Heart of Darkness: The CIA- MACV-SOG & Phung Hoang (The Phoenix Program)

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When I began sifting through the CIA website and the agency collection I was hoping to uncover information confirming what I had experienced... however, what I found was disinformation and outright lies; basically the same narrative that's been pushed all along. I was faced with two choices, help perpetuate a false narrative, or tell the truth about what I know and attempt at least to counter some of the myths surrounding Phung Hoang. I chose the second. I suggest reading this post I made yesterday, the recollections of an 18-20 year old kid told the best I could in retrospect as it will help understand how I became embroiled in this fiasco- one of the darkest annals of the Vietnam War.

https://steemit.com/writing/@richq11/diary-of-an-unbroken-child-my-autobiography-chap-iv

The Phoenix Program, officially Phung Hoang was allegedly launched in 1968 and went on until 72; but like so much of that war this too is likely disinformation. In some form it most likely went on throughout the duration. I know it was in operation at least as early as 1965. It was only in 1967 that the operation was taken over by MACV-SOG (Military Assistance Command Vietnam- Studies and Observations Group). This is a difficult subject to write about without sounding like I supported the things that went on under the program- I guess I did at the time, but I was little more than a kid. The program was designed to attack the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI) which was formidable in the South. We mistakenly tend to view the conflict as an internecine struggle between the North and South in which we intervened. To some extent this is true but the issue is more complex than that. The Viet Cong was supplied by the North and they were ideologically attuned, but the Cong were fighting for an independent Communist South.

Had the Viet Cong survived as a political entity the war wouldn't have ended with the US withdrawal, it would have lasted until the North subdued the South. Like I said this is a more complex issue that most people think. There were two governments operating in the South during the war- the government supported by the US and the one run by the Viet Cong. It was the Viet Cong that the Phoenix Program was designed, not to mention determined, to defeat. Although the VC were supplied by the North against what appeared to be a mutual enemy, a showdown between the North and South was inevitable. The US policymakers for the war had determined that defeating the Viet Cong would have simplified the war... One reason is that the VC were adept guerilla fighters. The other I'm going to hazard a guess about. It's no secret that the CIA had been running drugs out of the "Golden Triangle" since the 1950's. This trade didn't stop or slow down after the war. My guess is that it was supported by the North, but not by the Viet Cong.

Rules of Engagement

Here's where things get sticky. The rules of engagement were very specific for military personnel- in short, military targets only, unless fired upon. Everybody knows from all of the movies that the Viet Cong for the most part didn't wear uniforms and were therefore difficult to distinguish from the civilian population. This is where the Phoenix Program came in. Run under a joint CIA/MACV-SOG operation- the CIA paid the piper and MACV called the tune- a list was devised naming potential officials in the VCI as well as sympathizers (pretty much anybody with a Vietnamese surname). They operated exclusively within Vietnam...

The Studies and Observations Group (aka SOG, MAC-SOG, and MACV-SOG) was a  top secret, joint unconventional warfare task force created on 24 January 1964 by the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV). The unit would eventually consist primarily of personnel from the United States Army Special Forces, United States Navy SEALs, United States Air Force, Central Intelligence Agency, and elements of the United States Marine Corps Force Reconnaissance. 

This list has been a little bit sanitized- there were mercenaries, ROK's (Republic of Korea Marines) Aussie Special Forces as well as others. " The Studies and Observation Group (as the unit was initially titled) was in fact controlled by the Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities (SACSA) and his staff at the Pentagon.  This arrangement was necessary since SOG needed some listing in the MACV table of organization and the fact that MACV's commander, "General William Westmoreland, had no authority to conduct operations outside territorial South Vietnam." This quote is true enough in its most literal sense, but the CIA is ingenous for finding ways around pesky technicalities. Hue Pham and I operated in Laos and Cambodia in 64-66 (after I was no longer military personnel) and I'm certain we weren't the only ones. Moreover, the ROK's and Aussie SF's had their own rules of engagement.

These are MACV-SOG's Rules of Engagement (I apologize for the poor quality)

I can't get the text to copy, but see Legal Position and Responsibilities P. 10 and Arrest and Detention P. 11. Also Operational Planning Guide P. 16. These are the "official" Rules of Engagement for the MACV-SOG personnel and those attached. I did NOT once see these rules adhered to in the slightest and this goes back to The List, spoken of in the Wiki article. The List was made up of names gotten from "informants." This is the truth of how informants were "encouraged"... You kick down a door and yell "VC- VC!" Of course the people in the hut say, "No VC- No VC!" You inform them that if they don't start giving names you'll take the whole family in for "questioning," a polite euphemism for torture. Or, if you read my post from yesterday, you blindfold 5-6 guys and take them up in a helicopter and throw one out. The others hear him scream on the way down and start naming people they don't even know just to stay alive. Honestly, it was a gigantic clusterfuck- I think there were more names on The List than there were people in Vietnam.

The Official Narrative

The Phoenix program is arguably the most misunderstood and controversial program undertaken by the governments of the United States and South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. It was, quite simply, a set of programs that sought to attack and destroy the political infrastructure of the Lao Dong Party (hereafter referred to as the Viet Cong infrastructure or VCI) in South Vietnam. 

Phoenix was misunderstood because it was classified, and the information obtained by the press and others was often anecdotal, unsubstantiated, or false. The program was controversial because the antiwar movement and critical scholars in the United States and elsewhere portrayed it as an unlawful and immoral assassination program targeting civilians.

Phoenix was one of several pacification and rural security programs that CIA ran in South Vietnam during the 1960s. The premise of pacification was that if peasants were persuaded that the government of South Vietnam and the United States were sincerely interested in protecting them from the Viet Cong and trained them to defend themselves, then large areas of the South Vietnamese countryside could be secured or won back from the enemy without direct engagement by the US military. (Anatomy of Phoenix- Official CIA Docs Written by Col Andrew Finlayson)

The report does, like any good propaganda, contain an element of truth. William Colby, later Director of the CIA was involved from the beginning and bears the brunt (unfairly) for its lack of success.

Colby had served as chief of station in Saigon from 1959 to 1962 and as chief of the Far Eastern Division since then. Colby believed the United States must rid the south of the existing communist parallel government in the villages and eradicate the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI) in the countryside. Thus CORDS, while working on village defense and civic action programs--the latter included land reform, infrastructure building, and economic development--also devoted considerable resources to rooting out the VCI.

Another component of CORDS was the Phoenix Program.2 Although Phoenix was run and ostensibly controlled by the Saigon government, CIA funded and administered it. Phoenix built on the work of the CIA-created network of over 100 provincial and district intelligence operation committees in South Vietnam that collected and disseminated information on the VCI to field police and paramilitary units. (From the same Finlayson report)

While Colby was incharge of the program, his focus was more on rebuilding the infrastructure and gaining the friendship and trust of the South Vietnamese people. It was after he left the program that most of the crazy stuff started. This is from his Senate Confirmation Hearings...

Essentially, these committees created lists of known VCI operatives. Once the name, rank, and location of each individual VCI member became known, CIA paramilitary or South Vietnamese police or military forces interrogated these individuals for further intelligence on the communist structure and its operations.

The lists were sent to various Phoenix field forces, which included the Vietnamese national police, US Navy Seal teams and US Army special operations groups, and Provincial Reconnaissance Units such as the one in Tay Ninh.

These forces went to the villages and hamlets and attempted to identify the named individuals and "neutralize" them. Those on a list were arrested or captured for interrogation, or if they resisted, they were killed. Initially, CIA, with Vietnamese assistance, handled interrogations at the provincial or district levels.

This speaks once again about The List, but why bring it up in a Senate Confirmation Hearing unless they were putting the blame on Colby for the death squads, or assassination squads as they were called. To be clear, Colby sanctioned assassinations, but after The List, things got out of control which resulted in wanton violence. You won't hear this as a part of any official narrative. I closing I want to make two further observations. The first is about William Colby: a patriot, a good man in a really bad occupation. Anything he did he did because he believed it was to protect America, and for that I respect him. The second is about the war itself... it was a CIA drug war. Ask yourself, why are we in Afghanistan? Our troops are there protecting the poppy fields. 80% of the world's heroin comes from Afghan poppies. In the 1960's and early 70's the heroin came from the "Golden Triangle." That's something else you won't read in the official archives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Assistance_Command,_Vietnam_%E2%80%93_Studies_and_Observations_Group#Laos_and_Cambodia

https://archive.org/details/Phung-Hoang-Advisor-Handbook

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol51no2/a-retrospective-on-counterinsurgency-operations.html

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/agency-and-the-hill/14-The%20Agency%20and%20the%20Hill_Part2-Chapter11.pdf