. Next, Scotton trained teams in Nha Be, Go Vap, and Thu Duc districts. He recalled going two weeks at a time without a shower, “subliminating the risk and danger,” and participating in operations. “We had a cheap rucksack, a submachine gun, and good friends. We weren’t interested in making history in the early days.”

  So successful was the motivational indoctrination program in support of Hop Tac that MACV decided to use it nationwide. In early 1965 Scotton was asked to introduce his program in SOG’s regional camps, in support of Project Delta, the successor to Leaping Lena. Recruits for SOG projects were profit-motivated people whom Scotton persuaded to desert from U.S. Special Forces A camps, which were strung out along South Vietnam’s borders. On a portable typewriter he typed a single-page contract, which each recruit signed, acknowledging that although listed as a deserter, he was actually employed by the CIA in “a sensitive project” for which he received substantially higher pay than before.

  The most valuable quality possessed by defectors, deserters, and criminals serving in “sensitive” CIA projects was their expendability. Take, for example, Project 24, which employed NVA officers and senior enlisted men. Candidates for Project 24 were vetted and, if selected, taken out for dinner and drinks, to a brothel, where they were photographed, then blackmailed into joining special reconnaissance teams. Trained in Saigon, outfitted with captured NVA or VC equipment, then given a “one-way ticket to Cambodia,” they were sent to locate enemy sanctuaries. When they radioed back their position and that of the sanctuary, the CIA would “arc-light” (bomb with B52’s) them along with the target. No Project 24 special reconnaissance team ever returned to South Vietnam.

  Notably, minds capable of creating Project 24 were not averse to exploiting deviants within their own community, and SOG occasionally recruited American soldiers who had committed war crimes. Rather than serve time in prison or as a way of getting released from stockades in Vietnam or elsewhere, people with defective personalities were likely to volunteer for dangerous and reprehensible jobs.

  In June 1965 Colonel Don Blackburn commanded SOG. His staff numbered around twelve and included the commanders of the First and Fifth Special Forces groups, plus various special warfare Marine, Air Force, and Navy officers. SOG headquarters in Saigon planned operations for the four hundred-odd volunteers in its operational units. However, 1965 was rough going for border surveillance. The Montagnards were no longer effective after their revolt, and as compensation, Project Delta was organized to provide intelligence for newly arrived U.S. Army and Marine divisions. About the paramilitary police, SOG, and pacification programs he and his compatriots developed, Scotton said, “For us, these programs were all part of the same thing. We did not think of things in terms of little packages.” That “thing,” of course, was a grand scheme to win the war, at the bottom of which were the province interrogation centers.

  John Patrick Muldoon, Picadoon to the people who knew him in Vietnam, was the first director of the PIC program in Vietnam. Six feet four inches tall, well over two hundred pounds, Muldoon has a scarlet face and a booming bass voice remarkably like Robert Mitchum’s. He was friendly and not overly impressed with either himself or the CIA mystique. That makes Muldoon one of the few emancipated retired CIA officers who do not feel obligated to call headquarters every time a writer asks a question about Vietnam.

  A Georgetown University dropout, Muldoon joined the agency in 1958, his entry greased by two sisters already in the CIA’s employ. He did his first tour in Germany and in 1962 was sent to South Korea. “I worked interrogation in Seoul,” Muldoon recalled. “I’d never been involved in interrogation before. Ray Valentine was my boss. Syngman Rhee had been replaced by Park Chung Hee, who was running the show. Park’s cousin Colonel Kim Chong Pil was director of the ROK [Republic of Korea] CIA. There was a joint KCIA-CIA interrogation center in Yon Don Tho, outside Seoul.”

  Here it is worth pausing for a moment to explain that in recruiting cadres for the Korean CIA, the CIA used the same method it used to staff the Vietnamese CIO. As revealed by John Marks in The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, the CIA sent its top psychologist, John Winne, to Seoul to “select the initial cadre,” using a CIA-developed psychological assessment test. “I set up an office with two translators,” Winne told Marks, “and used a Korean version of the Wechsler.” CIA psychologists “gave the tests to 25 to 30 police and military officers,” Marks writes, “and wrote up a half-page report on each, listing their strengths and weaknesses. Winne wanted to know about each candidate’s ability to follow orders, creativity, lack of personality disorders, motivation—why he wanted out of his current job. It was mostly for the money, especially with the civilians.”5

  In this way secret police are recruited as CIA assets in every country where the agency operates. In Latin America, Marks writes, “The CIA … found the assessment process most useful for showing how to train the anti-terrorist section. According to results, these men were shown to have very dependent psychologies and needed strong direction”—direction that came from the CIA. Marks quotes one assessor as saying, “Anytime the Company spent money for training a foreigner, the object was that he would ultimately serve our purposes.” CIA officers “were not content simply to work closely with these foreign intelligence agencies; they insisted on penetrating them, and the Personality Assessment System provided a useful aid.”6

  Following his tour in Korea, Muldoon was assigned to Vietnam in November 1964. “I was brought down to the National Interrogation Center [NIC] and told, ‘This is where you’re going to work…. You’re going to advise X number of interrogators. They’ll bring you their initial debriefing of the guy they’re working on; then you’ll give them additional CIA requirements.’”

&nb
sp; The CIA had different requirements, Muldoon explained, because “the South Vietnamese wanted information they could turn around and use in their battle against the Vietcong. They just wanted to know what was going on in the South…. But we were interested in information about things in the North that the South Vietnamese couldn’t care less about. And that’s where the American advisers would come in—to tell them, ‘You gotta ask this, too.’

  “We had standard requirements depending on where a guy was from. A lot of VC had been trained in North Vietnam and had come back down as volunteers. They weren’t regular NVA. So if a guy came from the North, we wanted to know where he was from, what unit he was with, how they were organized, where they were trained…. If a guy had been North for any length of time, we wanted to know if he’d traveled on a train. What kind of identification papers did he need? Anything about foreign weapons or foreigners advising them. That sort of thing.”

  Built in 1964, the National Interrogation Center served as CIO headquarters and was where civilian, police, and military intelligence was coordinated by the CIA. “It was located down on the Saigon River,” Muldoon recalled, “as part of a great big naval compound…. On the left was a wing of offices where the American military chief, an Air Force major, was located. In that same wing were the chief of the CIO … his deputy and the CIA advisers.” Muldoon referred to the CIO chief by his nom de guerre, Colonel Sam. “There was only one CIO chief the whole time I was there,” he added, “up until August 1966. His deputy was there the whole time, too, and the same interrogators.”