To complement these safety procedures, Phoenix advisers and their Vietnamese counterparts were issued, in July 1968, the Yellow Book, published by the CIA under cover of the RAND Corporation. Officially titled The Modus Operandi of Selected Political Cadre, the Yellow Book described the operational patterns and procedures of VCI cadre and suggested “possible actions” to exploit them.
In November 1968 came SOP 2, telling how to manage a DIOCC, and in December 1968 appeared the Green Book, Current Breakdown of Executive and Significant VCI Cadre. The bible of Phoenix advisers, the Green Book listed all VCI job titles, assigned each an A, B, or C rating, and prescribed the duration of detention suitable for each functionary. It told how the VCI routed messages, how they constructed and hid in tunnels, who was likely to know whom in the party organization, and other tips that would allow earnest Phoenix advisers to prioritize their targets, so they could go after the big fish recorded in the Black Book kept in the situation section of each DIOCC and PIOCC.
Other publications made available to Phoenix advisers included a biweekly newsletter that enabled advisers to share their favorite interrogation, operational, and briefing techniques; MACV’s monthly “Summary of VCI Activities”; Combined Document Exploitation Center and Combined Intelligence Center readouts; the PHMIS monthly report; and an eagerly awaited Phoenix End of Year Report.
Perhaps the most far-reaching innovation of 1968 was the Phoenix Coordinators Orientation Course (PCOC), which held its first classes at Vung Tau’s Seminary Camp in November 1968. The PCOC represented a final recognition that, as Doug Dillard remarked, “MACV really had to account for it.”14 To state it simply, military careers were now hitched to the Phoenix star.
The advent of the PCOC dovetailed neatly with the folderol of the accelerated pacification campaign and the infusion into the Phoenix Directorate of a new generation of staff officers, who brought with them new ideas and were confronted with new concerns, most concerning public relations. On the CIA side, Robert E. Haynes replaced Joe Sartiano as executive director, and Sartiano and two State Department officers began writing a plan to put Phung Hoang under the control of the National Police. On the military side, Colonel Robert E. Jones replaced William Greenwalt as deputy director.
In September, Army Security Agency officer Lieutenant Colonel Richard Bradish stepped in as the military liaison to Special Branch. Bradish “provided direct assistance” to the Phung Hoang staff in Special Branch headquarters at the NPIC. He and the sergeant assisting him were the only military personnel who had desks there. “We were very busy,” Bradish told me, “primarily advising the Special Branch in anti-infrastructure operations.”15 Bradish also advised Vietnamese inspectors visiting Phung Hoang committees on “how to bolster morale and improve record keeping on VCI neutralizations.”
Bradish noted that Parker’s military deputy, Colonel Jones did not provide “close supervision,” a condition that was “characteristic of the whole thing…. I was compartmented,” Bradish said about himself and the other military personnel on the staff. “We were outsiders. When I was there, Special Branch was Phung Hoang”—meaning that the CIA still controlled Phoenix, with the military there as window dressing. Likewise, Bradish observed, the Vietnamese at the Phung Hoang Office “were putting on a show. They were not acting like they were at war, but like it was a normal job.” In his judgment, “The North Vietnamese were more committed.”
The Central Phung Hoang Permanent Committee as of November 1968 looked like this:
Chairman: General Tran Thien Khiem
Assistant Chairman: Colonel Ly Trong Song
Phung Hoang Plan: Lieutenant Colonel Loi Nguyen Tan
Planning Bureau: Mr. Duong Than Huu
Intelligence Operations: Mr. Ha Van Tien
Action Programs: Mr. Mai Viet Dich
Inspections Bureau: Mr. Nguyen Van Hong
Chieu Hoi Representative: Mr. Le Doan Hung
Statistics Bureau: Military Security Service Captain Dinh Xuan Mai
Also arriving at the Phoenix directorate in September 1968, concurrent with its reorganization into separate branches for plans and training, was Lieutenant Colonel Walter Kolon. Put in charge of training, Kolon’s job was “to prepare incoming personnel at Seminary Camp at Vung Tau,”16 which in 1969 was still the private property of the CIA; only Air America was authorized to fly in and out. Having worked with the agency at various stages in his career, including his first tour in Vietnam in 1965 with the Special Military Intelligence Advisory Team (SMIAT), Phoenix was a program that Walter Kolon was well suited for. Assembled by CIA officer William Tidwell within MACV’s Technical Intelligence Branch, SMIAT was a deep cover for sophisticated “black” operations against the VCI before Phoenix. “The premise and charter of SMIAT,” said Kolon, “laid the groundwork conceptually for Phoenix.”
When Kolon arrived on the scene, CIA contract officers like Bob Slater and veteran Phoenix coordinators like Doug Dillard and Henry McWade were teaching classes at Vung Tau. Recalled Dillard: “There was a compound and classrooms and different kinds of training facilities out on the grounds. Colonel Be was there with his RD Cadre training school, although they kept them separate. And of course, I was involved only with American personnel. They had agency people who had been with ICEX as instructors. The U.S. cadre down there were all agency people; later they began to get some Army personnel in.”
Phoenix personnel assigned to Seminary Camp shared their mess hall with PRU advisers. “We had two elements,” Walter Kolon recalled. “One was the Phoenix school; the other was PRU. Those were the only two there. The RDC training area was separate. But the people being assigned were neither fish nor fowl; counterintelligence and intelligence people had no understanding of police or judicial procedures, and former policemen were not the solution either,” he added, noting that they and people from other agencies sometimes had no intelligence training at all. “What was needed was a new breed of cat, a person who understood collection, analysis, and response units like the National Police Field Force, and how all that jibed with gathering evidence and building a case.”
So, Kolon continued, “We made recommendations to Colby to get a new program under way in the States. Then I went back to brief the people at SACSA, CIA, Fort Holabird, and the Continental Army Command at Fort Lee as to what our needs were, not just immediately, but into the foreseeable future as well—always remembering that Phoenix was a coordinative function. As a result, the military intelligence branch of the Army, on instructions from the acting chief of staff for intelligence, actively began identifying in the United States people to volunteer as Phoenix advisers, on the understanding that they would be able to choose their next assignment after Vietnam. This would eventually develop into what was called the Phoenix Career Program.”
Phoenix curriculum was soon introduced to the Foreign Service Institute; the Defense Intelligence School; the Army Intelligence School; the Institute for Military Assistance at Fort Bragg; the Civil Affairs School at Fort Gordon (home of the Military Police); the Army Intelligence School in Okinawa; and Joint U.S. Military Advisory Group in Thailand. Walter Kolon then returned to Vung Tau, where he supervised the creation of the ten-day bimonthly Phoenix Coordinators’ Orientation Course. The staff was “originally about a dozen people. Some were former DIOCC advisers, and the CIA also supplied a number of guest lecturers.”
About his experience as a Phoenix facilitator, Henry McWade said, “I gave two classes. The first class was how the DIOCC should be, as set forth in SOP One and SOP Two. In the second class I said, ‘Forget the first class; this is how it really is.’ Then I explained how they had to adjust to the Vietnamese, how they would get money for expenditures but no money for bodies, and how sometimes they would get money for agents.”
Kolon and his deputy, Major Kelly Stewart, also provided advice and support to Special Branch training courses begun in Bien Hoa in December 1968, then expanded to the other corps. In this capacity Kolon traveled with Ed Brady a
nd Loi Nguyen Tan. By the end of 1969 corps centers had trained eighteen hundred students, primarily in how to be case officers. Beginning in February 1969, American advisers to ARVN ranger battalions, along with police advisers and Free World Military Assistance Forces, were also given Phoenix instruction.
In addition to classes at Vung Tau, the CIA gave instruction to Phoenix advisers at the Vietnamese Central Intelligence School. John Cook attended one of the sessions. He writes:
There were forty of us in the class, half American, half Vietnamese. The first day at the school was devoted to lectures by American experts in the insurgency business. Using a smooth, slick delivery, they reviewed all the popular theories concerning communist-oriented revolutions…. Like so many machines programmed to perform at a higher level than necessary, they dealt with platitudes and theories far above our dirty little war. They spoke in impersonal tones about what had to be done and how we should do it, as if we were in the business of selling life insurance, with a bonus going to the man who sold the most policies. Those districts that were performing well with the quota system were praised; the poor performers were admonished. And it all fitted together nicely with all the charts and figures they offered as support of their ideas.17
Like many of his colleagues, Cook resented “the pretentious men in high position” who gave him unattainable goals, then complained when he did not reach them. In particular, as a result of mounting criticism in the American press, Phoenix advisers were called to task for their failure to capture rather than kill VCI. The problem stemmed from the press’s equating Phoenix with the PRU teams it employed. For example, in December 1967 the Minneapolis Tribune described the PRU as “specially trained Vietnamese assassins” who “slip silently by night into sleeping hamlets to carry out their deadly function.” The Tribune noted: “This aspect of ICEX has a tradition that goes back far beyond the Vietnam conflict, and its methods are those of hired killers everywhere.”
The “hired killer” label was to stick to Phoenix, with hapless DIOCC advisers taking the heat for PRU advisers conducting their business with impunity. Writing for the Wall Street Journal on September 5, 1968, reporter Peter Kann described the VCI as “the invisible foe,” adding that “the target is assassinated, sometimes brutally as an object lesson to others.”
In this way Phoenix developed a reputation as an assassination program. That is why it became imperative that the CIA disassociate itself from the program through public statements building a case for plausible denial. Such was the tack William Colby took at a press conference held for thirty news correspondents on December 28, 1968, in response to mounting public queries about Phoenix. In his opening statement Colby called Phoenix “a Vietnamese program” in which Americans were involved “only as part of military operations.” The MACV information officer assisting Colby added that no American units were allocated to Phoenix. Colby stressed that the goal was to capture, not to kill, VCI. Nothing was said about wanted dead or alive posters, the PRU, or the Army’s combined reconnaissance and intelligence platoons (CRIPS), which Jeffrey Race calls “Far more effective than even the PRU at eliminating members of the VCI.”18
When asked how advisers prevented people from using Phoenix as a cover for political assassination, Colby cited systematic record keeping as the fail-safe mechanism, producing charts and graphs to show statistics backing his claims. He did not mention the massacre of Ky’s people on June 2, 1968, or Tran Van Don’s claim that Phoenix helped Truong Dinh Dzu in the 1967 election, or the station’s special unit, whose victims’ names never appeared on Phoenix rolls.
Colby made no reference to the CIA’s having built the province interrogation centers and said that advisers were “seldom” present at interrogations. He then outlined American-conceived legal procedures for detaining suspects.
The essence of Colby’s dissembling was his definition of Phoenix as an organization rather than a concept. As stated in the previous chapter, when Ed Brady was asked if Phoenix generated atrocities, his answer was that it depended on whether or not the PRU and the PICs were defined as part of Phoenix. The reason for Colby’s ignoring these two foundation stones of Phoenix was to conceal CIA involvement in the program, as well as to protect unilateral CIA penetrations, what Nelson Brickham called “the most important program in terms of gathering intelligence on the enemy.” What Jim Ward called “the real sensitive, important operations.”19 And, according to Colby, it worked: “We were getting more and more accurate reports from inside VCI provincial committees and regional Party headquarters from brave Vietnamese holding high ranks in such groups.”20
“CORDS provided an umbrella,” said John Vann’s deputy, Jack. “But people, especially the CIA, were always back-channeling through their own agencies to undermine it…. Komer insisted that CIA people would run Phoenix through regular channels. But on highly sensitive matters, like tracking high penetrations, it wasn’t reported in CORDS.”
In a conversation with the author, Jack noted that the informal lines of command are more important than formal lines, that, as he put it, “real power gravitates off the organizational charts. The way it gets organized isn’t critical; it had to be done some way, and it can adapt. For example, in Hau Nghia it was military, while in Gia Dinh it was Special Branch. It has to be flexible to account for HES A and B hamlets as opposed to C and D hamlets. Military or police, depending on the environment. In any event the CIA advised Special Branch had cognizance over Phoenix.”21 And Phoenix was a concept, not an organization.
* Lang’s sister had married Tucker Gougleman when Gougleman was managing SOG operations in Da Nang in 1964.
CHAPTER 18
Transitions
Saigon has been called a wicked city. It is said that the pungent smell of opium permeated its back alleys, that its casinos never closed, that its brothels occupied entire city blocks, and that a man could sell his soul for a hundred dollars, then use the money to hire an assassin to kill his lover, his boss, his enemy.
Anything was possible in Saigon. And given the massive infusion of American soldiers, dollars, and materiel that began in 1965, criminally minded individuals had the chance to make fortunes. This could be done in all the usual ways: by selling military supplies and equipment on the black market, by taking kickbacks for arranging service and construction contracts, and through extortion, gambling, prostitution, narcotics, and money changing. The dimensions of the black market were limitless and included corrupt officials, spies seeking untraceable funds and contact with the enemy, and mafiosi in league with military officers and businessmen out to make a fast buck. By late 1968, with the psychological defeat brought about by Tet, the crime wave was cresting, and the transition from a quest for military victory to making a profit had begun in earnest.
As one CIA officer recalled, “When the so-called Vietnamization of the war began, everyone knew that even though the Company would still be running CORDS, it was the beginning of the end. The contract employees began getting laid off, especially those running operations in Laos. The others, mostly ex-Army types, knew their turn was coming, so they began trying to make as much money as they could. Air America pilots doubled the amount of opium they carried.* The Americans in CORDS, with the help of the PRU, began shaking down the Vietnamese, arresting them if they didn’t pay protection money, even taking bribes to free suspects they’d already arrested. Everyone went crazy for a buck.”
“Here you have a very corrupt environment, a culture that tolerates corruption,” Ed Brady observed, “and now you’re going to run covert operations.”1
Considering that the Special Branch—which had cognizance over Phoenix—was responsible for investigating corruption, it was inevitable that some Phoenix coordinators would abuse the system. Much of that abuse occurred in Saigon under the nose of John O’Keefe, the CIA officer in charge of the Capital Military District. Described by Nelson Brickham as a “very capable officer”2 and a “raconteur” who spoke excellent Parisian French, O’Keefe was a ve
teran case officer with years of experience in Europe. In Vietnam he had served as the officer in charge of Chau Doc Province and Hue before being transferred to Saigon in September 1968.
Headquartered on the second floor of the three-story building behind City Hall on Nguyen Hue Boulevard, O’Keefe on paper reported to Hatcher James, the senior USAID adviser to Saigon Mayor Do Kin Nhieu, whose deputy “really ran things” (foremost among those things being the loan and default payments the GVN owed the “five communes,” the principal Chinese families in Cholon who served as South Vietnam’s major moneylenders). Tall, with sandy hair and a fondness for drinking scotch with the CIA’s notorious finance officer, alias General Monopoly, at the Cosmos, O’Keefe supervised Special Branch and Phoenix operations in Saigon beginning in September 1968.
Also arriving in Saigon in September 1968 was Captain Shelby Roberts. In 1965 Roberts had been a warrant officer flying photoreconnaissance missions for MACV’s Target Research and Analysis Division, locating targets for B-52 strikes. Another creation of Bill Tidwell’s, TRAC was used by General McChristian as the nucleus for the Combined Intelligence Center. In 1966 Roberts was commissioned an officer and, after completing the military adviser training program at Fort Bragg, returned to Vietnam and was assigned as Phoenix coordinator to Saigon’s high-rent neighborhood, Precinct 1. Snuggled on the east side of Saigon, far from the squalor of Cholon and Tan Son Nhut’s sprawling shantytowns, Precinct 1 had been the private domain of the French colonialists. By 1969 many of those rambling villas were occupied by Americans, including John O’Keefe, Hatcher James, and William Colby, who lived on treelined Hong Tap Thu Street.
Abutting Precinct 1 on the east was Gia Dinh Province, fiefdom of Major James K. Damron, whom Roberts described in an interview with the author as “the agency’s man in Gia Dinh” and “a warlord who went overboard and built a tremendous building. But he played from a position of power,” Roberts said. “He demanded total loyalty from his people, and the Vietnamese respected that and were terribly loyal to him.” Majors James Damron and Danny Pierce—who served as deputy coordinator of the Capital Phung Hoang Committee—were “business partners.”3
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