Phoenix Program Read Online Free PDF Page A

first appeared on the scene. Composed of two or three Montagnards or mercenaries and one or two American advisers, the hunter team penetrated enemy areas, reconnoitered for intelligence, and conducted kidnapping and assassination (snatch and snuff) operations. When the hunter teams, which performed as counterterrorists, stumbled on large enemy troop concentrations, they called in killer teams in black, unmarked helicopters provided by the CIA. Although they worked in tandem, hunter teams were not under the operational control of killer teams.
    Also at this time the CIA began using selective terror not just to do to the Vietcong what they were doing to GVN officials. Knowing that an act of selective terror against one Montagnard would send the whole village scurrying to a refugee center or a strategic hamlet, where they were then recruited into CIDG teams, the CTs began disguising themselves as Vietcong and committing acts of selective terror against ethnic rivals.
    However, as became increasingly clear during the early 1960’s, organizing favorable minorities through the CIDG program was not enough to stem the Communist tide. Through arrogance and repression, Diem had alienated the Buddhist majority, and even his generals were plotting against him. Meanwhile, the NLF was organizing more and more Buddhist villages, and the CIA was failing to do likewise on behalf of the GVN. As Jeffrey Race points out, “The [GVN] could not create a viable ‘underground’ apparatus like the Party’s, because of the low level of motivation of the government’s operatives and their lack of a sympathetic environment.” 6
    For VC and CIA alike, the purpose of political action was threefold: to expand influence through propaganda and civic action, to organize villagers to fight enemy military units, and to destroy the enemy’s infrastructure—meaning that if the counterinsurgency was to succeed, the CIA had to create cadres that were every bit as motivated as the Vietcong. So, in the spirit of Contre Coup, the CIA turned to defectors to spread its message in the rural villages of Vietnam, in effect, into enemy territory.
    According to William Colby, “The Armed Propaganda Team has [a number of] former Vietcong who are recruited to work for you…. Their function is to go around in the countryside and indicate to the people that they used to be Vietcong and that the government has received them and taken them in and that the Chieu Hoi [amnesty] program does exist as a wayof VC currently on the other side to rally. They contact people like the families of known VC” and provide transportation to defector and refugee centers. 7
    As Colby explained, communication is the essence of political warfare. Thus, to understand political warfare and how Phoenix fits within that context, it is essential first to understand the role of language.
    In its broadest political warfare application, language is the means by which governments, through subtle suggestion and disinformation, shape public opinion on issues. Communists and capitalists alike recognize the power of slogans and packaging to sell political as well as commercial products. For example, the Vietcong used language to peddle a totalitarian state in the guise of social justice, while language allowed Ed Lansdale to wrap the Diem dictatorship in the robe of Jesus Christ and sell it as a democracy. The difference in Vietnam, of course, was that the Vietcong slung their slogans at the rural population, proclaiming, “Land for the Landless,” while Lansdale (who prior to World War II handled accounts for an advertising agency in San Francisco) declared straight-faced that “Christ has moved South,” a pitch obviously aimed at the American public.
    Lansdale was not unaware of what he was doing. The first objective of a covert action program is to create plausible denial—specifically, in South Vietnam, to cloak the CIA’s role in