The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt
America and the World
By Douglas Valentine
| Chapter 3 |
THE VIETNAM WAR’S SILVER
LINING:
A BUREAUCRATIC
MODEL FOR POPULATION
CONTROL EMERGES
The CIA’s Phoenix program changed how America fights its wars and how
the public views this new type of political and psychological warfare, in which
civilian casualties are an explicit objective.
1
The CIA created Phoenix in Saigon in 1967 to “neutralize” the leaders and
supporters of the Communist-led insurgency in South Vietnam. Referred to by
the CIA as the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI), the targets were civilians who
were working at regular jobs while secretly engaged in administrative and
support functions for the armed guerrillas. These people were patriots resisting
foreign aggression and seeking to take back their country, but they were
considered spies and terrorists. American officials wrote laws that allowed US
military forces to detain, torture, and kill them by every means possible,
including B-52 raids, battalion-sized “cordon and search” operations, and death
squads.
Phoenix was originally called ICEX-SIDE, for Intelligence Coordination and
Exploitation – Screening, Interrogation and Detention of the Enemy. But the
name was quickly changed for symbolic purposes. In time, the mere mention of
Phoenix, the omnipotent bird of prey with a blacklist in one claw and a snake in
the other, was enough to terrorize not only targeted members of the VCI, but the
entire civilian population.
Phoenix evolved from a ‘rifle-shot” approach to neutralize enemy leaders
into a program of systematic repression for the political control of the South
Vietnamese people. It sought to accomplish this through a highly bureaucratized
system of disposing of people who could not be ideologically assimilated.
The CIA found a legal basis for the program in “emergency decrees” and
“administrative detention” laws that enabled American “advisors” to detain,
torture, and kill “national security offenders” (as the VCI were legally referred
to) without due process. The program was implemented over the objections of
Government of Vietnam (GVN) officials who understood that it undermined
their national sovereignty.
Within this extra-legal judicial system, with its Stalinist security committees,
a member of the VCI was anyone who didn’t actively support the government.
To be neutral or advocate for peace was viewed as supporting terrorism. Proof
wasn’t required, just the word of an anonymous informer.
The psychological warfare aspect of Phoenix was so pervasive that people
had to watch every word they said. Advocating peace with the Communists was
punishable by imprisonment without trial for two years or even death under the
administrative detention laws. And the threat of being detained was a
boondoggle for corrupt officials and professional criminals on the CIA payroll.
Persons arrested as VCI suspects or sympathizers were released only when their
families scraped together enough money to bribe the local Security Committee
members.
As a result, CIA officer Lucien Conein described Phoenix as “the greatest
blackmail scheme ever invented: If you don’t do what I want, you’re VC.”
Modeled by its creator, Nelson Brickham, on Ford Motor Company’s
“command post” structure, Phoenix concentrated power in a chief executive
officer and an operating committee at the top of the Embassy’s organizational
chart. The chief executive position – the Deputy for Civil Operations and
Revolutionary Development – oversaw the Phoenix Directorate in Saigon. The
Directorate was headed by a CIA officer supported by a statistical reporting unit,
which assigned a quota of 1800 neutralizations a month to the Phoenix
“coordinators” who ran the program in the field.
But Phoenix was a CIA program and deniability was one of its main
objectives, so the CIA left gaping holes in its safety net in order to facilitate the
systematic corruption that ensured the program’s true but unstated objective of
terrifying the entire civilian population into submission.
As CIA officer Frank Snepp wrote in Decent Interval, “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.”
2
The program existed in relative secrecy until June 1969, when numerous
South Vietnamese legislators complained in open session about Phoenix abuses.
Everyone knew that thousands of innocent people were being extorted, jailed
and killed, but the complicit American press corps never reported it. And in the
absence of any objection by the American public, the CIA had no reason to
relent. It was not until late 1970, when a handful of anti-war Phoenix veterans
exposed the program’s many abuses, that Congress finally launched an
investigation.
But even then, thanks to skillful dissembling on the part of William Colby,
the erstwhile Deputy for Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development in
charge of Phoenix, the CIA was able to shirk any responsibility. At
Congressional Hearings into Phoenix in 1971, Representative Ogden Reid (DNY) asked Colby: “Do you state categorically that Phoenix has never
perpetrated the premeditated killing of a civilian in a noncombat situation?”
Conflating stated policy with operational reality, the master of “DoubleSpeak” replied: “Phoenix as a program has never done that. Individual members
of it may have done it. But as a program it is not designed to do that.”
3
Colby, to put it mildly, lied. In actuality the Phoenix program was designed
to be mismanaged, to open the door to and incentivize bribery, corruption and
terror as an unstated policy lever for ensuring domination over the Vietnamese
population.
The Other Side of the Story
Censorship of opposing narratives is one of the main mechanisms for
controlling information. Americans rarely get to hear the other side of the story,
especially during a war. But in late 1970 and early 1971, a Vietnamese reporter
named Dinh Tuong An wrote a series of articles titled “The Truth About
Phoenix” for the newspaper Tin Sang (Morning News).
4 Tin Sang was published
in Saigon by Ngo Cong Duc, a member of the Vietnamese legislature. Half of
Tin Sang’s issues about Phoenix were confiscated by the secret police on orders
from the minister of information, Truong Buu Diem, a CIA asset.
An knew from personal experience what he was writing about; he’d been a
translator for Major Oscar L. Jenkins, one of the CIA’s Special Police advisors
running Phoenix operations in the Mekong Delta in 1968 and 1969.
“Phoenix,” wrote An, “is a series of big continuous operations which,
because of the bombing, 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-52s do not reach.
Americans in black uniforms,” according to An, “are the most terrible.”
5
The “black uniforms” were members of American “hunter-killer” teams. The
hunter team was a four-man unit, usually all Americans, sometimes with one or
two Vietnamese, Cambodian, or Chinese mercenaries called counter terrorists,
CTs for short. According to An, the CIA would send the hunter teams into a
village the day before a Phoenix cordon-search operation to map out the village
and capture people targeted for interrogation. The next day the CTs would return
in black choppers with the killer team, usually 12-25 South Vietnamese Special
Forces or Rangers led by Green Berets.
“When they go back to their base,” An said, “they bring people’s bleeding
ears. But are these the ears of the VC?”
CIA officials like Colby did their best to narrowly define Phoenix as a
perfectly legal program targeting specific individuals. But like Snepp explained,
and as An alluded to above, everyone was caught up in the dragnet, including
and especially those who were perfectly innocent.
The original purpose of Phoenix, An said, was “to avenge what the VC did
during Tet, which is why President Thieu did not hesitate to sign Phoenix into
law. But,” he added, “local officials (including the legislators who complained in
1969) knew nothing about the program except the decree. The central
government didn’t explain anything. Furthermore, the CIA and their assistants
had a hard time trying to explain to province chiefs about operations to pacify
the countryside and destroy the VC.”
Indeed, bombing villages and spraying fields with the toxic defoliant Agent
Orange served only to kill, maim and impoverish rural villagers. And despite the
avalanche of American propaganda telling the villagers such operations were
done for their protection, the rural population understood that such
indiscriminate attacks were directed at them, not at a few specific VCI.
By 1969, they also understood that American money and bribes prolonged
the war as a means of preventing any coalition government being formed with
the Communists. They knew from firsthand experience that powerful South
Vietnamese officials profited from the carnage; that corrupt province chiefs
reported the damage to their American advisors, ostensibly to get compensation
for those hurt in the attacks, but kept the money for themselves.
The Americans knew their counterpart officials in the Government of
Vietnam (GVN) were keeping the blood money, but they wanted it that way. The
Americans used those officials as straw dogs and blamed them for the problems
they had created. It’s the same patronage system that America imposes on any
nation it wishes to control. In Vietnam, the patronage system enabled the CIA to
maintain the illusion, pushed upon the American public by the complicit press
corps, that it cared for the Vietnamese people and wanted to protect them, while
assuring, through massive corruption, its freedom to pound them into submission
– and, of course, traffic in narcotics.
The result was a total lack of trust in the GVN, not in the VCI. As An noted,
the rural Vietnamese wondered how Phoenix could turn things around – the
same way average Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans wonder how relentless US
bombing and death squad operations are helping them, as opposed to helping the
corrupt warlords and government officials on the CIA payroll that authorize the
bombings and death squads.
Behind closed doors, CIA officials like An’s American boss, the
aforementioned Major Jenkins, argued that Phoenix was needed because B-52
strikes and defoliation “dustings” did not destroy “the VCI’s lower structure.”
This unstated policy was proof that the CIA could not reach the VCI leadership,
and instead opted for genocide - wiping out grass roots support for the
insurgency through the blanket application of terror.
In the process, An emphasized, Phoenix dragged everyone into its trap. For
example, as more and more fields were destroyed by Agent Orange, people had
no choice but to buy rice from Chinese merchants and smugglers. The CIA advised Special Police knew this and accused them of collaborating with the VC.
Naturally, the merchants and smugglers were then forced to bribe the police to
keep from being arrested.
This is how the CIA’s patronage system of corruption turned into the greatest
blackmail scheme ever invented. Anyone – including cops and soldiers – who
visited family members in VC-controlled areas was put on the Phoenix blacklist
and extorted by government security forces. They were surveilled, harassed, and
forced to become informants in order to protect their family members from CIA
“hunter-killer” teams and US military assaults.
The CIA relied heavily on false accusations to terrorize the Vietnamese. An
told of five teachers working for a Catholic priest in Vinh Long Province. The
women refused to attend a VC indoctrination session. When the group of actual
VC were captured, they named these five teachers as VC cadres. The teachers
were jailed without trial or evidence.
“That’s why people feared Phoenix,” An explained. “The biggest fear is
being falsely accused, from which there is no protection. That’s why Phoenix
doesn’t bring peace or security.”
Adding to the terror of being falsely accused, detained, tortured and even
killed, was the fact that the CIA rewarded security officials who extorted the
people. “The CIA,” An wrote, “spends money like water.”
“Many agents from the different police in IV Corps receive money from the
CIA,” An reported, “in the form of merit pay.” Money was spent bribing cops on
the CIA payroll with telephones, generators, air conditioners, Lambrettas, and
Xerox machines. Pretty secretaries and cash awards were lavished on officials
sitting on the Stalinist security committees the CIA created to prosecute national
security offenders. “Conveniences” given to committee members, wrote An,
made it easier for them “to explore information from agents,” leading to the
arrest of more suspects and, consequently, more bribes.
The corrupting effect of massive infusions of CIA money was no secret. In
an interview for The Phoenix Program, CIA officer Warren Milberg told me: “I
had virtually unlimited resources to develop agent operations, to pay for a staff
that translated and produced intelligence reports.”
Milberg had more secret CIA money, he claimed, than what the official
province budget was. While he saw this as “creating economic stability,” the
incentive to sell false information served only to further destabilize Vietnamese
society. The CIA had no way of corroborating the information it bought, but the
accusations were nevertheless used to build cases against VCI suspects, in order
to meet neutralization quotas imposed by the Phoenix Directorate. It was a
perfectly deniable facet of population control.
An stressed that CIA officers took no disciplinary action against officials
who took bribes, because the payoffs were often a vehicle for agent penetration
operations into the VCI. As An explained, “The CIA works to keep some
Communist areas intact so they can get information.”
These types of covert intelligence operations were in direct opposition to the
stated Phoenix mission of protecting the people from terrorism. Such covert
operations were many and varied. An noted that South Vietnamese CIA agents
often posed as pharmacists or doctors. These agents would smuggle CIA supplied medicines to VC hideouts in Cambodia in exchange for information.
“Phoenix,” explained An, “was watching and talking to the VC while at the
same time working to prevent the National Liberation Front from reorganizing
the VCI.”
All of the above, and more, led An to conclude that America was never
interested in ending the war. The goal was total victory, “even if many lives must
be lost.” Phoenix, for An, was a mechanism to extend the war indefinitely with a
minimum of American casualties. It was a cynical ploy used to pit the
Vietnamese against each other and undermine their efforts to negotiate a
peaceful settlement by fueling the conflict with money, lies and psychological
operations designed to destabilize the society.
Phoenix Is Gone But
the Method Lingers On
Ironically, before Phoenix was adopted as the model for policing the
American empire, many US military commanders in Vietnam resisted the
Phoenix strategy of targeting civilians with Einsatzgruppen style “special forces”
and Gestapo-style secret police. They resented the fact that military officers were
being involuntarily assigned to the program. “People in uniform who are pledged
to abide by the Geneva Conventions,” General Bruce Palmer said in letter to me,
“should not be put in the position of having to break those laws of warfare.”
Unfortunately, the current “stab-in-the-back” generation of military officers,
government officials and reporters was forged on the anvil of defeat in Vietnam.
This generation, which staffs the burgeoning number of Phoenix-style
committees in the public and private sectors, carries the burden of restoring
America’s reputation for invincibility. This ruling class within the National
Security Establishment, represented most perfectly by Hillary Clinton, knows
that its enemies, foreign and domestic, must be suppressed ideologically as well
as militarily. Thus they have embraced the Phoenix concept of employing
implicit and explicit terror to control, organize and pacify societies.
Phoenix was always understood as the silver lining in the Vietnam debacle.
The aforementioned CIA officer, Warren Milberg, wrote a thesis in 1974 titled,
“The Future Applicability of the Phoenix Program.”
6 Many of the CIA and
military officers I interviewed wrote similar papers extolling Phoenix.
As I’ll explain in greater detail in this book, Phoenix fulfilled its destiny in
the wake of 9/11 and became the template for policing the empire and fighting
its eternal War on Terror. So successful were Phoenix operations in overthrowing
the Ba’athist Party regime in Iraq that David Kilcullen, one of the US
government’s top terrorism advisors in 2004, called for a “global Phoenix
program.”
The threat of a global Phoenix program is that it will become fully activated
in the United States. If the CIA and military are successful at politically and
psychologically neutralizing suspected terrorists, what is to stop them applying
the full systematic extent of Phoenix-style operations to include political
dissidents, immigrants and despised minorities in America, just as they did in
Vietnam?
As Dinh Tuong An noted above, the program’s stated policy – consumer
safety – is contradicted by its operational reality – buyer beware. This is nothing
to take lightly. Security officials are adept at using double-speak to hide
repressive “covert actions” within “intelligence” operations, and they are using
the exact same advertising campaign they used in Vietnam: when the Phoenix
first arrived in America in the form of Homeland Security, it was advertised as
“protecting the people from terrorism,” just as it was in Vietnam.
Any domestic Phoenix-style organization or operation depends on doublespeak and deniability, as well as official secrecy and media self-censorship. The
overarching need for total control of information requires media complicity. This
was one of the great lesson defeat in Vietnam taught our leaders. The highly
indoctrinated and well rewarded managers who run the government will never
again allow the public to see the carnage they inflict upon foreign civilians.
Americans never will see the mutilated Iraqi, Afghani, Libyan and Syrian
children killed by marauding US forces and their cluster bombs.
On the other hand, falsified portrayals of CIA kidnappings, torture, and
assassinations are glorified on TV and in movies. Telling the proper story is
absolutely essential.
Thanks to media complicity, Phoenix has already become the template for
providing internal political security for America’s leaders. The process began
immediately after 9/11 with the repressive Patriot Act and a series of Presidential
executive orders that have since legalized the administrative detention and
murder of American citizens said to be involved in terrorism. – like Kamal
Derwish, killed by a drone strike in 2002, and cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, killed by
CIA drone strikes in 2009.
Since then, the government has steadily sought to expand its powers to target
Americans. In an editorial correction to an article written in 2010 by Dana Priest,
the Washington Post said: “The military’s Joint Special Operations Command
maintains a target list that includes several Americans. In recent weeks, U.S.
officials have said that the government is prepared to kill U.S. citizens who are
believed to be involved in terrorist activities that threaten Americans.”
7
The list of targeted individuals in growing too, and the intent to kill them is
there. As part of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, the military
(no mention is ever made of the CIA) was given the right to administratively
detain and assassinate US citizens without due process. Right now the
authorization is ostensibly limited to extraordinary circumstances. But the public
is being prepared for the worst. In 2013, Attorney General Eric Holder
announced that President Obama “has authority to use drone strikes to kill
Americans on US soil.”
8
The bureaucratic groundwork is being laid as well. Just as Phoenix
“Intelligence Operations and Coordination Centers” were established in every
province and district in South Vietnam, the Department of Homeland Security
has now established fusion centers, and the FBI has established Joint Terrorism
Task Forces, to coordinate representatives from every police, security, military
and civic organization in every state and major city.
The fascistic merging of government and corporate forces against the public
interest is the most insidious facet of Phoenix in American society. And it is
done with the full cooperation of the corporate media, which exploits each and
every mass murder we endure, whether it is a terrorist attack or not – like the gay
attacker’s assault on the gay nightclub in Orlando – to terrorize the public into
consenting to greater restrictions on civil liberties and more wars overseas.
The success of the Phoenix doctrine is most evident in the ability of its
advocates in the ruling class to corrupt Congress and force it to divert massive
amounts of public money into the militarization of foreign and domestic policy.
The constant barrage of propaganda about looming terrorist threats, and the lurid
human rights violations of straw dog enemies abroad, serves only to justify
heavily armed police officers and National Guardsmen patrolling in paramilitary
formations in our airports and train stations. Implicitly, the public knows those
weapons can be used against them.
Now that the corrupt and corrupting Phoenix institutional structure is firmly
in place in America, it is only a matter of time until we enter the next Phoenix
phase of explicit terror here at home.
| Chapter 4 |
THE SYSTEMATIC GATHERING
OF
INTELLIGENCE
“A census, if properly made and exploited, is a basic source of intelligence.
It would show, for instance, who is related to whom, an important piece of
information in counterinsurgency warfare because insurgent recruiting at the
village level is generally based initially on family ties.”
1
David Galula
As counterinsurgency expert Galula noted over 50 years ago – long before
the Internet made it easy for governments and internet corporations like Google
to amass and manipulate private information about individuals – an old fashioned, door-to-door census was an effective basis for the political control of
large numbers of persons.
So it was in South Vietnam, where in 1962 the CIA implemented its Family
Census program.
The Family Census program was the brainchild of Robert Thompson, a
British counterinsurgency expert the CIA hired in 1961 to advise it on population
control in South Vietnam. The CIA was still learning the ropes of modern neo-colonial repression and it looked to Brits like Thompson for guidance. Based on
his success in suppressing a Communist uprising in Malaya, Thompson
proposed a three-pronged approach that coordinated military, intelligence and
police agencies in a concerted attack on the underground Communist resistance
to American rule.
Managed by the National Police, the census meant compiling a dossier on
every family in South Vietnam. Along with everyone’s name and a portrait of the
family, the dossier included each person’s political affiliation, fingerprints,
income, savings, and other relevant information, such as who owned property or
had relatives outside the village and thus a legitimate reason to travel. By 1965
there were 7,453 registered families, primarily in Saigon and major cities.
The Family Census dossiers also helped the CIA discover the names of secret
Communist Party cell members in GVN-controlled villages. Apprehending these
political cadres was then a matter of arresting their associates and “softening
them up” until they informed. The idea was to weaken the insurgency by forcing
its political cadres to flee to guerrilla units in rural areas, thus depriving the VCI
of leadership in GVN-controlled areas. This was critical to winning the war, for
as South Vietnam’s President Nguyen Van Thieu once observed, “Ho Chi Minh
values his two cadres in every hamlet more highly than ten military divisions.”
2
Thompson’s three-pronged method was successful, but only up to a point, for
many political cadres were not terrorists. As Galula wrote, many were “men
whose motivations, even if the counterinsurgent disapproves of them, may be
perfectly honorable. They do not participate directly, as a rule, in direct terrorism
or guerrilla action and, technically, have no blood on their hands.”
3
Indeed, Thompson’s systematic approach created little love for the GVN, as
noted in the previous chapter, in so far as innocent people were routinely tortured
or extorted by crooked cops. On other occasions, double agents tricked security
forces into arresting people hostile to the insurgency.
Recognizing these weaknesses, Thompson persuaded the CIA to organize a
“Special Police” force (Cảnh-Sát Đặc-Biệt), later known as the Special Branch,
within the National Police. The Special Police was to be composed, theoretically,
of highly trained interrogators and carefully selected case officers – plain clothed professionals who, like FBI agents, could not be confused with regular
cops. Many were trained at the Central Intelligence Organization (CIO) school
the CIA established in 1961.
The CIA used the same sophisticated method to recruit staff for the South
Vietnamese Special Police and South Vietnam’s version of the CIA, the Central
Intelligence Organization (the CIO) that it used for recruiting cadres for the
Korean CIA.
As John Marks revealed in The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, the
CIA sent its top psychologist, John Winne, to Seoul to “select the initial cadre”
using a psychological assessment test. “I set up an office with two translators,”
Winne told Marks, “and used a Korean version of the Wechsler.” CIA
psychologists gave the personality assessment test to 25 to 30 military and police
officers, “and then wrote up a half-page report on each, listing their strengths and
weaknesses. Winne wanted to know about each candidate’s ability to follow
orders, creativity, lack of personality disorders, motivation – why he wanted out
of his current job. It was mostly for the money, especially with the civilians.”
4
In this way the CIA recruits secret police forces as assets in every country
where it operates, including occupied Iraq. In Latin America, Marks wrote, “The
CIA…found the assessment process most useful for showing how to train the
anti-terrorist section. According to results, these men were shown to have very
dependent psychologies and needed strong direction.”
5
That “direction” came from the CIA. Marks quoted one assessor as saying,
“Anytime the Company spent money for training a foreigner, the object was that
he would ultimately serve our purposes.” CIA officers “were not content simply
to work closely with these foreign intelligence agencies; they insisted on
penetrating them, and the Personality Assessment System provided a useful
aid.”
6
By 1964, plans were made to center the Special Police in Province
Intelligence Coordinating Committees (PICCs) in South Vietnam’s 44 provinces.
But first the government had to secure Saigon, and in July 1964, 2500 regular
policemen were introduced into seven provinces surrounding Saigon. By
December, 13,000 policemen were participating, of whom 7000 were manning
700 checkpoints, and ABC TV had done a documentary on the program.
Motivational Indoctrination
At the same time as the CIA was forming special police units to identify,
capture, interrogate and kill secret Communist cadres and their sympathizers in
GVN-controlled villages, it was also developing paramilitary “counterterror”
teams to locate, capture and kill cadres in rural areas. To this end, the CIA in
1964 formed experimental counter-terror teams in seven districts surrounding
Saigon. The CIA provided money and supplies, while US military intelligence
and Special Forces provided training and advisors. Lists of defectors, criminals,
and other potential recruits came from Special Police files.
Key to staffing the counterterror teams was the “motivational indoctrination”
training program designed by US Information Service officer Frank Scotton. As
Scotton explained it to me when we met at his home in McClean, Virginia, the
idea was to “develop improved combat skills and increased commitment to close
combat for South Vietnamese. This is not psywar against civilians or VC,” he
emphasized. It meant finding the most highly motivated people, saying they
deserted from the army, typing up a contract, and using them in these units. “Our
problem,” Scotton said, “was finding smart Vietnamese and Cambodians who
were willing to die.”
Volunteers for Scotton’s paramilitary program tended to be overly aggressive
mercenaries. Many were recruited from South Vietnamese Special Forces units
based along South Vietnam’s borders with Laos and Cambodia. On a portable
typewriter, Scotton would type a single-page contract, which each recruit signed,
acknowledging that although listed as a deserter, he was employed by the CIA in
“a sensitive project” for which he received substantially higher pay than before.
The most valuable quality possessed by people serving in “sensitive” CIA
paramilitary projects like Scotton’s was their expendability. Deserters, deranged
desperados and hardened criminals facing lengthy prison terms or execution
were placed in special reconnaissance teams, outfitted with captured enemy
equipment and clothing, and given a “one-way ticket to Cambodia” to locate
enemy sanctuaries. When they radioed back their position and that of the enemy
encampment, the CIA would bomb them along with the target.
Minds capable of such scenarios were not averse to exploiting American
soldiers who’d committed war crimes. Rather than serve hard time in military
stockades, they would volunteer for and be accepted to do reprehensible jobs for
the CIA’s paramilitary Special Operations Group.
The CIA trained and treated its secret policemen differently than its
mercenaries, but they were both CIA creations, and the CIA could plausibly deny
them when necessary. And in each case it got exactly what it wanted. Indeed, the
counterterror teams and secret policemen were the twin pillars upon which the
Phoenix program would be founded in 1967.
About the death squads he developed, Scotton said, “For us, these programs
were all part of the same thing. We did not think of things in terms of little
packages.” That “thing” of course was a grand scheme to win the war, at the
base of which were Province Interrogation Centers (PICs).
PICs and the Systematic
Gathering of Intelligence
John Patrick Muldoon, “Picadoon” to the folks who knew him in Vietnam,
was the first director of the CIA’s Province Interrogation Center (PIC) program
in Vietnam. Standing six four and weighing well over 200 pounds, Muldoon was
a college dropout who, thanks to family connections, joined the CIA in 1958. He
did his first tour in Germany and the next in South Korea. “I worked
interrogation in Seoul,” Muldoon recalled. “I’d never been involved in
interrogation before. Ray Valentine was my boss. There was a joint KCIA-CIA
interrogation center in Yon Don Tho, outside Seoul.”
Muldoon was assigned to South Vietnam in November 1964. “I was brought
down to the National Interrogation Center [NIC] and told, ‘This is where you’re
going to work. You’re going to advise X number of interrogators. They’ll bring
you their initial debriefing of the guy they’re working on, then you’ll give them
additional CIA requirements’.”
The CIA had its own requirements, Muldoon explained, because “the South
Vietnamese wanted information they could turn around and use in their battle
against the Viet Cong in the South. We were interested in information about
things in the North that the South Vietnamese couldn’t care less about. And
that’s where the American advisors would come in – to tell them, ‘You’ve got to
ask this, too.’
“We had standard requirements depending on where a guy was from. A lot of
VC had been trained in North Vietnam and had come back down as volunteers.
They weren’t regular North Vietnamese Army. So if a guy came from the North,
we wanted to know where he was from, what unit he was with, how they were
organized, where they were trained. If a guy had been up North for any length of
time, we wanted to know if he’d traveled on a train. What kind of identification
papers did he need? Anything about foreign weapons or foreigners advising
them. That sort of thing.”
Built in 1964, the NIC was where the CIA coordinated strategic civilian,
police, and military intelligence. “It was located down on the Saigon River,”
Muldoon recalled, “as part of a great big naval compound. On the left was a
wing of offices where the American military chief, an Air Force major, was
located. In that same wing were the chief of the CIO, his deputy, and the CIA
advisors.”
The same CIA interrogators were still at the NIC two years later when
Muldoon departed for Thailand in 1966. There were four interrogators when he
arrived. Three were Air Force enlisted men serving under an Army captain.
Muldoon’s boss, Ian “Sammy” Sammers, was the CIA chief of the NIC and
worked under the station’s senior liaison officer, Sam Hopler.
“There was a conference in Nha Trang in April 1965,” Muldoon continued.
“They were putting together an interrogation center in an existing building and
asked for help from the NIC. I was sent up there with the Army captain to look
at the place, figure out what kind of staff we needed, and how we were going to
train them. And while we were up there trying to break these guys in, the CIA
liaison officer in Nha Trang, Tony Bartolomucci, asked Sammy if he could keep
me there for this conference, at which all of our people were going to meet Jack
‘Red’ Stent, who was taking over from Paul Hodges as chief of foreign
intelligence. Bartolomucci wanted to show off his new interrogation center to all
the big shots.
“The military people from the NIC had done their job,” Muldoon continued,
“so they left. But I stayed around. Then Tucker Gougelmann and Red showed up
for this conference. Tucker was chief of Special Branch field operations, and
things were just starting to get off the ground with the PICs. A few were already
under way, and Tucker told me, ‘We’re going to build, build, build, and I need
someone to oversee the whole operation. I want you to do it.’
“So we had this big conference, and they packed the interrogation center full
of prisoners. Bartolomucci wanted to show off, so he got his police buddies to
bring in a bunch of prostitutes and what have you and put them in the cells. I
don’t think they had one VC in the place. After the conference they all went
back to the regular jail, and I went to work for Tucker.
“It’s funny,” Muldoon recalled," but me and Tucker used to talk about the
PICs. He said something like ‘John, if we lose this war one day, we could end up
in these god-dammed things if we get caught.’
“ ‘Well,’ I asked, ‘what would you do if you were in there?’
“He said he thought he’d kill himself rather than go through interrogation.”
Muldoon laughed. “Tucker wanted to turn the PICs into whorehouses. The
interrogation rooms had two-way mirrors.
“Tucker was a hero in the Marine Corps in World War Two,” Muldoon
added. “He joined the Agency right after and worked in Korea running
operations behind the lines. He was in Afghanistan and worked in training. He
got to Vietnam in 1962 and was base chief in Da Nang running everything that
had to do with intelligence and paramilitary operations. When I arrived in
Saigon he was trying to set up the Province Intelligence Coordination
Committees with Jack Barlow, a British guy from MI Six. Barlow had been in
Malaya with Robert Thompson, and they were the experts.”
Thompson’s proposed Province Intelligence Coordination Committee (PICC)
program was designed to extend CIO operations into the provinces.
Theoretically, the CIO officer assigned to run a PICC would guide, supervise,
and coordinate all military, police and civilian operations in a province. But the
US military refused to go along with Thompson’s PICC plan, so (and please
don’t be confused by the similar acronyms) the CIA settled on its unilateral
Province Interrogation Center (PIC) program.
Starting in late 1964, the PICs became the places where the CIA hoped to
coordinate its paramilitary and intelligence operations at the province level. The
Special Police officers assigned to a PIC would interrogate suspects and then tell
the CIA who and where the VCI were. The CIA liaison officer assigned to the
PIC would share the information with the CIA’s paramilitary officer in the
province, and the paramilitary officer would then send a counterterror team to
kidnap or kill the VCI. This was the one-two punch of the counterinsurgency;
through the PICs, the CIA learned the identity and structure of the VCI in each
province; and through the CTs, it eliminated VCI cadres and destroyed their
organization.
The problem with the PIC in Nha Trang was that it had been built within an
existing structure, so the CIA logistics staff hired Pacific Architects and
Engineers (PA&E) to design a standardized facility that was strictly functional,
minimizing cost while maximizing security. The CIA’s logistics staff scouted out
suitable locations and then, through PA&E, hired local Vietnamese contractors to
build an interrogation center in each of South Vietnam’s 44 provinces. Funds and
staff salaries came from the CIA through the Special Police budget.
7
After it was built, the CIA bought the PIC then donated it to the National
Police, at which point it became a National Police facility under the direction of
the Special Police. The four region capitals also had interrogation centers. The
difference was that region interrogation centers were larger and held, according
to Muldoon, 200-300 prisoners each.
It was the job of the CIA’s liaison officer to convince the province chief and
his CIO counterpart to find a spot near the provincial capital to build a PIC.
Once it was built, the liaison officer became its advisor and Muldoon helped him
recruit its staff. Most PICs were built or under construction by the time Muldoon
was transferred to Thailand to build the CIA’s huge interrogation center in
Udorn.
Inside a PIC
One storey high, fashioned from concrete blocks, poured cement and wood
in the shape of a hollow square, a PIC consisted of four buildings with tin roofs
linked around a courtyard. In the center of the yard was a combination lookout water tower with an electric generator under it.
“You couldn’t get the guards to stay out there at night without lights,”
Muldoon explained. “So we had spotlights on the corners, along the walls, and
on the tower shooting out all around. We also bulldozed around it so there were
no trees or bushes. Anybody coming at it could be seen crossing the open area.”
People entered and exited the PIC through green, steel-plated gates, “Which
were wide open every time I visited,” said Muldoon, who visited the PICs only
during the day. “You didn’t want to visit at night when attacks occurred.” PICs
were located on the outskirts of town, away from residential areas, so as not to
endanger people living nearby, as well as to discourage rubbernecking. “These
were self-contained places,” Muldoon emphasized.
Telephone lines to the PICs were tapped by the CIA.
On the left side were interrogation rooms and the cellblock; depending on the
size of the PIC, 20 to 60 solitary confinement cells the size of closets. Men and
women were not segregated. “You could walk right down the corridor,”
according to Muldoon. “It was an empty hallway with cells on both sides. Each
cell had a steel door and a panel at the bottom where you could slip the food in,
and a slot at the top where you could look in and see what the guy was doing.”
There were no toilets, just holes to squat over. “They didn’t have them in
their homes.” Muldoon laughed. “Why should we put them in their cells?”
Prisoners slept on concrete slabs. “Depending on how cooperative they were,
you’d give them a straw mat or a blanket. It could get very cold at night in the
Highlands.” A system of rewards and punishments was part of the treatment.
“There were little things you could give them and take away from them, not a
lot, but every little bit they got they were grateful for.”
Depending on the amount of VCI activity in a province and the personality
of the PIC chief, some were always full while others always empty. In either
case, “We didn’t want them sitting there talking to each other,” Muldoon said, so
“we would build up the cells gradually, until we had to put them next to each
other. They were completely isolated. They didn’t get time to go out and walk
around the yard. They sat in their cells when they weren’t being interrogated.
After that they were sent to the local jail or turned back over to the military,
where they were put in POW camps or taken out and shot. That part I never got
involved in,” he said, adding gratuitously that political prisoners “were treated
better in the PICs than in the local jails for common criminals. Public Safety was
advising the jails with the National Police.
8 Sometimes they had sixty to seventy
people in a cell that shouldn’t have had more than ten. But they didn’t care. If
you’re a criminal, you suffer. If you don’t like it, too bad; don’t be a criminal.”
Interrogation
According to Muldoon, the CIA interrogation process worked like this. “As
we brought prisoners in, the first thing we did was run them through the shower.
That’s on the left as you come in. After that they were checked by the doctor or
nurse. That was an absolute necessity because god knows what diseases they
might be carrying with them. They might need medication. They wouldn’t do
you much good if they died the first day they were there and you never got a
chance to interrogate them. That’s why the medical office was right inside the
main gate. In most PICs,” Muldoon noted, “the medical staff was usually a local
South Vietnamese army medic who would come out and check the prisoners
coming in that day.”
After the prisoner was cleaned, examined, repaired, weighed, photographed
and fingerprinted, his or her biography was taken by a Special Police officer in
the debriefing room. This initial interrogation extracted “hot” information that
could be acted upon immediately – the whereabouts of an ongoing Communist
Party committee meeting, for example, and other basic information needed to
come up with requirements for the series of interrogations that followed. Then
the prisoner was stuck in a cell.
The interrogation rooms were at the back of the PIC. Some had two-way
mirrors and polygraph machines, although sophisticated equipment was usually
reserved for region interrogation centers where expert CIA staff interrogators
could put them to better use. Most CIA liaison officers were not trained
interrogators. “They didn’t have to be,” according to Muldoon. “They were there
to collect intelligence, and they had a list of what they needed in their own
province. All they had to do was to make sure that whoever was running the PIC
followed their orders. All they had to say was: ‘This is the requirement I want.’
Then they read the initial reports and went back and gave the Special Police
interrogators additional requirements, just like we did at the NIC.”
The guards lived in the PIC. As they returned from duty, they stacked their
weapons in the first room on the right. The next room was the PIC chief’s office,
with a safe for classified documents, handguns, and a bottle of scotch. The PIC
chief’s job was to help “turn” captured VCI into agents and maintain informant
networks in the hamlets and villages. Farther down the corridor were offices for
interrogators, collation and report writers, translator-interpreters, and clerical and
kitchen staff. There were file rooms with locked cabinets and map rooms for
tracking the whereabouts of VCI. And there was a room where defectors were
encouraged to become counter terrorists.
Once an interrogation center had been constructed and a staff assigned,
Muldoon summoned the training team from the NIC. Each member was a
specialist. The Army captain trained the guards. One Air Force sergeant taught
the staff how to write proper reports. There were standard formats for tactical as
opposed to strategic intelligence, as well as for agent reports. To compile a
finished report, an interrogator’s notes were reviewed by the chief interrogator,
then collated, typed, copied and sent to the Special Police, CIO and CIA.
Translations were never considered accurate unless read and confirmed in the
original language by the same person, which rarely happened. Likewise,
interrogations conducted through interpreters were never considered totally
reliable, given that significant information was generally lost or misrepresented.
A second Air Force sergeant taught interrogators how to take notes and ask
questions during an interrogation. “You don’t just sit down with ten questions,
get ten answers, and then walk away,” Muldoon said. “Some of these guys, if
you gave them ten questions, would get ten answers for you, and that’s it. They
had to learn that you don’t drop a line of questioning just because you got the
answer. The answer, if it’s the right one, should lead to sixty more questions.
“For example,” Muldoon said, “Question one was: ‘Were you ever trained in
North Vietnam?’ Question two was, ‘Were you ever trained by people other than
Vietnamese?’ Well, lots of times the answer to question two is so interesting and
gives you so much information you keep going for an hour and never get to
question three: ‘When did you come to South Vietnam’?”
Special Police officers in region interrogation centers were sent to a special
interrogation training program conducted at the NIC by experts from the CIA’s
Support Services Branch, most of whom worked on Russian defectors and were
brought out from Washington to handle important cases. Training of
administrative personnel was conducted at region headquarters by professional
female secretaries, who taught their students how to type, file and use phones.
According to Muldoon, the Special Police employed “the old French
methods.” That means interrogation that included torture. “All this had to be
stopped by the Agency,” he said. “They had to be re-taught with more
sophisticated techniques.”
The Vietnamese, however, did not change “their” ways. It’s also important to
note that “they” did not conceive the PIC gulag archipelago; the Special Police
were the stepchildren of Robert Thompson, whose aristocratic Norman-English
ancestors perfected torture in dingy castle dungeons, on the rack and in the Iron
Lady, with thumbscrews and branding irons.
As for the American role: according to Muldoon, “You can’t have an
American there all the time watching these things.”
“These things” included rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes or hard
objects, and rape followed by murder; “the Bell Telephone Hour” rendered by
attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body;
waterboarding; “the airplane,” in which a prisoner’s arms were tied behind the
back and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling suspending the prisoner in
midair while he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; and
the use of police dogs to maul prisoners. All this and more occurred in PICs, one
of which was run by former Congressman Rob Simmons (R-CT) while he was a
CIA officer running the PIC in Phú Yên Province in 1972.
9
“The PIC advisor’s job was to keep the region officer informed about real
operations mounted in the capital city or against big shots in the field,” Muldoon
said, adding that advisors who wanted to do a good job ran the PICs themselves,
while the lazy ones hired contractors who were paid by the CIA but worked for
themselves, doing a dirty job in exchange for an inside track to the black market.
Apart from serving as torture chambers, PICs were faulted for only
producing information on low-level VCI. Whenever a VCI cadre with strategic
information (for example, a cadre in Hue who knew what was happening in the
Delta) was captured, he was immediately grabbed by the region bosses or the
NIC where expert CIA interrogators could produce quality reports for
Washington. The lack of feedback to the PIC for its own operations resulted in a
revolving door syndrome, wherein the PIC was reduced to picking up the same
low-level people month after month.
“A lot of PICs didn’t produce anything because the CIA advisors in the
provinces didn’t push them,” Muldoon said. “Some of them said, ‘It’s not that
we didn’t try; it’s just that it was a dumb idea in the first place, because we
couldn’t get the military, who were the ones capturing prisoners, to turn them
over. The military weren’t going to turn them over to us until they were finished
with them, and by then they were washed out.’
“This,” Muldoon conceded, “was part of the overall plan: let the military get
the tactical intelligence first. Obviously that’s the most important thing in a war.
But after the military got what they could use tomorrow or next week, then CIA
should talk to this guy. That was the idea of having the Province Intelligence
Coordination Committees and why the PICs became part of them, so we could
work this stuff back and forth. And in provinces where our guys went out of
their way to work with the MACV sector advisor, they were able to get
something done.”
As of August 2016, one can assume that similar CIA networks of secret
interrogation centers have been built to updated PIC specifications in every
nation the US engages militarily – Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya, etc. The
“black sites” the CIA establishes in other nations, by corrupting that nation’s
security forces, will also conform to the updated, computerized PIC design.
Last but not least, the CIA’s interrogation methods remain unchanged,
though the organization is now more perfectly able to punish people by driving
them insane.
The Military’s Side of the Story
The military’s side of the story was presented by Major General Joseph
McChristian in his book The Role of Military Intelligence 1965-1967.
10
McChristian arrived in Saigon in July 1965 as the military’s intelligence
chief. He recognized the threat posed by the VCI and, in order to destroy it,
proposed “a large countrywide counterintelligence effort involved in counter
sabotage, counter subversion and counterespionage activities.” In structuring this
attack against the VCI, McChristian assigned military intelligence detachments
to each US Army brigade, division and field force, as well as to each Army of
the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) division and corps. He created combined
centers for intelligence, document exploitation and interrogation, and directed
the centers to support and coordinate allied units in the field. He also ordered the
construction of military interrogation centers in each sector, division, and corps.
McChristian conceded the primacy of the CIA-advised Special Police in anti-VCI operations. He admitted that the military did not have the CIA’s
sophisticated agent nets, and that military advisors focused on acquiring tactical
intelligence needed to mount offensive operations. But he was upset when the
CIA, “without coordination with MACV, took over control of the files on the
infrastructure located” in the PICs. He got an even bigger shock when he “was
refused permission to see the infrastructure file by a member of the [CIA].”
11
Everyone was competing for success. As a result, some CIA officers
prevented military personnel from entering their PICs, and in retaliation the
military refused to send its prisoners to those PICs. As a result, anti-VCI
operations were often poorly coordinated at province level.
The US military assigned intelligence teams to the provinces to form agent
nets with the ARVN’s Military Security Service (MSS). These advisory teams
sent reports to the political order of battle section in the Combined Intelligence
Center, which “produced complete and timely intelligence on the boundaries,
location, structure, strengths, personalities and activities of the Communist
political organization, or infrastructure.” Information filtering into the Combined
Intelligence Center was placed in an automatic database, which enabled analysts
to compare known VCI offenders with known aliases. Agent reports and special
intelligence collection programs provided information on low-level VCI, while
information on high-level VCI came from the Combined Military Interrogation
Center, which, according to McChristian, was “the focal point of tactical and
strategic exploitation of selected human sources.”
12
By mid-1966, US military intelligence employed about a thousand agents in
South Vietnam, all of whom were paid through the 525th Military Intelligence
Group’s Intelligence Contingency Fund.
The 525th had a headquarters unit, a battalion placed in each corps, and a
battalion working with third countries. Like the CIA, it also had unilateral teams
working without the knowledge or approval of the GVN. Operational teams
consisted of five enlisted men reporting to an officer who served as team chief.
Each enlisted man functioned as an agent handler. Some agent handlers worked
undercover as State Department Foreign Service officers or employees of private
American companies like PA&E. They kept their military IDs for access to
classified information, areas and resources.
Upon arriving in South Vietnam, an agent handler was assigned a Principal
Agent (PA), who usually had a functioning agent network in place. Some of the
nets had been set up by the French decades earlier. Each PA had several
subagents working in cells. Like most spies, sub-agents were in it for the money;
in many cases the war had destroyed their businesses and left them no
alternative.
Agent handlers worked with PAs through interpreters and couriers. In theory,
an agent handler never met the PA’s subagents; instead, each cell had a cell
leader who secretly met with the PA to exchange information and receive
instructions, which were passed along to the other subagents. Some sub-agents
were political specialists; others attended to military concerns. Posing as
woodcutters or rice farmers or secretaries or auto mechanics, subagents
infiltrated VC-controlled villages and businesses, and reported on VCI cadres
and the GVN’s criminal undertakings, as well as on the size and whereabouts of
VC and NVA combat units.
Agent handlers managing political “accounts” were given requirements by
their team leaders for information on individual VCI. The cell leader would
report on a particular VCI to his PA, who would pass the information back to the
agent handler using standard tradecraft methods, such as a cryptic mark on a
wall or telephone pole that his handler would periodically look for. Upon seeing
the mark, the agent handler would send a courier to retrieve the report from the
PA’s courier at a prearranged time and place. The agent handler would then pass
the information to his team leader as well as other “customers,” including the
CIA liaison officer at “The Embassy House,” as CIA headquarters in a province
or major city was called.
The finished products of positive and counterintelligence operations were
called Army Information Reports. AIRs and agents were rated on the basis of
accuracy, but insofar as most agents were in it for money, accuracy was hard to
judge. An agent might implicate a person who owed him money or a rival in
love, business or politics. Many agents were in fact working for the insurgency,
and as a result all agents were periodically given lie detector tests. They were
also given code names. They were paid through the Military Intelligence
Contingency Fund, but not well enough to survive, so most dabbled in the black
market too.
The final stage of the intelligence cycle was the termination of agents,
usually by paying them off, swearing them to secrecy and saying goodbye.
Another option was termination with prejudice, which meant ordering an agent
out of an area and placing his or her name on a blacklist so they could never
work for the US again. Third was termination with extreme prejudice, a
euphemism meaning “to kill” which applied when the mere existence of an agent
threatened the security of an operation or other agents.
Military Intelligence officers were taught in off-the-record sessions how to
terminate their agents with extreme prejudice. CIA officers received similar
instruction.
These methods still apply today but on a grander scale; military intelligence
groups operate agent nets in the “camp-follower” communities that surround the
military’s hundreds of overseas bases. Agent handlers conduct much of their
business in the brothels and night clubs that sprout up around the bases and
provide sex and drugs to military personnel. These cottage industries provide
what Warren Milberg cynically characterized in the previous chapter as
“economic stability.” The agent handlers also spread money around, ostensibly
for information, but actually as the preferred methods of bribing local officials to
follow American policy at the expense of their own nation’s best interests. Like
missionaries of old, they preach the gospel and pave the way for capitalist
investment.
The end result is billions of unaccounted for tax dollars.
13
Case Studies: Ed Murphy and Sid Towle
Sergeant Ed Murphy was trained as a counterintelligence specialist at Fort
Holabird, then sent to the Defense Language Institute in Texas for Vietnamese
language training. From Texas he was assigned to Fort Lewis. “On the plane
from Fort Lewis to Cam Ranh Bay,” Murphy recalled, “I was given an article to
read. It was a study by the American Medical Association on interrogation
methods used in the Soviet Union. It showed how to do things without laying a
hand on a person, how you could torture a person just by having them stand
there.”
Upon his arrival in Vietnam in May 1968, Murphy was assigned to 4th
Infantry Division headquarters at Camp Enari outside Pleiku City, where his
understanding of counterinsurgency warfare rapidly evolved from theory to
reality. There were five enlisted men in his counterintelligence team, each with a
sector, each sector having around ten agents. The main function of the agents
was to uncover VC plans to attack and sabotage Camp Enari. Murphy’s agents,
furnished by the MSS, acted as day workers on the base. He also ran a team of
agents eleven miles away in Pleiku City.
14
Sometimes the agents got tips about a suspected VCI, and when that
happened, Murphy took the name and information to the local Phoenix
coordinator.
“Phoenix,” Murphy said, “was a bounty-hunting program, an attempt to
eliminate the opposition, by which I mean the opposition to us, the Americans,
getting what we wanted, which was to control the Vietnamese through our
clients – the Diems, the Kys, the Thieus.”
For Murphy, all other definitions of Phoenix are “intellectual jargon.”
Once a week Murphy went to the CIA’s Embassy House where he and the
other civilian and military intelligence people in the area submitted the names of
VCI suspects their agents had fingered. The names were sent to the Phoenix
Committee, which decided how to handle each case.
Surrounded by a concrete wall, its gate manned by a Montagnard PRU
team,
15
the CIA compound was located in a remote corner of Pleiku. Inside it
was a barbed-wire cage for prisoners. The cage was too small for prisoners to
stand up in. Murphy was not permitted into the PIC, which “sat on a hill and
looked like a U-shaped school.”
“I would never see a North Vietnamese or Vietcong soldier,” Murphy
stressed. “This is post-Tet and those people are dead. We’re talking civilian
infrastructure people supporting the NVA and VC. It could be anybody. It could
be somebody who works in a movie theater, somebody sweeping up.”
When asked what kind of information he needed before he could have a
suspect arrested, Murphy answered, “None. Whatever you wanted.”
When asked what sort of criteria he used to classify VCI suspects, Murphy
replied, “Nothing. One of my agents says somebody’s a spy. If I had reason to
believe he’s telling the truth, and if I wanted to bring somebody in for
interrogation, I could do it. It was that easy. I had an agreement with the team
leader that I could do anything I wanted. I wore civilian clothes. My cover
identity was as a construction worker with Pacific Architects and Engineers.”
Murphy called his agents “hustlers and entrepreneurs making money off
intelligence.” After noting the difficulty of verifying information submitted at
Phoenix Committee meetings, “the lack of files and things like that,” Murphy
told how one female suspect was raped and tortured simply because she refused
to sleep with an agent.
“Phoenix,” Murphy said, “was far worse than the things attributed to it. It
was heinous, but no worse than the bombing. And I don’t apologize. But it was a
watershed for me. It focused things. I realized it wasn’t just a war; but that based
on the assumption that nothing is worse than communism, the Government of
Vietnam, backed by the US, felt justified in suppressing all opposition while
extending its control throughout the country.”
That control, Murphy explained, served an economic purpose. “An employee
at Pacific Architects and Engineers told me about two million dollars in materiel
and cash being unaccounted for; that goods being sold on the black market didn’t
come from the Vietnamese, but from the Americans.
“In order to get into military intelligence school,” Murphy continued, “I had
to write an essay on the debate about the Vietnam War. The thrust of my paper
was, ‘What we do in Vietnam will come back to haunt us.’ It was a one world
thesis. Well, I go to Vietnam and see the bullshit going down. Then I come back
to the United States and see the same thing going on here. I’m at the 116th MI
Group in Washington, DC, and as you leave the room, they have nine slots for
pictures, eight of them filled: Rennie Davis, Abbie Hoffman, Ben Spock, Jerry
Rubin.
16 And I’m being sent out to spot and identify these people. [Now they are using Facebook,Twitter,Google,etc to 'spot',and 'identify' DC]
“This is Phoenix,” Murphy said, then added for emphasis, “This is Phoenix!”
“In ‘Nam I had composite descriptions of a person’s physical characteristics,
but then I wasn’t in a place where we had technology. It doesn’t make any
difference. The point is that it was used in Vietnam, it was used in the US, and it
still is used in the United States.”
In 1969, Murphy was one of precious few Americans acquainted with
Phoenix, and he was determined to make it a political issue. He came to that
decision in October 1969 while participating in the March Against Death outside
the Pentagon. “I was being surveilled,” Murphy said. “I know, because the
people doing it told me so. ‘I’ve been reading about you,’ one of the officers (Sid
Towle) said.”
Having fought for his country in defense of its civil liberties, Murphy was
enraged to learn that the 116th MIG was being used against American citizens
exercising their constitutional rights to protest the war. To him, this represented
“the Phoenix mentality in the United States.”
“To me,” he explained, “Phoenix was a lever to use to stop the war. You use
what you got. I got Phoenix. I’m a former intelligence agent, fluent in
Vietnamese, involved in Phoenix in the Central Highlands. That means I’m
credible. I’m using it.”
Intent on making Phoenix a political issue to stop the war, Murphy joined
forces with two other Vietnam veterans. At news conferences held
simultaneously in New York, San Francisco and Rome on 14 April 1970, the
three veterans issued a joint press release laying out the horrifying facts about
Phoenix. By then the program was nearly three years old.
Sid Towle’s Story
A graduate of Yale University, Lieutenant Sid Towle was assigned to the
116th MIG in Washington, DC in June 1969. As chief of a counterintelligence
team, he reviewed cases, including the investigation into Ed Murphy’s anti-war
activities.
Towle also conducted “offensive counterintelligence operations” that
consisted of disrupting antiwar demonstrations by building bonfires and inciting
people to riot, so the Capital Police could be called in to bash heads and arrest
demonstrators. During the period he was involved in military operations against
American civilians, Towle was rated by his commander as “one of the most
dedicated, professionally competent and outstanding junior officers I have had
the privilege to serve with anywhere.” [These masked goons running around America are all useful idiot assets for the criminals at Langley DC]
But Towle didn’t want to go to Vietnam, and in January 1971 he requested
release from active duty, citing his “complete abhorrence for the Vietnam War
and the continued US presence there.” Towle filed for release under Army
Regulation 635-100; but his request was denied and his “triple six” credentials
withdrawn.
17 He was sent to Vietnam in March 1971 as the Phoenix “Phung
Hoang” coordinator in Vung Liem District in Vinh Long Province.
18
During his stint as a Phoenix coordinator, Towle spent most of his time
“sifting through the District Intelligence and Operations and Coordination
Center’s target folders looking for aliases.
19 A sergeant assigned to the DIOCC
managed funds obtained from the CIA for informers and the PRU team. The
sergeant also acted as liaison with the Vinh Long PIC. Towle lived in a villa with
six other people in the MACV Civil Operations and Rural Development Support
(CORDS) district team.
20 Behind the villa were the PRU quarters. “We turned up
the radio when we heard the screams of the people being interrogated,” he said.
“I didn’t know what the PRU were doing ninety percent of the time,” Towle
explained. “They were directed by the CIA’s Province Officer in Charge.”
To clear operations against the VCI, Towle had to get permission from Tom
Ahern, the CIA’s Province Officer in Charge.
21 Regarding operations, Towle
said, “I went after an average of eight to ten VCI per week. The Special Branch
people would come up with the names, which I would check. Then the PRU
went out. They went out every night and always killed one or two people. But
verifying whether or not they were VCI was impossible. They’d tell you who
they had killed, and it was always a name on the list, but how could I know? We
had charts on the wall, and we’d cross off the name, and that was it.”
Towle kept score, until the day the district chief took him for a ride in a
helicopter. As they were flying over a village, they saw an old man and a girl
walking hand in hand down the main street. The district chief said to the door
gunner, “Kill them.”
The gunner asked Towle, “Should I?”
Towle said no.
“That was the beginning of the end,” Towle said. “Ahern called me on the
carpet. He told me the province chief was angry because I had caused the district
chief to lose face.”
There was another reason why Towle didn’t enjoy working in Phoenix.
Ahern started a bounty program in which cash prizes were offered as an
incentive to inform on VCI. Ahern even arranged a contest between the Phoenix
district advisors to see who could rack up the biggest body count. Disgusted, the
advisors got together and decided not to participate.
A few days later John Vann, who ran all CORDS operations in IV Corps,
arrived in his private helicopter.
22 “He flew right into the DIOCC,” Towle
recalled. “He was very critical. He asked where all the bodies and weapons were,
then sent me into a funeral in progress. He had me open the casket to identify the
body.
“I hated Vann,” Towle said. “He was really into body counts.”
On another occasion, while Towle was eating dinner in the CORDS villa, the
district chief stormed into the room with the PRU team and dumped a dirty bag
on the table. Eleven bloody ears spilled out. The district chief told Towle to give
the ears to Ahern as proof of six VCI neutralized.
“It made me sick,” Towle said. “I couldn’t go on with the meal.
"After the ear thing,” Towle continued, “I joined up with the air rescue team
on one of its missions. I was promoted to captain while I was there, and received
a message from the district senior advisor saying, ‘Don’t come back.’ So I went
to see a friend in the Judge Advocate General’s office in Can Tho, and he
reported the ear incident to General Cushman. The general came down in a
chopper and handed the province senior advisor a letter of reprimand. After that,
I knew I could never go back, so I had one of my friends in Vung Liem bring my
bags up to Can Tho.”
Towle was removed as the Vung Liem Phoenix coordinator on 20 July 1971.
Ten days later he received orders reassigning him to Kien Phong Province. “It
was the proverbial One-Way Ticket to Cambodia,” he sighed. “The last two guys
sent out there as Phoenix coordinators were killed by their own PRU. So I went
back to see the major running Phoenix administration in Can Tho, Major James
Damron, but he refused to reassign me. So from there I went back to the JAG
office, where my friend and I drafted a letter to the Phoenix Directorate in
Saigon.”
In his letter to Phoenix Director John Tilton, Towle said that “War crimes as
designated by the Geneva Conventions were not uncommon” in the Phoenix
program. He requested “immediate release” from the program under MACV
525-36.
The next day Major Damron reassigned Towle to the Tuyen Binh DIOCC –
the same DIOCC where the two previous “triple sixers” had been killed. To
avoid certain death, Towle hid at a friend’s house in Can Tho until 10 August,
when the new CORDS chief of staff, General Frank Smith, approved his release.
Referring to “the case that appalled us all,” a senior CORDS official
suggested that a records check be made in Saigon “before an officer or enlisted
man is assigned to a Phung Hoang position in Vietnam” as a way to “reduce
chances of assignment of unsuitable personnel.” [Yeah heaven forbid we put a human being in a position that requires a yes man zombie killer DC]
At the same time “unsuitable” Sid Towle was quitting Phoenix, CORDS
Director William Colby was assuring Congress that no Phoenix advisor had
resigned on moral grounds through MACV 525-36.
Colby also told Congress that incentive programs (like the one Ahern
organized in Vinh Long Province) were not policy. At the exact same time,
however, Phoenix Director Tilton was organizing a High Value Rewards
Program. In explaining the program to his wife, Tilton’s deputy Colonel Chester
McCoid wrote, “A very substantial reward is placed on highly placed VC
political leaders, as much as $8,000 at the rate on the black market or twice that
amount on the official rate of exchange. Our idea is to induce the lower-grade
VCI to turn their bosses in for the bounty money.”
Said McCoid with dismay, “our original proposal was watered down by the
bleeding hearts, who think placing a price on your enemy’s head is excessively
cruel! This despite Colby’s support.” [A perfect example of said zombie killer DC]
Ultimately, the Phoenix concept is the sum of all the programs it coordinated,
including the public information aspects – like the lies Colby told to Congress –
that concealed its true goals and operational realities. All other definitions and
expressions are, as Ed Murphy said, “intellectual jargon.”
“The point,” Murphy reminded us, “is that it was used in Vietnam, it was
used in the United States, and it still is used in the United States.”
next
WHAT WE REALLY LEARNED
FROM VIETNAM: A WAR CRIMES
MODEL FOR AFGHANISTAN AND
ELSEWHERE
notes
Chapter 3
1 The Toledo Blade, 1 January 1987, p. 27. The commander of US forces in Central America in the mid1980s, General Paul Gorman, described it as “a form of warfare repugnant to Americans, a conflict
which involves innocents, in which non-combatant casualties may be an explicit object.”
2 Frank Snepp, Decent Interval, Random House, New York, 1978, p. 12.
3 “US Assistance Programs in Vietnam”, (Foreign Operations and Government Information
Subcommittee, Committee on Government Operations, July 15, 16, 19, 21 and August 2, 1971), p. 206.
4 Dinh Tuong An, The Truth About Phoenix, Tin Sang, Saigon, 1970-71, available at Widener Library.
5 See Douglas Valentine, “Fragging Bob: Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, and the Need for a War Crimes
Trial”, Counterpunch, 17 May 2001, republished here.
6 Warren H. Milberg, “The Future Applicability of the Phoenix Program”, Research Study, Report #1835-
74, Air Command and Staff College, Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., May 1974.
7 Dana Priest, “U.S. military teams, intelligence deeply involved in aiding Yemen on strikes”, Washington
Post, 27 January 2010.
8 John Swaine, “Barack Obama ‘has authority to use drone strikes to kill Americans on US soil’”, The
Telegraph, 6 March 2013.
Chapter 4
1 David Galula, Counter-Insurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, Praeger, 1964, p. 117.
2 Robert Slater, “The History, Organization and Modus Operandi of the Viet Cong Infrastructure”, p. 21.
3 Galula, p. 124.
4 John Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control, Time Books, 1979,
p. 131.
5 Ibid. 132.
6 Ibid. 132.
7 From 1967-1969, Colonel Douglas Dillard managed Phoenix operations in IV Corps. Dillard said, “I
became a major construction tycoon in the Delta as a sideline to my Phoenix business.” As well as
giving $15,000 to every district chief to build a DIOCC, he worked with the CIA in building “those little
jails, as I call them, which really were interrogation centers.” As Dillard recalled: “The agency sent
down an elderly gentleman from Maryland who was a contractor. His job in the Delta… was to get these
interrogation centers constructed. Pacific Architects and Engineers did the work, but this guy was an
agency employee. I remember going into one we’d built in Chau Duc that had several monks inside.
They had a steel chain chained to their legs so they wouldn’t run off.”
8 The US State Department’s Agency for International Development (AID) had an Office of Public Safety
formed mostly by former cops and corrections officers who advised foreign police departments.
9 See Chapter 15: The Spook Who Would Be a Congressman.
10 Major General Joseph McChristian, The Role of Military Intelligence 1965-1967, Department of the
Army, Washington, DC, 1974.
11 Ibid, p. 71.
12 Ibid, p. 26.
13 David Pallister, “How the US sent $12bn in cash to Iraq. And watched it vanish”, Guardian, 7 February
2007.
14 As Anand Gopal says in No Good Men Among the Living: “A military base in a country like
Afghanistan is also a web of relationships, a hub for the local economy, and a key player in the political
ecosystem. Unravel how (the US base in Kandahar) came to be, and you’ll begin to understand how the
war returned to Maiwand.” p. 107. Maiwand is a district and village in Kandahar province.
15 PRU (for Provincial Reconnaissance Unit) was the new name given in 1966 to the CIA’s
Counterterrorism Teams.
16 Abbie Hoffman et al were leaders of the anti-Vietnam War movement.
17 The MOS numerical designation for army counterintelligence officers was 9666.
18 Phoenix was also referred to by its Vietnamese sobriquet, Phung Hoang.
19 Phoenix personnel staffed province (PIOCC) and district (DIOCC) Intelligence and Operations
Coordinating Centers.
20 CORDS, the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development division at MACV, managed
“pacification.”
21 While posing as the State Department’s Narcotics Control Officer in Iran, Ahern, who was actually the
CIA’s station chief, was one of 52 Americans taken hostage in Tehran in 1979.
22 Loved by William Colby, Vann was exposed as a rapist in Neil Sheehan’s book A Bright Shining Lie.
