Phoenix Program

by Douglas Valentine

  Muldoon estimated there were several hundred prisoners in the NIC and four interrogator-advisers. Muldoon was the fifth. Three were Air Force enlisted men serving under an Army captain. Muldoon’s boss, the CIA chief of the NIC, was Ian “Sammy” Sammers, who worked under the station’s senior liaison officer, Sam Hopper, who had supervised construction of the NIC in early 1964.

  One year later, according to Muldoon, “There was a conference in Nha Trang, in late April 1965. They were putting together an interrogation center in an existing building they had taken over, and they asked for help from the NIC. So I was sent up there with the Army captain to look at the place, figure out what kind of staff we needed, and how we were going to train them…. And while we were up there trying to break these guys in, the police liaison guy in Nha Trang, Tony Bartolomucci, asked Sammy if they could keep me there for this conference, at which all of our people were going to meet Jack ‘Red’ Stent, who was taking over from Paul Hodges as chief of foreign intelligence. Bartolomucci wanted to show off his new interrogation center to all these big shots.

  “The military people from the NIC had done their job,” Muldoon continued, “so they left. But I stayed around. Then Tucker Gougleman and Red showed up for this conference. Tucker was chief of Special Branch field operations, and things were just starting to get off the ground with the PICs. A couple were already under way—one in Phan Thiet and one in Phuoc Le—and Tucker told me, ‘We’re going to build, build, build, and I need someone to oversee the whole operation. I want you to do it.’

  “So we had this big conference, and they packed the interrogation center full of prisoners. Bartolomucci wanted to show off with a bunch of prisoners, so he got his police buddies to bring in a bunch of prostitutes and what have you and put them in the cells. I don’t think they had one VC in the place. After the conference they all went back to the regular jail, and I went to work for Tucker.”

  John Muldoon spoke affectionately about Tucker Gougleman. “Tucker was loud and foulmouthed, and he had a terrible temper; but it was all a big front. He was very easy to get to know … a likable guy. Always in a short-sleeved shirt and sneakers. He was married three times, divorced three times. He had adopted a girl in Korea, and in Vietnam he had what he called his family. He was back in Saigon trying to get them out when he was picked up. When the evacuation was over, he was still there, staying in the hotel. One day he came down, got off the elevator, walked into the lobby, and they were waiting for him. They took him out, threw him in a car, and took him to the National Police Interrogation Center. A French newspaper guy saw it happen. The North Vietnamese denied they had him, but they returned his body about a year later.

  “It’s funny, but me and Tucker used to talk about the PICs. He said something like ‘John, if we lose this war one day, we could end up in these goddammed things if we get caught.’

  “ ‘Well,’ I asked, ‘what would you do if you were in there?’

  “He said he thought he’d kill himself rather than go through interrogation. But he didn’t. The report I heard was that when his body got to the graves registration people in Okinawa, the broken bones had yet to heal. So obviously they had tortured him right up until the time he died. And I’d be willing to bet he didn’t say a damn thing to help them. I can see him spitting in their faces.”

  Muldoon laughed. “Tucker wanted to turn the PICs into whorehouses. The interrogation rooms had two-way mirrors.

  “Tucker was a hero in the Marine Corps in World War Two,” Muldoon added. “He joined the agency right after and worked with [station chief] John Hart in Korea, running operations behind the lines. He was in Afghanistan and worked in training, too. He got to Vietnam in 1962 and was base chief in Da Nang running everything* that had to do with intelligence and paramilitary operations…. He was no longer the Da Nang base chief when I arrived in Saigon,” Muldoon continued, “but he hadn’t taken over field operations yet either. He was in Saigon trying to set up the Province Intelligence Coordination Committees with Jack Barlow, a British guy from MI Six. Barlow had been in Africa and Malaya with Robert Thompson, and they were the experts. They’d succeeded in Malaya, and we wanted them to show us how to do it. Barlow and Tucker worked hand in hand. I shared an office with them at the embassy annex—which I had besides my office at the NIC—and that’s where I first met Tucker.”

  Forerunner to the Province Interrogation Center program, the Province Intelligence Coordination Committee program, established in November 1964, was designed to extend CIO operations into the provinces. Each PICC was to serve as the senior intelligence agency within each province and to guide, supervise, and coordinate all military, police, and civilian operations.

  “Barlow was the guy pushing the PICCs, and Tucker agreed it was a good idea,” Muldoon recalled. “But they weren’t able to convince the military to go along with them. It was bought by us and the embassy, but not by the military, and that’s the one you needed—’cause they were the ones who initially had control of the prisoners. And the Vietnamese military wasn’t going to go along unless the U.S. military approved it. So when the U.S. military said, ‘Don’t turn those prisoners over,’ there was no way we were going to get them. So the PICC project never got off the ground. Then after the embassy bombing [February 1965] they had a reorganization, and Tucker became chief of field operations. We started building the Province Interrogation Centers, and it was thought that people would say, ‘Hey, man, this is a great spot! We’ll send all our prisoners here!’ and that then they’d start moving in and set up the PICCs around the PICs. But that never happened either.

  “So after the Nha Trang conference we went down to Phuoc Le to set up a training schedule for the PIC that had already been built down there. The paramilitary guy, Pat, wanted to cooperate, and he had great relations with the province chief and the military. The intelligence guy, Ben, was serious about making everything in his province work. He wasn’t happy that he got stuck with building the interrogation center and being the adviser, but he wanted to be the best. And he had great relations with the Special Branch and the CIO. Now some paramilitary and liaison guys didn’t even talk to each other, but together Pat and Ben were able to make the thing work. It cost a lot of loyal Vietnamese their lives, but Ben would get hamlet informants to tell us who the VC were; then Pat would send the CTs out to get the names.”

  What Muldoon described was the one-two punch of the counterinsurgency—the Province Interrogation Centers and the counterterrorists. Through the PICs, the CIA learned the identity and structure of the VCI in each province; through the CTs, the CIA eliminated individual VCI members and destroyed their organization.

  The problem with the Phuoc Le PIC, according to Muldoon, was its design. “Ben had built his PIC with the guard posts outside each corner, so there was no way for the guards to get back into the inner compound during an attack. Once the shooting started and they ran out of ammunition, they were finished. So the first thing we did was change the design so they were still on each corner and could see in all directions but had a door leading inside the compound.”

  CIA architects settled on a standard design based on the modified Phuoc Le PIC. Strictly functional, it minimized cost while maximizing security. Under cover of Pacific Architects and Engineers (PA&E), the CIA’s logistics staff hired local Vietnamese contractors to build interrogation centers in every province. Funds and staff salaries came from the Special Branch budget. After it was built, the CIA bought the interrogation center, then donated it to the National Police, at which point it became a National Police facility under the direction of the Special Branch. In practice, however—because they got their operating funds directly from the CIA—Special Branch employees wielded more power than their supervisors in the National Police, who received Aid-in-Kind funds indirectly from the Agency for International Development through the National Police Directorate in Saigon.

  Each provincial capital would eventually have a PIC. However, regional interrogation centers were bu
ilt first and were larger, holding two to three hundred prisoners each. In IV Corps’s regional capital, Can Tho, where the French had built a jail capable of holding two thousand prisoners, existing facilities were renovated. In choosing where to build in the provinces, each CIA regional officer selected priority provinces. Then, according to Muldoon, it was up to the liaison officer in the province to talk to the province chief and his CIO counterpart to find a spot near the provincial capital. “ ’Cause that’s where our guy lived. Some of the guys had a hell of a time getting PICs started,” Muldoon noted, “because some province chiefs wanted money under the table.”

  Once the interrogation center was built, the liaison officer became its adviser, and Muldoon helped him recruit its staff. There were deadlines for each phase, and part of Muldoon’s job was to travel around and monitor progress. “In one place construction would be half done,” he recalled, “and in another they’d be trying to find a piece of land. It was a very big undertaking. We even had nit-PICs, which were smaller versions for smaller provinces.” Most interrogation centers were built or under construction by the time Muldoon left Vietnam in August 1966, at which point he was transferred to Thailand to build the CIA’s huge interrogation center in Udorn, “where the CIA ran the Laos war from the Air America base.” Muldoon was replaced as PIC chief in Vietnam by Bob Hill, a vice cop from Washington, D.C. Hill replaced Muldoon in Thailand in 1968.

  One story high, fashioned from concrete blocks, poured cement, and wood in the shape of a hollow square, an interrogation center was four buildings with tin roofs linked around a courtyard. In the center of the yard was a combination lookout-water tower with an electric generator under it. “You couldn’t get the guards to stay out there at night if they didn’t have lights,” Muldoon explained. “So we had spotlights on the corners, along the walls, and on the tower shooting out all around. We also bulldozed around it so there were no trees or bushes. Anybody coming at it could be seen crossing the open area.” People entered and exited through green, steel-plated gates, “Which were wide open every time I visited,” said Muldoon, who visited only during the day. “You didn’t want to visit at night,” when attacks occurred. PICs were located on the outskirts of town, away from residential areas, so as not to endanger the people living nearby, as well as to discourage rubbernecking. “These were self-contained places,” Muldoon emphasized. Telephone lines to the PICs were tapped by the CIA.

  On the left side were interrogation rooms and the cellblock—depending on the size, twenty to sixty solitary confinement cells the size of closets. Men and women were not segregated. “You could walk right down the corridor,” according to Muldoon. “It was an empty hallway with cells on both sides. Each cell had a steel door and a panel at the bottom where you could slip the food in and a slot at the top where you could look in and see what the guy was doing.” There were no toilets, just holes to squat over. “They didn’t have them in their homes.” Muldoon laughed. “Why should we put them in their cells?”

  Prisoners slept on concrete slabs. “Depending on how cooperative they were, you’d give them a straw mat or a blanket. It could get very cold at night in the highlands.” A system of rewards and punishments was part of the treatment. “There were little things you could give them and take away from them, not a lot, but every little bit they got they were grateful for.”

  Depending on the amount of VCI activity in the province and the personality of the PIC chief, some interrogation centers were always full while others were always empty. In either case, “We didn’t want them sitting there talking to each other,” Muldoon said, so “we would build up the cells gradually, until we had to put them next to each other. They were completely isolated. They didn’t get time to go out and walk around the yard. They sat in their cells when they weren’t being interrogated. After that they were sent to the local jail or were turned back over to the military, where they were put in POW camps or taken out and shot. That part I never got involved in,” he said, adding parenthetically, “They were treated better in the PICs than in the local jails already there for common criminals. Public Safety was advising them, working with the National Police. Sometimes they had sixty to seventy people in a cell that shouldn’t have had more than ten. But they didn’t care. If you’re a criminal, you suffer. If you don’t like it, too bad. Don’t be a criminal.”

  The interrogation process worked like this. “As we brought prisoners in, the first thing we did was … run them through the shower. That’s on the left as you come in. After that they were checked by the doctor or nurse. That was an absolute necessity because God knows what diseases they might be carrying with them. They might need medication. They wouldn’t do you much good if they died the first day they were there and you never got a chance to interrogate them. That’s why the medical office was right inside the main gate. In most PICs,” Muldoon noted, “the medical staff was usually a local ARVN medic who would come out and check the prisoners coming in that day.”

  After the prisoner was cleaned, examined, repaired, weighed, photographed, and fingerprinted, his biography was taken by a Special Branch officer in the debriefing room. This initial interrogation extracted “hot” information that could be immediately exploited—the whereabouts of an ongoing party committee meeting, for example—as well as the basic information needed to come up with requirements for the series of interrogations that followed. Then the prisoner was given a uniform and stuck in a cell.

  The interrogation rooms were at the back of the PIC. Some had two-way mirrors and polygraph machines, although sophisticated equipment was usually reserved for regional interrogation centers, where expert interrogators could put them to better use. Most province liaison officers were not trained interrogators. “They didn’t have to be,” according to Muldoon. “They were there to collect intelligence, and they had a list of what they needed in their own province. All they had to do was to make sure that whoever was running the PIC followed their orders. All they had to say was ‘This is the requirement I want.’ Then they read the initial reports and went back and gave the Special Branch interrogators additional requirements, just like we did at the NIC.”

  The guards—usually policemen, sometimes soldiers—lived in the PIC. As they returned from guard duty, they stacked their weapons in the first room on the right. The next room was the PIC chief’s office, with a safe for classified documents, handguns, and the chief’s bottle of scotch. The PIC chief’s job was to turn those in the VCI—make them Special Branch agents—and maintain informant networks in the hamlets and villages. Farther down the corridor were offices for interrogators, collation and report writers, translator-interpreters, clerical and kitchen staff. There were file rooms with locked cabinets and map rooms for tracking the whereabouts of VCIs in the province. And there was a Chieu Hoi room where defectors were encouraged to become counterterrorists, political action cadre, or Kit Carson scouts—a play on the names Biet Kich and Kit Carson, the cavalry adviser who gave a reward for Navajo scalps. Kit Carson scouts worked exclusively for the Marines.

  Once an interrogation center had been constructed and a staff assigned, Muldoon summoned the training team from the NIC. Each member of the team was a specialist. The Army captain trained the guards. Air Force Sergeant Frank Rygalski taught report writers how to write proper reports—the tangible product of the PIC. There were standard reporting formats for tactical as opposed to strategic intelligence and for Chieu Hoi and agent reports. To compile a finished report, an interrogator’s notes were reviewed by the chief interrogator, then collated, typed, copied and sent to the Special Branch, CIO, and CIA. Translations were never considered totally accurate unless read and confirmed in the original language by the same person, but that rarely happened. Likewise, interrogations conducted through interpreters were never considered totally reliable, for significant information was generally lost or misrepresented.

  Another Air Force sergeant, Dick Falke, taught interrogators how to take notes and ask questions during a
n interrogation. “You don’t just sit down with ten questions, get ten answers, then walk away,” Muldoon commented. “Some of these guys, if you gave them ten questions, would get ten answers for you, and that’s it. A lot of them had to learn that you don’t drop a line of questioning just because you got the answer. The answer, if it’s the right one, should lead you to sixty more questions. For example,” he said, “Question one was ‘Were you ever trained in North Vietnam?’ Question two was ‘Were you ever trained by people other than Vietnamese?’ Well, lots of times the answer to question two is so interesting and gives you so much information you keep going for an hour and never get to question three, ‘When did you come to South Vietnam?’”

  For Special Branch officers in region interrogation centers, a special interrogation training program was conducted at the NIC by experts from the CIA’s Support Services Branch, most of whom had worked on Russian defectors and were brought out from Washington to handle important cases. Training of Special Branch administrative personnel was conducted at region headquarters by professional secretaries, who taught their students how to type, file, and use phones. This side of the program was run by a former professional football player with the Green Bay Packers named Gene, who chain-smoked and eventually died of emphysema. “In between puffs, he’d put this box to his mouth, squeeze it, and take a breath of oxygen,” Muldoon recalled.

  On the forbidden subject of torture, according to Muldoon, the Special Branch had “the old French methods,” interrogation that included torture. “All this had to be stopped by the agency,” he said. “They had to be retaught with more sophisticated techniques.”