Phoenix Program
Authors: Douglas Valentine
The Phoenix Program
America's Use of Terror in Vietnam
Douglas Valentine
With a New Introduction by the Author
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Phoenix Has Landed
Chapter 4: Revolutionary Development
Chapter 17: Accelerated Pacification
Chapter 19: Psyops
Series Introduction
I
We the people seem to have the freest book trade in the world. Certainly we have the biggest. Cruise the mighty Amazon, and you will see so many books for sale in the United States today as would require more than four hundred miles of shelving to display themâa bookshelf that would stretch from Boston's Old North Church to Fort McHenry in South Baltimore.
Surely that huge catalog is proof of our extraordinary freedom of expression: The US government does not ban books, because the First Amendment won't allow it. While books are widely banned in states like China and Iran,
no
book may be forbidden by the US government
at any level
(although the CIA censors books by former officers). Where books
are
banned in the United States, the censors tend to be private organizations-church groups, school boards, and other local (busy)bodies roused to purify the public schools or libraries nearby.
Despite such local prohibitions, we can surely find any book we want. After all, it's easy to locate those hot works that once
were
banned by the government as too “obscene” to sell, or mail, until the courts ruled otherwise on First Amendment groundsâ
Fanny Hill, Howl, Naked Lunch
. We also have no trouble finding books banned here and there as “antifamily,” “Satanic,” “racist,” and/or “filthy,” from
Huckleberry Finn to Heather Has Two Mommies
to the Harry Potter series, just to name a few.
II
And yet, the fact that those bold books are all in print, and widely read, does not mean that we have the freest book trade in the world. On the contrary: For over half a century, America's vast literary culture has been disparately policed, and imperceptibly contained, by state and corporate entities well placed and perfectly equipped to wipe out wayward writings. Their ad hoc suppressions through the years have been far more effectual than those quixotic bans imposed on classics like
The Catcher in the Rye
and
Fahrenheit 451
. For every one of those bestsellers scandalously purged from some provincial school curriculum, there are many others (we can't know how many) that have been so thoroughly erased that few of us, if any, can remember them, or have ever heard of them.
How have all those books (to quote George Orwell) “dropped into the memory hole” in these United States? As America does
not
ban books, other meansâless evident, and so less controversialâhave been deployed to vaporize them. Some almost never made it into print, as publishers were privately warned off them from on high, either on the grounds of “national security” or with blunt threats of endless corporate litigation. Other books were signed enthusiasticallyâthen “dumped,” as their own publishers mysteriously failed to market them, or even properly distribute them. But it has mainly been the press that stamps out inconvenient books, either by ignoring them, orâmost oftenâlaughing them off as “conspiracy theory,” despite their soundness (or because of it).
Once out of print, those books are gone. Even if some few of us have not forgotten them, and one might find used copies here and there, these books have disappeared. Missing from the shelves and never mentioned in the press (and seldom mentioned even in our schools), each book thus neutralized might just as well have been destroyed en masseâor never written in the first place, for all their contribution to the public good.
III
The purpose of this series is to bring such vanished books to lifeâfirst life for those that never saw the light of day, or barely did, and second life for those that got some notice, or even made a splash, then slipped too quickly out of print, and out of mind.
These books, by and large, were made to disappear, or were hastily forgotten, not because they were too lewd, heretical, or unpatriotic for some touchy group of citizens.
These
books sank without a trace, or faded fast, because they tell the sort of truths that Madison and Jefferson believed our Constitution should protectâtruths that the people have the right to know, and needs to know, about our government and other powers that keep us in the dark.
Thus the works on our Forbidden Bookshelf shed new lightâfor most of us, it's
still
new lightâon the most troubling trends and episodes in US history, especially since World War II: America's broad use of former Nazis and ex-Fascists in the Cold War; the Kennedy assassinations, and the murders of Martin Luther King Jr., Orlando Letelier, George Polk, and Paul Wellstone; Ronald Reagan's Mafia connections, Richard Nixon's close relationship with Jimmy Hoffa, and the mob's grip on the NFL; America's terroristic Phoenix Program in Vietnam, US support for South America's most brutal tyrannies, and CIA involvement in the Middle East; the secret histories of DuPont, ITT, and other giant US corporations; and the long war waged by Wall Street and its allies in real estate on New York City's poor and middle class.
The many vanished books on these forbidden subjects (among others) altogether constitute a shadow history of Americaâa history that We the People need to know at last, our country having now become a land with billionaires in charge, and millions not allowed to vote, and everybody under full surveillance. Through this series, we intend to pull that necessary history from the shadows at long lastâto shed some light on how America got here, and how we might now take it somewhere else.
Mark Crispin Miller
Introduction: The Phoenix Has Landed
Tens year after the publication of
The Phoenix Program
, I wrote a series of articles on the subject for
Counterpunch
magazine. The Clinton administration had popularized neoliberalism, hammered labor through NAFTA, and dismantled welfare. Conservatives were speaking of a “new American century” based on belligerent nationalism. The time seemed right to warn of the dangers.
The first of these articles, “Rob Simmons, the CIA, and the Issue of War Crimes in Vietnam: The Spook Who Would Be a Congressman,” appeared in November 2000.
As a CIA advisor to the Special Branch of the South Vietnamese Police, Simmons managed a secret interrogation center and a vast informant network in order to identify and locate members of the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI).Simmons then mounted paramilitary and psychological warfare operations against suspected “secret agents” who were administering the revolution in Phú Yên Province.
The people Simmons spied on, harassed, kidnapped, interrogated, and assassinated were civilians protected under the Geneva Conventions. He worked with the Phoenix program and what he did, in my opinion, amounted to war crimes.
Simmons, however, represented the nation's renewed, aggressive spirit, and longing to rid itself of the Vietnam Syndrome. He was elected to Congress in November 2000 and quickly became a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, as well as chairman of the Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing, and Terrorism Risk Assessment.
My second article, “Fragging Bob: Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, and the Need for a War Crimes Trial,” appeared in May 2001.The piece followed revelations that former Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey, as a member of a Navy SEAL team on a Phoenix mission in South Vietnam in 1969, participated in the killing of a dozen women and children in Thanh Phong village. Kerrey claimed the civilians were caught in a crossfire, but their bodies were found grouped together, as if they had been rounded up and executed.
Kerrey told the
New York Times
, “Standard operating procedure was to dispose of the people we made contact with. Kill the people we made contact with, or we have to abort the mission.”
According to the rules of land warfare, what Kerrey and his SEAL did was unlawful and amounted to a war crime. But again, in the spirit of the times, his crimes were rationalized away.
The articles about CIA officer Simmons and Navy SEAL Kerrey contrasted the stated purpose of the Phoenix program, which was to protect the people from terrorism, with its operational realityâthe pacification of the South Vietnamese population through terrorism, through the same tactics employed by the Gestapo and Einsatsgruppen in the Second World War.
Created by the CIA in 1967 and headquartered in Saigon, the Phoenix program coordinated all military, police, and intelligence agencies in South Vietnam in pursuit of civilian members of the VCI. To this end the CIA created Intelligence and Operations Coordinating Centers (IOCCs) at region, province, and district levels. A particular IOCC would amass data on suspects in its area of operations, through informants and the CIA's brutal interrogation centers, and then mount targeted operations using police, regular military, and special operations forces, as well as the CIA's notorious counterterror teams.
To facilitate this sweeping method of population control, every citizen's biographical data was fed into a computer at the Phoenix Directorate in Saigon. The Directorate was managed by a senior CIA officer whose job was to funnel information on top-ranking members of the VCI to the CIA station, where the staff attempted to turn these people into penetration agents who could report on the enemy's strategies, plans, and allies in North Vietnam.
Any South Vietnamese citizen could become a VCI suspect based on the word of an anonymous informant. The suspect was then arrested, indefinitely detained in a CIA interrogation center like the one that Congressman Rob Simmons managed, and tortured until he or she (in some cases children as young as twelve) confessed, informed on others, died, or was brought before a military tribunal for disposition.
At the height of the program, Phoenix managers imposed quotas of eighteen hundred “neutralizations” per month on the CIA officers and soldiers in the field. The unstated intention was to corrupt the system, and the CIA succeeded in this effort. Crooked security officers, policemen, politicians, and racketeers began to extort loyal civilians as well as enemy agents. As one CIA officer put it, Phoenix was “a very good blackmail scheme for the central government. âIf you don't do what I want, you're VC.'”
Warning: America's democratic institutions are on the brink of being similarly corrupted, and for the same insidious purpose: the political control of its citizens through terrorism, on behalf of the rich military-industrial-political elite who rule our society.