The Phoenix Program

On occasion of the CIA’s 70th anniversary, Lars Schall talked with US researcher Douglas Valentine about the Central Intelligence Agency. According to Valentine, the CIA is “the organized crime branch of the U.S. government”, doing the dirty work for the rich and powerful. Douglas Valentine is the author of the non-fictional, historical books The Hotel Tacloban, The Phoenix Program, The Strength of the Wolf, The Strength of the Pack, and The CIA as Organized Crime.
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My guest today is the great Douglas Valentine. Doug joins me to discuss his latest book The CIA as Organized Crime. We begin by looking at why Doug decided to write this book and the way in which it is structured. Next we delve into Doug’s relationship with the CIA and how he came to write about it’s inner-workings. Doug talks about his relationship with the agency and how he began getting access to operatives and officials while writing The Phoneix Program, including his meetings with former CIA Director William Colby.

Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever: But, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an œconomy of truth. It is a sort of temperance, by which a man speaks truth with measure that he may speak it the longer.
— Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796)
Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
— Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897)

For the vast majority of Westerners, that is to say both US Americans and their relatives (imagined or real) in Europe, the war against Vietnam was a brutal military conflict waged by the United States against a small Southeast Asian country by deploying up to some 500,000 combat personnel and more ordnance than dropped on Germany in WWII. The virtues of this endeavor are still disputed.

Guillermo Jimenez Presents Douglas Valentine
On this edition of De-Manufacturing Consent: Guillermo is joined by CIA expert and author of The Phoenix Program, Douglas Valentine. Douglas explains how the CIA’s proposed “sweeping organizational changes,” as reported in the Washington Post, are the natural evolution of a process that began in 1967 with the Phoenix Program in Vietnam.

Phoenix was far worse than the things attributed to it.
— Ed Murphy, former member of the Phoenix program