Ruth’s Remembrances-With Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show” In Mind

Ruth’s Remembrances-With Peter Bogdanovich’s  “The Last Picture Show” In Mind

By Si Lannon

Ruth Snyder had all the prejudices of any West Texas girl growing up in the hard-scrabble Great Depression of the 1930s when money had been scarcer, maybe more so, than hen’s teeth. Had all the so-called secrets of such girls as well. She had been Anchor City born and raised out in the places where the oilfields out-numbered the number of residents. As part of that Anchor City (silly nautical name for a town out in the middle of Blue Norther country but there you have it. Legend had it that some restless Yankee sea captain who had had enough of the sea had founded the place and in a fit of nostalgia named the town that rather than after himself like half the foolish towns in the state). Prejudice number one, aside from not allowing the “colored” to get a toehold in the town but that was usual all over the South and not Anchor City-bound, was drilled into her by her hard-shell Pentecostal parents who had gotten religion when West Texas was burned over in the Third Awakening, third Texas Awakening and that was marriage was forever. Forever meaning until one or the other of the two contracted parties kick-off. Not before.      

So Ruth Snyder, not the prettiest girl in town, not by a long shot, in fact rather plain like some Grant Wood painting, pure prairie plain which was in man-short West Texas (marrying man-short West Texas the other kind as everywhere were plentiful enough) good enough with proper household training to get a man. But get this Ruth Snyder, Plain Jane Ruth Snyder snagged herself a football player, Tom Snyder, who starred for the Anchor City Hawks before heading to Texas A&M and a short career made shorter by a crippling knee injury. Who would have figured that Tom in those brave football days would court Ruth Snyder. Ruth would come to try to figure that one out herself. Tried to figure out that all Tom wanted from a woman, no, a wife, was to just keep his house clean, his socks darned and his rifles well-oiled. While Tom in very West Texas good old boys fashion would head out with his fellow good old boys and proceed to get well-oiled in another way or two.     

Married at just short of twenty years of age Ruth was now reaching that funny quirky time, forty. Things had only gotten worse as time went by and after several serious campaigns by alumni Tom had cornered himself into being both the football and basketball coach at old Anchor City High. Thus not only did Ruth suffer the pangs of loneliness during his weekly hunting and fishing trips but for well over half the year he would be too busy with his coaching to pay even minimal attention to Ruth. Not a good thing, not a good thing at all for somebody who was entering funny quirky time.  

One of the things that was required of a coach’s wife in those days, those early 1950s days when all the way from kid sandlot football to University of Texas University all Texas was aflutter in football was to attend the Friday night games. Ruth unlike other mothers and wives rather enjoyed watching the game which had been part of the reason that she had grabbed onto Tom with both hands when he first asked her out those many years before. Of late, this season, this season of her reaching forty she found herself looking rather longingly at the young men on the field and thinking of those days when her own heart had been all aflutter when she spied Tom Snyder doing his pre-game warm-ups. In particular this year, this 1951 year when the team was pretty poor even by Anchor City standards she was drawn to two players, Duane, Duane Wilson, and Sonny, Sonny Burgess. Not because they were any great shakes as football players, they seemed to be in way over their heads when matched up against any decent teams but because they had similar physiques to her Tom’s when he was a star (the years of good old boy-dom had not been kind to Tom and he was now a certified member of the pot-bellied, sloughing forty something guys who could not have gotten out of their own ways if something had come up to startle them). Here’s the point though our Ruth started to have certain “improper” fantasies about those two young men. Yeah, that funny quirky forty thing.     

Ruth also knew that Duane had this thing, this crush on Jackie, Jackie Germaine, the head cheer leader who in that day, in her day when she was younger, and her now was nothing but a cock-teaser, a femme or whatever they called such “come hither” to be sliced and diced girls. She would lead him a merry chase, make him cry “Uncle,” literally since in the end he volunteered like a good West Texas young man back then to join the Army to get the taste of Jackie out of his system (what he told Sonny in one of his more candid and reflective moments was that he would never totally, short of the grave, get her out of his system and years later would say the same thing even when by that time she had been married three times, had a parcel of kids and even at the high side of forty was making guys make sophomoric fools out of themselves). As he told Sonny he would rather just then face the red hordes in Korea than to see her with another man. That “another man” in the space of a few short months between the end of high school and going off to college entail screwing Duane, screwing rich boy Randy, his friend Tom, who wanted to marry her, Adonis one of her father’s wild-call oil riggers, hell, even Sonny which is where Duane and Sonny’s friendship since elementary school was sorely tested. Yeah, thought Ruth who would get her information about the younger set, older set, every set from Jennie who ran the Last Chance Café one of the few reasons to stop in the pass through town. 

      

So Ruth almost by default kept her eye of Sonny Burgess, looking for a way to get to him in a proper manner, at least for public consumption. As it turned out Tom, her no bullshit husband who was the vehicle for bringing Ruth and Sonny together. Out of pure laziness or cussedness, take your pick. One day Tom asked Sonny to take Ruth to the nearest hospital in Waverly some fifty miles away in order for her to check up on some “female” problem she was having. Tom’s reason for not taking her himself was that he was too busy with basketball practice to do so. The lure for Sonny was that Coach would get him out of classes for the remainder of the day. The trip started out uneventfully enough with Sonny doing chauffer duty-and acting that way. After getting Ruth home safe and sound though she asked him if he would like something to eat. Sure, like any growing kid, and teenage kid. Noting happened that day but between whatever mother hunger mother-less Sonny had and whatever real man hunger Ruth had a few weeks later they would me at the annual town Christmas Party (the same party where the perfidious Jackie blew Duane off for some party with Randy) and gave each other such looks that when Ruth asked Sonny if he would take her to her doctor’s appointment the next he answered with a yes without hesitation.

And so Ruth and Sonny would start an affair, an affair of the heart which would last on and off again for several years. That open secret would keep the customers at the Last Chance Café going for many months once Jennie retailed the story. Funny nobody took umbrage that Ruth was bedding a young man half her age. But here is where we get into Ruth’s knowledge of the West Texas girl-woman prejudices. The reason that the Ruth-Sonny affair was the hot topic for only a few months was that Ellie, Jackie’s mother had started an affair with a young oil well driller employed by her husband. So Ruth was just following West Texas girl prejudice. What do think about that.        

Happy, Happy Birthday Karl Marx, On The 200th Anniversary Of His Birth-Some Thoughts

Happy, Happy Birthday Karl Marx, On The 200^th Anniversary Of His Birth-Some Thoughts  

A link to NPR’s Christopher Lydon’s Open Source  2018 program on the meaning of Karl Marx in the 21^st century on the 200^th anniversary of his birth:

http://radioopensource.org/marx-at-200/

By Seth Garth

Normally Frank Jackman would be the natural person to do his take on the name, the role, the legacy of one German revolutionary exiled to London after the revolutions of 1848 faded away, Karl Marx on the 200^th anniversary of his birth in 2018. And Frank at first fought me a little on this and mentioned it to site manager Greg Green. Greg had both of us come in to his office to discuss the issue. My frame of reference and what amounted to the winning argument was that I had been Peter Paul Markin’s closest friend in high school, forever known as Scribe for obvious reasons, and so I knew the details of how Frank, Frankie Riley, Jimmy Jenkins, Si Lannon and maybe a couple of others first heard about the name and ideas of one Karl Marx and later would act on them a little. (Some of the other guys who hung around with Scribe and the rest of us like Ricky Rizzo and Dave Whiting, both who would lay their heads down in hellhole Vietnam and wound up on the town monument and Washington black granite, Red Riley and even Frank Jackman almost lynched him when he started talking favorably about Karl Marx and the idea of red revolution in those dead ass red scare Cold War nights. All they wanted to hear about was whatever intelligence Scribe had on some girl they were interested in of which he had been plenty or what his next plan was for the “midnight creep” which I assume needs no further explanation except he planned the capers but no way would Frankie Riley or the rest of us let him lead the expeditions-hell we would still be in jail.)

Others, including Frank Jackman, have now seemingly endlessly gone over the effect Scribe had on them a little later when the turbulent 1960s we all got caught up in blew a gasket in the Summer of Love, 1967 as the culmination of what he also had been talking about for years on those lonely forlorn weekend nights when we hung around good guy Tonio’s Pizza Parlor “up the Downs” in the growing up Acre section of North Adamsville. What most guys did not know, or did not want to know, was that a little of what Scribe was thinking at the time was that maybe Karl Marx might be proven to be right, might have been onto something when he spoke about the working classes, us, getting a big jump ahead in the world once things turned upside down. He held those views  pretty closely then, especially when he was practically red-baited into silence by those guys who were even more hung up, as was Scribe in many ways, on normal American propaganda about Russia, Communism, and Karl Marx.

Like I say a glimmer then in high school, not at all thought out like it would be more so later in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we got back to the “real” world from ‘Nam and knew we had been fucked over by our government. That the “reds” in Vietnam were poor folk, peasants, with whom we had no quarrel. But that was later. I remember one night Scribe told me that he had had to stay after school one day for Mr. Donovan, the World History teacher and football coach which tells you what he was about, when Scribe had given a surly answer about some question Mr. Donovan had asked not about Marxism but something else and Donovan had asked him if he was a “Bolshevik.” Scribe recoiled in horror he said knowing that to say yes would get him in some trouble (probably more after school time at least) and for the simple fact that he could not say truthfully whatever teen angst and alienation he was feeling was driven by that kind of understanding of the world-then.         

What this confrontation did do was get Scribe looking again at his dog-eared copy of Karl Marx’s (and his co-thinker and financial “angel” Friedrich Engels) classic statement of his views The Communist Manifesto to confirm whether he was a “Marxist,” “Communist,” whatever and he came away from that re-reading knowing that he was not one of those guys, a red. That was the kind of guy Scribe was when he was confronted with something he didn’t understand. The rest of us would have said “fuck it” and let it go at that or have challenged old Donovan with a spurious “yeah, what about it.” Maybe some silly remark like “better red than dead” or “my mommy is a commie,” expressions making the rounds in that dead air time.

To finish up on this though I should say that the way Scribe got his copy of the Manifesto back when he was fourteen or fifteen and had heard that it was a cool document or something, who knows with Scribe was kind of strange. He couldn’t find the book in either the school or town libraries for the simple fact that neither had the document not wanted to have it in circulation. Yeah it was that kind of time. A young librarian suggested that he try the Government Printing Office which might have a copy if somebody in Congress (like the red-baiter par excellence Senator Joseph McCarthy) or some governmental agency had ordered it printed for whatever reason. He got the address in Washington and the GPO sent back a brochure with their publications for sale. And there it was. He ordered a copy and a few weeks alter it came in the mail. Here’s the funnier part, funnier that the government providing copies on the cheap (or maybe free I forget on that point) of such a notorious document the document had been placed on the publication list because it was part of the record for the raucous House Un-American Activities Committee meeting in San Francisco in 1960 when they were practically run out of town by protestors as the Cold War began to thaw in certain places. Of course that was a recollection later when we were deep into the Summer of Love out in that very town.

Yeah, Scribe was a piece of work and he would eventually drag some of along with him in his good days like the Summer of Love and later after Vietnam time running around with radical students in Cambridge when checking out Mark and Marxism was all the rage. Like I said old Marx has had his up and downs, has taken his beatings but some things he said were spot on. Worse, in a way, some of the stuff reads like it could have been written today. How about that.             

Whose Side Is the CIA On? - WhoWhatWhy Global Network

Whose Side Is the CIA On? - WhoWhatWhy

https://whowhatwhy.org/2018/09/06/whose-side-is-the-cia-on/

Whose Side Is the CIA On?

Army of the Republic of Vietnam soldiers and an American advisor in Vietnam taken sometime between 1967 and 1975. Photo credit: US Army / Wikimedia

What does it say about the state of the nation that many on both the left and right are banking their hopes for the future of American democracy on the patriotism and competence of cloak-and-dagger spooks?

If you tune in to left-leaning mainstream cable news shows on MSNBC or CNN, you’ll see a steady parade of such stalwarts of the intelligence community as former CIA director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Former FBI director James Comey, once the bane of the left for reopening the Clinton email inquiry two weeks before the 2016 election, is now lauded in Democratic circles for his attacks on President Donald Trump.

The view of many on the left that the president is an existential threat to the safety and security of the country is a sentiment shared with many right-wing #NeverTrumpers.

Meanwhile, to Trump and his loyal followers, this cabal of current and former intelligence figures represents a usually invisible “Deep State” faction, whose intention is to overturn the democratic will as expressed in the Electoral College.

But perhaps there’s an upside to this seismic realignment of public opinion: the American people are coming to terms with the notion that the intelligence community — far from being an above-the-fray servant of a popularly elected government — is in fact inherently political, serving long-term shadowy interests, including its own.

It’s with this in mind that we present an excerpt from Douglas Valentine’s The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World (Clarity Press, January 15, 2017).

A longtime author and researcher of the US national security state, Valentine is perhaps known best for his book The Phoenix Program: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam, which many consider the definitive study of the CIA’s secretive counter-insurgency program during the war in Vietnam.

The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World by Douglas Valentine. Photo credit: Clarity Press

He’s also written several books — The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack — chronicling the US’s history of the war on drugs, its connections to US intelligence agencies, and the rise and fall of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

The CIA as Organized Crime contains excerpts from these works, as well as interviews with the author.

This condensed excerpt from chapter one is a radio interview transcript in which Valentine explains how he researched and connected with many top-level CIA agents (including CIA Director William Colby), learned of the agency’s dark history in Vietnam, and uncovered its undue influence over media, illegal drugs, and more.

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How William Colby Gave Me the Keys to the CIA Kingdom

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[Editor’s note: Valentine’s approach to the mysteries of the CIA is enriched by a personal in-depth study of language and literature — a background which he has weaponized to deconstruct the myth of America’s top spy agency.] 

DOUG: It’s complicated, and my experience was different from other writers and researchers I’ve spoken with about it. From the time I started college, my philosophy of life has been based on the study of language and literary criticism. I have a very broad approach, from a variety of different perspectives — psychological, political, anthropological, sociological, historical, philosophical, etc. When I look at a subject, I look at it comprehensively from all those different points of view. More importantly, literary criticism teaches the power of symbolic transformation, of processing experience into ideas, into meaning. To be a Madison Avenue adman, one must understand how to use symbols and myths to sell commodities. Admen use logos and slogans, and so do political propagandists. Left or right; doesn’t matter. The left is as adept at branding as the right. To be a speech writer or public relations consultant one must, above all, understand the archetypal power of the myth of the hero. That way you can transform, through words, Joe the Plumber or Donald Trump into a national hero. 

When I decided to research and write about the CIA’s Phoenix program¹, that was how I went at it. I went directly to William Colby, who’d been Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Colby was the person most associated with Phoenix, the controversial CIA “assassination” program that resulted in the death of tens of thousands of civilians during the Vietnam War. No one had written a book about it, so I wrote Colby a letter and sent him my first book, The Hotel Tacloban. I told him I wanted to write a book that would de-mystify the Phoenix program, and he was all for that. Colby liked my approach — to look at it from all these different points of view — so he got behind me and started introducing me to a lot of senior CIA people. And that gave me access from the inside. After that it was pretty easy. I have good interview skills. I was able to persuade a lot of these CIA people to talk about Phoenix.

“Most CIA officers consider themselves to be soldiers. The CIA is set up as a military organization with a chain of command. Somebody tells you what to do, and you salute and do it.”

But I also approached it from an organizational point of view, which is absolutely essential when writing about bureaucracies like the CIA or the DEA. You really have to understand them as a bureaucracy, that they have an historical arc. They begin somewhere, they have a Congressional mandate, they have a purpose, and organizational and management structures. And in that regard I really lucked out. One of the first people I interviewed was the CIA officer, Nelson Brickham, who actually organized the Phoenix program. Brickham graduated magna cum laude from Yale and was something of an organizational genius. He explained to me how he organized Phoenix. He also explained the different divisions and branches of the CIA so I’d be able to understand it.

Nelson Brickham was the senior CIA officer in charge of Foreign Intelligence Field Operations throughout South Vietnam, 1965-1966. Photo credit: Douglas Valentine

So I lucked out. Through Colby I had access to the people in the CIA who created the Phoenix program, and I was able to find out what was on their minds and why they did what they did. That never would have happened if I had gone to the Columbia School of Journalism, or if I’d been involved with journalism for many years. I’d have had a much narrower way of going at the thing. But the CIA officers I spoke with loved the broad view that I was bringing to the subject. They liked me asking them about their philosophy. It enabled me to understand the subject comprehensively.

TRACY: There’s an associate of William Colby’s whom you discuss and write about, also a CIA officer, Evan Parker. You were able to get a great many names from him and then you asked these people for interviews. The interview subjects, many of whom were CIA personnel, would go back to Colby or Parker and ask if it was okay to speak to you. Correct?

DOUG: That’s right. Once I had Colby’s approbation, many CIA officers thought I was in the CIA. No one had heard of me. I wasn’t Morley Safer or Seymour Hersh or someone who’d been a celebrity reporter in Vietnam. I was a Nobody, in the Eduardo Galeano sense of the word. I’d published a book about my father’s experiences in World War Two which some of these guys would read. Those who did read The Hotel Tacloban tended to like it, because it was sympathetic to soldiers and showed I understood what it means to be a soldier. Most CIA officers consider themselves to be soldiers. The CIA is set up as a military organization with a chain of command. Somebody tells you what to do, and you salute and do it.

“They trusted me because I didn’t ask them their secrets — so they told me their secrets.”

Evan Parker had that feeling about me — that I would understand him personally, why he did the things he did, because I’d written this sympathetic book about my father as a soldier, and because Colby sent me to him. I had an interesting experience with him. He invited me to his house for an interview and when I arrived, he invited me upstairs to his little den, which was stacked with bookshelves full of Welsh history and poetry books. Parker is a Welsh name. Because of my background in literature, I was able to talk to him about things like The Mabinogion, which is a book about Welsh mythology. I had this broad knowledge that helped me relate to people like him. I put him at ease.

Also, for a year before I started interviewing people, I’d read everything I could find about Vietnam and the CIA. I was knowledgeable, plus I looked like a good Methodist. I wore a suit and a tie. We spoke for an hour and Parker got to like me. I hadn’t asked him anything about the CIA. We were just getting to know each other. But he had a stack of official-looking documents on his coffee table. He glanced at the documents and politely said he was going down to get us some tea and cookies. “It’ll take about fifteen minutes. I’ll be back.” He winked and went downstairs.

William E. Colby, Former Director of Central Intelligence, July 23, 2012. Photo credit: CIA / Wikimedia

I opened the top folder. It was a roster of everybody in the Phoenix Directorate from when Parker started it in the summer of 1967. I started furiously writing their names and ranks and the position they held in the program. Fifteen minutes later as I’m writing the last name, he yells from downstairs: “Doug, the tea is ready. I’m coming up.” I closed the file and put my notebook away. He came up with a tray with tea and cookies on it. He winked, and sat down, and I started to ask him about Phoenix.

We never got to the documents on his desk. But he liked me and he referred me to people. That’s the way it went with most of the CIA people I met. They cooperated because Colby had sent me to them. Like Parker said, “(Colby) was the Director and we still consider him to be the Director. If he says you’re okay, we believe it.”

He didn’t say, “Now I can waive my secrecy oath.” But that’s what they did.

I talked to members of almost every branch of the CIA and I approached my interviews organizationally. What kind of a budget did you have? Who was your boss and how did you report to him? Who worked for you and what jobs did you give them? I had a big organizational chart in my den and I’d fill in names and positions. I never asked anyone, “Did you kill anybody? Did you do this kind of illegal thing?” And because I approached it in that benign way, they were confident I was de-mystifying the program and just sticking to the facts. It had the effect of reverse psychology. They trusted me because I didn’t ask them their secrets — so they told me their secrets.

“The Department of Homeland Security was based on the Phoenix program model Nelson Brickham developed in Vietnam.”

They didn’t like it in the end because I exposed all the secrets. I talked to so many people that eventually they all started thinking that I was CIA. Because the CIA compartmentalizes itself, I ended up knowing more about the program than any individual in the CIA. I got a rat-a-tat going and pitted them against each other. They started telling me secrets about their rivals. They all want to be the hero in their myth.

TRACY: The interviews you conducted and the multitude of conversations you documented were placed alongside actual documentation which you had to acquire through a considerable amount of research.

DOUG: In the interviews, people were giving me original documents to confirm their assertions. Nelson Brickham was the CIA’s head of Foreign Intelligence Field Operations in Saigon (1965-1967). Brickham managed the liaison officers the CIA placed in the provinces to work with the South Vietnamese Police Special Branch, which is an organization like our FBI. The CIA created and funded the Special Police and sent them after the Viet Cong’s civilian leadership, and anyone else trying to undermine the American puppet government. Phoenix is political warfare. He managed the staff that ran all those operations in the provinces.

In late 1966 the CIA station chief in Saigon, John Hart, was working on improving operations against the VC’s leadership with a CIA officer in Washington, Robert Komer. Komer was Lyndon Johnson’s personal aide on pacification in Vietnam, what was called “the other war”. Anyway, Hart gave Brickham the task of creating a general staff for pacification, at which point Brickham went to work for Komer. In creating a general staff for pacification, Brickham cobbled together the Phoenix program. And Brickham gave me, over the course of several interviews, copies of all the original documents he wrote for Komer and Hart. These were the enabling documents of the Phoenix program.

Robert Komer meeting with President Lyndon B. Johnson, November 16 1967. Photo credit: Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum / Wikimedia

That happened a lot. I’d ask a guy if he had any documents to back up what he was saying and if he did he’d give me copies of what he kept in his library. Everyone thought because Colby had sent me that somehow this was all going to be ok. I wasn’t going to reveal all this stuff or that Colby had decided it was okay to reveal all of it.

The documents Brickham gave me showed in his own words what he was thinking when he created the Phoenix program. I posted all those documents online at Cryptocomb, along with the taped interviews with Brickham, Colby, Parker and several other CIA and military officers. They are part of the collection titled The CIA Speaks. I put them online so my critics can’t challenge me on the facts, other than by making up things, which they do all the time. I just quoted from these documents and my interviews. So it’s accurate reporting.²

“Following its ignoble defeat in Vietnam, America was driven by a reactionary impulse to reassert its global dominance. The justifications used to rationalize Phoenix were institutionalized as policy, as became evident after 9/11 and the initiation of the War on Terror.”

TRACY: There is a Douglas Valentine Collection at the National Security Archives at George Washington University.

DOUG: Yes, the collection contains my interview notes with close to 100 CIA officers and military officers involved in the Phoenix program. People kept referring me to people, and I made some great connections. I met a guy named Tullius Acampora who recently passed away; he was in his nineties. He’d been an army counterintelligence officer and worked for General Douglas MacArthur in Shanghai after World War Two. When the CIA was formed, Tully, like many army counterintelligence officers, started working with the counterintelligence staff at the CIA. He was detailed to the CIA. Although he kept his military rank, Tully was a CIA officer for many years. He went to Italy in 1958 and met and worked closely with Bureau of Narcotics agents in Rome. In the 50s and 60s, federal narcotic agents spent half their time doing favors for the CIA, and in exchange the CIA gave them intelligence on the mobsters they were going after.

Tully was sent to Vietnam in 1966 and was involved in one of the “anti-infrastructure” programs that Phoenix was based upon. Tully’s program was called Cong Tac IV and, like Phoenix, it targeted civilians who were functioning as secret agents for the Viet Cong. When the CIA and military created Phoenix, Evan Parker moved into Tully’s office. Tully knew the top Vietnamese officials and CIA officers in Vietnam, and he also knew the Italian Americans who were prominent in the Bureau of Narcotics and later the DEA. Tully and I became personal friends and he introduced me to senior people from the Bureau of Narcotics and the DEA.

Senior CIA officer Evan Parker, director of the Phoenix Program (1967-1969) and senior CIA officer John Mason, his replacement, with US and Vietnamese Phung Hoang officers. Photo credit: Quora

The same way I had entrée through Colby into the CIA, I had an entrée through Tully into federal drug law enforcement at a high level. I met historically important people and got historically important documents, most of it new history. I haven’t gotten around to digitizing the tapes of the federal drug law enforcement officers I interviewed, but there are separate collections at the National Security Archive, for both my CIA/Phoenix program materials and my federal drug law enforcement materials.

“By the time America invaded Iraq in 2003, reporters were embedded in military units. The media became a PR unit of the military and the CIA, with the Orwellian result that the public did not see images of the mangled bodies.”

TRACY: I’m wondering how the former governor of Pennsylvania and Bush administration officer, Tom Ridge, fits into all this. Was he not involved in Operation Phoenix?

DOUG: I’m not sure about Ridge. He was in an infantry unit in Vietnam from late 1969 into 1970. He worked in a team with four Americans and seven Vietnamese soldiers going after insurgents, not North Vietnamese regulars. So he was part of the pacification program. He got a bronze star for killing a young man carrying a sack of potatoes. He may have been a sniper and he may have been involved in one of the programs Phoenix coordinated, but it doesn’t seem like he was a Phoenix adviser.

Ridge had been a governor and had executive management experience when he was appointed to run the Office of Homeland Security and later the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). He was a political cadre who could be trusted to implement Republican Party policy.

At the same time, the Department of Homeland Security was based on the Phoenix program model Nelson Brickham developed in Vietnam. Ridge may have had some related pacification experience, which is what homeland security is; but he certainly understood how to manage organizations. The key word is coordination. When the National Security Establishment wanted to centralize the war on terror here in the United States, through the DHS, they copied how Phoenix had coordinated multiple agencies in order to streamline and bureaucratize the war against the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI).

Homeland Security’s first Secretary, Tom Ridge, speaks with employees during the first days of the Agency. Photo credit: U.S. Customs and Border Protection / Flickr

Phoenix proved an incredibly successful model for pacification in South Vietnam. It was the silver lining in the Vietnam War. Politically the war was a disaster, but bureaucratically the Phoenix program succeeded. It became the model for CIA operations in Central America — the Salvador Option.

The Phoenix program established Intelligence Operations and Coordinating Centers in the provinces and districts (PIOCCs and DIOCCs) of South Vietnam. Similarly, the Department of Homeland Security has created “fusion centers” in every state and major city across the country. The fusion centers coordinate all the agencies in an area exactly like IOCCs did in Vietnam; systematized and computerized, they coordinate contributing intelligence analysts and operating units. It’s the same highly bureaucratized system for dispensing with anything and anyone who can’t be assimilated.

TRACY: That’s an ominous set of observations for someone who has studied the Phoenix program in such great depth. You are saying the Phoenix template is something that has been grafted onto the American homeland.

“Since Iran Contra, the bureaucracies have instituted incredible obstacles that make it impossible for people to see what’s going on inside their private club. The public is totally reliant now on whistleblowers.”

DOUG: Absolutely. And I’m not the only one that talks about it. David Kilcullen was a counter insurgency adviser to the Bush and Obama administrations and in 2004 he called for a global Phoenix operation.³

Tom Hayden described Kilcullen as the “chief adviser on counterinsurgency operations” to General David Petraeus “in planning the 2007 US troop surge (in Iraq). He also served as chief strategist in the State Department’s counterterrorism office in 2005 and 2006, and has been employed in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa and Southeast Asia. In the section titled ‘A Global Phoenix Program’ in his 2004 article, Kilcullen describes the Vietnam Phoenix program as ‘unfairly maligned’ and ‘highly effective.’ Dismissing CIA sponsorship and torture allegations as ‘popular mythology,’ Kilcullen calls Phoenix a misunderstood ‘civilian aid and development program’ that was supported by ‘pacification’ operations to disrupt the Vietcong, whose infrastructure ruled vast swaths of rural South Vietnam. A ‘global Phoenix program,’ he wrote, would provide a starting point for dismantling the worldwide jihadist infrastructure today.”⁴

TRACY: How did Kilcullen want to see a Phoenix program imposed upon the world?

DOUG: If he understood it correctly, he’d know that the strength of the Phoenix program was in the IOCC centers, which allowed for political control. Through a network of Phoenix centers, management is able to control targeting and messaging. I imagine Kilcullen wanted such highly bureaucratized centers set up in or near nations in which the CIA and military are hunting terrorists. Such centers would allow the White House to direct the CIA to direct the military to target the right terrorists. Leave ours alone.

Most-wanted Iraqi playing cards.
Photo credit: Brakeet / Wikimedia (CC0 1.0)

Seymour Hersh is always looked to for insight into the CIA. In December 2003 he wrote an article in The New Yorker in which he said the Special Operations people in the military were going to use Phoenix as a model in Iraq.⁵ True to his high-toned style, Hersh focused on the sensational “death squad” aspect of Phoenix, not the revealing organizational aspect. He keeps the focus narrow.

Phoenix is greater than the sum of its parts because it has symbolic meaning. But its lurid aspects — like the death squads Hersh emphasizes — grab everyone’s attention. In Iraq, the CIA handed out decks of “playing” cards featuring pictures of “High Value” Sunni officials in the Saddam Hussein government. That psywar gimmick and jargon was right out of the Phoenix program.

The purpose of the Phoenix program was to “neutralize” the civilian members of the underground revolutionary government in South Vietnam. Neutralize was a broad term that included a number of measures. The first step was to identity a suspected subversive. After that, Nelson Brickham, the CIA officer who created Phoenix in 1967, explained the process to me as follows: “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. That was my attitude toward high-level VCI.”

“The pressures the CIA imposes on the media amounts to political warfare directed against the American public. It’s no different than how the CIA mounts counter-subversion operations overseas.”

VCI was the acronym for Viet Cong Infrastructure — the name the CIA gave to the members of the revolutionaries’ underground government and guerrilla support system.

As part of its Congressional mandate, the CIA has the job of counter-subversion outside the United States. Thus, when the US is waging a counter-insurgency in a nation like Iraq or Afghanistan, the CIA pursues a political order of battle, while the US armed forces pursue a military order of battle. In practice, however, counter-subversion during a counter-insurgency is a paramilitary police function. Thus, in South Vietnam, the US military supported the CIA’s Phoenix program with troops and equipment.

In 1969, the CIA ostensibly turned the Phoenix program over to the US military, at which point soldiers first began to pursue a political order of battle and conduct systematic counter-subversive operations against foreign civilians. The creation of Phoenix was a watershed. Prior to it, military people were only allowed to target civilians if they were secret agents or guerillas attacking military bases or personnel. But in its fanatical pursuit of victory in Vietnam, the military deliberately blurred the lines between subversives and innocent civilians, and killed anyone who got in the way, including children, like it did at My Lai and a thousand other places.

Following its ignoble defeat in Vietnam, America was driven by a reactionary impulse to reassert its global dominance. The justifications used to rationalize Phoenix were institutionalized as policy, as became evident after 9/11 and the initiation of the War on Terror. Since then the CIA and US military have been conducting joint Phoenix-style operations worldwide without any compunctions, most prominently in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Original unissued patch for the Phoenix Program. Photo credit: Tuxxmeister / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Also evolving was the relationship between the CIA, the military and the media. In Vietnam, there was more press freedom and the carnage was filmed and shown on TV every night. But the CIA and military felt those images turned the public against the war, so by the time America invaded Iraq in 2003, reporters were embedded in military units. The media became a PR unit of the military and the CIA, with the Orwellian result that the public did not see images of the mangled bodies. The public was denied access to the truth of what its government was actually doing, and when Chelsea Manning leaked the Collateral Murder video to Wikileaks, she was summarily tried and imprisoned.⁶

When I was doing my interviews for The Phoenix Program, certain CIA people would tell me how a particular correspondent from CBS or The New York Times would come into their offices and ask about the programs they managed. The CIA officers would talk openly about their operations, but the Vietnam-era correspondents wouldn’t publish the details, because their editors had a gentlemen’s agreement with the CIA not to reveal the secrets. They could know the secrets and as long as they didn’t reveal them, they could continue to have access.

“As power gets more concentrated in the security services, the media is no longer simply compliant, it’s functioning as their public relations arm. It simply ignores anything that contradicts the official line.”

While I was researching Phoenix, I went to people like Seymour Hersh and Gloria Emerson but they wouldn’t talk to me. I had a harder time getting reporters to talk to me than I did CIA people, because as soon as they expressed any knowledge about Phoenix, the follow up question was: Why weren’t you writing about it? Then they’d have to reveal this gentlemen’s agreement with the CIA.

The “old boy” network existed in Vietnam but it’s gotten a lot worse; it’s impossible now for anyone to interview mid-level CIA people on the record and reveal the facts. Since Iran Contra, the bureaucracies have instituted incredible obstacles that make it impossible for people to see what’s going on inside their private club. The public is totally reliant now on whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, who are then vilified, imprisoned, and/or chased into exile.

TRACY: We see what, for example, happened to Gary Webb in the mid-1990s. He had some people who had divulged significant information to him and yet the CIA denied it, and that more or less cost him his career. He had no one, no colleagues of his, who actually went to bat for him to any significant degree to keep him in the industry because what he was doing is what investigative journalists and historians, such as you, should be doing.

DOUG: Yes. Gary Webb was an investigative journalist whose “Dark Alliance” series in 1996 exposed the link between the CIA’s “Contras” in Central America and a crack cocaine dealer in Los Angeles. The story rattled the CIA. Members of the black community were up in arms. Then the CIA’s old boy network sprang into action and Webb was nitpicked to death by fellow journalists for minor inaccuracies in his work. But his real sin was revealing the CIA’s criminal involvement in systematic racial oppression through the war on drugs.

Webb committed suicide in 2004. But he wasn’t the first American citizen to be attacked for telling the truth about the CIA’s central role in drug trafficking. In his 1972 book The Politics in Heroin in Southeast Asia, Al McCoy detailed much of the CIA’s drug network in Vietnam and the Golden Triangle region of Laos, Burma and Thailand. When the CIA found out what McCoy was doing, one of its most senior executives, Cord Meyer, tried to get McCoy’s publisher to suppress the book. When that didn’t work, the CIA tapped McCoy’s phone and the IRS audited his income tax. Behind the scenes, the CIA forced McCoy’s sources to recant. The famous Church Committee, which exposed a lot of the CIA’s secrets, investigated McCoy’s allegations and found the CIA innocent of any involvement in drug trafficking. McCoy moved to Australia and didn’t return to America for eleven years.

The CIA’s control of international drug trafficking is America’s darkest secret, and after the Webb scandal, the old boy network imposed even more restrictions on the media. The pressures the CIA imposes on the media amounts to political warfare directed against the American public. It’s no different than how the CIA mounts counter-subversion operations overseas.

Nowadays, the only way you can discern what’s going on is by studying and understanding the historical arc of these bureaucracies. Where did the CIA come from? Where is it going? If you look at it historically, you can see beyond the spin and it becomes de-mystified. And that is not a happy story. As power gets more concentrated in the security services, the media is no longer simply compliant, it’s functioning as their public relations arm. It simply ignores anything that contradicts the official line.

TRACY: There is almost a complete blackout of Jade Helm in the mainstream media. It is only getting coverage and discussion and analysis in the alternative media.

DOUG: Yes. Jade Helm was a military training exercise in Texas, Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Utah. Military and local officials set up Phoenix-style coordination centers, as a way of giving Special Operations and “Civil Affairs” personnel experience working with para-militarized police forces in what was called a realistic “war experience” in domestic counter-insurgency operations. The media blackout was an essential part of the plan. The censorship was symbolic of how, as a function of the concentration of capital, the communications/media industry has been centralized and is now part of the political warfare apparatus. The media industry has been reduced to a few huge corporations that control most of the outlets. Control of information has become the key to the oligarchy’s success. Very few independent news organizations are able to compete with the giants, or get information out across the country, so people really have to search for facts on the Internet.

TRACY: Even some of the alternative progressive left media that were good twenty or so years ago are increasingly dependent upon foundation money that comes with strings attached, and they’re not as inclined to push the envelope as I think they once were.

DOUG: Sure. As a person who is interested in how the CIA uses language and mythology to control political and social movements, I see this development as ominous. People like Glenn Greenwald who take money from billionaires insist it has no editorial influence on them. But media people who are taking money from billionaires and CIA-connected foundations must realize that their sugar daddies can sink their operations in a moment because of something they write, and that knowledge surely impacts what they are willing to do and say.

Taking money from a billionaire also has tremendous symbolic meaning. It means the person taking the money approves of one person having eight billion dollars when three billion people barely survive. Through their example, celebrity media figures like Greenwald are telling their followers that they support the exploitation and imperialism their benefactors engage in.

As all advertising people know, symbolic messages don’t have to be articulated, they’re understood subliminally. Greenwald’s followers like it that way. It means they don’t have to consciously confront their tacit support for an unjust system. That self-censorship allows celebrity journalists like Greenwald and his sidekick Jeremy Scahill to promote themselves as heroic adversaries of the system. And they’ll continue to get away with the double game until their followers start challenging their own basic assumptions. The system will never change until people climb out of their comfortable darkness and start rejecting the system’s inequalities, instead of just feeding off of them.

Endnotes

1. Phoenix is Phụng Hoàng in Vietnamese.

2. <http://www.cryptocomb.org/Phoenix%20Tapes.html>

3. See David Kilcullen, “Countering Global Insurgency”, Small Wars Journal, September-November 2004.

4. Tom Hayden, “Reviving Vietnam War Tactics”, The Nation, 13 March

5. Seymour Hersh, “Moving Targets: Will the counter-insurgency plan in Iraq repeat the mistakes of Vietnam?”, The New Yorker, 15 December 2003. Hersh said, “According to official South Vietnamese statistics, Phoenix claimed nearly forty-one thousand victims between 1968 and 1972; the US counted more than twenty thousand in the same time Span.”

6.<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0>

The Not So Pretty Finish-With Etta James’ “Please, No More” in Mind

The Not So Pretty Finish-With Etta James’ “Please, No More” in Mind

By Hank Jones

“No more, no more,” had become Shep Wilson’s new mantra once he got over his rage against his long-time companion, Sarah Long, after she had set him adrift, had as she said “moved on” to fine herself whatever that might have meant when she uttered the ugly words of separation one night and then the next day was gone, leaving no forwarding address and only the thin reed of a cellphone number and e-mail address to remember her by. It had not been like Shep had not known it was coming, or could see it coming since Sarah had been making noises about leaving, and under what conditions, for a couple of years prior to that sneaking out the next day door. And maybe she was right to make a clean break, although in his heart of hearts Shep knew he was only fooling himself, only acting out of his version of male alleged indifference which had been part of the problem between the pair for the past several years.

Shep kept trying to think through what he could have done differently, where he had fallen down bad enough to make her leave. And make him take up her chant of “no more” (not really put that way by her since she would have used more gentile language that fit her persona but that was the way that it rang through this latest fire in his head and that was the way he was trying to think the matter through). He knew that he shared the blame, shared in the debacle of their love, had lost that magic that held them together for so many years, and that the little saying that she had had in sunnier times about how they had been so much in love in those early years and though it would continue forever. And in the early days, hell, up until the last few years that love had been as genuine as any emotion that he held dear. Then a whole series of events, a whole personal deluge of troubles laid him low, and had made him a grumpy old man. The last month or so, maybe two months he had tried to take stock of himself (and of her role in their decline after all as she admitted she could have signaled him more concretely about what was ailing her, what make her say her own “no more”). Had tried to put, as he constantly told her against all odds, to put his best foot forward. Unfortunately it had been too late.     

After Shep thought about those early days when they were so in love, were so sympathetic to each other, fed off each other’s needs, faced the wicked old world as a pair of waifs, soul mate waifs was the way she put it one time early on, sipping on a little light wine to numb himself a bit against the emptiness in his heart, he tried to retrace where he had fallen down (her shortcomings were her business now and so he looked at the lonely world through his future path and  how he could become the “new” Shep, get rid of that mantra of “no more” into a better place). 

Shep had never been much for reflection, never much to think how his actions, or better his omissions, would affect Sarah, would make her withdraw, make her close her heart to him. Had dismissed at least in his on fire head much of what she would speak of when she was seriously trying to signal him that things had dramatically drifted downhill. Would not take the signals about getting help, psychiatric help foremost, that she first gently and then more insistently tried to get him to undertake. Saw that as her New Age Cambridge background thing that she was forever trying out (and to his mind without much success but he kept that to himself especially as she seemed more and more to withdraw into that world as she got more distraught about them and as well about her place in the sun, about who she was). 

Funny, Shep thought to himself, in the end, or rather toward the end, in one of those previous downhill moments he had agreed to go with her to couples counselling (they had tried that route about twenty years before but both had been dissatisfied with the counsellor who seemed to be more interested in what she had to say than what they had had to say). Funny as well that he, not she though, and if he had been wise enough to see what that meant he could have seen what was coming, he felt that the then current counselling, and the counsellor, was a worthwhile endeavor every week (Sarah, before they decided, or rather she decided, to discontinue the work, had told him that she thought the counsellor was “championing him” because, as a gregarious type in such situations he had the better of it against her more quiet and thoughtful responses which tended to be short, if to the point.)         

Shep’s troubles really had started with the advent of his medical troubles, with what he called “the poking and prodding” of the medicos, a few years before. Yeah, he knew growing older, getting to be an old grumpy man, meant that health issues would surface, would especially as he reached his seventh decade (he knew first-hand as well from his friends of similar ages that this was the “deal,” the real deal). Shep had prided himself on keeping a semblance of fitness, of keeping himself heathy as measured by very infrequent visits to the doctor’s office and of not feeling sick most of the time except for an occasional cold. Then the deluge, first trouble with breathing and eating necessitating an endoscopy which found some problems, and medications. After that bladder problems associated with his smoking many years before according to the urologist, more medications, and then more recently the final nail in the coffin (his expression as stated to Sarah many times and a silly foolish thing to say), the early discovery of bladder cancer after a scope should unusual inflammations. More procedures and more medications.       

One day Shep just erupted, started yelling at Sarah, started to approach her for which she would later say she stood in fear of physical danger he seemed so out of control (not at the time though as she thought that saying anything would only enflame him further). After a few minutes he settled down, because something of the old Shep, but the line had been crossed. Shep swore he would stop taking the medications since they seemed to be making him more aggressive, more sullen, and angrier. As it turned out one of the medications was reacting poorly with another one and had aided in Shep’s angry responses to the world-and to Sarah.   

If the medications, if the health issues were all that there were Sarah pointed told Shep before she departed she could have worked around that. What she could not work around was what Shep called one night the fire in his head (not helping that inability to “work around” were long-time, long-held issues around Sarah’s own worth, around who she was, around what was she to do in the world now that she too was retired, issues which had plagued her since childhood). In the end that “fire in his head,” that not being “at peace” with himself was the way she expressed her take on the situation was what made something snap in her psyche. Shep, as he would admit to himself in a moment of candor several weeks after she had gone, had reacted to his health issues and graceless aging rather than getting more rest and taking it easier in life had true Shep form driven himself even harder in order to leave what he told Sarah was his mark on the wicked old world. The snapping point for her was that he seemed indifferent to her needs, seemed to be in a world of his own, and had begun again to question every move that she made like he did not trust. In a final stab to his heart she had told him that her own increasing medical problems were being aggravated by his foul behavior(after being fearful of doing so since she still worried about his anger if she did tell him this hard truth).       

So this was Shep’s sad demise. Or could have been but one night a couple of months after Sarah left he woke up one night and said “no more.” No more acting like a crazed maniac, no more fruitless search for some netherworld place in the sun. He had read a book, a book on meditation that Sarah had left behind talking about the benefits of doing such a therapy, backed up by scientific evidence. (Shep was not sure that Sarah had not left the book behind on purpose since she, like in a lot of things around his well-being, had mentioned his doing meditation on numerous occasions in the past.) So Shep started practicing the art, had real trouble at the beginning in focusing away from his two million “pressing” forward that day issues and living in the moment. But as with many things when he gets “religion” Shep is still at it after a month. His mantra, his focus term, not surprisingly “no more.”    

[Shep would wind up meeting Sarah in a Whole Foods grocery store in Cambridge several months later and remarked after telling him she had spent the previous several months in California that he seemed calmer, seemed to have lost some of that fire in his head, and seemed more at peace with himself. Had said also that they should keep in touch now that  she was back in town and that he wasn’t such a maniac (her term for his previous late innings conduct). So who knows. All Shep knows is that he wanted “no more” to do with the old Shep).