Read Phoenix Program for Free Online

duplicitous nature of U.S.-Vietnamese relations.
    Scotton, Bumgartner, and Vann are described by Ngo Vinh Long in The CIA and the Vietnam Debacle:
    Frank Scotton was the originator of the Provincial Reconnaissance Units program, the predecessor of the Phoenix program. For years he worked closely with John Paul Vann, the famous CIA operative who specialized, among other things, in black propaganda, which involved him in murder, forgery and the outright deception of the American press in order to discredit the NLF in particular and the opposition to American intervention in general. Everett Bumgartner was Colby’s deputy and used to oversee pacification efforts in the central provinces of Vietnam. Any person who has the faintest knowledge of the pacification program would know what disasters have visited the Vietnamese people as a result of such programs. Bumgartner was also in charge of the Phoenix program in that area. 13
    When Scotton arrived in Vietnam, Bumgartner assigned him to the Central Highlands, the expansive area between Saigon and Qui Nhon City, the capital of Binh Dinh Province. Bumgartner thought there was “a vacuum of knowledge” in the highlands and directed Scotton “to energize the Vietnamese” in what Scotton calls “prerevolutionary development.” As Scotton likes to say, “pacification wasn’t even a term then.” 14
    The emphasis at the time was on the strategic hamlet program—separating the guerrilla fish from the sea of people through forced relocations. Begun in March 1962 with Operations Sea Swallow in Ca Mau Province and Royal Phoenix in Binh Dinh Province, more than four million Vietnamese had been relocated into strategic hamlets in most of South Vietnam’s forty-four provinces by the time Scotton arrived in-country. The program was administered by CIA-advised province security officers reporting to Ngo Dinh Nhu’s confidential agent in Saigon, the notorious double agent Pham Ngoc Thao. However, because VC guerrillas had at least the tacit support of the rural population, police and security officials had difficulty conducting law enforcement and intelligence operations outside strategic hamlets or other secure, generally urban areas. In following Bumgartner’s orders to fill the vacuum of knowledge in Central Vietnam, Scotton told me, “We would takea Vietnamese employee of the Vietnam Information Service (VIS) and put him in the provincial information system and have him provide resources—leaflets, school kits, films—that sort of thing. In return we expected reporting.”
    Having placed his agent net, Scotton turned his attention to the job of “energizing” the Vietnamese. However, as a result of CIA machinations against his regime, Diem had instructed his provincial appointees to resist American influence and to blunt U.S. efforts to escalate the war against the Communists. Indeed, Diem’s brother Nhu was secretly negotiating with the North Vietnamese in hopes of reaching a settlement before the United States found a pretext to call in the Marines, as the Pentagon seemed intent on doing.
    In looking for motivated individuals to mold into political cadres, Scotton turned to the CIA’s defector program, which in April 1963 was placed under cover of the Agency for International Development and named the Chieu Hoi (Open Arms) amnesty program. There Scotton found the raw material he needed to prove the viability of political action programs. Together with Vietnamese Special Forces Captain Nguyen Tuy (a graduate of Fort Bragg’s Special Warfare Center who commanded the Fourth Special Operations Detachment) and Tuy’s case officer, U.S. Special Forces Captain Howard Walters (a Korean War veteran and psywar expert), Scotton worked through an extension of the Mountain Scout program Ralph Johnson had established in Pleiku Province.
    As part of a pilot program designed to induce defectors, Scotton, Walters,