Phoenix Program (37 page)

“PRU belonged to the RDC/O side of the province organization until the consolidation,” Milberg told me. “I started out as the plans officer, but toward the end of 1967 I was appointed the province officer in charge of both programs. This is where I actually control and direct the PRU myself. Prior to this, if I had need of the PRU, because of some intelligence I had developed, what I did was go and see the RDC/O people—which was a relatively large program, five or six Americans involved—whereas RDC/P was only me. I lived by myself away from them. But I'm not sure if that's the way it was in every province.”

In regard to Phoenix, Milberg said, “I'm not sure how you bound Phoenix, but it certainly falls right in the middle. But at this point the agency was beginning to turn the reins of the program over to the U.S. Army, as advisers to the Vietnamese, and going through whatever Orwellian mind-set was necessary to make believe this was a Vietnamese program.”

Phoenix operations in Quang Tri Province were different from Phoenix operations in other provinces, Milberg explained, in that “a lot of military activity was going on, as opposed to the Vietcong insurgency. Clearly, both things were going on, but it was a heavily militarily oriented province. So there was a lot of action there.”

In “The Future Applicability of the Phoenix Program,” Milberg describes a typical Phoenix operation. Capitalizing on their assets in the CIO, PRU, and Special Branch, Milberg and Quang Tri Province Senior Adviser Bob Brewer mounted a Phoenix operation in the village of Thuong Xa, fourteen miles south of the DMZ. As Elton Manzione noted earlier, in this area it was hard to determine anyone's political affiliations, and the tendency was to consider everyone a Vietcong sympathizer. Indeed, Thuong Xa had served as a staging area for the Vietminh in the First Indochina War, and in 1968 its inhabitants were supporting the Vietcong in the same manner against the Americans. Milberg writes this was because “the people were afraid to offer information since they feared VC reprisals.”
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A decision to conduct a Phoenix operation of “massive proportions” against Thuong Xa was made by Quang Tri's Province Security Council at Brewer's urging. Once permission had been granted, “Only the barest essential information was given to the various Vietnamese agencies in Quang Tri,” Milberg writes. In this way, it was thought, those Vietnamese officials who had been coerced by the VC could not interfere with the “planning process.” To ensure security, “The actual name of the targeted village was not released to the Vietnamese until the day before the operation.”
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In preparing the Thuong Xa operation, information from Special Branch informers and PIC reports was fed into DIOCCs in and around Thuong Xa—a phenomenon rarely observed in provinces where the Phoenix coordinator was an MACV officer, not a CIA employee. As a blacklist of suspected VCI was compiled in Quang Tri's Province Intelligence and Operations Coordination Center, it was cross-checked with neighboring Quang Tin's PIOCC and “against master Phoenix lists” in Saigon (to ensure that penetration agents were crossed off the list), then fed to Quang Tri's DIOCCs.

Next, PRU teams were sent to locate and surveil targeted VCI. Escape routes were studied for ambush sites, and “the [province senior adviser] personally arranged” for local U.S. Army and Marine units to act as a “blocking force” to seal off the entire town.
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At dawn on the day of the operation MACV psywar planes dropped leaflets on Thuong Xa urging identified VCI to surrender and offering rewards and Chieu Hoi status to informers.

No one took advantage of the deal. Instead, the residents of Thuong Xa braced for the shock. In the early-morning hours twenty-five-man PRU teams—accompanied by Special Branch interrogators and CIA advisers—began searching hooches for booby traps, weapons, documents, food caches, and VCI suspects. They “compared the names and descriptions on the blacklists with every man, woman, and child in Thuong Xa.”
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Suspects were sent to screening zones, where innocent bystanders were fed and “entertained” by RD teams. The hard-core VCI, meanwhile, were systematically driven into the northeast corner of town, where they were cornered, then killed or
captured as they tried to escape through Brewer's “ring of steel.”

The result was two VCI captured. One was the district party chief; the other was the chief of the local NLF farmers' association. Both were sent to the interrogation center in Da Nang. Eight other targeted VCI were killed or escaped. Two fifty-nine-member Revolutionary Development teams stayed behind to assert the GVN's presence, but within a month they were driven out of town and Thuong Xa reverted to Vietcong control. As Milberg observes, “Even with this unusual amount of coordination, the fact that the village reverted to communist control and known members of the VCI escaped strongly suggests that the operation failed as a future model for counterinsurgency operations.”
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Perhaps the inhabitants of Thuong Xa resisted the intrusion into their village because they feared Vietcong reprisals. Or maybe they really did support the Vietcong. In either case, the point is the same. Even under ideal conditions Phoenix operations failed where the Vietnamese were determined to resist. Where ideal conditions did not exist—where Vietnamese officials were included in the planning of operations and where U.S. military officers replaced CIA officers as Phoenix coordinators—the program failed to an even greater degree.

In early 1968 each of the CIA's region officers in charge was assigned a military intelligence officer, either a major or a lieutenant colonel, to serve as his Phoenix coordinator. In IV Corps the job was given to Lieutenant Colonel Doug Dillard, an easygoing Georgian who, at sixteen, lied about his age, enlisted in the Eighty-second Airborne Brigade, and fought in World War II. After the war Dillard became a commissioned officer, and in Korea he served in the Combined Command for Reconnaissance Activity, which, under CIA auspices, coordinated special operations behind enemy lines. Dillard gained further espionage experience in the late 1950's as a case officer in Germany running agent operations in conjunction with the Army's attache office and the CIA. After a stint teaching airborne and amphibious “offensive” counterintelligence operations at Fort Holabird, Dillard was made deputy chief of intelligence at the Continental Army Command, where he trained and deployed “practically every army intelligence unit that went to Vietnam.”
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Speaking in a drawl, Dillard told me, “I went over to Vietnam in February 1968 as the Phoenix coordinator for Four Corps, reporting to the CIA's region officer in charge. Branch called me and said, ‘We have what we consider a critical requirement. We can't discuss it over the phone—it's classified—but you'll find out what it is when you get there.'

“So,” Dillard continued, “when I arrived in Saigon, I immediately contacted several of my friends. One, Colonel Russ Conger, the senior adviser
in Phong Dinh Province, gave me some tips on getting different agencies to cooperate and on overcoming the terrorist psychology in the villages and hamlets. He also informed me that there were many people around who felt Phoenix was a threat to them—to their power base.” In other words, military officers commanding units in the field “considered Phoenix, on occasion, as getting in their way and inhibiting resources they could otherwise use for their own operations.”

Right away Dillard understood that his job would be to bridge the gap, so that conventional military forces could be made available for unconventional Phoenix operations planned by the CIA. But he also sensed another problem festering beneath the surface. “It's kind of in conflict to our culture and experience over the years,” he explained, “to take a U.S. Army element—whatever it may be—and direct it not only toward the military and paramilitary enemy forces but also toward the civilians that cooperate with them.”

General Bruce Palmer, commander of the U.S. Ninth Infantry Division in 1968, put it more bluntly. “My objection to the program,” he wrote in a letter to the author, “was the involuntary assignment of U.S. Army officers to the program. I don't believe that people in uniform, who are pledged to abide by the Geneva Conventions, should be put in the position of having to break those laws of warfare.”
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Most military officers, however, resented Phoenix on other than legal grounds. The notion of attacking an elusive and illusionary civilian infrastructure was anathema to conventional warriors looking for spectacular main force battles. For an ambitious officer assigned to Phoenix, “the headlines would not be very impressive in terms of body counts, weapons captured, or some other measure of success,” as Warren Milberg notes. In addition, Phoenix coordinators were merely advisers to their counterparts, not commanders in the field.

After being informally briefed by his friends, Dillard reported to the Phoenix Directorate, which “represented the program at the national level, ensuring that we got the kind of personnel and logistical support we felt we needed.” However, because of the staff's “very narrow administrative type of intelligence background,” it did not “understand how the program was going to develop. As the ICEX program,” Dillard explained, “it was run directly at the province level, principally by the agency. But Parker's staff didn't grasp that when MACV took over and fleshed out Phoenix with hundreds of military officers and money, it really was a joint operation—that CIA was a supporter and partial sponsor, but really MACV had to account for it. This is how it evolved.”

While the Saigon staff was content to view Phoenix as a CIA subsidiary, Dillard set about asserting MACV's presence in Phoenix operations in the Delta—a task made easier by the relative absence of regular military units
and by Dillard's engaging personality and wide experience in command, staff, and operational positions. Ultimately, though, Dillard's leverage was logistics.

“As a matter of protocol between itself and the CIA,” Dillard explained, “MACV assumed half of the agency's operational expenses in support of Phoenix. For example, every time the agency's aircraft were used to support a Phoenix activity, technically it should have been charged against the fund allocation MACV had given to the Phoenix program. So when I found out about that, I contacted the Air America operations people in Four Corps and said, ‘Just to keep everybody honest, I want a record of what you're charging for aircraft support against the Phoenix program.' And thereafter I tried to get air support from U.S. Army region headquarters at Can Tho, so I didn't have to squander MACV operational funds reimbursing the agency for use of its aircraft.”

By protecting MACV's financial interests, Dillard won the support of IV Corps commander, General George Eckhardt. “Most of my work with the MACV staff was either with General Eckhardt directly, or with the intelligence chief, Colonel Ted Greyman,” Dillard recalled. “Ted and I worked hand in hand coordinating the activity, and it paid off…. General Eckhardt and Colonel Greyman set aside for me a light gun platoon and six helicopter gunships to run Phoenix operations throughout the region.” This contingent became “a regional reaction force to haul troops and provide fire support.” With it, Dillard was able to provide the PRU with air mobility and thus get access to CIA intelligence in exchange.

Jim Ward spoke highly of Doug Dillard, saying, “He was assigned to me because they wanted the best man they could get down in the Delta.”
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The admiration was mutual. About Ward and his deputy, Andy Rogers, Dillard said, “They were great guys to work with. There was an immediate acceptance of my credentials.” That was not always the case. But Dillard and Ward agreed on what constituted a legitimate Phoenix operation—be it an ambush dreamed up at a DIOCC or a multiprovince operation concocted by the CIA—and together they would push Phoenix beyond the narrow rifle shot parameters advocated by Robert Komer.

Dillard's liberal interpretation of Phoenix is partially the result of his perception of the “terrorist psychology” in Vietnam. “I arrived in Can Tho on a Friday afternoon,” he recalled. “The two army sergeants that had come in to be my administrative assistants met me at the airport and took me over to the compound and settled me in the CIA's regional house, which was also being used by the local Phong Dinh Province CIA personnel. There was a vacant room, so I took it, and the next morning I reported in to Andy Rogers. I was given a little office with the two enlisted men [who] handled reports and requests from the field. I was also assigned a deputy, Major Keith Ogden.

“Anyway, I found out there was a helicopter going up to Chau Doc Province on the Cambodian border on Sunday morning, so I went up there. It was my first introduction to the real war…. It was right after Tet, and there was still a lot of activity. The young sergeant there, Drew Dix, had been in a little village early that morning…. The VC had come in and got a couple out that were accused of collaborating with the government, and they'd shot them in the ears. Their bodies were lying out on a cart. We drove out there, and I looked at that … and I had my first awareness of what those natives were up against. Because during the night, the damn VC team would come in, gather all those villagers together, warn them about cooperating, and present an example of what happened to collaborators. They shot them in the ears on the spot.

“So I knew what my job was. I realized there was a tremendous psychological problem to overcome in getting that specific group of villagers to cooperate in the program. Because to me the Phoenix program was one requiring adequate, timely, and detailed information so we could intercept, make to defect, kill, maim, or capture the Vietcong guerrilla forces operating in our area. Or put a strike on them. If either through intercepting messages or capturing VCI, you could get information on some of the main force guerrilla battalion activity, you could put a B-fifty-two strike on them, which we did in Four Corps.”