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The Phoenix Program

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The Phoenix Program is a grim history of one of the darkest episodes of the Vietnam War, the CIA's civilian torture and assassination program called Phoenix. Phoenix was the grotesque brainchild of William Colby and may have resulted in the elimination, to use Colby anaseptic phrase, more than 40,000 South Vietnamese civilians, suspected by the CIA of having anti-American sentiments. This was a difficult story to excavate, taking all of the professional and human resources of one of America's most gifted and tenacious investigative reporters, Douglas Valentine.

Valentine dares to tred across territory long considered taboo to reveal the shocking and baldly criminal behavior of the CIA and its South Vietnamese clients at the peak of the war in Vietnam. Wholesale arrests of non-combatants, burtal interrogations, torture of the most unspeakable nature and murder. Valentine shows that the My Lai massacre was no isolated incident, but an outgrowth of a systematic, decade-long program of state sponsored terrorism.

Dare to tell the truth about the CIA and you will pay a heavy price. Valentine's book has oddly disappeared from the shelves of American bookstores. This a historical tragedy, since it is one of the few volumes that has dared to tell the truth about the true nature of the CIA's role in Vietnam. This book demands to be republished, as it is quite simply one of the best histories of the Vietnam war.

Jeffrey St. Clair Co-author Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press

Along with saturation bombing of civilian populations, Operation Phoenix has to rate as America's most atrocious chapter in its collection of fun facts from Vietnam. Between 1967 to 1973 an estimated 40,000 Vietnamese were killed by CIA-sponsored "counterterror" and "hunter-killer" teams, and hundreds of thousands were sent to secret interrogation centers. William Colby's records show 20,587 dead between 1968 and 1971, though he likes to believe that most were killed in military combat and afterwards identified as part of the VC infrastructure.

Other testimony suggests that Colby was a bit disingenuous in these 1971 hearings. At one point Congressman Ogden Reid pulled out a list signed by a CIA officer that named VC cadre rounded up in a particular action in 1967. "It is of some interest that on this list, 33 of the 61 names were women and some persons were as young as 11 and 12," noted Reid.

Valentine spent four years researching this name-intensive book, and managed to interview over 100 Phoenix participants. If post-Vietnam America had ever looked into a mirror, this book might have become a bestseller. Instead it was published just as the Gulf War allowed us to resume business as usual, and went virtually unnoticed.

(Daniel Brandt is founder and president of Public Information Research, Inc.)

After having read Douglas Valentine's essay on how the Phoenix is coming home to roost via Homeland Security on his website, I decided to look into his book, The Phoenix Program. Besides his comprehensive, journalistic coverage of the details involved with the program, unafraid to uncover the deeds of all sides involved, two things impressed me even more.

First, this type of book usually has alphabet soup groups, projects and missions labeled with acronyms, and so many individuals' names woven through that I grow weary of reading half way through, if that far. Not so with Valentine's opus. Somehow he presents all these details in a readable fashion, which if you begin from the beginning, unfolds those normally boring and confusing details without losing the reader. At least not this one, who is easily confused by such matters.

Second, and even more impressive were his interviews. It was more like watching a good documentary than reading. Valentine conveyed the characters and their personalities so that they became real people to me, and he let them tell their stories in a very human, honest way. At times even touching, those interviewed were equally human regardless of rank, station, deed or misdeed. It's rare that an interviewer gets the interviewee's real voice and viewpoint. Great stuff, really soulfull and heartfelt. Read it and check out his article on his website, the Phoenix Program is not just history, and it's not just Vietnam.

During the past few months, I have been devouring the literature on covert ops during the Vietnam War. By far the most candid, unflinching examination of these controversial programs is the excellent book by Doug Valentine. He carefully explains all the special operations techniques of compartmentalization, cover stories, plausible deniability, and secrecy oaths which are designed to keep covert ops secret forever. Moreover, he appears to have interviewed at length all the central players in Phoenix. Many books on covert ops, (which sometimes tend to glorify the operatives), rely on supposedly secret or newly declassified documents to buttress their claims. The problem with such an analytical approach is that frequently such documents are bogus, especially designed to camoflouge controversial or illegal activities. Valentine goes directly to the source -- the men of Phoenix and the officers in the chain of command. Valentine has succeeded in gaining access to many special operators who appear to have spoken from the heart about their missions. Moreover, he thoroughly and concretely lays out the structure of the controversial Phoenix program, in all of its complicated facets, from Provincial Reconnaissance Units to Studies and Observations Group missions. His book is likely to be criticized by those who wish to bury the uglier side of covert ops forever. It is precisely for this reason that his is such an important contribution to literature on Vietnam. April Oliver (former producer, CNN)

One appalling fact in particular stands out to me from Doug Valentine's valuable history of the Phoenix Program: the CIA and U.S. military leadership knew very well that their operatives were torturing and murdering thousands of innocent civilian people in Vietnam. They knew it and they didn't care.

The problem for the CIA and U.S. military was that the Viet Cong were a superior enemy. They were intelligent, very resourceful, very tough and much more highly motivated than most American soldiers. Most important of all, the VC had the steadily increasing support of the Vietnamese people.

The CIA doesn't want you to know that the Vietnam War was a true People's War. The vast majority of Vietnamese people very justifiably despised the murdering, raping, racist American invaders. It was therefore quite natural for the people to support their Viet Cong brothers and sisters. The VC were the best and most courageous of the southern Vietnamese people. For all these reasons it was extremely difficult for U.S. forces even to identify them, much less catch them.

Knowing all this privately (and, of course, never admitting it publicly) the CIA's Phoenix Program adopted the shotgun approach: murder, rape and torture as many people as you can, and hopefully there will be a few VC among them.

This bestial, genocidal approach was in fact the (unofficial) method of every branch of the U.S. government and military involved in Vietnam. The U.S. Air Force dropped millions of tons of napalm, Agent Orange and cluster bombs on people all over Southeast Asia, knowing full well it would brutally murder hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian women and children -- but hoping to get a few VC, Pathet Lao and NVA among them.

U.S. Navy SEALS like Bob Kerrey snuck into villages considered to be populated by VC sympathizers and slit the throats of children and their grandparents.

Under the guidance of the CIA's Phoenix Program the U.S. Army committed thousands of atrocities like the My Lai massacre: murdering, raping and sodomizing women and girls, literally blowing away little babies with M-16 rifles, tossing grenades into huts full of children, bayonetting old men, cutting people's ears and fingers off, torturing people in horrible ways. The victims were the children, the wives, the sisters, mothers, fathers, grandfathers and grandmothers of suspected VC.

"The Phoenix Program" is a serious wake up call to all Americans. We were definitely the bad guys in Vietnam. No honest person can deny it. The genocide of the Vietnamese people was fueled by racism. In their own twisted minds, CIA and U.S. military personnel imagined Vietnamese people as ... That made it easy for such Americans to justify the cold-blooded butchery of literally millions of innocent, helpless children and civilian people. There is no fundamental difference between those Americans and the demonic Nazis.

In 1967, during the height of the genocide, Senator Wayne Morse (D-Oregon) had this to say:

"We're going to become guilty, in my judgement, of being the greatest threat to the peace of the world. It's an ugly reality, and we Americans don't like to face up to it. I hate to think of the chapter of American history that's going to be written in the future in connection with our outlawry in Southeast Asia."

The Phoenix Program is one of those chapters. The whole Vietnam Genocide is one of the absolute ugliest chapters of American history. And as long as the war criminals of the CIA are still walking around loose, it's a chapter that is still being written today.

It's no wonder the CIA is attempting to suppress and denigrate this book. In "The Phoenix Program" Doug Valentine is not afraid to name names. Lots of them. In the middle of the book he even provides 16 pages of photographs of many U.S. government, military and CIA officers involved in the Phoenix Program.

Looking at the photos one is struck by the ordinary appearance of these men. It's hard to picture them involved in the mass-murder, rape and torture of their fellow human beings. They look just like any businessman, bureaucrat or soldier you might see on the street of any town in America. And that is an important point.

As Mr. Valentine writes in the introduction: "This book asks what happens when Phoenix comes home to roost."

The CIA works endlessly to cover up all evidence and silence all testimony of its war crimes. But do we as a nation really think we can just sweep this monumental horror under the rug? The United States butchered over three million people in Vietnam alone. No sane person could actually believe there will be no punitive consequences for one of the greatest and most brutal genocides of the twentieth century.

Mainstream American society has deeply poisoned itself by its collective refusal to come clean about the war crimes committed by our government and military around the world. And if we, as a nation, do not take serious steps to undo all this violent evil -- it will destroy us.

The Phoenix program
By Douglas Valentine
Vietnam Veterans Against the War Anti Imperialist
vvawai@oz.net

Between 1967 and 1973, the United States undertook the most ambitious and far reaching operation of the Vietnam War. Created and coordinated by the Central Intelligence Agency, and implemented by mercenary "counter-terror" teams, Phoenix (or Phuong Hoang Operation) was the final solution to the problem posed by a secret underground of Vietnamese civilians who supported the armed Vietcong insurgents. Over time, hundreds of thousands of Vietcong sympathizers, and innocent bystanders, were apprehended by the Phoenix teams and sent to hideous interrogation centers manned by South Vietnam's cruel secret police. An estimated forty thousand Vietnamese were killed, and countless atrocities, including the My Lai Massacre, were perpetrated in the name of "neutralizing the Vietcong infrastructure. The Phoenix program was launched on August 1, 1968, (after the Tet Offensive) in order to eradicate the communist infrastructure. The number killed if proportionate to population, would total over 200,000 Americans deliberately assignated over a three-year period, were Phoenix in practice in the United States.
Central to the Phoenix Program is the fact that it targeted civilians, not soldiers.. One of the principal tasks of high-level US officials, led by CIA William Colby, was to establish quotes for the number of Vietnamese to be "neutralized each month". In 1969 the target was for 1800 eliminations per month. The result was vastly increased numbers of innocent persons rounded up and imprisoned, indiscriminately murdered, and brutally tortured in an effort to show results. A Phoenix agent testified to Congress "I never knew an individual to be detained as a VC suspect who ever lied through an entire interrogation".
Although epic in scope and significance, the Phoenix Program has never been analyzed in detail until (this book) now back in print. This book tracks the program from its roots in earlier programs, through its conclusion in South Vietnam, to its current use as a model for CIA counter-terror and counter-insurgency operations worldwide. Based on previously classified documents and extensive research conducted over four years, the book includes interviews with over one hundred participants, from senior CIA officers who created and managed the program, to the CIA officers and Serviceman who ran its field operations.
This book is documentary proof not only of CIA sponsored torture but also assassinations not only in Latin America in the eighties but also in Vietnam earlier. Phoenix was an American creation. Once arrested, suspects could not confront accusers or see dossiers, they were denied bail, legal council, and denied a trial or even a hearing. Due process was non existent. This book is about terror and its role in political warfare. It shows how successive American administrations sank deeper in the vortex of covert operations and asks what happens when Phoenix comes home to roost?
Phoenix wasn't the first nor last special operations by the US government. The list is long from the Bolivia in '91, El Salvador from '81-92, Iraq in '91, Hungary in '57, Peru in '91 to Vietnam in the early 1960's. As the US steps up its intervention in Columbia - and as protesters fight to close the School of Americas - its more important than ever to learn from history to apply it to what our government is doing today - though much of it is yet unrevealed. Scratch the surface.

The Phoenix Program is a work of courage and a masterpiece of investigative reporting. It is contemporary writing at its best and should be required reading for all American history and government classes in high school and college.

It is a sad but telling fact that the CIA's secret supporters have managed to suppress this book, and I strongly urge all scholars and historians who are currently being denied documents about the CIA's involvement in war crimes to acquire this book and organize an effort to have it reprinted.

I have been studying and writing about the CIA for over twenty years, so I appreciate Valentine's ability to cut through the lies and expose the essense of the CIA: which is to deceive the American public about its involvement in assassination and torture. Remarkably, he has managed to have CIA agents admit to this in The Phoenix Program. Moreover, he has done this without sloganeering, and in the process has presented the best case yet for abolishing the CIA and prosecuting its war criminals for their unspeakable crimes.

An intelligent person knows the truth. A courageous person knows the truth and speaks it at any cost. Doug Valentine is a brave and wise man who should be heard and supported. For now, the CIA and its minions have killed the messenger, but this should not be allowed to continue.

This review has been written by John Kelly, author of Tainting Evidence: Inside The Scandals At The FBI Crime Lab.

This book is rife with information about the conduct and operations of the Vietnam War. I am glad I read this book. It discussed and explained many things I had never known nor thought about before.

Valentine manages to tell the truth about about a difficult subject while never allowing the reader to lose sight of the humanity of all the people involved. The number of negative reviews are unsurpirising given that there are still many who refuse to acknowledge the criminal brutality of that war, even now that we have so much information about the scale of the killing (SecDef McNamara said 3.8 million Vietnamese deaths) and the phony justifications at every step (Domino Theory, Gulf of Tonkin, Bloodbath, etc).

Valentine's book is highly recommended, and considering the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is still very timely.

Unlike Mark Moyar's propaganda piece "Birds of Prey", this book is absolutely essential to understanding the truth about Phoenix. That it causes so much virulent anger on the part of those who saw the extermination of civilians during wartime as acceptable is the first clue to it's accuracy. An unbiased review of the history outlined in this book will find no factual errors at all. Great reading.