The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt
America and the World
By Douglas Valentine
PART IV
America and the World
By Douglas Valentine
PART IV
MANUFACTURING COMPLICITY:
SHAPING THE AMERICAN
WORLDVIEW
“All experts serve the state and the media and
only in that way do they achieve their status.
Every expert follows his master, for all former
possibilities for independence have been
gradually reduced to nil by present society’s mode
of organization. The most useful expert, of course,
is the one who can lie. With their different
motives, those who need experts are falsifiers and
fools. Whenever individuals lose the capacity to
see things for themselves, the expert is there to
offer an absolute reassurance.”
Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the
Spectacle
Chapter 18
FRAGGING BOB KERREY:
THE CIA
AND THE NEED
FOR A WAR
CRIMES TRIBUNAL
This chapter is a compilation of two articles. One was published in
December 2003 and titled “Preemptive Manhunting: The CIA’s New
Assassination Program” in response to an article by Seymour Hersh titled
“Moving Targets: Will the counterinsurgency plan in Iraq repeat the mistakes of
Vietnam.”
1
The other article, written two and a half years earlier, was titled “Fragging
Bob Kerrey: CIA War Crimes and the Need for a War Crimes Trial.” It tells how
former Senator Kerrey led a team of Navy SEALs into a village in Vietnam and
murdered 20 women and children in 1969. He lied about the operation and said
the team killed 21 VC. He was given a medal as a reward.
Kerrey’s career took off as a result of that war crime and cover-up. He
moved from one important public sector job to another until May 2016, when he
was appointed chair of the board of trustees of the Fulbright University in
Vietnam.
One can only imagine what J. William Fulbright would have thought of that
supreme act of arrogance. As Fulbright said in his book, The Arrogance of
Power: “One simply cannot engage in barbarous action without becoming a
barbarian … one cannot defend human values by calculated and unprovoked
violence without doing mortal damage to the values one is trying to defend.”
The American media reacted as expected, with non-judgmental accounts
about the irony of appointing a mass murderer of Vietnamese to head a
Vietnamese institution. Featured in most accounts were the comments of
Vietnamese who supported the decision.
But what if the tables were turned? If the government of Vietnam sent a
former revolutionary, known to have murdered American women and children,
to head a Vietnamese university in America, the media would have flipped out
and called for the renewed bombing of Hanoi.
The hypocrisy of the American media is a wonder to behold.
In my 2001 article about Kerrey, I argued that the CIA, which instigated the
raid on Thanh Phong, should be tried for its policy of waging war crimes in
Vietnam. I’m still hoping that will happen, especially since 9/11 and the resulting
CIA horrors, many of which have been carefully documented. The only
difference is that I would now put the media in the dock too.
Seymour Hersh’s December 2003 article is an example of how the
mainstream media dissembles when it can no longer conceal evidence that
political assassinations are official US policy. In his article, Hersh revealed “a
new Special Forces operation” in Iraq called “preemptive manhunting.” He
compared the operation to Phoenix and noted that “The new civilian Assistant
Secretary for Special Operations in the Pentagon is Thomas O’Connell, an Army
veteran who served in the Phoenix program in Vietnam, and who, in the early
eighties, ran Grey Fox, the Army’s secret commando unit.”
An article by Julian Borger published the same day as Hersh’s (8 December
2003) dealt with the same subject, minus the sensational rhetoric.
2 As Borger
noted, and as The New York Times had reported a month earlier, Task Force 121
was the name of the unit conducting the Phoenix-style operation in Iraq. Trained
by Israeli commandos, Task Force 121 was originally designed to capture and
assassinate High Value targets within Saddam Hussein’s Baathist Party.
However, the targeted Baathists tried to hide among family, friends and
supporters, and soon Task Force 121 death squads were kicking down the doors
to private homes and, as Hersh correctly observed, killing everyone within “the
broad middle of the Ba’athist underground.”
As CIA officer Frank Snepp had written 40 years earlier, “the Phoenix strike
teams opted for a scattershot approach, picking up anyone who might be a
suspect, and eventually, when the jails were packed to overflowing, they began
simply taking the law, such as it was, into their own hands.”
Hersh’s article was billed as news, but it wasn’t. CIA commandos had been
in Iraq since 2002, preparing rebel Kurdish forces to guide the task forces that
followed in 2003. These earlier CIA units assembled the blacklists that Task
Force 121 later used to target Saddam and his senior staff. The military called
this earlier adventure “decapitation” and credited it with degrading the Iraqi
army’s ability to resist the US invasion.
Prior to the invasion, CIA officers also squeezed key Iraqi army officers and
civil officials into defecting and spreading CIA-scripted black propaganda in
widely dispersed articles like the one Chris Hedges wrote for The New York
Times on 8 November 2001, titled “Defectors Cite Iraqi Training for Terrorism”.
Likewise, characterizing Phoenix as a Special Forces assassination program
is a half-truth at best, akin to saying that baseball is only about throwing a ball,
without mentioning the fielding and hitting. The CIA managed the entirety of the
multi-faceted Phoenix program, just as it manages every “task force” sent into
Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, etc. Some prominent left journalists have
spread the fiction that the military is in charge, hopefully out of stupidity.
3
Special Forces units participated in Phoenix operations, yes, but, as I’ll show
in this chapter, as one of the many elements the program coordinated, and
always under the supervision of senior CIA officers.
Phoenix operations ranged from small units on snatch and snuff missions to
My Lai-style cordon and search operations involving hundreds of American and
Vietnamese soldiers, Special Police officials, and psychological warfare
(psywar) teams. In their pursuit of Communist political cadres, senior Phoenix
officials conducted operations in Cambodia, Laos and North Vietnam, as well as
in South Vietnam. As Colonel Douglas Dillard revealed to me, they even had the
authority to call in massive air strikes.
From mid-1968 until mid-1969, Dillard, under the guidance of Jim Ward, the
CIA’s region officer in charge, coordinated Phoenix operations in the Delta
region of South Vietnam. Dillard told me that he and Ward had the authority to
call in B-52 strikes on targeted groups and individuals. “The idea was that if we
knew their pattern and if we could put the fear of God in them, then we could
influence their movements so they could never assemble as a battalion,” Dillard
explained. “We continued to try to do that from the summer of 1968 on, and we
started getting in some pretty good defectors because of that pressure. The
overall coordination was working.”
Indeed – and this is important in understanding Bob Kerrey’s mission –
coordination at every level of the Phoenix program was absolutely essential. For
example, the CIA could not run a small unit operation in enemy territory without
first consulting its military associates, because, as Dillard put it, “it’s conceivable
that the operations people have scheduled a B-52 strike in that area.”
In a thesis he wrote for Air University in 1974, titled “The Future
Applicability of the Phoenix Program,” CIA officer Warren Milberg described a
typical Phoenix operation involving several US army infantry companies. The
operation was conducted in the village of Thuong Xa in Quang Tri Province in
early 1968. As Milberg noted, Thuong Xa had served as a staging area for the
Vietminh in the First Indochina War and its inhabitants still supported the
Communists. However, according to Milberg, the villagers’ support for the
Communists had been coerced through atrocities and armed propaganda, and
therefore the Americans had no choice but to save the villagers from themselves.
The decision to conduct a Phoenix operation of “massive proportions”
against Thuong Xa was made by the Province Security Council at the direction
of Milberg’s boss, Bob Brewer, the CIA’s province officer in charge. Brewer
functioned like a warlord, and once permission was granted, “Only the barest
essential information was given to the various Vietnamese agencies in Quang
Tri,” Milberg wrote.
Cutting out the Vietnamese was designed to prevent local officials on the VC
payroll from interfering with the “planning process.” To further ensure security,
“The actual name of the targeted village was not released to the Vietnamese until
the day before the operation.”
In preparing the Thuong Xa operation, information from South Vietnamese
Police Special Branch informers, along with information from Province
Interrogation Center (PIC) reports, was fed into the Phoenix program’s newly
established District Intelligence and Operations Coordinating Centers (DIOCCs)
near Thuong Xa. A blacklist of suspected VCI was compiled in Quang Tri’s
Province Intelligence and Operations Coordination Center (PIOCC), and then
cross-checked “against master Phoenix lists” at the Phoenix Directorate in
Saigon to ensure that high level CIA penetration agents were protected.
Before the operation, Provincial Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) teams, advised
by US Marines detached to the CIA, were sent to locate and surveil targeted
Communist cadres, known as members of the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI).
Escape routes were studied for ambush sites and local US Army and Marine
units were conscripted to act as a “blocking force” to seal off the village, just as
happened at My Lai on 16 March 1968.
4 At dawn on the day of the Phoenix
operation in Thuong Xa, US military aircraft dropped thousands of psywar
leaflets on the village urging the targeted VCI to surrender, and offering rewards
to defectors and informers. All that happened at My Lai too.
None of the villagers took advantage of the deal. Instead, the residents
braced for the shock. In the early morning hours, the PRU “counterterror” teams
accompanied by Special Branch interrogators and CIA advisors like Milberg
started searching people’s homes for weapons, documents, food caches and VCI
suspects.
As Milberg noted, the Special Police and its CIA advisors “compared the
names and descriptions on the blacklists with every man, woman, and child in
Thuong Xa.”
Suspects were sent to screening zones where they were interrogated, while
people identified as innocent bystanders were fed and “entertained” by RD
Cadre psywar teams. The VCI, meanwhile, were driven into the northeast corner
of town, where they were killed or captured as they tried to escape through
Milberg’s “ring of steel.”
The result was two VCI captured. One was the district party chief; the other
was the chief of the local National Liberation Front farmers’ association. Both
were sent to the CIA’s brutal interrogation center in Da Nang. Eight other
targeted VCI were killed or escaped. Two psywar teams stayed behind to assert
the puppet government’s presence, but within a month they were driven out of
town and Thuong Xa reverted to Communist control.
As a result of such costly failures, which depleted resources without
producing spectacular body counts, the CIA turned to small, unilateral operations
like the one Bob Kerrey conducted. The military initially resisted on moral and
legal grounds. General Bruce Palmer, commander of the Ninth Infantry Division
in the Mekong Delta, objected to the “involuntary assignment” of American
soldiers to Phoenix. He did not believe that “people in uniform, who are pledged
to abide by the Geneva Conventions, should be put in the position of having to
break those laws of warfare.”
Despite the hesitancy of conventional military commanders, US Special
Forces, including Navy SEALs, have no compunctions about killing civilians.
As Frank Snepp noted, as mentioned above, small unit Phoenix operations
proliferated and took “the law, such as it was, into their own hands.” They also
proved to be the most efficient way of waging a counterinsurgency.
Today, under CIA guidance and coordination, US Special Forces and the
military’s legion of unaccountable mercenary contractors have become the de
facto policemen of the American empire, and each branch of the military has
created its own commandos to conduct such “extra-legal” operations. It’s the
new wave.
But counter-subversion is a police responsibility, and as the American
agency mandated to work with foreign special police forces, the CIA will always
manage Phoenix-style assassination programs, with the military providing the
manpower to staff them in America’s colonies around the world.
Blaming the Victim
To his credit, Seymour Hersh was correct when he said the original “moving
targets” were members of the Ba’ath Party.
5 But he studiously avoided putting
either the Vietnam war or the Iraq War in its proper context. He ignored the
overarching fact that the CIA’s assassination programs in Iraq and Vietnam were
both illegal precisely because they targeted civilians. He didn’t mention the
network of CIA interrogation centers and special police informant programs
upon which pacification depends. Nor did he mention that American war
managers, through administrative detention laws, denied targeted Iraqi and
Vietnamese civilians due process in their own country, as part of the Phoenix
model the CIA applies in every nation the US conquers and corrupts.
Hersh did focus on the problems caused by faulty information, but he
omitted a significant gory detail: that based on the word of an anonymous
informant, Ba’ath Party members who had never harmed a single American were
detained indefinitely and tortured until they confessed or became double agents
spreading CIA propaganda. Instead, Hersh focused on soldiers who escaped the
dragnet.
He did not accuse US commander Stanley McChrystal of systematic war
crimes related to the “political cleansing” that preceded the “reconstruction” of
Iraq. Nor did he call the task force hit teams “death squads” or name the war
criminals who ran the murder machine at McChrystal’s headquarters 50 miles
north of Baghdad.
Something else Hersh failed to mention: anyone who resisted the American
invasion was put on the CIA’s hit list, not just former Ba’ath Party members. Nor
was the murder of those people a mistake arising from faulty intelligence, as
Hersh suggested. It was and is policy. As the CIA learned in Vietnam, killing
specific targets doesn’t terrorize an entire population into submission; only
indiscriminate mass murder can achieve that ghastly goal.
Phoenix, according to Hersh, was on everyone’s minds in late 2003. He said
that “many” of the anonymous officials he interviewed were afraid the preemptive manhunting strategy would turn into another Phoenix program. But
that’s not true. The officials planning the war within the Bush regime, including
Phoenix-veteran John Negroponte, knew exactly what the consequences of preemptive manhunting would be. They had every intention of using the Phoenix
model to permanently fracture Iraq society, rule it through a regime of corrupted
collaborators, and then steal all its oil wealth. Hersh never characterizes
American military aggression as a function of capitalism and imperialism.
The trick for journalists like Hersh was to cover up the plan, using cherry picked interviews that follow the CIA script. For example, one anonymous
Pentagon advisor Hersh interviewed justified preemptive manhunting by
asserting that America’s leaders had to stop the 9/11 “terrorists” from striking
again. In other words, America had no choice. But, as Hersh strikingly neglected
to mention, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. The Iraqis were “terrorists” only in
the sense that they resisted the American occupation of their country. They
hadn’t even had WMD's.
Hersh never says anything about the CIA or Special Forces as instruments of
an unstated but intentional policy of systematic and sustained war crimes. There
is always, in his reporting, a justification for what Americans do. They can be
misled. And sometimes they mislead. But only when the nation’s survival is at
stake.
In a final apologetics tour de force, Hersh exonerated his American sources
for any mistakes that were made. “In choosing targets,” he said in regard to
Phoenix, “the Americans relied on information supplied by South Vietnamese
Army officers and village chiefs. The operation got out of control.”
Even for a craftsman like Hersh, this generalization was a nifty piece of
disinformation. As Milberg noted above, the CIA excluded its Vietnamese
counterparts from Phoenix planning, but the operations failed anyway – and not
because the Communists had coerced the people, as Milberg claimed, but
because the people supported them.
Hersh failed to note that the Americans were fully aware much of the
incriminating information they were fed was false. But, as this book has shown,
their system was geared to work that way. The CIA deliberately jerry-rigged the
Phoenix program so it would overflow with false confessions and accusations,
precisely so it could get away with mass murder and terrorizing the population.
What a writer doesn’t say is often more important than what he or she does
say. In this regard, Hersh did not mention that as soon as American soldiers
started fighting and dying in Iraq, they cultivated grievances against the Iraqis
who hated them for kicking down their doors, invading their homes, and carting
off their men to torture chambers. American war managers always factor this
inevitability into their schemes. Why don’t journalists acknowledge it?
William Calley and his men blamed every Vietnamese man, woman and
child for the deaths of their comrades, which is why the majority of Americans
refused to condemn them for massacring hundreds of civilians in My Lai. This is
what makes America exceptional: our lives have value, others’ don’t. It’s that
double standard that enables the American war machine to cut a swath of
righteous savagery across the Muslim world, and for the media to characterize it
as “protecting the American people from terror.”
This places me among those who say it: some of America’s top leaders do
have evil intentions. Those who planned the war on Iraq knew that war crimes
like the My Lai massacre would proliferate in Iraq just as they had in Vietnam,
and for all the same reasons. The CIA is their increasingly not-so-secret
instrument for carrying out many of those evil plans, including a long and well
documented history of well concealed programs that result from the mass
murdering of civilians whose beliefs the war managers hate and whose wealth
they covet. And over the course of the CIA’s criminal career, it has relied on
journalists like Hersh to never tell that part of the story. In their corrupt world of
anonymous sources and quid pro quos, Americans never have evil intentions.
Quoting one of his stable of anonymous sources – invariably tough guys who
talk like John Wayne – Hersh perpetuated the myth that the Iraqis attacked us
first. “The only way we can win is to go unconventional,” Hersh quoted one of
his patent heroic American sources as saying. “We’re going to have to play their
game. Guerrilla versus guerrilla. Terrorism versus terrorism. We’ve got to scare
the Iraqis into submission.”
All this BS served its intended purpose: it made Hersh’s audience of pseudo intellectuals, middle class liberals and Compatible Leftists feel good, thinking
that America was a victim and had no choice but resort to terrorism.
Men in Black
In a concerted effort to “scare” an entire population into submission, the CIA
went “unconventional” in Vietnam, establishing Phoenix centers and conducting
“selective terrorism” in each of the country’s 240 districts. The stated policy was
to replace the bludgeon of B-52 bombings and My Lai-style search and destroy
operations (which had alienated the people) with the scalpel of assassinations of
selected VCI. Phoenix co-creator Robert Komer called this the “rifle shot”
approach.
Much of this terrorism was the result of unilateral CIA counter-terror
operations. As Dinh Tuong An noted in his series of articles in 1970 and 1971
about Phoenix for Tin Sang, Phoenix was “a series of big continuous operations
which destroy the countryside and put innocent people to death. In the sky are
armed helicopters, but on the ground are the black uniforms, doing what they
want where the helicopters and B-52’s do not reach.”
“Americans in black uniforms,” said An, “are the most terrible.” 6
An could have been writing about the SEAL team mission former Nebraska governor and senator Bob Kerrey led into Thanh Phong village on the night of 25 February 1969. During that mission, Kerrey and his seven-man squad murdered, in cold blood, more than a dozen women and children, as reported by Gregory Vistica 32 years later. 7 [I would also add that the Franklin pedophile ring ran during his governorship DC]
To make matters worse, the SEALs lied about it when they got back to their Navy base. Kerrey reported that they had killed 21 Viet Cong guerrillas in a terrible battle, and received a Bronze Star in return.
The CIA’s strategy of using systematic war crimes was christened Contre Coup by its creator, CIA officer Ralph Johnson, in South Vietnam. A veteran of the Flying Tigers and notorious ladies’ man whose most famous liaison was with Nguyen Cao Ky’s wife, Johnson was described by one colleague as “a good looking, fast-talking snake-oil salesman.” In his book The Phoenix Program: Planned Assassination or Legitimate Conflict Management, political warfare pioneer Johnson described Contre Coup as “Turning the Communist terrorist strategy, which had proven effective, into a US-Saigon pacification strategy.” 8
This is the same disingenuous argument Hersh made above, the idea that we have no choice but to adopt the enemy’s use of “selective terrorism” and use it against them to protect ourselves. This strategy of being more terrifying than the Viet Cong was based on the belief that the war was essentially political and psychological in nature. The CIA misrepresented the war as being fought by opposing ideological factions, each side amounting to about five percent of the total population, while the remaining ninety percent were caught in the cross-fire and just wanted the war to go away.
On one side were Communists supported by comrades in Moscow and Peking. The Communists fought for land reform, to rid Vietnam of American militants, and to unite the north and south, which had been split apart at the end of World War Two. The other faction was composed of Americans and its GVN collaborators, many of whom were Catholics the CIA had relocated from North Vietnam in 1954. This faction was fighting to protect South Vietnam’s rich political elite under the direction of Quiet American businessmen.
The object shared by both factions was to win the uncommitted ninety percent over to its side, by coercion if necessary.
The Contre Coup strategy was adopted and advanced by Peer DeSilva, who arrived in Saigon in December 1963 as the CIA’s station chief. DeSilva claimed to have been shocked by what he saw. In his autobiography SubRosa, he described how the VC had “impaled a young boy, a village chief, and his pregnant wife on sharp poles. To make sure this horrible sight would remain with the villagers, one of the VC terror squad used his machete to disembowel the woman, spilling the fetus onto the ground.” 9
Several military and CIA veterans I spoke with had the same experience as DeSilva. Warren Milberg, for example, served his first tour in Vietnam as an air force security officer. He returned in 1967 as a CIA employee, at which point the scales fell from his eyes and he began to see “evidence of how the Vietcong were operating in the hamlets. And what will always stand out in my mind was the terror and torture they used to strike fear and get compliance from the villagers.”
Milberg cited “an event where a particular village chief’s wife, who was pregnant, was disemboweled and their unborn baby’s head was smashed with a rifle butt. We stumbled on this incident quite by accident within hours of it happening. I’d never seen anything like it in my life.”
The aforementioned Colonel Douglas Dillard had the same experience. Assigned as the senior Phoenix officer in the Mekong Delta in February 1968, Dillard, as he recalled, “arrived in Can Tho on a Friday afternoon. The two army sergeants that had come in to be my administrative assistants met me at the airport and took me over to the compound and settled me in the CIA’s regional Embassy House.”
The next day Dillard took a chopper to Chau Doc Province on the Cambodian border. “It was my first introduction to the real war,” Dillard said. “It was right after Tet, and there was still a lot of activity. The young sergeant there, Drew Dix, had been in a little village early that morning. The VC had come in and got a couple out that were accused of collaborating with the government, and they’d shot them in the ears. Their bodies were lying out on a cart. We drove out there, and I looked at that, and I had my first awareness of what those natives were up against. Because during the night, the damn VC team would come in, gather all those villagers together, warn them about cooperating, and present an example of what happened to collaborators. They shot them in the ears on the spot.
“So I knew what my job was. I realized there was a tremendous psychological problem to overcome in getting that specific group of villagers to cooperate in the program. Because to me the Phoenix program required adequate, timely, and detailed information so we could intercept, make to defect, kill, maim, or capture the Vietcong guerrilla forces operating in our area. Or put a strike on them. If either through intercepting messages or capturing VCI, you could get information on some of the main force guerrilla battalion activity, you could put a B-fifty-two strike on them, which we did in Four Corps.”
It’s debatable how random such introductions to VC terror actually were. As I mentioned in Chapter 6: “The Afghan ‘Dirty War’ Escalates”, CIA officer Robert Haynes (who was serving as a deputy to Evan Parker in the Phoenix Directorate in February 1968) told Senator Brewster that CIA teams committed atrocities and made them look like the work of the VC.
Such “black propaganda” was not uncommon. In his autobiography Soldier, Anthony Herbert told how he reported for duty with the CIA’s Special Operations Group in Saigon in late 1965 and was asked to join a top secret psywar program. “What they wanted me to do was to take charge of execution teams that wiped out entire families and tried to make it look as though the VC themselves had done the killing. The rationale was that other Vietnamese would see that the VC had killed another VC and would be frightened away from becoming VC themselves. Of course, the villagers would then be inclined to some sort of allegiance to our side.” 10
Herbert refused to join the “black propaganda” SOG program. Not only that, he spilled the beans on one of the CIA’s dirty tricks. As a result, Herbert was vilified in military circles. For above all, Americans can never be said to willfully do anything evil.
They can never be said to be hypocrites either, but station chief DeSilva, who said the VC “were monstrous” authorized the creation of small “counter terrorism teams” (later renamed the PRU) to do the exact same thing, and worse – to commit acts of selective terror and blame them on the VC. As DeSilva described the counterterrorism teams in the passage from his book cited above, they were designed “to bring danger and death to the Vietcong functionaries themselves, especially in areas where they felt secure.”
Ever suspicious of their Vietnamese counterparts, the military branches organized their own counterterrorism teams to terrorize VC in territory they controlled. The Navy had responsibility for the Mekong Delta and gave the job of creating counterterrorism teams to its nascent SEAL program, which President Kennedy authorized in 1962 and was still experimental in the mid-1960s.
In The Phoenix Program, I featured my extensive interview with Navy Lieutenant John Wilbur. In 1967, Wilbur arrived in Vietnam as deputy commander of SEAL Team 2, a 12-man detachment with no combat veterans in its ranks. Wilbur’s SEAL team was assigned to a naval riverine warfare group and quartered in a Quonset hut at the My Tho River dock facility in the middle of the Mekong Delta.
“Frankly,” Wilbur told me, “the Navy didn’t know what to do with us. They didn’t know how to target us or how to operationally control us. So basically they said, “You guys are to go out and interdict supply lines and conduct harassing ambushes and create destruction upon the enemy however you can.”
“Mostly we were to be reactive to, and protective of, the Navy’s PBRs (patrol boats, river),” Wilbur said. “That was our most understandable and direct mission. The PBR squadron leaders would bring us intelligence from the PBR patrols. They would report where they saw enemy troops or if there was an ambush of a PBR. Then we’d go out and get the guys who did it.”
Knowing what to do and doing it were two vastly different things. Despite being highly trained and motivationally indoctrinated, the SEALs started out, in Wilbur’s words, “with the typical disastrous screw-up operations. In our first operation we went out at low tide and ended up getting stuck in mud flats in broad daylight for six hours before we could be extracted. We didn’t have any Vietnamese with us and we didn’t understand very basic things. We didn’t know whether it was a VC cadre or a guy trying to pick up a piece of ass late at night. The only things we had were curfews and free fire zones. And what a curfew was, and what a free fire zone was, became sort of an administrative-political decision. For all we knew, everybody there was terrible.
“We got lost. We got hurt. People were shooting back at us, and other times we never got to a place where we could find people to shoot at. There was a lot of frustration,” Wilbur said, “of having no assurance that the information you got was at all reliable and timely.”
Wilbur cited the time his team “raided an island across from where the US Ninth Infantry Division was based. We surrounded the settlement that morning and came in with guns blazing. I remember crawling into a hut – which in Vietnam was a sort of shed encompassing a mud pillbox where people would hide from attacks – looking for a VC field hospital. There I was with a hand grenade with the pin pulled, my hand on my automatic, guys running around, adrenaline going crazy, people screaming – and I didn’t know who the hell was shooting at who. I can remember that I just wanted to throw the goddamned grenade in the hut and screw whoever was in it. And all of a sudden discovering there was nothing but women and children in there. It was a very poignant experience.”
The CIA assigned Vietnamese scouts from its PRU program to Wilbur’s SEAL teams as a way of improving its effectiveness. But the PRU were not trusted and, once acclimated, the SEALs worked unilaterally. Which brings us to Bob Kerrey.
Phoenix Comes to Thanh Phong
The village of Thanh Phong was located in Kien Hoa Province in the Mekong Delta. It was one of the places the VCI were said to control in February 1969.
Crisscrossed with waterways and rice paddies, Kien Hoa Province was an important rice production area for both the insurgents and the GVN. It was close to Saigon, densely populated, and one of the eight most heavily infiltrated provinces in Vietnam. The estimated 4700 VCI in Kien Hoa Province accounted for more than five percent of the insurgency’s total leadership.
In Operation Speedy Express, the US Army’s Ninth Infantry Division spent the first six months of 1969 rampaging through the province, obliterating villages and killing an estimated 11,000 civilians, all supposedly VC or VC sympathizers.
Meanwhile, the US Navy was patrolling Kien Hoa’s waterways, looking for guerrillas who had escaped the army’s genocidal offensive. As the Navy’s “unconventional” warriors, the SEALs had the task of mounting Phoenix-style “snatch and snuff” operations against targeted VCI in the Delta. 11 The Navy coordinated its anti-VCI with the Phoenix Directorate in Saigon, with Phoenix region headquarters in Can Tho, and with the CIA’s officer in charge in whatever province the operation was to occur. Coordination was necessary to make sure the SEALs were not targeting CIA double-agents in the villages, as Jim Ward and Doug Dillard explained earlier.
As Gregory Vistica noted in his book, The Education of Lieutenant Kerrey, “SEAL advisors were made available to the CIA’s Phoenix program, and Langley used them to train Vietnamese Provincial Reconnaissance Units.” Vistica added, “By 1968 it was common for complete SEAL platoons to operate with the PRU.” 12
Phoenix advisors in Kien Hoa Province did not report to individual military units, but were organized within MACV Advisory Team 88 as part of the CORDs program. Phoenix advisors in the province’s District Intelligence and Operations Coordinating Centers (DIOCCs) wore the MACV patch and were often army counterintelligence officers like Sid Towle involuntarily assigned to the program (see Chapter 4). As Vistica noted in his book, the head of MACV Advisory Team 88 “had to coordinate the State Department’s pacification program, and CIA and army intelligence.” 13 [background on 88 DC]
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2008/10/14-and-88-why-white-supremacists-love-the-numbers.html
Based on information from the local Phoenix DIOCC, the MACV Team 88 commander believed the tiny, coastal village of Thanh Phong was a VC stronghold and that an important VCI cadre was planning a visit there. This intelligence was passed to the CIA’s Province Officer in Charge (POIC), who had cognizance over all “anti-infrastructure” operations in Kien Hoa, and from the POIC to the CIA’s region officer in charge (Jim Ward or his replacement) and from the ROIC to Navy Seal commanders. The Seal commanders assigned Lt Bob Kerrey and his SEAL team the job of capturing or killing the targeted individual. It was Kerrey’s maiden mission. He was 25.
In an article written for The New York Times, Vistica recounted how the operation unfolded. 14
“Kerrey’s group was called Delta Platoon, Seal Team One, Fire Team Bravo,” Vistica said. “Unofficially, they would be dubbed Kerrey’s Raiders, in honor of their enthusiastic commanding officer, who was ready to take on Hanoi, as he has said many times, with ‘a knife in my teeth.’ Only two of the men, Mike Ambrose and Gerhard Klann, had previous experience on SEAL teams in Vietnam. The others – William H. Tucker III, Gene Peterson, Rick Knepper, a medic named Lloyd Schreier and Kerrey himself – were flying into the unknown.”
Kerrey’s platoon was based at Cat Lo near Vung Tao, cite of the sprawling RD Cadre facility where the CIA trained its PRU teams. Kerrey’s SEAL team launched their mission into the “Thanh Phong Secret Zone” from the joint CIA/Navy compound at Vung Tau. They were delivered on Swift boats.
Everything indicates Kerrey’s SEAL Team was on a traditional Phoenix operation. The program was still under CIA control in February 1969, and the intelligence for the mission came from a DIOCC through the chain of command described above. Vistica interviewed Captain David Marion, the senior CORDS advisor in the district where Thanh Phong was located. Marion’s GVN counterpart, Tiet Lun Du, was “a 45-year old military officer trained at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.” According to Vistica, Du designated Thanh Phu District “a “free-fire zone” which allowed combat pilots and Navy warships to attack “targets of opportunity,” including people and villages, “without prior command authority.”
Marion’s intelligence, obtained from the Thanh Phu DIOCC, indicated that the VCI “village secretary” was planning a meeting in the area at some unknown point in time. Based on that sketchy information, the preemptive manhunt for a moving target commenced. Again, it followed Phoenix SOP.
Thanh Phong consisted of 75 to 150 people living in “groups of four or five hooches … strung out over about a third of a mile of shoreline. On Feb. 13, 1969, according to the SEALs after-action reports, Kerrey’s team entered a section of Thanh Phong, searched two hooches and ‘interrogated 14 women and small children,’ looking for the village secretary. They departed on a swift boat the next day, then returned to the general area later that night only to abort because of a malfunctioning radio.”
Kerrey’s team performed exactly as Warren Milberg and Dinh Tuong An described Phoenix operations earlier in this book: the CIA always sent a small unit (the PRU or “hunter” team) into a village the day before the operation to map out the village and capture people targeted for interrogation. The next day the CT/PRU team would return with the “killer” team to take out the larger target – the people in the village itself. The massacres were afforded plausible deniability back at headquarters, where – in so far as the only rule in psychological warfare is “post your own score” – the victims were identified as armed and dangerous VC guerrillas.
Some important details standard to such operations are missing from Kerrey’s story. For example, how did the SEALs conduct their interrogations? Did they have a PRU interpreter with them? Did they chop off fingers? In any event, Kerrey knew how the village was laid out, how many people lived there, and where they lived. All that was needed was a provocation, generated through CIA “black propaganda” or otherwise, and such a provocation magically occurred a few days later when the VC allegedly committed an atrocity of some sort in the area, the “monstrous” kind Milberg, DeSilva and Dillard have described above.
Once the provocation had occurred, Captain Martin and District Chief Duc responded in the usual manner; they told the villagers an operation was going to be conducted and that anyone who wasn’t gone would be considered VC and killed. And indeed, on the night of 25 February, a Swift boat brought Kerrey and his SEAL team back to Thanh Phong to finish their business. The marauders moved in around midnight and, by Kerrey’s account, the killings were committed in self-defense.
According to Kerrey, his team stumbled on a home they hadn’t noticed the first time they were in the village, even though it was on the pre-arranged path they had walked a few days earlier. The home was occupied, Kerrey said, by two lookouts. Kerrey ordered two SEALs to kill the lookouts using their knives, often Gerber Mark II daggers. American commandos are taught how to put their hand over the sleeping victim’s mouth, slip the dagger up under the second rib through the heart, and then give it a flick so it snaps the spinal cord. Or they just slice the throat from ear to ear.
Having done that, the team, according to Kerrey, worked their way along a dyke into a hamlet consisting of four hooches. Suddenly without warning someone opened fire on the SEALs, who, in a blind fury, responded with everything they had, expending 1,200 rounds of ammunition. When the dust settled, 14 people were clumped together, dead. Seven more were killed trying to flee.
That’s Kerrey’s version, as reported by Vistica. According to Gerhard Klann, the most experienced SEAL on the mission and later a member of SEAL Team 6 (credited with killing Osama bin Laden), the murders were not committed in response to an ambush, but were conducted systematically, in cold blood.
Klann told Vistica that Kerrey ordered him to kill an old man, an old woman, and three children in the first home – the one Kerrey said was occupied by armed VC guerrilla lookouts. When the old man resisted, Kerrey kneeled on him so Klann could slit his throat. Reminiscent of a scene out of Truman Capote’s book In Cold Blood, a third SEAL came to their assistance and helped kill the old woman and kids, who were now fully awake and screaming.
A Vietnamese woman, Pham Tri Lanh, witnessed the murders and confirmed Klann’s account. She added that the old folks – Bui Van Vat and his wife, Luu Thi Canh – were the children’s grandparents. Vistica confirmed they existed by visiting their graves in the village (something the New London Day could have done, if it really wanted to know what really went on in the PIC Rob Simmons ran, as described in Chapter 15).
Having dispatched with those five yellow-skinned “Commie symps”, the heroic SEALs abandoned their preemptive manhunt for the elusive, moving VCI cadre. They knew the other villagers had heard the murdered family’s screams, so, according to Klann, they rounded up all the “women and children from a group of hooches on the fringes of the village.” Having done that, they searched their homes. Finding no arms or evidence of the political cadre they were hunting, they massacred everyone else in an attempt to conceal the murder of the five people in the first home, and as a psychological warfare warning to villagers in surrounding villages. Klann said they were less than ten feet away from the people they cut down, and that Kerrey gave the order. Some were still crying and squirming after the first barrage, so they finished off the survivors, including a baby. [yeah,real f*#king hero's,not DC]
As CIA officer Peer DeSilva put it, the SEALs were monstrous in the application of murder to achieve the political and psychological impact they wanted. Then they went home and reported they had killed 21 VC.
“You spend half your
life just covering up” 15
It’s ludicrous to think Kerrey and the SEALs didn’t know what they were getting into and didn’t intend to murder everyone in Thanh Phong.
While on contract with the CIA from early 1967 through early 1969, Marine Captain Robert Slater served as director of the PIC program and chief interrogation advisor to the Special Police. In a 1970 thesis for the Defense Intelligence Institute titled “The History, Organization and Modus Operandi of the Viet Cong Infrastructure,” Slater described the District Party Secretary as the “indispensable link” in the VCI hierarchy.
As Slater explained, “The District Party Secretary usually does not sleep in the same house or even hamlet where his family lived, to preclude any injury to his family during assassination attempts.” But he added, “the Allies have frequently found out where the District Party Secretaries live and raided their homes: in an ensuing fire fight the secretary’s wife and children have been killed and injured.”
Kerrey’s SEAL team targeted a Village Party Secretary for assassination in Thanh Phong, and the same result occurred: even though they couldn’t find the target, everyone present was killed, including children.
This is the intellectual context in which Kerrey’s war crime took place: it was standard procedure to kill the target along with his family and friends. For purposes of plausible denial, you could say the others were unintended victims and collateral damage, but when you know it’s going to happen and it happens every time, consistently, over years, that threadbare excuse doesn’t hold water. Omerta, the Mafia’s term for its sacred code of silence, alone enabled Kerrey and the SEAL team to get away with the premeditated murder and mutilation of 21 defenseless people, and then report it as a fierce battle with VC. 16
That’s American military idolatry in a nutshell. Convicted of murdering 22 unarmed civilians in My Lai, William Calley was venerated as a hero and served three years under house arrest until pardoned by Richard Nixon. Calley’s defense was to say that massacring civilians happened all the time.
Bob Kerrey’s friend and colleague, Secretary of State John Kerry, used the same “everyone else does it” grade school rationale to defend Kerrey. Along with senators Max Cleland and Chuck Hagel, Kerry (then a senator), issued a statement in 2001 stating their belief that an investigation into the Thanh Phong massacre would be counterproductive, in so far as it blamed “the warrior rather than the war.” 17
While “in effect conceding that the war as a whole was criminal in character…Kerry elaborated, in one television appearance, on the thesis that soldiers should not be held responsible for actions that were in accordance with the policies of the US government. The raid on Thanh Phong was part of Operation Phoenix, he said, and ‘the Phoenix program was an assassination program run by the United States of America.’ 18
Kerrey’s war crime was made worse by the fact that the unarmed civilians his SEAL team murdered were prisoners. But unrepentant Bob defended himself from that charge by claiming he was ordered not to take prisoners. He didn’t want to kill those little kids; he was told to do it.
Where have we heard that before?
In any event, justice of a sort prevailed; on his next mission, a grenade exploded at Kerrey’s feet. Who put it there is not known. Is it possible that he was fragged by his fellow SEALs for some unknown reason? However the grenade got there, it blew off the lower part of a leg. Kerrey’s career as a killer came to a close and he went home to weep in his mother’s arms.
After a few months of self-pity, Kerrey began his descent into the self deception and revisionism that accompanies war crimes. It is a process of identity recreation he shares with many veterans of Vietnam and America’s neo-colonial wars since 9/11. To a large extent, as I’ve noted throughout the text, the success of their collective cover-up defines America’s exceptionalism.
Kerrey’s rebirth as a certified hero began when he received the Medal of Honor on 14 May 1970, a mere ten days after the Ohio National Guard murdered four anti-war protester's at Kent State. The medal was a meal ticket not unlike being inducted into the Mafia as a “made man”. One of the Protected Few, Kerrey was forever guaranteed fame and fortune. The only burden he carried was the grudge he held against the anti-war protestors who didn’t appreciate his sacrifice.
Elected governor of Nebraska in 1982, he dated movie starlet Debra Winger, became a celebrity, and got elected to the US senate where he served as vice- chair of the intelligence committee. The picture of a neoliberal, he even ran for president in 1990, showering self-righteous criticism on draft dodger Bill Clinton for his penchant for lying.
Kerrey was no longer in government in 2001 when Klann revealed what had really happened in Thanh Phong. But the Ultras immediately and wholeheartedly rallied to his defense. His SEAL team, apart from Klann, closed ranks and backed his version of events. Kerrey accused Klann of having a personal grievance against him, and implied he was lying.
Colonel David Hackworth, representing the military establishment, defended Kerrey by saying “there were thousands of such atrocities.” Hackworth said that his own unit committed “at least a dozen such horrors.” He said it nonchalantly, as if he were mowing the lawn. 19
Representing Hollywood and the propaganda industry’s huge financial investment in the myth of the American war hero, Jack Valenti told the LA Times that, “all the normalities [sic] of a social contract are abandoned” in war. By the same token, this means it is perfectly okay for terrorists to attack Western civilians because CIA officers operate in secret and cannot be located. 20
Kerrey also received support from veterans of the Vietnam press corps. Former New York Times correspondent David Halberstam, author of The Best and the Brightest, described the region around Thanh Phong as “the purest bandit country.” He added that “by 1969 everyone who lived there would have been third-generation Vietcong.” 21
Clichés are the grist of revisionism at its sickest, and Halberstam’s racist, anti-Communist rant exposed him as nothing more than a myth-maker for the rich political elite. Halberstam might just as well have said, “Kill them all!”
Two other journalists stand out as examples of the press corps’ complicity in war crimes in Vietnam. Neil Sheehan, author of the aptly titled Bright Shining Lie, confessed that in 1966 he saw American GIs slaughter as many as 600 Vietnamese civilians in five fishing villages. He had been in Vietnam for three years by then and it didn’t occur to him that he was witnessing a war crime. It was business as usual.
Morley Safer is next on the list of co-conspirators. Safer vented his personal hatred for me when he wrote the half page review in The New York Times that killed my book The Phoenix Program in its cradle.
I wasn’t surprised that the Times employed Safer to assassinate my book. In it I’d said, “When it comes to the CIA and the press, one hand washes the other. In order to have access to informed officials, reporters frequently suppress or distort stories. In return, CIA officials leak stories to reporters to whom they owe favors. At its most incestuous, reporters and government officials are actually related, like Delta PRU commander Charles LeMoyne and his New York Times reporter brother James. 22 Likewise, if Ed Lansdale had not had Joseph Alsop to print his black propaganda in the US, there probably would have been no Vietnam War.”
At the time of the review (October 1990), I thought Safer hated me primarily for accusing the press corps of covering up war crimes. I thought he did for pecuniary reasons too; Safer’s self-congratulatory book on Vietnam had come out a few months before. It wasn’t until 25 years later that I found out that Safer owed William Colby a favor. Safer revealed his incestuous relationship with Colby for the first time at the American Experience conference in 2010. 23
“I got a call to come and see Colby in his office,” Safer explained. “And I walked in – and I had met him; we had no strong relationship at all – but – and Colby said, ‘Look, can you disappear for three days?’ (Laughter.) And I said, ‘I guess.’ (Laughter.) And he said, ‘Well, be at the airport – be at (inaudible) at the airport tomorrow morning at 5:30.’”
Bernard Kalb, the moderator, asked Safer if Colby wanted him to bring along a camera crew.
“No, no,” Safer replied. “And I showed up and [Colby] said, ‘Okay, here are the rules. You can see that I’m going on a tour of all the stations. You can’t take notes and you can’t report anything you hear.’And I spent three days first of all, down in the Delta and they were really, really revealing. There was only one meeting that he would ask me to leave the barracks. And it was fascinating because the stuff that these guys were reporting through whatever filters to you had been so doctored by the time it got to you – I mean, to this day, I still feel constrained in terms of talking about.”
Colby introduced Safer to all the top CIA officers in Vietnam, and introduced him to the interrogation centers and counterterrorism teams. Safer got to see how the CIA crime syndicate was organized and operated. And like Don Corleone dispensing favors in The Godfather, Colby knew that one day Safer would be obligated to return it.
That is how the CIA, as the organized crime branch of the US government, functions like the Mafia through its old boy network of complicit media hacks.
Can Bob Kerrey Be
Tried for Murder?
Kerrey says his actions at Thanh Phong were an atrocity, not a war crime. He feels remorse, not guilt. Totally rehabilitated, he has come to view Vietnam as a “just war.”
“Was the war worth the effort and sacrifice, or was it a mistake?” Kerrey asked rhetorically in a 1999 column in the Washington Post. “When I came home in 1969 and for many years afterward, I did not believe it was worth it. Today, with the passage of time and the experience of seeing both the benefits of freedom won by our sacrifice and the human destruction done by dictatorships, I believe the cause was just and the sacrifice not in vain.”
At the Democratic Party Convention in Los Angeles in 2000, Kerrey lectured the delegates not to be ashamed of war crimes and to treat Vietnam veterans, like him, as heroes, not terrorists. “I never felt more free than when I wore the uniform of our country,” he said without irony, and without noting that wearing the uniform made him “free” to murder women and children.
Promulgating the militaristic Business Party line is the price Bob Kerrey pays for getting away with mass murder. As long as he promulgates it, he’s one of the Protected Few, entrusted with the government’s top secrets. Indeed, he is one of a handful of Americans who has read the secret 28 pages on Saudi Arabia’s role in 9/11. He knows where all the bodies are buried.
Gregory Vistica traveled to Vietnam and visited the graves of Bui Van Vat, his wife Luu Thi Canh, and their three grandkids in Thanh Phong. And now that Kerrey knows where his victims are buried, he could pay his respects to the victims too. While he’s in Vietnam running the Americans’ Fulbright University, he could also pay a visit to the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. According to Wikipedia, the “War Remnants Museum features a display ‘based on the (Thanh Phong) incident. It includes several photos and a drain pipe, which it describes as the place where three children hid before they were found and killed.’”
The display includes the following account: “(The SEALs) cut 66 year-old Bui Van Vat and 62 year-old Luu Thi Canh’s necks and pulled their three grandchildren out from their hiding place in a drain and killed two, disembowell one. Then, these rangers moved to dugouts of other families, shot dead 15 civilians (including three pregnant women), disembowell a girl. The only survivor was a 12-year-old girl named Bui Thi Luom who suffered a foot injury.”
One wonders if Kerrey will visit the graves of the children his SEAL team disemboweled the next time he visits Vietnam. Perhaps he fears being arrested if he does?
As attorney Michael Ratner at the Center for Constitutional Rights told Counterpunch: “Kerrey should be tried as a war criminal. His actions on the night of February 24-25, 1969 when the seven man Navy SEAL unit which he headed killed approximately twenty unarmed Vietnamese civilians, eighteen of whom were women and children, was a war crime. Like those who murdered at My Lai, he too should be brought into the dock and tried for his crimes.”
The Geneva Conventions, customary international law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice all prohibit the killing of noncombatant civilians. The brutality of others is no justification. That is why there is a moral imperative to expose the Phoenix program as the basis for the CIA’s ongoing policy of committing war crimes. It is imperative to try the CIA officers who created it, as well as the people who participated in it, including the journalists who covered it up.
If America’s policy of conducting war crimes is ever to end, people of conscience must expose the dark side of our national psyche, the part that allows us to employ terror to assure our world dominance. To accomplish this there must be a War Crimes Tribunal like the one Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre put together in 1966-1967. I’ve assembled enough evidence in this book alone to put the likes of Bruce Lawlor, Rob Simmons, Frank Scotton and Bob Kerrey in the dock.
The National Security Establishment will try to prevent it. The US government has gone to great lengths to shield itself and its cadres from international law, while corrupting international institutions like the United Nations to prosecute US enemies like Slobodan Milosevic. 24 But if the UN could free itself from US influence, it could establish an ad hoc tribunal, such as it did with the Rwanda ICTR and Yugoslavia ICTY.
Alas, according to Ratner, the legal avenues for bringing Kerrey and his cohorts to justice in the US are limited. A civil suit could be lodged against him by the families of the victims under the Alien Tort Claims Act. There is no statute of limitations for war crimes, and under 18 USC sec. 2441 War Crimes, Kerrey could be sentenced to death or life imprisonment. But at the time of his crime in Vietnam, US criminal law did not apply to what US citizens did overseas. Only military law applied, and now that Kerrey is no longer in the Navy, the military courts have no jurisdiction over him.
In yet another great irony, Kerrey as a senator voted for the war crimes law, allowing others to be prosecuted for crimes similar to those he committed.
Prosecution in Vietnam and extradition are also possibilities. “Universal jurisdiction does not require the presence of the defendant – he can be indicted and tried in some countries in absentia – or his extradition can be requested,” Ratner said. “Some countries may have statutes permitting this. Kerrey should check his travel plans and hire a good lawyer before he gets on a plane. He can use Kissinger’s lawyer.”
But that’s not going to happen. The rule of law ended with 9/11, when illegal invasions and occupations became stated policy, along with targeted assassinations and mass murder. And until the media stops glorifying “preemptive manhunting” of “moving targets” as necessary for our security, rather than fueling the terrorism that threatens the unprotected many, the war crimes will never stop.
There were, however, dimensions to the problem that Priest and Arkin didn’t dare touch upon.
Let me tell you a story that fills in some of the blanks.
In 1985, I was contacted by a CIA officer. Larry had served as a deep-cover agent overseas for over 15 years. He’d had a breakdown and wanted to tell me his story. He’d read my book about my father, The Hotel Tacloban, and thought I’d understand.
Larry’s story began in South Vietnam in 1966 where, as a gungho Marine, he came to the attention of a CIA “talent scout”. The CIA officer ran a background check and discovered that Larry was an only child from a broken marriage. Larry was an emotional orphan, looking for something to latch onto. He chose the ultraconservative route. In high school his favorite activities were attending the local Lutheran church and participating in the Rotary Club debate team. His dream was to become a self-described “crusader” and follow in the footsteps of his hero, John Wayne.
Larry described himself as being “for freedom, the American way of life, and free enterprise.” Plus he was avidly anti-Communist and a combat veteran, which made him even more attractive to the CIA.
Strange things began to happen. Although still a Marine, he was sent to Okinawa and given special training in scuba diving, skydiving, demolition and the martial arts. No one told him why he was being groomed; and being a good soldier, he didn’t ask. But he soon learned that the CIA had decided to turn him into a “deep cover” agent.
At the time, the CIA’s Central Cover Staff managed a worldwide network of deep cover agents and freestanding proprietary companies. It existed (and may still exist with some new name) outside the regular CIA bureaucracy, and was used by presidents to conduct the CIA’s most sensitive operations.
The Central Cover Staff concocted an elaborate cover story. Only Larry’s case officer knew what was fact and what was fiction.
The story went like this: Larry’ father was an Australian soldier who, during a tour in the Philippines in the Second World War, had an affair with a woman whose maiden name was Velesco. His mother was half Spanish, half Filipino, from the upper class. The necessary documents were forged to prove that his mother had been a lawyer working in Samboaga.
Larry’s mother and the Australian soldier were never legally married, but Larry was, by birth, a Philippine citizen.
Abandoned by the Australian soldier, Larry’s mother succumbed to depression and never recovered. She was hospitalized, and Larry was put up for adoption. At the age of three, he was adopted by a loving foster family in America. His middle class parents raised him as their own son, never mentioning that he was not their natural child. He was (according to the “legend” the CIA created) popular and smart, with an aptitude for mechanics.
The CIA forged documents to show that he’d received a scholarship to the General Motors Institute for Automotive Engineering, and had attended the Sloan School of Management at MIT.
According to his cover story, Larry enlisted in the Marines and based on his mechanical aptitude was selected for helicopter pilot training. However, during the required security check, the Marines discovered that he was a Filipino citizen, not an American. This revelation came as a shock, but it also provided him with a pretext to visit the Philippines “to discover his past.”
Larry made the trip immediately upon leaving the Marines in 1968. As outlined in the Central Cover Staff’s script, and as actually happened, Larry learned to speak the language and settled in the land of his birth. He got a job as a manager and translator with a Japanese mining company. He did well but left that job to manage a Shell Oil service station franchise on the island of Leyte.
Over the next ten years, Larry held management positions with BF Goodrich, an American building and supply contractor to Clark Air Force Base, General Motors, VISA Card, and Westinghouse, which built the first nuclear reactor in the Philippines. As is true of most American multinationals, Larry’s employers all knowingly provided cover for CIA agents, as a way of maintaining influence overseas as well as in Washington.
By 1980, Larry had established himself as an upright Filipino citizen. His cover was impeccable and, to make a long story short, he was elected to public office. While in that position, however, things went wrong. The US State Department became aware that he was a deep cover CIA officer serving in the Philippine legislature. A series of actions were taken to destroy all records of his existence, and he was whisked out of the Philippines.
After Larry’s breakdown, the CIA got him a job as a manager of a Playboy club in Detroit. Later, they transferred him to Washington, DC, as manager of the posh Four Ways restaurant off DuPont Circle. When I met him there, his Filipino wife and entourage were working as the kitchen and wait staff. To make sure Larry behaved himself, the CIA had placed a former security officer in charge of finances.
This restaurant was the fanciest place I had ever been in my life. It was a place where striped pants State Department officials, foreign dignitaries and business tycoons met to make deals while sampling fine wines and haute cuisine. Each lavishly appointed room had its own dining table and waiter.
I was directed to a leather booth in the wood-paneled basement barroom, where Larry casually explained that each room was bugged by the CIA.
As we were talking, a group of well-dressed young men and women, chaperoned by an older man, took the booth next to us. The rest of the barroom was empty. They ordered drinks but remained silent and alert as Larry explained the ins and outs of his CIA experience to me.
At one point Larry nodded to the older man at the next booth, then informed me that the young people listening to our conversation were junior officer trainees from Langley.
Larry told me that the CIA manages a parallel society where deep-cover agents like him, as well as retired CIA officers and their agents, are provided with comfortable employment in their retirement years, or when they otherwise need sanctuary and recompense for their services.
Many of these agents have no applicable résumé, so they are folded into this parallel universe as managers of the local Ford dealership, or proprietors of a Chinese restaurant, or in hundreds of other jobs held in abeyance by cooperating businesses.
Think of it as a witness-protection program which, since 2001, has grown exponentially. It is the hidden geography of Top-Secret America, a subculture of highly trained operators with a dangerous set of skills that can be called upon at any moment. The one thing they have in common is that they are entirely dependent on the war criminals running the CIA.
As John Lennon said: “Imagine.”
next
HOW THE GOVERNMENT TRIES TO MESS WITH YOUR MIND
notes
Chapter 18
1 Seymour Hersh, “Moving Targets: Will the counter-insurgency plan in Iraq repeat the mistakes of Vietnam?”, The New Yorker, 15 December 2003. The Ba’athist Party, notably, went “underground” only after the US invasion, specifically to avoid assassination.
2 Julian Borger, “Israel trains US assassination squads in Iraq”, 8 December 2003, Guardian.
3 Douglas Valentine, “Antiwar Reporting On the National Security State”, 8 February 2010, Lew Rockwell.com.
4 See “The Phoenix Program, My Lai and the “Tiger Cages”” at <http://whale.to/b/ph2.html> and
relevant passages from my book The Phoenix Program.
5 As it had with the Communist VCI in South Vietnam, the US conferred upon itself the divine right to
exterminate Ba’athist Party leaders, along with their families and friends. This seemed unfair to
members of the Ba’athist Party, the vast majority of whom had no American blood on their hands. Like
their Vietnamese counterparts in the village of Thuong Xa, Iraqis who survived the US “shock and awe”
campaign, and weren’t terrorized into submission by the massive CIA-police repression that followed,
continue to resist. Some have reportedly formed alliances with or even joined ISIS. See Dina alShibeeb, “Where is Iraq’s Baath party today?” Al Arabiya News, Friday, 21 August 2015.
6 ISIS reportedly dresses its forces in black.
7 Gregory L. Vistica, “One Awful Night in Thanh Phong”, The New York Times, April 25, 2001.
8 Phoenix Phung Hoang: Planned Assassination or Legitimate Conflict Management?, American
University, 1Washington D.C., 1982, p. 5.
9 Peer DeSilva, Sub Rosa, New York Times Books, New York, 1978, p. 249.
10 Anthony Herbert, Soldier, Holt Rinehart & Winston, New York, 1973, pp. 105-106.
11 Generally speaking, the Marines supported Phoenix in I Corps, the Special Forces in II Corps, and the
US Army in II Corps.
12 Gregory Vistica, The Education of Lieutenant Kerrey, Thomas Dunne Books, 2003, p. 71.
13 Ibid, p. 75.
14 Gregory L. Vistica, “One Awful Night in Thanh Phong”, The New York Times, April 25, 2001.
15 From the song “Born in the USA” by Bruce Springfield.
16 Omerta applies as well when dealing with CIA secrecy. It literally means “manhood” and refers to the
idea of a man dealing with his own problems without the help of a lawful entity.
17 Patrick Martin, “New School students demand ouster of Kerrey over Vietnam War atrocity”, World
Socialist Website, 14 may 2001.
18 Ibid.
19 David Hackworth, “The Horror that Will Never Go Away”, King Features Syndicate, 1 May 2001.
20 Jack Valenti, “Killing Civilians Goes With the Duty of War”, LA Times, 8 May 2001.
21 Patrick Martin, “New School students demand ouster of Kerrey over Vietnam War atrocity”, World
Socialist Web Site, 14 May 2001.
22 LeMoyne commanded the Delta PRU at the time of the Kerrey mission into Thanh Phong.
23 US Department of State, Media Roundtable Discussion, The American Experience in Southeast Asia,
1946-1975, 29 September 2010.
24 It is worth noting that the ICTY exonerated Slobodan Milosevic in its ruling that convicted former
Bosnian-Serb president Radovan Karadzic of war crimes. See Alex Wilcoxson, “The Exoneration of
Milosovic: The CTY’s Surprise Ruling,” Counterpunch, August 1, 2016,
<http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/08/01/the-exoneration-of-milosevic-the-ictys-surprise-ruling/>
“Americans in black uniforms,” said An, “are the most terrible.” 6
An could have been writing about the SEAL team mission former Nebraska governor and senator Bob Kerrey led into Thanh Phong village on the night of 25 February 1969. During that mission, Kerrey and his seven-man squad murdered, in cold blood, more than a dozen women and children, as reported by Gregory Vistica 32 years later. 7 [I would also add that the Franklin pedophile ring ran during his governorship DC]
To make matters worse, the SEALs lied about it when they got back to their Navy base. Kerrey reported that they had killed 21 Viet Cong guerrillas in a terrible battle, and received a Bronze Star in return.
The CIA’s strategy of using systematic war crimes was christened Contre Coup by its creator, CIA officer Ralph Johnson, in South Vietnam. A veteran of the Flying Tigers and notorious ladies’ man whose most famous liaison was with Nguyen Cao Ky’s wife, Johnson was described by one colleague as “a good looking, fast-talking snake-oil salesman.” In his book The Phoenix Program: Planned Assassination or Legitimate Conflict Management, political warfare pioneer Johnson described Contre Coup as “Turning the Communist terrorist strategy, which had proven effective, into a US-Saigon pacification strategy.” 8
This is the same disingenuous argument Hersh made above, the idea that we have no choice but to adopt the enemy’s use of “selective terrorism” and use it against them to protect ourselves. This strategy of being more terrifying than the Viet Cong was based on the belief that the war was essentially political and psychological in nature. The CIA misrepresented the war as being fought by opposing ideological factions, each side amounting to about five percent of the total population, while the remaining ninety percent were caught in the cross-fire and just wanted the war to go away.
On one side were Communists supported by comrades in Moscow and Peking. The Communists fought for land reform, to rid Vietnam of American militants, and to unite the north and south, which had been split apart at the end of World War Two. The other faction was composed of Americans and its GVN collaborators, many of whom were Catholics the CIA had relocated from North Vietnam in 1954. This faction was fighting to protect South Vietnam’s rich political elite under the direction of Quiet American businessmen.
The object shared by both factions was to win the uncommitted ninety percent over to its side, by coercion if necessary.
The Contre Coup strategy was adopted and advanced by Peer DeSilva, who arrived in Saigon in December 1963 as the CIA’s station chief. DeSilva claimed to have been shocked by what he saw. In his autobiography SubRosa, he described how the VC had “impaled a young boy, a village chief, and his pregnant wife on sharp poles. To make sure this horrible sight would remain with the villagers, one of the VC terror squad used his machete to disembowel the woman, spilling the fetus onto the ground.” 9
Several military and CIA veterans I spoke with had the same experience as DeSilva. Warren Milberg, for example, served his first tour in Vietnam as an air force security officer. He returned in 1967 as a CIA employee, at which point the scales fell from his eyes and he began to see “evidence of how the Vietcong were operating in the hamlets. And what will always stand out in my mind was the terror and torture they used to strike fear and get compliance from the villagers.”
Milberg cited “an event where a particular village chief’s wife, who was pregnant, was disemboweled and their unborn baby’s head was smashed with a rifle butt. We stumbled on this incident quite by accident within hours of it happening. I’d never seen anything like it in my life.”
The aforementioned Colonel Douglas Dillard had the same experience. Assigned as the senior Phoenix officer in the Mekong Delta in February 1968, Dillard, as he recalled, “arrived in Can Tho on a Friday afternoon. The two army sergeants that had come in to be my administrative assistants met me at the airport and took me over to the compound and settled me in the CIA’s regional Embassy House.”
The next day Dillard took a chopper to Chau Doc Province on the Cambodian border. “It was my first introduction to the real war,” Dillard said. “It was right after Tet, and there was still a lot of activity. The young sergeant there, Drew Dix, had been in a little village early that morning. The VC had come in and got a couple out that were accused of collaborating with the government, and they’d shot them in the ears. Their bodies were lying out on a cart. We drove out there, and I looked at that, and I had my first awareness of what those natives were up against. Because during the night, the damn VC team would come in, gather all those villagers together, warn them about cooperating, and present an example of what happened to collaborators. They shot them in the ears on the spot.
“So I knew what my job was. I realized there was a tremendous psychological problem to overcome in getting that specific group of villagers to cooperate in the program. Because to me the Phoenix program required adequate, timely, and detailed information so we could intercept, make to defect, kill, maim, or capture the Vietcong guerrilla forces operating in our area. Or put a strike on them. If either through intercepting messages or capturing VCI, you could get information on some of the main force guerrilla battalion activity, you could put a B-fifty-two strike on them, which we did in Four Corps.”
It’s debatable how random such introductions to VC terror actually were. As I mentioned in Chapter 6: “The Afghan ‘Dirty War’ Escalates”, CIA officer Robert Haynes (who was serving as a deputy to Evan Parker in the Phoenix Directorate in February 1968) told Senator Brewster that CIA teams committed atrocities and made them look like the work of the VC.
Such “black propaganda” was not uncommon. In his autobiography Soldier, Anthony Herbert told how he reported for duty with the CIA’s Special Operations Group in Saigon in late 1965 and was asked to join a top secret psywar program. “What they wanted me to do was to take charge of execution teams that wiped out entire families and tried to make it look as though the VC themselves had done the killing. The rationale was that other Vietnamese would see that the VC had killed another VC and would be frightened away from becoming VC themselves. Of course, the villagers would then be inclined to some sort of allegiance to our side.” 10
Herbert refused to join the “black propaganda” SOG program. Not only that, he spilled the beans on one of the CIA’s dirty tricks. As a result, Herbert was vilified in military circles. For above all, Americans can never be said to willfully do anything evil.
They can never be said to be hypocrites either, but station chief DeSilva, who said the VC “were monstrous” authorized the creation of small “counter terrorism teams” (later renamed the PRU) to do the exact same thing, and worse – to commit acts of selective terror and blame them on the VC. As DeSilva described the counterterrorism teams in the passage from his book cited above, they were designed “to bring danger and death to the Vietcong functionaries themselves, especially in areas where they felt secure.”
Ever suspicious of their Vietnamese counterparts, the military branches organized their own counterterrorism teams to terrorize VC in territory they controlled. The Navy had responsibility for the Mekong Delta and gave the job of creating counterterrorism teams to its nascent SEAL program, which President Kennedy authorized in 1962 and was still experimental in the mid-1960s.
In The Phoenix Program, I featured my extensive interview with Navy Lieutenant John Wilbur. In 1967, Wilbur arrived in Vietnam as deputy commander of SEAL Team 2, a 12-man detachment with no combat veterans in its ranks. Wilbur’s SEAL team was assigned to a naval riverine warfare group and quartered in a Quonset hut at the My Tho River dock facility in the middle of the Mekong Delta.
“Frankly,” Wilbur told me, “the Navy didn’t know what to do with us. They didn’t know how to target us or how to operationally control us. So basically they said, “You guys are to go out and interdict supply lines and conduct harassing ambushes and create destruction upon the enemy however you can.”
“Mostly we were to be reactive to, and protective of, the Navy’s PBRs (patrol boats, river),” Wilbur said. “That was our most understandable and direct mission. The PBR squadron leaders would bring us intelligence from the PBR patrols. They would report where they saw enemy troops or if there was an ambush of a PBR. Then we’d go out and get the guys who did it.”
Knowing what to do and doing it were two vastly different things. Despite being highly trained and motivationally indoctrinated, the SEALs started out, in Wilbur’s words, “with the typical disastrous screw-up operations. In our first operation we went out at low tide and ended up getting stuck in mud flats in broad daylight for six hours before we could be extracted. We didn’t have any Vietnamese with us and we didn’t understand very basic things. We didn’t know whether it was a VC cadre or a guy trying to pick up a piece of ass late at night. The only things we had were curfews and free fire zones. And what a curfew was, and what a free fire zone was, became sort of an administrative-political decision. For all we knew, everybody there was terrible.
“We got lost. We got hurt. People were shooting back at us, and other times we never got to a place where we could find people to shoot at. There was a lot of frustration,” Wilbur said, “of having no assurance that the information you got was at all reliable and timely.”
Wilbur cited the time his team “raided an island across from where the US Ninth Infantry Division was based. We surrounded the settlement that morning and came in with guns blazing. I remember crawling into a hut – which in Vietnam was a sort of shed encompassing a mud pillbox where people would hide from attacks – looking for a VC field hospital. There I was with a hand grenade with the pin pulled, my hand on my automatic, guys running around, adrenaline going crazy, people screaming – and I didn’t know who the hell was shooting at who. I can remember that I just wanted to throw the goddamned grenade in the hut and screw whoever was in it. And all of a sudden discovering there was nothing but women and children in there. It was a very poignant experience.”
The CIA assigned Vietnamese scouts from its PRU program to Wilbur’s SEAL teams as a way of improving its effectiveness. But the PRU were not trusted and, once acclimated, the SEALs worked unilaterally. Which brings us to Bob Kerrey.
Phoenix Comes to Thanh Phong
The village of Thanh Phong was located in Kien Hoa Province in the Mekong Delta. It was one of the places the VCI were said to control in February 1969.
Crisscrossed with waterways and rice paddies, Kien Hoa Province was an important rice production area for both the insurgents and the GVN. It was close to Saigon, densely populated, and one of the eight most heavily infiltrated provinces in Vietnam. The estimated 4700 VCI in Kien Hoa Province accounted for more than five percent of the insurgency’s total leadership.
In Operation Speedy Express, the US Army’s Ninth Infantry Division spent the first six months of 1969 rampaging through the province, obliterating villages and killing an estimated 11,000 civilians, all supposedly VC or VC sympathizers.
Meanwhile, the US Navy was patrolling Kien Hoa’s waterways, looking for guerrillas who had escaped the army’s genocidal offensive. As the Navy’s “unconventional” warriors, the SEALs had the task of mounting Phoenix-style “snatch and snuff” operations against targeted VCI in the Delta. 11 The Navy coordinated its anti-VCI with the Phoenix Directorate in Saigon, with Phoenix region headquarters in Can Tho, and with the CIA’s officer in charge in whatever province the operation was to occur. Coordination was necessary to make sure the SEALs were not targeting CIA double-agents in the villages, as Jim Ward and Doug Dillard explained earlier.
As Gregory Vistica noted in his book, The Education of Lieutenant Kerrey, “SEAL advisors were made available to the CIA’s Phoenix program, and Langley used them to train Vietnamese Provincial Reconnaissance Units.” Vistica added, “By 1968 it was common for complete SEAL platoons to operate with the PRU.” 12
Phoenix advisors in Kien Hoa Province did not report to individual military units, but were organized within MACV Advisory Team 88 as part of the CORDs program. Phoenix advisors in the province’s District Intelligence and Operations Coordinating Centers (DIOCCs) wore the MACV patch and were often army counterintelligence officers like Sid Towle involuntarily assigned to the program (see Chapter 4). As Vistica noted in his book, the head of MACV Advisory Team 88 “had to coordinate the State Department’s pacification program, and CIA and army intelligence.” 13 [background on 88 DC]
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2008/10/14-and-88-why-white-supremacists-love-the-numbers.html
Based on information from the local Phoenix DIOCC, the MACV Team 88 commander believed the tiny, coastal village of Thanh Phong was a VC stronghold and that an important VCI cadre was planning a visit there. This intelligence was passed to the CIA’s Province Officer in Charge (POIC), who had cognizance over all “anti-infrastructure” operations in Kien Hoa, and from the POIC to the CIA’s region officer in charge (Jim Ward or his replacement) and from the ROIC to Navy Seal commanders. The Seal commanders assigned Lt Bob Kerrey and his SEAL team the job of capturing or killing the targeted individual. It was Kerrey’s maiden mission. He was 25.
In an article written for The New York Times, Vistica recounted how the operation unfolded. 14
“Kerrey’s group was called Delta Platoon, Seal Team One, Fire Team Bravo,” Vistica said. “Unofficially, they would be dubbed Kerrey’s Raiders, in honor of their enthusiastic commanding officer, who was ready to take on Hanoi, as he has said many times, with ‘a knife in my teeth.’ Only two of the men, Mike Ambrose and Gerhard Klann, had previous experience on SEAL teams in Vietnam. The others – William H. Tucker III, Gene Peterson, Rick Knepper, a medic named Lloyd Schreier and Kerrey himself – were flying into the unknown.”
Kerrey’s platoon was based at Cat Lo near Vung Tao, cite of the sprawling RD Cadre facility where the CIA trained its PRU teams. Kerrey’s SEAL team launched their mission into the “Thanh Phong Secret Zone” from the joint CIA/Navy compound at Vung Tau. They were delivered on Swift boats.
Everything indicates Kerrey’s SEAL Team was on a traditional Phoenix operation. The program was still under CIA control in February 1969, and the intelligence for the mission came from a DIOCC through the chain of command described above. Vistica interviewed Captain David Marion, the senior CORDS advisor in the district where Thanh Phong was located. Marion’s GVN counterpart, Tiet Lun Du, was “a 45-year old military officer trained at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.” According to Vistica, Du designated Thanh Phu District “a “free-fire zone” which allowed combat pilots and Navy warships to attack “targets of opportunity,” including people and villages, “without prior command authority.”
Marion’s intelligence, obtained from the Thanh Phu DIOCC, indicated that the VCI “village secretary” was planning a meeting in the area at some unknown point in time. Based on that sketchy information, the preemptive manhunt for a moving target commenced. Again, it followed Phoenix SOP.
Thanh Phong consisted of 75 to 150 people living in “groups of four or five hooches … strung out over about a third of a mile of shoreline. On Feb. 13, 1969, according to the SEALs after-action reports, Kerrey’s team entered a section of Thanh Phong, searched two hooches and ‘interrogated 14 women and small children,’ looking for the village secretary. They departed on a swift boat the next day, then returned to the general area later that night only to abort because of a malfunctioning radio.”
Kerrey’s team performed exactly as Warren Milberg and Dinh Tuong An described Phoenix operations earlier in this book: the CIA always sent a small unit (the PRU or “hunter” team) into a village the day before the operation to map out the village and capture people targeted for interrogation. The next day the CT/PRU team would return with the “killer” team to take out the larger target – the people in the village itself. The massacres were afforded plausible deniability back at headquarters, where – in so far as the only rule in psychological warfare is “post your own score” – the victims were identified as armed and dangerous VC guerrillas.
Some important details standard to such operations are missing from Kerrey’s story. For example, how did the SEALs conduct their interrogations? Did they have a PRU interpreter with them? Did they chop off fingers? In any event, Kerrey knew how the village was laid out, how many people lived there, and where they lived. All that was needed was a provocation, generated through CIA “black propaganda” or otherwise, and such a provocation magically occurred a few days later when the VC allegedly committed an atrocity of some sort in the area, the “monstrous” kind Milberg, DeSilva and Dillard have described above.
Once the provocation had occurred, Captain Martin and District Chief Duc responded in the usual manner; they told the villagers an operation was going to be conducted and that anyone who wasn’t gone would be considered VC and killed. And indeed, on the night of 25 February, a Swift boat brought Kerrey and his SEAL team back to Thanh Phong to finish their business. The marauders moved in around midnight and, by Kerrey’s account, the killings were committed in self-defense.
According to Kerrey, his team stumbled on a home they hadn’t noticed the first time they were in the village, even though it was on the pre-arranged path they had walked a few days earlier. The home was occupied, Kerrey said, by two lookouts. Kerrey ordered two SEALs to kill the lookouts using their knives, often Gerber Mark II daggers. American commandos are taught how to put their hand over the sleeping victim’s mouth, slip the dagger up under the second rib through the heart, and then give it a flick so it snaps the spinal cord. Or they just slice the throat from ear to ear.
Having done that, the team, according to Kerrey, worked their way along a dyke into a hamlet consisting of four hooches. Suddenly without warning someone opened fire on the SEALs, who, in a blind fury, responded with everything they had, expending 1,200 rounds of ammunition. When the dust settled, 14 people were clumped together, dead. Seven more were killed trying to flee.
That’s Kerrey’s version, as reported by Vistica. According to Gerhard Klann, the most experienced SEAL on the mission and later a member of SEAL Team 6 (credited with killing Osama bin Laden), the murders were not committed in response to an ambush, but were conducted systematically, in cold blood.
Klann told Vistica that Kerrey ordered him to kill an old man, an old woman, and three children in the first home – the one Kerrey said was occupied by armed VC guerrilla lookouts. When the old man resisted, Kerrey kneeled on him so Klann could slit his throat. Reminiscent of a scene out of Truman Capote’s book In Cold Blood, a third SEAL came to their assistance and helped kill the old woman and kids, who were now fully awake and screaming.
A Vietnamese woman, Pham Tri Lanh, witnessed the murders and confirmed Klann’s account. She added that the old folks – Bui Van Vat and his wife, Luu Thi Canh – were the children’s grandparents. Vistica confirmed they existed by visiting their graves in the village (something the New London Day could have done, if it really wanted to know what really went on in the PIC Rob Simmons ran, as described in Chapter 15).
Having dispatched with those five yellow-skinned “Commie symps”, the heroic SEALs abandoned their preemptive manhunt for the elusive, moving VCI cadre. They knew the other villagers had heard the murdered family’s screams, so, according to Klann, they rounded up all the “women and children from a group of hooches on the fringes of the village.” Having done that, they searched their homes. Finding no arms or evidence of the political cadre they were hunting, they massacred everyone else in an attempt to conceal the murder of the five people in the first home, and as a psychological warfare warning to villagers in surrounding villages. Klann said they were less than ten feet away from the people they cut down, and that Kerrey gave the order. Some were still crying and squirming after the first barrage, so they finished off the survivors, including a baby. [yeah,real f*#king hero's,not DC]
As CIA officer Peer DeSilva put it, the SEALs were monstrous in the application of murder to achieve the political and psychological impact they wanted. Then they went home and reported they had killed 21 VC.
“You spend half your
life just covering up” 15
It’s ludicrous to think Kerrey and the SEALs didn’t know what they were getting into and didn’t intend to murder everyone in Thanh Phong.
While on contract with the CIA from early 1967 through early 1969, Marine Captain Robert Slater served as director of the PIC program and chief interrogation advisor to the Special Police. In a 1970 thesis for the Defense Intelligence Institute titled “The History, Organization and Modus Operandi of the Viet Cong Infrastructure,” Slater described the District Party Secretary as the “indispensable link” in the VCI hierarchy.
As Slater explained, “The District Party Secretary usually does not sleep in the same house or even hamlet where his family lived, to preclude any injury to his family during assassination attempts.” But he added, “the Allies have frequently found out where the District Party Secretaries live and raided their homes: in an ensuing fire fight the secretary’s wife and children have been killed and injured.”
Kerrey’s SEAL team targeted a Village Party Secretary for assassination in Thanh Phong, and the same result occurred: even though they couldn’t find the target, everyone present was killed, including children.
This is the intellectual context in which Kerrey’s war crime took place: it was standard procedure to kill the target along with his family and friends. For purposes of plausible denial, you could say the others were unintended victims and collateral damage, but when you know it’s going to happen and it happens every time, consistently, over years, that threadbare excuse doesn’t hold water. Omerta, the Mafia’s term for its sacred code of silence, alone enabled Kerrey and the SEAL team to get away with the premeditated murder and mutilation of 21 defenseless people, and then report it as a fierce battle with VC. 16
That’s American military idolatry in a nutshell. Convicted of murdering 22 unarmed civilians in My Lai, William Calley was venerated as a hero and served three years under house arrest until pardoned by Richard Nixon. Calley’s defense was to say that massacring civilians happened all the time.
Bob Kerrey’s friend and colleague, Secretary of State John Kerry, used the same “everyone else does it” grade school rationale to defend Kerrey. Along with senators Max Cleland and Chuck Hagel, Kerry (then a senator), issued a statement in 2001 stating their belief that an investigation into the Thanh Phong massacre would be counterproductive, in so far as it blamed “the warrior rather than the war.” 17
While “in effect conceding that the war as a whole was criminal in character…Kerry elaborated, in one television appearance, on the thesis that soldiers should not be held responsible for actions that were in accordance with the policies of the US government. The raid on Thanh Phong was part of Operation Phoenix, he said, and ‘the Phoenix program was an assassination program run by the United States of America.’ 18
Kerrey’s war crime was made worse by the fact that the unarmed civilians his SEAL team murdered were prisoners. But unrepentant Bob defended himself from that charge by claiming he was ordered not to take prisoners. He didn’t want to kill those little kids; he was told to do it.
Where have we heard that before?
In any event, justice of a sort prevailed; on his next mission, a grenade exploded at Kerrey’s feet. Who put it there is not known. Is it possible that he was fragged by his fellow SEALs for some unknown reason? However the grenade got there, it blew off the lower part of a leg. Kerrey’s career as a killer came to a close and he went home to weep in his mother’s arms.
After a few months of self-pity, Kerrey began his descent into the self deception and revisionism that accompanies war crimes. It is a process of identity recreation he shares with many veterans of Vietnam and America’s neo-colonial wars since 9/11. To a large extent, as I’ve noted throughout the text, the success of their collective cover-up defines America’s exceptionalism.
Kerrey’s rebirth as a certified hero began when he received the Medal of Honor on 14 May 1970, a mere ten days after the Ohio National Guard murdered four anti-war protester's at Kent State. The medal was a meal ticket not unlike being inducted into the Mafia as a “made man”. One of the Protected Few, Kerrey was forever guaranteed fame and fortune. The only burden he carried was the grudge he held against the anti-war protestors who didn’t appreciate his sacrifice.
Elected governor of Nebraska in 1982, he dated movie starlet Debra Winger, became a celebrity, and got elected to the US senate where he served as vice- chair of the intelligence committee. The picture of a neoliberal, he even ran for president in 1990, showering self-righteous criticism on draft dodger Bill Clinton for his penchant for lying.
Kerrey was no longer in government in 2001 when Klann revealed what had really happened in Thanh Phong. But the Ultras immediately and wholeheartedly rallied to his defense. His SEAL team, apart from Klann, closed ranks and backed his version of events. Kerrey accused Klann of having a personal grievance against him, and implied he was lying.
Colonel David Hackworth, representing the military establishment, defended Kerrey by saying “there were thousands of such atrocities.” Hackworth said that his own unit committed “at least a dozen such horrors.” He said it nonchalantly, as if he were mowing the lawn. 19
Representing Hollywood and the propaganda industry’s huge financial investment in the myth of the American war hero, Jack Valenti told the LA Times that, “all the normalities [sic] of a social contract are abandoned” in war. By the same token, this means it is perfectly okay for terrorists to attack Western civilians because CIA officers operate in secret and cannot be located. 20
Kerrey also received support from veterans of the Vietnam press corps. Former New York Times correspondent David Halberstam, author of The Best and the Brightest, described the region around Thanh Phong as “the purest bandit country.” He added that “by 1969 everyone who lived there would have been third-generation Vietcong.” 21
Clichés are the grist of revisionism at its sickest, and Halberstam’s racist, anti-Communist rant exposed him as nothing more than a myth-maker for the rich political elite. Halberstam might just as well have said, “Kill them all!”
Two other journalists stand out as examples of the press corps’ complicity in war crimes in Vietnam. Neil Sheehan, author of the aptly titled Bright Shining Lie, confessed that in 1966 he saw American GIs slaughter as many as 600 Vietnamese civilians in five fishing villages. He had been in Vietnam for three years by then and it didn’t occur to him that he was witnessing a war crime. It was business as usual.
Morley Safer is next on the list of co-conspirators. Safer vented his personal hatred for me when he wrote the half page review in The New York Times that killed my book The Phoenix Program in its cradle.
I wasn’t surprised that the Times employed Safer to assassinate my book. In it I’d said, “When it comes to the CIA and the press, one hand washes the other. In order to have access to informed officials, reporters frequently suppress or distort stories. In return, CIA officials leak stories to reporters to whom they owe favors. At its most incestuous, reporters and government officials are actually related, like Delta PRU commander Charles LeMoyne and his New York Times reporter brother James. 22 Likewise, if Ed Lansdale had not had Joseph Alsop to print his black propaganda in the US, there probably would have been no Vietnam War.”
At the time of the review (October 1990), I thought Safer hated me primarily for accusing the press corps of covering up war crimes. I thought he did for pecuniary reasons too; Safer’s self-congratulatory book on Vietnam had come out a few months before. It wasn’t until 25 years later that I found out that Safer owed William Colby a favor. Safer revealed his incestuous relationship with Colby for the first time at the American Experience conference in 2010. 23
“I got a call to come and see Colby in his office,” Safer explained. “And I walked in – and I had met him; we had no strong relationship at all – but – and Colby said, ‘Look, can you disappear for three days?’ (Laughter.) And I said, ‘I guess.’ (Laughter.) And he said, ‘Well, be at the airport – be at (inaudible) at the airport tomorrow morning at 5:30.’”
Bernard Kalb, the moderator, asked Safer if Colby wanted him to bring along a camera crew.
“No, no,” Safer replied. “And I showed up and [Colby] said, ‘Okay, here are the rules. You can see that I’m going on a tour of all the stations. You can’t take notes and you can’t report anything you hear.’And I spent three days first of all, down in the Delta and they were really, really revealing. There was only one meeting that he would ask me to leave the barracks. And it was fascinating because the stuff that these guys were reporting through whatever filters to you had been so doctored by the time it got to you – I mean, to this day, I still feel constrained in terms of talking about.”
Colby introduced Safer to all the top CIA officers in Vietnam, and introduced him to the interrogation centers and counterterrorism teams. Safer got to see how the CIA crime syndicate was organized and operated. And like Don Corleone dispensing favors in The Godfather, Colby knew that one day Safer would be obligated to return it.
That is how the CIA, as the organized crime branch of the US government, functions like the Mafia through its old boy network of complicit media hacks.
Can Bob Kerrey Be
Tried for Murder?
Kerrey says his actions at Thanh Phong were an atrocity, not a war crime. He feels remorse, not guilt. Totally rehabilitated, he has come to view Vietnam as a “just war.”
“Was the war worth the effort and sacrifice, or was it a mistake?” Kerrey asked rhetorically in a 1999 column in the Washington Post. “When I came home in 1969 and for many years afterward, I did not believe it was worth it. Today, with the passage of time and the experience of seeing both the benefits of freedom won by our sacrifice and the human destruction done by dictatorships, I believe the cause was just and the sacrifice not in vain.”
At the Democratic Party Convention in Los Angeles in 2000, Kerrey lectured the delegates not to be ashamed of war crimes and to treat Vietnam veterans, like him, as heroes, not terrorists. “I never felt more free than when I wore the uniform of our country,” he said without irony, and without noting that wearing the uniform made him “free” to murder women and children.
Promulgating the militaristic Business Party line is the price Bob Kerrey pays for getting away with mass murder. As long as he promulgates it, he’s one of the Protected Few, entrusted with the government’s top secrets. Indeed, he is one of a handful of Americans who has read the secret 28 pages on Saudi Arabia’s role in 9/11. He knows where all the bodies are buried.
Gregory Vistica traveled to Vietnam and visited the graves of Bui Van Vat, his wife Luu Thi Canh, and their three grandkids in Thanh Phong. And now that Kerrey knows where his victims are buried, he could pay his respects to the victims too. While he’s in Vietnam running the Americans’ Fulbright University, he could also pay a visit to the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. According to Wikipedia, the “War Remnants Museum features a display ‘based on the (Thanh Phong) incident. It includes several photos and a drain pipe, which it describes as the place where three children hid before they were found and killed.’”
The display includes the following account: “(The SEALs) cut 66 year-old Bui Van Vat and 62 year-old Luu Thi Canh’s necks and pulled their three grandchildren out from their hiding place in a drain and killed two, disembowell one. Then, these rangers moved to dugouts of other families, shot dead 15 civilians (including three pregnant women), disembowell a girl. The only survivor was a 12-year-old girl named Bui Thi Luom who suffered a foot injury.”
One wonders if Kerrey will visit the graves of the children his SEAL team disemboweled the next time he visits Vietnam. Perhaps he fears being arrested if he does?
As attorney Michael Ratner at the Center for Constitutional Rights told Counterpunch: “Kerrey should be tried as a war criminal. His actions on the night of February 24-25, 1969 when the seven man Navy SEAL unit which he headed killed approximately twenty unarmed Vietnamese civilians, eighteen of whom were women and children, was a war crime. Like those who murdered at My Lai, he too should be brought into the dock and tried for his crimes.”
The Geneva Conventions, customary international law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice all prohibit the killing of noncombatant civilians. The brutality of others is no justification. That is why there is a moral imperative to expose the Phoenix program as the basis for the CIA’s ongoing policy of committing war crimes. It is imperative to try the CIA officers who created it, as well as the people who participated in it, including the journalists who covered it up.
If America’s policy of conducting war crimes is ever to end, people of conscience must expose the dark side of our national psyche, the part that allows us to employ terror to assure our world dominance. To accomplish this there must be a War Crimes Tribunal like the one Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre put together in 1966-1967. I’ve assembled enough evidence in this book alone to put the likes of Bruce Lawlor, Rob Simmons, Frank Scotton and Bob Kerrey in the dock.
The National Security Establishment will try to prevent it. The US government has gone to great lengths to shield itself and its cadres from international law, while corrupting international institutions like the United Nations to prosecute US enemies like Slobodan Milosevic. 24 But if the UN could free itself from US influence, it could establish an ad hoc tribunal, such as it did with the Rwanda ICTR and Yugoslavia ICTY.
Alas, according to Ratner, the legal avenues for bringing Kerrey and his cohorts to justice in the US are limited. A civil suit could be lodged against him by the families of the victims under the Alien Tort Claims Act. There is no statute of limitations for war crimes, and under 18 USC sec. 2441 War Crimes, Kerrey could be sentenced to death or life imprisonment. But at the time of his crime in Vietnam, US criminal law did not apply to what US citizens did overseas. Only military law applied, and now that Kerrey is no longer in the Navy, the military courts have no jurisdiction over him.
In yet another great irony, Kerrey as a senator voted for the war crimes law, allowing others to be prosecuted for crimes similar to those he committed.
Prosecution in Vietnam and extradition are also possibilities. “Universal jurisdiction does not require the presence of the defendant – he can be indicted and tried in some countries in absentia – or his extradition can be requested,” Ratner said. “Some countries may have statutes permitting this. Kerrey should check his travel plans and hire a good lawyer before he gets on a plane. He can use Kissinger’s lawyer.”
But that’s not going to happen. The rule of law ended with 9/11, when illegal invasions and occupations became stated policy, along with targeted assassinations and mass murder. And until the media stops glorifying “preemptive manhunting” of “moving targets” as necessary for our security, rather than fueling the terrorism that threatens the unprotected many, the war crimes will never stop.
Chapter 19
TOP SECRET AMERICA
SHADOW
REWARD SYSTEM
After Dana Priest and William M. Arkin’s three-part series, “Top-Secret
America,” appeared in the Washington Post, pundits and academics began falling
all over themselves in a rush to quantify the post-9/11 “counterterrorism”
apparatus. Although few of them had seen fit to even notice the elephant in the
room before, they all swooned at its $75 billion price tag, as well as the
implications such a monstrous surveillance and covert action apparatus has for a
“free” society. There were, however, dimensions to the problem that Priest and Arkin didn’t dare touch upon.
Let me tell you a story that fills in some of the blanks.
In 1985, I was contacted by a CIA officer. Larry had served as a deep-cover agent overseas for over 15 years. He’d had a breakdown and wanted to tell me his story. He’d read my book about my father, The Hotel Tacloban, and thought I’d understand.
Larry’s story began in South Vietnam in 1966 where, as a gungho Marine, he came to the attention of a CIA “talent scout”. The CIA officer ran a background check and discovered that Larry was an only child from a broken marriage. Larry was an emotional orphan, looking for something to latch onto. He chose the ultraconservative route. In high school his favorite activities were attending the local Lutheran church and participating in the Rotary Club debate team. His dream was to become a self-described “crusader” and follow in the footsteps of his hero, John Wayne.
Larry described himself as being “for freedom, the American way of life, and free enterprise.” Plus he was avidly anti-Communist and a combat veteran, which made him even more attractive to the CIA.
Strange things began to happen. Although still a Marine, he was sent to Okinawa and given special training in scuba diving, skydiving, demolition and the martial arts. No one told him why he was being groomed; and being a good soldier, he didn’t ask. But he soon learned that the CIA had decided to turn him into a “deep cover” agent.
At the time, the CIA’s Central Cover Staff managed a worldwide network of deep cover agents and freestanding proprietary companies. It existed (and may still exist with some new name) outside the regular CIA bureaucracy, and was used by presidents to conduct the CIA’s most sensitive operations.
The Central Cover Staff concocted an elaborate cover story. Only Larry’s case officer knew what was fact and what was fiction.
The story went like this: Larry’ father was an Australian soldier who, during a tour in the Philippines in the Second World War, had an affair with a woman whose maiden name was Velesco. His mother was half Spanish, half Filipino, from the upper class. The necessary documents were forged to prove that his mother had been a lawyer working in Samboaga.
Larry’s mother and the Australian soldier were never legally married, but Larry was, by birth, a Philippine citizen.
Abandoned by the Australian soldier, Larry’s mother succumbed to depression and never recovered. She was hospitalized, and Larry was put up for adoption. At the age of three, he was adopted by a loving foster family in America. His middle class parents raised him as their own son, never mentioning that he was not their natural child. He was (according to the “legend” the CIA created) popular and smart, with an aptitude for mechanics.
The CIA forged documents to show that he’d received a scholarship to the General Motors Institute for Automotive Engineering, and had attended the Sloan School of Management at MIT.
According to his cover story, Larry enlisted in the Marines and based on his mechanical aptitude was selected for helicopter pilot training. However, during the required security check, the Marines discovered that he was a Filipino citizen, not an American. This revelation came as a shock, but it also provided him with a pretext to visit the Philippines “to discover his past.”
Larry made the trip immediately upon leaving the Marines in 1968. As outlined in the Central Cover Staff’s script, and as actually happened, Larry learned to speak the language and settled in the land of his birth. He got a job as a manager and translator with a Japanese mining company. He did well but left that job to manage a Shell Oil service station franchise on the island of Leyte.
Over the next ten years, Larry held management positions with BF Goodrich, an American building and supply contractor to Clark Air Force Base, General Motors, VISA Card, and Westinghouse, which built the first nuclear reactor in the Philippines. As is true of most American multinationals, Larry’s employers all knowingly provided cover for CIA agents, as a way of maintaining influence overseas as well as in Washington.
By 1980, Larry had established himself as an upright Filipino citizen. His cover was impeccable and, to make a long story short, he was elected to public office. While in that position, however, things went wrong. The US State Department became aware that he was a deep cover CIA officer serving in the Philippine legislature. A series of actions were taken to destroy all records of his existence, and he was whisked out of the Philippines.
After Larry’s breakdown, the CIA got him a job as a manager of a Playboy club in Detroit. Later, they transferred him to Washington, DC, as manager of the posh Four Ways restaurant off DuPont Circle. When I met him there, his Filipino wife and entourage were working as the kitchen and wait staff. To make sure Larry behaved himself, the CIA had placed a former security officer in charge of finances.
This restaurant was the fanciest place I had ever been in my life. It was a place where striped pants State Department officials, foreign dignitaries and business tycoons met to make deals while sampling fine wines and haute cuisine. Each lavishly appointed room had its own dining table and waiter.
I was directed to a leather booth in the wood-paneled basement barroom, where Larry casually explained that each room was bugged by the CIA.
As we were talking, a group of well-dressed young men and women, chaperoned by an older man, took the booth next to us. The rest of the barroom was empty. They ordered drinks but remained silent and alert as Larry explained the ins and outs of his CIA experience to me.
At one point Larry nodded to the older man at the next booth, then informed me that the young people listening to our conversation were junior officer trainees from Langley.
Larry told me that the CIA manages a parallel society where deep-cover agents like him, as well as retired CIA officers and their agents, are provided with comfortable employment in their retirement years, or when they otherwise need sanctuary and recompense for their services.
Many of these agents have no applicable résumé, so they are folded into this parallel universe as managers of the local Ford dealership, or proprietors of a Chinese restaurant, or in hundreds of other jobs held in abeyance by cooperating businesses.
Think of it as a witness-protection program which, since 2001, has grown exponentially. It is the hidden geography of Top-Secret America, a subculture of highly trained operators with a dangerous set of skills that can be called upon at any moment. The one thing they have in common is that they are entirely dependent on the war criminals running the CIA.
As John Lennon said: “Imagine.”
next
HOW THE GOVERNMENT TRIES TO MESS WITH YOUR MIND
notes
Chapter 18
1 Seymour Hersh, “Moving Targets: Will the counter-insurgency plan in Iraq repeat the mistakes of Vietnam?”, The New Yorker, 15 December 2003. The Ba’athist Party, notably, went “underground” only after the US invasion, specifically to avoid assassination.
2 Julian Borger, “Israel trains US assassination squads in Iraq”, 8 December 2003, Guardian.
3 Douglas Valentine, “Antiwar Reporting On the National Security State”, 8 February 2010, Lew Rockwell.com.
4 See “The Phoenix Program, My Lai and the “Tiger Cages”” at <http://whale.to/b/ph2.html>
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