In "The Phoenix Program," a majestic and important work of history, author and journalist Douglas Valentine exposes in copious detail one of the darkest and least known passages of contemporary U.S. history. At a minimum, Phoenix should be mandatory reading for all students majoring in history or attending war colleges, military academies, military institutes, and Central Intelligence Agency's (C.I.A.'s) field operations training site at Camp Peary, Virginia. This is a book to be studied and not merely read.
In sum and substance, Phoenix, a depraved creation of C.I.A., was a terrorist program directed at the Vietnamese civilian population under the guise of "winning hearts and minds" for the perpetually corrupt and despotic government of what was then South Vietnam. Sometimes called "The Second Indochina War" by many international historians, U.S. citizens generally refer to it simply as the "Vietnam War."
Ideologically, one presidential administration after another was guided in its policy toward Southeast Asia by the so-called "domino theory," the largely unquestioned belief that if one Southeast Asian country fell into communist hands, the rest would soon follow. The adversaries in the First Indochina War were France, the colonial power, and Vietnam, its unwilling colony for more than a century. That war ended in 1954 when the Vietminh (predecessor to what the U.S. military called the Viet Cong or V.C.), a coalition of indigenous nationalist and communist forces led politically by Ho Chi Minh, defeated French forces at the bloody Battle of Dien Bien Phu.
Militarily, the Vietminh were led by the brilliant, largely self-taught military strategist, Vo Nguyen Giap, whose wife, sister, father, and sister-in-law were arrested, tortured and later murdered by the French while Giap was in exile in China. Giap, who later organized and commanded the regular Army of North Vietnam (N.V.A.), was forced into exile after the French outlawed the communist party in Vietnam.
Ho Chi Minh (meaning Ho, "bringer of light") was the nom de guerre adopted by Nguyen Sinh Cung, whose father was a Confucian scholar and civil servant under French rule. Ho studied in France and learned to speak French fluently, the better to know the enemy he was to defeat in the course of time. Although portraying himself as only a nationalist, he became a communist in 1924 after joining the Comintern (Communist International), seven years after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia during the October Revolution. Although his communist affiliation was suspected by many, Ho largely succeeded in keeping it a secret for decades.
Ho once said: "You will kill 10 of our men, and we will kill 1 of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it." His statement proved accurate, even prescient, as applied to all his nation's enemies.
While unraveling the administrative complexities and various incarnations and manifestations of Phoenix, Valentine persuasively creates a reasonable inference that the program was instrumental in generating a massive number of recruits for the Viet Cong (Vietnamese Communists). Ho, who disliked the term "V.C.," called his forces in South Vietnam "the National Liberation Front" (N.L.F.).
Previously neutral or uncommitted Vietnamese civilians, most of them apolitical, uneducated in any formal sense, and unsophisticated, joined V.C. cadres, seeking revenge for acts of barbarism committed by Phoenix and its allies in the South Vietnamese Army (A.R.V.N.), South Vietnamese National Police Force, U.S. Special Forces units, and U.S. military personnel often furloughed from stockades and brigs for having committed atrocities, rape, murder, possession of heroin, theft and other crimes. Phoenix also used V.C. "defectors," many of whom were later discovered to be double agents merely posing as "defectors." On the other hand, the V.C. also used terror and other forms of coercion to recruit unwilling civilians, most of whom were poor rice farmers.
One of Valentine's most astonishing accomplishments was persuading many former C.I.A. personnel to go on the record and discuss the program as well as their roles in it, often with frosty detachment, even pride. Rarely did anyone speak of his conduct with a hint of regret or remorse.
Valentine interviewed 99 persons, most of them formerly with C.I.A., military intelligence, F.B.I., and other organizations involved with Phoenix in one phase or another.
During a series of interviews, former C.I.A. operative Nelson Brickham, a magna cum laude graduate of Yale University in international politics, described his first encounters with John Hart, a fellow Phoenix alum. Brickham explained that Hart came to Saigon to become Chief of (C.I.A.) Station.
"I have described the intelligence services as a socially acceptable way of expressing criminal tendencies," Brickham said. "A guy who has strong criminal tendencies-but is too much of a coward to be one-would wind up in a place like the C.I.A. if he had the education. I'd put John Hart in this category-a mercenary who found a socially acceptable way of doing these things and, I might add, getting very well paid for it." Although they initially disliked each other, Brickham recalled, he and Hart eventually developed a close working relationship and a sense of mutual trust and respect. (They apparently shared the same criminal tendencies but chose careers in C.I.A. rather than non-governmental organized crime. Ironically, C.I.A. has a long history of alliances and liaisons with organized crime figures and groups, including La Cosa Nostra.)
The author, like many other researchers, noted that some pilots for Air America, an airline formerly owned and operated by C.I.A., engaged in lucrative opium trafficking while conducting their "official" missions. At least ten other books have demonstrated C.I.A.'s complicity in the distribution and sale of illicit drugs, including cocaine and heroin. Such sordid activity was not limited to the Vietnam War. It was also a component of the complex and poorly explored Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan-Bush administration.
Valentine quotes the "legendary" C.I.A. agent Lucien Conein as saying that Phoenix was "a very good blackmail scheme for the central government (of South Vietnam). `If you don't do what I want, you're V.C.'" Thus, C.I.A. routinely blackmailed Vietnamese in and out of government to do whatever was required to accomplish the ever-devolving Phoenix mission. In writing about certain C.I.A. operatives who began their careers in the O.S.S. (Office of Strategic Services), the World War II predecessor to C.I.A., authors commonly insert the adjective "legendary." Conein spent so much of his life as a professional spook and rogue, that most who knew him were uncertain whether and when he was lying or embellishing his various professional exploits when discussing them.
Among Phoenix's myriad "black operations" ("black ops") was "neutralizations," often conducted at midnight or later (murders by moonlight, so to speak) when the program's victims were at home and asleep. One psychological warfare tactic was to murder V.C. members, their families and neighbors in such a "hideous" fashion that the population would be terrorized into submission. These murders were often made to appear they had been committed by the V.C., themselves. While not dwelling on it, Valentine does not flinch from stating that the V.C. were just as guilty of committing atrocities.
"When the V.C. would come into villages," Brickham said, "they'd leave a couple of heads sticking on fence posts as they left...Up there in I Corps, there was more than one occasion where U.S. advisers would be found dead with nails through their foreheads." (I Corps was one of four tactical zones, politically and militarily, established in South Vietnam by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. I Corps, which lay in the largely mountainous region of northern South Vietnam, included the cities of Hue and the port of Da Nang where U.S. forces maintained a large airbase.)
Former C.I.A. Province Officer Warren Milberg, in a paper written in 1974 for the Air University, discussed the problem of recruiting informants for Phoenix from all South Vietnam's rural hamlets. Because informing was dangerous work, he said, "motivational factors" had to be considered. Thus, the prime targets for recruitment in the Hamlet Informant program were those "who had been victims of Viet Cong atrocities and acts of terrorism." Milberg told Valentine: "In one village, the chief's wife, who was pregnant, was disemboweled (by V.C.), and their unborn baby's head was smashed with a rifle butt."
Valentine cited multiple sources for the proposition that Phoenix created Counter-Terrorism Units (C.T.s) that "donned black pyjamas (U.S. military slang for the black silk peasant clothing typically worn in rural villages but known to the Vietnamese as Ao ba ba), and plundered nationalist as well as communist villages." An Ohio Congressman, upon returning from a fact-finding mission to Vietnam, charged that C.I.A. "hired mercenaries to disguise themselves as Viet Cong and discredit communists by committing atrocities." Rep. Stephen Young reported: "It was alleged to me that several of them executed two village leaders and raped some women."
As part of an initiation ceremony for defectors who joined C.T.s, the words "Sat Cong" (Kill Communist) were tattooed on their chests to prevent them from returning to their former V.C. or N.V.A. units.
Many of those terrorized by these C.T. tactics became informants for the South Vietnam National Police Force's notorious "Special Branch" that ran a gulag of Provincial Interrogation Centers (P.I.C.s). Special Branch was trained and funded by C.I.A. Every suspect taken into Special Branch's custody was tortured, often for many days. Two "American advisers" were usually present for all interrogations, and it was common for persons outside the P.I.C.s to hear the piercing screams and wails of the victims. Valentine noted that torture was considered standard operating procedure for law enforcement officers and government officials in the north and south, particularly during war.
"Torture," he wrote, "involved rape, gang rape, rape using eels or hard objects inserted into the vagina, rectum or both, rape followed by murder, electrical shock (called `the Bell Telephone Hour' by C.I.A.) administered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive body parts such as the tongue, `the water treatment' (simulated drowning now called `waterboarding'), `the airplane' in which a prisoner's arms were tied behind the back and the rope looped over a hook mounted in the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair after which he or she was beaten, beatings with rubber hoses and whips, and the use of police dogs to maul prisoners."
Former C.I.A. officer Jim Ward said: "The key to the Vietnam War...was the political control of people. And the communists were doing a better job of this than we were, and the best way to stop this was to get at the infrastructure." Thus, C.I.A. had an institutional rationale for its organized program of torture, terror, and murder.
C.I.A. created "Provincial Reconnaissance Units" (P.R.U.s), operated like the V.C., and they would behead, mutilate, disembowel and leave bodies on trails where V.C. would find them. This was intended as a demonstration that "we will do anything you do." The P.R.U.s used South Vietnamese civilians, South Vietnamese criminals, mercenaries, Cambodians, Nung Chinese (an ethnic minority in both Vietnam and China having a reputation for ferocity in any type of fighting), Montagnards (another ethnic minority in Vietnam and given their name, meaning "mountain dwellers," by the French occupiers), and members of U.S. Navy S.E.A.L., U.S. Army Green Beret, and C.I.A. units.
A routine tactic used by Phoenix thugs, one of dozens in its grimoire, was the so-called "airborne interrogation." Phoenix operatives would force three "suspects" into a helicopter, their hands bound behind their backs and a detonation device wrapped around their necks. Typically, two of the "suspects" were not thought to have any useful information and were mere straw men. However, they would be "interrogated," anyway. Before one could protest or otherwise speak more than a few words, he would be shoved from the helicopter in flight and the device around the neck detonated, blowing his head off. The process would be repeated with the second "suspect." By the time the third "suspect" was forced toward the door, he would be telling everything he knew about the V.C. However, once satisfied that all useful intelligence had been wrested from him, the third "suspect" would also be shoved from the helicopter and the device around his neck likewise detonated.
Many Vietnamese were falsely accused by a massive Phoenix informer network of being V.C. members or sympathizers. Many of these accusations later proved to be false or at least untrustworthy because informers often used Phoenix to settle old scores with enemies who held no particular political ideology. They also used Phoenix to collect generous bounties offered by C.I.A. agents. This process accelerated when Phoenix established quotas requiring the mandatory disclosure of at least 1,800 suspected V.C. or V.C. sympathizers each month. Money flowed out and quotas were met, even though the disclosures were unreliable and even unprovable.
Under Phoenix, or Phung Hoang, as it was called by the Vietnamese, due process didn't exist. South Vietnamese civilians whose names appeared on blacklists, Valentine wrote, could be kidnapped, tortured, detained for two years without trial, or even murdered, simply on the word of an anonymous informer. When Phoenix managers imposed their monthly quotas, the program was fully opened for abuses by corrupt security officers, policemen, politicians, and racketeers, all of whom extorted innocent civilians as well as V.C.
In Phoenix, a crude vocabulary of evil evolved. For example, "snatch and snuff" referred to operations in which some were kidnapped and murdered by a person or persons on C.I.A.'s roster of spooks and other sociopaths.
As further proof that human life was only a means to an end for those running Phoenix, Valentine discusses the infamous Project 24, whose members were primarily recruited using blackmail. The author describes these members as mostly N.V.A. officers and senior enlisted men captured by the U.S. or South Vietnamese military. Valentine writes: "Trained in Saigon, outfitted with captured N.V.A. or V.C. equipment, then given `a one-way ticket to Cambodia,' they were sent to locate enemy sanctuaries. When they radioed back their position and that of their sanctuary, the C.I.A. would `arc-light' (bomb with B-52s) them along with the target. No Project 24 special reconnaissance team ever returned to South Vietnam."
U.S. Air Force Col. Edward Lansdale, a former advertising executive who later became "confidential agent" of then-C.I.A. Director Allen Dulles and his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, created the complex infrastructure that later morphed into the Phoenix program. Valentine describes Lansdale as "the merry prankster" who "used Madison Avenue (advertising) language to construct a squeaky-clean Boy Scout image behind which he masked his own perverse delight in atrocity."
Trained by C.I.A. under Lansdale's direction, Valentine writes, South Vietnamese Army units would travel from village to village during the 1950s with a portable guillotine and murder active and inactive members of the Vietminh (the predecessor to the V.C.). (The guillotine was then in use by the French for executions within their own country.)
However, it was the urbane and "legendary" former C.I.A. director, William Colby, who is often credited with having created Phoenix. Sometimes called "the warrior priest," in part because of his Roman Catholic roots, Colby was also a former O.S.S. operative and Princeton graduate. (C.I.A. often goes talent scouting for Ivy Leaguers.) Valentine, citing a former Colby colleague and supporting documents, noted the ease and regularity with which Colby dissembled and lied when testifying before Congressional committees investigating the grim deeds of Phoenix.
By the end of 1956, Valentine found, the jails of the U.S. puppet, Diem, were filled with an estimated 20,000 political prisoners, most of them guilty of nothing but opposing Diem and his policies. Diem and one of his brothers, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were assassinated in a C.I.A.-sponsored coup on November 2, 1963, only 20 days before President John Kennedy was, himself, assassinated in Dallas. It is generally agreed that the president and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, personally sanctioned the coup against Diem (if not his execution) by high ranking A.R.V.N. officers and Diem's hand-picked bodyguards. Indeed, C.I.A. executed many coups and assassinated many foreign leaders during the Kennedy administration.
Although the U.S. strategy for winning the war against the V.C. initially involved "winning the hearts and minds" of the people, it eventually changed to a war of attrition in which "body count" was the litmus test for "victory." There often being no way to distinguish between the V.C. and non-aligned Vietnamese civilians, the "body count" figure was almost always highly exaggerated.
Valentine, who spent five years producing this seminal work, recalled approaching a high-ranking official of a state Veterans Administration in the fall of 1983. Valentine wanted to determine whether "a part of the Vietnam War...had been concealed...[W]ithout hesitation, he (the official) replied: `Phoenix.'" After explaining a little about it, Valentine said, the official mentioned that one of his clients had been in the program. The official disclosed that his client's service records-like those of others in Phoenix and unrelated classified operations-had been "sheep dipped" (altered). "They showed that he had been a cook in Vietnam," the official said. When Valentine asked to interview the client, the client refused. "Formerly with Special Forces in Vietnam, he was disabled and expressed fear that the Veterans Administration would cut off his benefits if he talked to me." This drove Valentine to discover what sort of program could generate such fear so many years after the Vietnam War had ended.
In his lengthy research, Valentine discovered that the appalling My Lai Massacre, which occurred in a tiny rural hamlet of Quang N'gai Province on the morning of March 16, 1968, was a Phoenix operation. In the massacre, led by the "ordinary" Lt. William Laws (Rusty) Calley, more than 400 unarmed civilians-old men, young men, boys, old women, young women, girls and babies-were slaughtered. Many of the women and girls were gang raped. Bodies were mutilated with knives and/or automatic rifle fire. Noses and ears were cut off. Some victims were scalped. The details are unimaginable. (See "Four Hours at My Lai," by Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim; Penguin Books.) Only Calley served any time for these war crimes, and most of that was under "house arrest" in his private quarters on the Ft. Benning Military Reservation (Columbus, Georgia) because of the intervention of President Richard M. Nixon. Calley was the martinet lieutenant in charge of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Infantry Brigade, Americal Division.
None of the civilians was armed. No V.C. were within miles of the massacre site. No shots were fired at the marauding soldiers who went on a berserk rampage. No weapons were found.
After finishing their slaughter, many of the soldiers sat down within a few yards of a large ditch where most of the bodies lay. They proceeded to eat lunch as flies swarmed and a few of those who were not-quite-dead-yet moaned and gasped their final breaths. The sounds coming from the dying irritated a few of the soldiers who thought it best to "end their suffering" by firing more shots into the piles of bodies.
A second massacre, which has gone largely unreported, occurred at the same time as the one at My Lai in another village not far away. It was committed by Bravo Company, also a unit of 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Infantry Brigade, Americal Division.
All the intelligence given to Calley's company was provided by Phoenix operatives from various blacklists of alleged V.C. agents in the slaughter zone. The intelligence was wrong. As with other Phoenix "missions," no one in C.I.A. was ever called to account. Valentine's book is one of only two or three that solidly makes the connection between the My Lai Massacre and the rogue terrorist operation run by C.I.A., a secret cabal of the U.S. government that operates utterly without accountability and far in excess of its charter.
In his quiet and understated introduction, Valentine wrote: "This book questions how Americans, who consider themselves a nation ruled by laws and an ethic of fair play, could create a program like Phoenix. By scrutinizing the program and the people who participated in it, and by employing the program as a symbol of the dark side of the human psyche, the author hopes to articulate the subtle ways in which the Vietnam War changed how Americans think about themselves. This book is about terror and its role in political warfare. It will show how, as successive American governments sink deeper and deeper into the vortex of covert operations-ostensibly to combat terrorism and communist insurgencies-the American people gradually lose touch with the democratic ideals that once defined their national self-concept. This book asks what happens when Phoenix comes home to roost."
This triumphant work should convince anyone that U.S. citizens must start becoming informed-now-about what their government is doing in their name and where the present versions of Phoenix are being employed. Iraq? Afghanistan? Pakistan? Yemen? Iran? Somalia? Syria? Lebanon? The ordinarily timid and often incurious corporate U.S. media occasionally report that U.S. Special Forces units and C.I.A. operatives are "on the ground" in these places performing unspecified missions. They never seem to follow-up or question any of this.
Valentine, whose book should have won him the Pulitzer Prize, persuasively answers his own question about what happens when Phoenix (or its progeny) comes to roost in our midst. Our constitutional republic, he demonstrates, has degenerated into a dangerous cryptocracy.
"The Phoenix Program" begs the ultimate question: Based upon what moral authority does the U.S. government declare and wage a massive global "war on terror" when engaging, itself, in campaigns of orchestrated terror and mayhem as a matter of policy and expedience?
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