What is the Phoenix Program?

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The Phoenix Program (Vietnamese: Chiến dịch Phụng Hoàng) was designed and initially coordinated by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Vietnam War, involving the American, South Vietnamese militaries, and a small amount of special forces operatives from the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam. In 1970, CIA responsibility was phased out, and the program was put under the authority of the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS).

The program, which lasted from 1968 to 1972, was designed to identify and destroy the Viet Cong (VC) via infiltration, assassination, torture, capture, counter-terrorism, and interrogation. The CIA described it as “a set of programs that sought to attack and destroy the political infrastructure of the Viet Cong.” The Phoenix Program was premised on the idea that North Vietnamese infiltration had required local support within noncombat civilian populations, which were referred to as the “VC infrastructure” and “political branch” that had purportedly coordinated the insurgency.

Throughout the program, Phoenix “neutralized” 81,740 people suspected of VC membership, of whom 26,369 were killed, and the rest surrendered or were captured. Of those killed 87% were attributed to conventional military operations by South Vietnamese and American forces, while the remaining 13% were attributed to Phoenix Program operatives.

The Phoenix Program was heavily criticized on various grounds, including the number of neutral civilians killed, the nature of the program (which critics have labeled as a “civilian assassination program,”) the use of torture and other coercive methods, and the program being exploited for personal politics. Nevertheless, the program was very successful at suppressing VC political and revolutionary activities. Public disclosure of the program led to significant criticism, including hearings by the US Congress, and the CIA was pressured into shutting it down. A similar program, Plan F-6, continued under the government of South Vietnam.

Background

Shortly after the 1954 Geneva Conference and the adoption of the Geneva Accords, the government of North Vietnam organized a force of several thousand to mobilize support for the communists in the upcoming elections. When it became clear that the elections would not take place, these forces became the seeds of what would eventually become the Viet Cong, a North Vietnamese insurgency whose goal was unification of Vietnam under the control of the North.

While counterinsurgency efforts had been ongoing since the first days of US military involvement in Vietnam, they had been unsuccessful with dealing with either the armed VC or the VC’s civilian infrastructure (VCI) which swelled to between 80,000 and 150,000 members by the mid 1960’s. The VCI, unlike the armed component of the VC, was tasked with support activities including recruiting, political indoctrination, psychological operations, intelligence collection, and logistical support. The VCI rapidly set up shadow governments in rural South Vietnam by replacing local leadership in small rural hamlets loyal to the Saigon government with communist cadres. The VCI chose small rural villages because they lacked close supervision of the Saigon government or the South Vietnamese Army

VCI tactics for establishing local communist control began by identifying towns and villages with strategic importance to either the VC or North Vietnamese People’s Army of Vietnam and local populations with communist sympathies with the Hanoi government putting a great deal of emphasis on the activities and success of the VCI. After a community was identified, the VCI would threaten local leadership with reprisals if they refused to cooperate or kidnap local leaders and send them to reeducation camps in North Vietnam. Local leaders who continued to refuse to cooperate or threatened to contact the Saigon government were murdered along with their families. After VCI agents took control of an area it would be used to quarter and resupply VC guerrillas, supplying intelligence on US and South Vietnamese military movements, providing taxes to VCI cadres, and conscripting locals into the VC.

History

By April 1965, the CIA Counter-Terror Program supported 140 teams of between three and 12 men each. Aimed exclusively at the VCI, the teams claimed a kill ratio in excess of eight to one.

On 9 May 1967 all pacification efforts by the United States came under the authority of the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS). In June 1967, as part of CORDS, the Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation Program (ICEX) was created, from a plan drafted by Nelson Brickham. The purpose of the organization centered on gathering and coordinating information on the VC. In December 1967 the South Vietnamese Prime Minister signed a decree establishing Phụng Hoàng, (named after a mythical bird) to coordinate the numerous South Vietnamese entities involved in the anti-VCI campaign. The 1968 Tet Offensive demonstrated the importance of the VCI. In July 1968 South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu signed a decree implementing Phụng Hoàng.

The major two components of the program were Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs) and regional interrogation centers. PRUs would kill or capture suspected VC members, as well as civilians who were thought to have information on VC activities. Many of these people were taken to interrogation centers and were tortured in an attempt to gain intelligence on VC activities in the area. The information extracted at the centers was given to military commanders, who would use it to task the PRU with further capture and assassination missions. The program’s effectiveness was measured in the number of VC members who were “neutralized”, a euphemism meaning imprisoned, persuaded to defect, or killed.

The interrogation centers and PRUs were originally developed by the CIA’s Saigon station chief Peer de Silva. DeSilva was a proponent of a military strategy known as counter-terrorism, which encompasses military tactics and techniques that government, military, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies use to combat or prevent terrorist activities, and that it should be applied strategically to “enemy civilians” in order to reduce civilian support for the VC. The PRUs were designed with this in mind, and began targeting suspected VC members in 1964. Originally, the PRUs were known as “Counter Terror” teams, but they were renamed to “Provincial Reconnaissance Units” after CIA officials “became wary of the adverse publicity surrounding the use of the word ‘terror'”.

Officially, Phoenix operations continued until December 1972, although certain aspects continued until the fall of Saigon in 1975.

Agencies and individuals involved in the program

Central Intelligence Agency
United States special operations forces
U.S. Army intelligence collection units from the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV—the joint-service command that provided command and control for all U.S. advisory and assistance efforts in Vietnam)
US Navy SEAL Detachment Bravo
USMC, 1st Force Reconnaissance Company stationed near Da Nang
Special forces operatives from the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam (AATTV)
Republic of Vietnam National Police Field Force

Operations

The chief aspect of the Phoenix Program was the collection of intelligence information. VC members would then be captured, converted, or killed. Emphasis for the enforcement of the operation was placed on local government militia and police forces, rather than the military, as the main operational arm of the program. According to journalist Douglas Valentine, “Central to Phoenix is the fact that it targeted civilians, not soldiers”.

The Phoenix Program took place under special laws that allowed the arrest and prosecution of suspected communists. To avoid abuses such as phony accusations for personal reasons, or to rein in overzealous officials who might not be diligent enough in pursuing evidence before making arrests, the laws required three separate sources of evidence to convict an individual targeted for neutralization. If a suspected VC member was found guilty, they could be held in prison for two years, with renewable two-year sentences totaling up to six years. According to MACV Directive 381-41, the intent of Phoenix was to attack the VC with a “rifle shot rather than a shotgun approach to target key political leaders, command/control elements and activists in the VCI [Viet Cong Infrastructure].” The VCI was known by the communists as the Revolutionary Infrastructure.

Heavy-handed operations—such as random cordons and searches, large-scale and lengthy detentions of innocent civilians, and excessive use of firepower—had a negative effect on the civilian population. Intelligence derived from interrogations was often used to carry out “search and destroy” missions aimed at finding and killing VC members.

87% of those killed during the Phoenix Program were killed in conventional military operations. Many of those killed were only identified as members of the VCI following military engagements, which were often started by the VC. Between January 1970 and March 1971, 94% of those killed as a result of the program were killed during military operations (9,827 out of 10,443 VCI killed).

Torture

According to Valentine, methods of torture that were utilized at the interrogation centers included:

Rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electrical shock (“the Bell Telephone Hour”) rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; “the water treatment”; “the airplane,” in which a prisoner’s arms were tied behind the back and the rope looped over a hook on 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.

Military intelligence officer K. Barton Osborn reports that he witnessed “the use of the insertion of the 6-inch dowel into the canal of one of my detainee’s ears, and the tapping through the brain until dead. The starvation to death (in a cage), of a Vietnamese woman who was suspected of being part of the local political education cadre in one of the local villages … The use of electronic gear such as sealed telephones attached to … both the women’s vaginas and men’s testicles to shock them into submission.”

Osborn’s claims have been refuted by author Gary Kulik, who states that Osborn made exaggerated, contradictory and false claims and that his colleagues stated that he liked making “fantastic statements” and that he “frequently made exaggerated remarks in order to attract attention to himself.” Osborn served with the United States Marine Corps in I Corps in 1967–1968 before the Phoenix Program was implemented. Torture was carried out by South Vietnamese forces with the CIA and special forces playing a supervisory role.

Targeted killings

Phoenix operations often aimed to assassinate targets or kill them through other means. PRU units often anticipated resistance in disputed areas, and often operated on a shoot-first basis. Lieutenant Vincent Okamoto, an intelligence-liaison officer for the Phoenix Program for two months in 1968 and a recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross said the following:

The problem was, how do you find the people on the blacklist? It’s not like you had their address and telephone number. The normal procedure would be to go into a village and just grab someone and say, “Where’s Nguyen so-and-so?” Half the time the people were so afraid they would not say anything. Then a Phoenix team would take the informant, put a sandbag over his head, poke out two holes so he could see, put commo wire around his neck like a long leash, and walk him through the village and say, “When we go by Nguyen’s house scratch your head.” Then that night Phoenix would come back, knock on the door, and say, “April Fool, motherfucker.” Whoever answered the door would get wasted. As far as they were concerned whoever answered was a Communist, including family members. Sometimes they’d come back to camp with ears to prove that they killed people.

William Colby denied that the program was an assassination program stating: “To call it a program of murder is nonsense … They were of more value to us alive than dead, and therefore, the object was to get them alive.” His instructions to field officers stated “Our training emphasizes the desirability of obtaining these target individuals alive and of using intelligent and lawful methods of interrogation to obtain the truth of what they know about other aspects of the VCI … [U.S. personnel] are specifically not authorized to engage in assassinations or other violations of the rules of land warfare.”

Strategic and operational effect

Between 1968 and 1972, Phoenix officially “neutralized” (meaning imprisoned, persuaded to defect, or killed) 81,740 people suspected of VC membership, of whom 26,369 were killed, while Seymour Hersh wrote that South Vietnamese official statistics estimated that 41,000 were killed. A significant number of VC were killed, and between 1969 and 1971, the program was quite successful in destroying VC infrastructure in many important areas. 87 percent of those killed in the program were attributed to conventional military operations by South Vietnamese and American forces; the remainder were killed by Phoenix Program operatives.

By 1970, communist plans repeatedly emphasized attacking the government’s pacification program and specifically targeted Phoenix officials. The VC imposed assassination quotas. In 1970, for example, communist officials near Da Nang in northern South Vietnam instructed their assassins to “kill 1,400 persons” deemed to be government “tyrant[s]” and to “annihilate” anyone involved with the pacification program.

Several North Vietnamese officials have made statements about the effectiveness of Phoenix. According to William Colby, “in the years since 1975, I have heard several references to North and South Vietnamese communists who state that, in their mind, the toughest period that they faced from 1960 to 1975 was the period from 1968 to ’72 when the Phoenix Program was at work.” The CIA said that through Phoenix they were able to learn the identity and structure of the VCI in every province.

According to Stuart A. Herrington: “Regardless of how effective the Phoenix Program was or wasn’t, area by area, the communists thought it was very effective. They saw it as a significant threat to the viability of the revolution because, to the extent that you could … carve out the shadow government, their means of control over the civilian population was dealt a death blow. And that’s why, when the war was over, the North Vietnamese reserved “special treatment” for those who had worked in the Phoenix Program. They considered it a mortal threat to the revolution.”

Public response and legal proceedings

The Phoenix Program was not generally known during most of the time it was operational to either the American public or American officials in Washington. In 1970, author Frances FitzGerald made several arguments to then-U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger against the program, which she alludes to in Fire in the Lake. One of the first people to criticize Phoenix publicly was Ed Murphy, a peace activist and former military intelligence soldier, in 1970.

There was eventually a series of U.S. Congressional hearings. In 1971, in the final day of hearing on “U.S. Assistance Programs in Vietnam”, Osborn described the Phoenix Program as a “sterile depersonalized murder program.” Consequently, the military command in Vietnam issued a directive that reiterated that it had based the anti-VCI campaign on South Vietnamese law, that the program was in compliance with the laws of land warfare, and that U.S. personnel had the responsibility to report breaches of the law.

Former CIA analyst Samuel A. Adams, in an interview with CBC News, talked about the program as basically an assassination program that also included torture. They would also kill people by throwing them out of helicopters to threaten and intimidate those they wanted to interrogate. While acknowledging that “No one can prove the null hypothesis that no prisoner was ever thrown from a helicopter,” Gary Kulik states that “no such story has ever been corroborated” and that the noise inside a helicopter would make conducting an interrogation impossible.

According to Nick Turse, abuses were common. In many instances, rival Vietnamese would report their enemies as “VC” in order to get U.S. troops to kill them. In many cases, Phung Hoang chiefs were incompetent bureaucrats who used their positions to enrich themselves. Phoenix tried to address this problem by establishing monthly neutralization quotas, but these often led to fabrications or, worse, false arrests. In some cases, district officials accepted bribes from the VC to release certain suspects.

After Phoenix Program abuses began receiving negative publicity, the program was officially shut down, although it continued under the name Plan F-6 with the government of South Vietnam in control.

A DIRTY, INGLORIOUS AFFAIR:
THE PHOENIX PROGRAM IN VIETNAM

The “Phoenix Program”, technically a civilian operation, became infamous as the
conflict declined and people tried to find an honorable solution to the war. Phoenix, or
the Phung Hoang Program to the Vietnamese, erupted into a firestorm of media attention
and political intrigue. In an effort to defeat an insurgent force bent on destroying the
Saigon government from within, Phoenix instead faced the same frustrations that plagued
the rest of the war. From 1967 to 1972, the Americans and South Vietnamese police
forces focused their energies on the destruction of the enemy infrastructure and the
securing of the population for the Government of South Vietnam (GVN). Even today, thirty-seven years after the fall of Saigon, the Phoenix Program is misunderstood and
steeped in mystery. This paper weaves through the conflicting reports, various agendas,
and military jargon in order to better understand and assess the goals of the Phoenix
Program.

The Phoenix Program faced many accusations and labels during its existence. One
side saw Phoenix as an assassination operation conducted against the Communist
infrastructure within South Vietnam. Launched at a point when the entire war was
unpopular, the media, American public, and some members of Congress believed
Phoenix an assassination program. Following the stunning Communist successes of the
Tet Offensive in January to March 1968, the CIA and U.S. military launched Phoenix to
target NLF for elimination. During the active years of Phoenix, over 20,000 Vietnamese
were assassinated and thousands more incarcerated, some later found to have little to do
with the NLF. The NLF assisted North Vietnam in the fight against the Saigon
government and their American patrons. In the end, even the sinister acts of Phoenix
could not prolong the fight.

Others believe Phoenix to be something different, something less sinister. This
side consisted of Phoenix advisors, CIA officials, and military officers—people that had
access to top secret files or who experienced it firsthand. The Phoenix Program was a
counterinsurgency operation whose goal was to arrest and turn NLF agents against their former confederates with the hope of destroying the VCI and increase support for the
Saigon government. Some suspects died in the process of arresting suspects, but this was
war and casualties were expected. Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development
Support (CORDS), which ran Phoenix, officially condemned assassination, preferring to
interrogate prisoners to gain vital intelligence. Each Phoenix advisor received training on
intelligence gathering and dealing with their Vietnamese counterparts. This is very
different from a CIA assassination program that hunted down targets without remorse,
where Communists and innocent Vietnamese lived in fear of becoming the next victim of
Phoenix.

There is still no consensus definition for Phoenix. Dale Andradé, Zalin Grant and Mark Moyar, in their works, firmly believe Phoenix to be an effective counterinsurgency program that did significant damage to the VCI—although they come to different conclusions on who and what was responsible for Phoenix’s ultimate demise. Douglas Valentine believes differently about Phoenix. Valentine takes the various abuses and places the blame on CORDS. These were not isolated incidents, but rather unofficially sanctioned operations intending to bring terror to NLF supporters. Intentions might have been good, but by arming former criminals, mercenaries, and other socially unwanted characters, Phoenix risked too much. These “thugs” had bones to pick with the Communists and sought revenge against their enemies. The Phoenix advisors enabled the members of the Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs) to fight back.

Douglas Valentine’s research and interviews led him to conclude
that the Phoenix Program committed acts of terror against the South Vietnamese
peasants. These historians studied Phoenix and came to different conclusions based on
their perspective and opinion of the sources. Some were against Phoenix because it relied
on Vietnamese assistance in gathering intelligence and arresting suspects. Accusations of
corruption, abuses, and negligence prevented the American advisors from effectively
targeting the VCI. When American involvement in Phoenix was at its height, the program
ran efficiently and the NLF power within the village declined.

By the time Phoenix ended, the VCI needed tremendous assistance from the
North in order to remain effective. The Vietnam War became one of the most
controversial events in history as tens of thousands died and the American public
protested against the government. When Colby appeared before Congress in 1971, the
public learned of Phoenix and continued to question Colby for the rest of his life over its
alleged abuses. Phoenix became the symbol of American tyranny and abuses overseas.
The greatest country in the world spent twenty years fighting and had nothing to show for
it when the war ended. This was very different from the beginning of the Cold War when
the American public demanded a firm stance against Communism. As the historian
Kathryn Olmsted wrote: “This was the foreign policy of the ‘liberal consensus.’
Conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats alike agreed on the need for an aggressive, anticommunist foreign policy, including overt and covert intervention abroad.” Following Vietnam, the American public was wary of military intervention. The basic principles of the Cold War came into question as the cost of fighting Communism became unbearable. The twenty years in Vietnam changed the political, social, and strategic objectives of the United States and Phoenix became a major mechanism of that change.

Phoenix arrived towards the end of the Vietnam War when U.S. military
involvement began to decline. Some, however, remained to advise the South Vietnamese
on the nuances of pacification and assist in the destruction of the VCI. Former Phoenix
advisor Stuart Herrington writes, “The Americanization of the war during the sixties and
the subsequent assignment of advisors down to the lower levels of the Vietnamese chain
of command probably caused as many problems as it solved…More often than not,
American advisors were resented by their counterparts.”11 The American withdrawal left
the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) on its own and Phoenix in the hands of
the unprepared Vietnamese Special Police. Despite this failure, Phoenix decimated the
VCI’s ranks. With the guerilla war at an end, Washington and Saigon could focus on the
conventional tactics of the NVA. However, the NVA struck hard into the South once the
Americans departed and South Vietnamese resistance crumbled.

During its five years in existence, the Phoenix Program targeted the enemy
infrastructure creating a rudimentary Communist government in South Vietnam. Since
the Geneva Accords in 1954 that created the two halves of Vietnam, NLF insurgents
remained in the South and stirred up discontent. In response, the Saigon government and
the Americans created a series of pacification programs to prevent the loss of the
countryside to the Communists. These programs faced their share of struggles as the VCI
proved to be a consistently resilient enemy, surviving the various attempts to destroy it.
Borrowing from the British successes in Malaya, Sir Robert Thompson and the CIA in
the early 1960s tried their hands at the Strategic Hamlet program, meant to gather
peasants from the countryside and place them under the “protection” of the government.
However, it became difficult to win the loyal of the people by placing them into hamlets
surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. In designing Phoenix, the CIA hoped to
avoid past failures and eliminate the lack of cohesion in previous pacification attempts.
Phoenix became an umbrella organization uniting various police and intelligence forces
together under one roof.

Phoenix also emphasized new methods of finding and eliminating the VCI. While
conventional warfare eliminated the enemy through firepower and numbers, Phoenix’s methodical and scientific approach targeted individuals, with the preference of capturing
rather than killing. NLF political cadre had long felt secure travelling throughout the
countryside until Phoenix made these journeys unsafe. Along with police forces and the
Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs), Phoenix gathered intelligence on the evergrowing VCI. Once Phoenix teams received enough intelligence on a suspect, they
launched an operation against the target. Killed or captured, the VCI member no longer
contributed to the infrastructure. Slain targets yielded no information—aside from any
documents they may have been carrying—but captured suspects received the opportunity
to rally to the government under the Chieu Hoi program and assist Phoenix in hurting the
VCI. Tens of thousands of former VCI took advantage of the Chieu Hoi program and
rallied to the government, but not all had the government’s best interests in mind. Some
became double agents for the VCI and sabotaged the program. While the Phoenix
Program worked well on paper, corruption and incompetence plagued the program from
the beginning.

CIA officers spent years in Vietnam developing relationships and intelligence
gathering techniques, while the American military officers received several months of
classroom training, then served one-year tours before departing. However, the quality of
the Vietnamese forces varied from province to province. Some had officers and men
eager protect their homes and take the fight to the VCI. Phoenix advisors felt comfortable
sending these forces into the field, knowing they could trust them to bring back valuable
intelligence with few civilian casualties. On the other hand, Phoenix advisors also worked
with incompetent or corrupt officers. Some Vietnamese officers were not qualified for the program and, in other cases, the officer merely wanted to survive the war, obtain wealth,
and punish his enemies. Consequently, the majority of alleged violations came from
provinces with poor police forces. These allegations reached journalists and then the
American public, causing an outrage and undermining support for the war.

Whether one believes the Phoenix Program was an assassination program or
effective counterinsurgency operation, Phoenix successfully combated the VCI for five
years. By 1972, the conventional NVA fought the war, rather than the South Vietnamese
insurgency and Colby’s remark that NVA tanks stormed the Presidential Palace and not
men in pajamas and sandals proved that Phoenix severely weakened the NLF.285 By
1975, the NLF had little impact during the Saigon Offensive and on the outcome of the
war. Phoenix also failed, however, because it did not ensure the South Vietnamese could
run the program without the Americans, nor did it change the overall outcome of the war.
Despite over two million dead Vietnamese and over seven million tons of bombs dropped
on the country, the war would continue without the Americans. Participants in the
program as well as those on the outside debate this conclusion. Officers such as William
Colby, John Paul Vann, Stuart Herrington, Alan Cornett, Orrin DeForest, John Cook, and
countless others believed in their mission and felt they made a difference. They watched
as the war effort crumbled and it sickened them to witness the fall of Saigon after decades
of American support. They participated on many missions and fervently disagreed with
the claims of torture, execution, and other violations allegedly committed by Phoenix.

Those against the program focused on alleged atrocities to attack Phoenix and
U.S. policy in Vietnam. As protests against the war increased, so too did opposition to the
Phoenix Program. Even some intelligence officers refused involvement in the program
after hearing and reading the rumors leveled against it. In the eyes of those against the
war, Phoenix became guilty through its association with the war. The country suffered
from the “Vietnam Syndrome,” where people became doubtful of U.S. foreign policy and
fearful of another Vietnam. Military interventionism gave way to military isolationism.
Several presidents found themselves handcuffed by the Vietnam Syndrome, forcing them
to react to events, rather than precipitate them. Politicians opposed going on the offensive
lest the U.S. suffer another political, social, and military defeat. The Vietnam War
remained a dark period in the country’s history and people tried to forget what went on in
Southeast Asia. President Johnson’s prediction of a “domino effect” failed to materialize.
Although Cambodia suffered greatly from Communist rule for four years, the entire
region did not fall to Communism. The war occupied six administrations and the thoughts
of millions. Forgetting such an event became impossible. In the annuals of American
history, the Phoenix Program remains a dirty, inglorious affair.

Resources

en.wikipedia.org, ” Phoenix Program.” By Wikipedia Editors; “A DIRTY, INGLORIOUS AFFAIR:
THE PHOENIX PROGRAM IN VIETNAM.” By Michael Gabbe-Gross;

Common Sense and Ramblings In America

What is the Phoenix Program?

Background

History

Agencies and individuals involved in the program

Operations

Torture

Targeted killings

Strategic and operational effect

Public response and legal proceedings

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Background

History

Agencies and individuals involved in the program

Operations

Torture

Targeted killings

Strategic and operational effect

Public response and legal proceedings

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