Phoenix Program

by Douglas Valentine

  Despite the optimism, there were problems. The pending cease-fire, aka the stab in the back, meant that just as the coup de grace was about to be delivered to the VCI, Washington politicians were preparing to grant it legal status, a development which would enable its agents, the directorate warned, “to increase their activity in controlled and contested areas and, with their anonymity, be free to proselytize, terrorize and propagandize in the GVN controlled rural and urban areas.” Citing captured documents that revealed plans for Communist subversion after the truce, the directorate said, “It is imperative that the Phung Hoang or a similar anti-VCI effort be continued, particularly during an in-place ceasefire.” Moreover, because the politicians were hastening to withdraw American troops, the directorate suggested “[c]areful and studied consideration … to ensure that the Phung Hoang Program is not adversely affected by the premature withdrawal of advisory personnel.”3

  Apart from the cease-fire and the drawdown, what the directorate feared most was the inability of the Vietnamese to manage the attack on the VCI. The pressure began to mount on December 3, 1970, when The New York Times quoted Robert Thompson as saying that captured documents indicated that hundreds of South Vietnamese policemen were Vietcong agents, that there were as many as thirty thousand Communist agents in the GVN, and that Phoenix was not doing the job and was itself infiltrated by Communists. Thompson’s charge was substantiated when, in 1970, a CIA counterintelligence investigation revealed that Da Nang’s PIC chief was a Communist double agent who had killed his captured comrades during the Tet offensive in order to maintain his cover.

  As a result of these problems, it was suggested that further revisions in the Phoenix program be made. One of the first steps was to hire two private companies—Southeast Asia Computer Associates (managed by CIA officer Jim Smith) and the Computer Science Corporation (under CIA officer Joe Langbien)—to advise the two hundred-odd Vietnamese technicians who were scheduled to take over the MACV and CORDS computers. The Vietnamese were folded into Big Mack, and the Phung Hoang Management Information System (PHMIS) was joined with the National Police Criminal Information System, which tracked the VCI members from their identification through their capture, legal processing, detention, and (when it happened), release.

  Personnel changes designed to strengthen National Police Command support of Phoenix began at the top with the promotion of Colonel Hai to brigadier general in September 1970.* Five months later twenty-five thousand ARVN officers and enlisted men and ten thousand RD Cadre were transferred to the National Police. Three policemen were sent to each village having at least five hundred residents, and in urban areas two cops were assigned for each thousand people. Field Police platoons were sent to the districts, and twenty-six hundred additional special policemen were hired into the force.4

  As a way of addressing what General Clay called “the critical shortage of qualified Special Police case officers,” the directorate focused greater attention on the case officer training courses and seminars at the regional Phung Hoang schools, emphasizing the use of target folders.

  Regarding American personnel, Phoenix inspection teams were given the authority to remove unsatisfactory Vietnamese, and more than two hundred senior enlisted men scheduled to return to the United States as part of the drawdown were transferred instead to Phoenix as deputy DIOCC advisers, mostly in the Delta. Because these men could speak Vietnamese and were counterintelligence experts, Jack called this a windfall. These counterintelligence specialists maintained target folders, reviewed agent reports, PIC reports, and Chieu Hoi debriefings, and liaisoned among PICs, PIOCCs, and Chieu Hoi centers.

  September 1970 also marked the creation of the Phoenix Career Program and the Military Assistance Security Advisory (MASA) course at Fort Bragg, climaxing a process begun in 1950, when the U.S. Army had established its Psywar Division at Fort Riley. Requirements for MASA training included an “outstanding” record and Vietnamese-language “ability and aptitude.” Prior service in Vietnam was “desirable,” and military intelligence officers were given top priority. Field-grade officers were promised entry into the Command and General Staff College. Other ranks were promised, among other things, preference of next assignment; civil schooling upon completion of the tour; an invitation to join the Army’s Foreign Area Specialist program; and, while in Vietnam, five vacations and a special thirty-day leave, including a round-trip ticket anywhere in the free world.

  “The only bad side to that,” said Doug Dillard, “is that it didn’t work. When I came from the War College to take over as chief of Military Intelligence Branch, we were getting a lot of complaints from the youngsters saying, ‘You’re not living up to your promise. I wanted to go to Fort Bragg and you’re sending me to Fort Lewis.’ It was part of the turmoil of the drawdown, that all these jobs were not going to exist when these kids started coming out of Vietnam. I immediately did everything I could to change that program and not make any commitment to those youngsters.”5

  In July 1970 the Phoenix Coordinators’ Orientation Course was renamed the Phung Hoang Advisory School and moved from Seminary Camp to the Driftwood Service Club on the Vung Tau Air Base. Classes began in August and were taught by CIA instructors and a team of intelligence officers assigned to Lieutenant Colonel C. J. Fulford. As the National Police assumed greater responsibility for Phoenix, more Public Safety advisers began to receive Phung Hoang training and were folded into the program as PIC and Phoenix task force advisers.

  Another development in 1970 was the proliferation of Phoenix task forces. For example, in September 1970 in Quang Tin Province, a Phoenix task force composed of 180 field policemen, 60 PRU, and 30 armed propagandists was organized and used as a private army by the Phoenix coordinator in Tam Ky. Called Hiep Dong, the force was broken down into platoons that operated independently and in combined operations with U.S. or ARVN forces. The Quang Tin province chief wrote Hiep Dong’s operational orders, which were cosigned by the local U.S. and ARVN commanders. In one Hiep Dong operation, 24 Regional Force companies, 99 Popular Force platoons, and the entire 196th and 5th ARVN regiments were committed. Of the operation’s 132 objectives, 116 were VCI targets, 99 of which were neutralized.

  In addition, the Territorial Forces and People’s Self-Defense Forces provided “intelligence and reconnaissance units” to the force. “In my hamlet,” said a resident of Quang Tin Province quoted in Hostages of War, “the Phoenix men come at night and rap on our doors. They are dressed in the black pajamas of the Liberation soldiers and tell people they are with the Liberation army. But they are really the secret police. If the people welcome them with joy, these policemen kill them or take them away as Viet Cong. But if they are VC soldiers and we say anything good about the Saigon government, we are taken off as rice bearers or soldiers for the Front.”6

  All in all, 8,191 VCI were killed in 1970—more than any year before or after; 7,745 VCI rallied and 6,405 were jailed, for a total of 22,341 VCI neutralized, all class A and B. Approximately 40 percent of all VCI kills were credited to Territorial Forces. The Field Police were still “underemployed,” according to the 1970 End of Year Report, and “Coordination of the PRU with the DIOCCs was somewhat less than ideal in some areas. The PRU, in some cases justifiably critical of the security in the DIOCCs and PIOCCs, generally did not contribute intelligence regularly to the DIOCC but instead reacted to intelligence they had gathered on their own.” PRU matters, however, were not within the directorate’s bailiwick but were “addressed by the advisory elements at the Saigon level.”7

  In A Systems Analysis View of the Vietnam War, Thomas Thayer reports that the PRU in 1970 were “per man … at least ten times as effective as any other anti-VCI action force.”8 He also writes: “The PRU are being incorporated into the Special Branch” and that “Hopefully [sic] they will serve as a nucleus around which an improved police force may be built.”9 However, in March 1972 William Grieves told General Abrams, “To date … not a single application has been received from a member
of the PRU for enrollment in the National Police.”10

  Thayer is far more critical of Phoenix than the revisionist directorate. According to Thayer, “Results through April 1971 indicate that Phoenix is still a fragmented effort, lacking central direction, control and priority. Most neutralizations still involve low level, relatively unimportant workers gained as a side benefit from military operations…. Only 2% of all VCI neutralized were specifically targeted and killed by Phoenix forces, and there have been very few reports of such assassinations from the field.” He faults the judicial system for being unable to “process the 2500 or so suspected VCI captured each month,” and citing a “constant backlog” of detainees, he observes: “Significant numbers of alleged VCI wait 6 months before going to trial.”11

  Meanwhile, the issues of incentives and internal security were dominating Phoenix planning. Regarding internal security, General Frank Clay, the deputy director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, blamed the CIA for the “critical shortage of qualified Special Police case officers.”12 Colby, meanwhile, in a December 12, 1970, presentation to Defense Secretary Melvin Laird (titled “Internal Security in South Vietnam—Phoenix”), complained about the “continuing predominance of military leadership in the program.” Colby then made twenty-seven recommendations for “improving GVN internal security in general and Phung Hoang in particular.” Chief among his recommendations were that an FBI officer be sent to Saigon and that an incentive program be implemented.

  The request for FBI assistance was initially made by General Abrams in the summer of 1970 “for the specific purpose of providing recommendations for the neutralization of important national level members of the [VCI].”13 It fell to Colby to get the ball rolling. He assigned Jack, the assistant for concepts and strategy on the Vietnam Task Force, as action officer on the matter. “People in Washington, D.C., wanted Colby’s scalp,” Jack explained. “Things weren’t moving, Phoenix being one. What there was was tension between the CIA and the Pentagon. And so the FBI was called in.”

  On February 4, 1970, through General Fritz Kramer, Jack met with FBI Internal Security Division chief William C. Sullivan, who told him “that any request for FBI assistance would have to come from the White House as a directive signed by Kissinger.” Sullivan said he would call Kissinger “on a quiet” basis and apprise him of the request. The problem, said Jack, was that “Senior people were very sensitive about the FBI screwing around in the embassy” and that AID Assistant Director Robert Nooter thought that the task being assigned to the FBI was a police function rightly belonging to AID.

  To clear the way for the FBI, Colby back-channeled instructions to his friend and CIA colleague Byron Engel, the chief of Public Safety. Engel passed those instructions along to his Vietnam desk officer, John Manopoli. When Jack met with Manopoli on February 8, the latter said that AID had changed its mind and had no objections to the FBI visit. That day Jack drafted a “talking paper” for General Karhohs, which the Vietnam Task Force chief used to brief Defense Secretary Laird the next day. Jack called Sullivan “to clear the action,” and on February 12 Warren Nutter signed the necessary letter of transmittal, which Laird sent to the White House for approval. On February 23, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover received the directive, signed by National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger.

  On March 30 Jack received a copy of a White House memo directing the FBI to send two people TDY to Vietnam. Hoover approved it and sent Harold Child, the FBI’s legal adviser at the Tokyo Embassy, to Saigon for four or five days on a “diagnostic” basis, to see if an investigation was warranted. “It was a perfunctory execution of a White House directive.” Jack chuckled. “There was not enough time to do a thorough review.”

  Harold Child writes:

  Early one morning I received a telephone call from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. [He] wanted me to go immediately to Saigon to talk with all the people concerned to help him reach a conclusion as to whether there was anything that the FBI could constructively do in South Vietnam…. John Mason turned out to be the individual in Saigon who was designated to assist me in my contacts and provide information and background that I required.

  Until I landed in Saigon, I had no idea whatever as to what the Phoenix program was. In fact, even after the first two or three days, what they were doing and what they had accomplished were very confusing to me. Upon return to Tokyo, I furnished a detailed report to Mr. Hoover … [and] my recommendations were in summary: 1) No information had been presented to me to demonstrate that operations of the Phoenix Program had any direct relation to FBI internal security responsibilities; 2) There was much confusion and inconsistency inherent in the program, which had developed over a considerable period of time, making it impractical for the FBI to come in at this late stage; and 3) I recommended against the FBI becoming involved in insurgency problems or other local problems in Vietnam.14

  John Mason’s military deputy, Colonel Chester McCoid, has a different recollection. According to McCoid, in an interview with the author, Child was there to obtain information on Vietnamese supporters of American antiwar groups; the FBI wanted current intelligence, but the CIA would not share what it had. Mason presented “the CIA’s perspective, not the CORDS perspective,” McCoid claimed.15 Citing the separate charters of the CIA and FBI, “Mason lectured Child on cognizance, arguing that overseas intelligence is the CIA’s job.

  “Phoenix was a creature of the embassy,” McCoid said. “The footwork was done by uniforms, but the tone was set by the CIA—by Ted Shackley and John Mason.”*

  Colby denied any shenanigans. “I just wanted FBI ideas on how to improve Phoenix,” he said to me.18 Yet while seeming to advance the process, Colby actually blunted it. On April 30, 1971, Hoover reported to Colby that FBI services were not required in Saigon. Jack terminated the action on May 24. “Colby sent a letter killing it,” he said. Instead of the FBI’s advising the directorate, the Internal Security Bureau of the National Police was expanded from forty to six hundred personnel.

  For a view of Phoenix in the field, we turn to a December 1970 report by the III Corps DEPCORDS, Richard Funkhouser. At the time, according to Funkhouser, the VCI were lying low, concentrating on recruiting new cadres, penetrating the GVN, and bumping off the occasional GVN official. The III Corps commander, General Do Cao Tri, had approved “a combined U.S.-GVN Phung Hoang Task Force” to inspect IOCCs and “get the horses galloping in the same direction.” General Tri (who was killed when his helicopter was shot down on February 23, 1971) had approved the task force as part of a “crash VCI program” that “Thieu kicked off … himself at a special secret meeting at Vung Tau on 31 October.”19

  Funkhouser reported that PIOCCs were being integrated into police operation centers, that the VCI was stronger in urban than rural areas, and that “the leadership of the police traces itself back to the Ministry of Interior which reportedly makes assignments after the proper payoff is made.” He deemed quotas “redundant, difficult to attain and in fact not susceptible to accurate measurement,” the problem being that neutralization figures were inflated to meet goals. He said that most Vietnamese police officers were too busy to devote time to Phoenix but that targeting of the VCI had improved with the assignment of senior noncommissioned officers as deputy DIOCC advisers in thirty-five of III Corps’s fifty-three districts. “Coordination with PICs ranges from good to fair,” he reported, “but advisors often conducted supplementary interrogations.” To be successful, Funkhouser noted, anti VCI operations required “the sensitive and instant use of informers and total secrecy.”

  “We stayed on our own side of the fence,” said the III Corps senior Public Safety adviser Walt Burmester. “And the Vietnamese felt the same way…. People didn’t come to the police for help, because the only places attacked by the VC were government installations.” Burmester added that the National Police merely supplied Phoenix with equipment and that Phoenix itself acted more as a resource center than an action agency.20

  In fact, the attack
against the VCI in the early 1970’s was carried out primarily by the CIA through the PRU. As reported by Funkhouser, “The increase in PRU effectiveness throughout the region has been spectacular, and is due primarily to the strong leadership of the Region PRU commander and his U.S. adviser.” That PRU adviser was Rudy Enders.

  In 1965, with only nine cadres (one of whom was PVT), Rudy Enders had formed III Corps’s original counterterror team in Tan Uyen. In 1970 he returned to Bien Hoa, at Ted Shackley’s request, to manage the region’s paramilitary forces. “Our main job was to keep rockets from raining on Saigon,” Enders said to me, although he also managed the attack on the VCI.21 However, he added, “There were simply too many party committee structures. To unscramble this, we centralized in Bien Hoa. We got access to high-level guys in the Chieu Hoi center, the PIC, or the hospital—anyone we could get our hands on. We’d take him around, watch him for two weeks, and try to win him over.

  “Sam Adams was making a case that the commander of VC military subsection twenty-two, Tu Thanh, had recruited four hundred fifty penetrations in Hau Nghia,” Enders said, then told how he proved Adams wrong. The process began when “Our Long An officer and a defector from COSVN were going past the market one day.” Quite by accident, the defector spotted Tu Thanh’s secretary. She was grabbed and taken to the embassy house, where, during interrogation, it was learned that she was in love with Tu Thanh’s son and that Tu Thanh’s family had established legal residence under aliases in Hau Nghia after the Cambodian invasion. However, because Tu Thanh had forbidden his son to see his secretary, the woman decided to defect. Blessed with a photographic memory and eager to exact revenge, she supplied the CIA with Tu Thanh’s identification number, along with the real names and addresses of another two hundred VCI in Tu Thanh’s network.