U.S. operation, run from 1967 to 1971, to identify and destroy the communist apparatus in South Vietnam. Phoenix was a combined effort of the CIA, the U.S. Army, the Special Branch of the South Vietnamese Police, and South Vietnam's Central Intelligence Organization. But the CIA dominated through the U.S. aspect of the program, called ICEX (Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation).
ICEX was to collect information on what was called the "Vietcong infrastructure" and to "neutralize" it. Robert W. Komer, a CIA intelligence officer ran that effort, which he renamed Phoenix. His deputy, who in 1968 took over Phoenix, was William E. Colby, who in 1973 became Director of Central Intelligence. (In Vietnam his cover was director of Civil Operations and Rural Development Support for the Agency for International Development.)
According to the CIA, in the period 1968-1971 Operation Phoenix granted amnesty to 17,000 suspected communists; 28,000 were captured and 20,587 killed. Most of those killed died in military combat operations, their deaths being "credited" to Phoenix. The rest were killed by police or other security forces.
Colby always denied that Phoenix was involved in assassination, John Prados wrote in Lost Crusader (2003), adding, “Ultimately, the record should show that Phoenix was not an assassination program per se. … But what Phoenix did do, which its former car consistently refused to acknowledge, was to elicit, indeed demand, lawlessness on the part of the Saigon regime and its American advisers.”
