In his letter to Tilton, Towle said that “War crimes as designated by the Geneva Conventions were not uncommon” in Phoenix and that he “had expressed my negative feelings on the program to the province Phung Hoang Coordinator and had given much thought to applying for release under MACV 525-36.” He then requested “immediate release” from Phoenix.
The next day Major Damron, with the approval of the IV Corps Phoenix adviser, Lieutenant Colonel Efram E. Waller, reassigned Towle to the Tuyen Binh DIOCC—the same DIOCC where the previous two “triple sixers” had been killed in action. Damron noted that General Cushman was aware of the move, as was the JAG. Meanwhile, Towle’s request for release was in the pipeline. So, taking two weeks’ vacation, he hid at a friend’s house in Can Tho until August 10, when the new CORDS chief of staff, General Frank Smith, approved his release. (Postscript: Referring to “the case that appalled us all,” Wilbur Wilson wrote to George Jacobson, at the request of John Tilton, suggesting: “A records check in Saigon before an officer or enlisted man is assigned to a Phung Hoang position in Vietnam could reduce chances of assignment of unsuitable personnel.”)
While William Colby was assuring Congress that no Phoenix adviser had resigned on moral grounds, or through MACV 525-36, and that incentive programs were not policy, John Tilton was organizing, with the National Police Command, a High Value Rewards Program (HVRP). In explaining the program to his wife, Colonel McCoid writes, “A very substantial reward is placed on highly placed VC political leaders, as much as $8,000 at the rate on the blackmarket or twice that amount on the official rate of exchange. Our idea is to induce the lower-grade VCI to turn their bosses in for the bounty money.” Sadly, says McCoid, “our original proposal … was watered down by the bleeding hearts, who think placing a price on your enemy’s head is excessively cruel! This despite Colby’s support.”
A conference of police and CORDS personnel, including Tilton, was scheduled for July 23, to select a list of VCI whose names were to be passed down to Phoenix officers in four pilot provinces (Binh Dinh, Quang Nam, Bien Hoa, and Vinh Binh) crucial to Thieu’s election in October. Selected VCI were to be district rank or higher, dangerous, and confirmed with enough evidence to convict. Province chiefs, in their role as Phoenix committee chairmen, were to select dossiers and coordinate with the PIOCC. The list was to be approved by the region’s military commander, and as stated in Interior Ministry Directive 1223, the “Phung Hoang Bloc of the National Police Command, acting for the Central Phung Hoang Committee, will review and make final selection of the VCI to be placed on the rewards list and will be submitted to the Major General Commander of the National Police, Vice Chairman concurrently Secretary General of the Central Phung Hoang Committee for final approval.”
The HVRP, which was to be expanded into all provinces and administered by Phoenix advisers, was tentatively approved on July 31 by Josiah Bennett, director of the Vietnam Working Group; Henry Sizer at the Saigon Embassy’s Internal Unit; the State Department’s Vietnam desk officer, Lars Hydle; MACV; and the Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO). However, the conference to select HVRP targets was indefinitely postponed as a result of Decree 1042. Promulgated in secret by General Khiem on August 2, 1971, its provisions known only to the Central Security Committee, the decree granted VCI suspects the right to an attorney and the right to appear in person at their trials. As a result, “public action” on the HVRP was deferred until after the election.
On October 3, 1971, Thieu was reelected with nearly 90 percent of the vote. The next day The New York Times reported that more than twenty thousand innocent civilians had been killed under the Phoenix program and that a congressional subcommittee had criticized the Pentagon for not investigating war crimes. A few days later the High Values Reward Program was scrapped by Ambassador Bunker, and plans to phase out American involvement in Phoenix were begun in earnest.
The process had begun on August 11, 1971, when Gage McAfee, a legal adviser to William Colby, submitted his end of tour report. Citing reports that the VCI was actually growing in number, McAfee writes, “There is doubt that the Phung Hoang Program is achieving its desired goal of eliminating the infrastructure. It can be argued that its resources and energy are actually being diverted to other undesirable activities that are … counterproductive in the context of supporting a viable and responsive government which will provide an effective alternative to the insurgent government.” He adds that “some if not the majority of the war results from the social grievances of the part of the population, separate and distinct from the military aggression of the North,” and that “No really responsive government should ever need such a program at all.”
McAfee notes that An Tri “lacks a legislative base, there being no specific statute enacted by the National Assembly which empowers the Executive in time of war or emergency to administratively detain.” He cites the legislature’s opposition to Province Security Committees, which, he adds, “were generally acknowledged to be extra-constitutional if not unconstitutional.” He rejects as “irrelevant” the argument that no residual responsibility for civilian detainees exists, citing Nuremberg and Vietnam, in which Telford Taylor says that if the GVN did not abide by the Geneva Conventions, “then the original captor power [the United States] must take effective steps to correct the situation, or shall request the return of the prisoners.”26
McAfee emphasizes that Province Security Committees were not “regularly constituted courts” and that support for them was “a departure from the standards” of Article 3. “From a strictly legal standpoint,” he concludes, the Rimestead letter required that the United States either demand the elimination of security committees or take steps to insure that no prisoners captured by U.S. forces were sentenced by them. “Not only are we now in the difficult position of having supported these committees in the past,” he writes, “but many Vietnamese now think that Security Committees are as American as apple pie and baseball. The Phung Hoang program itself has always been associated with the Americans and of course the CIA. If the U.S. decides … to recommend the elimination of these Committees, it might be useful for the Vietnamese … to blame it all on the U.S. So with the Phung Hoang program in general. If it fades into and is totally absorbed by the Special Police, it might help the Vietnamese to eliminate the bad aftertaste by blaming the entire program on their misguided benefactors.” The only alternative, McAfee suggests, was “to force the GVN to make necessary improvements.”
But the U.S. government would not go along with McAfee’s recommendations that the Stalinist security committees “should die,” that trials be made public, or that “The kill quota be eliminated as the ultimate misuse of the body count.” Instead, it stalled until the problem could be sloughed off on the GVN. The Defense Department denied any “residual responsibility” whatsoever, and the Saigon Embassy minimized the problem, saying that only “between 1500 and 2500 individuals out of a VCI correction population of about 17,000 are the subject of that responsibility.”27
The final word on U.S. policy regarding civilian detainees was stated on November 12, 1971, in State Department telegram 220774, which directed the Saigon Embassy to work with the Directorate of Political Security to guarantee “humanitarian treatment of detainees” and to ensure that An Tri was implemented “in terms of fundamental concepts of due process and to improve conditions of internment.” This, despite State Department attorney Robert Starr’s admission that “We cannot justify secrecy of procedural reforms in Circular 1042,” which failed to provide for judicial review, “meaningful” appeal, “free choice” of an attorney, or the right to cross-examine witnesses. Noting that confessions alone were enough to convict a suspected VCI, Starr urged that “there should be a requirement of corroborating evidence.” He cautioned Bunker that An Tri “is subject to attack on grounds it does not simply provide for emergency detention, but involves actual findings of guilt or innocence and sentencing of persons,” and he suggested that Bunker work to implement “new legisl
ation establishing a clear and detailed basis for program.”
What Starr envisioned was legislation transferring security committee responsibilities to regularly constituted courts. But that never happened. Until the fall of Saigon, only the CIA-advised Directorate of Political Security could reverse Province Security Committee recommendations to extend detention. In November the GVN did withdraw from security committees the power to recommend An Tri detention against Communist offenders whose sentences had expired, VCI suspects who were released before trial for lack of evidence, and VCI suspects who were referred and had been acquitted. Unless “new factors” were specified. In December Prime Minister Khiem announced a parole and conditional release program “to release selected prisoners and also provide a system for post-release surveillance.”
On December 13, 1971, Robert Starr reported to William H. Sullivan: “These reforms are another welcome step in the right direction but fall short of effectively dealing with the underlying problems.”28 The next day the Washington Post printed an article by Peter Osnos headlined us PLAN FAILS TO WIPE OUT vc CADRE. The year 1971 closed without a resolution of An Tri or Phoenix.
CHAPTER 28
Technicalities
In early October 1971 Lieutenant Colonel Connie O’Shea arrived at the Phoenix Directorate and was assigned by John Tilton as liaison officer to Colonel Song at the Phung Hoang bloc office in the National Police Interrogation Center. His job, he told me, “was to tell Tilton what Song was thinking.”1
A veteran intelligence officer who had served in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967, O’Shea described the directorate in late 1971 as “Sleepy Hollow …. There were ongoing discussions between U.S. and Vietnamese police officials,” he recalled, “as to how to get the program transferred. Tilton and [operations chief Paul] Coughlin were doing their PHREEX [Phung Hoang reexamination] report, and coming down from Washington was a proposed list of things we should back away from. They were going to turn the dossiers over to the Vietnamese, and the Special Branch was apprehensive; they didn’t want to turn their files over to anybody…. The other big thing was PHMIS [Phung Hoang Management Information System], but it was not ready to be used yet by the Vietnamese.”
Coauthored by the CORDS Research and Analysis Division, PHREEX, according to Phoenix operations chief Paul Coughlin, “came from John Tilton,” who initially wanted to call it Phung Hoang Reprise.2 “It involved four months of depth research and included slides and graphs,” explained Coughlin, “and basically outlined how to transfer Phoenix to the Vietnamese and how to deal with lessening assets [in 1972 the directorate had at most fifteen staffers]. But it also addressed what activities U.S. forces should be involved in, and to what degree; the whole idea of Revolutionary Development support and CORDS, which was the program’s Achilles’ heel, because everyone was answering to a different master…. Detention was not a PHREEX issue,” Coughlin added, “but military justice and the moral aspects of the program were, as were our concerns over Vietnamese loyalty. After all of these things were considered together, we decided not to let the program die on the vine, but just to let the dead areas go.” Otherwise, Coughlin noted, “Our concern in the directorate was that people in the field got what they needed—jeeps, communications equipment, et cetera—which we learned about through reports.”
He added that “reports on operations ran up through another channel—through Special Branch.” As for the relationship between the Special Branch and Phoenix, Coughlin observed that the directorate was “very compartmented,” that a reserve officer on staff might have worked for the CIA, and that Chester McCoid’s replacement as deputy director, Colonel Herb Allen, “was not in the know” and “was selected for that reason.” Coughlin asserted that the Green Beret murder trial “changed the whole thing” and that employees of the Defense Investigative Service started arriving, running agents, and doing background investigations for Phoenix in 1972.
A different perspective on PHREEX was provided by Coughlin’s deputy, Lieutenant Colonel George Hudman, a veteran intelligence officer who was also a friend of John Tilton’s. “Coughlin was not an intelligence officer,” Hudman explained, “and, as a result, was not trusted by Tilton. So I briefed PHREEX to Jake [George Jacobson] and General Forrester…. Basically, it explained why Phoenix didn’t work. People in the agency were looking for a way to back out, and PHREEX was it. We took all the data compiled from all Phoenix centers, put it all together, and showed that the program was failing because it was too big and because the military had no understanding of it. They had no understanding of intelligence. They would round up VCI suspects, and they resorted to body counts. But intelligence isn’t predicated on body counts.”3
Despite blaming the military for the failure of Phoenix, Hudman explained that “Shackley, then Polgar to Tilton was the real chain of command” and that “Bob Wall [then senior adviser to the Special Branch] oversaw Phoenix.”
Indeed, as the U.S. military prepared to leave Vietnam, the CIA needed to find a new way of managing the attack against the VCI without appearing to do so. In other words, the concept of an attack against the VCI was still considered vital; what was sought was a new organization. The process began when General Abrams suggested in October that “responsibility for the full anti-VCI mission should be assigned to the National Police Command on a time-phased basis commencing 1972”4 and that Phung Hoang committees and centers be deactivated as a way of “increasing the emphasis on the antiVCI responsibilities of district and province chiefs.”
These recommendations were studied in Washington by a working group composed of Josiah Bennett (State), John Arthur (AID), George Carver (CIA), John Manopoli (Public Safety), General Karhohs (ISA), the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and SACSA. After each agency had considered the proposals, Bennett shot a telegram (196060) back to Saigon indicating tentative approval, although, in deference to the CIA, “with the Special Branch collating intelligence and maintaining dossiers on the VCI, and with positive action responsibilities assigned to the PRU, NPFF and other elements as required.” A few weeks later Ambassador Bunker sent a telegram (17357) to Secretary of State William Rogers saying that Robert Thompson and the GVN had also approved of the plan. The working group then prepared to send a team, headed by the Vietnam Task Force’s action officer Jack, to Saigon to determine which “key people” could be reassigned to Phoenix. When the team arrived in Saigon in mid-November, according to Jack, “Tilton got the okay from Carver to give me the Phoenix information.”
Despite its tentative approval of the plan to phase out Phoenix and turn the management of the attack against the VCI over to the National Police Command (NPC), the CIA had no such intentions. In fact, in October 1971 orders went out to all province Special Branch advisers to begin forming Special Intelligence Force Units (SIFU). Eight-man teams composed of four volunteers each from the Special Police and Field Police, the SIFU were targeted specifically at high-level VCI, as substitutes for the PRU. They were also a sign that the CIA planned to manage the attack on the VCI through the Special Branch, while keeping Phoenix intact as a way of deflecting attention and accountability.
For Phu Yen Province PIC adviser Rob Simmons—who worked under cover of the CORDS Pacification Security Coordination Division but who never even met the CORDS province senior adviser—Phoenix in 1972 was merely a library of files to cross-check information, not the CIA’s partner in the attack on the VCI. “We would go to Phoenix,” Simmons told me, “and they’d show us a file, and we’d use the file to build a case. And every report we generated, we sent to the PIOCC. But Special Branch had its own files. And if at the PIC we got someone who cooperated, we would withhold his file—if he was going to be doubled—because we knew the PIOCC was penetrated.”5 Furthermore, according to Simmons, the Phu Yen Province officer in charge concentrated on unilateral operations and political reporting, because he considered (as had Rocky Stone) Special Branch liaison too exposed to be secure.
As William Colby explained it, “CORDS people were
kept out of the station. And even though Special Branch coordinated through the province senior adviser, the station had a clear chain of command in intelligence matters.”6
Indeed, Phoenix was a valuable resource, and it allowed the CIA to say that it had no officers in the districts. But the CIA was not about to turn over its Special Branch files to the National Police Command (NPC) or submit its agents to NPC authority. And when those proposals returned to Carver’s desk for final approval, there they died. In December 1971 Carver wrote a working paper entitled “Future U.S. Role in the Phung Hoang Program.” Its stated purpose was “to ensure that the GVN Phung Hoang Program continues to receive effective U.S. advisory support during up-coming 18-24 month period with an option for continuance if required.”
Using familiar terms, Carver defines Phoenix as: a) “the intelligence effort against the higher levels of the VCI who possess information … on enemy plans and intentions; b) the intelligence effort directed against the lowest level of the VCI [who] perform an essentially political function of relating the Communist party mechanism to the population; and c) an action effort to neutralize the targets in (a) and (b).” He also notes that, on November 27, 1971, General Khiem changed his mind and said that “Phung Hoang Centers and Committees will be retained,” that the Central Phung Hoang Committee would be upgraded and chaired by Khiem himself, that the Phoenix program “will be continued indefinitely,” and that “included … will be a rewards program funded by the GVN.” One month after Bunker had killed the High Value Rewards Program, it was born anew as a GVN program, as part of Phung Hoang.
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