In July 1967, Komer set up the Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation (ICEX) operation which aimed at correlating intelligence information from all sources to identify and then root out the Vietcong infrastructure (VCI) - the Vietcong leadership in the South; chain of command; agents; informers. Komer and Colby tried to impress the Saigon government and MACV with the importance of identifying the VCI, but made little impact. Because of this, they developed the Phoenix plan out of ICEX as a way of getting on with the job themselves, utilising CIA information to the full, and the help of cooperative South Vietnamese commanders in the field. Bowing to the inevitable, the South Vietnamese government formally endorsed Phoenix in December 1967.
PHOENIX
Phoenix came about because the agency was more efficacious and original in the Third World than anyone else. Laos was already demonstrating the agency's ability next door. With Phoenix, it was called into Vietnam in a way that was different from its previous experience: the military was failing, could the CIA do the trick?
Phoenix was set in motion at the end of 1967 with the aim of carrying the war to the VCI. U.S. intelligence - from MACV and the CIA - was to be pooled with South Vietnamese intelligence. South Vietnamese security forces were then to go into action to identify members of the Vietcong chain of command, arrest and interrogate them, and if possible turn them into informers. Bill Colby described Phoenix as:
"To re-establish local territorial security in a gradually expanding number of hamlets and villages. As this expansion occurred, increasing attention could be placed on the re-establishment of local government through village and hamlet elections and the reconstruction of roads, schools, etc. This was followed by the initiation of local economic economic development and the reinforcement of community defense."
Inter-agency rivalries had dogged all previous attempts to coordinate activity in Vietnam: Bob Komer had a constant battle with MACV about his own position in Vietnam; the air force constantly argued with the CIA about its assessments of air force bombing operations (this reached a climax when in 1967 the air force and the CIA ended up spying on each other's activities along the Ho Chi Minh Vietcong supply trail from the North to the South); MACV constantly wanted to control CIA operations; the U.S. ambassador in Saigon usually wanted the CIA station schief to report to him rather than to Langley; the various South Vietnamese military and security commanders often would not work with each other or the CIA. Phoenix was also an attempt to cut through this bickering by having a clear target, the VCI, and a clear command structure: both Komer and Colby were given ambassadorial rank by President Johnson in order for them to be able to insist on their requirements to MACV, the U.S. Embassy, the CIA, and the South Vietnamese.
Phoenix, however, was never at the forefront of the war and always had to fight for resources and support. Komer returned to Washington in November 1968, leaving Bill Colby in charge.
As CORDS chief, Colby was responsible for a huge bureaucracy which between 1968 and 1970 cost $4 billion, of which Phoenix was a substantial part. 637 U.S. military personnel worked with South Vietnamese units in Phoenix operations throughout South Vietnam. About 100 CIA officers were also involved.
After the war was over, the Vietcong said that Phoenix had been the most effective programme against them. But it had probably impaired less than 10 per cent of their effort.
Phoenix showed the agency that nothing but very heavy killing would resolve the guerrilla war: 20,000+ dead - the number of Vietcong estimated to have been killed in Phoenix - had not worked; 300-400,000 would probably need to be killed in order to win. But it produced tactical intelligence, and demonstrated the agency's commitment to the war to the satisfaction of Washington. The programme conformed to Washington expectations of the CIA, buying the agency the right to question the conduct of the war. It won the agency credibility when it came to advice and estimates.
Phoenix was a well-conceived operation, badly executed: it soon acquired a reputation for murder and terror second only to that of the Vietcong, and became a focus of anti-war protests in the United States. The drive to quantify everything in the war, to produce statistics of Vietcong "neutralization", resulted in corrupt reporting procedures by Vietnamese forces who invented body counts in order to fulfil quotas (and thus get paid). Phoenix often acted as a cover for personal vendettas. Once arrested, prisoners were routinely tortured and killed, and no action was taken against those responsible. After 1971, with U.S. commitment to the war fast disappearing, Phoenix collapsed. Of the 81,740 individuals captured in Phoenix operations by August 1972, 23,369 were killed.
The generals in Vietnam made perfectly sure that the agency was not going to be allowed to become big enough to win the war. In bureaucratic terms it was "their" war, and defeat at the agency's hands would have been a devastating blow to their standing. Thus keeping Phoenix weak suited their bureaucratic objectives. For Phoenix to have been decisive it would have to have been multiplied about twenty times. Since it was not allowed to pay off, it is remembered as a murder programme.
HIGH WIRE
In February 1965, President Johnson approved the "Rolling Thunder" bombing campaign against North Vietnam, and in July major reinforcements for MACV began to arrive. The agency, walking a high wire, discreetly cautioned against greater direct U.S. involvement in the war, but under Raborn its views were not presented strongly either to Congress or the White House.
When Richard Helms was sworn-in as DCI on 30 June 1966, Johnson had already made the critical decision to wage all-out war in Vietnam. Helms' job, as far as Johnson was concerned, was to sustain the war effort in Vietnam and in Congress. Johnson, with the most agonised reluctance, having determined to go into Vietnam, did not want his intimate counsel darkened by "yets", "buts", "ifs", and "if you don't minds". Helms knew that in being pessimistic about the Vietnam war the agency was going up against LBJ arm-in-arm with his secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, and the Joint Chiefs. And, at that moment in 1966, no one could be certain that Bobby Kennedy would provide a centre of resistance to the war. No one could be sure that Bobby would not take the line of "Give it to the Cong harder!"
At the top level in U.S. policymaking circles, support for the war was almost complete. Johnson's policymakers broke on the issue later - although before the vast majority of the country did - when the war became a political issue. They came from a cadre of people who were very conscious of their own children, and pressure from their children (especially in the case of McNamara and Cyrus Vance) and young people generally had a direct effect: they thought their children were wiser than they were; that somehow by pursuing the war they were alienating the future.
It was wise, constructive and effective of Helms to choose the agency's ground within the tent where it argued for complexity, subtlety, for the degree to which Vietnam was not an ordinary war - or at least unlike any war the United States had had occasion to fight so far - rather than to argue directly against it. The agency would have engaged in hari-kari if it had gone up against the LBJ/McNamara/Joint Chiefs combination in 1965-67. Not until McNamara's nerve started cracking in the spring/summer of 1967 as he realised that his quantitative approach to the war was not succeeding, could the agency really speak out to any degree. By that time, too, the war had become the major political issue in the United States. When the whole country got in on the act, behind-the-scenes bureaucratic initiatives were no longer so important in changing decisions.
The high-wire act of the agency under Helms caused grea
