Phoenix Program

Based on Wikipedia: Phoenix Program

Between 1968 and 1972, the United States government ran a secret program in Vietnam that killed over 26,000 people. Most Americans have never heard of it.

The Phoenix Program was designed to do something that conventional military force could not: destroy an enemy that wore no uniform, carried no flag, and lived among ordinary villagers. It targeted what military planners called the "Viet Cong Infrastructure"—the network of recruiters, tax collectors, intelligence gatherers, and political organizers who made the communist insurgency possible. These were civilians. That was precisely the point.

The Shadow Government Problem

To understand Phoenix, you first have to understand what the United States was actually fighting in Vietnam. It wasn't just the North Vietnamese army. It was something far more difficult to defeat.

After the 1954 Geneva Conference divided Vietnam into North and South, the communist government in Hanoi sent several thousand operatives south. When promised reunification elections never materialized, these operatives became the seeds of an insurgency. They built what amounted to a parallel government in the South Vietnamese countryside.

By the mid-1960s, this shadow government had grown to somewhere between 80,000 and 150,000 members. They weren't soldiers. They were organizers. Their job was recruiting, political education, intelligence collection, and logistics. In practical terms, they replaced the village leaders loyal to Saigon with communist cadres.

Their method was brutally effective. First, they identified villages with strategic importance. Then they approached local leaders with a simple choice: cooperate or face consequences. Those who refused might be kidnapped and sent to "reeducation camps" in the North. Those who threatened to contact the Saigon government were murdered—sometimes along with their entire families.

Once the infrastructure controlled an area, it became a resource. Local farmers fed and housed guerrilla fighters. They reported on American and South Vietnamese troop movements. They paid taxes to fund the revolution. They provided recruits, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not.

This was the enemy that conventional warfare couldn't touch. You can bomb a military base. You can't bomb an idea that lives in ten thousand villages.

The Architecture of Phoenix

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had been experimenting with counterinsurgency tactics since the early days of American involvement in Vietnam. By April 1965, they were running 140 small teams—groups of three to twelve men each—targeting suspected infrastructure members. These teams called themselves "Counter-Terror" units. They claimed a kill ratio of eight to one.

That name would later prove embarrassing.

In 1967, the scattered counterinsurgency efforts were consolidated. The Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation Program, created from a plan drafted by CIA officer Nelson Brickham, began coordinating information on suspected Viet Cong members across different agencies. The South Vietnamese government created its own parallel organization called Phụng Hoàng—named after a mythical bird. Americans called it Phoenix.

The program had two core components. Provincial Reconnaissance Units did the hunting—capturing or killing suspected infrastructure members, along with civilians thought to have useful information. Regional interrogation centers did the questioning. Information extracted at these centers went to military commanders, who used it to direct further operations. Success was measured in "neutralizations"—a bloodless bureaucratic term that meant imprisoned, persuaded to defect, or killed.

The Counter-Terror teams were quietly renamed. CIA officials had "become wary of the adverse publicity surrounding the use of the word 'terror.'"

How It Worked in Practice

Special laws allowed the arrest and prosecution of suspected communists without the normal protections of criminal procedure. To prevent abuse—or at least to create the appearance of preventing it—the laws required three separate sources of evidence before someone could be targeted for neutralization. If convicted, a suspect could be held for two years, with the sentence renewable up to a maximum of six years.

The official policy emphasized precision. According to military directives, Phoenix was supposed to use a "rifle shot rather than a shotgun approach," targeting specific political leaders and activists rather than sweeping up everyone in sight.

Reality was messier.

Lieutenant Vincent Okamoto, an intelligence liaison officer who worked with Phoenix for two months in 1968 and later received the Distinguished Service Cross for heroism, described the actual procedure:

The problem was, how do you find the people on the blacklist? It's not like you had their address and telephone number. The normal procedure would be to go into a village and just grab someone and say, "Where's Nguyen so-and-so?" Half the time the people were so afraid they would say anything. Then a Phoenix team would take the informant, put a sandbag over his head, poke out two holes so he could see, put commo wire around his neck like a long leash, and walk him through the village and say, "When we go by Nguyen's house scratch your head." Then that night Phoenix would come back, knock on the door, and say, "April Fool, motherfucker." Whoever answered the door would get wasted. As far as they were concerned whoever answered was a Communist, including family members. Sometimes they'd come back to camp with ears to prove that they killed people.

This was not the clinical, intelligence-driven operation described in official reports.

The Interrogation Centers

What happened to those who were captured alive was often worse than death.

The interrogation centers were conceived by Peer de Silva, the CIA's Saigon station chief, who believed counter-terrorism tactics should be applied strategically to "enemy civilians" to reduce support for the insurgency. The techniques employed there reflected that philosophy.

According to journalist Douglas Valentine, who interviewed dozens of Phoenix operatives for his book on the program, the torture methods included rape, including gang rape and rape with foreign objects; electrical shock applied to genitals, tongues, and other sensitive areas—known colloquially as "the Bell Telephone Hour"; water torture; suspension by bound arms from ceiling hooks followed by beatings; and the use of police dogs to attack prisoners.

Military intelligence officer K. Barton Osborn testified to Congress that he witnessed a six-inch wooden dowel inserted into a detainee's ear canal and tapped through the brain until the man died. He described a Vietnamese woman starved to death in a cage on suspicion of being a political education instructor. He reported electrical devices attached to prisoners' genitals to shock them into compliance.

Some have questioned Osborn's credibility. Author Gary Kulik noted that colleagues described him as prone to exaggeration and "fantastic statements." Osborn served with the Marines before Phoenix was formally implemented, which raises questions about exactly what he witnessed and when.

But few dispute that torture occurred. The question was always one of degree and authorization. Officially, the torture was conducted by South Vietnamese forces, with American CIA officers and special forces personnel playing what was delicately termed a "supervisory role."

The Numbers

Between 1968 and 1972, Phoenix officially neutralized 81,740 people suspected of Viet Cong membership. Of these, 26,369 were killed. The rest were captured or persuaded to defect.

That killed figure may be low. Journalist Seymour Hersh, citing South Vietnamese official statistics, put the death toll at 41,000.

Here's a detail that often gets lost: 87 percent of those killed during the Phoenix Program died in conventional military operations. Many were only identified as infrastructure members after firefights that the Viet Cong themselves had initiated. Between January 1970 and March 1971, 94 percent of Phoenix-attributed deaths—9,827 out of 10,443—occurred during military operations rather than targeted assassinations.

This complicates the narrative. Phoenix was simultaneously a calculated assassination program and a retroactive accounting system that claimed credit for enemies killed in ordinary combat. Both things were true.

The Debate Over Effectiveness

Did Phoenix work?

The communists thought so. By 1970, their planning documents repeatedly emphasized attacking the pacification program and specifically targeting Phoenix officials. The Viet Cong imposed assassination quotas on their own operatives. Near Da Nang, communist officials instructed their teams to kill 1,400 government "tyrants" and to annihilate anyone involved with pacification.

After the war, several North Vietnamese officials confirmed that 1968 to 1972—the Phoenix years—was the most difficult period they faced. William Colby, who directed the program and later became CIA Director, reported hearing multiple Vietnamese communists describe Phoenix as the toughest challenge of the entire war.

Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence officer, explained why: "To the extent that you could carve out the shadow government, their means of control over the civilian population was dealt a death blow." This was why the North Vietnamese reserved "special treatment" for Phoenix operatives after the war ended. They considered the program a mortal threat to the revolution.

The CIA claimed that Phoenix allowed them to learn the identity and structure of the Viet Cong infrastructure in every province. In many important areas, the program successfully destroyed the organizational capacity that made the insurgency possible.

But there's a different way to measure effectiveness. The United States lost the Vietnam War. The shadow government Phoenix was designed to destroy ultimately won. Whatever tactical successes the program achieved, they weren't enough.

The Moral Question

Colby always denied that Phoenix was an assassination program. "To call it a program of murder is nonsense," he said. "They were of more value to us alive than dead." His official instructions to field officers emphasized capturing targets alive and using "intelligent and lawful methods of interrogation."

But Colby wasn't in the villages at night. He wasn't walking informants on leashes through hamlets. He wasn't knocking on doors.

The program was criticized on multiple grounds: the number of neutral civilians killed, the systematic use of torture, the exploitation of the blacklist system for personal vendettas, and the fundamental nature of targeting civilians in what critics labeled a "civilian assassination program."

The journalist Douglas Valentine put it simply: "Central to Phoenix is the fact that it targeted civilians, not soldiers."

Public disclosure of the program's methods eventually led to Congressional hearings. The CIA was pressured into shutting Phoenix down by 1972, though certain aspects continued until Saigon fell in 1975. A similar program, Plan F-6, carried on under direct South Vietnamese control.

The Legacy

Phoenix remains relevant because it represents something the United States keeps rediscovering: the difficulty of fighting an enemy embedded in a civilian population.

The program's architects faced a genuine strategic problem. The Viet Cong infrastructure was real. It did coordinate the insurgency. It did use murder and kidnapping to establish control. The villagers it operated among were often victims, not supporters. Destroying the infrastructure might have liberated them.

But the methods used to destroy it—the torture, the shoot-first raids, the body counts that conflated confirmed operatives with anyone unlucky enough to be home when the door was kicked in—created their own moral catastrophe. They also generated new enemies faster than they eliminated old ones.

The Vietnam War produced no shortage of horrors. What made Phoenix distinctive was its bureaucratic rationality. This wasn't the fog of war or soldiers losing control. This was a systematic program with flowcharts and quotas and official definitions of success. It was, in the literal sense of the word, organized.

That organization is why Phoenix matters as history. Atrocities committed in chaos are terrible but perhaps inevitable in warfare. Atrocities committed according to a plan, with legal frameworks and chain-of-command approval, tell us something different about what governments will do when they believe the stakes are high enough.

The mythical phoenix of legend dies in flames and rises from its own ashes, renewed. The Phoenix Program's legacy is less poetic. It killed tens of thousands of people, tortured countless more, and failed to save South Vietnam from the outcome it was designed to prevent. What rose from those ashes was not renewal but a long argument about whether any of it was worth the cost—an argument that, fifty years later, remains unresolved.