Vietnam 1964 - 1975
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
by Mark Zepezauer
Following the deaths of JFK and Ngo Dinh
Diem, it was only a matter of time before US combat troops became
involved in Vietnam. Within days of the JFK assassination in November
1963, President Johnson had reversed JFK's plan to withdraw US
personnel by the end of 1965. As LBJ told one impatient general,
"Just get me elected; you can have your damn war."
In August 1964, the CIA and related military
intelligence agencies helped fabricate a phony Vietnamese attack
in the Gulf of Tonkin off North Vietnam. This supposed act of
North Vietnamese aggression was used as the basis for escalating
In March 1965, US troops began pouring
into Vietnam. Nine years of backing the French, another nine years
of backing Diem and two more years of CIA operations had failed.
From this point on, the US Army took over the war effort.
Since the Vietnamese people overwhelmingly
supported their own National Liberation Front (the NLF, or "Viet
Cong" as we called it), the Army began destroying villages,
herding people into internment camps, weeding out the leaders
and turning the countryside into a "free-fire zone"
(in other words, shoot anything that moves).
The CIA still had a role to play, however.
Called Operation Phoenix, it was an assassination program plain
and simple. The idea was to cripple the NLF by killing influential
people like mayors, teachers, doctors, tax collectors-anyone who
aided the functioning of the NLF's parallel government in the
Many of the "suspects" were
tortured and some were tossed from helicopters during interrogation.
William Colby, the CIA official in charge of Phoenix (he later
became director of the CIA), insisted this was all part of "military
necessity"- though he admitted to Congress that he really
had no idea how many of the 20,000 killed were Viet Cong and how
many were "loyal" Vietnamese.
Colby's confusion was understandable,
since Phoenix was a joint operation between the US and the South
Vietnamese, who used it as a means of extortion, a protection
racket and a way to settle vendettas. Significantly, the South
Vietnamese estimated the Operation Phoenix death toll at closer
to 40,000. Whatever the exact number, there's no question the
killings were necessary-after all, we were trying to prevent a