The Phoenix Program — to the extent that anybody has even heard of it anymore — is perhaps the most controversial and most misunderstood operation of the Vietnam War. It is usually portrayed as a covert assassination program that featured Green Berets leading indigenous teams out into the Vietnamese countryside to slaughter Viet Cong cadre in their sleep. Mel Gibson’s Martin Riggs character in Lethal Weapon was portrayed as a Phoenix Program veteran, with the strong implication that he was half-crazed in part because of all the nasty shit he got up to in country.
Well… there certainly was “wet work” done, and some of it was questionable. But the Phoenix Program was broader and deeper than that — an intelligence-based, data-driven counterinsurgency program that identified and dismantled Viet Cong Infrastructure so effectively that it verged on completely crippling revolutionary insurgency as a tactic and strategy in the South, forcing the North Vietnamese to go over to conventional operations.
In an excellent white paper for the Army University Press, Dale Andrade and Lt. Col. (Ret.) James H. Wilbanks write:
Phoenix emphasized four aspects in its attack on the VCI:
- Decentralization of the old ICEX command and control (C2) apparatus by placing most of the responsibility on the provinces and districts. This included building intelligence-gathering and interrogation centers (called district intelligence and operations coordinating centers, or DIOCCs) in the regions where the VCI operated.
- Establishment of files and dossiers on suspects, and placing of emphasis on “neutralizing” (capturing, converting, or killing) members of the VCI.
- Institution of rules by which suspected VCI could be tried and imprisoned.
- Emphasis on local militia and police rather than the military as the main operational arm of the program.
Between 1968 and 1972 Phoenix neutralized 81,740 VC, of whom 26,369 were killed. This was a large piece taken out of the VCI, and between 1969 and 1971 the program was quite successful in destroying the VCI in many important areas. However, these statistics have been used to suggest that Phoenix was an assassination program. It was not. People were killed, yes, but statistics show that more than two-thirds of neutralized VC were captured, not killed. Indeed, only by capturing Viet Cong could Phoenix develop the intelligence needed to net additional Viet Cong. Abuses did occur, such as torture, which U.S. advisers could not always halt, but most advisers understood the adage that dead Viet Cong do not tell about live ones.
Phoenix was also accused of sometimes targeting civilians, because the VCI did not wear military uniforms. But the VCI was an integral—indeed paramount—aspect of the insurgency and a legitimate target. We Americans should have done a better job of pointing this out to critics…
Counterinsurgency team with the Phoenix Program in South Vietnam, 1968. (Photo Credit: Central Intelligence Agency / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain)
Although the anti-infrastructure program did not crush the VCI, in combination with other pacification programs it probably did hinder insurgent progress. In Vietnam, with its blend of guerrilla and main-force war, this was not enough to prevail, but it seems clear that without Phoenix, pacification would have fared far worse. Communist accounts after the war bear this out. In Vietnam: A History, Stanley Karnow quotes the North Vietnamese deputy commander in South Vietnam, General Tran Do, as saying that Phoenix was “extremely destructive.” Former Viet Cong Minister of Justice Truong Nhu Tang wrote in his memoirs that “Phoenix was dangerously effective” and that in Hau Nghia Province west of Saigon, “the Front Infrastructure was virtually eliminated.” Nguyen Co Thach, who became the Vietnamese foreign minister after the war, claimed that “[w]e had many weaknesses in the South because of Phoenix.”
BK Marshall, a MACV-SOG veteran and author, produces high-quality YouTube content on the covert war in Vietnam, and I found his piece on Phoenix excellent — clear-eyed and honest.
Gary Miller says
I am quite confident that my CIA Psychologist father was involved in the ntelligence gathering and interrogation training and guidelines for this operation, Jim. His philosophy went even further than “dead VC tell no tales” to interrogators gaining some trust with the prisoners through giving small rewards for small information (food, drink, cigs, priveleges) to large rewards (protection or sanctuary for family) for big crucial information nuggets. The idiot consultants hired to run the black sites in the Middle East apparently never learned that lesson that torture and death does not yield truth.
JimC says
Thanks for weighing in on this Gary. Great to hear from you.
Gary Miller says
…[addendum] Bill lost vision in one eye and was having issues with the other (suspected tropical virus) so they shipped us back stateside mid 1968.
Matthew Ilseman says
Just about everything about the Vietnam War was controversial.
I sent you a review of the Marvel Comic The ‘Nam about the war. One issue was fairly critical of the Phoenix program though it does mention that it was effective if nothing else in some supplementary materials in the omnibus.
deuce says
Michael Golden did some great art on that.
Matthew Ilseman says
Yes. That’s an understatement.
deuce says
While I loathe Communism, I don’t think fighting a war in Vietnam–whatever the outcome–was in America’s best interests. That said, a lot of fine soldiers fought over there and their accomplishments and sacrifices should never be forgotten.
JimC says
That is precisely how I feel about it. I was strongly opposed to the 2003 invasion of Iraq — and editorialized against it at time when 72 percent of the American populace supported the action. I thought it was a wrong move for a variety of reasons, not least of which was a belief that it would turn into an insurgency. Opposition to the war did not mean I had any sympathy for the jihadi savages who poured in and mobilized under that sadistic POS Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and I am full of admiration for the men and women who went after al Qaeda in Iraq at a furious tempo, gathering and exploiting intelligence probably more effectively than ever before in military history.
That seems contradictory and even hypocritical to some folks — but I’m pretty sure that everybody around this campfire gets it instinctively.
deuce says
“I was strongly opposed to the 2003 invasion of Iraq…”
You, me and Johnny Cash.
I supported the Aghan operation right up until the moment Baby Bush said that Bin Laden was ‘irrelevant’. At that moment, I knew we were going for ‘regime change’. We should’ve been in n’ out of there. There is no ‘reforming’ the Afghans.
JimC says
100 percent. There was something hinky about the bin Laden thing at Tora Bora.
John M. says
You were on the right side of that one in 2003, Jim, and I was on the wrong one.
I think I mentioned this here a month or so ago, but I feel like I’m living an awful déjà vu with the Iran war this year, with all the same Iraq war justifications trotted out, right down to “We have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.” (Spoiler alert: We ARE fighting them over here, thanks in no small part to the Iraq-era Invade the World/Invite the World decisionmaking of Bush and 10,000 other of our erstwhile elites.)
Setting aside the horrible squandering of life for a moment, imagine what we could have done with all that MONEY. Imagine how much more united we could have been as a country. Ugh.
SQUIRE RUSTICUS says
Supposedly my grandfather was an original trainer of the first class for Phoenix with Mitchell Livington Werbell, whom he served in China with OSS 1945-46. Later grandfather was with Phoenix at Phu Bon and Bien Hoa.
Australian Barry Patterson “Tigerman”, mentions CIA pressuring him to turn his montagnard soldiers into Phoenix like PRU in the early 60’s. I think grandfather and Stu Methven were with him in the Highlands in 62. Thus the start of Phoenix must of been much earlier then acknowledged. Patterson mentions CIA destroying his career because of his decision.
Phoenix like all the Agency projects held great promise, and was effective. It also held some corruption due to the culture of Vietnam. Really with so much that had to do with Vietnam, we try to distill what went wrong and why it went wrong down to the smallest answer, which is impossible.
Vietnam was a big deal in my family, my Grandfather was there in 45-46 to fight the Japanese, back in 54 then off and on until expelled from the Country in 68. Then back as a private businessman in the 70’s. One of my uncles and an aunt were born there. My step-grandmother was born there, her family once owning a coffee plantation in the North by Vinn. Then she moved to Hanoi in her teens.
Grandfather helped with the elections, moved people south when the country split, blew up trains with his commandos trained in the Phillipines, and buried weapons in graveyards in 1955. He smuggled agents in with Project Blackhawk, was head of Village Hamlet for awhile, trained the montagnards in the Central Highlands, worked on each Lansdale team (doing whatever was required), lead troops in the counter coup by Vietnamese street gangs,was the CIA man in the Diem Coup, Station Chief at some point, head of Presidential Security, a head intelligence officer for lll Corps, blah, blah, blah….
The Phoenix Project was based on the best practices of what seemed to work by the British and French in their colonial wars. I see a parallel between what the Selous Scouts later did in Rhodesia with their pseudo and gang warfare, turning terrorist.
Some think the French were less then stellar in there colonial wars, but that is a somewhat unjust reasoning. The French offered Lansdale and my grandfather their montagnard programs that had been up and running in Laos, and OUR leadership turned it down for like 7 years. We turned our war into a Beau Geste conflict, we later had the same results as the French (as warned of by Bernard Fall)
JimC says
Holy smokes — what a history! Thank you for sharing this with us.