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The Phoenix Program
"An important work." —John Prados, author of President's Secret Wars "This definitive account of the Phoenix program, the US attempt to destroy the Viet Cong through torture and summary execution, remains sobering reading for all those trying to understand the Vietnam War and the moral ambiguities of America’s Cold War victory. Though carefully documented, the book is written in an accessible style that makes it ideal for readers at all levels, from undergraduates to professional historians." —Alfred W. McCoy, author of The Politics of CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade
484 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1990
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2758 people want to read
About the author
Douglas Valentine
18 books112 followersDouglas Valentine is the author of four books of historical nonfiction: The Hotel Tacloban, The Phoenix Program, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs, and The Strength of the Pack: The Personalities, Politics and Espionage Intrigues that Shaped the DEA. He is the author of the novel TDY, and a book of poems, A Crow's Dream. He is also the editor of the poetry anthology With Our Eyes Wide Open: Poems of the New American Century (West End Press, 2014). He lives with his wife, Alice, in Massachusetts.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 37 reviews
December 7, 2021
France has its own nasty history trying to pacify Vietnam from the mid 1800’s until the 1950’s. The US saw France committing war crimes and failing in Vietnam and, wanting in, spent over three billion dollars from 1950 to 1954 propping up the failed French strategy. Four million annually went to the coffers of Emperor Bao Dai, building up his Swiss bank accounts with US taxpayer dollars. After the French leave, Bao Dai is replaced by Washington boy toy Ngo Dinh Diem. Fake elections followed and 80% of the population followed the VC, not Diem. South Vietnamese leaders knew if they didn’t support these fake elections the secret police would find and torture them. The FBI and CIA play a large role in this and the ID program to identify communists. CIA involvement is ratcheted up in 1960 when Colby takes over the CIA. By the end of 1962, there are 12,000 US soldiers in Vietnam dropping napalm and Agent Orange on fellow humans (no doubt to spread “freedom and liberty” among the scarred survivors).
In South Vietnam, a CIA officer explained their program to Seymour Hersh, “They would kill a VC, spread eagle him, remove an eye and place it in the man’s back. They also cut ears off dead corpses and nailed the ears to doors to let people know “Big Brother was listening.” Or. throw two people out of a helicopter and watch the third person talk so fast, “by the time you get to your man, he’s talking so fast you got to pop the weasel just to shut him up. I guess you could say we wrote the book on terror.” They would hammer calling cards into people’s third eye with “our pistol butts”. “The third eye is the seat of consciousness for Buddhists, and this was a form of mutilation that had a powerful psychological effect”. The GVN was not a government, it was a military dictatorship. In 1962, every South Vietnam family had its photo taken just to better control the populace. The portrait went in a file with your fingerprints, and all info known about you. Enlisting South Vietnamese to help Americans betray their countrymen was hard, “Our problem was finding smart Vietnamese and Cambodians willing to die.”
By 1965, the strategy on bombing villages had led to a half million ex-villagers in camps, and another half-million wandering around homeless. The US had already sent 250,000 soldiers and felt it now needed twice as many soldiers to control this problem of its own making. Would it surprise you to know that “Vietnamese policemen were prohibited from arresting American soldiers”? The official Phoenix Program began in 1967 under CIA management and targeted Vietnamese civilians, not soldiers (violating part of the Geneva Conventions). Under the Phoenix Program, due process rarely existed. With quotas of 1,800 “neutralizations” per month, it was inevitable that people started turning in any street competitor or adversary. Do what I want, or I’ll turn you in as a VC. By design, the Phoenix Program sadly would only lose Vietnamese hearts and minds.
The recent rightward shift in American politics can be attributed partly to something the Nazi’s felt. The anger, sense of betrayal and bitterness felt by conservative Germans after German WWI defeat (which led to Hitler’s rise) is analogous to conservative US “patriots” angered by Vietnam and other obvious military defeats and wanting a US victory at all costs. This cool analogy came from an ex-CIA officer and was told to the author. Counterinsurgencies rely on informants; without them, you are dead. “Ohio Senator Stephen Young charged that the CIA hired mercenaries to disguise themselves as Vietcong and discredit Communists by committing atrocities.” He said, “It was alleged to me that several of them executed two village leaders and raped some women.” In a book called, Soldier, the author joined a group that “wiped out entire families and tried to make it look as though the VC themselves had done the killing.” Some informers were “paid” to point the finger. This was acknowledged by ex-servicemembers. One ex-high official said, “Recruit them, if you can’t, then defect them, if you can’t, then capture them, if you can’t, then kill them.” As one CIA officer explained, “We don’t have time to worry about our reputations, we have to win the goddamned thing!” Such short-sighted (all or nothing) thinking led to the US losing both the “thing” and our country’s moral reputation.
President Johnson couldn’t pull out once knowing that the South Vietnamese hated the GVN so much if the US pulled out, the GVN would fold and North Vietnam would win. By 1966, it was also clear the US could not win by “seizing pieces of territory.” The Phoenix Program failed because it was based on the belief that it could not lose. “There is no doubt that Phoenix, in its fledgling state was conceived and implemented by the CIA.” Village sweeps would often find nothing but old people (thanks to early warning to VC). Civilian interrogation was brutal with rooms out of a “medieval torture chamber” and “spasmodic screams of pain.” Then factor in the huge amount of corruption, with US tax dollars funding the lining of pockets of all the wrong sorts of people. In the Quang Ngai Province in 1967, eight hundred of the thirteen hundred employed cadres didn’t exist. Some province chiefs kept money tagged for village compensation for themselves. Young officers were the most brutal and were called the “young tiger enlisted men”. They were incarcerated criminals, in for rape, murder, theft and assault, yet bailed out by the CIA if they agreed to work for mercenary units. What could go wrong? The Minneapolis Tribune wrote, “Its methods are those of hired killers everywhere.” Tactics: One Phoenix favorite was taking out a village chief while making it look like the VC did it. Wipe out the king and you “disrupt the leadership”. The problem was Vietcong didn’t organize in hierarchies. Later the US found they often had wiped out leaders only guilty of being a liability to the informant. Sometimes a South Vietnamese leader was the target. “We never knew who the VC district chief was.” Setting up a district chief might take six months; “it was much easier to go out and shoot people – to setup an ambush.” Charming.
General Bruce Palmer had his own objections: “I do not 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.” One Vietnamese said, “Americans in black uniforms are the most terrible” and that the Phoenix purpose was “to avenge what the VC did during Tet. Phoenix’s Vietnamese employees worked to financially survive in the present moment; it was the American advisors who were alone obsessed with “eliminating Communists from the face of the earth.” Interesting South Vietnamese fact: police stations during the war had no walk-in policy because no one trusted the police. By 1968, Colby had to deny CIA involvement in the Phoenix Program by calling it Vietnamese. Another nail in the coffin for Phoenix Program was that it became common knowledge if you gave Phoenix great intel, you still wouldn’t get the reward money. Who doesn’t like to be both humiliated and stiffed? At some point CIA operators began asking deeper questions like, “Why did we insist on killing people instead of talking to them?” “It was obvious that we were bolstering a hopelessly corrupt government that had neither the support nor respect of the Vietnamese people”. “Meanwhile, other CIA officers were thinking the same thing.” Phoenix was “based on the assumption that nothing is worse than communism.” Phoenix “sought to accomplish through capture, intimidation, elimination, and assassination what the US up to this time was unable to accomplish through the …use of military power.” For a lovely example, Phoenix kills a guy and returns him to his own front lawn in pieces with his eyes, head and ears and other parts placed in different parts of the lawn. It’s like a standard Mafia scene only without the extortion and no one named Vinnie. Meanwhile, back in the world of morals, a Gallup Poll shows that 58% of all Americans disapprove of the war.
The CIA in Cambodia engineers a coup bringing in Lon Nol, so that Union Oil of California freely gets offshore Cambodian Oil. “The catalyst for the 1973 coup in Chile was a forged document” discovered by enemies of Allende. “Forged letters are a CIA specialty” –Jean Seberg, MLK, and Dan Ellsberg were its victims. The Kent State episode taught that “dissent was as dangerous in the United States as it was in South Vietnam.” The Phoenix Program had only come home to roost. William F. Buckley was a CIA asset. Phoenix was the art of “denying due process in order to create a democracy, of using terror and repression to foster freedom.” A Navy Seal broke down having to keep killing not enemy combatants, but their family and innocent bystanders as well. That guy later went AWOL. When the My Lai story came out, Time Magazine reported only 35% of Americans polled were upset by the massacre. So much for the Beatitudes, Sermon on the Mount, Golden Rule, International Law, or even the Geneva Convention in this flag waving land of freedom and liberty. “My Lai was a result of Phoenix.” A Vietnamese colonel said that the job of Phoenix was to “terrorize the civilian population into submission.” “Phoenix made it as easy to shoot a Vietnamese child as it was to shoot a sparrow in a tree.” Agent Bart Osborn said, “I never knew in the course of all those operations any detainee to live through his interrogation.” Our tax dollars at work.
After living in the tiger cages so long on Con Son Island with withered legs “they scuttled like crabs across the floor, begging for food, water, and mercy. Some interviewed cried. Others told of having lime buckets, which sat ready above each cage, emptied on them.” The cow cages were even worse; when you left there, you could no longer walk. Under Phoenix, abuses weren’t accidental but integral and intentional. One ex-Phoenix worker said, “The people in the villages had no concept of communism. They’d help the guerillas at night and the GVN during the day. We were helping the wrong side. The GVN had no real connection to the people.” “The VC had principles. The GVN was only corrupt.” Another Phoenix worker said, “It was necessary, sometimes, to cut throats and that it was also important, for psychological reasons, that sometimes it be made to look like the communists had done it.” How far did the Phoenix insanity go? “Pepsi was trying to move in on Coke, so the Coke distributor used his influence to have his rival’s name put on the Phoenix hit list.” There’s the Vietnam War in a nutshell; with such out of control corruption and not even a basic attempt to win hearts and minds, how could it have succeeded? One American (Bill Taylor) who successfully reported another American rolling grenades into a restaurant to kill everyone including women and children (page 360), was told he would go to jail if he reported the brazen murders to anyone else. And for showing moral qualms, by the military Taylor was then denied an upcoming silver star. It’s easy to understand 9/11 blowback when you add all the stories of brazen murders clearly by Americans that are intentionally hushed up by higher ups. Instead, let’s keep pretending those who we invade, only hate us for our freedoms (after taking theirs away).
Under Phoenix, everything was justifiable and every policy and war crime “was sanctioned by the US government.” William Colby denied all crimes to Congressman McCloskey by saying Phoenix officers might do something bad, but Phoenix itself wasn’t designed to do that. Army man Sid Towle was in a helicopter when they spotted an old man and a girl walking hand in hand down a street. The district chief said to the door gunner, “Kill them.” Towle tells the gunner, “No”. Towle gets in deep s--- from the province chief later because he made the district chief “lose face”. There’s your Vietnam War right there, either kill civilians for holding hands or “lose face”. The South Vietnamese knew the Phoenix program won’t work with their culture and, by targeting anyone, would end up a “shotgun method of population control.” The prosperity of American allies in South Vietnam did not depend on what they personally believed, it depended on them merely doing what they were told.
William Colby also admitted that the CIA had spent eight million dollars just in order to destabilize Allende in Chile. Meanwhile the CIA started “Department 5” in El Salvador in the 1970’s; anyone on its lists provided by informants were eliminated, “always by machete”. And who doesn’t want to die for a withheld reason, without due process, by multiple whacks from a dull machete? When told of two entire Salvadorian villages of about three hundred, all first interrogated then all murdered, a CIA agent said, “We know all that.” Reading this book made me wonder why the CIA isn’t openly opposed by the majority of US citizens. Why does the illusion of actual US diplomacy still exist? Why bother? Why even have US ambassadors since all we offer the world now is TR’s “big stick” (which recent victims will rarely even see coming)? We all pay taxes to the same rogue endless war state where the actions of its CIA and FBI (COINTELPRO) are shown to be unaccountable to law, the Constitution, and the wishes of its own people. It’s wonderful to go past the myths and in this book study what really happened in Vietnam, on behalf of the many silenced victims of the US Phoenix Program. Great book.
In South Vietnam, a CIA officer explained their program to Seymour Hersh, “They would kill a VC, spread eagle him, remove an eye and place it in the man’s back. They also cut ears off dead corpses and nailed the ears to doors to let people know “Big Brother was listening.” Or. throw two people out of a helicopter and watch the third person talk so fast, “by the time you get to your man, he’s talking so fast you got to pop the weasel just to shut him up. I guess you could say we wrote the book on terror.” They would hammer calling cards into people’s third eye with “our pistol butts”. “The third eye is the seat of consciousness for Buddhists, and this was a form of mutilation that had a powerful psychological effect”. The GVN was not a government, it was a military dictatorship. In 1962, every South Vietnam family had its photo taken just to better control the populace. The portrait went in a file with your fingerprints, and all info known about you. Enlisting South Vietnamese to help Americans betray their countrymen was hard, “Our problem was finding smart Vietnamese and Cambodians willing to die.”
By 1965, the strategy on bombing villages had led to a half million ex-villagers in camps, and another half-million wandering around homeless. The US had already sent 250,000 soldiers and felt it now needed twice as many soldiers to control this problem of its own making. Would it surprise you to know that “Vietnamese policemen were prohibited from arresting American soldiers”? The official Phoenix Program began in 1967 under CIA management and targeted Vietnamese civilians, not soldiers (violating part of the Geneva Conventions). Under the Phoenix Program, due process rarely existed. With quotas of 1,800 “neutralizations” per month, it was inevitable that people started turning in any street competitor or adversary. Do what I want, or I’ll turn you in as a VC. By design, the Phoenix Program sadly would only lose Vietnamese hearts and minds.
The recent rightward shift in American politics can be attributed partly to something the Nazi’s felt. The anger, sense of betrayal and bitterness felt by conservative Germans after German WWI defeat (which led to Hitler’s rise) is analogous to conservative US “patriots” angered by Vietnam and other obvious military defeats and wanting a US victory at all costs. This cool analogy came from an ex-CIA officer and was told to the author. Counterinsurgencies rely on informants; without them, you are dead. “Ohio Senator Stephen Young charged that the CIA hired mercenaries to disguise themselves as Vietcong and discredit Communists by committing atrocities.” He said, “It was alleged to me that several of them executed two village leaders and raped some women.” In a book called, Soldier, the author joined a group that “wiped out entire families and tried to make it look as though the VC themselves had done the killing.” Some informers were “paid” to point the finger. This was acknowledged by ex-servicemembers. One ex-high official said, “Recruit them, if you can’t, then defect them, if you can’t, then capture them, if you can’t, then kill them.” As one CIA officer explained, “We don’t have time to worry about our reputations, we have to win the goddamned thing!” Such short-sighted (all or nothing) thinking led to the US losing both the “thing” and our country’s moral reputation.
President Johnson couldn’t pull out once knowing that the South Vietnamese hated the GVN so much if the US pulled out, the GVN would fold and North Vietnam would win. By 1966, it was also clear the US could not win by “seizing pieces of territory.” The Phoenix Program failed because it was based on the belief that it could not lose. “There is no doubt that Phoenix, in its fledgling state was conceived and implemented by the CIA.” Village sweeps would often find nothing but old people (thanks to early warning to VC). Civilian interrogation was brutal with rooms out of a “medieval torture chamber” and “spasmodic screams of pain.” Then factor in the huge amount of corruption, with US tax dollars funding the lining of pockets of all the wrong sorts of people. In the Quang Ngai Province in 1967, eight hundred of the thirteen hundred employed cadres didn’t exist. Some province chiefs kept money tagged for village compensation for themselves. Young officers were the most brutal and were called the “young tiger enlisted men”. They were incarcerated criminals, in for rape, murder, theft and assault, yet bailed out by the CIA if they agreed to work for mercenary units. What could go wrong? The Minneapolis Tribune wrote, “Its methods are those of hired killers everywhere.” Tactics: One Phoenix favorite was taking out a village chief while making it look like the VC did it. Wipe out the king and you “disrupt the leadership”. The problem was Vietcong didn’t organize in hierarchies. Later the US found they often had wiped out leaders only guilty of being a liability to the informant. Sometimes a South Vietnamese leader was the target. “We never knew who the VC district chief was.” Setting up a district chief might take six months; “it was much easier to go out and shoot people – to setup an ambush.” Charming.
General Bruce Palmer had his own objections: “I do not 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.” One Vietnamese said, “Americans in black uniforms are the most terrible” and that the Phoenix purpose was “to avenge what the VC did during Tet. Phoenix’s Vietnamese employees worked to financially survive in the present moment; it was the American advisors who were alone obsessed with “eliminating Communists from the face of the earth.” Interesting South Vietnamese fact: police stations during the war had no walk-in policy because no one trusted the police. By 1968, Colby had to deny CIA involvement in the Phoenix Program by calling it Vietnamese. Another nail in the coffin for Phoenix Program was that it became common knowledge if you gave Phoenix great intel, you still wouldn’t get the reward money. Who doesn’t like to be both humiliated and stiffed? At some point CIA operators began asking deeper questions like, “Why did we insist on killing people instead of talking to them?” “It was obvious that we were bolstering a hopelessly corrupt government that had neither the support nor respect of the Vietnamese people”. “Meanwhile, other CIA officers were thinking the same thing.” Phoenix was “based on the assumption that nothing is worse than communism.” Phoenix “sought to accomplish through capture, intimidation, elimination, and assassination what the US up to this time was unable to accomplish through the …use of military power.” For a lovely example, Phoenix kills a guy and returns him to his own front lawn in pieces with his eyes, head and ears and other parts placed in different parts of the lawn. It’s like a standard Mafia scene only without the extortion and no one named Vinnie. Meanwhile, back in the world of morals, a Gallup Poll shows that 58% of all Americans disapprove of the war.
The CIA in Cambodia engineers a coup bringing in Lon Nol, so that Union Oil of California freely gets offshore Cambodian Oil. “The catalyst for the 1973 coup in Chile was a forged document” discovered by enemies of Allende. “Forged letters are a CIA specialty” –Jean Seberg, MLK, and Dan Ellsberg were its victims. The Kent State episode taught that “dissent was as dangerous in the United States as it was in South Vietnam.” The Phoenix Program had only come home to roost. William F. Buckley was a CIA asset. Phoenix was the art of “denying due process in order to create a democracy, of using terror and repression to foster freedom.” A Navy Seal broke down having to keep killing not enemy combatants, but their family and innocent bystanders as well. That guy later went AWOL. When the My Lai story came out, Time Magazine reported only 35% of Americans polled were upset by the massacre. So much for the Beatitudes, Sermon on the Mount, Golden Rule, International Law, or even the Geneva Convention in this flag waving land of freedom and liberty. “My Lai was a result of Phoenix.” A Vietnamese colonel said that the job of Phoenix was to “terrorize the civilian population into submission.” “Phoenix made it as easy to shoot a Vietnamese child as it was to shoot a sparrow in a tree.” Agent Bart Osborn said, “I never knew in the course of all those operations any detainee to live through his interrogation.” Our tax dollars at work.
After living in the tiger cages so long on Con Son Island with withered legs “they scuttled like crabs across the floor, begging for food, water, and mercy. Some interviewed cried. Others told of having lime buckets, which sat ready above each cage, emptied on them.” The cow cages were even worse; when you left there, you could no longer walk. Under Phoenix, abuses weren’t accidental but integral and intentional. One ex-Phoenix worker said, “The people in the villages had no concept of communism. They’d help the guerillas at night and the GVN during the day. We were helping the wrong side. The GVN had no real connection to the people.” “The VC had principles. The GVN was only corrupt.” Another Phoenix worker said, “It was necessary, sometimes, to cut throats and that it was also important, for psychological reasons, that sometimes it be made to look like the communists had done it.” How far did the Phoenix insanity go? “Pepsi was trying to move in on Coke, so the Coke distributor used his influence to have his rival’s name put on the Phoenix hit list.” There’s the Vietnam War in a nutshell; with such out of control corruption and not even a basic attempt to win hearts and minds, how could it have succeeded? One American (Bill Taylor) who successfully reported another American rolling grenades into a restaurant to kill everyone including women and children (page 360), was told he would go to jail if he reported the brazen murders to anyone else. And for showing moral qualms, by the military Taylor was then denied an upcoming silver star. It’s easy to understand 9/11 blowback when you add all the stories of brazen murders clearly by Americans that are intentionally hushed up by higher ups. Instead, let’s keep pretending those who we invade, only hate us for our freedoms (after taking theirs away).
Under Phoenix, everything was justifiable and every policy and war crime “was sanctioned by the US government.” William Colby denied all crimes to Congressman McCloskey by saying Phoenix officers might do something bad, but Phoenix itself wasn’t designed to do that. Army man Sid Towle was in a helicopter when they spotted an old man and a girl walking hand in hand down a street. The district chief said to the door gunner, “Kill them.” Towle tells the gunner, “No”. Towle gets in deep s--- from the province chief later because he made the district chief “lose face”. There’s your Vietnam War right there, either kill civilians for holding hands or “lose face”. The South Vietnamese knew the Phoenix program won’t work with their culture and, by targeting anyone, would end up a “shotgun method of population control.” The prosperity of American allies in South Vietnam did not depend on what they personally believed, it depended on them merely doing what they were told.
William Colby also admitted that the CIA had spent eight million dollars just in order to destabilize Allende in Chile. Meanwhile the CIA started “Department 5” in El Salvador in the 1970’s; anyone on its lists provided by informants were eliminated, “always by machete”. And who doesn’t want to die for a withheld reason, without due process, by multiple whacks from a dull machete? When told of two entire Salvadorian villages of about three hundred, all first interrogated then all murdered, a CIA agent said, “We know all that.” Reading this book made me wonder why the CIA isn’t openly opposed by the majority of US citizens. Why does the illusion of actual US diplomacy still exist? Why bother? Why even have US ambassadors since all we offer the world now is TR’s “big stick” (which recent victims will rarely even see coming)? We all pay taxes to the same rogue endless war state where the actions of its CIA and FBI (COINTELPRO) are shown to be unaccountable to law, the Constitution, and the wishes of its own people. It’s wonderful to go past the myths and in this book study what really happened in Vietnam, on behalf of the many silenced victims of the US Phoenix Program. Great book.
April 14, 2017
It's really hard to tell what I think of this book, because while Valentine doesn't seem like a complete conspiracy theory whackjob, he definitely doesn't go out of his way to establish his skeptical credibility - which is important for a book like this if you want to be taken seriously. That said, I haven't found anything he said in this book that was obviously false, and a surprising amount of it has checked out. The fishiest statement I've seen so far was the implication that Colston Westbrook induced Donald Defreeze to "assassinate prominent leaders in the black community", when that seems way out of whack with the much more credible story of the SLA situation presented in Jeffrey Toobin's
American Heiress
.
The other issue here is that it's just a list of shit that the US government or the Vietnamese government did during the run up to the Vietnam war and afterwards. It certainly sounded pretty fucked up that they were going around killing people like that, but it was not exactly put in context. Certainly during a war you kill people. Certainly fucked up regimes kill people. I am not at all surprised that the US government was involved in some sketchy shit, but I find it hard to gauge the scale of things.
I also feel like the book was flooded with almost too many details, and also too much repetition of the same basic themes, over and over again. My overall takeaway was that the CIA had a program where they identified people to be "neutralized", picked them up and then mostly killed them, sometimes after torture. He says this has become the template for future administrations, particularly in Iran and int he "war on terror", but it seems hard for there to be a playbook that's anything other than that if you are fighting some sort of war or quasi-war, particularly against a population that's integrated with civilians. What's the other option? Indiscriminate killing (also done, mind you)? The whole narrative doesn't quite hang together.
2.5 of 5 stars
The other issue here is that it's just a list of shit that the US government or the Vietnamese government did during the run up to the Vietnam war and afterwards. It certainly sounded pretty fucked up that they were going around killing people like that, but it was not exactly put in context. Certainly during a war you kill people. Certainly fucked up regimes kill people. I am not at all surprised that the US government was involved in some sketchy shit, but I find it hard to gauge the scale of things.
I also feel like the book was flooded with almost too many details, and also too much repetition of the same basic themes, over and over again. My overall takeaway was that the CIA had a program where they identified people to be "neutralized", picked them up and then mostly killed them, sometimes after torture. He says this has become the template for future administrations, particularly in Iran and int he "war on terror", but it seems hard for there to be a playbook that's anything other than that if you are fighting some sort of war or quasi-war, particularly against a population that's integrated with civilians. What's the other option? Indiscriminate killing (also done, mind you)? The whole narrative doesn't quite hang together.
2.5 of 5 stars
April 7, 2013
Douglas Valentine's book 'The Phoenix Program' gets the evolutionary information regarding this program correct. While there have been many books written about the 'Phoenix Program', Valentine's book is much more thoroughly researched than the other books. He has done his homework.
The program was, at the time and still is controversial. Back in the early days of the Vietnam War, Americans did not assassinate people for political reasons, or so we thought. Since those days, much has been admitted by the various intelligence agencies and our Government, about this practice. Today, information about 'black-ops' squads and their missions is readily accepted as being a necessary evil in War time.
When the Phoenix Program was in effect in Vietnam, MACV-SOG reported greatly reduced VC & NVA activities in the targeted AO. In other words, the program was successful. Was it a popular program? Obviously no, it was not. For very real political reasons, these missions were kept out of the main stream media, and in fact much of the program will never be known because, in the last few days of the South Vietnam Government, most of the Program's records were shredded, and are not recoverable.
All in all this book is the one book you should read if you want to get the information available today regarding the Phoenix Program, warts and all.
The program was, at the time and still is controversial. Back in the early days of the Vietnam War, Americans did not assassinate people for political reasons, or so we thought. Since those days, much has been admitted by the various intelligence agencies and our Government, about this practice. Today, information about 'black-ops' squads and their missions is readily accepted as being a necessary evil in War time.
When the Phoenix Program was in effect in Vietnam, MACV-SOG reported greatly reduced VC & NVA activities in the targeted AO. In other words, the program was successful. Was it a popular program? Obviously no, it was not. For very real political reasons, these missions were kept out of the main stream media, and in fact much of the program will never be known because, in the last few days of the South Vietnam Government, most of the Program's records were shredded, and are not recoverable.
All in all this book is the one book you should read if you want to get the information available today regarding the Phoenix Program, warts and all.
May 8, 2025
"This is a political war and it calls for discrimination in killing. The best weapon for killing would be a knife, but I'm afraid we can't do it that way. The worst is an airplane. The next worst is artillery. Barring a knife, the best is a rifle — you know who you're killing"
--USAID advisor Lt. Col John Paul Vann
War is an atrocity. Murder is an atrocity. The Phoenix Program, as documented in this book, is an atrocity. And unfortunately, it is one which undergirds the present national security state. As we've all learned since 9/11, the political terrorist does not fit neatly into the categories of Westphalian order. The terrorist does not wear a uniform or fight in ranks, so he is not a soldier. And while acts of violence are crimes, an ideology of violence is not, making judicial convictions difficult to obtain. Phoenix is about the gray area between war and crime, and America's complicity in both in Vietnam.
Writing about the Phoenix Program is difficult for several reasons. First is one of bureaucratic confusion over the 20 year stretch of the Second Indochina War, with dozens of paramilitary action groups and even more diversity in funding and organizations. The best thing to do is to avoid hair-splitting and unwarranted precision; the Phoenix Program was an effort to eliminate individual civilians in South Vietnam as communist agents, and support for communism as a political phenomenon. The second difficulty is one of official evasion. Much of the program is and was classified. Official testimony, particularly by CIA director William Colby, is full of obfuscation and outright lies. The third difficult is one of conspiracy. Valentine alleges that records have been doctored to make some of his sources look insane, to say that they were never even in Vietnam. Still, even discounting the conspiratorial, there is plenty in the public record and his on-the-record interviews to document Phoenix.
As Ngo Dinh Diem tightened his grasp on power in the late 1950s, the basic problem his regime confronted was one of unpopularity. Guerrilla warfare experts, most notably Ed Lansdale, suggested an aggressive program of counter-terror. Small forces would attack pro-Communist villages dressed in VC black pajamas and make public spectacles of murder. Assisted by intelligence from the rural grievance survey, these programs attempted to dislocate the Viet Cong. Of course, getting people for these units was a problem. The Viet Cong could rely on large numbers of ardent nationalists and Party members for their squads. The government turned to the dregs of society, Nung mercenaries and the sweepings of hardened criminals in Saigon jails.
As the war expanded after 1965, the Phoenix Program fell victim to the characteristic American mistake of the war: bad metrics and short-term careerism. Robert "Blowtorch" Komer used all his powers to organize a national system of Provincial Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) assassination teams, and district and province interrogation centers. Interrogation centers were rated on prisoners taken in and processed, frequently involving torture, while collating usable intelligence took a backseat. The overburdened South Vietnamese judicial system couldn't process thousands of detainees, who languished in jail on flimsy pretexts. US advisors varied wildly in quality, with the unconventional warfare experts of the early years pushed out in favor of junior counter-intelligence lieutenants and CIA case officers.
The Phoenix Program also suffered from the typical South Vietnamese weakness of public corruption. PRUs were used as the personal goon squads of province governors to eliminate business and political rivals. Diversion of materials into the black market and drug trafficking were rampant. The detention system became a source for bribes and shakedowns.
Money, primarily from the CIA black budget, poured into the system, but to little effect. There were dozens of agencies and informer networks, and rather than combining information, most officials assumed that the South Vietnamese internal security system was thoroughly riddled with Viet Cong agents (it was), and so acted unilaterally. One branch of Phoenix would assassinate a man which another branch of Phoenix had been cultivating as an internal source.
In my favorite "fractally fucked up" story from this book, Komer spent months pushing the phrase 'Viet Con Infrastructure', which got befuddlement from South Vietnamese partners to his endless frustration. This was because when translated, 'infrastructure' means roads, bridges, canals. This was not South Vietnamese incompetence, their secret police understood the enemy, but they called them 'cadres'.
Valentine was writing in the mid-1980s, at the height of dirty wars in Latin America. This book has aged like wine. Maybe Vann is right, and killing with a knife is better than killing from the air. I wouldn't know. But the creation of secret kill lists is anathema to liberty. The fact that when pressed, the American government and American people will take the kill lists over 'disorder' is an enduring indictment of the evils of empire, and how its corruption always returns home.
--USAID advisor Lt. Col John Paul Vann
War is an atrocity. Murder is an atrocity. The Phoenix Program, as documented in this book, is an atrocity. And unfortunately, it is one which undergirds the present national security state. As we've all learned since 9/11, the political terrorist does not fit neatly into the categories of Westphalian order. The terrorist does not wear a uniform or fight in ranks, so he is not a soldier. And while acts of violence are crimes, an ideology of violence is not, making judicial convictions difficult to obtain. Phoenix is about the gray area between war and crime, and America's complicity in both in Vietnam.
Writing about the Phoenix Program is difficult for several reasons. First is one of bureaucratic confusion over the 20 year stretch of the Second Indochina War, with dozens of paramilitary action groups and even more diversity in funding and organizations. The best thing to do is to avoid hair-splitting and unwarranted precision; the Phoenix Program was an effort to eliminate individual civilians in South Vietnam as communist agents, and support for communism as a political phenomenon. The second difficulty is one of official evasion. Much of the program is and was classified. Official testimony, particularly by CIA director William Colby, is full of obfuscation and outright lies. The third difficult is one of conspiracy. Valentine alleges that records have been doctored to make some of his sources look insane, to say that they were never even in Vietnam. Still, even discounting the conspiratorial, there is plenty in the public record and his on-the-record interviews to document Phoenix.
As Ngo Dinh Diem tightened his grasp on power in the late 1950s, the basic problem his regime confronted was one of unpopularity. Guerrilla warfare experts, most notably Ed Lansdale, suggested an aggressive program of counter-terror. Small forces would attack pro-Communist villages dressed in VC black pajamas and make public spectacles of murder. Assisted by intelligence from the rural grievance survey, these programs attempted to dislocate the Viet Cong. Of course, getting people for these units was a problem. The Viet Cong could rely on large numbers of ardent nationalists and Party members for their squads. The government turned to the dregs of society, Nung mercenaries and the sweepings of hardened criminals in Saigon jails.
As the war expanded after 1965, the Phoenix Program fell victim to the characteristic American mistake of the war: bad metrics and short-term careerism. Robert "Blowtorch" Komer used all his powers to organize a national system of Provincial Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) assassination teams, and district and province interrogation centers. Interrogation centers were rated on prisoners taken in and processed, frequently involving torture, while collating usable intelligence took a backseat. The overburdened South Vietnamese judicial system couldn't process thousands of detainees, who languished in jail on flimsy pretexts. US advisors varied wildly in quality, with the unconventional warfare experts of the early years pushed out in favor of junior counter-intelligence lieutenants and CIA case officers.
The Phoenix Program also suffered from the typical South Vietnamese weakness of public corruption. PRUs were used as the personal goon squads of province governors to eliminate business and political rivals. Diversion of materials into the black market and drug trafficking were rampant. The detention system became a source for bribes and shakedowns.
Money, primarily from the CIA black budget, poured into the system, but to little effect. There were dozens of agencies and informer networks, and rather than combining information, most officials assumed that the South Vietnamese internal security system was thoroughly riddled with Viet Cong agents (it was), and so acted unilaterally. One branch of Phoenix would assassinate a man which another branch of Phoenix had been cultivating as an internal source.
In my favorite "fractally fucked up" story from this book, Komer spent months pushing the phrase 'Viet Con Infrastructure', which got befuddlement from South Vietnamese partners to his endless frustration. This was because when translated, 'infrastructure' means roads, bridges, canals. This was not South Vietnamese incompetence, their secret police understood the enemy, but they called them 'cadres'.
Valentine was writing in the mid-1980s, at the height of dirty wars in Latin America. This book has aged like wine. Maybe Vann is right, and killing with a knife is better than killing from the air. I wouldn't know. But the creation of secret kill lists is anathema to liberty. The fact that when pressed, the American government and American people will take the kill lists over 'disorder' is an enduring indictment of the evils of empire, and how its corruption always returns home.
May 3, 2019
This book is full of detailed information and first-hand interviews with the CIA officials who ran the Phoenix Program, the U.S. government's "counter"-terror apparatus in Vietnam. Valentine even managed to get an interview with Phoenix program head and later Director of Central Intelligence, William Colby.
This may be the definitive work for understanding the U.S. war in Southeast Asia and its systematic lack of regard for the people of that region. It is a bit of an intimidating read but well worth the effort.
For those who are doubt the veracity of Valentine's incredible interviews, the recordings and transcripts are available online for free:
http://www.cryptocomb.org/Phoenix%20T...
This may be the definitive work for understanding the U.S. war in Southeast Asia and its systematic lack of regard for the people of that region. It is a bit of an intimidating read but well worth the effort.
For those who are doubt the veracity of Valentine's incredible interviews, the recordings and transcripts are available online for free:
http://www.cryptocomb.org/Phoenix%20T...
February 11, 2017
Extensive academic analysis of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. There are a lot of facts about the organizations and structures but the author tends to use these to legitimize some sensational accounts. Essential background, but remain skeptical of some of his sources and unsubstantiated claims. What really stood out to me was the similarities between the program and JSOC Operations in Iraq.
August 11, 2016
This book rocked my world. Everything I thought about the Viet Nam war, all those beliefs I had growing up, were blown away.
February 4, 2018
The author does not even know what SOG stood for. He is untrustworthy for this material.
May 15, 2022
I have an experience to book focused on Vietnam in a while. Vietnam is now over 50 years ago. The people who are now my age during the time of Vietnam have experienced a whole string of wars in the past 20 years. You can’t even keep track of all of them.
This book is pretty long and pretty boring. It is a little more academic and administrative than action oriented. At the end of the book it dips a little into the fall of Saigon in 1975. And then the epilogue dips into Central America in the 1980s.
The book is really about the internal and bureaucratic workings of the CIA. The organization that is hidden behind the activities of many people in many disguises. Because this book deals with many events that most people will not remember and that was intentionally kept away from the sight of most people even when it was happening, I am not quite sure what the benefit of the book is today evidently 30 years from when it was written. The book names names constantly. Mostly men who are you have never heard of. Many of them Vietnamese men whose names are strange and unknown.
But mostly this book just leaves me beyond angry and exceedingly powerless. Because you have to believe that there are men today just like the men described in this book who are similarly motivated and who believe that acting invisibly is necessary and appropriate to achieve their goals.
This book is pretty long and pretty boring. It is a little more academic and administrative than action oriented. At the end of the book it dips a little into the fall of Saigon in 1975. And then the epilogue dips into Central America in the 1980s.
The book is really about the internal and bureaucratic workings of the CIA. The organization that is hidden behind the activities of many people in many disguises. Because this book deals with many events that most people will not remember and that was intentionally kept away from the sight of most people even when it was happening, I am not quite sure what the benefit of the book is today evidently 30 years from when it was written. The book names names constantly. Mostly men who are you have never heard of. Many of them Vietnamese men whose names are strange and unknown.
But mostly this book just leaves me beyond angry and exceedingly powerless. Because you have to believe that there are men today just like the men described in this book who are similarly motivated and who believe that acting invisibly is necessary and appropriate to achieve their goals.
October 18, 2018
A good book on one of the more nefarious aspects of Vietnam. It gets pretty tedious as times, with all of the names and various office holders, but there are several very interesting personal accounts of individuals directly involved in Phoenix. Another cogent reminder of the messed up foreign policy of the U.S., and the evils accompanying intervention.
April 19, 2022
An interesting examination of a too often ignored part of the Vietnam War that has massively shaped the way police/intelligence counterinsurgency programs operate in the US.
Starting out with my criticisms of what overall I think is a useful and important book:
Unfortunately, Valentine focuses way too much on the peculiarities of the various individuals and personalities involved with the program for my purposes. I don't deny that the quirks of individuals played a role in the bureaucratic nightmare within the military/intelligence operations in the war, and that that played a role in how things played out. But what I'm looking to glean from the history of the program is the nature of its structure and how that has translated into modern police and counter insurgency programs, which is more or less independent of the individuals involved.
Valentine also takes the word of several mercenaries and SEALs (or at least claimed SEALs) a bit more credulously than I would. I don't doubt the general outlines of what he's discussing, or the horrifying particulars of the PRU "counter terror" operations, those are well documented. Which is why I think just reprinting the assertions of someone like Elton Manzione with no evidence that clearly sound like bullshit exagerrations (he literally calls himself a super soldier lmao) hurts the book unnecessarily. He also alleges that the SS Columbia Eagle incident was staged by the CIA, and I don't doubt they would have done something like that, they have done far worse. But since the two mutineers he purports to have been CIA agents, one spent spent 10 years in jail in the US and the other died in Cambodia, that's not exactly the end you'd expect to see for actual CIA agents, and he provides no evidence to back to claim up.
Those concerns aside, this is still a good and important book.
Valentine was able to secure interviews with many of the key personnel involved with Phoenix, and pulls from a variety of press and congressional record sources. Despite the issue with a few of his sources, and a few spots where claims could have been more rigorously cited, the book is full of verifiable, well sourced information on the program.
And boy is that damning information. The Phoenix Program, functionally, was the birthplace of the modern counterinsurgency programs the US has now spread across the world. The techniques of information gathering, political warfare, police/intelligence/military coordination used in Phoenix are the foundations upon which things like Operation Condor and even modern police Fusion Centers are built on. The modern panopticon inside the US, where the FBI, NSA, CIA, DIA, and various police and military intelligence programs cooperate to suppress dissent is all founded on the techniques of Phoenix.
While there may be more detail on the specifics of the bureacracy within the program than necessary, this book documents how the US has developed its techniques of "low intensity warfare" that it has used to crush and destroy liberation movements around the world. So even with its issues, I definitely recommend this book for anyone serious about grappling with the challenges posed to movements for liberation by these modern gestapo programs.
Starting out with my criticisms of what overall I think is a useful and important book:
Unfortunately, Valentine focuses way too much on the peculiarities of the various individuals and personalities involved with the program for my purposes. I don't deny that the quirks of individuals played a role in the bureaucratic nightmare within the military/intelligence operations in the war, and that that played a role in how things played out. But what I'm looking to glean from the history of the program is the nature of its structure and how that has translated into modern police and counter insurgency programs, which is more or less independent of the individuals involved.
Valentine also takes the word of several mercenaries and SEALs (or at least claimed SEALs) a bit more credulously than I would. I don't doubt the general outlines of what he's discussing, or the horrifying particulars of the PRU "counter terror" operations, those are well documented. Which is why I think just reprinting the assertions of someone like Elton Manzione with no evidence that clearly sound like bullshit exagerrations (he literally calls himself a super soldier lmao) hurts the book unnecessarily. He also alleges that the SS Columbia Eagle incident was staged by the CIA, and I don't doubt they would have done something like that, they have done far worse. But since the two mutineers he purports to have been CIA agents, one spent spent 10 years in jail in the US and the other died in Cambodia, that's not exactly the end you'd expect to see for actual CIA agents, and he provides no evidence to back to claim up.
Those concerns aside, this is still a good and important book.
Valentine was able to secure interviews with many of the key personnel involved with Phoenix, and pulls from a variety of press and congressional record sources. Despite the issue with a few of his sources, and a few spots where claims could have been more rigorously cited, the book is full of verifiable, well sourced information on the program.
And boy is that damning information. The Phoenix Program, functionally, was the birthplace of the modern counterinsurgency programs the US has now spread across the world. The techniques of information gathering, political warfare, police/intelligence/military coordination used in Phoenix are the foundations upon which things like Operation Condor and even modern police Fusion Centers are built on. The modern panopticon inside the US, where the FBI, NSA, CIA, DIA, and various police and military intelligence programs cooperate to suppress dissent is all founded on the techniques of Phoenix.
While there may be more detail on the specifics of the bureacracy within the program than necessary, this book documents how the US has developed its techniques of "low intensity warfare" that it has used to crush and destroy liberation movements around the world. So even with its issues, I definitely recommend this book for anyone serious about grappling with the challenges posed to movements for liberation by these modern gestapo programs.
November 29, 2018
Having been drafted into the Army in October 1966, subsequently enlisting into the regular army to have some control over my fate and then discarding any control to attend reserve officer candidate school, this information was particularly poignant.
Fortunately, events were favorable and I sat out the conflict in Europe, perhaps influenced by musical activities while in OIC, Officer Candidate School. I was a member of a combo that performed for our company, writing original parody material and covering popular songs. I was assigned to the same Brigade in Friedberg, Germany as Elvis Presley approximately ten years after, November 1967 thru April ‘69.
What I found most striking about Mr Valentine’s account of the Phoenix Program, and there were many exclamatory moments, was the central and most glaring of policy errors, apart from the inevitable atrocity of violence and war, and which could be summarized in the most basic of school boy training, and the veritable rock upon which the church I had come to know as a lad is built - the 2nd great axiom, “do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.” It was if the constitution, the amendments, the bill of rights had been abandoned here, for whatever reasons, and then this sickness exported abroad, in Vietnam, and elsewhere. Sadly, it appears, it has always been so, our great document, a fantasy, science fiction, a candle in the turbulent rumble and stampede of human nature, practiced, held aloft by fools, dreamers, outcasts, incapable of acquiescence, dealing with reality. Even the great Alexander was said to have sought the council of the Greek philosopher, Diogenes, whom I find the more appealing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dioge...
Fortunately, events were favorable and I sat out the conflict in Europe, perhaps influenced by musical activities while in OIC, Officer Candidate School. I was a member of a combo that performed for our company, writing original parody material and covering popular songs. I was assigned to the same Brigade in Friedberg, Germany as Elvis Presley approximately ten years after, November 1967 thru April ‘69.
What I found most striking about Mr Valentine’s account of the Phoenix Program, and there were many exclamatory moments, was the central and most glaring of policy errors, apart from the inevitable atrocity of violence and war, and which could be summarized in the most basic of school boy training, and the veritable rock upon which the church I had come to know as a lad is built - the 2nd great axiom, “do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.” It was if the constitution, the amendments, the bill of rights had been abandoned here, for whatever reasons, and then this sickness exported abroad, in Vietnam, and elsewhere. Sadly, it appears, it has always been so, our great document, a fantasy, science fiction, a candle in the turbulent rumble and stampede of human nature, practiced, held aloft by fools, dreamers, outcasts, incapable of acquiescence, dealing with reality. Even the great Alexander was said to have sought the council of the Greek philosopher, Diogenes, whom I find the more appealing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dioge...
December 7, 2016
The definitive book on the US terrorist Phoenix Program.
April 15, 2017
A really dark book about the evils of the CIA. e.g. killing entire villages suspected of having undesirable people.
I will reread it when I can stomach it.
I will reread it when I can stomach it.
April 16, 2025
Very thorough and packed with facts from beginning to end. 100s of interviews from the people involved in the program along with those impacted by it. This is not a fun reader but instead it’s for someone who is very interested in the Vietnam war. This book goes through each and every action that led to the deaths of thousands upon thousands of Vietnamese without proper due process. Violence, torture, maltreatment of prisoners, and violations of international law taken by our nation’s government in its failed attempt to recolonize Vietnam. This program not only killed thousands overseas but it helped Americans loose faith and trust in their nation’s government.
March 25, 2023
Great overview of what become the model for clandestine terrorism ised by the CIA and it’s shadow agencies, made up of the same gooey soup of spooks, mercenaries, hitmen, from the Gladio nets and anti-Castro Cubans to Iran Contra. As comprehensive and honest the book is in detailing the excesses of the US war machine, it still doesn’t capture the absolute brutality of the Phoenix program. Must read for McGowan readers
September 24, 2020
Too many acronyms
Found this book hard to follow partly because of too many acronyms. I think it needs many charts throughout the text to help the reader out. I could not tell what to think of Phoenix.
Found this book hard to follow partly because of too many acronyms. I think it needs many charts throughout the text to help the reader out. I could not tell what to think of Phoenix.
October 18, 2021
Confusing Reading
Unless you have spent time in Vietnam during the war, this may be a bit confusing. To many organizations competing against each other plus you have the Government involved throwing money around like theirs no tomorrow. No wonder we lost the the war !!!!
Unless you have spent time in Vietnam during the war, this may be a bit confusing. To many organizations competing against each other plus you have the Government involved throwing money around like theirs no tomorrow. No wonder we lost the the war !!!!
December 27, 2024
This book was clearly well researched and the ending was interesting where the author connected Phoenix in Vietnam to other CIA/military operations, but it was basically impossible to read. Much too dense and too many names, places, and acronyms to accurately keep track of.
January 1, 2018
I read CIA as Organized crime first. I liked that better. Had some of the same stories/information.
December 20, 2019
Confusing but the American government foreign policy always has been
July 16, 2020
Best book you've not ever read. Buy 2, give one to a good friend . If you're not convinced after the first chapter, shame on ya!
January 18, 2021
Given how hard it is to access CIA files or investigate crimes of the U.S. government and military, Valentine did remarkable journalistic work to write this book.
August 26, 2021
Not bad
The book has lots of stuff in it but I lost interest after 20 pages, but that's just me. It is very informative about secret CIA sneaky crap🤣🤣🤣🤣
The book has lots of stuff in it but I lost interest after 20 pages, but that's just me. It is very informative about secret CIA sneaky crap🤣🤣🤣🤣
August 31, 2022
the politics of the author is a bit on the left safaris politics are concerned. but the written story and facts are well executed.
January 19, 2023
Incredibly informative, but you will be using the glossary heavily throughout much of this book. Valentine seems to like saying the definitions of abbreviations once and never again.
June 16, 2024
Amazingly in-depth analysis of the program. Too technical at times.
October 7, 2024
Eye-opening.
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