the CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD), they would need to bring in extra telephone assistance to cope with the calls that would come from agents following the broadcast of these shows.
One project that the TSD invested some time in was nicknamed ‘Acoustic Kitty’, which, although it sounds like something from an episode of spy spoof
A rather more conventional spy worked for the CIA for nearly twenty-five years and was described as a jewel in the crown by more than one senior member of the agency. Dimitri Fedorovich Polyakov was a GRU agent who had worked as a member of the Soviet mission at the United Nations, and run illegal agents into West Germany during a posting in Berlin.
Initially offering his services to the FBI as a counterintelligence source during his second stint at the UN in 1961 and working with them for a year, he was handed over to the CIA before he returned to Russia in 1962. Polyakov didn’t appear to be motivated by money: he accepted no more than $3,000 a year, and mostly took that in the form of tools, fishing gear or shotguns. According to one CIA case officer who worked with him for fifteen years, Polyakov ‘articulated a sense that he had to help us out or the Soviets were going to win the cold war, and he couldn’t stand that. He felt we were very naive and we were going to fail.’ It’s also been suggested that he felt disillusioned when he was refused permission to allow his son to enter a New York hospital for life-saving treatment and the boy died.
Polyakov was posted to Rangoon, Burma, and was able to assist the US war effort in Vietnam by passing over the GRU’s details on the Chinese and Vietnamese military forces, as well as revealing the identity of the GRU spy in the British Ministry of Aviation, Frank Bossard. His material would continue to influence American policy through the following decade, notably with its insight into the relationship between Russia and China, which had deteriorated through the sixties.
Discussion of the US military’s role during the Vietnam War will often turn to darker actions, such as the massacre of Vietnamese civilians by American soldiers at My Lai. The CIA’s reputation was not enhanced when news reached the American public about the abuses carried out in the name of Operation Phoenix, although it wasn’t all negative. Many US servicemen and their families were extremely grateful to the Agency for their work in establishing contact between prisoners of war and their homes.
The purpose of Operation Phoenix was to root out supporters of the Viet Cong, otherwise known as the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam. The Viet Cong wanted to ‘overthrow the camouflaged colonial regime of the American imperialists’, and to all intents and purposes were carrying out the wishes of the North Vietnamese government in Hanoi. They carried out acts of violence and terrorism against government employees and anyone assisting those they regarded as the enemy, which at times could include medical personnel.
The Viet Cong carried out what became known as the Tet Offensive in early 1968, attacking more than a hundred towns around South Vietnam. They even mounted a commando raid on the US embassy in Saigon. They hoped that an urban uprising would follow, but it didn’t, and between forty thousand (the US estimate) and seventy-five thousand (the Viet Cong’s own figure) of their own troops were killed, as compared to around six thousand American and South Vietnamese. Although this was presented as a major defeat for the Americans by the anti-war media in the States, it was equally devastating for the Viet Cong, whose infrastructure was weakened, and numbers depleted to such a level that they were unable to ever fully regroup: ‘We failed to seize a number of primary objectives. We also failed to hold the occupied areas. In the political field we failed to motivate the people to stage uprisings,’ the Viet Cong themselves admitted. However, as Richard Nixon pointed out: ‘Though it was an overwhelming victory for South Vietnam and the United States, the almost universal theme of media coverage was that we had suffered a disastrous defeat. The steady drumbeat of inaccurate stories convinced millions of Americans that we had lost a major battle.’
Operation Phoenix had already been in existence prior to the Tet Offensive, but went into overdrive afterwards. Created as the Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation Program as part of the general Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support program (CORDS), it was quickly renamed Phoenix (or Phung Hoang in Vietnamese). MACV Directive 381-41 of 9 July 1967 established it with the aim of attacking with a ‘rifle shot rather than a shotgun approach to target key political leaders, command/control elements and activists in the VCI’. In essence, it was similar to previous CIA operations, a struggle for the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese, so that they chose to turn against the Communists. It therefore needed to be carried out by the Vietnamese themselves.
Oversight committees operating at national, corps and district levels agreed the framework within which the Phoenix teams could operate, and set quotas. At the provincial level were teams, usually comprised of trained South Vietnamese soldiers, who would ascertain who was involved with the Viet Cong, and ‘neutralise’ them. This didn’t necessarily mean they were killed: it was recognized that that sort of heavy-handed operation could be counter-productive, and of course, dead Viet Cong couldn’t provide useful intelligence. According to a CIA report in 1969:
The Provincial Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) Program in South Vietnam forms an investigative and paramilitary attack upon the covert communist apparatus in South Vietnam. PRU teams, currently totalling approximately 4,200 men, operate in 44 provinces of South Vietnam. PRU are based in their home areas and operate in teams of 15–20 men. They are presently advised and supported by 101 US military advisors and seven CIA personnel. CIA funds the PRU and retains overall administrative control of the project for the US Government.
The official remit of Phoenix was:
… the collection of intelligence identifying these members; inducing them to abandon their allegiance to the VC and rally to the government; capturing or arresting them in order to bring them before province security committees or military courts for lawful sentencing; and as a final resort, the use of reasonable force should they resist capture or arrest where failure to use such force would result in the escape of the suspected VCI member or would result in threat of serious bodily harm to a member or members of the capturing or arresting party.
The problem was that there were many occasions where those carrying out the Phoenix program went beyond their orders, leading to the belief that Phoenix was a cover for assassination (although obviously there was a grey area between targeted kills of Viet Cong operatives and assassinations.) Interrogations could be brutal — K. Barton Osborn, who was connected to Phoenix in 1968, described the techniques in graphic detail to a Congress subcommittee in 1971, and called Phoenix a ‘sterile depersonalized murder program… I never knew an individual to be detained as a VC suspect who ever lived through an interrogation.’
The CIA wanted to pull out of the program and leave it in South Vietnamese hands as early as 1969, in part because it didn’t really fit with their intelligence-gathering mission any more. The program was run by William Colby, who had been Chief of Station in Saigon; it officially came to an end shortly after he returned to Washington as Executive Director of the CIA in 1971 and Congress began investigating the abuses. As far as Colby was concerned, despite the problems that he acknowledged had occurred, it was a success; as he explained in a 1981 television interview: ‘I have heard several references to North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese communists who account, who state that in their mind the most, the toughest period that they faced in the whole period of the war from 1960 to 1975 was the period from 1968 to ’72 when the Phoenix Program was at work.’
The CIA was instrumental in assisting with information about prisoners of war being held during the Vietnam War. Future Vice-Presidential candidate James Bond Stockdale (yes, that really was his name) was shot down in September 1965 and spent the next seven years as a prisoner. During that time he developed a code that
