Phoenix Program Read Free

everywhere in positions of authority, threatening the democratic institutions we hold dear.
    I had warned against this development in the introduction to The Phoenix Program . As I said in 1990, “This book is about terror and its role in political warfare. It will show how, as successive American governments sink deeper and deeper into the vortex of covert operations—ostensibly to combat terrorism and Communist insurgencies—the American people gradually lose touch with the democratic ideals that once defined their national self-concept. This book asks what happens when Phoenix comes home to roost.”
    The Phoenix has landed. The ultimate fusion of bureaucracy and psychological warfare, it serves as the model for America’s homeland security apparatus, as well as its global war on terror. That is not a theory. In his strategy paper “Countering Global Insurgency” published in Small Wars Journal in September–November 2004, Lt. Col. David Kilcullen called for a “global Phoenix program.” Kilcullen would become one of the government’s top counterinsurgency advisors.
    Phoenix terms like high-values target and neutralization are now as common as Phoenix strategies and tactics. And the process of institutionalizing the Phoenix program, conceptually and programmatically, is just beginning.
    Douglas Valentine, February 2014

INTRODUCTION, 1990
    It was well after midnight. Elton Manzione, his wife, Lynn, and I sat at their kitchen table, drinking steaming cups of coffee. Rock ’n’ roll music throbbed from the living room. A lean, dark man with large Mediterranean features, Elton was chain-smoking Pall Malls and telling me about his experiences as a twenty-year-old U.S. Navy SEAL in Vietnam in 1964. It was hot and humid that sultry Georgia night, and we were exhausted; but I pressed him for more specific information. “What was your most memorable experience?” I asked.
    Elton looked down and with considerable effort, said quietly, “There’s one experience I remember very well. It was my last assignment. I remember my last assignment very well.
    â€œThey,” Elton began, referring to the Navy commander and Special Forces colonel who issued orders to the SEAL team, “called the three of us [Elton, Eddie Swetz, and John Laboon] into the briefing room and sat us down. They said they were having a problem at a tiny village about a quarter of a mile from North Vietnam in the DMZ. They said some choppers and recon planes were taking fire from there. They never really explained why, for example, they just didn’t bomb it, which was their usual response, but I got the idea that the village chief was politically connected and that the thing had to be done quietly.
    â€œWe worked in what were called hunter-killer teams,” Elton explained.“The hunter team was a four-man unit, usually all Americans, sometimes one or two Vietnamese or Chinese mercenaries called counterterrorists—CTs for short. Most CTs were enemy soldiers who had deserted or South Vietnamese criminals. Our job was to find the enemy and nail him in place—spot his position, then go back to a prearranged place and call in the killer team. The killer team was usually twelve to twenty-five South Vietnamese Special Forces led by Green Berets. Then we’d join up with the killer team and take out the enemy.”
    But on this particular mission, Elton explained, the SEALs went in alone. “They said there was this fifty-one-caliber antiaircraft gun somewhere near the village that was taking potshots at us and that there was a specific person in the village operating the gun. They give us a picture of the guy and a map of the village. It’s a small village, maybe twelve or fifteen hooches. ‘This is the hooch,’ they say. ‘The guy sleeps on the mat on the left side. He has two daughters.’ They don’t know if he has a mama-san or where she is, but they