Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

by Tom O'Neill

I did find, however, a record of Herrmann’s overseas work, much of which he conducted while still employed with the LAPD. Having spent four months in 1967 training Thai police in counterinsurgency tactics, Herrmann returned to Asia in September 1968 to join the U.S. effort in South Vietnam. Documents from the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, listed him as a scientific “advisor” to the army. His responsibility was to train South Vietnamese police in “paramilitary techniques” to deploy against Viet Cong insurgents. None of the records described those techniques in any detail, but the mere mention of them was enough to make me put a few things together. The dates of Herrmann’s stint in Vietnam, his job description, his professional affiliations, and his training made it abundantly likely that he was working for a CIA project called Phoenix, one of the most controversial elements in the agency’s history. Lyndon Johnson had secretly authorized Phoenix in 1968; it was discontinued in early ’71. The agency described it as “a set of programs that sought to attack and destroy the political infrastructure of the Viet Cong.”