Phoenix programme
[back] Assassinations   [back] Vietnam war

[CIA programme. The systematic killing and terrorising of civilians exposed in the My Lai massacre. Continues to exist and operate worldwide today (eg Iraqi and Palestinian civilians), was seen in Nicaragua under the code-name Operation Pegasus, and in El Salvador with the El Mozote massacre, and in Indonesia with the Santa Cruz Massacre.  And you can see the same hand at work with the manufactured Serial killers, at least one of whom was part of Phoenix.]

See: Torture  Serial killers  Human Sacrifice  Terror bombing

Nazi killing of civilians
CIA Nazi connections

My Lai massacre
El Mozote massacre
Santa Cruz Massacre

Articles
The Deadly "Operation Phoenix" by Texe Marrs

[2004] Dead Spooks Don't Lie (And Don't Deal Drugs Either) by Uri Dowbenko

[Book extract] The Phoenix Program, My Lai and the “Tiger Cages” excerpt from The Phoenix Program

[2001] Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, And The Need For A War Crimes Trial by Douglas Valentine

Book
The Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine

External
[2003] Preemptive Manhunting: The CIA’s New Assassination Program

CIA and Operation Phoenix in Vietnam — Information about the CIA's assassination program in Vietnam.

CIA Support of Death Squads William E. Colby on July 19, 1971, before Senate Subcommittee testified that CIA's Operation Phoenix had killed 21,587 Vietnamese citizens between January 1968 and May 1971.

Documents from the Phoenix Program
Created by the CIA in Saigon in 1967, Phoenix was a program aimed at "neutralizing"—through assassination, kidnapping, and systematic torture—the civilian infrastructure that supported the Viet Cong insurgency in South Vietnam. The CIA destroyed its copies of these documents, but the creator of Phoenix gave his personal copies to author Douglas Valentine. They have never previously been published, online or in print

Phoenix Document: "Internal Security in South Vietnam - Phoenix"
The latest in our collection of documents from the CIA's program of assassination, kidnapping, and torture in Vietnam

Quotes re Nicaragua [See: Nicaragua.]
The contras' brutality earned them a wide notoriety. They regularly destroyed health centers, schools, agricultural cooperatives, and community centers-symbols of the Sandinistas' social programs in rural areas. People caught in these assaults were often tortured and killed in the most gruesome ways. One example, reported by The Guardian of London, suffices. In the words of a survivor of a raid in Jinotega province, which borders on Honduras: "Rosa had her breasts cut off. Then they cut into her chest and took out her heart. The men had their arms broken, their testicles cut off, and their eyes poked out they were killed by slitting their throats and pulling the tongue out through the slit."
   
After many contra atrocity stories had been reported in the world press, it was disclosed in October 1984 that the CIA had prepared a manual of instruction for its clients which, amongst other things, encouraged the use of violence against civilians. In the wake of the furor in Congress caused by the expose, the State Department was obliged to publicly condemn the contras' terrorist activities. Congressional intelligence committees were informed by the CIA, by present and former contra leaders, and by other witnesses that the contras indeed "raped, tortured and killed unarmed civilians, including children" and that "groups of civilians, including women and children, were burned, dismembered, blinded and beheaded". These were the same rebels whom Ronald Reagan, with his strange mirror language, called "freedom fighters" and the "moral equal of our founding fathers". (The rebels in El Salvador, in the president's studied opinion, were "murderers and terrorists".)
   
The CIA manual, entitled Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, gave advice on such niceties as political assassination, blackmailing ordinary citizens, mob violence, kidnapping, and blowing up public buildings. Upon entering a town, it said, "establish a public tribunal" where the guerrillas can "shame, ridicule and humiliate" Sandinistas and their sympathizers by "shouting slogans and jeers". "If ... it should be necessary ... to fire on a citizen who was trying to leave the town," guerrillas should explain that "he was an enemy of the people" who would have alerted the Sandinistas who would then "carry out acts of reprisals such as rapes, pillage, destruction, captures, etc."  [2003] Nicaragua 1981-1990 by William Blum

Quotes
Colby's C.I.A. specialty, the "Phoenix Operation" in Southeast Asia, was known for its torture, political assassinations, mass murders (20,000 to 40,000 civilians), tiger cages, rigged elections, and slanted intelligence.
    The fact that this person was approved for appointment as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency by a Senate vote of 83-13 indicates that the Senate both agrees with, and rewards, an agent of theirs for these acts against mankind.
    It is no coincidence that the same Senate turned down a vote, after 25 years of stalling and debating, on an agreement that would outlaw genocide as late as March, 1974.
    A government that funds, promotes, recognizes, and allows war criminals to direct their domestic affairs reveals a total disrespect for our lives. This monster and its vicious machinery will now turn upon us at home.
    The Phoenix program was an indiscriminate murder program in Asia, utilizing terror and the killing of innocent people. The Hearst kidnapping is part of the Phoenix program inside the United States. INSIDE THE HEARST KIDNAPPING

So, I volunteered for this Operation Phoenix, which was a psychological operation. To make a long story short, it would make Charlie Manson look like Abigail Van Buren. It was basically a psychological operation, and it was very well done. Americans have done it many times before and in essence we did it inadvertently in Libya. The theory is you don't kill the leader, you kill his children, or his family.
    Basically, what you do is you destroy the chief's family very ignominiously, and I mean ignominiously. I mean, Charlie Manson would look like a "sweetie" compared to what this stuff was. And so when the guy comes back, he sees this mess -- you know his wife beheaded, and her infant child stripped out of her abdomen, and beheaded and bleeding on her body, hung from a rafter, shit all over the walls, those kind of things -- that's how you do it. And when that happens, then these guys lose confidence in themselves, and the village loses confidence in them, but they're not martyrs. So the whole operation loses its fighting will. And that's basically "The American Way."  [1993 Interview with Dr. Alan Levin.] Modern Medicine and its Military Links

On August 25, 1970, an article appeared in The New York Times hinting that the CIA, through Phoenix, was responsible for My Lai. The story line was advanced on October 14, when defense attorneys for David Mitchell — a sergeant accused and later cleared of machine-gunning scores of Vietnamese in a drainage ditch in My Lai — citing Phoenix as the CIA’s “systematic program of assassination,” named Evan Parker as the CIA officer who “signed documents, certain blacklists,” of Vietnamese to be assassinated in My Lai. When we spoke, Parker denied the charge.
......As in any large-scale Phoenix operation, two of Task Force Barker’s companies cordoned off the hamlet while a third one — Calley’s — moved in, clearing the way for Kotouc and Special Branch officers who were “brought to the field to identify VC from among the detained inhabitants.” .....The CIA, via Phoenix, not only perpetrated the My Lai massacre but also concealed the crime.
....As Jeff Stein said, “The first thing you learn in the Army is not competence, you learn corruption. And you learn ‘to get along, go along.’”  Unfortunately not everyone learns to get along. On September 3, 1988, Robert T’Souvas was apparently shot in the head by his girl friend, after an argument over a bottle of vodka. The two were homeless, living out of a van they had parked under a bridge in Pittsburgh. T’Souvas was a Vietnam veteran and a participant in the My Lai massacre.
.....T’Souvas’s attorney, George Davis, traveled to Da Nang in 1970 to investigate the massacre and while there was assigned as an aide a Vietnamese colonel who said that the massacre was a Phoenix operation and that the purpose of Phoenix was “to terrorize the civilian population into submission.”
    Davis told me: “When I told the people in the War Department what I knew and that I would attempt to obtain all records on the program in order to defend my client, they agreed to drop the charges.”
.....Bart Osborn (whose agent net Stein inherited) is more specific. “I never knew in the course of all those operations any detainee to live through his interrogation,” Osborn testified before Congress in 1971. “They all died. There was never any reasonable establishment of the fact that any one of those individuals was, in fact, cooperating with the VC, but they all died and the majority were wither tortured to death or things like thrown out of helicopters.” [book extract] The My Lai Massacre and The “Tiger Cages” by Douglas Valentine

But the American establishment and media denied it then, and continue to deny it until today, because Phoenix was a genocidal program -- and the CIA officials, members of the media who were complicit through their silence, and the red-blooded American boys who carried it out, are all war criminals. As Michael Ratner a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights told CounterPunch: "Kerrey should be tried as a war criminal. His actions on the night of February 24-25, 1969 when the seven man Navy Seal unit which he headed killed approximately twenty unarmed Vietnamese civilians, eighteen of whom were women and children was a war crime. Like those who murdered at My Lai, he too should be brought into the dock and tried for his crimes."
......A famous Phoenix operation, known as the My Lai Massacre, was proceeding along smoothly, with a grand total of 504 Vietnamese women and children killed, when a soldier named Hugh Thompson in a helicopter gunship saw what was happening. Risking his life to preserve that "social contract," Thomson landed his helicopter between the mass murderers and their victims, turned his machine guns on his fellow Americans, and brought the carnage to a halt.
.....
It was the CIA that forced soldiers like Kerrey into Phoenix operations, and the hidden hand of the CIA lingers over his war crime. Kerrey even uses the same rationale offered by CIA officer DeSilva. According to Kerrey, "the Viet Cong were a thousand per cent more ruthless than" the Seals or U.S. Army. [2001] Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, And The Need For A War Crimes Trial by Douglas Valentine

Page 63 (hardcover edition)
"Now everyone knows about the airborne interrogation—taking three people up in a chopper, taking one guy and saying. Talk,' then throwing him out before he even gets the chance to open his mouth. Well, we wrapped det [detonator] cord around their necks and wired them to the detonator box. And basically what it did was blow their heads off. The interrogator would tell the translator, usually a South Vietnamese intelligence officer, 'Ask him this.' He'd ask him, 'Who gave you the gun?' And the guy would start to answer, or maybe he wouldn't—maybe he'd resist—but the general idea was to waste the first two. They planned the snatches that way. Pick up this guy because we're pretty sure he's VC cadre—these other two guys just run errands for him. Or maybe they're nobody; Tran, the farmer, and his brother Nguyen. But bring in two. Put them in a row. By the time you get to your man, he's talking so fast you got to pop the weasel just to shut him up." After a moment's silence he added, "I guess you could say that we wrote the book on terror." The Phoenix Program by Douglas Valentine

 Page 85
As for the American role, according to Muldoon, "you can't have an American there all the time watching these things." "These things" included: rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electrical shock ("the Bell Telephone Hour") rendered by at- taching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; "the water treatment"; "the airplane," in which a prisoner's arms were tied behind the back and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair, after which he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; and the use of police dogs to maul prisoners. All this and more occurred in PICs. The Phoenix Program

The Ultimate Cold War Apparatchik, Ted Shackley was the notorious Director of 'Operation Phoenix' in Laos and Viet Nam, and thus responsible for a slaughter which claimed the lives of over 40,000 Vietnamese civilians under the guise of neutralizing communist sympathizers. Dead Spooks Don't Lie (And Don't Deal Drugs Either)  by CONSPIRACY PLANET

"During the next several days, the state became very upset at the U. S. military because the US. military said I was involved in a military group in Vietnam called Phoenix and that all members who were in Phoenix their military records were sealed and in Langley, VA. with the CIA." Johnny Todd Bloodlines of the Illuminati by Fritz Springmeier:  Collins

This is a program that was the CIA folks go behind the lines and assassinate civilian leaders  Transcript of 12 hours of radio interview of Chip Tatum on Intelligence Report. Ted Gundersson interviewe 1999.

As Douglas Valentine writes in The Phoenix Program (Morrow, 1990)- concerning the CIA's assassination, torture and terror program waged against the people of Vietnam - the Phoenix teams consisted of SEALs working with "CTs," described by one participant as "a combination of ARVN deserters, VC turncoats, and bad motherfucker criminals the South Vietnamese couldn't deal with in prison, so they turned them over to us." The spooks were only too happy to employ the services of these men, who "taught [their] SEAL comrades the secrets of the psy war campaign." So depraved were these agency recruits that some of them "would actually devour their enemies' vital organs." All in a day's work for America's premier intelligence agency. Henry - Portrait of an MK-ULTRA Assassin?

From Library Journal
Designed to destroy the Vietcong infrastructure and ostensibly run by the South Vietnamese government, the Phoenix Program--in fact directed by the United States--developed a variety of counterinsurgency activities including, at its worst, torture and assassination. For Valentine ( The Hotel Tacloban , LJ 9/15/84), the program epitomizes all that was wrong with the Vietnam War; its evils are still present wherever there are "ideologues obsessed with security, who seek to impose their way of thinking on everyone else." Exhaustive detail and extensive use of interviews with and writings by Phoenix participants make up the book's principal strengths; the author's own analysis is weaker. This is a good complement to Dale Andrade's less emotional Ashes to Ashes (Lexington, 1990) and such participant accounts as Orrin M. DeForest and David Chanoff's Slow Burn (S. & S., 1990).
- Kenneth W. Berger, Duke Univ. Lib., Durham, N.C.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
 

http://www.thememoryhole.org/phoenix/

 

 
Monarch: Chapter One: Phoenix Program