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Summary: Valentine writes an unflinching account of covert warfare.
Review: During the past few months, I have been devouring the literature on covert ops during the Vietnam War. By far the most candid, unflinching examination of these controversial programs is the excellent book by Doug Valentine. He carefully explains all the special operations techniques of compartmentalization, cover stories, plausible deniability, and secrecy oaths which are designed to keep covert ops secret forever. Moreover, he appears to have interviewed at length all the central players in Phoenix. Many books on covert ops, (which sometimes tend to glorify the operatives), rely on supposedly secret or newly declassified documents to buttress their claims. The problem with such an analytical approach is that frequently such documents are bogus, especially designed to camoflouge controversial or illegal activities. Valentine goes directly to the source -- the men of Phoenix and the officers in the chain of command. Valentine has succeeded in gaining access to many special operators who appear to have spoken from the heart about their missions. Moreover, he thoroughly and concretely lays out the structure of the controversial Phoenix program, in all of its complicated facets, from Provincial Reconnaissance Units to Studies and Observations Group missions. His book is likely to be criticized by those who wish to bury the uglier side of covert ops forever. It is precisely for this reason that his is such an important contribution to literature on Vietnam. April Oliver (former producer, CNN)
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Summary: Extensive Research, Accurate Annalysis of Data, Objective
Review: I was involved in Project Phoenix so I know the who, what, when, where and how's. This book is an accurate presentation of the project and some of the people that were involved. There are few book that present such a picture. Most are whitewashed. If the history of the Viet-Nam War is to be presented to our prodigy then it must be objective and accurate. Otherwise, they will never learn the truth of what we did there. Project Phoenix should be a text book in college history classes. Bill sat with no other interviewers to discuss Phoenix like he did with Doug Valentine.I have read Doug's other book Hotel Tacloban. I lived in Tacloban for a considerable time and have heard the stories he relates told there. I amm not a literary critic so I can't comment on style with authority but I find his works easy and interesting to read. I imagine it must be hard to do this with facts and none of the literary tools of fiction. I am intimately familiar with the facts presented in both books so I can vewrify that the research and analysis are excellent. I believe the author to be an excellent investigative author.
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Summary: Oliver Stone, call your office
Review: More unsubstantiated tripe bout events that never took place, told by unqualified people and written down wholesale by a naive author. It is very telling that one of the most positive reviews posted here is from one of the purveyors of the fairy tale about Americans using nerve gas on other Americans. Avoid this book; there are lots of better and more balanced ones. And, yes, I was there, as a matter of fact.
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Summary: Oliver Stone, call your office
Review: More unsubstantiated tripe bout events that never took place, told by unqualified people and written down wholesale by a naive author. It is very telling that one of the most positive reviews posted here is from one of the purveyors of the fairy tale about Americans using nerve gas on other Americans. Avoid this book; there are lots of better and more balanced ones. And, yes, I was there, as a matter of fact.
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Summary: Mostly fantasy substantiated by proven frauds with an agenda
Review: Once you know that Manzione is a verified fraud everthing that follows is discredited. A lot of facts mixed with a lot of fiction. It is unfortunate that this trash has been used as reference in many bibliographies. "Phouc Ninh PRU, Tay Ninh Province, Aug-Dec 1966". My OER (Officer Efficiency Report) evaluating my responsibilities and performance as a PRU Advisor is unclassified-never was.
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Summary: The Shotgun Approach
Review: One appalling fact in particular stands out to me from Doug Valentine's valuable history of the Phoenix Program: the CIA and U.S. military leadership knew very well that their operatives were torturing and murdering thousands of innocent civilian people in Vietnam. They knew it and they didn't care. The problem for the CIA and U.S. military was that the Viet Cong were a superior enemy. They were intelligent, very resourceful, very tough and much more highly motivated than most American soldiers. Most important of all, the VC had the steadily increasing support of the Vietnamese people. The CIA doesn't want you to know that the Vietnam War was a true People's War. The vast majority of Vietnamese people very justifiably despised the murdering, raping, racist American invaders. It was therefore quite natural for the people to support their Viet Cong brothers and sisters. The VC were the best and most courageous of the southern Vietnamese people. For all these reasons it was extremely difficult for U.S. forces even to identify them, much less catch them. Knowing all this privately (and, of course, never admitting it publicly) the CIA's Phoenix Program adopted the shotgun approach: murder, rape and torture as many people as you can, and hopefully there will be a few VC among them. This bestial, genocidal approach was in fact the (unofficial) method of every branch of the U.S. government and military involved in Vietnam. The U.S. Air Force dropped millions of tons of napalm, Agent Orange and cluster bombs on people all over Southeast Asia, knowing full well it would brutally murder hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian women and children -- but hoping to get a few VC, Pathet Lao and NVA among them. U.S. Navy SEALS like Bob Kerrey snuck into villages considered to be populated by VC sympathizers and slit the throats of children and their grandparents. Under the guidance of the CIA's Phoenix Program the U.S. Army committed thousands of atrocities like the My Lai massacre: murdering, raping and sodomizing women and girls, literally blowing away little babies with M-16 rifles, tossing grenades into huts full of children, bayonetting old men, cutting people's ears and fingers off, torturing people in horrible ways. The victims were the children, the wives, the sisters, mothers, fathers, grandfathers and grandmothers of suspected VC. "The Phoenix Program" is a serious wake up call to all Americans. We were definitely the bad guys in Vietnam. No honest person can deny it. The genocide of the Vietnamese people was fueled by racism. In their own twisted minds, CIA and U.S. military personnel imagined Vietnamese people as ... That made it easy for such Americans to justify the cold-blooded butchery of literally millions of innocent, helpless children and civilian people. There is no fundamental difference between those Americans and the demonic Nazis. In 1967, during the height of the genocide, Senator Wayne Morse (D-Oregon) had this to say: "We're going to become guilty, in my judgement, of being the greatest threat to the peace of the world. It's an ugly reality, and we Americans don't like to face up to it. I hate to think of the chapter of American history that's going to be written in the future in connection with our outlawry in Southeast Asia." The Phoenix Program is one of those chapters. The whole Vietnam Genocide is one of the absolute ugliest chapters of American history. And as long as the war criminals of the CIA are still walking around loose, it's a chapter that is still being written today. It's no wonder the CIA is attempting to suppress and denigrate this book. In "The Phoenix Program" Doug Valentine is not afraid to name names. Lots of them. In the middle of the book he even provides 16 pages of photographs of many U.S. government, military and CIA officers involved in the Phoenix Program. Looking at the photos one is struck by the ordinary appearance of these men. It's hard to picture them involved in the mass-murder, rape and torture of their fellow human beings. They look just like any businessman, bureaucrat or soldier you might see on the street of any town in America. And that is an important point. As Mr. Valentine writes in the introduction: "This book asks what happens when Phoenix comes home to roost." The CIA works endlessly to cover up all evidence and silence all testimony of its war crimes. But do we as a nation really think we can just sweep this monumental horror under the rug? The United States butchered over three million people in Vietnam alone. No sane person could actually believe there will be no punitive consequences for one of the greatest and most brutal genocides of the twentieth century. Mainstream American society has deeply poisoned itself by its collective refusal to come clean about the war crimes committed by our government and military around the world. And if we, as a nation, do not take serious steps to undo all this violent evil -- it will destroy us.
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Summary: Just one question ....
Review: One reviewer writes: "It is a sad but telling fact that the CIA's secret supporters have managed to suppress this book"...
Hmmm. If the book is "suppressed," then why can you buy it on Amazon? (In fact, a REPRINT of the original version!)
Maybe the answer is in my motto: never trust anyone, esp. an "author," who talks about himself in the third person. :)
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Summary: Disappointing
Review: The author's intent is very obvious, however, his structure is too detailed in facts that clouded the issues by making a boring and difficult read. The flow and continuity were just not there. I am quite surprised the editor did not have a field day rewriting much of his work.
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Summary: One of the Best Books on Vietnam
Review: The Phoenix Program is a grim history of one of the darkest episodes of the Vietnam War, the CIA's civilian torture and assassination program called Phoenix. Phoenix was the grotesque brainchild of William Colby and may have resulted in the elimination, to use Colby anaseptic phrase, more than 40,000 South Vietnamese civilians, suspected by the CIA of having anti-American sentiments. This was a difficult story to excavate, taking all of the professional and human resources of one of America's most gifted and tenacious investigative reporters, Douglas Valentine. Valentine dares to tred across territory long considered taboo to reveal the shocking and baldly criminal behavior of the CIA and its South Vietnamese clients at the peak of the war in Vietnam. Wholesale arrests of non-combatants, burtal interrogations, torture of the most unspeakable nature and murder. Valentine shows that the My Lai massacre was no isolated incident, but an outgrowth of a systematic, decade-long program of state sponsored terrorism. Dare to tell the truth about the CIA and you will pay a heavy price. Valentine's book has oddly disappeared from the shelves of American bookstores. This a historical tragedy, since it is one of the few volumes that has dared to tell the truth about the true nature of the CIA's role in Vietnam. This book demands to be republished, as it is quite simply one of the best histories of the Vietnam war. Jeffrey St. Clair Co-author Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press
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Summary: A work of courage, a masterpiece of investigative reporting.
Review: The Phoenix Program is a work of courage and a masterpiece of investigative reporting. It is contemporary writing at its best and should be required reading for all American history and government classes in high school and college. It is a sad but telling fact that the CIA's secret supporters have managed to suppress this book, and I strongly urge all scholars and historians who are currently being denied documents about the CIA's involvement in war crimes to acquire this book and organize an effort to have it reprinted. I have been studying and writing about the CIA for over twenty years, so I appreciate Valentine's ability to cut through the lies and expose the essense of the CIA: which is to deceive the American public about its involvement in assassination and torture. Remarkably, he has managed to have CIA agents admit to this in The Phoenix Program. Moreover, he has done this without sloganeering, and in the process has presented the best case yet for abolishing the CIA and prosecuting its war criminals for their unspeakable crimes. An intelligent person knows the truth. A courageous person knows the truth and speaks it at any cost. Doug Valentine is a brave and wise man who should be heard and supported. For now, the CIA and its minions have killed the messenger, but this should not be allowed to continue. This review has been written by John Kelly, author of Tainting Evidence: Inside The Scandals At The FBI Crime Lab.
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