The Phoenix Program

"This is a political war and it calls for discrimination in killing. The best weapon for killing would be a knife, but I'm afraid we can't do it that way. The worst is an airplane. The next worst is artillery. Barring a knife, the best is a rifle — you know who you're killing"
--USAID advisor Lt. Col John Paul Vann

War is an atrocity. Murder is an atrocity. The Phoenix Program, as documented in this book, is an atrocity. And unfortunately, it is one which undergirds the present national security state. As we've all learned since 9/11, the political terrorist does not fit neatly into the categories of Westphalian order. The terrorist does not wear a uniform or fight in ranks, so he is not a soldier. And while acts of violence are crimes, show more an ideology of violence is not, making judicial convictions difficult to obtain. Phoenix is about the gray area between war and crime, and America's complicity in both in Vietnam.

Writing about the Phoenix Program is difficult for several reasons. First is one of bureaucratic confusion over the 20 year stretch of the Second Indochina War, with dozens of paramilitary action groups and even more diversity in funding and organizations. The best thing to do is to avoid hair-splitting and unwarranted precision; the Phoenix Program was an effort to eliminate individual civilians in South Vietnam as communist agents, and support for communism as a political phenomenon. The second difficulty is one of official evasion. Much of the program is and was classified. Official testimony, particularly by CIA director William Colby, is full of obfuscation and outright lies. The third difficult is one of conspiracy. Valentine alleges that records have been doctored to make some of his sources look insane, to say that they were never even in Vietnam. Still, even discounting the conspiratorial, there is plenty in the public record and his on-the-record interviews to document Phoenix.

As Ngo Dinh Diem tightened his grasp on power in the late 1950s, the basic problem his regime confronted was one of unpopularity. Guerrilla warfare experts, most notably Ed Lansdale, suggested an aggressive program of counter-terror. Small forces would attack pro-Communist villages dressed in VC black pajamas and make public spectacles of murder. Assisted by intelligence from the rural grievance survey, these programs attempted to dislocate the Viet Cong. Of course, getting people for these units was a problem. The Viet Cong could rely on large numbers of ardent nationalists and Party members for their squads. The government turned to the dregs of society, Nung mercenaries and the sweepings of hardened criminals in Saigon jails.

As the war expanded after 1965, the Phoenix Program fell victim to the characteristic American mistake of the war: bad metrics and short-term careerism. Robert "Blowtorch" Komer used all his powers to organize a national system of Provincial Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) assassination teams, and district and province interrogation centers. Interrogation centers were rated on prisoners taken in and processed, frequently involving torture, while collating usable intelligence took a backseat. The overburdened South Vietnamese judicial system couldn't process thousands of detainees, who languished in jail on flimsy pretexts. US advisors varied wildly in quality, with the unconventional warfare experts of the early years pushed out in favor of junior counter-intelligence lieutenants and CIA case officers.

The Phoenix Program also suffered from the typical South Vietnamese weakness of public corruption. PRUs were used as the personal goon squads of province governors to eliminate business and political rivals. Diversion of materials into the black market and drug trafficking were rampant. The detention system became a source for bribes and shakedowns.

Money, primarily from the CIA black budget, poured into the system, but to little effect. There were dozens of agencies and informer networks, and rather than combining information, most officials assumed that the South Vietnamese internal security system was thoroughly riddled with Viet Cong agents (it was), and so acted unilaterally. One branch of Phoenix would assassinate a man which another branch of Phoenix had been cultivating as an internal source.

In my favorite "fractally fucked up" story from this book, Komer spent months pushing the phrase 'Viet Con Infrastructure', which got befuddlement from South Vietnamese partners to his endless frustration. This was because when translated, 'infrastructure' means roads, bridges, canals. This was not South Vietnamese incompetence, their secret police understood the enemy, but they called them 'cadres'.

Valentine was writing in the mid-1980s, at the height of dirty wars in Latin America. This book has aged like wine. Maybe Vann is right, and killing with a knife is better than killing from the air. I wouldn't know. But the creation of secret kill lists is anathema to liberty. The fact that when pressed, the American government and American people will take the kill lists over 'disorder' is an enduring indictment of the evils of empire, and how its corruption always returns home. show less

Morley Safer of CBS, writing in the New York Times:

Mr. Valentine - the author as well of ''The Hotel Tacloban,'' about life in a Japanese prisoner of war camp - has written as turgid and dense and often incomprehensible a book as I have ever had the misfortune to open. Somewhere in those almost 500 gray pages there is stuff of great importance: examples of human folly, courage, stupidity and greed.

Mr. Valentine handles these epic themes as so much fodder from a database - not unlike the paper end of the Phoenix program itself. He has interviewed scores of participants in Phoenix, but instead of putting the interviews into some kind of historical (or even logical) framework - it's called editing - he has simply transcribed them. And if show more Phoenix acted like Phoenix talked, then the American intervention in Vietnam was even more inept than those of us who were witnesses believed. ... show less