A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA - Softcover

Kurlantzick, Joshua

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1451667884 ISBN 13: 9781451667882

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2018

Synopsis

The untold story of how America’s secret war in Laos in the 1960s transformed the CIA from a loose collection of spies into a military operation and a key player in American foreign policy.

January, 1961: Laos, a tiny nation few Americans have heard of, is at risk of falling to communism and triggering a domino effect throughout Southeast Asia. This is what President Eisenhower believed when he approved the CIA’s Operation Momentum, creating an army of ethnic Hmong to fight communist forces there. Largely hidden from the American public—and most of Congress—Momentum became the largest CIA paramilitary operation in the history of the United States. The brutal war lasted more than a decade, left the ground littered with thousands of unexploded bombs, and changed the nature of the CIA forever.

With “revelatory reporting” and “lucid prose” (The Economist), Kurlantzick provides the definitive account of the Laos war, focusing on the four key people who led the operation: the CIA operative whose idea it was, the Hmong general who led the proxy army in the field, the paramilitary specialist who trained the Hmong forces, and the State Department careerist who took control over the war as it grew.

Using recently declassified records and extensive interviews, Kurlantzick shows for the first time how the CIA’s clandestine adventures in one small, Southeast Asian country became the template for how the United States has conducted war ever since—all the way to today’s war on terrorism.

About this title

About the Author

Joshua Kurlantzick is a senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has been a correspondent in Southeast Asia for The Economist, a columnist for Time, the foreign editor of the New Republic, a senior correspondent for the American Prospect, and a contributing writer for Mother Jones. He has written about Asia for publications ranging from Rolling Stone to The New York Times Magazine. He is the winner of the Luce Scholarship and was selected as a finalist for the Osborn Elliot prize, both for journalism in Asia. He is the author of multiple books on Asia, including A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA. For more information on Kurlantzick, visit CFR.org.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A Great Place to Have a War Chapter 1

Baci

BILL LAIR HELD OUT HIS lanky arms, the sleeves of his button-down shirt rolled up to the shoulder. Smoke wafted through the one-room building with mud floors and walls made of corrugated metal and thatch. Besides an open stove in the back of the room and a simple wood table in the middle, there was little other furniture in the building. Lair had been given a low wooden bench to sit on, and he struggled to fold his legs under it. Most of the other people inside the building stood or squatted on the muddy ground.

Lair was surrounded by men and women from the Hmong hill tribe, one of the largest ethnic minority groups in the Southeast Asian nation of Laos, the landlocked country wedged, like a fishhook, among Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, China, and Vietnam. They had come for the baci, the Thai and Laotian ceremony in which people are symbolically bound through the tying of strings around each other’s wrists and forearms. The ceremony had been going on since the late afternoon, and Lair already had at least twenty white strings tied around his arms. His arms would be covered in strings by night. There seemed to be no end to the mass of people crowding through the door of the house and waiting to see the American with the bristly buzz cut and the thick Clark Kent glasses who spoke fluent Lao with a Texas accent. Behind the Texan, women loaded up simple metal plates with pig parts, sticky rice, and fruit, and handed them to Lair, nodding at him to eat. The Hmong women mostly waited to eat until men were finished. Three shamans chanted just behind Lair. Many Hmong believed that when they chanted, the shamans literally entered another world. The men writhed and sang and spat as if possessed.

Vang Pao, a military officer in the anti-communist forces and the leader of this group of Hmong, paced among Lair, the doorway, and the shamans, directing the event. Lair could not see all the people outside the hut, but he estimated that at least five hundred Hmong had come to the baci. Vang Pao’s battlefield successes had helped him ascend from a modest background—his family had not been clan leaders—to become one of the most powerful Hmong men on the anti-communist side. He would soon be the most powerful Hmong leader in Laos.1

Vang Pao claimed to be leading an army of nearly five thousand irregulars against the Vietnamese and Laotian communists. But Lair saw not only young men who might be fighting types but also younger women, children, and older Hmong. Some of the older Hmong men and women had come to the baci dressed in what Lair believed was their finest attire: baggy black trousers, embroidered black vests, and strings of silver ornaments.

It was the winter of 1961. Lair had already lived in Southeast Asia for more than a decade, and he had attended baci ceremonies before. Groups throughout Southeast Asia had bacis all the time. Bacis were held, and strings tied, when new homes were built, when relatives relocated, when babies were born, when men and women were married off, when visitors arrived from far away. A village of Hmong might hold fifteen or twenty baci ceremonies in one month, if many auspicious events occurred at one time.

But this was not a normal baci. Bill Lair had spent his decade in Southeast Asia as a clandestine operative for the Central Intelligence Agency, and he had become known within the agency for his knowledge of the region, his language skills, and his extensive contacts. Behind his shy, aw-shucks demeanor, his plain shirts and plain face, lurked a fierce man who had fought through France and Belgium with an armored division in the Second World War and had devoted his whole life to the CIA. Lair had flown up to the central highlands of Laos, where the Hmong lived on peaks and high mountain plateaus, not just to have strings tied around his wrists—though he understood that ceremony mattered in a place where there was no written language, and oral agreements were the rule. He had flown up, his pilot twisting around high peaks and limestone cliffs and dense forests, to inaugurate a bold plan that the agency would call Operation Momentum.2

Operation Momentum was a plan to arm and train the Hmong under Vang Pao to fight in the growing civil war in Laos, which pitted communist insurgents called the Pathet Lao, backed by North Vietnam, against Laos’s government and its non-communist allies such as Vang Pao and his men. The war in Laos had raged on and off almost from the time Japan surrendered in World War II in 1945, leaving in Southeast Asia former French colonies where local leaders battled to determine the future. France’s loss to the Viet Minh, the Vietnamese independence forces, in 1954 had left Vietnam divided, with the Viet Minh’s leaders in control in the north, and a vacuum of power in Laos. (The Viet Minh was led by communists, but the coalition fighting France for independence also included some non-communist nationalists.) Laos’s weak central government had maintained control of only parts of the country. The civil war in Laos, which had been going on for nearly a decade, had flared up intensely. Conservative and communist Laotian forces now struggled to control Laos, as well as other countries in the region.

And in Washington, Laos increasingly appeared, at least to American officials, to be part of a broader effort by international communist forces to dominate Asia—and the world. It did not seem to matter to American leaders that Laos was so small it had only one major city, Vientiane—the capital, which was basically a muddy village—or that most people in Laos lived on subsistence farming and had little idea of the differences between communism, democracy, and other political systems.

As a French colony, Laos had mostly been ignored by Paris. But President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his staff, attuned to the domino theory of one country after the next falling to communism, saw Laos as a bulwark—a nation where the United States could make a stand to prevent communism from spreading west out of China and North Vietnam into Thailand and India and beyond. A pro-Western Laos would place a state between Vietnam and Thailand, a critical US partner, and would make it easier for the United States to support non-communist forces in Vietnam. In one of the most famous moments of his presidency, at a press conference in April 1954, Eisenhower had publicly enunciated this domino principle as a reason for supporting France’s continued struggle against independence forces in Vietnam.

“You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly,” Eisenhower said. “So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences” if Indochinese countries fell to communism.3 Even after the French loss in Indochina, the Eisenhower administration had made clear the importance of Indochina to US security; a paper issued by the National Security Council in December 1954 stated that it was the United States’ objective to “defeat Communist subversion and influence” in Indochina.4 Over the course of the 1950s, with Vietnam divided and half controlled by a communist party, Eisenhower had come to see Laos as another critical domino. He personally followed reports about Laos day by day during the final year of his presidency.5 He warned his successor, John F. Kennedy, that Laos was the most pressing foreign policy issue in the world. In fact, the day before Kennedy’s inauguration, Eisenhower organized a foreign policy briefing for the president elect, with issues to be addressed in what Eisenhower considered their order of importance to American security. Laos came first—and only after Laos was discussed was the president elect briefed on the looming US-Soviet standoff in Berlin, on Cuba, and on the global strategic nuclear arms race.6

Agency headquarters had approved Lair’s plan to train and arm the Hmong, which he had outlined in an eighteen-page cable, almost instantly upon receiving it in the winter of 1960–61. The White House took a personal interest in the plan for the operation. After the CIA’s Far East division and its director signed off on Lair’s idea, the plan was approved by President Eisenhower’s staff, on one of Eisenhower’s last days in office in January 1961. It helped that Lair had already run a successful CIA training program for Thai commandos in the 1950s. Some of those Thais would join him in running Operation Momentum, and in fighting Laos’s civil war; Bangkok would eventually send thousands of its men to fight in Laos. The CIA leadership had signed off on starting with a training program for a thousand Hmong men and then expanding from there.7 The operation was budgeted at around $5 million US, but by 1962, it would grow to over $11 million. That was only the start for an undertaking that would command $500 million annually by the end of the decade, with Vang Pao controlling a force of over thirty thousand soldiers.8 A budget of $500 million in 1970 dollars was equivalent to $3.1 billion in 2016 dollars, for an operation in a country that today has less outward trade with the rest of the world than Luxembourg does.

Vang Pao had spent his entire adult life fighting: fighting the Japanese, fighting with the French against the Viet Minh, and now fighting with the government against the Pathet Lao and its backers in Hanoi. Like many of the Hmong, he was intensely proud of the group’s freedom. Many Hmong had originally migrated south from China into Southeast Asia, and they traditionally migrated through the mountains, hunting and practicing swidden, or slash and burn, agriculture, and governing their affairs through a kind of communal consensus building. The group repeatedly fought any powers, including the French at first, who tried to control its society. Historian Mai Na M. Lee, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, notes that the Hmong fought for centuries—against the Chinese, the French, and others—to maintain their independence and try to win a state for their people. Although they never gained their own state, they forced these powers to give them a measure of autonomy.9 Like many Hmong, Vang Pao resented any outside control of the hill tribe’s affairs and feared that a government managed by Vietnamese communists would turn Laos into a much more centralized state, starving the Hmong of their freedoms.

Vang Pao had developed a personal animus toward the Vietnamese as well. The long French Indochina War had lasted from 1946 to 1954, as France tried desperately to hold on to its Indochinese colonies. During that war, and then during Laos’s on-and-off civil war, Vang Pao had watched many of his friends, aides, and allies be killed by the Vietnamese and their allies. The fighting in the French Indochina War was fierce; many of the French soldiers came from the Foreign Legion, a force of professional soldiers drawn from all over the globe that was known for its willingness to take enormous casualties. The Viet Minh, meanwhile, were brutal not only toward captured enemy soldiers but also toward civilians. Fighting with the French and then with Laotian anti-communist forces, Vang Pao himself had repeatedly shot, bombed, and stabbed to death Vietnamese troops in Laos.

The Hmong leader had organized the baci to inaugurate Momentum and introduce Lair to clan leaders in the hill tribe. He roamed the muddy house, encouraging everyone to eat and drink more, and talking, rapid-fire, in Lao, in Hmong, and in the French he had learned from French officers. Vang Pao was moving constantly—gesturing, introducing Lair to clan leaders who had come for the baci, telling stories of the French Indochina War, commanding some of his men to find Lair more drinks. He commanded his wives—like many powerful Hmong men, he had multiple wives—to bring food to guests who were not eating at that minute. (Vang Pao had married women from different Hmong clans to unite several clans behind him.) As a musician played the thin Hmong bamboo mouth pipe and stomped his feet on the mud floor, Vang Pao himself tied the final string around Lair’s wrist, binding him metaphorically to the tribe. Vang Pao led Lair toward the shamans, who waved pungent incense candles around their heads and blessed the nascent cooperation.10 Locally brewed rice alcohol flowed liberally. Vang Pao’s men handed balls of sticky rice to Lair, to make sure that the Texan had something in his stomach to absorb all the liquor.

Circles of Hmong men stood together, dancing the slow, hypnotic lamvong, a Laotian folk dance in which people slowly twist their wrists from side to side while swaying together to mournful, minor-key tunes that sound almost like American country and western ballads. Vang Pao laughed and drank and danced the lamvong. But during pauses, he also told other Hmong at the baci, “We will kill all the Vietnamese who come near. Now we can kill many more.”

During a private meeting between Lair and Vang Pao, just before the baci, the two men had gone over the details of the operation: how the Hmong would receive arms and supplies in airdrops; how Vang Pao could help identify places to set up simple airstrips in mountain valleys; how the CIA might handle training programs for capable Hmong soldiers. But Vang Pao also made a request. Here the Hmong leader’s account of the meeting diverges from Lair’s. “I asked Bill Lair to promise me that America would not abandon us [the Hmong] no matter what happened,” Vang Pao said.11 Some Hmong sources claim further that, as the two men decided to start the operation, Lair presented Vang Pao and the Hmong with a written agreement from the American government pledging a kind of alliance, starting with a promise that the United States would soon ship the Hmong five hundred firearms.12 Several of Vang Pao’s aides, who were at the meeting with the Hmong leader, say that Lair told them, “If the Hmong people lose, we [the United States] will find a new place where we can help the Hmong people.”13 American government sources do not corroborate any of these claims, and Lair did not remember making these statements.14

Later, years after the end of the Laos war, Vang Pao would tell anyone who asked him about Laos that, no matter what was said when he agreed to the operation, no matter whether the two sides had made any written agreement, the United States had made a lasting commitment. After all, the US government, over time, would push the Hmong to broaden their battle beyond simply protecting Hmong villages and to help America’s interests in Vietnam. That war did not involve the Hmong directly; yet Vang Pao’s men played a major role by tying down and killing not only the small groups of Pathet Lao communists but also regular North Vietnamese troops who might otherwise have been killing Americans.15

And the United States would unleash a bombing campaign on Laos unlike any other in modern history, bigger even than the bombings of Japan and Germany in the Second World War. This campaign would become central to the Laos operation, though the American bombing sorties, supposedly designed to weaken the North Vietnamese and cut their supply lines through Laos and into South Vietnam, would kill more Laotians than...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1451667884
• ISBN 13: 9781451667882
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336