Keyhoe continued to be unhappy. He met with Low once again during the spring and learned that of the thousand or so reports that NICAP had given to the project, “probably four or five,” were to be spot-checked. So far, Low conceded, none of them had been. When, in March, Keyhoe met with his old friend Frank Edwards, Edwards recommended that NICAP withdraw its support. Although no longer nationally syndicated, Edwards still was on the radio and decided to blast the project over the airwaves. He began to work on an expose and told Keyhoe that he was planning to speed it up.23 Unfortunately, Frank Edwards died of a heart attack on June 23, 1967, at the age of fifty-eight. Amid the growing storm, APRO continued to support Condon. Members of the project visited APRO headquarters in March, and the Lorenzens gave leads on several classified cases which they had obtained with great effort. The project members tentatively agreed to try developing these leads, but in fact nothing happened with them. One of the main problems was that, despite the supposedly independent nature of the Colorado investigation, project members were directed by the Pentagon to rely primarily on current cases. Digging up old cases, they were told, was too expensive.24
SECRECY IN 1967
While the UFO was busily being solved, courtesy of the nation’s tax money, the national security state spent much more money to solve other problems secretly. The escalation of the undeclared war in Vietnam pressed President Johnson and the entire intelligence community into new acts of illegality, partly to contain domestic discontent, partly to neutralize the Vietnamese enemy in new ways. According to Gordon Thomas, by 1967, many of the MK-Search projects were costing lots of money without producing results. In the spring of 1967, however, the CIA began to take Vietcong prisoners to a room where the men were strapped to tables and given electroshock. An unknown number of VC were subjected to the torture, and apparently all of them died as a result. The idea was to see whether the CIA could “depattern” the VC communist indoctrination.25
More gruesome activities lay in store for the Vietnamese. In May 1967, William Colby, head of the CIA’s Far East Division of Clandestine Services, launched Project Phoenix. This was a comprehensive attack against the Vietcong infrastructure which soon turned into a straightforward assassination program of suspected Vietcong (or VC sympathizers), often as a bullet in the head while the victim slept. The CIA established a nationwide system of interrogation centers, about which little is known. According to Colby’s testimony in 1971, Phoenix killed 20,587 suspected VC in two and a half years. The South Vietnamese government put the figure at 40,994.26
Not everything in Vietnam went according to CIA wishes. In late June 1967, a major debate emerged between the CIA, the chairman of the Board of National Estimates, and the Pentagon regarding the North Vietnamese Order of Battle—that is, the size of enemy forces. The gap was irreconcilable. Military numbers placed the number at 270,000, while the CIA’s main analyst called this “ridiculously low”—more like 600,000, he said. By September, the military had compromised to 300,000. Just as it played with UFO statistics, so now did the military manipulate numbers and categories in this debate. When the CIA analyst proved the VC had more men in one category, the military reduced another category by a similar amount. On September 11, DCI Richard Helms ordered the CIA station in Saigon to accept the military’s figure of 299,000. It soon went down to 248,000. Thus could the Pentagon prove that America was winning the war. Helms knew the numbers were phony, but he also knew what numbers President Johnson wanted. In January 1968, the Tet Offensive made the debate moot.27
Elsewhere for the CIA, it was business as usual. In Greece, a CIAORGANIZED coup placed the military in power. In Bolivia, on October 8, 1967, the CIA-advised Bolivian rangers, in the presence of a CIA operator, tortured and murdered longtime irritant Ernesto “Che” Guevara.28
