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Phoenix Program
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== Strategic and operational effect == Between 1968 and 1972, Phoenix officially "neutralized" (meaning imprisoned, persuaded to defect, or killed) 81,740 people suspected of VC membership, of whom 26,369 were killed, while [[Seymour Hersh]] wrote that South Vietnamese official statistics estimated that 41,000 were killed.<ref name=hersh03>{{cite magazine |author-link=Seymour Hersh |last=Hersh|first=Seymour|title=Moving Targets|magazine=The New Yorker|date=December 15, 2003|url=http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/12/15/031215fa_fact?currentPage=all|access-date=20 November 2013}}</ref> A significant number of VC were killed, and between 1969 and 1971, the program was quite successful in destroying VC infrastructure in many important areas. 87 percent of those killed in the program were attributed to conventional military operations by South Vietnamese and American forces; the remainder were killed by Phoenix Program operatives.{{sfn|Andradé|Willbanks|2006}}{{rp|17–21}} By 1970, communist plans repeatedly emphasized attacking the government's pacification program and specifically targeted Phoenix officials. The VC imposed assassination quotas. In 1970, for example, communist officials near [[Da Nang]] in northern South Vietnam instructed their assassins to "kill 1,400 persons" deemed to be government "tyrant[s]" and to "annihilate" anyone involved with the pacification program.{{sfn|Andradé|Willbanks|2006}}{{rp|20–21}} Several North Vietnamese officials have made statements about the effectiveness of Phoenix.{{sfn|Andradé|Willbanks|2006}} According to William Colby, "in the years since 1975, I have heard several references to North and South Vietnamese communists who state that, in their mind, the toughest period that they faced from 1960 to 1975 was the period from 1968 to '72 when the Phoenix Program was at work."<ref>[http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/org.wgbh.mla:65c9763227c226e106cadd63f7ef9024ad4e3224 "Interview with William Egan Colby, 1981."] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101221233032/http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/org.wgbh.mla%3A65c9763227c226e106cadd63f7ef9024ad4e3224 |date=2010-12-21 }} 07/16/1981. WGBH Media Library & Archives. Retrieved 9 November 2010.</ref> The CIA said that through Phoenix they were able to learn the identity and structure of the VCI in every province.<ref name="Blakely, Ruth 2009 50">{{cite book|author=Blakely, Ruth|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=FoxuDCMmlqoC&pg=PA50|title=State Terrorism and Neoliberalism: the North in the South|publisher=[[Taylor & Francis]]|year=2009|isbn=978-0-415-46240-2|page=50}}</ref> According to [[Stuart A. Herrington]]: "Regardless of how effective the Phoenix Program was or wasn't, area by area, the communists thought it was very effective. They saw it as a significant threat to the viability of the revolution because, to the extent that you could ... carve out the shadow government, their means of control over the civilian population was dealt a death blow. And that's why, when the war was over, the North Vietnamese reserved "special treatment" for those who had worked in the Phoenix Program. They considered it a mortal threat to the revolution."<ref>{{cite book|last1=Ward|first1=Geoffrey|last2=Burns|first2=Ken|title=The Vietnam War An Intimate History|publisher=Alfred A. Knopf|year=2017|isbn=978-0-307-70025-4|page=342}}</ref>
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