Cockburn
/ St. Clair's Scorching New History of a Decade of War
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Today's
Stories
May
15 / 16, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
Green Lights for Torture
May
14, 2004
Dr.
Susan Block
Bush's POW Porn
Ron
Jacobs
Secret History of the War on Drugs
William
Blum
God, Country and Torture
Michael
Donnelly
The People v. Corporate Greed: A Victory on the North Coast
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
India Shines
Stephen
Gowans
Building Democracy in Iraq and Other
Absurdities
May
13, 2004
Dave
Lindorff
Where is Kerry?
Colm
O'Laithian
Torture and Degradation: Revenge American Style?
Saul
Landau and Farrah Hassan
Wal-Mart: Scrooge with Hi-Tech Accounting
Practices
Ralph
Nader
An Open Letter to Bush on the Inhumane Treatment of Iraqi Prisoners
Willliam
James Martin
Deir Yassin Massacre Recalled
Marc
Salomon
Reality TV Bites
Forrest
Hylton
Law 'n Order in La Paz: All Quiet
on the Southern Front?
May
12, 2004
Blanton
/ Kornbluh
Prisoner Abuse: Cheney Warned in
1992
Virginia
Tilley
So, Who's to Blame?
Bruce
Jackson
James Inhofe, the Dumbest Senator
of Them All
Thomas
P. Healy
No Enemies: Making Peace with Bert Sacks
Linda
S. Heard
Racism and Ignorance: a Lethal Cocktail in Iraq
Norman
Solomon
Spinning Torturegate
Lisa
Viscidi
The People's Voice: Community Radio in Guatemala
Jack
Heyman
View from the Bay Bridge: Longshoremen Plan Mass Workers March
on DC
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Rummy's Reprieve
CounterPunch
Wire
Teamsters Corruption Scandal: Hoffa Exec. Assistant Alleged to
Have Quashed Investigation into Mob Influence
Christopher
Brauchli
Detention Camp, USA
William
S. Lind
Bush's Waterloo?
May 11, 2004
Mark
Engler
On the "Necessity" of Torture
Ray
McGovern
More Troops? A March of Folly
Kurt
Nimmo
Dirty Nukes and Jefferson's Grand Experiment
Mickey
Z.
Less Than Hero
Christopher
Reed
Torture on the Homefront: America's Long History of Prison Abuse
Dennis
Hans
When John Negroponte was Mullah Omar
Bruce
Jackson
Pete Seeger at 85
Mike
Whitney
Killing al Sadr
Simon
Helweg-Larsen
Shrinking the Guatemalan Military
William
A. Cook
The Unconscious Country: Righteous Indignation,
Nakedly Displayed
May
10, 2004
Robert
Fisk
From Hollywood to Abu Ghraib: Racism
and Torture as Entertainment
Wayne
Madsen
The Israeli Torture Template: Rape,
Feces and Urine-Soaked Cloth Sacks
Col.
Dan Smith
The Shame of Abu Ghraib
Joe
Bageant
John Ashcroft, Keep Your Mouth Off My Wife!
Ron
Jacobs
Rummy's Prisongate Blues: Don't Leave Mad; Just Leave
Ben
Tripp
Getting in Touch with Your Inner Savage
Ray
Hanania
Why They Hate Us: Racism, Bigotry and Abuse
Reza
Fiyouzat
"Mishandled" Invasions
Diane
Christian
Images & Abstractions &
Genitals
Website
of the Day
Crushing Iraqi Skulls with Tanks for Sport?
May
8 / 9, 2004
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Torture: as American as Apple Pie
Adam
Jones
America's Srebrenica: What About the Hundreds of POWs Suffocated
and Shot at Kunduz?
Douglas
Valentine
Who Let the Dogs Out?: Torture, the CIA and the Press
Kurt
Nimmo
Rush Limbaugh and the Babes of Abu Ghraib
Brian
Cloughley
Humpty Dumpty is Falling
Lucia
Dailey
Forbidden Games
Joanne
Mariner
* * * *: Redacting Moussaoui
Mickey
Z.
Please Forgive U.S.? (There Are No Innocent Bystanders)
John
Chuckman
The Thing with No Brain
Doug
Giebel
Someone Knew: There Were No WMDs
Norm
Dixon
How the Bush Gang Exploited 9/11
Sam
Bahour
A Guiding Light Falls on Ramallah
Susan
Davis
Disorderly Conduct as Fine Art
Dave
Marsh
In a Pig's Eye: Alan Lomax, Dead But Still Stealing
Laura
Flanders
Life with Dick and Lynne
Dave
Zirin
Fans Push Spiderman Off Base
Carolyn
Baker
Why I Won't Vote in 2004
Prince
"Ain't No Sense in Voting"
Dr.
Susan Block
Onan for Two: Liberating Masturbation
Poets'
Basement
Smith, Sleeth, Ford, Albert and Saska
May
7, 2004
Human
Rights Watch
10 Prisons; 9,000 Prisoners: US Detention
Facilities in Iraq
Ron
Jacobs
UnAmerican? I Wish It Were So
Robert
Fisk
An Illegal and Immoral War
Ahmad
Faruqui
The 50th Anniversary of Dien Bien
Phu
Alexander
Zaitchik
From Terrell Unit in Texas to Abu Ghraib: Doesn't It Ring a (Prison)
Bell?
Mike
Whitney
The Price of Victory
Norman
Solomon
This War, Racism and Media Denial
M.
Shahid Alam
A Comic Apology
May
6, 2004
Jeffrey
St. Clair
They Did It for Jessica: Smeared with
Shit; Kicked to Death
Kathy
Kelly
May Day in Pekin Prison: Prison Labor
for the War Machine
Werther
The Sunk Cost Fallacy: War as Vegas
Casino Game
Lawrence
Ferlinghetti
Totalitarian Democracy
Robert
Fisk
"Smoke Him": Video Shows Wounded
Men Being Shot by US Helicopter
John
Janney
Torturing the Way to Freedom?
Christopher
Ketcham
Outlaw Heterosexual Marriage Now!
Alan
Farago
Dead Oceans: So Long, Thanks for the Fish
Sam
Hamod
Bush on Arab TV: Worthless and Demeaning
James
Brooks
Sullen Spring
William
S. Lind
On the Brink of Defeat in Iraq
May
5, 2004
Maj.
Gen. Antonio M. Taguba
Complete US Army Report on Abuse of
Iraqi Prisoners
Kathleen
and Bill Christison
Kerry: a Lost Cause for Progressives?
Will
Youmans
Deal with the Devil: a Palestinian
Zionist and the End of the World
Patrick
B. Barr
Terrorists R Us: the Powerful are Exempt from the Label
Lawrence
Magnuson
Nightline's All-American Morgue
Greg
Moses
Pocketbook of Denuded Ideals
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Tormenting Prisoners, Torturing
Truth
Lee
Ballinger
Cinco de Mayo and Unity
Gilbert
Achcar
Bush's Cakewalk into the Iraq Quaqmire
Website
of the Day
Operation Phoenix & Iraq
May
4, 2004
Human
Rights Watch
A Timeline of Torture and Abuse Allegations
and Responses
Kurt
Nimmo
The CIA Privatized Torture
David
Peterson
CBS, Self-Censorship & Iraq
Barry
Lando
CACI's Private Torture Chambers
Patrick
Cockburn
Torture: Iraqis Disgusted, But Not Surprised
Dr.
Susan Block
Indecent Insurgents: Watch What You Say
Fidel
Castro
A Mindless, Unnecessary War
Mike
Whitney
Empire of Torture
Sonali
Kolhatkar
How to Stop the War: Demonstrate Against
John Kerry
Josh
Frank
The Lost Sierra Club
Stan
Goff
The Role: Another Open Letter to US Troops in Iraq
Agustin
Velloso
Spare Us Your Disgusting Ethics
Stew
Albert
American Know-How
Website
of the Day
Scenes from a Cover-Up
May
3, 2004
Virginia
Tilley
Let the Wall of Silence Fall
May
1 / 2, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
An Army in Disgrace, a Policy
in Tatters, the Real Prospect of Defeat
Robert
Fisk
"Good Guys" Who Can Do No
Wrong
Alexander
Cockburn
Watching Niagara: Stupid Leaders,
Useless Spies, Angry World
Heather
Williams
Gringo, We're Going Home: Latin
American Troops Flee Iraq
Diane
Rejman
An Army Vet on Torture in Iraq:
Abu Ghraib as My Lai?
Diane
Christian
Blood Spilling: Osama, Bush and
Sharon Speak the Same Language
Patrick
Cockburn
Seems Like Old Times in Fallujah
Dave
Lindorff
Bush's Torturous Logic: Shocked,
Shocked, Shocked
Chris
Floyd
Suicide Bomber: Neocons, Nihilists
and Annihilation
April
29 / 30, 2004
Dave
Zirin
A Pawn in Their Game: the Unlonesome
Death of Pat Tillman
Kathy
Kelly
The Warden's Tour
Greg
Weiher
Fallujah and the Warsaw Ghetto: the
Banality of Evil
Michael
S. Ladah
Terrorism and Assassination: the
Ultimate Depception
Patrick
Cockburn
The Fallujah Mutinies
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
|
Weekend
Edition
May 15 / 16, 2004
The Phoenix
Program, Revisited
ABCs of American
Interrogation Methods
By DOUGLAS VALENTINE
Adapted From "Chapter
5: PICS" in The Phoenix Program, Douglas Valentine
(NY, Wm Morrow, 1990)
"A census, if properly
made and exploited, is a basic source of intelligence. It would
show, for instance, who is related to whom, an important piece
of information in counterinsurgency warfare because insurgent
recruiting at the village level is generally based initially
on family ties."'
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
their covert Census Grievance Program to gather intelligence
in Viet Cong controlled villages, CIA police advisers were conducting
a census program of their own. Its origins are traced to Robert
Thompson, a British counterinsurgency expert the State Department
hired in 1961 to advise the US on police operations in South
Vietnam. Based 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
Viet Cong Infrastructure.
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 instrumental
in identifying persons who could be blackmailed 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 government-controlled
villages. Apprehending the cadre that ran the cells was then
a matter of arresting all minor suspects and "softening
them up" until they informed. The idea was to weaken the
insurgency by forcing its political cadres to flee to guerrilla
units in the jungle, thus 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."'
Thompson's method was successful,
up to a point, because 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."'
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 double agents prompted CIA "contractors"
to arrest 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 mercenary contractors. This, in 1964, at Thompson's suggestion,
the Police Special Branch was formed plans were
made to center it in Province Intelligence Coordinating Committees
(PICCs) in South Vietnam's 44 provinces. As one of their main
features, the CIA-controlled PICCs were designed to coordinate
paramilitary kidnapping and assassination operations with the
intelligence operations of the Special Branch.
Also in 1964, as part of the
effort to combine police, intelligence and paramilitary programs,
the CIA formed paramilitary reaction forces in seven key districts
surrounding Saigon. The CIA provided supplies and training, while
military intelligence and Special Forces provided personnel.
Lists of defectors, criminals, and other potential recruits,
as well as targets, came from Special Branch files.
The CIA's "motivational
indoctrination training program" was designed by its creator,
Frank Scotton, 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."'
The typical recruit was a profit-motivated
person Scotton would persuade to desert from 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 he was 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. After signing their contracts,
they were taken out for dinner and drinks, then to a brothel,
where they were photographed, then blackmailed into joining special
reconnaissance teams. Trained in Saigon, outfitted with captured
enemy 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
bomb them along with the target.
Minds capable of such murderous
scenes were not averse to exploiting American soldiers who had
committed war crimes. Rather than serve time in military stockades
in Vietnam or elsewhere, Americans with deviant personalities
were likely to volunteer for dangerous and reprehensible jobs
for the CIA's Special Operations Group.
About the assassination squads
he and the CIA 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.
The PICS
John Patrick Muldoon, Picadoon
to the people who knew him in Vietnam, was the first director
of the CIA's PIC Program in Vietnam. Six feet four inches tall,
well over two hundred pounds, Muldoon has a scarlet face and
deep voice. A Georgetown University dropout, he joined the Agency
in 1958,. 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. There was a joint KCIA-CIA
interrogation center in Yon Don Tho, outside Seoul."
Here it is worth pausing to
explain that in recruiting cadres for the Korean CIA, the CIA
used the same method it used to staff the South Vietnamese Central
Intelligence Organization (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."'
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."'
Following his tour in Korea,
Muldoon was assigned to South 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 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 North Vietnamese Army. 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 up 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
the CIA coordinated civilian, police, and military intelligence.
"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 notes
that the same CIA interrogators were there until his departure
for Thailand in August 1966. There were four interrogators when
he arrived and he was the fifth. Three were Air Force enlisted
men serving under an Army captain. Muldoon's boss, the CIA chief
of the National Interrogation Center (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 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 CIA liaison officer 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 (CIA officer) 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 two provinces 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."
"It's funny," Muldoon
reminisces," 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 god-dammed 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." Then
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 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 that had to do with intelligence and paramilitary
operations. When I arrived in Saigon 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 Malaya
with Robert Thompson, and they were the experts.
PICCs
Forerunner to the Province
Interrogation Center program, the Province Intelligence Coordination
Committee program 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. But the military
refused to go along, so the CIA settled on its unilateral Province
Interrogation Center Program. And that's when the PICs became
the place where the CIA coordinated its paramilitary and intelligence
operations at the province level. The Special Branch and CIA
officials stationed at the PIC would get  informants
to tell the CIA who the VCI were, then the CIA would send the
assassination squads to kidnap or kill them. This was the one-two
punch of the counterinsurgency; the secret interrogation centers
and the "counter-terrorists (CTs)." 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 initial
PIC was its design, so CIA architects re-designed it. 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 each of South Vietnam's 44 provinces. 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. Each provincial capital
also had a CIA interrogation center, as did each of the four
region capitals. The difference was that regional interrogation
centers were larger, holding two to three hundred prisoners each.
According to Muldoon, it was
up to the CIA's liaison officer to convince the province chief
and his CIO counterpart to find a spot near the provincial capital.
Once the interrogation center was built, the liaison officer
became its adviser, and Muldoon helped him recruit its staff.
Most 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.
Inside a
PIC
One story high, fashioned from
concrete blocks, poured cement, and wood in the shape of a hollow
square, a PIC 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 the PICs 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?"
Prisoners slept on concrete
slabs. "Depending on how cooperative they were, you'd give
them a straw mat or a blanket. It could get very cold at night
in the highlands." A system of rewards and punishments was
part of the treatment. "There were little things you could
give them and take away from them, not a lot, but every little
bit they got they were grateful for." Depending on the amount
of VCI activity in the province and the personality of the PIC
chief, some interrogation centers were always full while others
were always empty. In either case, "We didn't want them
sitting there talking to each other," Muldoon said, so "we
would build up the cells gradually, until we had to put them
next to each other. They were completely isolated. They didn't
get time to go out and walk around the yard. They sat in their
cells when they weren't being interrogated. After that they were
sent to the local jail or were turned back over to the military,
where they were put in POW camps or taken out and shot. That
part I never got involved in," he said, adding that they
"were treated better in the PICs than in the local jails
for common criminals. Public Safety was advising them, working
with the National Police. Sometimes they had sixty to seventy
people in a cell that shouldn't have had more than ten. But they
didn't care. If you're a criminal, you suffer. If you don't like
it, too bad. Don't be a criminal."
The CIA interrogation process
worked like this. "As we brought prisoners in, the first
thing we did was run them through the shower. That's on the left
as you come in. After that they were checked by the doctor or
nurse. That was an absolute necessity because God knows what
diseases they might be carrying with them. They might need medication.
They wouldn't do you much good if they died the first day they
were there and you never got a chance to interrogate them. That's
why the medical office was right inside the main gate. In most
PICs," Muldoon noted, "the medical staff was usually
a local South Vietnamese Army medic who would come out and check
the prisoners coming in that day." After the prisoner was
cleaned, examined, repaired, weighed, photographed, and fingerprinted,
his biography was taken by a Special Branch officer in the debriefing
room. This initial interrogation extracted "hot" information
that could be immediately exploited-the whereabouts of an ongoing
Communist party committee meeting, for example, as well as the
basic information needed to come up with requirements for the
series of interrogations that followed. Then the prisoner was
given a uniform and stuck in a cell.
The interrogation rooms were
at the back of the PIC. Some had two-way mirrors and polygraph
machines, although sophisticated equipment was usually reserved
for regional interrogation centers, where expert CIA staff interrogators
could put them to better use. Most province liaison officers
were not trained interrogators. "They didn't have to be,"
according to Muldoon. "They were there to collect intelligence,
and they had a list of what they needed in their own province.
All they had to do was to make sure that whoever was running
the PIC followed their orders. All they had to say was: `This
is the requirement I want.' Then they read the initial reports
and went back and gave the Special Branch interrogators additional
requirements, just like we did at the NIC."
The guards lived in the PIC.
As they returned from duty, they stacked their weapons in the
first room on the right. The next room was the PIC chief's office,
with a safe for classified documents, handguns, and his bottle
of scotch. The PIC chief's job was to "turn" captured
VCI into double agents, and maintain informant networks in the
hamlets and villages. Farther down the corridor were offices
for interrogators, collation and report writers, translator-interpreters,
and clerical and kitchen staff. There were file rooms with locked
cabinets and map rooms for tracking the whereabouts of VCI in
the province. And there was a room where defectors were encouraged
to become counter-terrorists.
Once an interrogation center
had been constructed and a staff assigned, Muldoon summoned the
training team from the NIC. Each member of the team was a specialist.
The Army captain trained the guards. Air Force Sergeant Frank
Rygalski taught report writers how to write proper reports. There
were standard reporting formats for tactical as opposed to strategic
intelligence and for agent reports. To compile a finished report,
an interrogator's notes were reviewed by the chief interrogator,
then collated, typed, copied and sent to the Special Branch,
CIO, and CIA. Translations were never considered totally accurate
unless read and confirmed in the original language by the same
person, but that rarely happened. Likewise, interrogations conducted
through interpreters were never considered totally reliable,
for significant information was generally lost or misrepresented.
An Air Force sergeant, Dick
Falke, taught interrogators how to take notes and ask questions
during an interrogation. "You don't just sit down with ten
questions, get ten answers, then walk away," Muldoon said.
"Some of these guys, if you gave them ten questions, would
get ten answers for you, and that's it. A lot of them had to
learn that you don't drop a line of questioning just because
you got the answer. The answer, if it's the right one, should
lead you to sixty more questions. For example," he said,
"Question one was: `Were you ever trained in North Vietnam?'
Question two was `Were you ever trained by people other than
Vietnamese?' Well, lots of times the answer to question two is
so interesting and gives you so much information you keep going
for an hour and never get to question three: `When did you come
to South Vietnam?"'
Special Branch officers in
region interrogation centers were sent to a special interrogation-training
program conducted at the NIC by experts from the CIA's Support
Services Branch, most of whom had worked on Russian defectors
and were brought out from Washington to handle important cases.
Training of Special Branch administrative personnel was conducted
at region headquarters by professional secretaries, who taught
their students how to type, file, and use phones.
According to Muldoon, the Special
Branch had "the old French methods." That means interrogation
that included torture. "All this had to be stopped by the
agency," he said. "They had to be re-taught with more
sophisticated techniques." In Ralph Johnson's opinion,
"the Vietnamese, both Communist and GVN, looked upon torture
as a normal and valid method of obtaining intelligence."'
But of course, the Vietnamese did not conceive the PICs; they
were the stepchildren of Robert Thompson, whose aristocratic
English ancestors perfected torture in dingy castle dungeons,
on the rack and in the iron lady, with thumbscrews and branding
irons.
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 attaching 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, one of which was run by Congressman Rob Simmons (R-CT)
while he was the CIA officer running the PIC in Phu Yen Province
in 1972.
"The PIC adviser's job
was to keep the region officer informed about real operations
mounted in the capital city or against big shots in the field,"
Muldoon said, adding that advisers who wanted to do a good job
ran the PICs themselves, while the others hired assistants (contractors)
who were paid by the CIA but worked for themselves, doing a dirty
job in exchange for a line on the inside track to the black market.
Apart from being known as
torture chambers, PICs are also faulted for producing only information
on low-level VCI. Whenever a VCI member with strategic information
(for example, a cadre in Hue who knew what was happening in the
Delta) was captured, he was immediately grabbed by the region
interrogation center, or the NIC in Saigon, where expert CIA
interrogators could produce quality reports for Washington. The
lack of feedback to the PIC for its own province operations resulted
in a revolving door syndrome, wherein the PIC was reduced to
picking up the same low-level people month after month.
"A lot of PICs didn't
produce anything because the (CIA advisors) in the provinces
didn't push them," Muldoon said. "Some of them said,
`It's not that we didn't try; it's just that it was a dumb idea
in the first place, because we couldn't get the military, who
were the ones capturing prisoners, to turn them over. The military
weren't going to turn them over to us until they were finished
with them, and by then they were washed out.'
"This," Muldoon conceded,
"was part of the overall plan: Let the military get the
tactical military intelligence first. Obviously that's the most
important thing going on in a war. But then we felt that after
the military got what they could use tomorrow or next week, maybe
the CIA should talk to this guy. That was the whole idea of having
the Province Intelligence Coordination Committees and why the
PICs became part of them, so we could work this stuff back and
forth. And in provinces where our guys went out of their way
to work with the MACV sector adviser, they were able to get something
done."
The Military's
Side of the Story
The military's side of the
story is given by Major General Joseph McChristian, who arrived
in Saigon in July 1965 as the military's intelligence chief.
McChristian recognized the threat posed by the VCI and, in order
to destroy it, proposed "a large countrywide counterintelligence
effort involved in counter sabotage, counter subversion and counterespionage
activities."' In structuring this attack against the VCI,
McChristian assigned military intelligence detachments to each
US Army brigade, division, and field force, as well as to each
South Vietnamese division and corps. He created combined centers
for intelligence, document exploitation, interrogation, and materiel
exploitation and directed them to support and coordinate allied
units in the field. And he ordered the construction of military
interrogation centers in each sector, division, and corps.
McChristian readily conceded
the primacy of the CIA in anti-VCI operations. He acknowledged
that the military did not have the CIA's sophisticated agent
nets, and that military advisers at sector level focused on acquiring
tactical intelligence needed to mount offensive operations. But
he was very upset when the CIA, "without coordination with
MACV, took over control of the files on the infrastructure located"
in the PICs. He got an even bigger shock when he "was refused
permission to see the infrastructure file by a member of the
[CIA]." Indeed, because the CIA prevented the military from
entering the PICs, the military retaliated by refusing to send
them prisoners. As a result, anti-VCI operations were poorly
coordinated at province level.'
Meanwhile, the military assigned
intelligence teams to the provinces, which formed agent nets
mainly through South Vietnamese forces under military control.
These advisory teams sent reports to the political order of battle
section in the Combined Intelligence Center, which "produced
complete and timely intelligence on the boundaries, location,
structure, strengths, personalities and activities of the Communist
political organization, or infrastructure. Information filtering
into the Combined Intelligence Center was placed in an automatic
database, which enabled analysts to compare known VCI offenders
with known aliases. Agent reports and special intelligence collection
programs provided the military with information on low-level
VCI, while information on high-level VCI came from the Combined
Military Interrogation Center, which, according to McChristian,
was the "focal point of tactical and strategic exploitation
of selected human sources.""
By mid-1966 U.S. military intelligence
employed about a thousand agents in South Vietnam, all of whom
were paid through the 525th's Intelligence Contingency Fund.
The 525th had a headquarters
unit, one battalion for each corps, and one working with third
countries. The 525th had unilateral teams working without the
knowledge or approval of the GVN. Operational teams consisted
of five enlisted men, each one an agent handler reporting to
an officer who served as team chief. When assigned to the field,
agent handlers in unilateral teams lived on their own, "on
the economy." To avoid "flaps," they were given
identification as Foreign Service officers or employees of private
American companies, although they kept their military IDs for
access to classified information, areas, and resources. Upon
arriving in South Vietnam, each agent handler (aka case officer)
was assigned a principal agent, who usually had a functioning
agent network already in place. Some of these nets had been set
up by the French, the British, or the Chinese. Each principal
agent had several subagents working in cells. Like most spies,
subagents were usually in it for the money; in many cases the
war had destroyed their businesses and left them no alternative.
Case officers worked with principal
agents through interpreters and couriers. In theory, a case officer
never met subagents. Instead, each cell had a cell leader who
secretly met with the principal agent to exchange information
and receive instructions, which were passed along to the other
subagents. Some subagents were political specialists; others
attended to tactical military concerns. Posing as woodcutters
or rice farmers or secretaries or auto mechanics, subagents infiltrated
Vietcong villages or businesses and reported on NLF associations,
VCI cadres, and the GVN's criminal undertakings as well as on
the size and whereabouts of VC and NVA combat units.
Case officers handling political
"accounts" were given requirements, originated at battalion
headquarters, by their team leaders. The requirements were for
specific information on individual VCI. The cell leader would
report on a particular VCI to the principal agent, who would
pass the information back to the case officer using standard
tradecraft methods, such as a cryptic mark on a wall or telephone
pole that the case officer would periodically look for. The case
officer would, upon seeing the signal, send a courier to retrieve
the report from the principal agent's courier at a prearranged
time and place. The case officer would then pass the information
to his team leader as well as to other customers, including the
CIA liaison officer at "The Embassy House," as CIA
headquarters in a province was called.
The finished products of positive
and counterintelligence operations were called army information
reports. Reports and agents were rated on the basis of accuracy,
but insofar as most agents were in it for money, accuracy was
hard to judge. A spy might implicate a person who owed him money
or a rival in love, business, or politics. Many sources were
double agents, and all agents were periodically given lie detector
tests. For protection they were also given code names. They were
paid through the Military Intelligence Contingency Fund, but
not well enough to survive on their salaries alone, so many dabbled
in the black market, too.
The final stage of the intelligence
cycle was the termination of agents, for which there were three
methods. First was termination by paying the agent off, swearing
him to secrecy, and saying so long. Second was termination with
prejudice, which meant ordering an agent out of an area and placing
his or her name on a blacklist so he or she could never work
for the United States again; third was termination with extreme
prejudice, applied when the mere existence of an agent threatened
the security of an operation or other agents. Military Intelligence
officers were taught, in off-the-record sessions, how to terminate
their agents with extreme prejudice.
CIA officers received similar
instruction.
Douglas Valentine is the author of The
Hotel Tacloban, The
Phoenix Program, and TDY.
His fourth book, The
Strength of the Wolf: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1930-1968,
is newly published by Verso. For information about Mr. Valentine,
and his books and articles, please visit his web sites at www.DouglasValentine.com
and http://members.authorsguild.net/valentine
Weekend
Edition Features for May 8 / 9, 2004
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Torture: as American as Apple Pie
Adam
Jones
America's Srebrenica: What About the Hundreds of POWs Suffocated
and Shot at Kunduz?
Douglas
Valentine
Who Let the Dogs Out?: Torture, the CIA and the Press
Kurt
Nimmo
Rush Limbaugh and the Babes of Abu Ghraib
Brian
Cloughley
Humpty Dumpty is Falling
Lucia
Dailey
Forbidden Games
Joanne
Mariner
* * * *: Redacting Moussaoui
Mickey
Z.
Please Forgive U.S.? (There Are No Innocent Bystanders)
John
Chuckman
The Thing with No Brain
Doug
Giebel
Someone Knew: There Were No WMDs
Norm
Dixon
How the Bush Gang Exploited 9/11
Sam
Bahour
A Guiding Light Falls on Ramallah
Susan
Davis
Disorderly Conduct as Fine Art
Dave
Marsh
In a Pig's Eye: Alan Lomax, Dead But Still Stealing
Laura
Flanders
Life with Dick and Lynne
Dave
Zirin
Fans Push Spiderman Off Base
Carolyn
Baker
Why I Won't Vote in 2004
Prince
"Ain't No Sense in Voting"
Dr.
Susan Block
Onan for Two: Liberating Masturbation
Poets'
Basement
Smith, Sleeth, Ford, Albert and Saska
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