In the following interview, Valentine reflects on a variety of issues including the Phoenix Program, plausible deniability, paramilitary wars, drug trafficking, sabotage, blackmail, propaganda, Operation GLADIO, class interests of the CIA establishment, Trump, the Mueller Report and the Bidens.
Heidi Boghosian: In 1947, Congress passed the National Security Act, which led to the formation of the National Security Council and, under its direction, the CIA. Its original mandate was to collect and analyze strategic information for use in war. Though shrouded in secrecy, many CIA activities such as covert military and cybersecurity operations have drawn considerable public scrutiny and criticism. In 1948, the Security Council approved a secret directive NSC 10.2, authorizing the CIA to carry out an array of covert operations. This essentially allowed the CIA to become a paramilitary organization.
Before he died, George F. Kennan, the diplomat and Cold War strategist who sponsored the directive, said that, “in light of latter history, it was the greatest mistake I ever made.” Since NSC 10.2 authorized violation of international law, it also established an official policy of lying to cover up the law breaking.
We speak today with Douglas Valentine, author of The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World. Mr. Valentine’s rare access to CIA officials has resulted in portions of his research materials being archived at the National Security Archive, Texas Tech University’s Vietnam Center and John Jay College. He has written three books on CIA operations, including the Phoenix Program:America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam, which documented the CIA’s elaborate system of population surveillance, control, entrapment, imprisonment, torture, and assassination in Vietnam. His new book describes how many of these practices remain operational today. Doug Valentine, welcome to Law and Disorder.
Douglas Valentine: Thank you very much for having me.
Heidi Boghosian: Doug, how did you come to get such unparalleled access to top level CIA agents, including director Bill Colby?
Douglas Valentine: Well, I’m not really sure of the answer. I was a nobody. I hadn’t gone to the Columbia Journalism School. In fact, I was a college dropout. I had written a book about my father and his experiences in World War II and I wanted to write a book about the Vietnam war. And so, I sent this book that I wrote about my father called the Hotel Tacloban: The Explosive True Story of One American’s Journey to Hell in a Japanese POW Camp to Colby. And he read it! And based on him reading this book I wrote about my father, he agreed to do an interview with me about the CIA’s Phoenix program.
But I really just stumbled into it. And I think that the reasons that Colby talked to me and then introduced me to a lot of other CIA officers are complex, and I think a lot of it has to do with the psychology of the country at the time. That was in 1984, and what was known as the generation gap. I’m not exactly sure why, but I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I just had the audacity to approach Colby and ask him to help me write a book about the Phoenix program, which nobody else had done at that time.
Michael Steven Smith: Doug, the book that you wrote, the Phoenix Program: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam, is considered by many the definitive study of the CIA’s secretive counterinsurgency program during the war in Vietnam. One CIA officer named Lucien Conein called it “the greatest blackmail scheme ever invented.” What do you think he meant by that?
Douglas Valentine: Well, it meant that the Phoenix program was targeted against civilians, the civilians who managed the insurgency in South Vietnam, not soldiers, not even guerrillas or terrorists. But these were civilians who were working undercover in political positions, generally speaking. We managed the insurgency in South Vietnam and their names could be put on blacklists. And once their name was on a list—once somebody had been informed about them, and once they were a member of a list a that was called the Vietcong infrastructure, the insurgency—the CIA and its forces could go out and kidnap them, put them in interrogation centers, kill them along with their families, and do anything they wanted to try and suppress them. And the problem was that lots of innocent civilians got their names put on these blacklists. In fact, one of the ways that the CIA and its forces, the South Vietnamese Special Police and its mercenary army, one of the ways that they got people to inform on the members of the Vietcong insurgency was by threatening to put their names on blacklists. So therefore, it became a blackmail scheme.
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