Phoenix Program Read Online Free PDF Page B

reaction force to locate hidden enemy arms or food caches. Others, upon turning themselves in, were screened and interrogated by security officers. Once turned, these defectors became penetration leads back into the VCI. Defectors who returned to their former positions inside enemy military units or political organizations were provided with a “secure” means of contacting their VBI case officer, whom they fed information leading to the arrest or ambush of enemy cadres, soldiers, and secret agents.
    VBI case officers monitoring the defector program for potential recruits also conducted CIA-advised political reeducation programs for Communistsand common criminals alike. Recycled wrongdoers were transformed by CIA advisers into counterterrorists and political action cadres who then co-opted former comrades, prepared leaflets, and conducted interrogations. Where hardened criminals were unavailable, counterterror elements were extracted from political action teams and hidden in sealed compounds inside Special Forces camps and CIA safe houses.
    So it was that political and psychological warfare experts moved to the forefront of the counterinsurgency in the early 1960’s, fighting, under cover of Civic Action, a plausibly deniable war against enemy agents and soldiers, using black propaganda, defectors, criminals (the entire Fifty-second Ranger Battalion was recruited from Saigon prisons), selective terror, forcible relocations, and racial hatred to achieve its goal of internal security.
    The importance of information management in political warfare also meant a larger role in Vietnam for the U.S. Information Service (USIS). Ostensibly the overseas branch of the U.S. Information Agency—performing the same propaganda and censorship functions outside America as the USIA performs within—the USIS has as its raison d’être promotion of the “American way” in its narrowest big business sense. In its crusade to convert the world into one big Chamber of Commerce, the USIS employs all manner of media, from TVs, radios, and satellites to armed propaganda teams, wanted posters, and counterterror.
    The USIS officer most deeply involved in Phoenix was Frank Scotton. A graduate of American University’s College of International Relations, Scotton received a U.S. government graduate assistantship to the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii. About the CIA-sponsored East-West Center, Scotton said in an interview with the author, “It was a cover for a training program in which Southeast Asians were brought to Hawaii and trained to go back to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos to create agent nets.” After passing the Foreign Service exam, Scotton was persuaded by a patron to join the USIS, which “dealt with people,” unlike the State Department, which “observed from a distance.” 12
    A fabulously charismatic personality, tall and swarthy, Scotton had recently returned from a trip to Thailand—which included taking his teenage son on a patrol into Cambodia, where they were shot at by Khmer Rouge guerrillas—when William Colby introduced us in 1986. According to Scotton, when he arrived in Saigon in November 1962, he was met by and fell under the influence of Everett Bumgartner, chief of USIS field operations in Vietnam. A Lansdale disciple, Bumgartner had launched wanted poster and defector programs in Laos in 1954 and implemented similar programs in Vietnam after he arrived there in 1959.
    Bumgartner introduced Scotton to John Paul Vann, the senior adviser to the ARVN Seventh Division and a friend of Colonel Tran Ngoc Chau’s,the controversial Kien Hoa Province chief. A graduate of Fort Bragg, where he roomed with Nguyen Van Thieu, Chau was a CIA asset who in 1962 had just finished a six-year tour as chief of the GVN’s Psychological Warfare Service. Over the next ten years Chau’s relationship with Scotton, Bumgartner and Vann came to symbolize Phoenix and the