Phoenix Program

by Douglas Valentine

* That afternoon Parker had “a brief conversation with General Loan,” during which Loan rejected the ICEX proposal, claiming it infringed on Vietnamese sovereignty.

  CHAPTER 10

  Action Programs

  Before he bade adieu to Vietnam in November 1967, Nelson Brickham helped put together what was entitled “Action Program for Attack on VC Infrastructure 1967-1968.” Signed by the CORDS assistant chief of staff, Wade Lathram, “Action Program” represented Robert Komer’s administrative and operational directives for the ICEX program. It is the most significant Phoenix document, charting the program’s dimensions and course over its first eighteen months. It set in place Brickham’s reporting requirements, established tables of organization, identified major problems, and formed groups to find solutions.

  “Action Program” consisted of twelve separate tabs, each addressing a separate mission or function to be accomplished by a specific deadline. First on the list, Tab 1, called for promulgating the ICEX mission directive, MACV 381-41. Tab 2 called for briefing all corps senior advisers, and Tab 3 directed the CIA region officers to designate corps and province ICEX coordinators, all by July 31, 1967. By year’s end ICEX committees were operating in thirty-nine provinces, thirty-four of which were chaired by CIA officers. Most were meeting monthly and had initiated anti-VCI operations. Also by year’s end twenty-nine Province Intelligence Operations Coordination Centers (the province equivalents of a DIOCC) were functioning and sending reports to the ICEX Directorate. In certain provinces, such as Vinh Long in the Delta, the PIOCC doubled as a Phoenix committee.

  Tab 4 called for continuation and expansion of DIOCC development. At the time “Action Program” was issued, 10 DIOCCs were in operation; by year’s end there were 103, although most were gathering tactical military intelligence, not infiltrating and attacking the VCI. In November 1967 more than half a million dollars were authorized for DIOCC construction, salaries of Vietnamese employees, office equipment and supplies, and transportation. “These were not operational funds in the sense of supporting anti-infrastructure activities.”1 Money for anti-VCI operations came from the parent agency.

  To his credit, Evan Parker did not approve of the rapid pace at which Phoenix was expanding. “I didn’t think we needed an elaborate structure everywhere in the country,” he told me. “Some of the provinces didn’t have enough people or activity in them to warrant it. I would have preferred to concentrate on the more populated active areas where you knew that you had people to work with and something to work against.”2

  There were too many variables, Parker contended, to have “a uniform program.” The methodology had not been perfected, and too much depended “on the personal likes and dislikes of the senior Vietnamese people in the field … and their adviser…. For instance, in I Corps there was a lot of activity, not so much concerned with the VCI as with the machinations of rival political parties—the Buddhists or whatever…. These are things that were hung over from the French days…. This was always the problem with Thieu…. [it] was sort of open season on the enemy—of settling scores.”

  Tab 5 of “Action Program” prescribed ICEX staff organization along the committee lines proposed by Brickham. In Saigon the ICEX board of directors consisted of the DEPCORDS as chairman, the CIA station chief, the MACV intelligence (J2) and operations (J3) chiefs, and the CIA chief of Revolutionary Development. In fact, the board met only once, and Robert Komer quickly assumed control of Phoenix, setting policy as he saw fit, with the directorate serving as his personal staff. “Komer or Colby [who replaced Komer as DEPCORDS in November 1968] said, ‘You’ll do it.’ My job,” explained Parker, “was to say, ‘Okay, Colby says you’ll do this, and this is how you’re gonna go about doing it.’ What I did was help people carry out what they were ordered to do. And I firmly believe in the soft sell.”

  In practice, Parker’s CIA kinship with Komer and especially Colby enabled him to manage the Phoenix Directorate without having to consult agency heads. He had merely to state his wishes to the DEPCORDS in order to bypass the various chains of command.

  “Colby was my division chief in the field, and in Washington also,” Parker explained. “I served with him in World War Two when I was in England. I met him when we were both in a program known as the Jedburghs. He went into the field in Europe, and I went into the field in the Far East. “Colby is a fine gentleman, I’ll tell you. He was tremendously helpful to me. So was Komer. But their personalities were very different. Komer was essentially a rasping, grating sort of voice … but he was consistently staunch in his support of the program…. He may have given orders, he may have been sarcastic—all those things—but at the same time he was not one to stand on ceremony, not one to do things because that’s the way it’s always been done. He didn’t give a damn about that. He’d say, ‘I want Parker’s organization to get four trucks! I don’t give a good goddamn where they come from, just give him four trucks!’

  “Colby was quieter, more soft-spoken, but just as firm in terms of getting things done…. He would suddenly say, ‘Let’s go visit so-and-so,’ in a province or region. That meant you would call up and get a helicopter or a plane, with no notice, and he would just go there and see them. That made it a whole lot more secure because we traveled without bodyguards.”

  Case in point: While serving as Phoenix coordinator in Quang Tri Province, Warren Milberg was visited by Colby, who was on an inspection tour. As Milberg recalled it, Colby decided to spend the night, so Milberg assigned a Nung guard to watch over him. That night there was a mortar attack. The Nung guard grabbed Colby by the scruff of the neck, dragged him backward down the stairs (Milberg arrived in time to see Colby’s heels bouncing on the steps) into the basement of the building, threw him on a cot, and threw himself on top of the future director of Central Intelligence. Somewhat dismayed at the treatment the Nung had afforded the DEPCORDS, Milberg half expected the ax to fall when Colby and his entourage assembled for breakfast the following morning. But Colby merely thanked the earnest Nung for the gesture of concern.

  The consummate insider, Colby would win many friends with his “just folks” management style, while using his considerable influence to refine and redirect the broad policies put in place by Komer—the outside agitator who rode roughshod over everyone. Together, Komer and Colby were the perfect one-two combination required to jump-start Phoenix and keep it running for five years.

  As of August 15, 1967, Parker’s part-time staff had been replaced by three permanent CIA officers: Joe Sartiano as executive director; William Law as chief of operations; and James Brogdon as administrative officer; Colonel William J. Greenwalt had replaced Junichi Buhto as deputy director, and six MACV officers were assigned as full-time employees, along with a smattering of AID and State Department people.

  “We set up a working organization built around agency people,” Parker said, “with other individuals made available from the different agencies, but still paid for by the agencies they belonged to.” By then there were American women serving as secretaries, MACV and CIA officers advising the Vietnamese, and others in the office keeping records. “There were probably three or four people I counted on more than anyone else,” Parker remarked, but “in order to make this work, I would say that the core people were the agency people in charge of the special police—the senior agency advisers.”

  Tab 6 provided for military augmentation of ICEX field units. As Parker put it, “Then you realize you’re going to have a nationwide organization as well as a headquarters staff, and that you’re going to need a lot more people than you envisioned. So the Army becomes the principal.

  “In due course a table of organization was set up which assigned people to region, then to province, and most of them were Army. You’d have a captain at province and a major or [lieutenant colonel] at region with assistants—corporals and sergeants and so forth. MACV took the bodies at first as they came in-country and assigned them regardless of the fact that they may have been intended for something else
. For example, my deputy was going to a military unit but found himself in ICEX instead. Another fellow who was going to be assigned to MACV counterintelligence instead was assigned to an intelligence function in ICEX. That’s where the first people came from.”

  The first MACV allotment to Phoenix was for 126 military officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs), all counterintelligence specialists. One officer, one NCO, and one clerk-typist had been sent to each corps by September 15, and one officer and/or NCO to each province. By the end of 1967 one NCO had been assigned to each of the 103 DIOCCs then in existence. All military officers and enlisted men assigned to the Phoenix program in 1967 took orders from the CIA.

  Tab 7 provided for briefing and coordination with senior GVN officials. While the groundwork was being laid on the American side of the program, Parker said, “we were working with the Vietnamese to sell them the idea. Although they were militarily assisting, the Vietnamese police had the major role because after all, you’re dealing primarily with civilians. So the person who worked most closely with us was the director general of the National Police.”

  But General Nguyen Ngoc Loan was wary of the CIA, which was supporting Nguyen Van Thieu—not Nguyen Cao Ky—in the campaign leading up to the October 1967 presidential elections. And even though Ky was persuaded to run as Thieu’s vice-president (they joined forces against “peace” candidate Tran Van Dzu), the two were bitter enemies. As Ky’s enforcer General Loan opposed Phoenix not only because it infringed on Vietnamese sovereignty but because he believed it was being used to promote Thieu. Their opposition to Phoenix was to spell trouble for General Loan and his patron, Ky.

  General Loan’s opposition to Phoenix, however, did not mean that he refused to work with Americans on an equal basis. His support for CT IV disproves that. And Cong Tac IV “was a program that was doing well, too,” said Tully Acampora, “until February 1967. Then Robert Komer arrived, grabbed the political implications, and, after returning to Washington and conferring with his boss, Walt Rostow, purloined it from the Vietnamese.”3

  CT IV differed, fundamentally, from Phoenix in that the U.S. military units it employed were not empowered to arrest Vietnamese civilians. Phoenix, on the other hand, relied primarily on the PRU, which operated under the exclusive jurisdiction of the CIA and thus were beyond General Loan’s control. General Loan naturally preferred to work with General McChristian’s Combined Intelligence Staff. But when McChristian left Vietnam in July 1967, Komer immediately exploited the situation. At Komer’s direction, MACV officers assigned to CT IV were gradually withdrawn by McChristian’s replacement, General Phillip Davidson, whom Tully Acampora described as “beholden” to Komer for his job.

  “Komer was disastrous,” Acampora stressed. “He more than anyone politicized MACV. He was forcing for a treaty, promoting Phoenix and promising Westmoreland the job of Army chief of staff, if he went along. In mid-1967 it was a completely political situation.”

  Indeed, by deducting more than a hundred thousand Self-Defense Forces and “political cadre” from the enemy order of battle, Westmoreland, Komer, and Hart were able to show success and in the process convince President Johnson that “the light” really was at the end of the tunnel. Meanwhile, having backed themselves into a corner, they decided to do the job themselves. So what if General Loan was resistant? As Nelson Brickham had said, “That’s okay ‘cause we’re gonna do it anyway!”

  Symbolizing this “get tough” policy was Phoenix, rising from the devastation of two years of a stalemated war. Phoenix in this hawkish manifestation represented the final solution to the problem of distinguishing between a covert Communist enemy and an inscrutable ally. Uninhibited by family ties, Americans in charge of irregular forces, or by themselves, began hunting the VCI in its villages, doing what the Vietnamese were reluctant to do—even though they were never quite sure of whom they were stalking.

  This desperate policy was not without its American detractors. Tempestuous Tully Acampora called it “detrimental and contradictory.” Ed Brady, the Army captain assigned to the Phoenix Directorate as a cover for his CIA activities, concurs. “It’s very hard to carry out secret covert operations and repressive kinds of things in order to separate guerrillas from people—and then make a speech to them about how their individual rights are so important,” Brady said in an interview with Al Santoli.4

  But while Acampora and Brady believed the United States had no business preempting the Vietnamese when it came to the attack against the VCI, other Americans thought that the time for patience and cooperation had come and gone. From Evan Parker’s perspective, the problem was competition between the Special Branch and the ARVN. “It involved one Vietnamese agency saying, ‘Well, we can’t give [information] to them, because they’re penetrated by the VC.’ That sort of thing. And in some cases undoubted it was true.”

  Parker raised a legitimate point. In order for an intelligence coordination and exploitation program like Phoenix to work, institutional mistrust between the police and the military had to be overcome. But, Parker explained, “Having the Special Branch have such an active role made it difficult in many provinces and many of the more rural areas, because the special policeman was probably the equivalent of a sergeant. So … he doesn’t have much clout. … And the [outgunned, outmanned] police are pretty subordinate to the military, so you have all this business of army versus police. It’s a wonder it worked at all.”

  Moreover, frustration with Vietnamese security leaks gave Americans yet another reason not to wait for the Vietnamese to throw their support behind Phoenix. As Evan Parker said, “One of the great problems with the Vietnamese in getting this started was that the classification of the directive was so high—in order to prevent it from falling into enemy hands—that it was very difficult to handle these documents in the field … and tell people what they were supposed to do.”

  Typically, Tully Acampora refuted Parker’s explanation and interpreted the emphasis on secrecy in political terms. According to Acampora, for whom the switch from CT IV to Phoenix meant a loss in status, Parker “always envisioned Phoenix as a wholly U.S.-promoted, -managed, and -supported program.” Moreover, “Hart’s one mission was to undermine Loan’s influence, to reduce his power base, and to superimpose Phoenix on CT Four. They bought off the head of Special Branch, Major Nguyen Tien. Then Parker started suborning guys on the MACV intelligence staff. He seduced Colonel Junichi Buhto [MACV’s chief of counterintelligence] by promising to make him a GS-nineteen if he went along with the CIA…. Davidson’s mission was to destroy CT Four, and in August, Davidson and the CIA began withdrawing Americans from the Combined Intelligence Staff. This involves the election of 1967.”

  There is no doubt that Phoenix, in its fledgling stage, was conceived and implemented by the CIA. Furthermore, Ralph Johnson writes, “The results obtained by ICEX by the end of 1967 were primarily, if not totally, stimulated and supported by the Americans.”5 There was early acceptance of Phoenix by the Vietnamese in I Corps, but as Parker himself noted, much of that activity was directed against Thieu’s non-Communist political opponents. Otherwise, the majority of Vietnamese hesitated to embrace a program as politically explosive as Phoenix. As Johnson observes, “most province chiefs were waiting for instructions from the Central Government.”6

  The first step in that direction was taken in late December 1967, two months after Thieu had been elected president and Ky had begun to lose influence. On December 20, 1967, Prime Minister Nguyen Van Loc signed Directive 89-Th. T/VP/M, legalizing Phung Hoang, the Vietnamese clone of Phoenix. However, the directive was not signed by President Thieu and thus carried little weight with cautious province chiefs hedging their bets while Thieu established himself more solidly.

  It is also important to note that Prime Minister Loc’s reasons for authorizing Phung Hoang were directly related to Robert Komer’s attempt to undermine General Loan and Nguyen Cao Ky by ending support for CT IV. After December 1, 1967, when Komer managed to terminate Oper
ation Fairfax, Loc had no choice but to support Phoenix. And, according to Tully Acampora, by withdrawing the U.S. units that shielded CT IV’s Field Police, “Komer opened up all the avenues which led to Tet.” Making matters worse, in an attempt to stimulate the South Vietnamese economy and, in the process, allow Thieu to reap the political rewards, Komer went so far as to remove police roadblocks and checkpoints around Saigon.

  Meanwhile, Tully Acampora was pleading with as many American generals as he could find, asking them not to withdraw American forces from CT IV. “Loan was saying that there was a massive influx of VC into Saigon,” Acampora recalled, “but Komer was calling it light, and Hart backed him. They wouldn’t listen to Loan, who was trying to convince them for sixty days prior to Tet.”

  Nelson Brickham, for one, admitted to having been fooled. “The VC had pulled their good people out and sent them up North in 1966. We knew that. Then, in the summer and fall of 1967, they came back. But I misinterpreted it. In October 1967 I told Colby that we were in a position that no NVA or VC unit could move without us knowing it. We saw Loan’s warnings as crying wolf.”7

  “We were picking up massive numbers of infiltrators,” Acampora told me, “so Loan countermanded the Joint General Staff’s orders to withdraw; he refused to pull out all of his people. He kept a paratroop unit and a marine unit in Saigon and canceled all police leaves. Those units, with the police, met the first assault in Tet. Then, of course, Loan was resurrected.”

  But by then it was too late. In Acampora’s judgment, Komer’s machinations brought about Tet. “The fact is,” he said, “that Parker contributed to that disaster, too. Parker said Phoenix was the only impediment, that it turned defeat into victory. But the embassy was attacked! How could that happen? The fact is, Phoenix was a failure, and it was only because of Loan that the VC suffered a setback.”

  “In any event, the prime minister said, ‘Do it.’ He gave the order,” Evan Parker said, “and he wrote the letters to empower them to do it, and Phung Hoang came into being on the Vietnamese side …. A Phung Hoang staff was set up by the Vietnamese consisting primarily of people from Special Branch. Then they set up quarters for them” at the National Police Interrogation Center. “The two organizations had separate quarters,” Parker added, “because we wanted the Vietnamese to feel that Phoenix was a Vietnamese program and that the Americans were simply advisers.”