The phoenix program

As counterinsurgency expert David Galula notes above, a census is an effective way of controlling large numbers of persons. Thus, while CIA paramilitary officers used Census Grievance to gather intelligence in VC-controlled villages, CIA police advisers were conducting a census program of their own. Its origins are traced to Robert Thompson, a British counter-insurgency expert hired in 1961 by Roger Hilsman, director of the State Department's Office of Research and Intelligence, to advise the United States and GVN on police operations in South Vietnam. Basing it on a system he had used in Malaya, Thompson proposed a three-pronged approach that coordinated military, civilian intelligence, and police agencies in a concerted attack on the VCI.

On Thompson's advice, the National Police in 1962 initiated the Family Census program, in which a name list was made and a group photo taken of every family in South Vietnam. The portrait was filed in a police dossier along with each person's political affiliations, fingerprints, income, savings, and other relevant information, such as who owned property or had relatives outside the village and thus had a legitimate reason to travel. This program was also instrumental in leading to the identification of former sect members and suppletifs, who were then blackmailed by VBI case officers into working in their villages as informers. By 1965 there were 7,453 registered families.

Through the Family Census, the CIA learned the names of Communist cell members in GVN-controlled villages. Apprehending the cadre that ran the cells was then a matter of arresting all minor suspects and working them over until they informed. This system weakened the insurgency insofar as it forced political cadres to flee to guerrilla units enduring the hardships of the jungle, depriving the VCI of its leadership in GVN areas. This was no small success, for, as Nguyen Van Thieu once observed, "Ho Chi Minh values his two cadres in every hamlet more highly than ten military divisions." [2]

Thompson's method was successful, but only up to a point. Because many VCI cadres were former Vietminh heroes, it was counterproductive for Political Action Teams and counterterrorists to hunt them down in their own villages. Many VCI were not terrorists but, as Galula writes, "men whose motivations, even if the counterinsurgent disapproves of them, may be perfectly honorable. They do not participate directly, as a rule, in direct terrorism or guerrilla action and, technically, have no blood on their hands." [3]

Thompson's dragnet technique engendered other problems. Mistakes were made, and innocent people were routinely tortured or subject to extortion by crooked cops. On other occasions VCI agents deliberately led Political Action Teams into arresting people hostile to the insurgency. Recognizing these facts, Thompson suggested that the CIA organize a police special branch of professional interrogators who would not be confused with PATs working to win hearts and minds. In 1964, at Thompson's suggestion, the Police Special Branch was formed from the Vietnam Bureau of Investigation and plans were made to center it in Province Intelligence Coordinating Committees (PICCs) in South Vietnam's provinces.

Creation of the police Special Branch coincided with the reorganization of the "Special Branch" of the Vietnamese Special Forces into the Special Exploitation Service (SES), the GVN's counterpart to the Special Operations Group. SOG and SES intelligence operations were coordinated with those of the Special Branch through the CIO, though only at the regional and national level, an inadequacy the PICCs were designed to overcome.

The birth of the police Special Branch also coincided with the Hop Tac (Pacification Intensive Capital Area) program, activated in July 1964 to bring security to the besieged capital. A variation on the oil spot technique, Hop Tac introduced twenty-five hundred national policemen into seven provinces surrounding Saigon. In October 1964 the National Identification and Family Census programs were combined in the Resources Control Bureau in the National Police Directorate, and a Public Safety adviser was placed in each region specifically to manage these programs. By December 1964 thirteen thousand policemen were participating in Hop Tac, seven thousand cops were manning seven hundred checkpoints, more than six thousand arrests had been made, and ABC TV had done a documentary on the program. In the provinces, Public Safety advised policemen-enforced curfews and regulations on the movement of persons and goods under the Resources Control program.

Also in September 1964, as part of the effort to combine police and paramilitary programs, Frank Scotton was directed to apply his motivational indoctrination program to Hop Tac. Assisted by cadres from his Quang Ngai PAT team, Scotton formed paramilitary reaction forces in seven key districts surrounding Saigon. Scotton's cadres were trained at the Ho Ngoc Tau Special Forces camp where SOG based its CS program for operations inside Cambodia. Equipment, supplies, and training for Scotton's teams were provided by the CIA, while MACV and Special Forces provided personnel. Lists of defectors, criminals, and other potential recruits, as well as targets, came from Special Branch files.

The aim of the motivational indoctrination program, according to Scotton, was to "develop improved combat skills -- increased commitment to close combat -- for South Vietnamese. This is not psywar against civilians or VC. This is taking the most highly motivated people, saying they deserted, typing up a contract, and using them in these units. Our problem," Scotton said, "was finding smart Vietnamese and Cambodians who were willing to die." [4]

The first district Scotton entered in search of recruits was Tan Binh, between Saigon and Tan Son Nhut airport, where he extracted cadres from a Popular Force platoon guarding Vinh Loc village. These cadres were trained to keep moving, to sleep in the jungle by day and attack VC patrols at night. Next, Scotton trained teams in Nha Be, Go Vap, and Thu Duc districts. He recalled going two weeks at a time without a shower, "subliminating the risk and danger," and participating in operations. "We had a cheap rucksack, a submachine gun, and good friends. We weren't interested in making history in the early days."

So successful was the motivational indoctrination program in support of Hop Tac that MACV decided to use it nationwide. In early 1965 Scotton was asked to introduce his program in SOG's regional camps, in support of Project Delta, the successor to Leaping Lena. Recruits for SOG projects were profit-motivated people whom Scotton persuaded to desert from U.S. Special Forces A camps, which were strung out along South Vietnam's borders. On a portable typewriter he typed a single-page contract, which each recruit signed, acknowledging that although listed as a deserter, he was actually employed by the CIA in "a sensitive project" for which he received substantially higher pay than before.

The most valuable quality possessed by defectors, deserters, and criminals serving in "sensitive" CIA projects was their expendability. Take, for example, Project 24, which employed NVA officers and senior enlisted men. Candidates for Project 24 were vetted and, if selected, taken out for dinner and drinks, to a brothel, where they were photographed, then blackmailed into joining special reconnaissance teams. Trained in Saigon, outfitted with captured NVA or VC equipment, then given a "one-way ticket to Cambodia," they were sent to locate enemy sanctuaries. When they radioed back their position and that of the sanctuary, the CIA would "arc-light" (bomb with B52's) them along with the target. No Project 24 special reconnaissance team ever returned to South Vietnam.

Notably, minds capable of creating Project 24 were not averse to exploiting deviants within their own community, and SOG occasionally recruited American soldiers who had committed war crimes. Rather than serve time in prison or as a way of getting released from stockades in Vietnam or elsewhere, people with defective personalities were likely to volunteer for dangerous and reprehensible jobs.

In June 1965 Colonel Don Blackburn commanded SOG. His staff numbered around twelve and included the commanders of the First and Fifth Special Forces groups, plus various special warfare Marine, Air Force, and Navy officers. SOG headquarters in Saigon planned operations for the four hundred-odd volunteers in its operational units. However, 1965 was rough going for border surveillance. The Montagnards were no longer effective after their revolt, and as compensation, Project Delta was organized to provide intelligence for newly arrived U.S. Army and Marine divisions. About the paramilitary police, SOG, and pacification programs he and his compatriots developed, Scotton said, "For us, these programs were all part of the same thing. We did not think of things in terms of little packages." That "thing," of course, was a grand scheme to win the war, at the bottom of which "were the province interrogation centers.

***

John Patrick Muldoon, Picadoon to the people who knew him in Vietnam, was the first director of the PIC program in Vietnam. Six feet four inches tall, well over two hundred pounds, Muldoon has a scarlet face and a booming bass voice remarkably like Robert Mitchum's. He was friendly and not overly impressed with either himself or the CIA mystique. That makes Muldoon one of the few emancipated retired CIA officers who do not feel obligated to call headquarters every time a writer asks a question about Vietnam.

A Georgetown University dropout, Muldoon joined the agency in 1958, his entry greased by two sisters already in the CIA's employ. He did his first tour in Germany and in 1962 was sent to South Korea. "I worked interrogation in Seoul," Muldoon recalled. "I'd never been involved in interrogation before. Ray Valentine was my boss. Syngman Rhee had been replaced by Park Chung Hee, who was running the show. Park's cousin Colonel Kim Chong Pil was director of the ROK [Republic of Korea] CIA. There was a joint KCIA-CIA interrogation center in Yon Don Tho, outside Seoul."

Here it is worth pausing for a moment to explain that in recruiting cadres for the Korean CIA, the CIA used the same method it used to staff the Vietnamese CIO. As revealed by John Marks in The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, the CIA sent its top psychologist, John Winne, to Seoul to "select the initial cadre" using a CIA-developed psychological assessment test. "I set up an office with two translators," Winne told Marks, "and used a Korean version of the Wechsler." CIA psychologists "gave the tests to 25 to 30 police and military officers," Marks writes, "and wrote up a half-page report on each, listing their strengths and weaknesses. Winne wanted to know about each candidate's ability to follow orders, creativity, lack of personality disorders, motivation -- why he wanted out of his current job. It was mostly for the money, especially with the civilians." [5]

In this way secret police are recruited as CIA assets in every country where the agency operates. In Latin America, Marks writes, "The CIA ... found the assessment process most useful for showing how to train the anti-terrorist section. According to results, these men were shown to have very dependent psychologies and needed strong direction" -- direction that came from the CIA. Marks quotes one assessor as saying, "Anytime the Company spent money for training a foreigner, the object was that he would ultimately serve our purposes." CIA officers "were not content simply to work closely with these foreign intelligence agencies; they insisted on penetrating them, and the Personality Assessment System provided a useful aid." [6]

Following his tour in Korea, Muldoon was assigned to Vietnam in November 1964. "I was brought down to the National Interrogation Center [NIC] and told, 'This is where you're going to work ....You're going to advise X number of interrogators. They'll bring you their initial debriefing of the guy they're working on; then you'll give them additional CIA requirements.'"

The CIA had different requirements, Muldoon explained, because "the South Vietnamese wanted information they could turn around and use in their battle against the Vietcong. They just wanted to know what was going on in the South .... But we were interested in information about things in the North that the South Vietnamese couldn't care less about. And that's where the American advisers would come in -- to tell them, 'You gotta ask this, too.'"

"We had standard requirements depending on where a guy was from. A lot of VC had been trained in North Vietnam and had come back down as volunteers. They weren't regular NVA. So if a guy came from the North, we wanted to know where he was from, what unit he was with, how they were organized, where they were trained .... If a guy had been North for any length of time, we wanted to know if he'd traveled on a train. What kind of identification papers did he need? Anything about foreign weapons or foreigners advising them. That sort of thing."

Built in 1964, the National Interrogation Center served as CIO headquarters and was where civilian, police, and military intelligence was coordinated by the CIA. "It was located down on the Saigon River," Muldoon recalled, ''as part of a great big naval compound .... On the left was a wing of offices where the American military chief, an Air Force major, was located. In that same wing were the chief of the CIO ... his deputy and the CIA advisers." Muldoon referred to the CIO chief by his nom de guerre, Colonel Sam. "There was only one CIO chief the whole time I was there," he added, "up until August 1966. His deputy was there the whole time, too, and the same interrogators."

Muldoon estimated there were several hundred prisoners in the NIC and four interrogator-advisers. Muldoon was the fifth. Three were Air Force enlisted men serving under an Army captain. Muldoon's boss, the CIA chief of the NIC, was Ian "Sammy" Sammers, who worked under the station's senior liaison officer, Sam Hopper, who had supervised construction of the NIC in early 1964.

One year later, according to Muldoon, "There was a conference in Nha Trang, in late April 1965. They were putting together an interrogation center in an existing building they had taken over, and they asked for help from the NIC. So I was sent up there with the Army captain to look at the place, figure out what kind of staff we needed, and how we were going to train them .... And while we were up there trying to break these guys in, the police liaison guy in Nha Trang, Tony Bartolomucci, asked Sammy if they could keep me there for this conference, at which all of our people were going to meet Jack 'Red' Stent, who was taking over from Paul Hodges as chief of foreign intelligence. Bartolomucci wanted to show off his new interrogation center to all these big shots.

"The military people from the NIC had done their job," Muldoon continued, "so they left. But I stayed around. Then Tucker Gougleman and Red showed up for this conference. Tucker was chief of Special Branch field operations, and things were just starting to get off the ground with the PICs. A couple were already under way -- one in Phan Thiet and one in Phuoc Le -- and Tucker told me, 'We're going to build, build, build, and I need someone to oversee the whole operation. I want you to do it.'"

"So we had this big conference, and they packed the interrogation center full of prisoners. Bartolomucci wanted to show off with a bunch of prisoners, so he got his police buddies to bring in a bunch of prostitutes and what have you and put them in the cells. I don't think they had one VC in the place. After the conference they all went back to the regular jail, and I went to work for Tucker."

John Muldoon spoke affectionately about Tucker Gougleman. "Tucker was loud and foulmouthed, and he had a terrible temper; but it was all a big front. He was very easy to get to know ... a likable guy. Always in a short-sleeved shirt and sneakers. He was married three times, divorced three times. He had adopted a girl in Korea, and in Vietnam he had what he called his family. He was back in Saigon trying to get them out when he was picked up. When the evacuation was over, he was still there, staying in the hotel. One day he came down, got off the elevator, walked into the lobby, and they were waiting for him. They took him out, threw him in a car, and took him to the National Police Interrogation Center. A French newspaper guy saw it happen. The North Vietnamese denied they had him, but they returned his body about a year later.

"It's funny, but me and Tucker used to talk about the PICs. He said something like 'John, if we lose this war one day, we could end up in these goddammed things if we get caught.'

"'Well,' I asked, 'what would you do if you were in there?'

"He said he thought he'd kill himself rather than go through interrogation. But he didn't. The report I heard was that when his body got to the graves registration people in Okinawa, the broken bones had yet to heal. So obviously they had tortured him right up until the time he died. And I'd be willing to bet he didn't say a damn thing to help them. I can see him spitting in their faces."

Muldoon laughed. "Tucker wanted to turn the PICs into whorehouses. The interrogation rooms had two-way mirrors.

"Tucker was a hero in the Marine Corps in World War Two," Muldoon added. "He joined the agency right after and worked with [station chief] John Hart in Korea, running operations behind the lines. He was in Afghanistan and worked in training, too. He got to Vietnam in 1962 and was base chief in Da Nang running everything [i] that had to do with intelligence and paramilitary operations .... He was no longer the Da Nang base chief when I arrived in Saigon," Muldoon continued, "but he hadn't taken over field operations yet either. He was in Saigon trying to set up the Province Intelligence Coordination Committees with Jack Barlow, a British guy from MI Six. Barlow had been in Africa and Malaya with Robert Thompson, and they were the experts. They'd succeeded in Malaya, and we wanted them to show us how to do it. Barlow and Tucker worked hand in hand. I shared an office with them at the embassy annex -- which I had besides my office at the NIC -- and that's where I first met Tucker."

Forerunner to the Province Interrogation Center program, the Province Intelligence Coordination Committee program, established in November 1964, was designed to extend CIO operations into the provinces. Each PICC was to serve as the senior intelligence agency within each province and to guide, supervise, and coordinate all military, police, and civilian operations.

"Barlow was the guy pushing the PICCs, and Tucker agreed it was a good idea," Muldoon recalled. "But they weren't able to convince the military to go along with them. It was bought by us and the embassy, but not by the military, and that's the one you needed -- 'cause they were the ones who initially had control of the prisoners. And the Vietnamese military wasn't going to go along unless the U.S. military approved it. So when the U.S. military said, 'Don't turn those prisoners over,' there was no way we were going to get them. So the PICC project never got off the ground. Then after the embassy bombing [February 1965] they had a reorganization, and Tucker became chief of field operations. We started building the Province Interrogation Centers, and it was thought that people would say, 'Hey, man, this is a great spot! We'll send all our prisoners here!' and that then they'd start moving in and set up the PICCs around the PICs. But that never happened either.

"So after the Nha Trang conference we went down to Phuoc Le to set up a training schedule for the PIC that had already been built down there. The paramilitary guy, Pat, wanted to cooperate, and he had great relations with the province chief and the military. The intelligence guy, Ben, was serious about making everything in his province work. He wasn't happy that he got stuck with building the interrogation center and being the adviser, but he wanted to be the best. And he had great relations with the Special Branch and the CIO. Now some paramilitary and liaison guys didn't even talk to each other, but together Pat and Ben were able to make the thing work. It cost a lot of loyal Vietnamese their lives, but Ben would get hamlet informants to tell us who the VC were; then Pat would send the CTs out to get the names."

What Muldoon described was the one-two punch of the counterinsurgency -- the Province Interrogation Centers and the counterterrorists. Through the PICs, the CIA learned the identity and structure of the VCI in each province; through the CTs, the CIA eliminated individual VCI members and destroyed their organization.

The problem with the Phuoc Le PIC, according to Muldoon, was its design. "Ben had built his PIC with the guard posts outside each corner, so there was no way for the guards to get back into the inner compound during an attack. Once the shooting started and they ran out of ammunition, they were finished. So the first thing we did was change the design so they were still on each corner and could see in all directions but had a door leading inside the compound."

CIA architects settled on a standard design based on the modified Phuoc Le PIC. Strictly functional, it minimized cost while maximizing security. Under cover of Pacific Architects and Engineers (PA&E), the CIA's logistics staff hired local Vietnamese contractors to build interrogation centers in every province. Funds and staff salaries came from the Special Branch budget. After it was built, the CIA bought the interrogation center, then donated it to the National Police, at which point it became a National Police facility under the direction of the Special Branch. In practice, however -- because they got their operating funds directly from the CIA -- Special Branch employees wielded more power than their supervisors in the National Police, who received Aid-in-Kind funds indirectly from the Agency for International Development through the National Police Directorate in Saigon.

Each provincial capital would eventually have a PIC. However, regional interrogation centers were built first and were larger, holding two to three hundred prisoners each. In IV Corps's regional capital, Can Tho, where the French had built a jail capable of holding two thousand prisoners, existing facilities were renovated. In choosing where to build in the provinces, each CIA regional officer selected priority provinces. Then, according to Muldoon, it was up to the liaison officer in the province to talk to the province chief and his CIO counterpart to find a spot near the provincial capital. "'Cause that's where our guy lived. Some of the guys had a hell of a time getting PICs started," Muldoon noted, "because some province chiefs wanted money under the table."

Once the interrogation center was built, the liaison officer became its adviser, and Muldoon helped him recruit its staff. There were deadlines for each phase, and part of Muldoon's job was to travel around and monitor progress. "In one place construction would be half done," he recalled, "and in another they'd be trying to find a piece of land. It was a very big undertaking. We even had nit-PICs, which were smaller versions for smaller provinces." Most interrogation centers were built or under construction by the time Muldoon left Vietnam in August 1966, at which point he was transferred to Thailand to build the CIA's huge interrogation center in Udorn, "where the CIA ran the Laos war from the Air America base." Muldoon was replaced as PIC chief in Vietnam by Bob Hill, a vice cop from Washington, D.C. Hill replaced Muldoon in Thailand in 1968.

***

One story high, fashioned from concrete blocks, poured cement, and wood in the shape of a hollow square, an interrogation center was four buildings with tin roofs linked around a courtyard. In the center of the yard was a combination lookout-water tower with an electric generator under it. "You couldn't get the guards to stay out there at night if they didn't have lights," Muldoon explained. "So we had spotlights on the corners, along the walls, and on the tower shooting out all around. We also bulldozed around it so there were no trees or bushes. Anybody coming at it could be seen crossing the open area." People entered and exited through green, steel-plated gates, "Which were wide open every time I visited," said Muldoon, who visited only during the day. "You didn't want to visit at night," when attacks occurred. PICs were located on the outskirts of town, away from residential areas, so as not to endanger the people living nearby, as well as to discourage rubbernecking. "These were self-contained places," Muldoon emphasized. Telephone lines to the PICs were tapped by the CIA.

On the left side were interrogation rooms and the cellblock -- depending on the size, twenty to sixty solitary confinement cells the size of closets. Men and women were not segregated. "You could walk right down the corridor," according to Muldoon. "It was an empty hallway with cells on both sides. Each cell had a steel door and a panel at the bottom where you could slip the food in and a slot at the top where you could look in and see what the guy was doing." There were no toilets, just holes to squat over. "They didn't have them in their homes." Muldoon laughed. "Why should we put them in their cells?"