CONSTRUCTIVE BLOODBATHS
IN VIETNAM
French and Diemist
Bloodbaths
Although the only pre-1965 bloodbath recognized in
the official doctrine is that which occurred in North Vietnam during its land
reform of the mid-5Os, there were others. In 1946, without warning, the French
bombarded Haiphong, killing an estimated 6000 civilians (108), probably greater
than the number of victims of the well publicized North Vietnamese land reform
episode (discussed below). But as part of the French recolonization effort, and
with Vietnam of little interest to the American leadership, this bloodbath was
ignored and has not been mentioned yet by President Nixon or Douglas Pike in
their historical reconstructions.
Diem’s bloodbaths also were impressive, but as they
were in the service of anti-Communism and the preservation of our client, Diem,
they fall into the constructive or benign categories. Under our tutelage, Diem
began his own “search and destroy” operations in the mid-and late 1950s, and
his prison camps and torture chambers were filled and active. In 1956 the
official figure for political prisoners in South Vietnam was fifteen to twenty
thousand. Even the Diem friend and adviser, P. J. Honey, concluded on the basis
of talks with former inmates, that the majority of these were “neither
Communists nor pro-Communists.” (109) The maltreatment and massacre of
political prisoners was a regular practice during the Diem period, although
these problems have become much more acute in recent years. (110) The 1958
massacre of prisoners in Diem’s concentration camp Phu Loi led to such an
outcry that P. J. Honey was dispatched to inquire into these events; and
according to Lacouture, Honey could not verify more that twenty deaths at Phu
Loi. (111)
“Pacification” as it developed from the earliest Diem
period consisted in “killing, or arresting without either evidence or trials,
large numbers of persons suspected of being Vietminh or ‘rebels.’ (112) This
resulted in many small bloodbaths at the local level, plus larger ones
associated with military expeditions carried out by Diem against the rural
population. One former Vietminh resistance fighter gave the following account
(113) of the Diemist terror and bloodbath in his village:
My village chief was a stranger to the village. He
was very cruel. He hunted all the former members of the Communist Party during
the Resistance to arrest and kill them. All told, he slaughtered fourteen Party
members in my village. I saw him with my own eyes order the killing of two
Party members in Mau Lam hamlet. They had their hands tied behind their backs
and they were buried alive by the militia. I was scared to death.
Another former resistance fighter in Central Vietnam
claimed that (114): In 1956, the local government of Quang Nam started a
terrorist action against old Resistance members. About 10,000 persons of the
Resistance Army were arrested, and a good many of them were slaughtered. I had
to run for my life, and I stayed in the mountains until 1960. I lived with
three others who came from my village. We got help from the tribal population
there.
The general mechanics of the larger bloodbaths were
described (115) by Joseph Buttinger, another former Diem supporter and advisor.
In June 1956 Diem organized two massive expeditions
to the regions that were controlled by the Communists without the slightest use
of force. His soldiers arrested tens of thousands of people... Hundreds,
perhaps thousands of peasants were killed. Whole villages whose populations
were not friendly to the government were destroyed by artillery. These facts
were kept secret from the American people.
According to Jeffrey Race, a former U.S. Army adviser
in South Vietnam who had access to extensive documentation on recent Vietnamese
history (116), the government terrorized far more than did the revolutionary
movement - for example, by liguidations of former Vietminh, by artillery and
ground attacks on “communist villages,” and by roundups of “communist
sympathizers.” Yet it was just these tactics that led to the constantly
increasing strength of the revolutionary movement in Long An from 1960 to 1965.
During the period 1955-60 the Vietminh mission was
political, and “though it used assassinations and kidnapping,” according to the
Pentagon Papers historians it “circumspectly avoided military operations.”
(117) A USMAAG report of July 1957 stated: “The Viet Cong guerillas and
propagandists ... are still waging a grim battle for survival. In addition to
an accelerated propaganda campaign, the Communists have been forming ‘front’
organizations ... seeking to spread the theory of ‘Peace and Co-existence.’ “
(118) On the other hand, Diem, at least through 1957, was having “marked
success with fairly sophisticated pacification programs in the countryside.”
(119) In a precise analogy with his sponsor’s pacification efforts of 1965-72,
“By the end of 1956, the civic action component of the GVN pacification program
had been cut back severely.” (120) The Pentagon historians refer to “Diem’s
nearly paranoid preoccupation with security,” which led to policies that
“thoroughly terrified the Vietnamese peasants and detracted significantly from
the regime’s popularity.” (121)
According to the Pentagon historians, “No direct
links have been established between Hanoi and perpetrators of rural violence.”
(122) The phrase “perpetrators of rural violence” is applied by the Pentagon
historians only to the Vietminh, who admittedly were concentrating on political
activities, and not to the Diem regime, which as they note was conducting a
policy of large-scale reprisals and violence, so extensive and undiscriminating
as to be counterproductive. It is not difficult to establish “direct links”
between Washington and perpetrators of the Diemist repression,incidentally.
Once again it is clear that “constructive” bloodbaths can never involve
“violence” for establishment propagandists and scholars; the word is reserved
for those seeking social change in an illegitimate direction and under improper
auspices.
Diem’s extensive use of violence and reprisals
against former Resistance fighters was in direct violation of the Geneva
Accords (Article 14c), as was his refusal to abide by the election proviso.
Diem had publicly repudiated the Accords in January, 1955, and the United
States gave him complete support until he became a liability in 1963. The
analogy with the later scenario and the Agreement of January, 1973 and its
surrounding events is, once again, depressingly apt. Thieu has plainly
expressed a similar disdain for the Accords. The constitutional structure of
his regime -- which remains “intact and unchanged” with full U.S. support,
Washington announces -- outlaws the second of the two parallel and equivalent
parties that are to achieve peaceful reconciliation in South Vietnam. And Thieu’s
open retaliatory activities and intentions are completely incompatible with
those parts of the 1973 Agreement that prohibit all acts of reprisal (Article
11), and require settlement through negotiations (Articles 10,12 and 13). But
then, the entire U.S. strategy and policy of militarization of and support for
its minority faction is incompatible with the commitment to nonintervention
(Article 4), selfdetermination for the South Vietnamese (Introduction and
Article 9), settlement of all disagreements “through negotiations, and
avoid(ance of) all armed conflict” (Article 10). In brief, even more clearly
than in 1954 the United States and its agent have entered into an agreement,
which is incompatible with their clearly stated aims and policies -- indeed,
with the very nature of the Saigon regime. (123)
The Overall U.S. Assault
as the Primary Bloodbath
In a very real sense the overall U.S. effort in South
Vietnam may be regarded as a deliberately imposed bloodbath. Military
escalation was undertaken to offset the well understood lack of any significant
social and political base for the elite military faction supported by the
United States. Despite occasional expressions of interest in the welfare and
free choice of the South Vietnamese, the documents made available as part of
the Pentagon Papers show that U.S. planners consistently regarded the impact of
their decisions on the Vietnamese at most as a peripheral issue, more commonly
as totally inconsequential. Nonintervention and an NLF takeover were
unacceptable for reasons that had nothing to do with Vietnamese interests, they
were based on an assumed adverse effect on our material and strategic
interests. It was assumed that an American failure would be harmful to our
prestige and would reduce the confidence of our satellite governments that we would
protect them from the winds of change. (124) The Thai elite, for example, might
“conclude that we simply could not be counted on” to help them in suppressing
local insurgencies. What is more, there was the constant threat of a
“demonstration effect” of real social and economic progress in China (125),
North Korea (126), and North Vietnam (127).
In spite of official reiterations of the alleged
threat of Chinese and North Vietnamese “expansionism,” it was recognized by
U.S. policy makers that a unified Communist Vietnam probably would have limited
ambitions itself, and would provide a barrier to any Chinese moves further
South. (128) It is not the threat of military expanison that official documents
cite as the justification for the huge assault on Vietnam. Rather, it was
feared that by processes never spelled out in detail, “the rot (might) spread
to Thailand” (129) and perhaps beyond. The “rot” can only be the Communist
“ideological threat” that is, the possibility of social and economic progress
outside the framework of American control and imperial interests, which must be
fought by American intervention against local Communist uprisings, whether or
not any armed attack is involved. This is the rot that might spread to Thailand
and beyond, inspiring Communist-led nationalist movements. But no skillful
ideologist would want such implications spelled out too clearly, to himself or
to others. Consequently, the central factors involved remain vague, their place
taken by propagandistic fabrications about aggression, threatened bloodbaths,
and our interest in self-determination.
It is important to bear in mind that these concepts
-- in fact, even the terminology in which they were expressed -- were not
invented by Vietnam planners. Rather, they merely adopted a standard mechanism
of proven effectiveness in mobilizing support for American intervention. When
Dean Acheson faced the problem of convincing the “leaders of Congress” (his
quotes) to support the Truman Doctrine in February, 1947, he outlined the
threat as follows: (130)
In the past eighteen months, I said, Soviet pressure
on the Straits, on Iran, and on northern Greece had brought the Balkans to the
point where a highly possible Soviet breakthrough might open three continents
to Soviet penetration. Like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the
corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to the east. It would also carry
infection to Africa through Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe through Italy
and France, already threatened by the strongest domestic Communist parties in
Western Europe.
As Acheson well knew, Soviet pressure on the Straits
and Iran had been withdrawn already and American control was firmly
established. Further, there was no evidence of Soviet pressure on Northern
Greece - on the contrary, Stalin was unsympathetic to the Greek guerrillas.
Still the rot might spread unless the U.S. undertook to rescue the terroristic
regime in Athens, and a “Soviet breakthrough” was a useful propaganda device
with which to mobilize domestic support. Acheson was concerned with the more
remote dominoes - the Middle East and the industrial societies that were
subject to the “threat” of internal democratic politics that might bring
Communist parties to power, thwarting American intentions. Similarly in the
case of Indochina, it was the potential exit from the Free World of Indonesia
with its rich resources, and industrial Japan, that obsessed American planners
as they contemplated the threat of falling dominoes and rotting apples.
As the Pentagon Papers show, the U.S. leadership knew
that in Vietnam the “primary sources of Communist strength in the South remain
indigenous,” with a corresponding “ability to recruit locally” and it was
recognized that the NLF “enjoys some status as a nationalist movement,” whereas
the military government “is composed primarily of technicians” lacking in
“positive support from various key segments of the populace” and determined “to
remain the real power in South Vietnam” without any “interference from the
civilians in the conduct of the war.” (131) The experienced pacification Chief
John Paul Vann, writing in 1965, put the matter more brutally (132):
A popular political base for the Government of South
Vietnam does not now ....... The existing government is oriented toward the
exploitation of the rural and lower class urban populations. It is, in fact, a
continuation of the French colonial system of government with upper class
Vietnamese replacing the French The dissatisfaction of the agrarian
population... is expressed largely through alliance with the NLF.
It was thus well known to American authorities in
1965 that we were fighting a nationalist mass movement in favor of a corrupt
oligarchy that lacked popular backing. The Vietnam war was fought to return
this nationalist mass movement to that measure of passivity and defeatism”
identified by Pool as necessary for “stability” in the Third World (see note
12). It must be brought under comprador military control such as we have
imposed or supported in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Bolivia, Greece,
Thailand, etc. The power to rationalize self-interest is great, however, and
some American leaders may have been able to keep their minds from being
cluttered with inconvenient facts. In so doing, they preserved the belief that
because we were the good guys our purposes must be benign and democratic and
must have some positive relationship to the interests of the South Vietnamese
people. Even the evidence that we were directing a large part of our military
effort to assaulting and uprooting the rural population of the South, already
overwhelming before the end of 1965, was easily assimilated into the Orwellian
doctrine of “defense against aggression.”
The decision to employ technologically advanced
conventional weaponry against the southern countryside made a certain amount of
sense on two assumptions: first, that the revolutionary forces were predominant
in the rural areas, so that the war had to be a true anti-population war to
force submission; and secondly, that the “demonstration effect” is important to
U.S. interests, and that our job was to terrorize, kill and destroy in order to
prove that revolution “doesn’t pay.” The first assumption was true in fact and
must be assumed to have contributed to the gradual emergence of a full-fledged
and semi-genocidal policy of search and destroy and unrestrained firepower. The
second assumption was evidently important in the thinking of high level U.S.
planners and advisers and also contributed to the evolution of policy. (133)
The character of U.S. policy was also influenced by
the gradual recognition of two additional facts: first, that the South
Vietnamese victims of “pacification” were essentially voiceless, unable to
reach U.S. or world opinion even as effectively as the North Vietnamese, (134)
with the result that the population being “saved” could be and has been treated
with virtually unrestrained violence (see the descriptions in the sections
which follow) The second fact was that relevant U.S. sensitivities (i.e those
of politically significant numbers of people) were almost exclusively related
to U.S. casualties. Both of these considerations encouraged the development of
an indiscriminate war of firepower, a war of shooting first and making
inquiries later; this would minimize U.S. casualties and have the spin-off
benefit of more thoroughly terrorizing the population. The enhanced civilian
casualties need not be reported -- the enormous statistical service of the
Pentagon always has had difficulty dredging up anything credible on this one
question -- or such casualties could be reported as “enemy” or “Vietcong.”
Years of familiarity with this practice has not caused the news services to
refrain from transmitting, as straight news, Saigon and Pentagon handouts on
“enemy” casualties.
Other factors were involved in making the entire U.S.
enterprise in Vietnam a huge bloodbath; faith in technological solutions,
racism reinforced by the corruption of “our” Vietnamese and the helplessness of
the victimized population, and the frustrations of the war. But essentially the
initial high level decisions to bomb freely, to conduct search-and-destroy
operations, and to fight a war against the rural population with virtually
unlimited force were the source of the bloodbath.
The immensity of the overall American-imposed
bloodbath can be inferred to some degree from the sheer volume of ordnance
employed, the nature of the weaponry, and the principles which have governed
their use. Through the end of 1971 over 3.9 million tons of bombs were dropped
on South Vietnam from the air alone - about double the total bomb tonnage used
by the United States in all theaters during World War II - with ground ordnance
also employed in historically unique volume. (135) A large fraction of the
napalm used in Indochina has been dropped in South Vietnam, an illustration of
the abuse visited on the voiceless South Vietnamese (in protecting them from
aggression”!) by the American command in collaboration with its client
government in Saigon Over 90% of the air strikes in South Vietnam were
classified officially as “interdiction” (136), which means bombing not carried
out in support of specific on-going military actions, but rather area bombing,
frequently on a programmed basis, and attacks on “what are suspected” to be “enemy
base camps, or sites from which a shot may have been fired.
One former military intelligence officer with the
American Division in South Vietnam told a Congressional Subcommittee: “Every
information report (IR) we wrote based on our sources’ information was
classified as (1) unverifiable and (2) usually reliable source ... The
unverified and in fact unverifiable information, nevertheless, was used
regularly as input to artillery strikes, harassment and interdiction fire (H
& I), B-52 and other air strikes, often on populated areas.” (137) In the
words of Army Chief of Staff General Johnson, “We have not enough information.
We act with ruthlessness, like a steamroller, bombing extensive areas and not
selected targets based on detailed intelligence.” (138) This is an expression
of indiscriminateness as a principle, and it is a perfect complement to the
other facets of a policy which was from the beginning semi-genocidal in purpose
and method, resting in large part on the fact that the civilian population has been
regarded as enemy or, at best, of no account.
The number of civilian casualties inflicted on South
Vietnam is unknown, but surely is underestimated by the Senate Subcommittee on
Refugees at 400,000 dead, 900,000 wounded and 6.4 million turned into refugees.
(139) Conservative as these figures are, however, they mean “that there is
hardly a family in South Vietnam that has not suffered a death, injury or the
anguish of abandoning an ancient homestead.” (140)
That the overall American assault on South Vietnam
has involved a huge bloodbath can also be inferred from the nature of
“pacification,” both in general concept and in the details of implementation.
We shall not here go into the general concept and the ways in which it was
applied and was rapidly transformed into the wholesale killing and forced
transfer of civilians. (141) We shall confine ourselves to an examination of
three cases: a specific operation by U.S. forces over a brief time period; a
series of atrocities perpetrated over a six or seven-year period by our South
Korean mercenary allies,with the certain knowledge and tacit acceptance of U.S.
authorities; and the Phoenix program of extra-legal counter terror against
enemy civilians. These are by no means the only blood baths that typify the constructive
mode, but they are offered as illustrative and deserving of greater attention.
“Operation Speedy
Express”
Operation Speedy Express was only one of a great many
major pacification efforts carried out by the U.S. command. It is unusual,
apparently, only in that it was studied and reported by a competent and
experienced correspondent, Kevin P. Buckley of Newsweek. He examined the
military and hospital records of the Operation and interviewed South Vietnamese
inhabitants and pacification officials of the Mekong Delta province of Kien
Hoa, the site of Speedy Express. In the latter part of 1968 the American
command launched an “accelerated pacification program” to wrest territory from
the NLF and place it back under the “control” of Saigon. “Operation Speedy
Express” was the code name for a six-month campaign by the U.S. Ninth Infantry
Division under that program. The campaign was carried out in a heavily
populated Delta province that had traditionally supported the NLF. Buckley
reported (142):
All the evidence I gathered pointed to a clear
conclusion: a staggering number of noncombatant civilians - perhaps as many as
5,000 according to one official - were killed by U.S. fire power to “pacify”
Kien Hoa. The death toll there made the My Lai massacre look trifling by
comparison... The Ninth Division put all it had into the operation. Eight
thousand infantrymen scoured the heavily populated countryside, but contact
with the elusive enemy was rare. Thus, in its pursuit of pacification, the
division relied heavily on its 50 artillery pieces, 50 helicopters (many armed
with rockets and mini-guns) and the deadly support lent by the Air Force. There
were 3,381 tactical air strikes by tighter bombers during “Speedy Express”...
“Death is our business and business is good,” was the slogan painted on one
helicopter unit’s quarters during the operation. And so it was. Cumulative
statistics for “Speedy Express” show that 10,899 “enemy” were killed. In the
month of March alone, “over 3,000 enemy troops were killed... which is the
largest monthly total for any American division in the Vietnam war,” said the
division’s official magazine. when asked to account for the enormous body
counts, a division senior ofticer explained that helicopter crews often caught
unarmed “enemy” in open fields. But Vietnamese repeatedly told me that those
“enemy” were farmers gunned down while they worked in their rice tields...
There is overwhelming evidence that virtually all the Viet Cong were well
armed. Simple civilians were, of course, not armed. And the enormous
discrepancy between the body count (i.e 11,000) and the number of captured
weapons (i.e 748) is hard to explain - except by the conclusion that many
victims were unarmed innocent civilians... The people who still live in
pacified Kien Hoa all have vivid recollections of the devastation that American
firepower brought to their lives in early 1969. Virtually every person to whom
I spoke had suftered in some way. “There were 5,000 people in our village
before 1969, but there were none in 1970,” one village elder told me. “The
Americans destroyed every house with artillery, air strikes, or by burning them
down with cigarette lighters. About 100 people were killed by bombing, others
were wounded and others became refugees. Many were children killed by
concussion from the bombs which their small bodies could not withstand, even if
they were hiding underground.” Other officials, including the village police
chief, corroborated the man’s testimony. I could not, of course, reach every
village. But in each of the many places where I went, the testimony was the
same: 100 killed here, 200 killed there. One old man summed up all the stories:
“The Americans killed some VC but only a small number. But of civilians, there
were a large number killed”
Although Buckley states that pacification chief John
Paul Vann found that Speedy Express had alienated the population (a profound
discovery), he reports that the Army command considered its work well done.
After all, “the ‘land rush’ succeeded. Government troops moved into the ravaged
countryside in the wake of the bombardments, set up outposts and established
Saigon’s dominance of Kien Hoa.” The commander of the unit responsible for this
achievement was promoted with an accolade from General Abrams, who felt that
“the performance of this division has been magnificent.” On another occasion,
when awarding him the Legion of Merit, Abrams referred to George Patton III,
the man most noted for converting “pacification” into plain killing, as “one of
my finest young commanders.” (143)
The 43-plus My Lais of
the South Korean Mercenaries
South Korean mercenary forces were contracted for and
brought into South Vietnam by the Johnson Administration in 1965, and they
remained there into 1973. News reports in 1965 and 1966 described these South
Korean forces as “fierce” and “effective,” but only in January 1970 was it
disclosed publicly that their effectiveness rested on a policy of simple and
deliberate murder of South Vietnamese civilians. At that time it was reported that
they had carried out a policy of simply shooting one of ten civilians in
villages which they occupied. (144)
Not until 1972, however, did the scale of South
Korean civilian murders become public knowledge (although still of little
interest to the mass media these murders fall into the “constructive”
category). (145) Two Vietnamese-speaking Quakers, Diane and Michael Jones,
carried out an intensive study of a portion of the area that had been occupied
by the South Koreans for half a decade. To summarize their findings (146):
(a) The South Korean “rented soldiers,” as the South
Vietnamese describe them, committed a whole series of My Lai-scale massacres,
twelve separate massacres of 100 or more civilians having been uncovered in the
Jones’ study. These soldiers carried out dozens of other massacres of twenty or
more unarmed civilians, plus innumerable isolated killings, robberies, rapes,
tortures, and devastation of land and personal property. The aggregate number
of known murders by the South Koreans clearly runs into many thousands; and the
Joneses examined only a part of the territory “pacified” by these “allied”
forces. (b) The bulk of the victims of these slaughters were women, children,
and old people, as draft-age males had either joined the NLF, been recruited
into the Saigon army, or were in hiding. (c) These mass murders were carried
out in part, but only in part (147), as reprisals for attacks on the South
Korean forces, or as a warning against such attacks. Briefly, the civilians of
the entire area covered by the South Koreans served as hostages; if any
casualties were taken by these mercenaries, as by an exploding mine, they often
would go to the nearest village and shoot twenty, or 120, unarmed civilians.
This policy is similar to that employed by the Nazis, but South Korean hostage
murders of civilians have been relatively more extensive and undiscriminating
than those perpetrated by the Nazis in Western Europe during World War II,
considering the relative scale of the occupation. (d) These mass murders were
carried out over an extended time period, and into 1972, with certain knowledge
by U.S. authorities. (148) There is no evidence that U.S. officials made any
effort to discourage this form of “pacification” or that any disciplinary
action was ever taken in response to these frequent and sustained atrocities.
In fact, there is reason to believe the South Korean policy of deliberate
murder of civilians was not merely known and tolerated but was looked upon with
favor by some U.S. authorities. Frank Baldwin, of Columbia University’s East
Asia Institute, reports that the Korean policy was “an open secret in Korea for
several years.” American officials admitted to Baldwin that these accounts were
true, “sometimes with regret, but usually with admiration.” (149) (e) In its
request for $134 million for fiscal 1973 to support the continued presence of
South Korean troops in Vietnam (raising the 1966-73 total to $1.76 billion),
the DOD pointed out to Congress that the South Korean troops “protect” an important
section of South Vietnam. It is a fact that the South Koreans have “protected”
and given “security” (150) to people in South Vietnam in precisely the
Orwellian- official American sense that Nixon, Westmoreland, and the
pacification program in general have done.
The acceptability of this form of pacification and
the now well established and consistent propensity of American forces and each
of their “allies” -- not merely South Koreans (151) -- to carry out systematic
acts of violence against South Vietnamese civilians, suggest that such
atrocities and bloodbaths must be “built in” to the American effort and
mission, they must be an integral part of “pacifying” a poor, virtually
defenseless, but stubbornly uncooperative, foreign population.
Phoenix: A Case Study of
Indiscriminate “Selective” Terror
With unlimited resources available for killing, one
option fitfully pursued by the American invaders of Vietnam -- supplementing
bombing, search and destroy, and the organization of forces of mercenaries --
has been selective counter-terror. If the NLF had a political infrastructure
that was important to its success, and if their own terror against the Saigon
political machine effectively had made a shambles of the latter, why not
duplicate and better their program of selective force? By doing so we would, as
in providing them with the South Koreans and Ninth Division, help “to protect
the Vietnamese people against terrorism” (to quote William Colby) (152), and
thus bring “security” to the peasantry, threatened by the terror employed by
their sister1 brothers and other relatives among the NLF cadres. Phoenix was a
late-comer on the stage of selective counter-terror; it illustrates as well as
any program, the inability of the American leadership to grasp the reasons for
the NLF successes and the failures of Saigon. It points up the ease with which
American programs are absorbed into (and add further corrupting impetus to) a
system of rackets and indiscriminate torture and killings, and the willingness
of the U.S. political/military bureaucracy actively to support and rationalize
the most outlandish and brutal systems of terror. The defense of this
degenerate program by Komer, Colby, Sullivan and other American officials is
also unusual in the quality of the rationalizations offered for U.S.-planned
and financed bloodbaths.
The immediate predecessor (153) of the Phoenix
program was the Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation (ICEX) programs
initiated in mid-1967 (154) under the direction of Westmoreland and Komer, and
involving CIA, American civilian and military personnel, and the Saigon
military-intelligence-police apparatus. Early internal directives describe the
Phoenix program as a U.S. effort of advice, support, and assistance to the
Saigon Phung Hoang program. Later modifications delete reference to “Phoenix”
and refer merely to the Saigon Phung Hoang program, in line with the approach
of “keep(ing) the GVN foremost in the picture presented to its own people and
the world at large.” (155) On March 4,1968 the U.S. Secretary of Defense
recommended that “Operation Phoenix which is targetted (sic) against the Viet
Cong must be pursued more vigorously in closer liaison with the U.S.” while
“Vietnamese armed forces should be devoted to anti-infrastructure activities on
a priority basis.” (156)
After Westmoreland’s and Komer’s ICEX became Phoenix
the coordinated U.S.-Saigon intelligence-military-police program succeeded in
“neutralizing” (157) some 84,000 “Viet Cong infrastructure,” with 21,000
killed, according to one set of reported official figures (158). The Saigon
government claims that, under Phoenix, 40,994 suspected enemy civilians were
killed, from its inception in August 1968 through the middle of 1971. (159)
Just who these victims have been is not entirely clear to William E. Colby,
former head of Civil Operations and Rural Development (sic) Support Program
(CORDS), and now up for confirmation to head the CIA. Colby told a
Congressional Committee that he has “never been highly satisfied with the
accuracies of our intelligence efforts on the Vietcong Infrastructure,”
conceding that “larger numbers” than the thousand suggested to him by
Congressman Reid “might have been improperly identified” as Vietcong
Infrastructure in the course of Phoenix operations. (160) However, he assured
the Committee that things are steadily “improving” (Colby’s favorite word), and
while we have not yet reached perfect due process or comprehensive knowledge of
VC Infrastructure, Phoenix has actually improved the quality of U.S.-Saigon counter
terror by its deep concern with accurate intelligence and its dedication to
“stern justice.” (161) Most of the Vietnamese killed, Colby assured the
Committee, were killed “as members of military units or while fighting off
arrest.” (162) Conveniently these dead enemy have usually had incriminating
documents on their person that permits identification. (“What they are
identified from is from documents on the body after a fire fight.”) (163) Thus
although things are not perfect South Vietnam is not the “pretty wild place” it
was at one period “when the government was very unstable.” Though there are
“unjustifiable abuses,” “in collaboration with the Vietnamese authorities we
have moved to stop that sort of nonsense.” (164)
Colby’s suggestions that intelligence of VC
Infrastructure has improved, that such intelligence has been relevant to
Phoenix operations, and that deaths have occurred mainly in combat are
contradicted by all nonofficial testimony on the subject. The program initially
was motivated by the belief that U.S. forces were developing much valuable
information that was not being put to use. (165) Actually, much of this
intelligence was unverified and unverifiable even in the best of circumstances.
And Komer and his colleagues were aware of the fact that the “primary interest”
of Saigon officials “is money,” (166) with the potential, therefore, that a
counter-terror program using Saigon machinery would be corrupt, indiscriminate,
and ineffective, except for the “spinoff’ from mass terror. Potential
corruption would be further heightened under a body quota system, which was
quickly installed and subsequently enlarged with specific prize money of
$11,000 offered for a live VCI and half that for a dead one. Corruption would
be maximized by using dubious personnel to carry out the assassinations. And,
in fact, the actual assassinations were carried out regularly by former
criminals or former Communists recruited and paid by the CIA, by CIA-directed
teams drawn from ethnic minorities, American military men, and Nationalist
Chinese and Thai mercenaries. An American IVS volunteer reports picking up two
hitchhikers in the Mekong Delta, former criminals, who told him that by
bringing in a few bodies now and then and collecting the bounty, they can live
handsomely. (167)
The quota system is applied at many levels. Michael
J. Uhi, a former military intelligence (MI) officer, testified that a Phoenix
MI team “measured its success ... not only by its ‘body count’ and ‘kill ratio’
but by the number of CD’s (civil detainees) it had captured... All CD’s,
because of this command pressure ... were listed as VCI. To my knowledge, not
one of these people ever freely admitted being a cadre member. And again,
contrary to Colby’s statement, most of our CD’s were women and children...”
(168) Quotas were also fixed for local officials in an effort to produce
“results” on a wider front; and as one American adviser noted, “They will meet
every quota that’s established for them.”(169)
Torture, a long-standing policy of the Saigon regime
is greatly encouraged by quotas and rewards for “Vietcong Infrastructure.” A
sardonic saying favored by the Saigon police is: “If they are innocent beat
them until they become guilty.” (170) According to Uhl, “Not only was there no
due process. ..but fully all detainees were brutalized and many were literally
tortured.” (171) A woman interviewed by Tom Fox after her release from a Saigon
interrogation center in July 1972 claimed that more than 90% of those arrested
and taken to the center were subjected to torture. (172) K. Baron Osborn, who
served in a covert program of intelligence in Vietnam, not only testified to a
wide variety of forms of torture used by U.S. and Saigon personnel, but also
made the startling claim that “I never knew an individual to be detained as a
VC suspect who ever lived through an interrogation in a year and a half, and
that included quite a number of individuals.” (173)
In some respects the Phoenix system has been biased
in favor of the PRC and its cadres and against the ordinary citizen. The former
are more elusive and better able to defend themselves and sometimes have
established a modus vivendi with local officials. But Phoenix can be “widely
used to arrest and detail non-Communist dissidents,” according to Theodore Jacqueney,
a former AID and CORDS employee in Vietnam. (174) The Phoenix program also
serves for personal vendettas, or for obtaining cash rewards for producing
bodies. Meeting quotas is always possible in Free Vietnam by simply committing
violence against the defenseless.
A system of terror-run-amok is facilitated by the
incompetence and chronic irrelevance of the “intelligence” system that Colby
claimed to be “improving” and which gave him hopes of “stern justice.”
According to Michael Uhi, Colby’s claim of increasingly adequate intelligence
as a basis for the huge number of Phoenix victims simply reflects Colby’s
“general lack of understanding of what is actually going on in the field.”
(175) According to Uhi, the MI groups in South Vietnam never had the capacity
to do such a major intelligence job. “A mammoth task such as this would greatly
tax even our resourceful FBI, where we have none of the vast cross-cultural
problems to contend with.” As noted earlier, in the reality of practice (176),
We had no way of determining the background of these
sources, nor their motivation for providing American units with information. No
American in the team spoke or understood Vietnamese well enough to
independently debrief any “contact.” ... Our paid sources could easily have
been either provocateurs or opportunists with a score to settle. Every
information report (IR) we wrote based on our sources’ information was
classified as (1) unverifiable and (2) usually reliable source. As to the
first, it speaks for itself; the second, in most cases was pure rationale for
the existence of the program. The unverified and in fact unverifiable
information, nevertheless, was used regularly as input to artillery strikes,
harassment and interdiction fire (H& I), B52 and other air strikes, often
on populated areas.
K. Barton Osborn testified, also, that the Phoenix
bureaucracy unofficially encourage killing on the spot rather than going
through the required administrative procedures: (177)
After all, it was a big problem that had to be dealt
with expediently. This was the mentality. This carries a semi-official or
semi-illegal program to the logical conclusion that I described here. It became
a sterile depersonalized murder program... There was no cross-check; there was
no investigation; there were no second opinions. And certainly not whatever
official modus operandi had been described as a triple reporting system for
verification. There was no verification and there was no discrimination. It was
completely indiscriminate and at best the individuals were either able to
escape capture and neutralize them or interrogated and let go.
The indiscriminateness of the Phoenix murders was so
blatant that in 1970 one senior AID adviser of ‘the Danang City Advisory Group
told former AID employee Theodore Jacqueney that he refused ever to set foot in
the Province Interrogation Center again, because “war crimes are going on
there.” (178) A UPI report of November 1971 cites another U.S. adviser, who
claims that local officials in the Delta decided simply to kill outright 80% of
their “suspects,” but American advisers were able to convince them that the
proportion should be reduced to 50%. (179) This is the “selective”
counter-terror by which the United States and its client have been bringing
“security” to the benighted.
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