The Phoenix Project

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that the Phoenix Program, known as Phung Hoang in Vietnam, was designed to combine the resources of existing Vietnamese intelligence operations under a single banner of CIA control to "neutralize" the Vietcong and South Vietnamese VC sympathizers and to assist the United States in winning the war by stemming the flood of communists seeping down from the north. The author points out that, in retrospect, Phoenix was a program, which gained a horrible reputation during and after the war for its alleged crimes against humanity; American officially stated that Phoenix was responsible for the death of 20,857 Vietcong members during the war. The paper states that the fundamental flaw of the program was America's inability to recognize the Vietcong as a revolutionary, anti-colonial force whose origins are nearly a hundred years old and whose purpose might have some legitimacy; rather the CIA argued that the VC were crippled victims of Communist terror practices.

From the Paper:

"The creation of the CIO marked a sudden increase in the use of political warfare by the Americans in Vietnam. Their tactics were copied almost directly from their Communist partners. Vietcong propaganda teams would descend on a Southern village and call a general meeting for the dissemination of anti-American ideas and propaganda. The visits were repeated, and if the villagers were reluctant to join the Vietcong, then they practiced what is known as selective terror. They would arrest a member of the village for spying and then put the villager on trial before a dummy court. The villager was always convicted, and then brutally murdered in the center of the village."

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