“We were going out every other day, sometimes every day,” he recalled. “I worked eighteen hours a day, six or seven days a week.” And yet, he was never really in control. “I had no operational control over any units, and I had to rely one hundred percent on my counterpart,” he said. “So every operation had to be simple,” primarily because of language. “I was at the mercy of an interpretor with a five-hundred-word vocabulary,” McWade sighed. “It was like being deaf and dumb. And I just assumed every operation was compromised, at a minimum because my interpretor was an undercover Military Security Service agent.” And even though he monitored agent nets, “No one reported directly to me; it would have been impossible to try, if you can’t speak the language. There was no such thing as a secure agent, and we didn’t have walk-ins because the people couldn’t trust the police.” Making matters worse, there were at least a dozen intelligence agencies operating in the area, each with what it assumed were its own unilateral agents in the field. But because the various intelligence agencies refused to share their files with one another, they never realized that each agent, as McWade put it, “was selling information to everybody.”
The picture is one of total chaos. Indeed, most of McWade’s initial operations were conducted—without his realizing it—by his police counterparts against common criminals or dissidents. He recalled his first day on the job, which coincided with the beginning of the second Tet offensive. “The first one in February came through Cholon,” McWade said. “This one came through Go Vap. We were out with the Regional and Popular Forces company, picking up anyone who looked like an ARVN draft dodger. Meanwhile the Vietnamese police were shaking them down, although I didn’t learn about it till much later.”
There were other surprises. In an area outside Go Vap, for example, over thirty thousand refugees lived in a sprawling ghetto. McWade told me, “They were mostly prostitutes working for organized crime—meaning the police. I thought we were investigating the VCI, but actually I was used by my police counterpart to raid the madams who hadn’t paid him off.” When he figured out what was really going on, McWade said, “I developed what I called ‘MeWade’s Rule’; fifteen percent for graft, eighty-five percent for the program. And this was a complete reversal of what was happening when I arrived!”
But Henry McWade did not become bitter, nor was he unable to cope with Vietnamese culture. Unlike many of his colleagues, he did not interpret Vietnamese customs as insidious schemes designed to deceive him. “The Vietnamese had a different vocabulary and different goals. They were not interested in acquiring bodies,” he said. “They were interested in acquiring money and items on the black market.” In other words, their motives were practical, geared toward surviving in the present, while it was generally only their American advisers who were obsessed with eliminating Communists from the face of the earth.
As a means of bringing Vietnamese and American procedures into closer sync, the Phoenix Directorate in July 1968 issued its first standard operating procedures (SOP 1) manual. SOP 1 stressed the leadership role of the police and the need for paramilitary forces to support the police in the attack on the VCI. It subdivided Intelligence and Operations Coordination Centers (IOCCs) into three areas. The Plans and Operations Center devised plans and organized available forces in operations against guerrilla units and individual VCI. The Situation Center maintained files, handled agent security and operations, produced reports, and set requirements. It had a military order of battle section under the Vietnamese army intelligence officer, the S2, gathering intelligence on and targeting guerrilla units, and a political order of battle section under the Special Branch, targeting VCI. The Message Section communicated with the district or province chief, who exercised overall responsibility for any particular IOCC.
In practice, SOP 1 had little effect. “It didn’t do any harm,” Henry McWade observed; but it was issued only to Americans, and the Vietnamese continued to organize the IOCCs according to their own “separate goals and missions. The double standard persisted, even after a translation (minus diacritical marks) was circulated.”
Ralph Johnson acknowledges this, noting that the GVN’s instructions to its own people—by making no reference to the role of U.S. Phoenix advisers in the IOCCs—widened the gap between Americans and Vietnamese. At first only the CIA, which “controlled the salaries, training and support of critical elements in Phung Hoang,” was able to exert influence, by parceling out resources and funds. Otherwise, when Phoenix advisers received adequate funds through CORDS, they, too, “were able and willing to use monetary leverage to drive home needed advice and guidance. And a CORDS agreement with President Thieu gave CORDS the right to call attention to officials who should be replaced.”6
In any event, Phoenix advisers found themselves caught in the middle of intrigues beyond their comprehension. Woefully unprepared, they stood between their Vietnamese army and police counterparts; their CIA and U.S. Army superiors; and the GVN and the sect or opposition political party in their area of operation. Everything was expected of them, but in reality, very little was possible.
Shedding light on the problems of Phoenix advisers is Ed Brady, a slender Army officer who served his first tour in Vietnam in 1965 as an adviser to the Twenty-second Ranger Battalion in Pleiku. After that, Brady volunteered for another tour and was assigned as a Regional and Popular Forces adviser in Da Lat, where he learned about the connection between politics and the black market in Vietnam. “Both the VC and the ARVN tried to avoid military operations in Da Lat,” Brady told me, adding that as part of the modus vivendi, it was “a neutral city where you could have meetings and where financial transactions could take place, legal and illegal. It was a place where the VC could raise and wash and change money. It was sort of what Geneva was like in World War Two. There were many businesses in the province, like woodcutting, rubber and tea plantations, and the ngoc mam [fish sauce] industry. All were sources of money for the VC and the GVN.”7
In Da Lat Brady worked with CIA Province Officer Peter Scove, who introduced him to Ted Serong, who at the time was handing over control of the Field Police to Pappy Grieves. “I was learning a lot,” Brady said. “I learned Vietnamese from the officer I was working with … the words that dealt with money and corruption. Then Serong asked me if I would be willing to go on loan to his team. They had a new kind of platoon … that they wanted to train in small-unit tactics. More like guerrilla warfare than what the police did. And would I be willing to train this platoon because he didn’t think that the Australian warrant officers he had there were the right people?”
Brady agreed and spent the next few months at the Field Police center, training what turned out to be “the first experimental PRU team in Tuyen Duc Province … recruited by the CIA to be the action arm of the province officer.” The platoon had four squads, two composed of Nungs and two of Montagnards. “They couldn’t speak to each other.” There were also squad leaders and a platoon commander, all of whom were South Vietnamese Special Forces officers, none of whom could speak Montagnard or Nung or English either.
“It was really the strangest thing you ever saw,” Brady said. “And I taught them small-unit tactics.”
As was generally the case, Brady’s association with the CIA spelled trouble for his military career. “I had a lot of problems with my sector boss over these activities,” he told me. “He thought I should eat in the sector house with the rest of the team, not with the Aussies and CIA people. I also spent most of my off time with Vietnamese officers in their homes, in bars, doing the things they did. I rented a house on my own, lived off the economy, learned how you buy your jobs, and met a lot of general officers’ mistresses who liked to come to Da Lat for the weather. The American colonel I worked for thought this was atrocious, and I got a zero on my performance report.”
Having been suborned by the CIA, enticed by the Vietnamese, and excommunicated by the Army, Brady—whose family was connected to a powerful U.S. senator and the III Corps commander—was
reassigned to the Vietnamese Joint General Staff (JGS), “in their command center. We were a division of the MACV Combat Operations Center. The main purpose of this group was to collect data on Vietnamese operations and feed it to the MACV so it could be reported to Washington.
“General Cao Van Vien was commander of the Joint Staff,” Brady continued, “and these guys were his operations staff. They traveled to every major Vietnamese battle to find out what happened—they placed no reliance on any official message—and I went on every one of those trips. I met all the key commanders. Plus which I was moving in Vietnamese social circles.”
Brady became friends with General Vien’s executive officer and with the JGS operations chief, Major General Tran Tran Phong. “And for some reason,” he added, “a number of the ranger officers and people I knew in Da Lat had moved into key positions in Thieu’s administration. They had sort of been in exile when I met them—you didn’t get assigned to a ranger outfit because you were in good graces with the administration … —but later they showed up in Saigon. And I had a great bond with them. I’d been in combat and brothels with them. But they were now full colonels. And I met many of their bosses, who were generals in powerful positions.”
When Brady’s tour at the JGS ended, the CIA station asked him to capitalize on his well-placed connections and report on what he learned about GVN plans and strategies. Brady agreed, and was assigned to the Phoenix Directorate as a cover for his espionage activities. “Somebody called me up one day and said, ‘We’re starting a new organization, and we’d like you to consider joining it.’ This was ICEX. So I went over there … and spent a couple hours talking to Evan Parker. He said, ‘We’re interested in targeted operations against the civilian part of the Communist party…. The main force war doesn’t address the real problem … the shadow government.’ And I was ready for that—psychologically and emotionally. Everything I knew said, ‘That’s exactly right.’
“ICEX was to work with the Special Branch,” Brady continued, “which set up a separate building in the National Police compound to be the Phung Hoang Central Office. They detailed mostly Special Branch policemen to work there, but there were a few military officers and a few National Police officers to round out the staff. Their office was only two months old when I arrived. There were a couple of CIA advisers down there to be the people who worked with them. Joe Sartiano was the senior CIA guy down in the Phung Hoang Central Office. And me and Bob Inman were down there from the Phoenix operations section.”
The Phoenix assignment put Brady in close contact with Dang Van Minh, Duong Than Huu, and Lieutenant Colonel Loi Nguyen Tan. About his relationship with Tan, Brady said, “Since Colonel Tan was a military officer, we knew people in common, so there was an immediate rapport. Tan was very friendly, very easy to talk to. But he was not, from an American point of view, demanding. We would go out on inspection teams together, to operations centers, and he’d have a discussion with the chief. Meanwhile, his Vietnamese subordinate and I pored through the dossiers, looked at their procedures and what operations they had run recently. And a lot of it was a sham—a facade that they were meeting the letter of the law. So they had a hundred dossiers. Big deal! Seventy-five had nothing in them. Fifteen of the other twenty-five had a couple of newspaper clippings from the local newspaper about the VC district chief. But they had no real intelligence, no real targeted operations that they were setting up or running. And Tan would never crack down on them or lean on them in some way that was acceptable to us from the West.
“Now in Vietnamese he would make a few remarks to them: ‘You really ought to try to do better.’ And when he got back, he’d file a report that this place was not in very good shape. But he didn’t say, ‘Damn it, I’m going to be back here in three weeks and you’d better have something going by then!’ That’s why it’s difficult to say if he was effective.”
Brady, who has deep affection for the Vietnamese, explained why their approach to Phoenix was at odds with the one pressed by Evan Parker: “If you really want to get down to cases, no Vietnamese of any significance in the military or in the police didn’t know who the truly high-level people were—the district chiefs and the province chiefs. Let me give you an example. Colonel Tan and Mr. Huu and I were eating in a market stall up near the border in Three Corps. The place was a hotbed of VCI support for NVA units. There was lots of money flowing there, donated by French rubber plantation owners without much coercion. They didn’t like the GVN. Anyway, this woman comes in. She’s got three or four kids, the youngest is maybe two, the oldest about seven. And Tan says to me, ‘You see this woman?’ We’re there eating soup and drinking Vietnamese coffee. She’s there feeding her kids at a nearby table in the market stall.
“I say, ‘Yeah.’
“He says, ‘You know who she is? She’s the province chief’s wife.’
“I looked around and said, ‘I don’t see the province chief. You’re telling me there’s an honest province chief, and his wife doesn’t own a jeep and go around collecting money all day?’
“No, no,” he says. “The VC province chief.”
“So, being young and naive, I say, ‘Well, look at how many young kids she has. She either goes to see him, or he comes to see her. Or she’s got a lover.’
“He says, ‘Right.’ But they are his kids. They even look like him.
“So I say, ‘Well, he must come in to see her, then, or she goes to see him.’ I’m really excited. I say, ‘This is something we can really work with.’
“He says, ‘You don’t understand. You don’t live the way we live. You don’t have any family here. You’re going to go home when this operation is over with. You don’t think like you’re going to live here forever. But I have a home and a family and kids that go to school. I have a wife that has to go to market…. And you want me to go kill his wife? You want me to set a trap for him and kill him when he comes in to see his wife? If we do that, what are they going to do to our wives?’
“How many wives were ever killed?” Brady asked rhetorically. “Zero— unless they happened to drive over a land mine, and then it was a random death. The VC didn’t run targeted operations against them either. There were set rules that you played by. If you went out and conducted a military operation and you chased them down fair and square in the jungle and you had a fight, that was okay. If they ambushed you on the way back from a military operation, that was fair. But to conduct these clandestine police operations and really get at the heart of things, that was kind of immoral to them. That was not cricket. And the Vietnamese were very, very leery of upsetting that.”
Likewise, as Tran Van Truong notes in A Vietcong Memoir: “Thieu’s chief of psywar hid in his own house a sister-in-law who was the Vietcong cadre in charge of the Hue People’s Uprising Committee. Neither had any particular love for their enemies, but family loyalty they considered sacrosanct.”8
“Atrocities happened,” Brady said. “Those things happened by individual province officers or people who worked for them and the PRUs…. It happened in the U.S. units. My Lai happened. No matter what anybody says about ‘it didn’t happen,’ it did happen. I’ve watched people torch Montagnard villages for no real reason except they were frustrated by not being able to catch the VC. And the Montagnards must have known about the VC, which I believe they did. But we didn’t have to burn their houses.”
When asked if Phoenix encouraged atrocities, Brady answered that it depended on whether or not the PRU and the PICs were defined as part of Phoenix. “If you want to say that all the intelligence activities that were supposed to be coordinated by Phoenix are a part of Phoenix, then yes,” Brady said. “But if you want to say, ‘Did Phoenix go do these things?,’ then my answer is no. Because Phoenix was too inactive, too incompetent, and too passive. Now, Phoenix should have been doing many more things directly, and if it had, then my belief is that Phoenix would have perpetrated some atrocities, because they would have been in the position these other people were in, where they
were frustrated, they were angry, and they would have done some things.
“Furthermore,” Brady added, “you can make the case that Phoenix was helping to repress the loyal opposition political parties and prevented a neutral Vietnam from occurring. The Vietnamese said that, because the Special Branch guy who planned the operation to nullify their political operations was also running Phoenix operations…. So it depends on how you want to interpret the data and how you want to say things were connected together. … I’d say either of those interpretations are valid.
“I think the director of Phoenix never planned such things,” Brady concluded in defense of Evan Parker and American policy in general. But he also said, “Yes, people assigned to Phoenix did such things.”
CHAPTER 17
Accelerated Pacification
The election of Richard Nixon in November 1968 signaled a shift in U.S. policy in Vietnam. Reflecting the desire of most Americans, in the wake of Tet, for an honorable withdrawal, the policy balanced negotiations with the bombing of North Vietnam. Called the Nixon Doctrine, the policy had as its premise that the United States has a moral obligation to support foreign governments fighting Communist insurgents, on the condition that those governments supply their own cannon fodder.
Shortly after taking office, Nixon instructed his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, to start negotiating with the North Vietnamese in Paris. On the assumptions that Tet had dealt the VCI a deathblow and that the Thieu regime was firmly in control of the country, Nixon began planning for troop reductions. Following in the footsteps of the French, U.S. forces began a gradual retreat to coastal enclaves. And MACV, under General William Westmoreland’s replacement, General Creighton Abrams, prepared to fight a sanctuary war based on CIA estimates that forty thousand NVA soldiers hunkered down in Cambodia constituted the major outside threat to the Thieu regime. The bombing of these potential invaders began in February 1969, with the consent of Cambodia’s Prince Norodom Sihanouk, whose agents provided the Special Operations Group (SOG) with information on the location of enemy forces, many of which were located in densely populated areas. Conducted in secret, the illegal raids into Cambodia were revealed in May 1969 and resulted in increased opposition to U.S. government conduct in Southeast Asia.
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