IN 1967 THE CIA instituted a program in Vietnam called Phoenix. The name is a rough translation of Phunng Hoang, also a mythological bird. The program was run by William Colby, who later became head of the CIA.
One of the phrases that Teddy Brody pulled out of Sam Keen’s Faces of the Enemy for his one page of adages on propaganda, but which did not make the final cut, was, “Notice, the undertone beneath the self-justification in all propaganda is the whining voice of the child: ‘He did it to me first—I only hit him back.’ ” They did it first is the foundation of Phoenix. It happens to be true. They did do it first. The Viet Cong had an extensive and very effective terrorist program. It targeted everybody and anybody whose work supported the routine functions of government—mayors, tax collectors, police, postmen, teachers. Guerrilla warfare isn’t nice, and opposing the power of the state is always difficult. Yet, however politically correct the VC may have been, it’s fair to say that only motive separates what they did from the most ruthless forms of gangsterism. They established their underground rule in much the same way as the Mafia in Sicily or the drug gangs in Colombia.80There are lots of good atrocity stories—good in the sense of “As a popular passion producer, experience indicates that there is nothing quite like the atrocity story”81—about VC terror. These include young boys and elders impaled on stakes where the rest of the village is sure to see them and pregnant women disemboweled, the fetus cut out and left on the ground as a public display.
The South Vietnamese government, the CIA, and the other American organizations had all made attempts to imitate these tactics before Phoenix. The CIA had various CT—counterterrorist—teams that consisted of Vietnamese, and sometimes Chinese, who are frequently referred to as mercenaries because they were not regular Army and they were paid. Some of these teams consisted of convicted murderers, rapists, and other criminals, recruited from Vietnamese prisons, real-life versions of The Dirty Dozen. The Special Operations Group (SOG), which ran Project Delta and Project 24, Navy Seals, hunter-killer teams, and most especially the Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRU),82all engaged in counterterror operations.
What Phoenix did was centralize all the South Vietnamese intelligence services under American supervision and target what was called the VCI—Viet Cong Infrastructure—in a systematic way. The Americans and the South Vietnamese actually had a lot of information about who the VC and their sympathizers were. Phoenix put it all together. They put up wanted posters, they offered rewards. They set up interrogation centers. They sent in teams to arrest and to assassinate.
To the degree that Phoenix was known, it was instantly controversial.83And it remains so. Vietnamese named to Phoenix as VC or VC sympathizers were not innocent until proven guilty. Assassinations did not wait upon due process. Suspects were detained without trial, on the basis of anonymous accusations. In prison they were often beaten and tortured. South Vietnamese district intelligence officers got rich through extortion—threatening to put people on the list unless they paid—and by letting real VC buy their way off the list.
For some people Phoenix was a lot of fun. This was tropical Lawrence of Arabia stuff. Dressing up in native garb, eating indigenous foods, setting up ambushes, sneaking into villages at night to kill silently, committing bizarre yet colorful acts like hammering custom-made calling cards into the third eye of their victims and cutting out their livers because you can’t get into Buddhist heaven without one. Actually, it was better than the Lawrence scenario, especially for heterosexuals—instead of veiled females covered in layers of robes, there were the accommodating girls of Indochina in their bao dais; instead of eating goat bits and rice with their fingers, these western warriors in mufti had steak and ice cream from the States or Vietnamese cuisine which, combining the traditions of France and Southeast Asia, is among the most enticing in the world; there was no prohibition of alcohol; the drugs were of superb quality; and to be an American was to be very rich.84
With all this—the cowboys, the profiteering, the moral corruption of participating in torture and assassination—the truly strange thing was that Phoenix worked. It hurt the Viet Cong very badly. Combined with their losses in the Tet offensive, it crippled them to a degree from which they never recovered.85
Taylor brought in two men to intercept Kitty. They were waiting outside her house. They knew what time she was supposed to meet Joe Broz and how long the drive took, so they knew approximately when she was expected to leave. They had photos of her for identification purposes. She was very attractive in the photos, smiling, bright-eyed, voluptuous. Both of the watchers were graduates of Phoenix. Their names were Charles “Chaz” Otis and Christian “Bo” Perkins. There are a lot of ways to describe both of them, but bottom-line and the simplest is to say that Bo was a sadist and Chaz was a rapist.
80 Of course, the VC can say “He did it to me first—I only hit him back.” And that’s true too. State terror—a concept discussed at length in The Terrorism Industry by Herman and Sullivan and in the works of Noam Chomsky—can be, and frequently is, more murderous and less discriminating than any guerrilla group. Certainly, Diem and the imperialist French before him ruled by force, not consent, which is to say through terror.
81 Oddly enough, the U.S. failed to make very good use of enemy atrocity stories in the Vietnam war. This was partly deliberate. Johnson did not want to whip the American people into a war frenzy. Later the Nixon administration did push the atrocity line, at least a little, but only about the treatment of our own POWs.
82 . . . one form of psychological pressure on the guerrillas which the Americans do not advertise is the PRU. The PRU work on the theory of giving back what the Viet Cong deals out—assassination and butchery. Accordingly, a Viet Cong unit on occasion will find the disemboweled remains of its fellows among a well trod canal bank path, an effective message to guerrillas and to non-committed Vietnamese that two can play the same bloody game.” (Chalmers Roberts, Washington Post, 2/18/67)
83 “By analogy,” said Ogden Reid, a member of a congressional committee investigating Phoenix in 1971, “if the Union had a Phoenix program during the Civil War, its targets would have been civilians like Jefferson Davis or the Mayor of Macon, Georgia.” (The Phoenix Program)
“The Phoenix operation aroused an outcry from American antiwar activists, who labeled it ‘mass murder.’ But several Americans involved described it instead as a program riddled with inefficiency, corruption and abuse.” (Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History [Viking, 1983])
84 “The CIA people were the worst. I was appalled at the kind of people the CIA had out in the provinces . . . these guys loved to ride through the streets and down the country roads in their Jeeps with all manner of weapons strapped to them, gun belts and helmets and all of it. They had lots of booze, lots of women, the best furniture, and the nicest places to live. They had their own private airline, Air America, to take them anywhere they wanted to go on a moment’s notice. They played the Terry and the Pirates game, swashbuckling, lots of bravado. Some killing, too. They were after the VCI, the Viet Cong infrastructure. This is where you get your assassination squad.” (Robert Boettcher quoted in Harry Maurer, Strange Ground: Americans in Vietnam 1945-1975: An Oral History [Henry Holt, 1990]).
85 In 1969 according to the wonderfully precise statistics released by the American mission in Saigon, 19,534 Viet Cong organizers, propagandists, tax collectors, and the like were listed as having been neutralized—6,187 of them killed.” (Vietnam: A History) Karnow was at first very skeptical of these numbers and “the claim, advanced by William Colby . . . that the program . . . eliminated 60,000 authentic Viet Cong agents.” After the war, however, Viet Cong and NVA sources confirmed to Karnow that Phoenix had hurt them very severely.
Obviously, they won anyway. But they did so with North Vietnamese forces, mostly regulars, and without the local guerrilla forces.