THE PHOENIX PROGRAM

CHAPTER 14: Phoenix in Flight

When his first tour in Vietnam ended in the spring of 1966, Warren Milberg returned to the United States and was assigned to an Air Force base in South Dakota. But his name and accomplishments remained on file at CIA headquarters in Washington, and one year later Milberg was one of fifty officers and enlisted men from the various military services (all Vietnam veterans) whom the Pentagon invited to join a Presidentially Directed Counter-insurgency Program through a participating agency/service agreement. Those who volunteered were tested and, if accepted by the CIA as junior officer trainees, given extensive training and returned to Vietnam to serve at the discretion of the senior CIA officers in Saigon and the regions. Most were assigned to the provinces as RDC/P or RDC/O advisers, and many became Phoenix coordinators.

Notably, the two other Air Force officers asked to join the program both withdrew, one ''as a matter of conscience." Jacques Kline, who is Jewish, was born and reared in France during World War II and withdrew, according to Milberg, because "he felt the means and methods that he thought were going to be used in it were similar to the means and methods used by the Nazis in World War Two." [1]

Milberg, who is also Jewish -- but obviously did not agree with Kline -- returned to Vietnam in July 1967 and was assigned to CIA region officer in charge Jack Horgan in Da Nang. "I wound up getting a make-work job on the staff there, as liaison to some military units in and around Da Nang, trying to coordinate an intelligence collection and analysis unit for things, like motor units, that the VC used to harass the air base and the city. It was pretty unexciting. I stayed there for maybe a month, bored out of my mind. Then the RDC/P officer in Quang Tri was relieved by Horgan, which left them with a gap. And when I heard about that, I went to him and said, 'I'd like to take the job in Quang Tri.' And he was surprised that I did that -- that anybody would want to go to the provinces .... But Quang Tri was the end of the line, and it was a way for Horgan to get rid of me.

"So I went up to Quang Tri and was delighted to find that when I got there, somebody actually met me. This was the guy who was leaving. He had three days left in Quang Tri, and in those three days he was going to orient me as to what was going on. After spending virtually the whole day and night talking, we loaded up two jeeps, one full of Nung bodyguards, then drove around to all the districts and met all the people in the Special Branch, the CIO, and anybody else we dealt with that were part of his bilateral operations. And I remember as we crossed the Quang Tri River bridge, heading up Highway One toward Dong Ha, thinking, 'I'm back. Now I'm really back,' and wondering what this was all going to be like.

"I guess we couldn't have been driving for more than half an hour when a bus, one of those Asian buses with pigs and chickens and people hanging off the roof and out the windows, blows up about fifty yards ahead of us. The highway was just a little two-lane road, running along the coastal plain. The bomb was a land mine, constructed out of an unexploded U.S. five-hundred-pound bomb, remotely detonated, and probably meant for us. But either a faulty detonator or vibrations set it off. Whatever, here were a lot of innocent civilians either dead or wounded, and it was like deja vu: 'Here I am again. What am I doing here? What is this whole thing about?' And I guess I went through a period of depression early on, thinking, 'There's no way to win this thing. This war is going to go on forever. All these programs and activities are just a waste of human and economic resources.'

"All I had left -- to justify why I was there -- was to do the same thing I had done before, which was to personalize it. What I did while I was there in the midst of all the turmoil and pain and agony -- a thing that made absolutely no sense to me -- was to apply my own value system to it, which was such that I was going to keep pregnant women from being disemboweled. And it got to be a very personal war for me."

After taking over Quang Tri from his predecessor, Milberg "learned right away that the people you inherited, the counterparts in Special Branch or CIO, had a lot to do with the kind of tour you were going to have. They were either good and competent people or bureaucratic, corrupt functionaries -- or variations in between. And I was really fortunate to wind up working with a man named Nguyen Van Khoi, the Special Branch chief in Quang Tri .... I was there to advise and assist him, only to find he had been fighting the war his whole life. He was a pro. An incredible man ... who survived my tour there, often times at great risk to himself." (Khoi was reportedly killed by ARVN deserters in Hue in April 1975.)

In view of Khoi's expertise, there was little for Milberg to do in terms of advising on Special Branch operations. Apart from fighting for his life during Tet, conducting unilateral operations, and monitoring the Province Interrogation Center, Milberg worked largely in financial administration. "I had to go to Da Nang once a month to account for funds I had expended and to bring the region officer and his staff up-to-date on what was going on. And I can remember thinking that I controlled more money as a single individual, that I was sprinkling around the province in one way or another, than what the entire [CORDS] province budget was. I had conversations with the fellow who was the deputy in Da Nang about the fact that we thought that we were providing some measure of economic stability and really weren't interested in the quality of the intelligence we were buying -- that by sprinkling this money as we did, to these low-level informant nets, we were creating economic stability as opposed to engaging in intelligence operations. Interesting concept and idea.

"Once a quarter I was called into Saigon," Milberg continued, "and when I went to Saigon, I stayed at the Duc Hotel. And I felt like if the Vietcong ever targeted the hotel or the city, it would be a piece of cake. I was in the business of planning these kinds of things, and I knew that if I had to do it, it would be a simple thing to do. I used to say to myself, 'My God. If this happens, what the hell am I going to do here in Saigon? They have no plans.' People were carrying around little pistols in shoulder holsters because it was fashionable .... It was a bureaucratic war in Saigon. All these people supposedly involved in intelligence collection and analysis, planning for the use of intelligence resources and the participation of paramilitary forces -- all these people were doing nothing! They lived in their villas in and around town in grand splendor. They'd come to work at eight A.M. and leave at five p.m. It was just like being in an office building, and they had no idea what was going on outside Saigon. None. And I just felt helpless and exposed when I was there. I couldn't wait to get back to the provinces.

"This probably sounds strange," Milberg confessed, "but I felt very much at home in Quang Tri, which was really nothing more than a sleepy province capital consisting of two cross streets and a population between fifteen to twenty thousand people. When I got to Saigon, with its teeming millions, I felt in more danger than I did up-country in my little rural compound in Quang Tri.

"Of course, I wasn't out on operations in the jungle all the time, like I was on my first tour. But whenever we did go out, we were required to send in little spot reports on what we did and why we did it and what the result was. Everybody was manic about body counts -- all that kind of crap. In any event, I kept getting warned by the guy [Jack Horgan's replacement, Harry Mustakos] who was in the region office not to go out on operations. That wasn't my job. And this was a guy who was totally paranoid about being in Vietnam. He was living in Da Nang in relative comfort next to the police station, and he could never understand why there was a need to go out on operations when your counterpart was going on those operations, that there was no way you were going to stay home and still maintain credibility with that counterpart. And I remember getting direct orders from him not to do that. Which I ignored.

"I had a compound that was relatively comfortable as things go," Milberg said "and a personal guard force of Nung mercenaries whose only job was to keep me alive. I had virtually unlimited resources to pay for a staff that translated and produced intelligence reports, which I disseminated to anybody in the province, U.S. military or otherwise, that I thought could take action on those reports. And I owned and operated a forty-man PRU force [see photo] which was my personal army. I wound up having a marine working for me who I think was a psychopath. I never saw or participated in what he did, but I was aware of it." (In "The Future Applicability of the Phoenix Program," Milberg called "those abuses that did occur ... the 'normal' aberrations which result in any form of warfare." [2])

"PRU belonged to the RDC/O side of the province organization until the consolidation," Milberg told me. "I started out as the plans officer, but toward the end of 1967 I was appointed the province officer in charge of both programs. This is where I actually control and direct the PRU myself. Prior to this, if I had need of the PRU, because of some intelligence I had developed, what I did was go and see the RDC/O people -- which was a relatively large program, five or six Americans involved -- whereas RDC/P was only me. I lived by myself away from them. But I'm not sure if that's the way it was in every province."

In regard to Phoenix, Milberg said, "I'm not sure how you bound Phoenix, but it certainly falls right in the middle. But at this point the agency was beginning to turn the reins of the program over to the U.S. Army, as advisers to the Vietnamese, and going through whatever Orwellian mind-set was necessary to make believe this was a Vietnamese program."

Phoenix operations in Quang Tri Province were different from Phoenix operations in other provinces, Milberg explained, in that "a lot of military activity was going on, as opposed to the Vietcong insurgency. Clearly, both things were going on, but it was a heavily militarily oriented province. So there was a lot of action there."

In "The Future Applicability of the Phoenix Program," Milberg describes a typical Phoenix operation. Capitalizing on their assets in the CIO, PRU, and Special Branch, Milberg and Quang Tri Province Senior Adviser Bob Brewer mounted a Phoenix operation in the village of Thuong Xa, fourteen miles south of the DMZ. As Elton Manzione noted earlier, in this area it was hard to determine anyone's political affiliations, and the tendency was to consider everyone a Vietcong sympathizer. Indeed, Thuong Xa had served as a staging area for the Vietminh in the First Indochina War, and in 1968 its inhabitants were supporting the Vietcong in the same manner against the Americans. Milberg writes this was because "the people were afraid to offer information since they feared VC reprisals." [3]

A decision to conduct a Phoenix operation of "massive proportions" against Thuong Xa was made by Quang Tri's Province Security Council at Brewer's urging. Once permission had been granted, "Only the barest essential information was given to the various Vietnamese agencies in Quang Tri," Milberg writes. In this way, it was thought, those Vietnamese officials who had been coerced by the VC could not interfere with the "planning process." To ensure security, "The actual name of the targeted village was not released to the Vietnamese until the day before the operation." [4]

In preparing the Thuong Xa operation, information from Special Branch informers and PIC reports was fed into DIOCCs in and around Thuong Xa -- a phenomenon rarely observed in provinces where the Phoenix coordinator was an MACV officer, not a CIA employee. As a blacklist of suspected VCI was compiled in Quang Tri's Province Intelligence and Operations Coordination Center, it was cross-checked with neighboring Quang Tin's PIOCC and "against master Phoenix lists" in Saigon (to ensure that penetration agents were crossed off the list), then fed to Quang Tri's DIOCCs.

Next, PRU teams were sent to locate and surveil targeted VCI. Escape routes were studied for ambush sites, and "the [province senior adviser] personally arranged" for local U.S. Army and Marine units to act as a "blocking force" to seal off the entire town. [5] At dawn on the day of the operation MACV psywar planes dropped leaflets on Thuong Xa urging identified VCI to surrender and offering rewards and Chieu Hoi status to informers.

No one took advantage of the deal. Instead, the residents of Thuong Xa braced for the shock. In the early morning hours twenty-five-man PRU teams -- accompanied by Special Branch interrogators and CIA advisers -- began searching hooches for booby traps, weapons, documents, food caches, and VCI suspects. They "compared the names and descriptions on the blacklists with every man, woman, and child in Thuong Xa." [6] Suspects were sent to screening zones, where innocent bystanders were fed and "entertained" by RD teams. The hard-core VCI, meanwhile, were systematically driven into the northeast corner of town, where they were cornered, then killed or captured as they tried to escape through Brewer's "ring of steel."

The result was two VCI captured. One was the district party chief; the other was the chief of the local NLF farmers' association. Both were sent to the interrogation center in Da Nang. Eight other targeted VCI were killed or escaped. Two fifty-nine-member Revolutionary Development teams stayed behind to assert the GVN's presence, but within a month they were driven out of town and Thuong Xa reverted to Vietcong control. As Milberg observes, "Even with this unusual amount of coordination, the fact that the village reverted to communist control and known members of the VCI escaped strongly suggests that the operation failed as a future model for counterinsurgency operations." [7]

Perhaps the inhabitants of Thuong Xa resisted the intrusion into their village because they feared Vietcong reprisals. Or maybe they really did support the Vietcong. In either case, the point is the same. Even under ideal conditions Phoenix operations failed where the Vietnamese were determined to resist. Where ideal conditions did not exist -- where Vietnamese officials were included in the planning of operations and where U.S. military officers replaced CIA officers as Phoenix coordinators -- the program failed to an even greater degree.

***

In early 1968 each of the CIA's region officers in charge was assigned a military intelligence officer, either a major or a lieutenant colonel, to serve as his Phoenix coordinator. In IV Corps the job was given to Lieutenant Colonel Doug Dillard, an easygoing Georgian who, at sixteen, lied about his age, enlisted in the Eighty-second Airborne Brigade, and fought in World War II. After the war Dillard became a commissioned officer, and in Korea he served in the Combined Command for Reconnaissance Activity, which, under CIA auspices, coordinated special operations behind enemy lines. Dillard gained further espionage experience in the late 1950's as a case officer in Germany running agent operations in conjunction with the Army's attache office and the CIA. After a stint teaching airborne and amphibious "offensive" counterintelligence operations at Fort Holabird, Dillard was made deputy chief of intelligence at the Continental Army Command, where he trained and deployed "practically every army intelligence unit that went to Vietnam." [8]

Speaking in a drawl, Dillard told me, "I went over to Vietnam in February 1968 as the Phoenix coordinator for Four Corps, reporting to the CIA's region officer in charge. Branch called me and said, 'We have what we consider a critical requirement. We can't discuss it over the phone -- it's classified -- but you'll find out what it is when you get there.'

"So," Dillard continued, "when I arrived in Saigon, I immediately contacted several of my friends. One, Colonel Russ Conger, the senior adviser in Phong Dinh Province, gave me some tips on getting different agencies to cooperate and on overcoming the terrorist psychology in the villages and hamlets. He also informed me that there were many people around who felt Phoenix was a threat to them -- to their power base. " In other words, military officers commanding units in the field "considered Phoenix, on occasion, as getting in their way and inhibiting resources they could otherwise use for their own operations."

Right away Dillard understood that his job would be to bridge the gap, so that conventional military forces could be made available for unconventional Phoenix operations planned by the CIA. But he also sensed another problem festering beneath the surface. "It's kind of in conflict to our culture and experience over the years," he explained, "to take a U.S. Army element -- whatever it may be -- and direct it not only toward the military and paramilitary enemy forces but also toward the civilians that cooperate with them."

General Bruce Palmer, commander of the U.S. Ninth Infantry Division in 1968, put it more bluntly. "My objection to the program," he wrote in a letter to the author, "was the involuntary assignment of U.S. Army officers to the program. I don't believe that people in uniform, who are pledged to abide by the Geneva Conventions, should be put in the position of having to break those laws of warfare." [9]

Most military officers, however, resented Phoenix on other than legal grounds. The notion of attacking an elusive and illusionary civilian infrastructure was anathema to conventional warriors looking for spectacular main force battles. For an ambitious officer assigned to Phoenix, "the headlines would not be very impressive in terms of body counts, weapons captured, or some other measure of success," as Warren Milberg notes. In addition, Phoenix coordinators were merely advisers to their counterparts, not commanders in the field.

After being informally briefed by his friends, Dillard reported to the Phoenix Directorate, which "represented the program at the national level, ensuring that we got the kind of personnel and logistical support we felt we needed." However, because of the staff's "very narrow administrative type of intelligence background," it did not "understand how the program was going to develop. As the ICEX program," Dillard explained, "it was run directly at the province level, principally by the agency. But Parker's staff didn't grasp that when MACV took over and fleshed out Phoenix with hundreds of military officers and money, it really was a joint operation -- that CIA was a supporter and partial sponsor, but really MACV had to account for it. This is how it evolved."

While the Saigon staff was content to view Phoenix as a CIA subsidiary, Dillard set about asserting MACV's presence in Phoenix operations in the Delta -- a task made easier by the relative absence of regular military units and by Dillard's engaging personality and wide experience in command, staff, and operational positions. Ultimately, though, Dillard's leverage was logistics.

"As a matter of protocol between itself and the CIA," Dillard explained, "MACV assumed half of the agency's operational expenses in support of Phoenix. For example, every time the agency's aircraft were used to support a Phoenix activity, technically it should have been charged against the fund allocation MACV had given to the Phoenix program. So when I found out about that, I contacted the Air America operations people in Four Corps and said, 'Just to keep everybody honest, I want a record of what you're charging for aircraft support against the Phoenix program.' And thereafter I tried to get air support from U.S. Army region headquarters at Can Tho, so I didn't have to squander MACV operational funds reimbursing the agency for use of its aircraft."

By protecting MACV's financial interests, Dillard won the support of IV Corps commander, General George Eckhardt. "Most of my work with the MACV staff was either with General Eckhardt directly, or with the intelligence chief, Colonel Ted Greyman," Dillard recalled. "Ted and I worked hand in hand coordinating the activity, and it paid off .... General Eckhardt and Colonel Greyman set aside for me a light gun platoon and six helicopter gunships to run Phoenix operations throughout the region." This contingent became "a regional reaction force to haul troops and provide fire support." With it, Dillard was able to provide the PRU with air mobility and thus get access to CIA intelligence in exchange.

Jim Ward spoke highly of Doug Dillard, saying, "He was assigned to me because they wanted the best man they could get down in the Delta." [10] The admiration was mutual. About Ward and his deputy, Andy Rogers, Dillard said, "They were great guys to work with. There was an immediate acceptance of my credentials." That was not always the case. But Dillard and Ward agreed on what constituted a legitimate Phoenix operation -- be it an ambush dreamed up at a DIOCC or a multiprovince operation concocted by the CIA -- and together they would push Phoenix beyond the narrow rifle shot parameters advocated by Robert Komer.

Dillard's liberal interpretation of Phoenix is partially the result of his perception of the "terrorist psychology" in Vietnam. "I arrived in Can Tho on a Friday afternoon," he recalled. "The two army sergeants that had come in to be my administrative assistants met me at the airport and took me over to the compound and settled me in the CIA's regional house, which was also being used by the local Phong Dinh Province CIA personnel. There was a vacant room, so I took it, and the next morning I reported in to Andy Rogers. I was given a little office with the two enlisted men [who] handled reports and requests from the field. I was also assigned a deputy, Major Keith Ogden.

"Anyway, I found out there was a helicopter going up to Chau Doc Province on the Cambodian border on Sunday morning, so I went up there. It was my first introduction to the real war .... It was right after Tet, and there was still a lot of activity. The young sergeant there, Drew Dix, had been in a little village early that morning .... The VC had come in and got a couple out that were accused of collaborating with the government, and they'd shot them in the ears. Their bodies were lying out on a cart. We drove out there, and I looked at that ... and I had my first awareness of what those natives were up against. Because during the night, the damn VC team would come in, gather all those villagers together, warn them about cooperating, and present an example of what happened to collaborators. They shot them in the ears on the spot.

"So I knew what my job was. I realized there was a tremendous psychological problem to overcome in getting that specific group of villagers to cooperate in the program. Because to me the Phoenix program was one requiring adequate, timely, and detailed information so we could intercept, make to defect, kill, maim, or capture the Vietcong guerrilla forces operating in our area. Or put a strike on them. If either through intercepting messages or capturing VCI, you could get information on some of the main force guerrilla battalion activity, you could put a B-fifty-two strike on them, which we did in Four Corps."

For Jim Ward, "intelligence was the most important part of Phoenix." Handling that task for Ward was "a regular staffer with the agency who worked full time on intelligence -- the real sensitive, important operations" -- meaning unilateral penetrations into the VCI and GVN. The staffer "had military people assigned to him," working as liaison officers in the provinces, as well as CIA, State Department, and USIS officers and policemen from the United States. His job was "making sure they were properly supervised." Of course, the station's special unit could abscond with any penetrations that had national significance.

At the other end of the spectrum, "the first and most important purpose of the DIOCC," according to Ward, "the one that got General Thanh behind Phoenix," was getting tactical military intelligence. When managed by a military officer, as they usually were, DIOCCs focused on this area, while the PIOCCs, where the CIA exerted greater influence, focused on the VCI.

According to Ward, when information generally obtained from interrogation centers or hamlet informants indicated that a person was a VCI, the CIA's liaison officer started a three-by-five card file on that person at the Province Intelligence and Operations Coordination Center, which was often located in the embassy house. When a second piece of information came in -- from the provincial reconnaissance units or the Regional and Popular Forces -- a folder was opened. After a third source had incriminated the suspect, he or she was targeted for penetration, defection, or capture and interrogation at the PIC, then turned over to the Province Security Committee with evidence for sentencing.

This was the rifle shot approach. But where large concentrations of people or security teams surrounded the targeted VCI, Jim Ward favored a variation on the cordon and search method employed by Brewer and Milberg in Quang Tri, "where you move in at three A.M., surround the entire area, and block everybody off." However, because Ward lacked the "troop density" enjoyed in I Corps, in his Phoenix operations he used light observation helicopters "to buzz the paddy fields to keep people from running off. You don't have enough men to cordon off an entire village when you have only a hundred PRU and two Americans," he said, the two Americans being the PRU adviser and the Phoenix coordinator.

Using this approach, which relied on surprise, Ward would conduct five operations in a day. "They would go in on one side of the village. The first outfit would jump off a helicopter with one adviser and set up a block. Then another helicopter would land a hundred yards further down. Then a third and a fourth, with the other U.S. adviser. These guys would branch out in a skirmish line and start moving into town. They would catch everybody with rifles stacked, unprepared. When a helicopter is coming in low," Ward explained, "you don't even hear it coming in your direction. All of a sudden there's a tremendous roar, and they see people landing in different places.

"The PRU knew exactly what to do," Ward continued. "They'd get all these people [VCI suspects] out in a larger helicopter and take them back to where the province chief could put them in a special stockade. Then they'd get Special Branch people going through identifying each one. Meanwhile, the PRU would reequip with more ammo and go to the next drop."

Ward's method closely resembled the hunter-killer technique developed in 1962 and detailed by Elton Manzione. Omitted from Ward's sanitized account, however, was what happened before the arrival of the killer team, when the hunter team "snatches and/or snuffs" the cadre. Ward also neglected to describe the conduct of the PRU.

"Sometimes we'd go out with a whole pack of mercenaries," recalled Mike Beamon. "They were very good going in, but once we got there and made our target, they would completely pillage the place .... It was a complete carnival ...." [11]

***

In balancing MACV's and the CIA's interests in Phoenix, Colonel Doug Dillard was destined to rain on somebody's parade. In IV Corps the man who got soaked was the regional Public Safety adviser, Del Spiers.

Dillard as the regional Phoenix coordinator had the job of bringing police resources to bear against the VCI. The idea was to prevent region officers in charge like Jim Ward and Bob Wall from using PRU as blocking forces during Phoenix operations, so the PRU would be available to conduct rifle shot operations. "Our concept," Dillard said, "was to put the Field Police in a location as a blocking force and let the PRUs do the dirty work."

In 1968, however, most province chiefs were still feeling the aftershocks of Tet and preferred to use the Field Police as bodyguards in the province capital. "Unless you had an effective Regional and Popular Forces organization at the district level," Dillard explained, "the only thing you had ... was the Field Police, and hell, he was guarding the province chief's house, not out trying to run operations in support of your activity."

Compounding the problem were the Public Safety advisers themselves, whom Dillard described as "principally responsible for getting new jeeps and radios and supplies and funds for the National Police. And that was about it. Their proclivity was to support the Field Police, as opposed to trying to see that force engaged in operations.

"As I began to get out in the provinces," Dillard continued, "it seemed the Public Safety adviser was never there. He was either en route to Saigon or coming back from Saigon. When I talked to the U.S. people in the province, they would say, 'Well, this guy is either drunk or shacked up with his girl friend.' ... Many of them were former policemen or policemen on leave," Dillard grumbled, "or they came from some law enforcement activity and were plunged into that environment ... [and] based on my experience, there was almost a total incompetence."

Nor was the problem alleviated when "after Tet, they brought in a group of enlisted men out of the Military Police. They were going to be advisers to the Field Police, but many of them were inept, too. I know from talking to them that they had never been in combat, and their experience was analogous to Shore Patrol," Dillard said. "They were principally experienced as physical security guards, and many of them had drinking problems.

"Anyway, we just wrote the Field Police off. When it came to trying to get their resources on the ground, to put them in helicopters and move them around, we began to find that the province chief had one problem after another: Either the Field Police weren't available, or the Public Safety advisers weren't aware of the nature of Phoenix operations, or [the operations weren't] cleared with the province chief. And the Public Safety adviser would be running against the grain if he took the province chief's resources or even tried to influence him to free up the Field Police to run our operations.

"So the senior CORDS advisor, 'Coal Bin' Willie Wilson, came down to Four Corps, and he called me over and asked, 'What can we do to improve the Phoenix program?' And I complained about the lack of use of Field Police. I said I wanted to use it as a light infantry strike force, which would give us, if you added in the PRU, about a four- thousand-man strike force in the Delta. 'We know the PRU are damn good,' I said, 'but we can't get them all killed trying to do everybody's job.'

"What I proposed is that there be some kind of central control set up that would give us the capability to use police in the Delta to support Phoenix I operations. I added that with the kind of people there were out advising in the provinces, 'that ain't ever gonna get done.'"

When confronted by Coal Bin Willie, Doug Dillard recalled, Del Spiers said, "I can't fire the province senior adviser. I have to put up with the people he assigns to me. It's not like the military," where an officer can transfer an unsatisfactory subordinate.

Said Dillard: "Well, I am a military man, and I have a job to get done." And from that day on the Field Police and their Public Safety advisers were the Phoenix program's scapegoats in the Delta. At their expense Dillard achieved peace between the CIA and MACV in the Delta. He convinced the CIA that by sharing its information, military resources could be used against the VCI. In exchange for supporting the CIA's attack on the VCI, the military benefited from CIA intelligence on the location of main force enemy units. That translated into higher body counts and brighter careers.

"I could do what I wanted within the guidelines of the Phoenix program," Doug Dillard said with satisfaction, "which to me was the overall coordination of the units that existed in the Delta to destroy the infrastructure." With his regional reaction force ready and raring to go, Dillard mounted regional Phoenix operations on the Ward mini-cordon and search technique.

"At the province level we had almost daily involvement with the CIA's province adviser and SEAL team PRU adviser," Dillard explained. "This was either trying to help them get resources or going over the potential for operations. A good example is the time we got good intelligence on the VC staff on sampans in the U Minh Forest. The idea was to work in coordination with the U.S. Ninth Infantry Division in Chuong Thien Province. It was good timing because they had troops and could expand their artillery fire into An Xuyen, where the U Minh Forest was. We decided to use the PRU team from Kien Giang, with their SEAL adviser, and Major Leroy Suddath [the Phong Dinh paramilitary adviser, who as a major general in 1986 commanded the First Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg]."

As in the Milberg-Brewer operation in Quang Tri, the Vietnamese were cut out of the planning. "We decided we should lift out without a lot of notice," Dillard said. "So the SEAL adviser put his PRU on alert. But we didn't want to spook them, so they were told they were going on an operation in their province .... We took the PRU team out of Kien Giang with Leroy in the lead, and with the Ninth Division helicopters and artillery support to cover our infiltration and exfiltration. This way we could put the PRU on the canal, capture those people, and get in and out during daylight.

"We went over to Cbuong Thien and loaded out of there. I flew out of there in the command and control helicopter. We went up to Kien Giang, and Leroy had the PRU team ready .... We loaded up early that morning, flew down, and inserted the team on the canal. Then the chopper went back to Chuong Thien; I stayed over there with the radio and talked to Leroy to get a progress report. Leroy went in with the PRU-SEAL team. There were two Americans, and the rest were Vietnamese. They scarfed up twelve people almost immediately but couldn't find the sampan they were looking for. We think the damn operation got leaked, and they got spooked."

As in the Thuong Xa operation, despite elaborate planning and security precautions, a large-scale Phoenix operation failed to accomplish its mission. However, by showing that military assets could be used in support of Province Reconnaissance Units and that CIA intelligence could generate a sizable operation, the U Minh Forest operation did prove to MACV that Phoenix was a viable coordinating mechanism.

***

"In working with Ted Greyman in the Can Tho Advisory Group," Dillard said, "we were trying to piece together patterns of the main force guerrilla battalions, which constituted the single greatest danger to a district or even a province. Ted very closely coordinated with us in our Phoenix activities, plotting information where VC attacks had occurred, in what force, when, and so forth. When these facts came together, he would coordinate a B-fifty-two strike in that area."

In particular, Dillard was concerned with the movements of the Muoi Tu Battalion, which periodically emerged from its sanctuary in Cambodia and conducted operations in Chau Doc, Kien Phong, and Kien Tuong provinces. "Annually they'd come down and cut a wide swath through these three provinces, then go back into Cambodia," Dillard explained. "That's where Ted Greyman and I began to work very closely to try to plot every piece of information that we could get on the Muoi Tu Battalion."

The job of finding the Muoi Tu in Cambodia belonged to the Special Operations Group and its Vietnamese assets, which ran agent nets and reconnaissance missions into Cambodia. But, explained Dillard, "Quite often there was a lot of clumsy, heavy-handed type of activity, and I don't think [Special Forces] were appreciative of the nuances of being supercautious in collecting and evaluating intelligence before running operations. I think it was in Kien Phong on the border; the sun rose one morning, and they went into position there, and every man on the line had been shot through the back of the head. This was the Vietnamese Special Forces. They were infiltrated constantly by the VC."

Dispersed along South Vietnam's borders since 1962, the Fifth Special Forces A teams, augmented by the 403d Special Operations Detachment and an unnumbered intelligence group, routinely fed intelligence to MACV and the CIA. "The sophistication of the intelligence apparatus," General McChristian writes, "allowed for operations against the infrastructure." [12]

However, by September 1967 it was clear, as Doug Dillard noted, that the Vietnamese Special Forces were too heavily infiltrated to be trusted. So concurrent with the creation of ICEX and the reorganization of SOG, the CIA commissioned Project Gamma. Also known as Detachment B-57, Gamma was charged with the mission of organizing cross-border counter-intelligence operations to find out who within the Cambodian government was helping the NVA and VC infiltrate and attack Special Forces A camps, recon teams, and agent nets. While posing as medical and agricultural specialists in a "dummy" civil affairs unit, Gamma personnel coordinated intelligence from A teams, identifying the key VCI cadres that were mounting penetration operations against them. Detachment B-57 coordinated its activities with SOG and the various Special Forces projects, including Delta, Sigma, Omega, and Blackjack out of Tay Ninh. In defense of its A camps, Special Forces mounted its own attack on the VCI through a combination of agent nets, "specialized patrolling," mobile strike forces, and a "kill on sight" rewards program. In this way, SOG and Phoenix were united.

As for the "heavy-handedness" cited by Dillard, on November 27, 1967, Fifth Special Forces Captain John McCarthy was sitting beside his principal agent, Inchin Hai Lam (a Cambodian working for B-57 out of Quang Loi), in the front seat of a car parked on a street in Tay Ninh. A suspected double agent, Lam was a member of the Khmer Serai, a dissident Cambodian political party created by the CIA to overthrow Cambodia's Prince Sihanouk. Without warning, McCarthy turned and put a bullet between Lam's eyes.

McCarthy was tried for Lam's murder, and the ensuing scandal raised questions about the legality of "terminating with extreme prejudice" suspected double agents. The issue would surface again in regard to Phoenix.

Regardless of where the VCI were -- in South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, or North Vietnam -- "the idea," said Dillard, "was that if we knew their pattern and if we could put the fear of God in them, then we could influence their movements so they could never assemble as a battalion. Our forces could resist any company-sized attacks, and that pretty much cut back their capabilities by preventing them from operating at a battalion-level force."

MACV "could do a fifty-two strike pretty easily," Dillard explained. And once MACV began using B-52 strikes as a way of harassing VC guerrilla units, "Thereafter we had pretty good evidence that the VC were doing just what we wanted them to do. They were not assembling in large battalion-sized forces, and we could route them around. We continued to try to do that from the summer of 1968 on, and we started getting in some pretty good defectors because of that pressure. The overall coordination was working."

Indeed, when B-52 strikes were mounted, coordination was essential. For example, the CIA could not run a PRU operation in enemy territory without first consulting MACV, because, as Dillard put it, "it's conceivable that the operations people have scheduled a strike in that area. " Yet everyone mounted unilateral operations anyway. "An element of the five-twenty-fifth" -- Dillard sighed -- "their collection and special security unit, was trying to get the VCI to defect -- this was in the summer of 1968. They had a lead to a VCI cadre meeting, and they ran the operation, and there was nothing there. We were all called into General Eckhardt's office to find out who the hell had approved this special operation without Ted Greyman knowing it.

"There's always that problem," Dillard contended, "when some outfit perceives that they're going to pull off a coup. Then it backfires. The damn thing was a total embarrassment. Just like the sale of arms to Iran."

As long as unilateral operations persisted, Phoenix could never fly. "It was kind of hard at times to determine just who was operating in that environment," Dillard remarked. "Quite often the main mission of the Special Branch guy may have been to keep tabs on the ARVN people. In the case of the Military Security Service, if I was able to get to the guy through [his counterpart, MSS Colonel] Phuoc or through the Army security unit in the Delta ... I would try to push an operation or try to find out what they knew that we were not being informed of. But in the whole time I was there, I was convinced that there was a lot of unilateral reporting that did not get into the U.S. system, whether it was Phoenix or something else. It had to do with the different axes people had to grind."

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