Phoenix Program

The South Vietnamese government, with CIA assistance, officially creates the Phoenix Program.  This program evolves from CORDS Director Robert Komer’s 1967 CIA plan called Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation. Phoenix utilizes military and CIA intelligence and identifies Viet Cong operatives to target for arrest, defection, or assassination. Phoenix agents employ extremely controversial methods, and both military and civilian leaders eventually question its effectiveness. Congress begins investigating Phoenix in 1971, and the United States ends its involvement in the program the next year.¹

Some journalists and antiwar activists characterized the Phoenix Probram as a CIA-led assassination squad, while its defenders maintained it was an effort to coordinate American and South Vietnamese intelligence operations in order to arrest and interrogate members of the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI) in South Vietnam. Communist sources have stated that the Phoenix Program devastated the Viet Cong’s ranks.

Some scholars say research shows that the Phoenix Program apprehended, interrogated, rehabilitated, and even turned into double agents a large number of Viet Cong operatives. Therefore, they assert, Phoenix proved remarkably successful at eliminating internal threats to the government of South Vietnam. Critical historians, however admonish that Phoenix mostly captured or killed low-level Viet Cong functionaries, the program was plagued by corruption and poor oversight on the part of the South Vietnamese, and that the program’s violent operations in villages further alienated Vietnamese citizens from the Saigon regime.

Scholars on all sides of the debate agree that the United States paid a heavy political price for its participation in this program. Allegations in the press of extrajudicial killings, which led to a Congressional inquiry in 1971, and the secrecy surrounding the Phoenix Program helped convince members of the U.S. government and the American public that the United States was waging an unjust war in Vietnam. The Phoenix Program remains a controversial and much debated aspect of the war even today. 

Andradé, Dale. Ashes to Ashes: The Phoenix Program and the Vietnam War. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1990.

Ahern, Thomas L. Vietnam Declassified: The CIA and Counterinsurgency. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2010.

Hess, Gary R. Vietnam: Explaining America’s Lost War. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2009.

Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History. New York: The Viking Press, 1983.

Lewy, Guenter. America in Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Moyar, Mark. Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: The CIA’s Secret Campaign to Destroy the Viet Cong. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1997.