Nelson Brickham person
also: Brickham, Brigham, this guy
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CIAintelligence service · 17Phoenix Programoperation · 10Soviet Unioncountry · 9Vietnamcountry · 7Viet Congorganization · 4John Hartperson · 4Irancountry · 3David Galulaperson · 3Inter-Services Intelligenceintelligence service · 3Howard Stoneperson · 2Robert Komerperson · 2Chinacountry · 2Police Special Branchorganization · 2Czechoslovakiacountry · 2Provisional Reconnaissance Unitsorganization · 1The Phoenix Programbook · 1Tucker Gouglemanperson · 1John Sherwoodperson · 1Sam Draculichperson · 1Third Corpsorganization · 1Roles in Mission Studybook · 1Regional Coordinating Centersorganization · 1Mohammad Mosaddeghperson · 1South Vietnamplace · 1
Claims (16)
Nelson Brickham member_of
CIA book_quoted
“He also says, well, let me go a little bit about who he is, because it puts him into context. So he joined the CIA in the immediate aftermath of the creation of it in 1949. He's a Yale graduate, of course, and he graduated magna cum laude w…”
▶ Operation Gladio-Vietnam Part 8 Phoenix Program @ 5:44
Nelson Brickham member_of
Phoenix Program book_quoted
“But I'm going to fly through this part. There's a guy in the CIA that's part of Phoenix and that Doug Valentine talks to. And his name is Nelson Brickham, B-R-I-C-K-H-A-M. And so he interviews him quite extensively for this book. And what w…”
▶ Operation Gladio-Vietnam Part 8 Phoenix Program @ 4:15
Nelson Brickham trained
Vietnam book_quoted
“kind of to circle information back to him. It says the special branch advisors should limit himself to his primary duties, which were training Vietnamese special branch case officers to penetrate the Viet Cong, giving them cash for informat…”
▶ Operation Gladio-Vietnam Part 8 Phoenix Program @ 24:42
Nelson Brickham founded
Phoenix Program book_quoted
“Brigham's notion of a systematic approach served for the conceptual basis for Phoenix. And although in Phoenix, the targets were people, not missile silos. And see, in order to understand this, I hope you guys can appreciate why I had to ta…”
▶ Operation Gladio-Vietnam Part 8 Phoenix Program @ 10:10
Nelson Brickham spied_on
Soviet Union book_quoted
“Inside the Soviet Union, these operations dealt with putting sensors and equipment in to be able to spy on the Soviet Union inside the Soviet Union. They put them all around Soviet Union military bases so they could watch what they were doi…”
▶ Operation Gladio-Vietnam Part 8 Phoenix Program @ 7:42
Nelson Brickham member_of
Iran book_quoted
“This is kind of the egg on your face and everything is not working and everything is totally dysfunctional. So you have to put that in context to understand where we're going with this. Brigham, on his way to Vietnam, was originally assigne…”
▶ Operation Gladio-Vietnam Part 8 Phoenix Program @ 11:33
Nelson Brickham member_of
China book_quoted
“In 64, he was sent to manage the Chinese-Soviet relations branch. And at the heart of that organization was creating false flag events in order to piss the Chinese off against the Soviet and vice versa. So that was kind of what he did there…”
▶ Operation Gladio-Vietnam Part 8 Phoenix Program @ 12:31
Nelson Brickham carried_out_attack
China book_quoted
“In 64, he was sent to manage the Chinese-Soviet relations branch. And at the heart of that organization was creating false flag events in order to piss the Chinese off against the Soviet and vice versa. So that was kind of what he did there…”
▶ Operation Gladio-Vietnam Part 8 Phoenix Program @ 12:31
Nelson Brickham appointed
Phoenix Program book_quoted
“And it says Brickham got assigned to be the chief of special branch field operations in the spring of 66 after this guy that he liked left. And him being installed in that job was basically the go button for laying the foundation for Phoeni…”
▶ Operation Gladio-Vietnam Part 8 Phoenix Program @ 18:24
Howard Stone recruited
Nelson Brickham host_asserted
“The military, the entire time they're over there thinking they're actually fighting communists, were fighting nationalists who would gladly give their blood for their country, as would all of us. Those are two very different enemies, milita…”
▶ Operation Gladio-Vietnam Part 8 Phoenix Program @ 1:04:40
Nelson Brickham recruited
William Westmoreland host_asserted
“The military, the entire time they're over there thinking they're actually fighting communists, were fighting nationalists who would gladly give their blood for their country, as would all of us. Those are two very different enemies, milita…”
▶ Operation Gladio-Vietnam Part 8 Phoenix Program @ 1:04:40
Nelson Brickham book_quoted
Viet Cong book_quoted
“Brigham viewed the Viet Cong as a criminal conspiracy, a mafia operating under the pretense of political ideology, coercing people through the selective use of terror. We've already established they're not generally the ones, not that they …”
▶ Operation Gladio-Vietnam Part 8 Phoenix Program @ 1:10:16
Nelson Brickham member_of
Inter-Services Intelligence book_quoted
“He was involved in an organization, a project called Caesar Project, which had to do with looking at potential Soviet leaders after Stalin's death. And as a result of him participating in Caesar Project, he was invited to basically work wit…”
▶ Operation Gladio-Vietnam Part 8 Phoenix Program @ 6:43
Nelson Brickham member_of
Phoenix Program book_quoted
“At least one CIA officer deeply involved in Phoenix was influenced by this guy. That would be Nelson Brickham, B-R-I-C-K-H-A-M, who is generally credited with creating the infrastructure of Phoenix. Reportedly, Brickham was a staunch believ…”
▶ The Colonel’s Corner-Strange Tales of the Parapolitical Part 14 Final @ 32:34
Nelson Brickham appointed
CIA book_quoted
“as like a CIA liaison. He traveled as a result of that all over the world. And in 1955, he transferred to an area that focused specifically on Soviet Russia inside of the CIA and their clandestine operations. In 1958, Brigham was appointed …”
▶ Operation Gladio-Vietnam Part 8 Phoenix Program @ 7:12
Nelson Brickham member_of
Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation Center book_quoted
“thought process into the United States. More importantly, many of the CIA officers who would play a crucial role in Phoenix had been influenced by these tactics. There was Evan Parker Jr. who oversaw the Intelligence Coordination and Exploi…”
▶ The Colonel’s Corner-Drugs Oil and War by Peter Dale Scott Part 1 @ 29:35
Mentions (45)
▶ 4:15
But I'm going to fly through this part. There's a guy in the CIA that's part of Phoenix and that Doug Valentine talks to. And his name is Nelson Brickham, B-R-I-C-K-H-A-M. And so he interviews him quite extensively for this book. And what w…
▶ 4:44
I'm going to give you a couple of quotes. He said during the interview, I've been called an organizational genius. That's not true. I'm just well read. Another quote, I feel that I, as well as a number of other people, never got the recogni…
▶ 5:12
we've seen in recent years are a reaction to the psychic trauma of the country following Vietnam, a reaction which, on a far more modest scale, is similar in character. And here's where it gets dangerous, to the frustration and bitterness o…
▶ 5:44
He also says, well, let me go a little bit about who he is, because it puts him into context. So he joined the CIA in the immediate aftermath of the creation of it in 1949. He's a Yale graduate, of course, and he graduated magna cum laude w…
▶ 6:14
And, of course, we know that we demolished the Czechoslovakia as a country. And he also was part of the Korean War and worked, quote unquote, special intelligence branch. And he also worked in an area of the CIA called current intelligence.…
▶ 6:43
He was involved in an organization, a project called Caesar Project, which had to do with looking at potential Soviet leaders after Stalin's death. And as a result of him participating in Caesar Project, he was invited to basically work wit…
▶ 7:12
as like a CIA liaison. He traveled as a result of that all over the world. And in 1955, he transferred to an area that focused specifically on Soviet Russia inside of the CIA and their clandestine operations. In 1958, Brigham was appointed …
▶ 7:42
Inside the Soviet Union, these operations dealt with putting sensors and equipment in to be able to spy on the Soviet Union inside the Soviet Union. They put them all around Soviet Union military bases so they could watch what they were doi…
▶ 8:10
He wrote a research paper on this. And it says, this is a quote from him. And so I was put in charge of a massive research project designed to develop collection targets against the Soviet missile program after they sent up Sputnik. Well, i…
▶ 8:41
approach to guiding espionage and other collection activities. In applying that target plot idea to the Soviet problem, it immediately occurred to me to magnify it as a systems analysis study so that we could go after the whole Soviet missi…
▶ 9:10
of whatever degree of reliability, and collect that information in terms of its geographical location. And from that effort, we would come up with targets, and they would naturally spring up. So, unquote. So, this systems approach is basica…
▶ 9:41
of pure evilness. And so Brigham also says, quote, for the first time, there was a complete view of everything known about Russian military and missile development systems. The British called this the best thing achieved by American researc…
▶ 10:10
Brigham's notion of a systematic approach served for the conceptual basis for Phoenix. And although in Phoenix, the targets were people, not missile silos. And see, in order to understand this, I hope you guys can appreciate why I had to ta…
▶ 11:33
This is kind of the egg on your face and everything is not working and everything is totally dysfunctional. So you have to put that in context to understand where we're going with this. Brigham, on his way to Vietnam, was originally assigne…
▶ 12:00
their intel and counterintelligence operations against the Soviets. Now, keep in mind, we had couped the Iran and got rid of Mosaddegh and installed the Shah back, right? So he's going in there. He would have served there with Schwarzkopf's…
▶ 12:31
In 64, he was sent to manage the Chinese-Soviet relations branch. And at the heart of that organization was creating false flag events in order to piss the Chinese off against the Soviet and vice versa. So that was kind of what he did there…
▶ 13:01
China and Russia. And it says the CIA case officers at Brigham's instruction used the unsuspecting Chinese agents to create mischief against the Russians and vice versa. So then he gets to Saigon in 1965 and…
▶ 13:28
He's just full of vim and vinegar. He's got all of these ideas. He's done all of this clandestine covert work. And he's anxious to get to work and fix all of the woes of Vietnam. So his boss there is a guy by the name of Tucker Googleman. I…
▶ 15:54
He would use the French as an arrogant thing because a lot of the Vietnamese spoke French because, of course, they'd been occupied by France for so long. And he basically used it to exclude people in the CIA that he didn't like in conversat…
▶ 16:24
he kind of got to know him on a more casual side. So normally when a station chief comes in, especially in an active war theater, they're going to tour the area and they will have one or two escort officers assigned to them. And so Brickham…
▶ 16:56
One of the things about the CIA that I've come to appreciate is when they go into a new job, a lot of them have worked together in other areas, in other countries. And so they have these informal cliques. And one of the guys that was there …
▶ 17:27
And so there was shenanigans played about who's going to get what job. Brigham is quoted as saying, there's a great division in the foreign service world between people who get out on the economy and try to eat native and find out what's go…
▶ 17:54
golden ghetto people. And they're more afraid to mix with the locals. And so there was some kind of rivalry between Hart accusing this Brigham guy as being one of those golden people when he was actually the exact opposite. So after they ki…
▶ 18:24
And it says Brickham got assigned to be the chief of special branch field operations in the spring of 66 after this guy that he liked left. And him being installed in that job was basically the go button for laying the foundation for Phoeni…
▶ 22:46
That's not a reserve. That's over taxation. Then that's the way it should be. Back to the story. All right. So and this is a foot stomper. Brigham himself in this interview compares the special branch activity that will house Phoenix with t…
▶ 38:57
That's what they were doing over there. The special branch then constructed sometimes elaborate, sometimes simple plans to bring in the informants in the sphere of the people that they had just terrorized. Anyway, another major program that…
▶ 41:01
It's like criminals recruiting criminals, using criminality to do it. Special branch case officers were used to handle penetrations into the Viet Cong network. And by 1967, Brigham told the author that the CIA had several hundred penetratio…
▶ 43:08
and was largely the work of a guy by the name of Sam Draculich, D-R-A-K-U-L-I-C-H. He's a senior special branch advisor for Third Corps in 1965. He had a lot of good ideas, but everybody around him described him as flaky.…
▶ 43:36
but I think anybody that does this stuff, quite frankly, is flaky. So he was just a little bit more flaky than normal. He was petrified of being in Vietnam. So he wouldn't live in the province that he was assigned to work in under Brigham's…
▶ 44:05
He drove back into Saigon and slept there in a hotel because he did not trust anybody anywhere. He was like totally paranoid about everything. Okay, next guy, Howard Rocky Stone. He came in to be the chief of foreign intelligence. And he wa…
▶ 53:04
Brickham said, we did claim in roles and mission that the police should have a major civilian role and be the spearhead of the effort because it was the police over the long haul in the terms of a victory that would have to own the program …
▶ 1:02:45
And it says it was one of the options discussed during the reorganization. And basically, it was going to be an integration of the counterterrorist and intel into an actionable paramilitary combined unit. Brigham says that he didn't want th…
▶ 1:03:13
mainly because I didn't think we could manage them properly. My foreign intel guys were in no way, in terms of experience, able to control them. Consequently, as of November 1966, the recycled counter-terrorists were called preventional rec…
▶ 1:04:40
The military, the entire time they're over there thinking they're actually fighting communists, were fighting nationalists who would gladly give their blood for their country, as would all of us. Those are two very different enemies, milita…
▶ 1:08:45
basically giving back to the Americans what they were doing to them. But in the word, quote unquote, infrastructure, Brigham said during our interview, it may be particularly applicable to insurgencies due to the conceptual view held by rur…
▶ 1:09:15
Brigham held the revisionist view that in an insurgency among such people, only 5% of the population is politically active, with 2.5% for insurgents and 2.5% against them. The rural population is not the driving force. Their attitude, he sa…
▶ 1:09:45
There is only a headless body. If you destroy the infrastructure, you destroy the insurgency. And that just shows you kind of the craziness of the way these people, they're trying to behead something that doesn't exist. There was never a co…
▶ 1:10:16
Brigham viewed the Viet Cong as a criminal conspiracy, a mafia operating under the pretense of political ideology, coercing people through the selective use of terror. We've already established they're not generally the ones, not that they …
▶ 1:11:16
The presence of such marginal characters, he contends, made the attack on the Viet Cong a difficult task. Also, attack is significant in that it defines the attack against the Viet Cong in terms of the special branch mission, their informan…
▶ 1:11:45
ambushes by police and regional forces and also their special forces elements. The going in and kind of hunting and pecking around to try to find somebody on their list that they had gotten from their informants that they paid. Even though …
▶ 1:12:15
writing about the attack definition, they quote, a final and not insignificant tool are direct military operations, not police. For example, 175 millimeter artillery fire was directed on the reported site of a combined conference of Viet Co…
▶ 1:12:46
Unquote. On the basis of an after action report, Brigham writes, quote, we are confident that the damage to the infrastructure in terms of key personnel killed is significant. Unquote. The attack plan also mentioned a special task force org…
▶ 32:34
At least one CIA officer deeply involved in Phoenix was influenced by this guy. That would be Nelson Brickham, B-R-I-C-K-H-A-M, who is generally credited with creating the infrastructure of Phoenix. Reportedly, Brickham was a staunch believ…
▶ 33:03
of counterinsurgency. Both Galula and Phoenix would prove to be enormously influential on how U.S. operated in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2006, the U.S. Army published a new counterinsurgency field manual, FM 3-24. One of its authors was none…
▶ 32:34
At least one CIA officer deeply involved in Phoenix was influenced by this guy. That would be Nelson Brickham, B-R-I-C-K-H-A-M, who is generally credited with creating the infrastructure of Phoenix. Reportedly, Brickham was a staunch believ…