THE PHOENIX PROGRAM

CHAPTER 9: ICEX

In May 1967 CIA officer Robert Komer arrived in Saigon as deputy for Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development. Thereafter he was called the DEPCORDS, a job that afforded him full ambassadorial rank and privileges and had him answering only, in theory, to MACV Commander William Westmoreland and Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker.

"I'd known Komer from 1952, when he was with the Office of National Estimates," Nelson Brickham told me, [1] "which from the beginning was a high-level organization. Komer would go on to move from one high-level job to another, and in 1967, of course, he was working for the national security adviser, Walt Rostow, in the White House. Komer and I always chatted when he came around and talked to the branches, as he had been doing since February 1967. But in May he was even more acerbic than before. Komer was intensely ambitious, intensely energetic, intensely results-oriented.

"In May," Brickham continued, "in connection with Komer coming out to run CORDS, Hart called me into his office one day and said, 'I want you to forget your other duties -- you're going home in June anyway -- and I want you to draw me up a plan for a general staff for pacification.' I was still chief of field operations," Brickham noted, "so my replacement, Dave West, was sent out early to free me up while I was working on this special paper. Then I asked for another officer in the station [John Hansen] to work with me on this paper. He was counterespionage. But he was also into computers, and he could say the right things about computers and be persuasive in ways that I could not. So Hansen was assigned to me, and we set about writing it up. Hansen focused on the computer end of this thing, and I focused on the organizational end.

"In complying with John Hart's request for a general staff for pacification, there were three things I had to review: strategy, structure, and management. Now the important thing to remember is that we were never at war in Vietnam. The ambassador was commander in chief. The MACV commander was under him. So all the annual military operations and everything else were focused under the Country Plan rather than a strictly military plan. And I was the principal agency representative each year for the development of next year's Country Plan.

"Regarding strategy, basically this was it: We had an army to provide a shield from North Vietnamese field units and to engage in military sweeps to go after Vietcong units .... And the Vietnamese Army did basically the same thing. That's in-country military. Pacification efforts ...were to operate behind the military shield to stabilize and to secure the situation. That's the civilian side. Then you had out-of-country military, which was aircraft reconnaissance, naval blockades, bombing operations in the DMZ and along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and operations in North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

"My point," Brickham emphasized, "was not to change anything, just do it better. We didn't need more intelligence; we needed better intelligence, properly analyzed and collated. That's the strategy.

"Next, the structure, which, of course, was interagency in nature and encompassed MACV, CIA, CORDS, Revolutionary Development, and the embassy. Now when you start fooling around with other agencies, you're in trouble. Each one has its own legislative mandate, meaning its job prescribed by Congress or as defined in the Constitution. Then there is legislative funding, funds allocations, accounting procedures, and the question of who is going to pay for something. Those legislative givens have to be respected. I as a CIA officer cannot set up an organizational arrangement where I'm going to spend Pentagon money unless the Pentagon gives it. And even if they give it to me, it still has to be within the framework of the congressional appropriation. Then there are the bureaucratic empires, in both Saigon and Washington, all deeply committed to these things. You have overlap, contradictory programs, ill-conceived ventures which receive hearings; time is wasted, and you get corruption, embezzlement, and low morale. And yet somehow you have to pull all these different agencies together."

In looking for a solution, Brickham seized on the personality and presidential mandate of Robert Komer. "Komer had already acquired the nickname Blowtorch," Brickham said, "and his position was a bureaucratic anomaly. He was a deputy ambassador on a par with General [Creighton] Abrams ... but actually he was reporting to Lyndon Johnson, and everyone knew that. So my idea was to set up a board of directors in which each agency head or his deputy was a member, then establish a reporting system that would allow a guy like Komer to hold their feet to the fire -- to make each agency responsive, to give it goals and targets, and to criticize its failures in performance, whether deliberately or inadvertently through sloppiness.

"Remember, the strategy was to sharpen up intelligence collection and analysis and to speed up the reaction time in responding to intelligence, whether on a military or a police level. So the idea was to set up a structure in which agencies had to participate and had to bring their own resources and funds to bear, without interfering with their legislative mandate or financial procedures."

In determining how to do this, Brickham borrowed an organizational model from the Ford Motor Company, which, he said, had "set up a command post to run their operations, with the policy of the corporation coming from the chief executive officer and a board of directors. Call it the operating committee at the top, supported by a statistical reporting unit that put everything together for the chief executive and the board of directors, giving management the bottom line for them to consider and make decisions .... This became the basic structure for the general staff, which Hart was calling ICEX -- intelligence coordination and exploitation. I wrote it so the different agencies would provide their own money, personnel, and direction, but as part of a machinery by which they would be directed to a specific purpose."

Having formulated a strategy and structure, Brickham turned to management, which for him boiled down to two things: the bottom line, telling management only what it needed to know; and using reporting as a tool to shape behavior, as articulated by Rensis Likert in New Patterns of Management.

"Basically," Brickham explained, "a reporting format fosters self-improvement, if the people reporting know what they are expected to do, and are provided with objective measurements of performance in terms of those expectations .... So we designed the reporting structure to provide critical types of information to the ICEX board of directors, primarily Komer. But also, by focusing attention in the regions and the provinces on the things we felt were important, we tried to guarantee that those things worked properly."

In particular, Brickham hoped to correct "the grave problem of distortion and cover-up which a reporting system must address." In explaining this problem to Komer, Brickham quoted a CIA officer who had criticized "the current system of reporting statistics that prove ... that successive generations of American officials in Vietnam are more successful than their predecessors." The officer observed that "Americans in the field, the majority of whom serve a one-year tour ... go through a honeymoon phase in which they try to see everything good about their counterpart and about the situation and report it thus. Then they go through a period of disillusionment in which they realize that nothing has been accomplished, but by this time they have become the victims of their own past reports and they have to maintain the fiction. Ultimately they go out of there very discouraged and probably very unhappy with their own performance because about the same time they become knowledgeable enough to really do something they are on their way home and have no desire to hurt their own professional career."

Explained Brickham: "The key to ICEX was decentralization" -- in other words, forcing field officers to do their jobs by putting responsibility on the scene, while at the same time trying to deliver to these officers the kinds and amounts of information they needed, fast. "This means feedback," Brickham stressed, "which reflects and recognizes the province officer's own activities, tells him what other people are doing, identifies to him the important and reportable activities, and induces a competitive and emulative spirit."

Keyed to Special Branch reporting cycles, the initial ICEX reporting format was submitted monthly and contained narrative and statistical data responding to requirements from Washington, Saigon, and the regions. It reflected the activities, understanding, and writing abilities of field officers, enabling managers like Komer to judge performance. It also revealed program progress and functioning of related systems. Meanwhile, John Hansen was developing a comprehensive input sheet capable of listing every piece of biographical information on VCI individuals, operations, and organization in general. He was also designing collated printouts on the VCI, which were to be sent to region, province, and district ICEX officers plugged into the ICEX computer system.

"Anyway," said Brickham, "those were the ideas that involved this statistical reporting unit for the ICEX staff, which was to pull everything together and analyze it. The statistical reporting unit was the guts, with a plans and programs unit and a special investigations unit tacked onto it."

On May 22, 1967, Nelson Brickham and John Hansen delivered to Komer a three-page memo titled "A Concept for Organization for Attack on VC Infrastructure." Hurriedly prepared, it recommended four things. First was the creation of a board of directors chaired by the DEPCORDS and including the senior intelligence and operations officers from MACV, CIA, and CORDS -- a general staff for pacification under Robert Komer. Next, it recommended the creation of a command post in Saigon and ICEX committees in the regions and provinces. Thirdly, it recommended that the Americans "coordinate and focus" the attack on the VCI and that they "stimulate" their Vietnamese counterparts. Lastly, it recommended that province officers create DIOCCs, which Brickham called "the essential ingredient in the Phoenix [as ICEX would eventually be renamed] stew." The concept paper was approved by the CIA station, then sent to Komer, who turned it down. As Brickham recalled, "Komer said, 'A concept paper is not what I want. I want a missions and functions paper -- something in military style that the military can understand.'"

"At this point," Brickham said, "I was seconded over to Komer's office. He was buying everything that we proposed to him, but he wanted to develop 'action papers.' He kept repeating, over and over again, that he wanted a 'rifle shot' approach -- a sniper's attack, not a shotgun approach -- against the VCI. And Komer is a stickler. He was constantly throwing papers back at me to rewrite over and over again until they satisfied him in those terms."

In response to Komer's demands, Brickham and Hansen incorporated the major themes of the concept paper into a detailed missions and functions paper titled "A Proposal for the Coordination and Management of Intelligence Programs and Attack on the VC Infrastructure and Local Irregular Forces." What resulted, according to Brickham, "was not a general staff planning body, but an executive action organization that was focused on getting the job done, not thinking about it, by taking advantage of Komer's dynamic personality."

Eleven pages long (plus annexes on interrogation, data processing, and screening and detention of VCI), "A Proposal" was accepted by Komer in early June 1967. Its stated purpose was: "to undertake the integration of efforts of all US and GVN organizations, both in intelligence collection and processing and in operations directed against the elimination of the VC Infrastructure and irregular forces" and "to insure that basic programs conducted by different organizations and components, as they relate to the elimination of the VCI, are made mutually compatible, continuous, and fully effective." [2]

ICEX as the embodiment of executive action had emerged as the solution to the problem posed by the VCI. It was a "machine" composed of joint committees at national, corps, province, and district levels. At the top sat Robert Komer as chairman of the board, setting policy with the approval of the ambassador and MACV commander. Serving as Komer's command post was the ICEX Directorate in Saigon, to be headed by "the senior U.S. coordinator for organizing the overall attack on the VCI." [3]

The ICEX Directorate was to be subdivided into three units. The intelligence unit was to be composed of two senior liaison officers -- one from MACV and one from the CIA -- who were to prepare briefings, conduct special investigations, and evaluate the effectiveness of the attack on the VCI.

The operations (aka the plans and programs) unit was to be composed of three program managers who planned activities, set requirements, managed funds, and were responsible for three specific problem areas: (1) intelligence collection programs and their coordination and reaction operations; (2) screening, detention, and judicial processing of VC civil defendants; and (3) the interrogation exploitation of VC captives and defectors. How ICEX handled these problem areas will be discussed at length in Chapter 10.

The reports management unit was to refine the attack on the VCI through the science fiction of statistical analysis. Reports officers were to help program managers "in developing reports to be required from Region and Province" and to analyze those reports. The reports dealt with province staffing; prisoner and defector accession and disposition; RD team locations, actions, and casualties; quantitative and qualitative descriptions of intelligence reports and PRU operations; and province inspection reports, among other things. The reporting unit included an inspections team because, as Brickham observed, "Everybody lies .... These guys are supposed to be on the road most of the time, dropping in unexpectedly to look at your files and to verify what was being reported to us in writing was true."

ICEX field operations were to be grafted onto the CIA's liaison and covert action programs, with the region and province officers in charge continuing to manage those programs and in most cases assuming the added job of ICEX coordinator. The ICEX Province Committee was to be "the center of gravity of intelligence operations against the VCI." The ICEX province coordinator in turn was to establish and supervise DIOCCs (usually seven or eight per province), "where the bulk of the attack on the low level infrastructure and local guerrilla forces must be generated and carried out." ICEX committees at each level were to be composed of the senior intelligence, operations, and pacification officers. And the ICEX coordinator was to "recommend and generate operations for the attack on infrastructure" and "stimulate Vietnamese interagency cooperation and coordination." [4]

"I'm a great advocate of committee meetings," Brickham told me, "provided they're properly run. That's why Phoenix wound up as a committee structure at nation, region, province, and district levels. A joint staff at every level down to district is the essence of Phoenix. We hoped the committee structure would be a nonoperative kind of thing, but we had to have some machinery for bringing together everybody involved in these programs."

Added Brickham: "Some Phoenix coordinators were from the Agency for International Development or the military. They didn't have to be CIA. Same with the province officer in charge; the POIC would be a member of the Phoenix committee, whether or not he was the coordinator." However, insofar as the PICs and the PRU were the foundation stones of Phoenix, if someone other than the CIA province officer in charge was the ICEX Province Committee chairman. or its coordinator, that person was totally dependent on the POIC for access to information on, and reaction forces for use against, the VCI. In addition, the committee structure allowed the CIA to deny plausibly that it had anyone operating in the DIOCCs.

"I was opposed to the DIOCCs at the beginning," Brickham admitted, "but after I visited three places up north and wrote the early June paper, I had converted into believing in them as important .... And then Komer said we could have as many men as we asked for, and at that point we tried to get district officers." In any event, according to Brickham, "ICEX institutionalizes the thing."

"Okay," said Brickham. "Komer approved this, and we sent a cable to Washington headquarters outlining the situation and requesting approval. And we got a cable back from Colby which basically said, 'Well, we don't know what you're going to do.' And as I recall, they suggested that we sort of pull in our horns."

"Well, we said, 'This is the only way to do it, so we'll just go ahead and do it.' We came up with the ambassador's approval out there in the field, so back in Washington they were left with a fait accompli. And the irony is, Colby had nothing to do with ICEX or Phoenix. He had to go along with it. It was approved by Komer and the ambassador and the White House, so we implemented it." At that point Nelson Brickham returned to Washington for a job on the Vietnamese desk, and a new personality appeared on the scene, willing and ready to pick up where Brickham had left off.

***

Having chatted with Roger Trinquier in Vung Tau in 1952, Evan Parker, Jr., was no stranger to Vietnam. As the son of an American pilot who had served in King George's Royal Flying Corps in the First World War, Parker was also well connected. Upon graduating from Cornell University in 1943, Parker, who was fluent in French, was invited to join the fashionable OSS. Trained with the jaunty Jedburghs, [i] he was slated to parachute into France but instead was sent to Burma, where he served in Detachment 101, as an interrogation and logistics officer fighting with Kachin hill tribes behind the Japanese lines. Parker later served as Detachment 101's liaison officer to Merrill's Marauders and the British Thirty-sixth Division. His service with the OSS (followed by a brief stint as a traveling salesman) led to a career in the CIA's clandestine services and to personal relationships with many of the major Vietnamese, French, and American players in Vietnam.

Parker began his CIA career as a courier in the Far East, then was graduated to case officer, operating mostly in Hong Kong and China. Over the ensuing years, he told me when we met in 1986, he made "four or five" trips to Vietnam and, when he arrived again in Saigon in June 1967, was slated to become the station's executive director, its third-highest-ranking position. However, Robert Komer and John Hart thought that Parker could better serve "the cause" as ICEX's first director.

Parker was chosen to manage ICEX, first and foremost, because Komer needed a senior CIA officer in that position. The CIA alone had the expertise in covert paramilitary and intelligence operations, the CIA alone was in liaison with the Special Branch and the CIO, and the CIA alone could supply money and resources on a moment's notice, without the red tape that strapped the military and the State Department. As a GS-16 with the equivalent rank of a brigadier general, Evan Parker, Jr., had the status and the security clearances that would allow him access to all these things.

Parker's persona and professional record also made him the perfect candidate for the job. Having just completed a tour as the CIA officer assigned to the Pentagon's Pacific Command, Parker had helped draw up the military's strategic plan for Vietnam and was well aware of how Vietnam fitted into the "big picture." Possessing the persuasive skills and political connections of a seasoned diplomat, Parker also enjoyed the status and the style necessary to soothe the monumental egos of obstinate military officers and bureaucrats. And ''as the expert on unconventional warfare," which was how Tully Acampora facetiously referred to him, Evan Parker had the tradecraft qualifications required to launch a top secret, highly sensitive, coordinated attack on the VCI.

Upon arriving in Saigon, Parker prepared himself by reading Brickham's papers and reviewing "the fifty to sixty" programs we already had in place to deal with the "infrastructure," a word Parker described to me as "hideous." [5] [ii] At an informal conference in Da Nang called to discuss the attack on the VCI, Parker learned that Brickham "and his partners in crime" wanted to concentrate their efforts initially on the Americans, then on the Vietnamese, but that Komer first had to ram ICEX through the impervious Saigon bureaucracy.

This was not hard to do, considering that President Johnson had given Komer a mandate that encompassed not only the formulation of an integrated attack on the VCI but also the reorganization of the Republic of Vietnam's armed forces, management of the October 1967 Vietnamese presidential elections, and revitalizing South Vietnam's economy. When faced with the irresistible force called Robert "Blowtorch" Komer, the immovable Saigon bureaucracy gave way quickly, if not altogether voluntarily.

Flanked by John Hart and General George Forsythe, MACV's chief of Revolutionary Development, Komer on June 14, 1967, presented MACV's chiefs of staff with Brickham's "Proposal." Komer made a forceful presentation, writes Ralph Johnson, but Generals Phillip B. Davidson Jr., Walter Kerwin, and William Pearson balked, "because MACV personnel requirements were not included." [6]

But it did not matter that the majority of DIOCC advisers were slated to be military men. Komer, backed by Hart, simply took his case to MACV commander Westmoreland, who, having been informed of President Johnson's wishes in the matter by Ambassador Bunker, overruled his staff on June 16. A few days later the White House Coordinating Committee (Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Earle Wheeler, and Chairman William Sullivan) nodded their final approval. And so it was that ICEX -- soon to be Phoenix -- was born. And not without resentment. General McChristian recalled, "On my last day in Vietnam, I became aware that a new plan for attacking the VCI was to be implemented. It was to be called ICEX. To put it mildly, I was amazed and dismayed." McChristian was amazed that he had not been told earlier, and was dismayed because ICEX was going to replace Cong Tac IV.

On the morning of June 20, [iii] Evan Parker met with General Davidson (McChristian's replacement as MACV intelligence chief) and General Pearson, the MACV chief of operations. At this meeting, Parker recalled, the generals agreed "to staff this thing out." But, he added, "I think from the point of view of the military, well, they may have felt this was being shoved down their throats by the chief of station.

"Anyway," said Parker, "[Komer and Hart] said, 'Do it,' and they identified me as the man they proposed to head up this staff, and the agency said they would supply assistance. Okay, but immediately you have a problem because there are already advisers to the Special Branch ... and if all of a sudden I come in and am put in charge, that means I'm getting into somebody else's business. So if I want to get to the Special Police, I have to sound out the American adviser to see if he wants to cooperate with this. Maybe he wants to, and maybe he doesn't. Maybe he feels he's already doing this.

('Well, he may not like it" -- Parker smiled -- "but he has to do it, because the chief of station tells him to. So he does it. But that doesn't make the pill any easier to swallow. In effect he's getting another layer of command or, I should say, coordination, over him."

Ed Brady, an Army officer on contract to the CIA and assigned to the ICEX Directorate, elaborated when we met in his office in 1987. "There certainly was a conflict going on," Brady said. [8] "Dave West [Nelson Brickham's replacement] didn't want to share his prerogatives with another powerful CIA guy .... Why should there be two organizations working with the Special Branch? It wasn't proposed that [ICEX] be under his control. It was proposed that it interact with the Special Branch on a separate basis and that separate Special Branch officers would be assigned over there to do that. And West wouldn't have any control or influence over it.

"The Special Branch," Brady explained, "was supposed to be carrying out internal surveillance and operations against subversives. That's its job. The problem ... was that the vast majority of Special Branch energy went into surveilling, reporting on, and thwarting opposition political parties. Non-Communists. Every now and then they did something about a VC -- if he was in Saigon. But they didn't have any systematic program against the Communists. Their main activity was to keep the existing regime in power, and the political threat to the existing regime was not the Communist party, 'cause the Communist party was outlawed! What the Special Branch was doing was keeping track of the so-called loyal opposition -- keeping track of what Tran Van Don or what Co Minh Tang or what the Vietnam Quoc Dan Dang was doing.

"Phoenix," Brady explained, "at an absolute minimum caused a focus to be brought to bear on anti-Communist activities."

Having pulled rank to get MACV and the liaison branch in line, John Hart then assigned four CIA officers to Evan Parker on a temporary basis, as well as the services of "key CIA personnel stationed outside of Saigon" and "integrated and CIA-funded programs such as Census Grievance Teams, PRU, RD Cadre, and Special Police." [9] Parker was then told to select a military deputy, and he asked for an old friend from OSS Detachment 101, Colonel Junichi Buhto, then the MACV chief of counterintelligence.

"Junichi agreed to assist," Parker said when we met at his home, "even though he had plenty to do in his own job. It was agreed he would keep his regular job and be my assistant on a part-time basis as another duty. And with his assistance we found a bunch of Army officers, all of whom were near the end of their tours but who could be spared from whatever they were doing. And so it went. That's the ICEX staff.

"Then the police were brought into it," Parker added, referring to the National Police. "Leaving aside the agency people, the key people are John Manopoli and myself because he was head of the National Police."

A retired New York State Police lieutenant, Manopoli had served as a police adviser in Vietnam from 1956 through 1959 and had returned to Saigon as chief of Public Safety in 1966. Although he had no authority over Special Branch, as senior adviser to the National Police, Manopoli was responsible for meeting its, as well as ICEX's, logistical and administrative needs.

"Manopoli," Parker pointed out, "was actually the senior police adviser in-country. I didn't have that kind of responsibility. Mine was a staff responsibility. We in Phoenix were not put over the police or military; we simply gave a directive in the name of MACV or Komer or Colby. The idea was to come up with an organization that would pool intelligence on the infrastructure and try to get these people to use that intelligence to go out and arrest them. This is so easily said and so difficult to do because all these agencies have their own jobs and they existed long before Phoenix."

Manopoli also got the job of kicking Tully Acampora out of his office and moving Parker's staff in. "They found some space for us in USAID Two," Parker said. "We were squeezed in." He was given some part-time secretarial help, and with the officers lent from Hart, "what we did first was come out with a MACV staff paper which described what this program was, what we were going to do, and what this coordinated program -- this ICEX -- was going to be."

This staff paper, titled "Intelligence, Intelligence Coordination, and Exploitation for Attack on VC Infrastructure (C)," short title: ICEX (U), commonly known as MACV 381-41, was promulgated on July 9, 1967, and marked the birth of ICEX as a formal entity. It also signaled the end to the escalation of the Vietnam War. Five days later the Defense Department imposed a 523,000-man troop limit on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

One of the authors of MACV 381-41 was CIA officer Jim Ward, who was then preparing to replace Kinloch Bull as region officer in charge of IV Corps. "The first meeting back in those days," Ward recalled, "was between Evan, me, and Junichi Buhto. That's early July 1967. I had known Juni from Germany and OSS Detachment One-oh-one. Just by chance all three of us had been in Detachment One-oh-one of OSS in World War Two. In fact, Evan and I were together at Camp David, where the Jedburghs were trained." [10]

A paramilitary expert who had commanded a unit of Kachin guerrillas operating behind Japanese lines, Ward -- whose CIA career began in 1948 in Malaya, where he was schooled by Claude Fenner -- was well aware of the prominence of the Special Branch in counterinsurgency warfare. According to Ward, "The key to the Vietnam War ... was the political control of people. And the Communists were doing a better job of this than we were, and the best way to stop this was to get at the infrastructure. Not the people who were sympathizers or supporters in any way of the VC. They didn't count. The people who counted were the key members of the People's Revolutionary party. These were the people behind the NLF.

"Anyway, Evan set up this meeting. He wanted input from someone with field operations experience and know-how, and what we talked about was concepts: what we had to do to bring everybody together who was collecting intelligence and that everybody should be channeling intelligence into the DIOCC. There intelligence would be collated, analyzed, interpreted, and then reaction operations could be undertaken almost immediately. And new intelligence directives would be drafted. Whoever was in charge was supposed to be doing that all the time -- that is, letting people know that a particular piece of information [needed to mount an operation against a particular VCI] was missing, or asking, 'What's the pattern of this guy's movements every day?' Then you decide who should get these directives -- the police if you're talking about an infrastructure guy or the military if you're talking about a battalion of VC. Anyway, the guy who runs the DIOCC -- be it Special Branch or MSS or S-two or whoever -- usually does the laying of requirements.

"First we talked about the coordination of intelligence. For instance, in the Delta there were approximately ten thousand intelligence reports a month coming in from different levels ... a few hundred were coming up through police channels, some through ARVN and American battalions, and others through the Green Berets and their [Vietnamese] counterparts. All of them were sending information through their own chains of command, rather than using it laterally and exploiting it locally. And we wanted them, at the reaction level [the DIOCC], to collate the information and exploit it. That's the first objective.

"The second objective -- assuming the military intelligence gets exploited by the military units -- is making sure the infrastructure intelligence gets exploited by whoever appears to be the most appropriate unit to coordinate it. If it's the kind of thing that can be handled only by a large military organization, fine. Even the largest of the American outfits get involved in this, like the First Air Cavalry and the Hundred First Airborne, which was especially good at cordon and search operations. They would take PRU or Field Police units along with them and Special Branch units to do the interrogating. But generally the outfit that's best equipped to get a single guy in a remote place is the PRU."

These concepts of intelligence collection and exploitation, as outlined by Ward, were incorporated in MACV 381-41 along with Brickham's organizational concepts. Timetables were set for the region officers in charge to draft missions and functions statements, to determine in which districts the first DIOCCs were to be built, and to prepare guidelines for DIOCC operations. All this was to be done by the end of July. MACV 381-41 also charged the CIA's region officers in charge with briefing their Vietnamese counterparts as soon as possible.

With MACV 381-41 in hand, Evan Parker and John Hart visited each ROIC. "We told them what we had in mind," Parker recalled, "what the objective was and what their function was. Briefly stated, they were to be the nucleus to get it going. This was all done orally .... They were simply told, 'You've now heard what Ev's in charge of -- you'll get it done here; you'll pass the word to your people.' Then we briefed the senior military people in the four regions."

Parker attributed his success in co-opting the ROICs to the fact that "in addition to being the Phoenix fellow, I was also a senior CIA officer wearing my other hat." In that capacity he attended CIA station meetings three times each week. In July 1967 the ROICS, who may be thought of as Phoenix's first field generals, were Jack Horgan in I Corps, Dean Almy in II Corps, Kinloch Bull in IV Corps, and Bob Wall in III Corps.

Each region was unique, geographically and politically, and Phoenix in flight conformed to those contours. As Parker explains, "Four Corps was different because there weren't as many Americans there." The Delta was also the breadbasket and population center of Vietnam, thus the locus of the counterinsurgency and Phoenix. I Corps was distinct by virtue of its proximity to North Vietnam and the extent to which Phoenix was directed against Thieu's domestic political opponents. Headquartered in Nha Trang under the shadow of Fifth Special Forces, II Corps was an admixture of SOG and Phoenix operations. And as the region encompassing Saigon and the Central Office of South Vietnam, III Corps was perhaps the most critical region -- although one in which, according to Nelson Brickham, there was little success against the VCI.

***

In June 1967 Robert Komer sent a cable to Richard Helms commending Nelson Brickham for "an outstanding job in helping design new attack on infrastructure" and asking that Brickham be made available for occasional temporary duty in Vietnam "if critical problems arise." Three weeks after arriving back in Langley, with yet another feather in his cap, Brickham was transferred from the Vietnamese desk to the office of the special assistant for Vietnamese affairs (SAVA).

"SAVA was up at the DCI level," Brickham noted, ''as a coordination point for an agency and interagency activities relating to Vietnam. The reason I was brought up there was that [SAVA Director George] Carver was obliged to brief [the secretary of defense] and other people on ICEX/Phoenix, and he didn't have a clue. He couldn't understand. Nobody in Washington could understand what we had done out there in the station. So Carver called me in and asked me to write a memorandum."

Brickham described Yale graduate Carver as the person who "provided the theoretical basis for U.S. intervention in Vietnam in an article he wrote for Foreign Affairs magazine ["The Faceless Viet Cong"] on the nature of the Vietnam insurgency and American interests there.

"I stayed in SAVA for two months," Brickham continued. "Then I went back out to Vietnam TDY to work with Ev Parker ... to assist him in the reporting formats, the requirements, and this and that and to implement the philosophy I explained earlier. And it was at this point that we ran into problems with Bob Wall.

"Bob Wall was a paramilitary type." Brickham sighed. "He was first assigned as a province officer, then as deputy in I Corps, and in that capacity he was instrumental in creating the first DIOCCs. He invited some Brits from Kuala Lumpur to explain what they had done there, and he was always hustling papers around the station. He was not a regional officer before the reorganization, but he ended up as our ROIC in Third Corps, in Bien Hoa. Now that was shortly before I left country, and I had very little to concern myself with that situation. It was when I came back TDY to help Evan Parker in the fall of 1967 that it became evident that Bob Wall was one of our less satisfactory region officers.

"One of our problems in Vietnam," Brickham philosophized, "is that that part of the world seems to generate the warlord. It's the damnation of the Far East and a disease that infects the white man when he goes there .... And the upshot in Vietnam, before someone came out with the sledgehammer to knock heads together, was that you had forty-four different wars in forty-four different provinces and forty-four different warlords ... and American region advisers often would fall victim to this same virus: Bob Wall is a prime example. So I recommended disciplinary action and relief from duty.

"Ev Parker, of course, was in charge of it, and he didn't do that. I'd never known Ev Parker before that, but just a finer gentleman you'll never know; he's what the Russians would call a cultured individual. Now Ev Parker is less abrasive than I am; he would see a problem and seek a diplomatic solution. Whereas I would rock a boat and sometimes sink it, Ev Parker would steer it in a different course, so it wouldn't take the waves. Ev Parker has a Chinese mind, and he chose a different way to soften Wall's position."

That position, according to Brickham, was that "Bob Wall was permitting the military people in Third Corps to turn the entire intelligence operation into a military support adjunct, ignoring the infrastructure. Even though he was pushing the DIOCCs like crazy, he and his military counterpart in Region Three were using the PRU as blocking forces for military operations. He was not following policy. He was pursuing his own war out there in the region. This became the issue between Bob Wall and myself in Third Corps."

Bob Wall, a balding, roly-poly man, emphatically denied Brickham's charges. "No way!" he said, adding that it was perfectly proper to use the Provincial Reconnaissance Units in village sweeps, because "the PRU could actually deal with the people. They spoke their language and knew what to look for, whereas U.S. forces were only interested in killing people."

Wall did solicit the help of his corps's deputy intelligence chief, Lieutenant Colonel John Kizirian, who anted up fifteen second lieutenants as DIOCC advisers in III Corps. But that in itself did not make him a warlord. For a CIA region officer could push Phoenix only to the extent that his military counterpart provided qualified personnel to run the DIOCCs. And the military always wanted something in return. And then, of course, there was the overriding question of Vietnamese participation.

On this issue Brickham said, "We put [Phoenix] together and presented, it to the Vietnamese. General Loan by this time was chief of the National Police. Everybody knows what he looks like -- they've seen pictures of him shooting the VC on TV -- but I'm convinced that Loan was an absolutely honest, dedicated patriot. Anyway, this ICEX proposal was presented to Loan, and it didn't take him long to turn it down, mainly because they looked upon it as an infringement on their sovereignty. When I say Loan was a patriot, he was! He was looking out for the Vietnamese. He recognized the fact that Vietnamese and American interests were not always identical. So they turned it down flat.

"We said, 'Well, that's okay 'cause we're gonna do it anyway.' ... Regardless of what the Vietnamese were going to do, we were going to go ahead with it anyway, if nothing else, to try to serve as an example. And there was really no need for the Vietnamese to string along with us, although up in Da Nang they did. Which, as you know, is where the name Phoenix came from.

"Jack Horgan was our ROIC up there," Brickham went on. "He was in good liaison with both the Vietnamese military and police, and when he presented this to the Vietnamese up there, one of them said, 'Well, we should really call this Phoenix, because it's to rise from the ashes and seek victory.' So Jack Horgan came down with a cable and said, 'By the way, so-and-so has coined the name Phoenix for this activity" and it took immediately. It became known as Operation Phoenix, and everybody was happy with that. By then it was beginning to go."

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Notes:

i. Elite OSS officers trained at Camp David. Colby, Ward, Parker, and Buhto all were Jedburghs.

ii. According to Parker, Komer liked the phrase "attack on the infrastructure" because "he thought it sounded sexy."

iii. That afternoon Parker had "a brief conversation with General Loan," during which Loan rejected the ICEX proposal, claiming it infringed on Vietnamese sovereignty.

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