The CIA as Organized Crime and The Phoenix Program
"As no other writer, Doug Valentine has been to the heart of darkness in American foreign policy and come back with stories of historic moment. His brilliant, courageous work is revelation, prophecy, wisdom. It will stand as a singular mark of our saving capacity to learn."
Roger Morris
June 10, 2014–"Back in print today is a book that, if you’re interested in the Phoenix Program, is a must read. During the Vietnam war Phoenix was a U.S. effort to aim directly at the leadership of the Vietnamese insurgency, what American officials called the “Viet Cong Infrastructure.” There have been few books that zeroed in directly on this subject, and of them, Douglas Valentine’s The Phoenix Program is the only book based on extensive interviews with Phoenix operatives. Indeed, the CIA, which furnished much of the staff for the program, tried to suppress this book when it was written in the 1980s."
Thanks to Mark Crispin Miller for hosting the event
Ed Brady, CIA Nelson Brickham, CIA George Carver, CIA William Colby, Colonel Paul Coughlin, Colonel Douglas Dillard, CIA Tom Donohue, Gen. James Hunt, CIA Bruce Lawlor, CIA Warren Milberg, CIA John Muldoon, Sgt. Ed Murphy, Colonel Connie O'Shea, CIA Evan Parker, CIA Tom Polgar, CIA Jean Andre Sauvageot, CIA Rob Simmons, Gen. Charles Timmes, CIA John Tilton, CIA James Ward, Navy Seal John Wilbur
The Douglas Valentine Vietnam Collection at the National Security Archive in Washington, DC, has been open and used by researchers since early 2007. The Collection contains the research material, including original handwritten interview notes and government documents obtained through FOIA requests, for my book The Phoenix Program. The Collection can only be used in the National Security Archive's Reading Room; it is not available for interlibrary loan and an appointment must be made to use it. The "resguide" link below will help anyone who wants to read the material.
Thanks to Cryptocomb for posting my taped interviews with the CIA and military officers who created and effected the Phoenix program in South Vietnam. The interviews were recorded on a tape in the 1980s, but were digitized in 2007 and are now available to the public and historians at The National Security Archive, Texas Tech, here at Cryptocomb, and below at . Thanks to Brendon McQuade and Abby Adams for transcribing and digitizing the tapes. A;lso available at cryptocomb are the most important government do military documents about the Phoenix program and its creation.
Reviews of The Phoenix Program
‘The Phoenix has landed’: What you need to know to fight for the survival of American democracy and your own
Forbidden Book: Douglas Valentine’s “The Phoenix Program: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam”
"The Phoenix Program2 was first published 24 years ago, fourteen years after the Congressional investigations that exposed and swiftly washed it from public memory. After successful attempts to bury this book, e.g. Morley Safer’s attack in the New York Times, this essential study of US political warfare has been reissued as an e-book. One can only hope that the reign of terror in and by the US that expanded vastly with the election of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan will finally reach the consciousness of the white “Left” and those whose sentimental attachment to the American creation myth is sincere enough to rebel against the two-plus centuries of imperial hypocrisy which engendered this bureaucratic terror system under the Stars and Stripes."