“The struggle… is in essence a struggle for political domination… The primary issue is control over people… our adversaries have generally employed armed force… primarily as a political abrasive intended to cow the population into submission, collapse all political structures… and erode the appetite for struggle… but the ultimate measure of success or failure will not be relative casualties… but — instead — whose political writ runs… over the population of South Vietnam.”
—Central Intelligence Agency, ”The Situation in Vietnam: Overview and Outlook,” 24 Jan. 1969 no. 0550/69, p. A-1.
In July of 1967, the CIA began what it would later call the Phoenix Program. A 2005 U.S. Army proposal paper drafted by Lieutenant Colonel Ken Tovo said Phoenix “directed the participation of key representatives from civil government, police, security services, and military organizations” in Việt Nam with the explicit purpose of destroying support for the Communists in the South. In 1971, after rumors exploded into the public consciousness, the U.S. Congress held a series of hearings on Phoenix where it was described as a “murder program.” In 2015, CIA analyst Samuel Adams described Phoenix as a combined assassination and torture program. The Phoenix Program was shut down on paper in December of 1972, but in reality, as our own Lt. Colonel Tovo noted in his very forthcoming paper, the program continued under CIA direction until the “fall of Saigon” in 1975.
Douglas Valentine, an independent journalist, has spent the last forty years warning the American public about the Phoenix Program and how it has been operationalized within U.S. borders. Today, we are going to talk about what the Phoenix Program still means for the broad group of Communists and anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist activists working to topple the U.S. foreign policy regime of terror, death, and profit. In reality, the Phoenix Program never went away: it was merely transplanted, first to Chile, then to El Salvador, Iraq, Afghanistan, and folded into the “Global War on Terror.” Now it is mushrooming up again as the Department of Homeland Security, militarized police, targeted murder of Black Lives Matter activists, and the not one but many Cop Cities springing up all over the United States.
Before we begin, it is important that we extend our thanks to Twitter user @sxlongshadow for his continued commitment to exposing the Phoenix Program’s involvement in modern domestic affairs and the CIA’s meddling in all aspects of U.S. policy. This article will not be able to replace the primary research conducted by people like Douglas Valentine, but it will lay out the basic operational outline of how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) follows the Phoenix outline and, we hope, provide cautionary information for those who are on the front lines of the struggle today.
Part One: What is the CIA?
To understand the methodology and function of the modern incarnation of Operation Phoenix, we have to understand the formation of the CIA and the national security state. When we say that fascism is already here, it is the creation of the national security state and the inauguration of a century of surveillance and murder primarily directed against the nationally oppressed and left groups — Communists, Black liberation fighters, and anyone else designated by the decision-makers of white “square” America as outside the social fold. In Marxist terms, the class-conscious advanced workers in all spheres, the nationally oppressed members of internal colonies like the Indigenous peoples and Puerto Rico, and the nationally oppressed members of the internal semi-colonies like the Black Belt, were all targeted as non-people, individuals outside the protection of the legal arrangements of the liberal U.S. state.
The 19th and early 20th century U.S. state was anemic when compared with the vast machinery we now associate with Washington. There were few federal agencies and departments: the State, War, and Treasury Departments (1789), Department of the Interior (1849), of Agriculture (1862), Justice (1870), Commerce (1903), and Labor (1913) were the entire executive apparatus. In 1901, President William McKinley was shot to death by Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exhibition. This set off an imagined scare of anarchists and revolution, which was used by Attorney General Charles Bonaparte (yes, of those Bonapartes), to justify the creation of the Bureau of Investigation in 1908. More state machinery was needed to “enforce” Prohibition, which led to the creation of new jobs and departments. By the end of the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt, pursuing his “program of preparation for fascism and war” (according to the CPUSA before its revisionist turn), created an American version of the German Reich’s controlled labor union, the Deutsche Arbeitsfront, by shepherding into existence the Works Progress Administration and the National Labor Relations Board. For those thinking this is a stretch, we refer you to the comments of President Biden this past week that the unions in the U.S. represent a “domestic NATO.”
World War II marks the major transition into a qualitatively different kind of state. In 1942, by Roosevelt’s executive order, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was created to serve as the intelligence agency of the U.S. during the war. One of the key tasks given to the OSS as the war progressed was to ensure the defeat of Communism in Eastern Europe and Asia. To achieve this, the OSS partnered with the Kuomintang in China, and became involved in protecting the drug-running operations that financed the Kuomintang warlord Chiang Kai Shek. To Washington and the bourgeois businesses of the U.S., the OSS was a way to strike against rivals for imperial power — Germany and Japan — as well as to prepare the ground against the Soviet Union for whatever would come after the war.
In 1947 Harry Truman, who was a pure class puppet of the high bourgeoisie and was a compromise vice president to replace the left-leaning Henry Wallace in case Roosevelt should die, signed the National Security Act, creating the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This new agency was formed out of members of the armed forces intelligence services as well as the OSS, and was immediately directed to continue the former activities of the OSS in combating Communism. The National Security Act forbade the CIA from taking action within the U.S. The newly created agency almost immediately violated its authorizing act and began the process of fighting Communism everywhere: at home and abroad. Among its most well-known domestic spying operations were CHAOS, which served as a counterpoint to the FBI COINTELPRO during the 1960s and 1970s, and the infamous MKULTRA, which began in ignominy as a series of mind-control experiments on U.S. citizens and ended with CIA agents filming U.S. politicians having sex with trafficked minors.
“The national security state emerges from war, from fear of revolution and change, from the economic instability of capitalism, and from nuclear weapons and military technology. It has been the actualizing mechanism of ruling elites to implement their imperial schemes and misplaced ideals,” wrote Marcus Raskin, co-director of the Institute for Policy Studies in 1976. At home, the national security state gave the office of the president nearly untrammeled power, placing him at the helm of the various national security gangs: the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, etc. It was Truman himself, in Executive Order 9835, who instituted loyalty oaths for government officials. By 1949, dissenting voices — Communists, socialists, progressives — were being driven out of the unions, which became the vehicle for capitalist control of the labor movement.
Let us consider the words of D. Guerin in his 1939 book, Fascism and Big Business:
[a]n important fact [in the case of Mussolini’s Italy] is that the fascist squadron had at their disposal… not only the subsidies of their financial backers but the material and moral support of the repressive forces of the state: police, carabinieri, and army. The police recruited for the squadrons, urging outlaws to enroll in them and promising them all sorts of benefits and immunity. The police loaned their cars to squadron members and rejected applications for arms permits by workers and peasants while extending the permits granted to fascists. The guardians of “law and order” had their orders to remain idle when the fascists attacked the “reds” and to intervene only if the latter resisted. Often the police collaborated with the fascists in preparing attacks on labor organizations.
The line between criminal gang and police is crossed without compunction in the national security state. Compare this to Noam Chomsky’s introduction to COINTELPRO: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom:
One FBI provocateur resigned when he was asked to arrange the bombing of a bridge in such a way that the person who placed the booby-trapped bomb would be killed. This was in Seattle where it was revealed that FBI infiltrators had been engaged in a campaign of arson, terrorism, and bombing of university and civil buildings, and where the FBI arranged a robbery, entrapping a young Black man who was paid $75 for the job and killed in a police ambush.
The CIA was once part of this network of national security gangs, but now stands above it as the premier agency of the national security state. They achieved this position through their control of criminal networks in Eastern Europe and Asia. This led them to infiltrate and essentially take over the Drug Enforcement Agency in order to protect their sources in drug running operations across the world. At the same time, they pioneered the Phoenix Program, which has become the counterinsurgency technique par excellence.
The CIA’s initial role, the destabilization of Communist governments, was undermined by their victory over the Soviet Union in 1991. In order to continue driving its militarism and the national security obsession, the U.S. needed a new enemy, and it turned out that the CIA had already financed them to be an enemy of the Soviets: political Islam. It’s here that we catch up with the 2005 proposal paper by Lieutenant Colonel Tovo and his desire to bring the Phoenix Program in its entirety to the “War on Terror.”
The contradiction for a secret police agency like the CIA is simple. The acts which the CIA targets are essentially non-criminal. Yes, it is against the law to commit treason or to teach of the necessity for the overthrow of the U.S. But there are ten thousand other acts that lead up to this treason that the CIA wants to stop. Subversion, progressivism, unrest, dissent. These are the hidden, non-criminal activities the CIA targets. These acts are usually carried out between willing participants. Talking about revolution isn’t something you do with every person you meet on the street. In order, therefore, to draw out their targets, the CIA needs to manufacture crimes by enticing potential Communists into criminal conspiracies with CIA plants.
To review: on the eve of George W. Bush’s War on Terror, the CIA was one of several terror gangs of secret police operating on U.S. soil. It pioneered a unique cocktail of drug running and hunter-killer squads abroad and domestic spying at home. It was poised at the tip of the U.S. foreign policy spear, to enter into a target country and subvert its government, undermine its authority, assassinate its leadership, and so on. It had already done so in Chile, in Nicaragua, etc. One of the CIA’s previous benefactors, political Islam, came into conflict with the U.S. empire at around the same time. The CIA recommended that they themselves be put in charge of all counterinsurgency operations, and for the U.S. to adopt the same plan the agency had deployed in Việt Nam. Lt. Col. Tovo’s proposal in 2005 is part of that scheme; the paper embodies that recommendation.
The CIA encouraged the federal government to create a Project Phoenix for the U.S. homeland. It engineered the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.
Part Two: What Is Phoenix?
Philip Agee and the other former spies that ran the magazine CounterSpy between 1973 and 1984 called the Phoenix Program “the most indiscriminate and massive programme of political murder since the Nazi death camps of World War 2.” In 1963, the CIA began operation Chiêu Hôi, “open arms,” which sought to subvert National Liberation Front (a.k.a. Viet Cong) members to defect through amnesty and resettlement. When this failed to produce results, the CIA reoriented and began to train, direct, and equip what were called Counter-Terror Teams (CTTs), later given the rebranded name of Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs). This was the beginning of Operation Phoenix.
Phoenix had the following attributes:
- Action at a distance;
- Data-driven;
- Civilian targets;
- Recruitment of motivated anti-Communists;
- Combined arms of counterinsurgency;
- Torture;
- Recruit, defect, capture, kill;
Action at a distance. Phoenix operated through “local” agencies to increase deniability. CIA advisors sat with Vietnamese National Police and gave them instructions about what they wanted not by doing it themselves, but primarily instructing their GVN subordinates. They created their own branch of the National Police to act on their behalf. If agents instructed information to be extracted by means of breaking ribs, withholding medicine, or attaching electrodes to a detainee, if they ordered their hunter-killer teams to kidnap or execute someone, they could tell Congress that the CIA never actually did anything illegal. A child’s distinction of morality, but such are the men (and now, women) that make up the premier intelligence agency of the U.S. empire.
Data driven. It began with a general census taken through the GVN to help identify the names of the secret Communist Party cell leaders in each village, as well as identifying their family members for later extortion, kidnap, and torture.
Civilian targets. The CIA developed its program not to demoralize the army, the National Liberation Front, but to kidnap, subvert, or kill the civilian members of the Communist Party that ran the administrative roles within Communist organizations. The CIA pursues what Douglas Valentine calls a “political order of battle” as opposed to the armed forces’ military order of battle.
Motivated anti-Communists. The CTTs or PRUs recruited the most highly motivated anti-Communsits and paramilitary forces available; this included deserters, desperados, and criminals facing lengthy prison terms or execution; even American soldiers who were otherwise going to be disciplined would volunteer for the CIA’s special operations roles.
Combined arms of counterinsurgency. The crown jewel of Phoenix from the CIA’s point of view was the Province Interrogation Center, or PIC. PICs were combined-arms centers that coordinated strategic civilian, police, and military intelligence in one place. The PICs were built all over the country, in each province, and that is where the Special Police interrogated “suspects.” Results of these interrogations, usually the identities of civilian Communists, were shared with a CIA paramilitary officer in the province, and the paramilitary officer could then dispatch a CTT to kidnap or kill the target.
Torture. There was widespread use of torture. As Douglas Valentine recounted in the words of a Phoenix officer, torture that was conducted out of sight of the CIA but with their instructions included “rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes or hard objects, and rape followed by murder, the ‘Bell Telephone Hour’ rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body; waterboarding; “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 mid-air while he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; and the use of police dogs to maul prisoners.
Recruit, defect, capture, kill. Phoenix established a hierarchy of outcomes. The creator of Phoenix, Nelson Brickham in 1967 explained it: “My motto was to recruit them; if you can’t recruit them, defect them (that’s Chieu Hoi); if you can’t defect them, capture them; if you can’t capture them, kill them.” The COINTELPRO and CHAOS programs were designed to sow distrust among Communist and left organizations by planting false evidence of federal agents in their midst; their crowning achievements were the actual subversion of Communists. The same with the Phoenix program.
Operation Phoenix went so far as to dress the Special Operations Division police in the clothes and gear of National Liberation units and have them commit atrocious crimes against the people to spread fear of the Communists among the rural population. Subversion can come from the inside, or the outside. These seven elements made up the basis of the Phoenix Program and still serve today as the underlying logic of the Department of Homeland Security.
The War on Terror and the drive for homeland security are merely two sides of the coin of class warfare. The effects of imperialist policies have long been known to us. In 1950, Aimé Césaire, the Martinican poet, wrote “colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken in him buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism…. no one colonizes innocently, [] no one colonizes with impunity either; [] a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization — and therefore force — is already a sick civilization.”
Veterans of the U.S. armed forces make up 20% of police officers. These men and women are sent overseas to engage in targeted murder and terror in Phoenix-like operations in Afghanistan or Iraq, to operate little Phoenix Programs across the world, and then brought back to work in the domestic police force. They are desensitized to killing, torture, and corruption because those tools are taught to them as the legitimate methods of control of foreign territories. They train in Abu Ghraibs abroad only to come home and build little Abu Ghraibs in the U.S. Officers who served in the military are more likely to have fired their weapons while doing police work (32% vs. 26%). The use of SWAT teams and military tactics has ballooned.
The Chicago Police Department operated a secret black site where suspects were held without booking, shackled, and beaten. Beginning in 2005, the Maryland State Police began keeping a list of death penalty opponents and anti-war protestors as part of their effort to track terror. After Hurricane Katrina, the private security firm Blackwater patrolled the city of New Orleans and operated under DHS authority. Starting with the Reagan-era War on Drugs, police began to receive surplus military equipment from the Pentagon. After 9/11, DHS created anti-terror grants to provide new military equipment — armored trucks, ballistics gear, armored personnel carriers — to police departments. As Valentine says, “[F]our months after 9/11, D[irector of Central Intelligence] George Tenet personally arranged with New York City’s Muslim-hating Mayor Michael Bloomberg to slip senior CIA officer David Cohen inside the NYPD as its deputy commissioner for intelligence.”
The Homeland Security Act of November 25, 2002, created the same centralized structure out of the domestic U.S. law enforcement agencies, including local police departments, as the Phoenix Program did in Việt Nam. This is point 5 of the Phoenix Program as described above. DHS established “fusion centers,” which they call “focal points in states and major urban areas for the receipt, analysis, gathering, and sharing of threat-related information between State, Local, Tribal and Territorial, federal and private sector partners.” DHS says the role of these fusion centers is to receive classified information from federal partners, analyze and assess the implication of those reports, gather information to feed back to federal partners, and then disseminate the threats assessed with local law enforcement.
That is point number 1 of the Phoenix Program: act through local agencies. There is at least one fusion center in every state, which permits the CIA to coordinate its so-called counterterrorism efforts through local law enforcement. As of 2018, there are 79 operating fusion centers. These are no different from the Province Interrogation Centers: coordinating hubs between the federal security gangs and local police and paramilitary operations.
It was recently confirmed by the Intercept that the FBI paid a felon to infiltrate Denver’s 2020 racial justice protests. He spent his time trying to convince George Floyd protestors to pick up a rifle so the right-wing paramilitary agents could shoot back. Even though the protestors were too smart to be fooled by this agent provocateur, that didn’t stop the media from creating the circumstances for Kyle Rittenhouse to murder Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber. He was recently set free by a Kenosha jury. So much for law and order!
At the top of DHS is the executive management team. Below them are the deputy undersecretary for intelligence and analysis, who manages the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, containing about 1,000 analysts, many from the contributing agencies. There is also an Office of Operations Coordination and Planning, which oversees the DHS National Operations Center (NOC). The NOC acts as a central clearing-house for the fusion centers. DHS employs over 250,000 people. It communicates with tens of thousands of private Terrorism Liaison Officers, or privately-paid secret police. TLOs monitored Occupy and BLM from inside the protests and encampments.
Citing Valentine again, “[a]t the strategic political level it consists of bankers and corporate lobbyists paying elected officials to create tax loopholes for the rich, blanket domestic surveillance that compels working people to live in terror of being fired if they make suspicious utterances, and corrupt officials rewarding their arms industry contributors by laundering taxpayer dollars into the war machine.”
Non-governmental agencies (NGOs) play a huge role in this machine by trammeling revolutionary energy and redirecting it. Grants are doled out by CIA cut-outs and in response, groups report their entire membership and submit expenditure reports directly to Washington.
Part Three: Why Don’t We Recognize the Enemy?
We are trained not to understand the class forces at play in society. There are several tactics used by the law enforcement gangs to shape public perception through the media we consume. For federal agencies, the most prominent is the scheme of “it happened long ago,” a kind of limited hangout. For police and the military, there is what we’ve come to call copaganda. A generation or two ago, these would have all been overshadowed by the sentimentalist portrayal of all these agencies as uncomplicated heroes, but the modern period is one of increasing cynicism as the machinery of capital becomes more and more exposed.
“It happened long ago,” is a rhetorical trick that the CIA and FBI use to downplay their history of misdeeds. They allow certain records of very bad behavior from 30+ years ago to become public, owning up to the things their agencies did in the past. COINTELPRO, CHAOS, MKULTRA, Phoenix? Yes, these agencies did those things. But they happened long ago. We’re a new agency now. Meanwhile, they continue to pursue the exact same strategies that they honed in the 1960s and 1970s.
Copaganda is a topic too broad to cover here, and there are numerous other good sources on it as a media tactic. The news media doesn’t cover the most egregious and flagrant abuses of federal law enforcement agencies because the reporters would lose their access to exclusive stories and contacts within those very same federal gangs. The letter agencies carefully control what information is published.
Together, these strategies feed what CIA agent Cord Meyer dubbed the “compatible left,” liberals and pseudo-intellectuals who claim to challenge power but in fact are easily duped by its narratives and influenced by the ruling class and its nodes of control. Compatible leftists will regurgitate pre-cooked CIA talking points about how everything happened a long time ago, or worse, will actively engage in disinformation, claiming there was never any proof for Iran-Contra or the flooding of Black communities with drugs by the intelligence agencies. During the Trump years, the compatible left was responsible for the Mueller Report amplification, and now works tirelessly to exonerate Biden and Washington from the provable charge of having engaged in genocide in Palestine.
Conclusion
We must hold ourselves apart from NGOs, which are tools of governmental control. We must make a firm break with the compatible left, and reject all attempts to escalate to “direct action” that we do not have a firm strategic plan for. Above all, when analyzing the behavior of police and local authorities, we must never forget that behind every tin badge in the U.S. empire there stands the full might of the letter agencies, coiled and ready to strike.
It is necessary for us to maintain independence of action from the compatible left and to strictly delineate our organizations to be independent of all NGOs and government grants. We cannot take money from the enemy state, for every grant comes with intelligence agents of one stripe or another quick behind it. The maintenance of strict organizational control over our local groups (and, eventually, our all-empire party) is necessary to prevent the kind of backbiting that was fostered by the letter agencies in the last century.
The effect that the federal law enforcement gangs hope to achieve is one of terror and paralysis. We cannot afford to become terrorized or paralyzed. It is not the death of one, or even one hundred, that destroys the movement, but the fear that ripples through it thereafter. For the same reason, we must engineer the production of new Communists as the first and most critical task of any organization we build.
Further, we must insist not only on organizational integrity but on political development as a necessary component of organizing. We cannot fall prey to the trend of hyper-security that plagued the New Communist Movement of the 1970s and 1980s and still haunts us today. This is an outcome actively desired by the CIA and the other federal law enforcement gangs because it cuts Communists off from the wellspring of the movement: the people. We must study the techniques used to build both above- and under-ground movements in China during the struggle against the Kuomintang and the Japanese; we must insist on politically developing our membership; we must above all be principled and reproduce principled members.
As Fred Hampton said — you can jail a revolutionary, but you can’t jail the revolution. You can murder a freedom fighter, but you can’t murder liberation. While we cannot underestimate the U.S. Empire’s capacity for violence against us, we must also remember that, by the very nature of this program, the anti-imperialists who came before us have already proven victory is possible. The Communists have beaten the Phoenix Program before, because it undermines the support of the capitalist invaders. We will beat the Phoenix Program again, in the same way.
