Phoenix Program

The Phoenix Program, called Phung Hoang in Vietnamese, was launched in 1967 by the CIA and the U.S. pacification command known as CORDS, working with South Vietnamese police and intelligence. Its target was the Viet Cong infrastructure: the hidden political cadres who collected taxes, recruited fighters and ran shadow governments in the villages. Teams compiled blacklists from informants and interrogations, then captured, persuaded to defect, or killed the people on them. William Colby, later CIA director, ran the American side from 1968. He told Congress in 1971 that more than 20,000 suspected Viet Cong had been killed under the program.¹³

American officials argued Phoenix was a legitimate police effort and that most deaths came in firefights during military operations. Critics, including some Americans who served in it, testified that quotas encouraged false accusations, that suspects were tortured in provincial interrogation centers, and that some units acted as death squads. Congressional hearings in 1970 and 1971 aired these charges. Phoenix formally ended in 1972, but historians still argue over how much it weakened the Viet Cong and how much of its killing was targeted assassination.²³