Part 9: The CIA as Organized Crime...The Spook who Became a Congressman, why CIA Officers can't be Allowed to Hold Public Office

The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt 
America and the World
By Douglas Valentine
| Chapter 15 | 

THE SPOOK WHO BECAME A CONGRESSMAN: WHY CIA OFFICERS CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO 

HOLD PUBLIC OFFICE 

While running for Congress as a Republican candidate in 2000, Robert R. “Rob” Simmons posted on his website and in TV ads a picture of himself standing in front of an American flag in an army uniform. The symbolic meaning was obvious: Simmons was glorifying himself as a soldier/patriot above all else. 

But in the final week of the campaign, his identification with militancy took an unexpected turn when he was scandalized by allegations that he had committed war crimes while serving not as a soldier, but as a CIA officer in Vietnam. Simmons called the accusation a “smear tactic.” 

“Any veteran, anybody who served his country in war, should be offended,” Simmons said, appealing directly to the patriotism of undecided voters in a last ditch effort to win the election, while inadvertently castigating the CIA. 

Adding to his indignation was the undisputed fact that the charges had emanated from the staff of his opponent, Congressman Sam Gejdenson, who had represented Connecticut’s 2nd District since 1981. Rocked by the outpouring of sympathy for Simmons, Gejdenson fired a campaign worker for inciting two (yes, two) college students to plan (yes, plan) a rally against Simmons. The students were intimidated – politically suppressed, in CIA terms – into cancelling their protest. 

The local newspaper, the New London Day, headlined the Gejdenson aspect of the story, calling it a “dirty trick,” but refusing to delve into the substance of the charges. So I wrote to the editor and said that I’d interviewed Simmons twelve years earlier. I offered to write an article about him; but the newspaper decided to wait until after the election. 

It seemed like the newspaper was trying to help Simmons win the election. And win he did; though trailing in the week before the election, he won by less than 3,000 votes. It was the allegation that he was a torturer that propelled him to victory. 

God bless America 

When the Day finally featured a story on Simmons’ sordid CIA past, it admitted that the war crimes charge wasn’t a “dirty trick” but stemmed from a profile of Simmons the Day itself had published in 1994. In a rare moment of candor, Simmons in 1994 had confessed that while managing the Phú Yên Province Interrogation Center (PIC), he would threaten to withhold medicine from injured prisoners in order to obtain information. But, he added piously, he never made good on the threat. 

According to Simmons, a coercive tactic like threatening to withhold medical treatment did not reach the threshold of a war crime. On the contrary, “If I hadn’t involved myself, many people would have lost their limbs or their lives,” Simmons said with a straight face. 

Simmons’ denial was enough for the Day. It didn’t ask if he’d withheld medicine for hours or days, or if his victims included children and the elderly. It wasn’t concerned with the guilt or innocence of the people Simmons abused, or if they were forced to sign false confessions to stop the bleeding. Steeped in the same racist stereotypes that military propagandists spewed during the war, the newspaper assumed that every Vietnamese in the PIC was a terrorist deserving of whatever atrocities were committed against him or her. They were all trying to kill heroic Americans like Rob Simmons, weren’t they? 

I wasn’t surprised by the newspaper’s shenanigans. From the time The Phoenix Program was published in 1990, I’d witnessed a gradual escalation of belligerent nationalistic rhetoric, accompanied by an outpouring of revisionist Vietnam War history. The reactionary Reagan, Bush and Clinton regimes had waged a series of increasingly militant and covert action initiatives, from El Salvador to Iraq to Serbia, in a calculated and well-publicized attempt to purge the Vietnam Syndrome from the fragile American psyche. 

The floodgates opened in the wake of 9/11. Suddenly, the practice of withholding medicine became CIA standard operating procedure as part of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld repertoire of torturous “enhanced” interrogation techniques. Torture became so popular that in 2003 the US Supreme Court approved the practice of withholding medical treatment for domestic law enforcement purposes. In a 6-3 decision, the Court exonerated several California cops who’d withheld medical treatment from a Hispanic suspect they’d shot five times. The cops, like Simmons, claimed they were merely trying to get him to talk. 1 

Withholding medical treatment, however, was not always applauded by American militarists as a cool way of coercing bad guys. When John McCain ran for president in 2008, withholding medical treatment was characterized as the dastardly sort of thing only subhuman Commies would do. McCain, who spent five and a half years in captivity in North Vietnam, was shot down while dropping bombs on civilians in the heart of Hanoi. Taken prisoner with fractures in his right leg and both arms, he received minimal care and was kept in wretched conditions. As he tearfully recalled, “They kept saying, ‘You will not receive any medical treatment until you talk’.” 2 McCain suffered. “I thought that if I just held out, that they’d take me to the hospital. I was fed small amounts of food by the guard and also allowed to drink some water. I was able to hold the water down, but I kept vomiting the food. 

“I looked at my knee. It was about the size, shape and color of a football. I remembered that when I was a flying instructor a fellow had ejected from his plane and broken his thigh. He had gone into shock, the blood had pooled in his leg, and he died, which came as quite a surprise to us – a man dying of a broken leg. Then I realized that a very similar thing was happening to me.” 

McCain cracked. Thereafter known as “Songbird”, McCain told the guards, “I’ll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital.” 

I’ve repeated McCain’s sorrowful story to show how easy it was for the Day to manipulate information to minimize the charge against Simmons. We didn’t hear the screams of pain and fear in the background like we did in McCain’s account. Simmons’ victims were given no voice at all. 

This magical ability to portray the same thing as good in one case and bad in another is the essence of the political and psychological warfare campaign being waged against Americans by rehabilitated war criminals like Simmons and McCain and their supporting cast in the old boy network that has manipulated public opinion for 70 years. But the differences between McCain and the Vietnamese Simmons tortured, are that McCain was wounded while terror bombing innocent civilians in a major city in a foreign country while Simmons remained unscathed, and the people he terrorized were snatched from their homes at midnight or in Phoenix round ups. 

As his well-rehearsed story illustrates, Simmons is an expert at dissembling, which, as I explained to the Day, is why he shouldn’t have been allowed to hold public office. He can’t be trusted to tell the truth about anything. But the sad fact is that many Americans are soothed by the double standard, which absolves them of complicity in the crimes their country commits. 

What’s worse is that he has legions of allies in the media to censor his critics, fellow CIA officers to back his alibi, and corrupted historians to lend an air of authenticity to his propaganda. 

Stated Policy vs Operational Reality 

Early in my research into the Phoenix program, I filed an FOIA with the CIA asking it to release all its records about the PICs. That request was denied. 

Forty years after they were abandoned, the PICs are still as big a secret as what happened inside the gulag archipelago of black sites the CIA built after 9/11 in eight countries, including Thailand (where al Qaeda commander Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded), Afghanistan, and “several democracies in Eastern Europe”. 3 

The CIA will never release to the public its secret files about the PICs, which certainly served as models for its black sites. And even if it did release them, they should not be believed. CIA officers are trained never to incriminate themselves in written reports or spoken words. Not to do so, after all, is key to achieving plausible deniability. 

The way to understand the operational realities of running a PIC, as opposed to the stated policies Simmons and his co-conspirators cite chapter and verse, is by studying the political, psychological and bureaucratic contexts in which they occur. By doing so, one realizes that war crimes like those committed in the PICs are unstated, but carefully crafted US policy. 

The mindset of CIA officers and their media co-conspirators is the unifying factor in this conspiracy. McCain, the tortured, and Simmons – by the same standards – the torturer, truly believe the heroic myth they have created about themselves. Indeed, the “Myth of the Hero” has informed Western literature and philosophy since the Greek elite paid Homer to pen the Iliad and Odyssey, forever endowing the warrior class with the highest social virtues, while justifying the tragic consequences of their imperial marauding as “fate.” 

Since then the theme of the warrior hero has determined Western social development. The Old Testament would be a short story without it. How many times have Hollywood’s leading men quoted the rousing speech Shakespeare had Henry V deliver to his soldiers on Saint Crispin’s Eve: 

For he today that sheds his blood with me 

Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile 

This day shall gentle his condition… 

Being initiated into a secret society – a “band of warrior brothers” that exists apart from and is superior to civil society – can be intoxicating. Even Confederate soldiers are venerated as heroes; for however vile they were as individuals, they obeyed their officers and killed and died on command. Much of America’s rhetorical identity as “exceptional” is based on this Marlboro macho man myth. 

What distinguishes CIA officers is their transcendent ability, through their bureaucratic association with the National Security Establishment and its Homeric scribes in Hollywood, to promulgate their myths as fact, while guaranteeing that the truth is concealed. 

McCain’s exalted status as a US Senator enabled him to enact legislation that sealed thousands of documents pertaining to Vietnam War POW briefings. He claimed he did it to protect the privacy of POWs, but his real motive, according to Sydney H. Schanberg, was to keep the lid on the details of his collaboration with his captors. 4 

Simmons pulled a similar stunt. While serving as a legislative aide in the US Congress, he helped author and enact the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which makes it a crime to name CIA agents. It was already a crime to report CIA “sources and methods,” but this Act added another layer of legal chain mail to the protective shield already separating CIA officers from the consequences of their crimes. Once they are safely ensconced in this legally-gated community, they have only to sculpt their Boy Scout persona. 

Every crime boss knows how to act in front of the press. In 1958, reporter Dom Frasca managed to get an interview with Vito Genovese, just before he went to prison for drug trafficking. Don Vito liked golf, wore yellow tinted glasses, and lived alone in a five-bedroom cottage. He did his own cooking, mostly traditional Italian dishes. Eight grandkids often visited. When Frasca asked him about the rackets, Vito blamed all his troubles on his ex-wife going through menopause. Most significantly, Vito’s wry humor kept Frasca at an impeccable distance without offending. 

It’s easy to put on an act. The best politicians, criminals and CIA officers do it naturally. The problem for the rest of us is that, over time, the actors come to believe it. The myths they internalize are the fatal “lie in the soul” Plato warned about. “Fate” isn’t what makes someone murder and torture for profit; it is deceiving oneself into believing one has no choice. 

Not everyone is a victim of this mass delusion. Warren Milberg, a CIA officer I interviewed for The Phoenix Program, told me how, in 1967, the Pentagon invited him and two other Air Force officers to join a secret CIA counterinsurgency program in Vietnam. Volunteers were given extensive training and sent to Vietnam to serve at the discretion of senior CIA officers in Saigon and the regions. Most were assigned to the provinces as paramilitary officers. Several became Phoenix coordinators. 

Milberg, who identified himself as one of the “Protected Few,” joined the program. But the other two officers withdrew, one “as a matter of conscience.” Jacques Klein withdrew because “he felt the means and methods that he thought were going to be used in [Phoenix] were similar to the means and methods used by the Nazis in World War Two.” 

Klein took individual responsibility. Simmons sacrificed his and is forever corrupted. It’s that simple. 

“What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?” 

Simmons enlisted in the army in July 1965. He went to the army’s intelligence school that fall and, upon graduating, was commissioned as a first lieutenant. He arrived in Vietnam in April 1967 and served a year with the 219th Military Intelligence Detachment in Bien Hoa, a major city in III Corps near Saigon. 

Simmons liked the war and volunteered for another tour, serving until December 1968 with MACV Team 96 in Can Tho City, where the CIA was headquartered in IV Corps. 5 His job was to work with South Vietnamese military and police forces to interdict the Viet Cong’s secret supply system. Secret agents and smugglers were moving weapons, drugs and other contraband through market places along the Cambodian border. Simmons was successful and, as a reward, was sent to brief Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker on his findings, which led to the initiation of the Cambodian Border Watch Program. 

While in Can Tho, Simmons worked with CIA officers. “I liked the Agency guys,” he said to me. “They listened, and they asked the smartest questions.” 

The CIA guys liked Simmons too and arranged a job interview for him at CIA headquarters. He was hired and entered the junior officer trainee program, which involved paramilitary training – handling weapons and making bombs – and intelligence training – surveillance, spy craft, running agent nets, setting up proprietary companies, etc. This was the same program Milberg joined and Klein quit. Similar programs have proliferated since 9/11.

Simmons returned to Vietnam in November 1970 as a CIA officer posing as a civilian employee of the Defense Department within MACV’s Pacification Security Coordination Group. 6 He was slated to return to Can Tho, but a CIA officer in Phu Yen Province had “flipped out” and locked himself in a room with a gun. That sorry soul was sent home, as was his predecessor. According to Simmons, the officer he replaced was fired for hitting a priest, “a Don Luce type” who, ironically, was at that very time investigating abuses at the Phu Yen PIC. 7 

Other ironies awaited Simmons. 

Located in II Corps, Phu Yen was a “heavy VC province.” CIA officers were confined to the compound, wore flak jackets, carried machine guns, periodically came under mortar attack, and had a personal force of “Nung” Chinese bodyguards. 

Simmons was assigned to the CIA compound in Tuy Hoa, the province’s capital city. He did not name his boss, the Province Officer in Charge (POIC), but described his counterpart, Special Police Chief Nguyen Tam, as a former French Foreign Legionnaire and paratrooper in the South Vietnamese Army. Tam was a tough veteran who didn’t trust Simmons and could not control his freewheeling subordinates. Simmons initially reported on police corruption, but, he said, “Morales never passed the reports to Saigon.” 8 

In 1970, CIA Station Chief Ted Shackley distanced the CIA from the pacification programs it had initiated earlier in the war, including Phoenix. Negotiations for a ceasefire were underway by 1971 and the CIA receded into the shadows. Simmons was not allowed to meet the CORDS Province Senior Advisor. Relations with military intelligence and with the Special Police were strained as well. 

Shackley told me that the CIA still oversaw Phoenix in 1972, but only “to iron out problems.” Was there a province chief not willing to cooperate with the PIC? Maybe there was overcrowding in a PIC that the province or region couldn’t resolve. What to do? Well, the Phoenix director would go to the secretary-general (of the National Police) and cite specific cases. There might be a knowledgeable source in a PIC who needed to be brought to Saigon. 9 Were the line managers looking at the dossiers? 

“Phoenix,” Shackley insisted, “had nothing to do with intelligence operations. It was completely separate from Special Branch trying to penetrate the Vietcong. Any guy who could be used as a penetration agent was spun out of Phoenix.” 

Under Shackley, Phoenix evolved into a massive screening operation under military control, while the Special Branch had the mission of “keying on important VCI political leaders and activists so as not to clog up the system with volumes of low-level VCI cadre or front members.” 10 

A typical Special Branch operation began when an agent submitted a report on a VCI suspect. The Special Branch would assign people to watch him or her. Special Police officers worked in two-man teams around the clock. They’d find where the suspect lived and worked and where his “contact points” were. Other agents were set up in business, perhaps a soup shop close to the suspect’s house, or a bicycle repair shop near his favorite cafe. Places the suspect visited were kept under surveillance. The Special Police wanted to know, for example, if the suspect and his comrades were printing leaflets in a safe-house for the Women’s Revolutionary Association. If the suspect was involved in revolutionary activity, he was secretly arrested and interrogated and, ideally, made to inform on his bosses. More arrests would follow and the best candidate among them would be coerced into working for the Special Police as a penetration agent, secretly channeling information to his case officer, which would lead to more arrests. 

For security purposes, photos of the penetration agent were taken in the company of Special Police personnel. He/she would also be forced to sign a sworn statement indicating that he/she was working for the GVN. The photos and documents would find their way to the VCI if the agent did not cooperate in the future. 

Such was nature of the spy business Simmons was in. When he arrived in Tuy Hoa, his boss had three other CIA officers on his staff. One advised Korean army forces in the province. Another oversaw “unilateral” operations and was isolated from every South Vietnamese agency, all of which were penetrated by the VCI. The POIC spent most of his time with the unilateral operations officer, a veteran who had over 20 years of spy experience. Simmons was low man on the totem pole and his boss gave him little supervision; he was, after all, working with counterparts who were not trusted. 

“We met and we talked,” Simmons explained, “but [the POIC] focused on the unilateral operations guy, on political reporting on dissident groups, who is running in elections, who is going to win.” 

The third officer advised the PIC Chief and vacated Vietnam soon after Simmons arrived. He was not replaced, due to the Reduction in Forces policy in place, and Simmons inherited the thankless job. 

But all was not doom and gloom. “In late 1970,” Simmons said, “there was a feeling that we were winning the war. Not conquering Hanoi. Not pacifying the countryside. But reducing the VCI threat and driving the NVA main forces back.” 

Simmons’ job involved intelligence and paramilitary operations. In regard to intelligence, he directed Special Police Chief Tam in operations designed to identify members of the VCI, with the goal of controlling the political environment by penetrating the VCI. This was not an easy thing to do; those in GVN-controlled areas had cover jobs – doctor, teacher, farmer – while filling positions within the insurgency, such as messenger to VCI in the hamlets and villages. Those in the countryside were armed and hiding in secret lairs. 

Knowing how the CIA worked with the Special Police in Vietnam is helpful in understanding how the CIA operates in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. As recently as May, 2016, the Pentagon announced that dozens of American “advisors” had been deployed to Yemen over the past two weeks. “They are working with Saudi and Arab coalition troops seeking to assert control over southern portions of the country, including the areas controlled by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).” 11 

As noted, CIA advisors like Simmons often work under military cover. Today, in Yemen and elsewhere, they are doing exactly what he did. More to the point, the CIA funds, equips, and manages the special police forces it has created worldwide, but you won’t hear about it on the news. 

In Vietnam, the CIA organized the Special Police into sections. At the top was the chief and under him were (among others) an Interrogation Section, a “Studies and Plans” Section, and the all-important Secret Services Section (SSS). 

The SSS was split in two sub-sections. The first would watch, track, arrest and recruit low level VCI sympathizers. The more important Special Operations Sub-Section ran infiltration and penetration operations. Because special operations involved strategic intelligence, the Special Police chief jointly supervised SSS cases with his CIA advisor, who met directly with and helped the SSS case-officers running agents in the field. 

Agent recruitment was compartmentalized. When the Special Police spotted an insider who could be recruited to infiltrate the VCI or an outsider in a position to approach members of the VCI, the first step was to determine if he/she could be turned into an agent. What did he do? Did she live in the area where the VCI were operating? Did the person have contact with someone inside the VCI? 

Such a person was known as a PIRL – a potential intelligence recruitment lead. If he or she was found to be suitable, they were recruited. 

Next the Special Police drafted a Preliminary Plan to train the recruit in “tradecraft”: how to collect information, what matters to focus on, how to maintain a cover story, and how to make contact with and secretly report to a case officer. All of this was discussed with the CIA advisor. If a CIA advisor like Simmons approved the plan, he dipped into his black bag and supplied the cash to pay the agent. He also provided the necessary equipment: cameras, tape recorders, safe-houses and items like antibiotics to purchase the target’s cooperation. 

The Special Police Chief, SSS Chief and SSS case-officer would periodically meet with the CIA advisor to evaluate the agent’s Information Report. When things were running smoothly, an Operational Plan was made. If the agent succeeded in transforming himself into a VC activist, the plan was upgraded to an Infiltration Plan. If the agent succeeded in turning a VCI cadre into a defector – a spy inside the VCI – the plan reached its highest level and became a Penetration Plan. At that point – and this is the crucial part – the running of the operation was turned over to the CIA, and the Special Police were ordered to protect, maintain, and not interfere in the plan. 

In every case, the Special Police had to follow the CIA advisor’s directions and satisfy his every need. This involved a significant degree of humiliation, for CIA advisors like Simmons rarely spoke Vietnamese. And even with a translator, they could not comprehend the subtleties of Vietnamese culture, let alone the intricacies of a penetration operation, which is why neither party trusted the other. 

Within this perverse environment, a CIA officer like Simmons was constantly asserting his dominance, and misunderstandings and resentments proliferated. Inevitably, CIA officers like Simmons internalized yet another integral part of the hero myth - the Lord Jim “warlord” mentality. 

Megalomaniacal warlords intriguing against one another to control the political environment is the dynamic that defines America’s hidden corridors of power.

Phoenix in Phu Yen 
The Special Police sent a representative to the Phu Yen Province Phoenix/Phụng Hoàng Committee, along with information and documents from its Studies and Plans Section. But they did not direct the Committee or its field operations. Consequently, Simmons considered Phoenix a duplication of Special Police operations. The Special Police “might send reports” to the Phoenix center, he observed, “which was out on Point, not downtown,” and consisted of “a bunch of people keeping files.” 

Just as the CIA knew that the VCI had penetrated the Special Police, so too the Special Police knew that Phoenix had been penetrated. Phoenix was more exposed and an easier target of enemy collection efforts. In Phu Yen Province, the Phoenix DIOCCs were often attacked and files stolen. 

“We would go to Phoenix and they’d show us a file,” Simmons said, “and we’d use the file to help build a case. 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.” 

Simmons and the PRU 
By 1971 the CIA was distancing itself from its PRU counter-terror teams as well as from Phoenix and the Special Branch. Simmons was never responsible for the PRU. He knew the South Vietnamese PRU chief, whom he described as “a smart, upstanding, responsible guy,” and he allowed the PRU to use his radio, but that was the extent of his involvement. 

According to Simmons, the Phoenix coordinator in Phu Yen Province worked more closely with the PRU than he did. The PRU, when developing information on VCI cadre in a village or hamlet, would acquire targeting information from the DIOCCs. The PRU would ask, “Who do you have in that village,” and then the PRU chief would check out the DIOCC’s files on likely candidates. 

The region’s PRU advisor, Jack Harrell, had attended the same CIA training class as Simmons. Harrell paid the PRU once a month out of the CIA’s bottomless black bag. Thirty years later, Simmons would call upon Harrell to support the story he told to the New London Day, that no one was ever tortured at the Phu Yen PIC. Harrell went along with the fiction. 

Simmons and the PIC 
Under Simmons’ supervision, the Special Police placed suspected members of the VCI, including children, on a blacklist. If they appeared to act suspiciously, or were accused by an informer, they were snatched and placed in the PIC. Simmons was involved at every stage of every operation. 

The PIC was a one-storey building with a tin roof in downtown Tuy Hoa. Simmons’ office was “around the corner” in a Quonset hut on the grounds of the National Police station. His translator had good relations with the PIC Chief, an Interrogation Section officer who reported to the Special Police Chief and to Tran Quang Nam, the ranking National Police Chief in the province. Simmons described the PIC chief as “smart, educated, from Saigon, a progressive.” 

The PIC Chief’s staff provided reports for Simmons to peruse. After reading the translated reports, Simmons would interrogate prisoners who, in his estimation, could become penetration agents. He conducted the interrogations himself but, he emphasized, he “never” let himself get in “untenable situations.” 

The PIC Chief did not manage penetration operations; he helped the SSS case officer interrogate and single out leads for the Special Police chief to exploit. But Simmons was a control freak and considered the PIC “the key place for recruiting double agents.” 

The PICs, like almost every CIA operation, were kept secret from the American public, but were a grim reality, like US military bases, to the people living around them. The PICs were notorious and South Vietnamese citizens were constantly complaining about them. Theoretically, a PIC advisor played a mediating role with the local population; while staying in the shadows, he helped improve conditions in response to citizen complaints for more light, more windows, more water, more space, more food and medicine. This public relations consideration was the reason why Simmons had access to Vietnamese medics and, in rare instances, American doctors. 

PICs were also a way station. Prisoners were supposed to be rotated out within a few days and their cases sent to Province Security Committees (PSC) for disposal. If enough evidence was presented to convict someone as a “national security offender,” he/she was placed in “administrative detention” without access to a lawyer or due process. There were detention centers in every province, apart from the PICs and prisons. This same system exists in every nation America currently occupies. Private US companies make out like bandits building the facilities. 

High level VCI were sent to the National Interrogation Center in Saigon. People convicted of national security offenses were sent to various prisons or the infamous facility at Con Son Island where they were stuck and often shackled in Tiger Cages – rows of submerged concrete cells shaped like coffins, built by French colonialists, with iron gates for roofs so that guards could look down on the prisoners from above – whose existence was revealed to the public by Don Luce in 1970. 

The Special Intelligence Force Unit 
The PRU teams were controversial and known for war crimes. Called “The CIA’s Hired Killers” by journalist Georgie Anne Geyer in a 1970 article for True magazine, the PRU were recruited by CIA talent scouts from Vietnam’s minority ethnic and social groups. PRU teams were composed of Chinese Nungs, Montagnards, Muslim Chams, Cambodians, convicts and former VC. The one thing they had in common was the ability to kill without remorse. 

By 1971 the CIA was distancing itself from the PRU, and Simmons was instructed to develop his own paramilitary unit for capturing and killing individual VCI. As a trained paramilitary officer, he was fully prepared and willing to mount operations designed to kill “targeted” members of the VCI. 

During our interview in 1988, Simmons produced reports of his paramilitary operations in Phu Yen Province. One report told how a Special Police team killed three VCI in November 1970. Based on a tip provided by an informer, the VCI were ambushed at night while digging a spider hole outside Vinh Phu hamlet. One of the people killed, Nguyen Van Toan, was described in the report as the Secretary of the Communist Party Chapter Committee and chairman of the Village People’s Revolutionary Committee. Toan was 20 years old and a native of Vinh Phu hamlet. He was killed in his neighborhood. 

As a result of this successful operation, Simmons was ordered to develop the province’s paramilitary capability. To that end he created one of several prototypes for “special action” teams in Military Region II. Called the Special Intelligence Force Unit (SIFU), it was formed in late 1971. Recruits came from nearby districts. All were volunteers from the Special Police and the National Police Field Forces. Eventually there were six teams, each consisting of four men from the Special Police and four from the Field Forces. The Phu Yen Province SIFU had its own facility and was commanded by Special Police officer Nguyen Van Quy. It was advised and funded by Rob Simmons. 

Simmons did not say if he accompanied the SIFU team on its missions, but in order to command respect, CIA paramilitary officers routinely went on missions. 

In a report dated December 1971, the National Police Commander in Phu Yen Province discussed several SIFU operations. Simmons objected to the word “assassinate,” so Colonel Nam used the word “exterminate” to describe a mission in which two VCI were killed in an ambush. 12 

As an example of SIFU effectiveness, Simmons produced a copy of a 29 January 1972 letter he sent to his CIA superiors. The letter was a request for medals for SIFU members who had participated in “the recent Lien Tri operation.” 

The Lien Tri operation began when an informer reported that elements of the Tuy Hoa City Party Committee Action Team were planning to enter Lien Tri hamlet to build hiding places in preparation for an attack against Tuy Hoa and its northern suburbs. The North Vietnamese were, at the time, laying the groundwork for the spring offensive of 1972. The SIFU moved into the area the following day to intercept the VC Action Team. At 9:00 pm, four confirmed VC, along with three women and seven youths, were seen digging a hole and were “taken under fire.” Killed were Trinh Tan Luc, a Tuy Hoa Party Committee member, and Nguyen Dung of the Tuy Hoa Current Affairs Committee. 

Under laws written by Americans, it was legal for Simmons to target for death South Vietnamese civilians such as the three women and seven youths digging the hole. Given that two of the VCI had organized a recent attack on Tuy Hoa, Simmons was pleased to “exterminate” them. The operation was over by 11:00 pm. 

“This operation epitomizes the type of operation we encourage the police to run against the VC/VCI in Phu Yen province,” Simmons boasted to his boss. “The special police prepared detailed information on the individual VC, tasked their local sources for information on the individuals targeted, which was of immediate value, and then were able to mount a strike force which was sufficiently well-equipped to effectively react to the information in a timely manner. The results speak for themselves.” 

Prior to leaving Vietnam in June 1972, Simmons conducted one last operation. That spring the NVA and VCI had attacked the Phu Yen PIC and CIA compound. Binh Dinh Province, bordering Phu Yen on the north, was overrun by enemy forces, which were advancing on Tuy Hoa, when Simmons leaped into action. 

Everyone was in a panic. For several harrowing days they were cut off from the rest of Region II. Simmons spent a night alone in the compound monitoring the radio, and the next day, after crawling out from under his desk, he helped move reinforcements and supplies across the beachhead. It was touch and go, and after the main attack was repulsed, Simmons and his homeboys were confronted with a dicey situation. Thousands of refugees were fleeing Binh Dinh and the VCI were using them as cover to sneak in their own assassins. CIA officers had been targeted for “assassination” (a word Simmons uses when people target Americans) in Binh Dinh, and reports indicated that the CIA officers in Phu Yen were next on the list. 

The fear and apprehension were palpable, but Simmons saved the day. Documents captured in March revealed that the VCI were planning to infiltrate Tuy Hoa in minivans called Lambros. “So,” Simmons explained, “we rolled [the Lambro drivers] up and we put them all in the PIC. That’s fifteen to twenty people. We interrogated the Lambro drivers and learned they had all been conscripted. They were bringing VC cadres posing as farmers into Tuy Hoa. The Lambros were driven by VCI, including a few women. They had weapons hidden under seats to attack government offices.” 

As Simmons is fond of saying, the results speak for themselves. But is there another side of the story of his CIA activities in Vietnam? What did the South Vietnamese and their government, which the US was ostensibly there to support, think of his operations? 

Mythological Transformations 
“ ’I’m a poor farm girl,’” Simmons said in a shrill, falsetto voice, mocking a woman he’d snatched and confined without due process in the PIC. “So we released her and watched her for three months, then we put her name in the paper. Arresting and watching her suppressed her and the organization too.” 

What Simmons described is the application of terror to suppress people. He traveled 12,000 miles to terrorize and kill Vietnamese citizens like 20-year old Nguyen Van Toan in their backyards, because they believed in agrarian reform and resisted foreign domination. As an “exceptional” American he did so unflinchingly, under the pretext of bringing self-determination to the Vietnamese. Meanwhile, some of the Communist sympathizers he terrorized were, despite his best efforts, being freely elected into public office as part of the ceasefire agreements. 

Although Simmons would insist that PICs and PRUs were synonymous with democratic institutions, many South Vietnamese disagreed. As early as June 1969, South Vietnam’s National Assembly had questioned the Ministers of Defense, Justice and Interior about abuses by Phoenix officials, including illegal arrest, torture and corruption. Eighty-six deputies signed a petition asking for an explanation. Justice Minister Le Van Thu noted that the extra-legal facet of the system, the Province Security Committees, had the power to sentence VCI cadre for up to two years in detention without convicting them of any crime. Thu said the practical difficulties of amassing solid evidence made it necessary to arrest everyone suspected of complicity. That explanation was not well received. 13 

One legislator charged the Vinh Binh Province police chief with “knowingly” arresting innocent people for the purpose of extortion. Another said VCI suspects were detained for six to eight months before their cases were heard, and that suspects were frequently tortured to extract confessions. She said the people “hated” the GVN for starting Phoenix. 

Other deputies were incensed that American troops forcefully and illegally detained suspects during military operations, a charge Colby would deny at Congressional hearings in 1971. 

Congressman Reid asked Colby, “Do [Phoenix advisors] perform any actual arrests or killings, or do they merely select the individuals who are to be placed on the list who are subject to killing or capturing and subsequent sentencing?” 14 

Colby replied, “They certainly do not arrest, because they have no right to arrest.” But, he added speciously, “Occasionally a police advisor may go out with a police unit to capture somebody [but] he would not be the man who reached out and grabbed the fellow.” 

At the same hearings, Army intelligence officer Michael Uhl testified that all civilian detainees were listed as VCI and that, despite Colby’s denials, Americans exercised power of arrest over Vietnamese civilians. “In Duc Pho,” Ulh said, “where the 11th Brigade base camp was located, we could arrest and detain at will any Vietnamese civilian we desired, without so much as a whisper of coordination with ARVN or GVN authorities.” 

As for the accuracy of information from “paid sources who could easily have been either provocateurs or opportunists with a score to settle,” Uhl said, “The unverified and in fact unverifiable information, nevertheless was used regularly as input to artillery strikes, harassment and interdiction fire, B-52s and other air strikes, often on populated areas.” 

No Vietnamese citizen was fooled by Colby’s double talk. Grass roots opposition to American occupation and systematic repression existed and was not confined to Communists. At senate hearings held in 1970, Foreign Relations Committee Chairman William Fulbright asked Colby “Where is Mr. (Truong Dinh) Dzu, the man who ran second in the last election?” 15

“Mr. Dzu is in Chi Hoa jail in Saigon,” Colby said, adding that Dzu was not arrested under Phoenix, but under Article 4, which made it a crime to propose the formation of a coalition government with the Communists. 16 

Apart from Colby and his co-conspirators, no one made a distinction between Vietnamese officials the Americans corrupted, or the Americans advising Phoenix, or the ubiquitous American-created and jerry-rigged judicial system that enabled all the atrocities that occurred. 

For its part, the CIA lumped together peaceniks, neutralists and political opponents as VCI, but again, the Vietnamese people weren’t fooled. They knew the CIA didn’t want to end the war if it meant sharing power with Communists. As it is in Afghanistan today, the CIA’s goal in Vietnam was to prevent rapprochement, which it tried to do by making advocating peace with the Communists punishable by death or imprisonment without trial under the An Tri Laws. 

Despite the Vietnamese peoples’ efforts at political accommodation, the CIA in 1972 still considered neutralists and anyone advocating peace as legitimate targets for extermination. And Congressman Rob Simmons was an agent of this genocidal endeavor to suppress the will of the Vietnamese people to live in peace. 

The same can be said of the American militants who lead America into war after war in Islamic states, pushing young Muslim men into fundamentalism, and provoking within them the lust for revenge that our leaders then insidiously use as a pretext to restrict civil liberties and institute a police state in the US. 

Being in Simmons’ presence was disturbing, the way being around CIA officers always is. One senses that the abuse they have heaped on their victims has forever warped their souls. They no longer need to psych themselves up to dehumanize their imaginary enemies; it’s second nature to them. 

My argument to the New London Day was that it is necessary to ask how Simmons’ prolonged abuse of people affected him and those like him, and how their sick sensibilities might determine their actions if they moved from clandestine operations into public office. 

The newspaper dismissed my argument as irrelevant, but the detrimental effects of engaging in torture are known. In December 2014, the Washington Post cited from the Senate Report on CIA torture. The Report said that “numerous” CIA agents engaged in torture in Iraq and around the world had “serious documented personal and professional problems” that “should have called into question” their employment by the CIA and access to classified information. The author of the article asked, “What can we expect for the future of those who carried out the rectal feedings, waterboardings, and other harsh treatment of detainees that the report described?” 17 

I was muzzled in 2000 when Simmons was running for Congress. But time has justified my fears that the public embrace of Simmons and those like him represented a dangerous drift toward fascism in America. Indeed, he and his CIA co-conspirators have applied the same tactics they used in South Vietnam against their “liberal” enemies in America, as I shall demonstrate later in this book. 

When I asked Simmons about the morality of interrogation centers and hit teams, he said, “Most of what we did was benign.” He assumed no responsibility. He admitted only to negligent cruelties and thanks to CIA secrecy, there is no official evidence to contradict him. But there is circumstantial evidence. 

Residual Responsibility 
When the Day ran its feature article on Simmons, it avoided the overarching issue of American responsibility for systematic repression in Vietnam, and focused solely on Simmons’ good intentions. In support of Simmons’ claim, it cited Gary Mattocks, who managed the CIA’s PRU teams in IV Corps in 1971. Mattocks (whose CIA escapades are chronicled in a prior chapter) said he visited Simmons and never observed any torture at the PIC. He qualified that statement, however, by adding, “Our orders were to vacate the premises if anybody was being mistreated. But we couldn’t tell them what to do. They ran the show.” 

Mattock’s statement, “They ran the show,” is patently untrue. And while the Day let it stand, there is plenty of evidence to prove it is false. 

The Special Police were well aware of who “ran the show.” One of the top Special Police officers told me that his organization – along with the entire South Vietnam government – “was like a needy person, and any gift given to her or him was precious and heartily welcomed. Every year the gifts were newer and better than before, and so the government willingly followed whatever directions and instructions accompanied the gifts.” 

The Special Police officer quoted a proverb used in South Vietnamese financial circles, a proverb that applied when CIA promises were accompanied by action (meaning money): “Who pays, governs.” 

Simmons admitted as much. When I interviewed him in 1988, I asked about his relationship with his counterparts. He replied that the PIC Chief reported administratively “up through the police structure, but he also knows that the building was built [by the CIA] and then turned over. Okey. But he also knows that, ‘Hey! You know this building came from the guy in the Quonset hut.’” 

I asked if the CIA paid Special Branch salaries. “That’s right,” he replied. “And also the agents. If you’ve got a hot agent that you want to recruit, the money comes from [the CIA]. 

“I was very interested in some of the quality of interrogation that was going on,” Simmons added, “and I had access to resources so that I could manage [phone rings], so that I could get what I wanted.” Simmons could get anything he wanted. 

And as we know, “He who pays, governs.” 

In a letter to the editor, I suggested that if the Day really wanted to confirm, as the editor had said, that Simmons was a good public figure with clean hands, it should send a reporter to Vietnam to interview any surviving civilians who had been held in the Phu Yen PIC while it was under Simmons’ supervision. Get the other side of the story, I suggested; let the victims be the judges. But the newspaper preferred the Homeric myths about Simmons, whom it endorsed. It never sent anyone to Vietnam. It didn’t even try to contact knowledgeable Vietnamese officials and historians. 

There are, however, contemporaneous reports regarding conditions in the PICs. One of them is a 9 September 1973 letter from David and Jane Barton to Congressman Robert N. C. Nix at the Asian and Pacific Affairs Sub-Committee. From May 1971 until May 1973, the Bartons were field directors with the American Friends Service Committee’s Rehabilitation Center in Quang Ngai Province. Quang Ngai is close to Phu Yen and what the Bartons said about the Quang Ngai PIC mirrored events in the PIC supervised by Simmons. I’ll cite portions of their letter to give a sense of what went on. 

The Bartons addressed the withholding of medicine as a torture technique. They noted that medical care for prisoners was “almost nonexistent.” During their two years in Quang Ngai, they said, “no Vietnamese doctor nor medical person visited any of the prisoners and there were few medicines stronger than aspirin.” Prisoners were seriously ill with, among other things, pneumonia, unset broken bones, infected wounds and malnutrition. Some were chained to their beds and prison officials rarely isolated prisoners with communicable diseases, such as tuberculosis. 

“A second problem,” they said, was that “many prisoners [in the hospital] were returned [to the PIC] for further interrogation even though they were diagnosed as seriously ill and under treatment. One such example is that of a 19- year-old woman whom our doctor discovered had a cardiovascular problem of potentially serious consequences. In addition, the patient had a three-month-old fractured femur due to a bullet wound and was unable to walk. The AFSO doctor asked both the American and Vietnamese officials to allow him to remove the bullet and evaluate this prisoner’s heart condition. The American and Vietnamese officials were fully aware of the danger to this prisoner’s life if she did not receive medical treatment, and yet [she] was returned to the Interrogation Center and denied medical care.” 

On the subject of torture in PICs, they wrote: 


The majority of the prisoners to whom we gave medical treatment had been tortured. We were able to gather evidence of torturing through the physical examination … through interviews and personal accounts … and from X-rays and photographs. During interrogation at the Province Interrogation Center prisoners explained that they are forced to drink large amounts of water mixed with [lime], soap, or salty fish sauce. After their stomachs are bloated, the Interrogator jumps on their stomachs. One APSO doctor examined several patients who had “petit mal” seizures and memory lapses. He felt that this was due to brain damage caused by drinking such toxics. Prisoners also told an AFSO doctor that they were forced to lie on a table and if they didn’t respond to questioning properly, the interrogator would reach underneath their ribcage and crack or break the prisoner’s rib. The same doctor examined and had X-ray evidence of several prisoners with cracked or broken ribs. Frequently prisoners suffered from internal bleeding and internal injuries. These prisoners described how they were placed upright in water-filled oil drums which were then beaten on the sides giving the prisoners internal injuries without leaving external marks of torture on their bodies. Many prisoners showed very visible signs of being beaten and in several cases skull fractures, brain hemorrhages, and various forms of paralysis resulted. Prisoners were also tortured with electricity. Electrical wires were attached to their toes, fingers, or [genitals]. When the electrical shocks were administered … they would become unconscious. Upon regaining consciousness, the prisoners would again be interrogated and if their interrogators were not satisfied with their answers, the electrical shocks would be repeated. The electrical torturing seemed to cause strange physiological phenomenon, fits and seizures, especially among the female prisoners. We knew as many as 25 women who routinely had 8 to 10 such seizures a day. During our routine medical visits with prisoners, we were able to witness and document the permanent mental and physical damage which prisoners sustained as a result of the tortures mentioned above. 18 

Ultimately, the Bartons were trying to convince Congress to stop funding the systematic political repression it imposed on the Vietnamese. To that end they said: 

We were distressed to hear stories of torture going on in the American built Interrogation Center and to see men and women rice farmers from the Quang Ngai countryside continually being arrested and transported there in American-purchased vehicles. Similarly, it was upsetting to speak with a Vietnamese National Police Commander who had been trained at the US International Police Academy and discover that this official expected a large bribe from us for the release of the brother of one of our Vietnamese staff. Incidents such as these were just a few of the constant superficial reminders of how American money and supplies were being used to mistreat and imprison Vietnamese civilians. 

Based on reports of torture in PICs, Congressman Paul McCloskey visited Vietnam in early 1971. While there, he asked CIA officer John Mason, the director of the Phoenix program, to arrange a visit to a PIC. It wasn’t easy getting in. McCloskey was met at the gate by a red-headed CIA officer with a revolver on each hip, cowboy style. A combat veteran of Korea, McCloskey brushed him aside and pushed his way in. 

To its credit, the Day cited McCloskey as saying, “There were instruments of torture in the interrogation room – whips and manacles, things of that nature.” 

The Day did not add that, upon returning to the US, McCloskey and several colleagues stated their belief that “torture is a regularly accepted part of interrogation” and that “US civilian and military personnel have participated for over three years in the deliberate denial of due process of law to thousands of people held in secret interrogation centers built with U.S. dollars.” 

Despite the censorship, taken together, the statements of the Bartons, McCloskey, and the anonymous Special Police chief I cited earlier are irrefutable: the CIA and its individual officers were responsible for any crimes the Special Police engaged in, including torture in PICs. 

As Jacques Klein observed, the CIA was an occupation force that functioned systematically like the Gestapo and SS Einsatzgruppen in France. 

Residual Responsibility and 
Systematic War Crimes 
Phoenix, the PRU, the PICs and the Special Police were part of a system of repression the CIA designed and implemented in Vietnam for the political control of people. But was everything – from assassination to extortion, massacre, Tiger Cages, terror, and torture – legitimate and justifiable? By 1971 the system’s legality was questioned not just by antiwar activists, but by the House Subcommittee on Foreign Operations and Government Information. 19 

As usual, a whistle-blower provided Congress with its ammunition. In late 1970, army intelligence officer Barton Osborn gave an aide on the Subcommittee staff a copy of the training manual he had been issued at Fort Holabird. According to the aide, William Phillips, “it showed that Phoenix policy was not something manufactured out in the field, but was sanctioned by the US government. This was the issue: that it is policy. So we requested, through the Army’s congressional liaison officer, a copy of the Holabird training manual, and they sent us a sanitized copy. They had renumbered the pages.” 

This stab at disguising policy and avoiding responsibility is what had prompted McCloskey to visit the Phoenix Directorate in April 1971, in preparation for hearings to be held that summer. Phoenix training officer Colonel James Hunt was there with CORDS Director Jake Jacobson and Phoenix Director Mason. “And just as I was getting up to go to the platform to give my briefing,” Hunt said, “Mason whispered into my ear, ‘We gotta talk to them, but the less we say, the better.’ Well, the first question McCloskey asked was if anyone in the program worked for the CIA. And Mason denied it. He denied any CIA involvement. Jake, too.”

It bothered Hunt that Mason and Jacobson “blatantly lied.” It also bothered McCloskey, who returned to Washington and charged that Phoenix “violated several treaties and laws.” The legal basis for his charge was Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits “the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.” 

Article 3 also prohibits mutilation, cruel treatment (withholding medicine, for example) and torture. 

Having agreed to the Conventions, Congress was aware of Article 3 but chose to ignore it. But a problem arose when the American ambassador to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) wrote a letter to Congress. In his 7 December 1970 letter, Imer Rimestead said, “With respect to South Vietnamese civilians captured by US forces and transferred by them to the authorities of the RVN (Republic of South Vietnam), the US Government recognizes that it has a residual responsibility to work with the Government of Vietnam (GVN) to see that all such civilians are treated in accordance with the requirements of Article 3 of the Conventions.” 

To the consternation of America’s war managers, Rimestead’s letter meant they could no longer dismiss the thousands of civilian detainees corralled in the Phoenix dragnet as an internal matter of the GVN. Rimestead reasoned that by funding Phoenix, the Special Police, and the Directorate of Corrections, America automatically assumed “residual responsibility” for detainees – for as we know, without US aid there never would have been an RVN – or puppet governments in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

The Rimestead letter implied that American war managers were war criminals, prompting CIA, State Department and Pentagon lawyers to review Phoenix procedures and contest their illegality at the House Subcommittee on Foreign Operations and Government Information hearings in the summer of 1971. Luckily for them, on June 13, The New York Times began printing excerpts from The Pentagon Papers which, by name, deflected attention away from the CIA. Consequently, the public paid little attention when, in July, Congressman Reid asked Colby, “Are you certain that we know a member of the VCI from a loyal member of the South Vietnamese citizenry?” 

Colby said “No.” But that didn’t stop Rob Simmons from throwing people in the PIC. On the contrary, the CIA, as part of the inter-agency Vietnam Task Force, insisted the Conventions afforded no protection to civilian detainees because “nationals of a co-belligerent state are not protected persons while the state of which they are nationals has diplomatic representation in the state in whose hands they are.” 

The CIA said that Article 3 “applies only to sentencing for crimes and does not prohibit a state from interning civilians or subjecting them to emergency detention when such measures are necessary for the security or safety of the state.” Skirting the issue of executions carried out “without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court,” it asserted that administrative detention procedures did not violate Article 3 precisely because they involved “no criminal sentence.” 

After the Bush regime began detaining suspects in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo, legal scholar Jennifer Van Bergen and I examined its assertion that administrative detention was legal. Our conclusion was that where you find administrative detentions, you are likely to find torture. The connection exists even where it is clear that investigations and screenings leading to such detentions are, as Bush’s White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales put it, “not haphazard, but elaborate, and careful … reasoned and deliberate.” 20 

This conclusion derives from the faulty elements of administrative detention: the absence of human rights safeguards and normal legal guarantees such as due process, habeas corpus, fair trial, confidential legal counsel, and judicial review; vague and confusing definitions, standards, and procedures; inadequate adversarial procedural oversight; excessive Executive Branch power stemming from prolonged emergencies (the War on Terror being the ultimate example); and the involvement of the CIA and other secret, thus unaccountable, Executive Branch agencies. 

When butchered in such a fashion, the judicial system is a charade and human rights are jeopardized. As William F. Schultz, Executive Director of Amnesty International, said: “This year we are witnessing not just a series of brutal but fundamentally independent human rights violations committed by disparate governments around the globe. This year we are witnessing something far more fundamental and far more dangerous. This year we are witnessing the orchestrated destruction by the United States of the very basis, the fragile scaffolding, upon which international human rights have been built, painstakingly, bit by bit by bit, since the end of World War Two.” 21 

The “scaffolding upon which international human rights have been built” has been destroyed forever by the Bush and Obama regimes, by a carryover of practices first applied in Vietnam. The similarities between systematic repression in Vietnam and what’s happening in the War on Terror and its domestic flipside, Homeland Security, are not limited to policies and procedures, but include the psychological warfare campaigns that create the fear, and thus the public support, for the policies and procedures. 

The linkage between administrative detention, torture and repressive police states is evident for all to see, but remains unrecognized due to the systematic censorship of information. The US and Israel are at the forefront of this ominous development, manufacturing crisis after crisis to maintain a perceived national emergency with its corresponding emergency decrees that target the unprotected classes and specifically US citizens such as blacks and Muslims. Intelligence laws that permit spying on suspects without probable cause of criminal activity are secretly revised and expanded; secret torture centers ensure confessions; and Star Chamber “security courts” are convened specifically to operate outside international law. And that’s to say nothing of all the secrecy that surrounds Guantanamo. 

When backed into a corner, the government’s public relations experts insist that torture is necessary to defend freedom. Cheney stood by it. Trump promised to bring back waterboarding and worse. That was a factor in his appeal. 

Behind this twisted logic are beastly impulses rooted in the dark side of the human psyche – the kind of impulses the CIA and the Mafia harness and use to achieve dominance. What differentiates the CIA and the Mafia, inter alia, is that the CIA more perfectly controls public institutions and information. The CIA, for example, owned and operated three newspapers in Saigon. 

One wonders how many it owns in America. 

Determined not to repeat the mistakes made in Vietnam, the Bush and Obama regimes prevented the media from publishing photos of dead US soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Like Bush, Obama uses censorship, disinformation and propaganda to conceal the brutality of his policies and practices. We don’t see the mutilated bodies after drone strikes. The purpose is to disguise criminal intent and practice. 

But any public official who engages in such a criminal conspiracy, including Rob Simmons, should be held responsible for the predictable result – which is why the nation needs a war crimes tribunal. At a bare minimum, Simmons could be tried for the human rights violation of denying due process. 

Due process is a human right recognized in international law to be enjoyed by all persons. But when Congressman Reid asked if civilian detainees had a right to counsel, Colby replied “No.” 

Flabbergasted, McCloskey asked Colby, “The administrative detention applies to those against whom there is insufficient evidence to convict, isn’t that right?” 

Colby agreed. 

But, McCloskey blurted, “the defendant informed against, or identified, has no right to appear in his own defense, no right to counsel, no right to confront his accusers, no right to see his dossier; is that correct?” ’ 

“That is correct,” Colby said. 

“That brings me to the real problem with the Phoenix program that I saw while I was there,” McCloskey said. “If the evidence is insufficient to convict a man, and also insufficient to show a reasonable probability that he may be a threat to security, then he may still be sent to the PIC.” 

Congressman Reid added in utter exasperation: “At least as shocking as the assassinations, torture, and drumhead incarcerations of civilians under the Phoenix program is the fact that in many cases the intelligence is so bad that innocent people are made victims.” 

Reid produced a list (signed by the CIA’s Special Branch advisor in Binh Dinh Province) of VC cadre rounded up in February 1967. Reid said, “It is of some interest that on this list, 33 of the 61 names were women and some persons were as young as eleven and twelve.” 

Did the people of Vietnam feel the CIA was protecting them from terrorism? 

CORDS official Ted Jacqueney testified before Congress in 1971 that “arrest without warrant or reason” was a major complaint of the people of Da Nang. “I have personally witnessed poor urban people literally quaking with fear when I questioned them about the activity of the secret police in the past election campaign. One fisherman in Da Nang, animated and talkative in complaining about economic conditions, clammed up in near terror when queried about the police, responding that ‘he must think about his family.’ After many personal interviews in Vietnam on this subject, I came to the conclusion that no single entity, including the feared and hated Vietcong, is more feared and hated than the South Vietnamese secret police.” 

Jacqueney added, “In every province in Vietnam there is a Province Interrogation Center – a PIC – with a reputation for using torture to interrogate people accused of Vietcong affiliations. 

“Last year the senior AID police advisor of Da Nang City Advisory Group told me he refused, after one visit, to ever set foot in a PIC again, because ‘war crimes are going on in there.’ . . . Another friend, himself a Phoenix advisor, was ultimately removed from his position when he refused to compile information on individuals who would, he felt, inevitably be ‘targeted’ however weak the evidence might be.” 

Army intelligence officer Bart Osborn agreed: “I had no way of establishing the basis on which my agents reported to me suspected VCI. There was no crosscheck; there was no investigation; there was no second opinion.” Osborn added, “I never knew of an individual to be detained as a VC suspect who ever lived through an interrogation in a year and a half, and that included quite a number of individuals.” 

“They all died?” Congressman Reid asked incredulously. 

“They all died,” Osborn replied. “There was never any reasonable establishment of the fact that any one of those individuals was, in fact, cooperating with the VC, but they all died and the majority were either tortured to death or things like thrown out of helicopters.” 

At the end of the hearings Representatives McCloskey, John Conyers, Ben Rosenthal and Bella Abzug stated their belief that, “The people of the United States have deliberately imposed on the Vietnamese people a system of justice which admittedly denies due process of law. In so doing, we appear to have violated the 1949 Geneva Convention for the protection of civilian peoples at the same time we are exerting every effort available to us to solicit the North Vietnamese to provide Geneva Convention protections to our own prisoners of war. 

“Some of us who have visited Vietnam,” they added, “share a real fear that the Phoenix program is an instrument of terror; that torture is a regularly accepted part of interrogation . . . and that the top US officials responsible for the program at best have a lack of understanding of its abuses.” 

They concluded “that US civilian and military personnel have participated for over three years in the deliberate denial of due process of law to thousands of people held in secret interrogation centers built with US dollars,” and they suggested that Congress owes a duty to act swiftly and decisively to see that the practices involved are terminated forthwith. 

It is as a participant in that genocidal endeavor that Rob Simmons should be tried as a war criminal. 

The Making of a Psychological Warrior 
Rob Simmons was trained and is highly skilled in the art of duplicity, of tricking people, and of torturing them into telling things that they didn’t want to tell. He was also involved in setting up a hit team that went out and assassinated people in their own backyards. 

How did doing those things affect him? One would have to have been inside a PIC and see the squalid conditions that the prisoners endured, and hear their screams, to understand the traumatic impact being in one of them for 18 months straight would have had on a 28-year-old CIA officer like Rob Simmons. 

When I met Simmons in September 1988, he not only exhibited signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, he admitted having it. “People never resolve war experiences,” he said with a lugubrious sigh. He seemed ready to explode and unleash the hatred he harbored against the anti-war left that sabotaged the patriots. He raged at “how the VC manipulated media in US, people like Walter Cronkite, who created the notion that Phoenix was an assassination program.” 

A super patriot in the Barry “bomb them into the Stone Age” Goldwater mold, Simmons believes the First Amendment “was never intended to be a free ride for individuals to say and do whatever they want.” He reserves to himself, as one of the Protected Few, the right to determine when it is not okay for Black Lives Matter protesters to speak freely. He seamlessly structures his moral universe on a double standard in which the flag is a sacred symbol of liberty, and burning it should be outlawed. 

In 2001, in one of his first votes as a Congressman, he supported an anti-flag desecration amendment, and in June 2003 he voted yes on a constitutional amendment prohibiting flag desecration. 

When I wrote about him in 2000, I said his ideology, his activities at the PIC, and his actions on behalf of the CIA while staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence raised doubts about his fitness to govern in an open society, within the framework of a Constitution that guarantees due process to all Americans, including flag burners, anti-war protestors, and leftists. 

Based on what he did after Vietnam, I still feel that way. In the short term, he stayed in the CIA as an Operations Officer. Between 1975 and 1978 he ran a major operation that prevented the Taiwanese from obtaining material for a nuclear weapon. Sensitive files the Taiwanese needed were stolen, and attempts to buy materials were “choked off.” It was a feather in his coonskin cap. 22 

But, as Simmons told author Joseph Persico, he got mad at Jimmy Carter’s CIA Director, Stansfield Turner. In what was called the Halloween Massacre of 1977, Turner fired an estimated 600 employees in the CIA’s covert operations branch. 

“I’d served overseas, risking myself and my family in some rough spots, and was damn poorly rewarded for it,” Simmons whined, then expressed resentment at CIA critics on the left. “People outside treated us like scum, like pariahs.” 23 

His rant had the ring of a prepared script delivered by a practiced actor, and his ostensible exit in 1979 did not translate into severed relations with the CIA. On the contrary, Simmons kept his TOP SECRET security clearance and went to work as a legislative assistant to neocon Senator John H. Chafee at the Select Committee on Intelligence, while simultaneously obtaining a degree in Public Administration from Harvard. This period in his Curriculum Vitae has all the earmarks of a covert action. 

It looked to me like Simmons was being “double-hatted,” an arrangement through which an officer works under administrative cover for an organization while secretly taking orders from the CIA. Many junior military officers enter this relationship with the CIA while advancing to field officer grade and studying at the Command and General Staff College. 

It appeared to me that Simmons had a specific CIA assignment. While serving on Chafee’s staff, he helped draft and facilitate passage of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. This legislation was ostensibly a result of the magazines CounterSpy and Covert Action Quarterly naming CIA officers. CIA dropout Philip Agee and the aforementioned Bart Osborn were associated with the magazines. The CIA hated them with a purple passion and, largely through its unofficial public relations firm, the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, publicly but falsely blamed them for the murder of CIA Officer Richard Welch in Athens in December 1975. 

The Intelligence Identities Protection Act makes it a crime to name CIA agents. John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle on CIA torture in 2007, is one of only two people convicted under it. 

Having proven his value as a “money-maker,” Simmons in 1981 became staff director of the Republican-controlled Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Reagan had been elected president and Democrats were pushing for an investigation of William Casey, whom Reagan had nominated as Director of the CIA. According to Persico, the committee’s conservative chairman, Barry Goldwater, hired Simmons precisely to “button up” the investigation of Casey. And, lo and behold, Simmons dutifully produced a truncated, five-page report describing Casey as “not unfit” to hold the job. 24 

There was no mention of Casey’s associations with underworld character Robert Vesco, his connection with an ITT bribery scandal, and various other criminal escapades in self-aggrandizement. Simmons told Persico, “[Casey] wasn’t screwing widows or orphans. He was taking advantage of the law.” 25 

Taking advantage is par for the course for the rich and powerful people Simmons serves – like Donald Rumsfeld; one day they’re routing nerve gas to Saddam Hussein, the next day they’re killing him, his family and followers, and stealing everything they own. 

The Democrats’ fears about Casey were realized once he was confirmed as DCI. He reversed the Turner policies that Simmons hated, and jumped in the stirrups of the counterterrorism network established by CIA careerists behind Carter’s back. Casey used the network to bypass Congress and launch the Enterprise, the network of companies established by Major General Richard Secord to secretly sell arms to Iran, through Israeli agents, as a way of financing the illegal Contra war in Nicaragua. At Casey’s direction, the CIA formed death squads, demolished an oil facility, and mined a harbor in Nicaragua – all violations of international law that had as their intent the terrorizing of civilians, the sort of thing former CIA dropout John Stockwell described as “destabilization.” 26

Destabilization, said Stockwell, means “hiring agents to tear apart the social and economic fabric of the country. It’s a technique for putting pressure on the government, hoping they can make the government come to the U.S.’s terms, or that the government will collapse altogether and they can engineer a coup d’état, and have the thing wind up with their own choice of people in power. 

“What we’re talking about is going in and deliberately creating conditions where the farmer can’t get his produce to market; where children can’t go to school; where women are terrified inside their homes as well as outside; where government-administered programs grind to a complete halt; where the hospitals are treating wounded people instead of sick people; where international capital is scared away and the country goes bankrupt. 27 

“Of course,” Stockwell added, “they’re attacking a lot more.” And, of course, the CIA is doing this everywhere around the world, every day. You just don’t hear about it on NPR. But Simmons knows how it works, that’s why the CIA appears to have placed him on Senator Goldwater’s staff. 

While in the prominent position of staff director of the Select Committee on Intelligence, Simmons was chaperoning “fact-finding” delegations to secret CIA installations for discussions not about the virtue of subverting US laws and foreign nations, but on how best to go about it. Surrounded by old boys, he had his hands on the controls, but somehow failed to uncover Casey’s “self sustaining, off-the shelf” drugs-for-guns apparatus that provided $1 million a month to the Contras. 

When the Iran-Contra scandal erupted, Simmons claimed that another CIA officer had deceived him, despite the fact that he’d talked to every major player and had read every secret document. But it was merely his “administrative” job to find out the truth and tell it to the American people. His prevailing “operational” job was to protect the secret old boy cabal that runs the CIA. 

Simmons rationalized Casey’s deception of Congress as inconsequential. “For people who served in war,” author Bob Woodward said, “Simmons thought that was the primary experience, real danger. Everything else paled by comparison. They had sent people to certain death. So to hustle some bucks was nothing. It was easy. To be criticized was nothing. So some judge or senator or reporter or cartoonist was beating on you. So what? You have served in war and survived.” 28 

For such militants, steeped in the Homeric myth of the warrior hero, the ultimate test is murdering another man; you can’t understand what life’s about unless you’ve done it. Fifty thousand American soldiers were sacrificed on that pagan altar in Vietnam, so the crime bosses could build an empire on their bones. 

To Lie, Cheat and Steal 
Simmons left Congress in 1985, after receiving awards from Casey and the Senate, to become a visiting lecturer at Yale, where he taught classes titled “Congress and the US Intelligence Community” and “The Politics of Intelligence”. In 1991 he was elected to Connecticut General Assembly, where he remained for eight years. 

While campaigning for the Senate in 2009, Simmons said, “I am honored to have served in the US Army and the CIA, putting my life on the line on difficult and dangerous missions abroad to protect our people and our interests.” 

Some things never change, including Simmons’ jingoism and self glorification. But was he really honored to have participated in the genocide of 2 million people who never threatened the US? 

Apparently he was. Such is the power of self-delusion, of constructing a persona and coming to believe in it so thoroughly it replaces the actual human being, like a bite from the Walking Dead. But do we want self-deluded ideologues whose loyalty is to the CIA and the military, not to the American public or democracy, as public officials? 

In 2000, in my article for Counterpunch, I asked if voters could be certain Simmons would tell them everything they needed to know in order to govern themselves. How could anyone know for sure he wasn’t playing a double game or hiding secrets, consistently promoting militarism and war, no matter its necessity or cost? 

As Simmons once said, “In intelligence, you have to lie, cheat, and steal to get the truth. The reason for it is for your national security.” 

Unfortunately, as FBN Agent Martin Pera explained, “You can’t check your morality at the door – go out and lie, cheat, and steal – then come back and retrieve it. In fact, if you’re successful because you can lie, cheat, and steal, those things become tools you use in the bureaucracy.” 

That’s exactly what Simmons did while serving as a legislative aide and staff director for the Senate Intelligence Committee. I’m guessing that he was intentionally placed in that position to effectuate the secret policies of the CIA. His career illustrates how the old boy network coordinates the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government on behalf of the arms industry, to which the military and CIA are joined at the hip, while simultaneously imposing increasingly systematic repression on the American people. 

It is rule by organized crime under the rubric of patriotism and national security. Just figure: the CIA runs the arms for drugs trade through its covert paramilitary army, while its logistics experts handle “off-the-shelf” shipping companies, and its financial experts create off-shore banks to recycle the cash into new operations. All of it is highly compartmented, with intelligence officers suborning foreign customs agents and special policemen, some of whom arrange, without their own government’s knowledge, the construction and operation of black sites. 

Simmons is naturally endowed with the persona needed for a PR position in this enterprise. He was a Lector at his Episcopalian Church in toney Stonington, Connecticut when I interviewed him. He knew I’d spoken with Colby and was glad to discuss aspects of his CIA activities that advanced the myths he was creating about himself as he prepared to re-enter the national political arena as a US Congressman – a career move that seemed preordained. 

In 2000 I also asked the overwhelming question: where, in a nation sharply divided along ideological lines, would a hardline political and psychological warrior like Simmons stand if the Bush administration embarked on another genocidal campaign against another manufactured enemy, like Johnson and Nixon did in Vietnam, and Reagan and Bush did during Iran-Contra? Would he betray the will of the American people to live in peace, as a way to reward his patrons in the CIA? Where would Simmons stand if America entered an age of dissent? 

His voting record “speaks for itself”, as Simmons is fond of saying. Claiming that “Intelligence is the first line of defense in the war on terrorism,” he voted to allow the Bush regime to authorize electronic surveillance without a court order to acquire foreign intelligence information. He voted to allow the security services to spy on Americans without a warrant and without going to the FISA court. He voted for intelligence gathering without civil oversight, which erodes our basic constitutional rights. 29 

He voted to declare that Iraq was part of the War on Terror, and to invade and occupy it forever. 

He voted to steal up to $78.9 billion in public funds and give it to arms manufacturers as “emergency” funds for the terror wars on Afghanistan and Iraq: that’s $62.5 billion for military operations in Iraq and the War on Terror, $4.2 billion for homeland security, $8 billion in aid to allies and for Iraqi relief and rebuilding, $3.2 billion for US airlines to cover additional security costs, and $1 billion in aid to Turkey, which in turn dutifully allows CIA agents to infiltrate Syria. 

He voted to give more and more public money to the War Machine while more and more Americans slipped out of the middle class into poverty. He voted YES on making the Bush tax cuts permanent, and was warned by the AARP not to use its name in his campaign ads. 

He received a Grade A from the NRA, and voted to continue military recruitment on college campuses. 

He voted YES on building a fence along the Mexican border, and YES for comprehensive immigration reform without amnesty. 

While Chairman of the Homeland Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing, and Terrorism Risk Assessment, he advocated improved intelligence coordination between federal, state, and local authorities on the Phoenix program model. 

He voted to create a Phoenix-style National Intelligence Director and National Counterterrorism Center. 

He voted YES on making the PATRIOT Act permanent; YES on protecting the Pledge of Allegiance; YES on disallowing R-rated movies and coffeepots in prison cells; YES on military border patrols to battle drugs and terrorism; on allowing school prayer during the War on Terror; YES on the Bush regime’s national energy policy; and YES on keeping the Cuba travel ban until its political prisoners were released. 

Finding himself a Congressperson at the most critical point in America’s legislative history in the past 50 years, he was a consistent and prominent advocate for the Bush regime’s extra-legal policies and practices regarding the administrative detention and torture of suspects in the War on Terror. 

In 2006, the host of Talk Nation Radio in Connecticut, Dori Smith, interviewed Wells Dixon, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Dixon worked on Guantanamo-related issues. Simmons had argued “that suspects in the War on Terror are exceptions to the Geneva Conventions and that rules that have been used in the past do not apply to them.” Smith asked Dixon if Simmons was correct. 30 

Dixon replied that Simmons was wrong. He emphasized that “the Geneva Conventions and Common Article Three are part of US military law and training. They are part of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and they are also part of Army Regulation 190.8, which governs the treatment of prisoners. The Geneva Conventions, of course, have also protected our soldiers for more than 50 years and will continue to do so as long as we adhere to them fully ourselves.” 

Simmons had also insisted that because the War on Terror is not fought against sovereign nations or organized liberation movements, the rules of prisoner’s engagement are “non-existent.” He insisted that the laws were vague and soldiers posted at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib couldn’t figure out how to treat prisoners. 

Simmons again was dissembling. As Dixon noted, “the Supreme Court held in the Hamdan case that there was no basis for concluding that compliance with the Uniform Code of Military Justice was impracticable in the War on Terror.” 

In a particularly outrageous assertion, Simmons said that conditions at Gitmo were more open than at the Osborn Correctional facility in Connecticut. 

Dixon again corrected Simmons. “The conditions at Guantanamo are … not more open than at Osborn Correctional facility. For one thing there is no question that the detainees at Guantanamo have been tortured and abused by US military personnel and (CIA) agents. The Center for Constitutional Rights has documented this in a report issued in July that provides firsthand accounts from current detainees and their lawyers of many of the abuses they have suffered while they have been detained in Guantanamo.” 

Dixon reminded the audience that Rumsfeld approved a list of techniques, including the “exploitation of phobias.” One detainee was deprived of sleep for 49 out of 50 days, subject to an induced hypothermia, and led to believe that he was in Egypt and he would be tortured unless provided information to the Government. 

Dixon said that Rumsfeld’s “enhanced interrogation” methods rose to the level of torture. “The General Counsel of the Navy Alberto Mora said in 2004 in a memorandum that it was his opinion that these sorts of activities would be not only unlawful but unworthy of military service, and that in his view they would rise to the level of torture. He raised a number of rhetorical questions such as, what does deprivation of light and auditory stimuli mean? Can a detainee be locked in a completely dark cell and if so, for how long: a month, a year? Another question he asked was, can phobias be applied until madness sets in? 

“If you consider the conclusions of people like Mr. Mora, I don’t think that there is any credible dispute at this point that the detainees in Guantanamo have been subject to torture and abuse.” 

Smith noted that Simmons backed legislation that would send detainees to military courts that could withhold classified evidence from suspects – which is exactly the system the US imposed on South Vietnam, as Simmons knew from having sent suspects to the Stalinist security courts there. 

Dixon again cited the Hamdan case, saying the Supreme Court ruled there is no basis to argue that the Uniform Code of Military Justice is inadequate to try terrorism suspects. He noted that after four years, suspects could not possibly have any intelligence value or pose a threat to the United States. They were pawns in a public relations game. Even the CIA had concluded in a 2002 report that most of the people at Gitmo “were there because they were captured at the wrong place at the wrong time. They had nothing to do with terrorism. This is a statement that’s been echoed by many former military officials including the former Guantanamo Commander Jay Hood who said, “Look, sometimes we just didn’t get the right folks.’ So I think it’s important to remember that.” 

Dixon raised another troubling issue. “A provision in the Military Commissions Act suspends Habeas Corpus for any alien detained by the United States,” he said. “This would include lawful immigrants picked up on the streets of New Haven or Hartford, and it therefore deprives them of any meaningful opportunity to challenge their detention. So as a result of this provision we expect that the United States will move to dismiss a number of the pending Habeas cases and we will then challenge the law on the ground that it’s an unconstitutional suspension of Habeas Corpus.” 

Next, Smith raised the issue of withholding medical care from wounded prisoners, as Simmons did when he was the PIC in Vietnam. “That was a violation of the Geneva Conventions wasn’t it?” she asked. 

“Absolutely,” Dixon replied. “The denial of medical care to someone in the custody of the United States certainly would be illegal and unconscionable and it would violate the Geneva Conventions. No question about it.” 

Last but not least, Smith asked, “Do you think that he should have been more open about this when he argued for changes to US law and the way we interpret the Geneva Conventions?” 

Dixon noted that military regulations do not apply to the CIA. He then stressed that “torture has proved to be extremely unreliable and in fact extremely dangerous.” He noted that the CIA had rendered Mahar Arar to Syria, “where he was tortured and then confessed.” Arar, however, was innocent and eventually cleared by the Canadian Government. “And so I think that you can see from that example that coercion and torture really is not useful for interrogation practices,” Dixon said. 

“The other instance that I would point to,” Dixon added, “is the case of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, a suspected Bin Laden associate who was captured a few months after September 11th in Afghanistan. He was rendered by the CIA to Libya where he was tortured and under torture provided information concerning the connection between Iraq and al Qaida. This information formed the basis for Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations in February of 2003 in which he said essentially that there was a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. We now know that that’s not the case; that the information [al-Libi provided] was false, and we now know what the unfortunate results are of that information [i.e. the invasion of Iraq]. So to the extent that Congressman Simmons or any other interrogator would employ coercive or other means to obtain information I would be very suspicious.” 

Suspicious, indeed: Simmons always finds a way to clear the CIA of any wrongdoing. He is, after all, clearing himself when he clears the CIA. 

That’s what happens when a nation is ruled by a “Protected Few,” regulated 31 only by one another. 

next
MAJOR GENERAL BRUCE LAWLOR: FROM CIA OFFICER IN VIETNAM TO HOMELAND SECURITY HONCHO

notes
Chapter 15 
1 Chavez v. Martinez, 538 US 760 (2003). 
2 “John McCain, Prisoner of War: A First-Person Account”, US News and World Report, 28 January 2008. 
3 Agence France-Presse, “US on Defensive as Reports of ‘Secret Torture Flights’ Pile Up”, 2 December 2005. 
4 Sydney H. Schanberg, “Why Has John McCain Blocked Info on MIAs?” The Nation, 18 September 2008. 
5 MACV Teams were part of CORDS. 
6 CORDS had eleven divisions: Public Safety; Pacification and Security Coordination; Regional and Popular Forces; Phoenix; Chieu Hoi; Psyops; Refugees; Public Health; Management Support; Political; and New Life Development. 
7 Don Luce, Hostages of War, Indochina Resource Center, 1973. Luce did what the US press corps didn’t dare to do; he investigated GVN’s prison system. In April 1970 he broke the Tiger Cage story. Luce called the GVN a “Prison Regime” and said Phoenix was a “microcosm” of the omnipotent and perverse US influence on Vietnamese society. He blamed the CIA for the deterioration of values that permitted torture, political repression, and assassination. For Luce, abuses were not accidental but an integral part of the system. “The widespread use of torture… can be explained by the admissibility of confession as evidence in court”, he said, and noted that “Phoenix was named after the all-seeing mythical bird which selectively snatches its prey - but the techniques of this operation are anything but selective. For many Vietnamese, the Phung Hoang program is a constant menace to their lives.” 
8 David Morales, a trusted associate of Station Chief Ted Shackley. 
9 In 1971, George Weisz managed the station’s Viet Cong Branch that reviewed Phoenix and Special Branch reports and absconded with their best penetration agents. 
10 Ralph Johnson, The Phoenix Program: Planned Assassination or Legitimate Conflict Management, American University, Washington, DC, 1982). 
11 Thomas Gaist, “US Defense Department announces deployment of troops in Yemen”, World Socialist Website, 9 May 2016. 
12 “Sure we got involved in assassinations”, said Charlie Yothers, the CIA’s chief of operations in I Corps in 1970. “That’s what PRU were set up for - assassination. I’m sure the word never appeared in any outlines or policy directives, but what else do you call a targeted kill?” 
13 Dinh Tuong An, “The Truth About Phoenix” (see The Phoenix Program, pages 217-220). 
14 US Assistance Programs in Vietnam” (Foreign Operations and Government Information Subcommittee, Committee on Government Operations, July 15, 16, 19, 21 and August 2, 1971); passim. 
15 “Vietnam Policy and Prospects 1970” (Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations, US Senate, February 17-20 and March 3, 14, 17, 19, 1970); passim. 
16 Colby’s strategy was outlined in State Dept. Telegram 024391 (17 February 1970) which says: “We believe the line of questioning attempting to establish the Phoenix program as an assassination program [can be] successfully blunted by repeated assertions regarding US/GVN policies, coupled with admissions of incidents of abuses.” 
17 Lydia DePillis, “How it feels to torture”, Washington Post, 11 December 2014. 
18 Recall the photograph of a hooded man standing Christ-like on a box with his arms outstretched and wires attached to his genitals and fingers at Abu Ghraib Prison. 
19 “US Assistance Programs in Vietnam”; passim. 
20 Jennifer Van Bergen and Douglas Valentine, “The Dangerous World of Administrative Detention”, Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, Volume 37, Issue 2, 2006. 
21 Ibid. 
22 Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987. 
23 Joseph Persico, Casey: The Lives and Secrets of William J. Casey: from the OSS to the CIA, p 276. 
24 Ibid, p. 276. 
25 Ibid,, p. 277. 
26 “The Secret Wars of the CIA”, excerpts from a talk by John Stockwell. <http://www.serendipity.li/cia/stock1.html> 
27 Ibid. 
28 Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987, p. 171. 
29 On The Issues Website (2010) <http://www.ontheissues.org/International/Rob_Simmons_Homeland_Security.htm> 
30 Smith/Dixon interview: <http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php? az=view_all&address=143x3992>

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