Shadow Warrior (54 page)

In addition to introducing proper legal procedures into the Phoenix program, McAfee was also charged with looking into abuses. The problem was that it was very difficult for outsiders to gain entrance to the Provincial Interrogation Centers. The attitude of the Special Branch—a division of SEPES, the South Vietnamese intelligence and internal security apparatus—which ran the PICs, was that if the Americans did not like coercive interrogations, then they wouldn't let them see any. In this the CIA was complicit. McAfee recalled that during a trip into a really dangerous part of the Mekong Delta, he first contacted the principal American adviser for Phoenix, who happened to be a US Army officer. “I want to tour the nearest PIC,” McAfee said. “I don't know,” the officer replied. McAfee asked if he had ever been inside of one. “No,” the officer said. McAfee, talking about the incident years later, said, “Here is a guy who is running the Phoenix program who hasn't even been to the PIC.” Describing what happened next, he said, “We went to the CIA place, which was this ratted out, dusty, sand-bagged hooch full of radios. The CIA guy looked like the Ohio State football coach. You know, shaved head . . . tough guy wearing a Chicom pistol. He said to me, ‘You can't go to the PIC.' I said, ‘That's my job, and I'm going to the PIC whether you like it or not.'” The Woody Hayes lookalike called headquarters and was told that McAfee worked for Bill Colby. “Okay, you can go,” he announced, “but not the Phoenix guy.” Later, Frank Snepp complained to Station Chief Tom Polgar about a prisoner whom Snepp found beaten nearly to death by the South Vietnamese. “Wait a minute,” Polgar responded. “You want me to go to the South Vietnamese with 140,000 North Vietnamese in their country and say to them you've got to ease up on the bad guys because we think it is wrong?” McAfee labored long and hard to have the Geneva Convention on treatment of prisoners applied to Phoenix detainees, but to no avail.
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Estimates are that during its existence—roughly from 1968 through 1972—the Phoenix program was responsible for neutralizing—that is,
killing, capturing, or turning—between 19,000 and 20,000 Viet Cong cadre. The ratio of captured to killed ran about 2:1. During one ten-month period from mid-1968 through the spring of 1969, the PRUs ran 50,770 missions and tallied 7,408 captured and 4,406 killed.
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In March 1969, the South Vietnamese government decreed that the PRUs be absorbed into the National Police. From that point on, Vietnamese province chiefs appointed PRU commanders, but the CIA continued to advise and fund the units. After the war, North Vietnamese officials termed Phoenix the most effective program the Americans and South Vietnamese had mounted against the Viet Cong. Colby's appraisal was more negative. Though he was proud of Phoenix, he regarded it as a failure. “You know our special program on the VCI, General,” he reported to Abrams in July 1969. “This, frankly we can't report any great success on. Figures of those neutralized seemed fairly impressive standing by themselves. But they represented a reduction of only one and one-half percent of the total VCI strength each month.” That would amount to 20 percent by the end of the year. “And they can probably replace a good part of that,” he said. “The standard version was that they were all being abused, killed,” Gage McAfee said. “From our perspective, the problem was that they were all being freed.” Indeed, Colby estimated that during the life of the Phoenix program, the South Vietnamese government released some 100,000 “communist offenders” from its correction centers.
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Phoenix became one of the seemingly endless ironies plaguing the American effort in Vietnam. Colby and Abrams placed increased emphasis on the campaign against the Viet Cong Infrastructure in 1969 and 1970 out of a recognition that time was running out, that US opinion was turning against the war. But by the beginning of 1970, news reporting on Phoenix—always identified as a CIA program in the American media—had become one of the principal factors contributing to public disillusionment. In story after story, the word “assassination” was used to describe the CIA's war on the Viet Cong.
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Colby understood the impact that bad press could have, not only on Phoenix but on CORDS in general. In October 1969, he issued a directive through MACV that Americans working with Phoenix should have nothing to do with targeted killings, that they should observe the rules of war when conducting operations, and that they should promptly report questionable activities by the PRUs to their superiors. But what would Phoenix
be without at least the threat of violence? Colby's directive ended by allowing for “reasonable military force . . . as necessary.”
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Whatever effect Colby's order had on American opinion was vitiated when, on November 13, 1969, journalist Seymour Hersh reported in the
New York Times
that US Army troops at a village called My Lai had massacred hundreds of Vietnamese civilians eighteen months earlier. Lieutenant William Calley and his Americal Division soldiers were not attached to Phoenix, but most Americans did not or would not differentiate.

In February 1970, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, under the direction of its powerful chairman, J. William Fulbright (D-AR), held four days of hearings on pacification in Vietnam. Colby returned to Washington to testify, bringing with him a CORDS team that included John Paul Vann. By this time Fulbright had become the symbol of establishment disillusionment with the war. In 1967, he had published
The Arrogance of Power
, in which he charged that in its mindless pursuit of communist enemies, the United States was supporting dictatorships abroad and suppressing civil liberties at home. In so doing, it was violating the very principles for which it claimed to be fighting.

During the hearings, Colby combined lawyer like adroitness with Mc-Namara-style statistics to demonstrate how the joint US–South Vietnamese pacification effort would bring 90 percent of South Vietnamese villages into the secure category by 1971. An entire day was devoted to Phoenix, with testimony being given in executive session. Fortunately for Colby, Fulbright used the term “execution” rather than “assassination” when asking questions about Phoenix. “There has been no one legally executed,” Colby testified. “You have not had convictions of members of the enemy apparatus in which executions followed.” In another exchange, New Jersey senator Clifford Case demanded that Colby “swear by all that is holy” that Phoenix was not a counterterror program. At this point Colby's emotions uncharacteristically got the better of him. “I have already taken an oath,” he answered with some heat. “There was a counter-terror program, but it has been discarded as a concept.” Of course, nothing could have been further from the truth. In its war on the Banh-anh-ninh, Phoenix was nothing if not a counterterror program. Colby's failure to defend the program on its own merits is striking.
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“The only two things that the Fulbright Committee was interested in, and most of Washington, really . . . were Phoenix and the Chau case,”
Colby told Abrams and his staff upon his return from Washington.
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The arrest and trial of Tran Ngoc Chau, the father of Vietnamese pacification, was rooted in Vietnamese national politics and went to the heart of Bill Colby's nation-building philosophy. The official American reaction to the Chau case would in many ways determine whether there would ever be a connection between the “rice-roots” revolution building in the countryside and the government in Saigon. Since 1962, men like Colby, Lansdale, Scotton, Bumgardner, Ellsberg, and Vann had been trying to foster self-determination and political self-consciousness among the peasantry. If the rice-roots revolution was going to succeed, however, it would have to be manifested at the national level. Some, like Colby, believed that Nguyen Van Thieu was capable of making the connection, and some did not. The naysayers saw in Tran Ngoc Chau an alternative to the venal, grasping, and autocratic generals who continued to hold the keys to power.

Two themes dominated post-Tet politics in Saigon: fear that the United States was going to broker a deal with the communists behind its ally's back, and the ongoing Thieu-Ky rivalry.

In the wake of Tet, the US Mission had briefly thrown its money and influence behind a nonpartisan political movement headed by the former general Tran Van Don, now a senator. Designed to meld South Vietnam's myriad of parties and factions into one noncommunist whole, Don's organization took the name National Salvation Front. Thieu's suspicions were immediately aroused. The new organization was obviously an instrument that the Americans intended to use to generate support for a coalition government that would include the National Liberation Front, he proclaimed to his friend Lieutenant General Le Nguyen Khang, commander of III Corps. During this same conversation, Thieu asked whether there was any evidence the United States had assisted the Viet Cong during the Tet Offensive. Fear of a betrayal continued to accelerate through 1968 as the Paris Peace Talks got underway. LBJ had announced a unilateral US bombing halt on October 31, and then Secretary of Defense Clifford had declared on December 15 that the United States felt completely free to discuss military matters, including troop withdrawals, unilaterally with the North Vietnamese. The Nixon administration subsequently embraced Vietnamization. Thieu's fears were, then, not without foundation.
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The hidden heart of South Vietnamese politics continued to be the corps commander system. Between 1966 and 1968, these warlords acquired the power to appoint all the key civil and military officials in their zones, including division and regimental commanders and province and district chiefs. These positions generally went to the highest bidders. Utilizing intermediaries—that is, wives, aides, and staff assistants—the corps commander and the aspiring candidate would work out a lump-sum down payment and the monthly tribute that was to follow. These payoffs were made possible by the corruption that came with the post. The key money-collecting official in the system was the province chief, who earned huge sums by raking off funds from various public works projects and payoffs from businessmen for favors and protection. According to Ed Lansdale, who reappeared on the Vietnam scene in the mid-1960s as an adviser to the ambassador, the corps commander system was much more the control mechanism for the South Vietnamese government and the ARVN than the ministries and channels of authority listed in the official organizational charts. In a system in which extortion and payoffs needed to be overseen by intermediaries, a coterie of corrupt subordinates grew up around each of the five warlords (the region around Saigon had been declared a separate corps area). Frequently, these networks became power centers and self-sustaining entities in themselves that continued to operate as various generals came and went. On the rare occasion that a new province chief arrived on the scene determined to eliminate corruption, key subordinates would quietly oppose his efforts at every turn, working to discredit him with his superiors. Significantly, the head of this snake was General Tran Thien Khiem, minister of the interior and subsequently prime minister, whose wife and brother-in-law oversaw a drug ring that sold heroin to all comers, including American GIs.
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Along with Bunker, Colby, as deputy commander of CORDS, had direct responsibility for the war against corruption and for overseeing the creation of a responsible, responsive government. He installed a permanent liaison officer in the prime minister's office—Jean Sauvageot, a US Army officer who was detailed to CORDS in part because of his fluency in Vietnamese—and paid personal visits to Huong, and subsequently Khiem, several times a week when he was in Saigon. On one level, he came across as a champion of a rice-roots revolution. In a February 1969 letter to Thieu, Colby urged the president to make the Pacification and Development Plan
the cornerstone of his nation-building effort. “It should call upon all to share the burden and at the same time it would provide all a share of the power,” he wrote.
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Yet, in 1967, when he was chief of the Far East Division, Colby had reported to Helms: “On the Ambassador's behalf we are developing discreet relationships and covert assets that can be manipulated to sponsor the emergence of what appears to the outside world as genuinely Vietnamese political initiatives, constitutional provisions, and electoral platforms.” Colby was, of course, a pragmatist. In a note to Bob Komer about the South Vietnamese government, he wrote, “While I certainly concur in its many flaws I am somewhat inclined to believe that this is part of the ‘given' of any problem such as this and that we should find a similarly flawed instrument almost wherever we looked.” The real solution to this sort of dilemma was the “patient collaboration” the United States was providing to Thieu but had denied to Diem. One day, Frank Scotton, then on special assignment to CORDS, was having lunch with Colby at the latter's house. “You know,” Scotton said, “does it strike you as strange that we are maintaining these files and presenting cases for removal to one of the half dozen most corrupt officials from one of the most corrupt families in South Vietnam [Khiem]?” Colby just laughed and said, “Well, that's the most we can do right now.” There came a point, however, when Bill Colby could no longer temporize.
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On February 26, 1970, Tran Ngoc Chau, secretary-general of the lower house of the National Assembly, was arrested in his office and forcibly removed by a squad of plainclothes policemen. Days before, he had been convicted in absentia by a military tribunal of collaborating with the enemy. Chau was confined in an eight-by-ten-foot cell and informed that he had been sentenced to twenty years of hard labor. During the mid-1960s, as province chief in Kien Hoa and then director of the Rural Development Cadre center at Vung Tau, Chau had become the darling of American counterinsurgency/pacification enthusiasts. The creator of the Census-Grievance Program, Chau had authored a two-volume work on the dos and don'ts of nation-building in South Vietnam. Vann, Scotton, and Ellsberg considered him a mentor and a friend. In 1967, frustrated with the corps commander system, Chau had resigned from the military and run successfully for the National Assembly. He became the representative from Kien Hoa, where he had built a noncommunist political coalition that included Catholics, Buddhists, Cao Dai, and members of various ethnic
minorities. He and Thieu had been classmates and friends at the South Vietnamese military academy at Dalat. Initially, like Colby, Chau had viewed Thieu as a pragmatic, patriotic leader who might be induced to put together an authentic national political organization that included all of the major noncommunist factions, religious groups, and ethnic minorities. He watched approvingly as Thieu gradually moved Ky and the northerners to the edge of the South Vietnamese political stage, but he steadfastly refused to join the growing coterie of Thieu loyalists in the National Assembly. Repeatedly, Chau pleaded with Thieu to broaden his political base, and, in particular, to reach out to the Buddhists. “How can I compromise with them,” the president had replied. “Their leaders are at least pro-Communist, if not outright Communists.” Ridiculous, Chau retorted. Marxism-Leninism called for the eradication of all religions. What the Buddhists wanted was a clean, responsive government in Saigon.
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