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From the document
Receiving Kennedy in the Cabinet Room on 19 January 1961, Eisenhower and his advisers had more to say about the tiny country’s strategic importance than about specific means of keeping the “cork in the bottle,” as they put it, to prevent communist dominion over most of the Far East.
CIA’s performance there was certainly not without flaws, but the story of the “secret war” in Laos reveals an admirable record of flexible, economical management and sound tactical judgment.
The arming of the first 300 Hmong volunteers began on 24 January 1961 when three C-46 cargo planes crossed the Mekong into Laos carrying weapons and equipment.
On 8 February, President Kennedy authorized CIA to arm as many Hmong irregulars as Vang Pao could recruit, though Headquarters put a cap of 5,000 in its message advising the field.
Excerpts are passages from a US government work (public domain), quoted exactly as they read in the scan, and checked against the full text on every rebuild.
Thomas L. Ahern, Jr. was not a detached historian of the war in Laos. A clandestine service officer who had served in both South Vietnam and Laos, he later joined the CIA History Staff and wrote six classified histories of the Agency in Indochina; this one, finished in 2006, is the longest1,2. His own footnotes cite "author's recollection" for the battle of Vientiane in December 1960 and note that he was the second CIA officer at the Hmong base of San Tiau in 19611. The six volumes were declassified in 2009 in answer to a Freedom of Information Act request by John Prados of the National Security Archive; the release stamp on this one is dated 19 February 20091,2.
What these chapters cover
The pages served here are the first 99 of 598, less the cover and two privately credited photographs: maps, the introduction, a prologue and four chapters that take the story from the 1954 Geneva Accords to the cease-fire of May 19611.
The introduction opens with Eisenhower briefing Kennedy on 19 January 1961 about Laos as the "cork in the bottle," and sets out Ahern's thesis: that the Agency's war in Laos was a lost cause run with economy and sound judgment, and that it was for nearly all who took part "the adventure of their professional lives"1. Chapter One describes the late 1950s, when the CIA backed the young anticommunist officers of the Committee for the Defense of the National Interest, clashed with Ambassador Smith, and saw the 1960 election rigged on behalf of Phoumi Nosavan's side, a fraud Allen Dulles was inclined to treat as a prank1. On 9 August 1960 Captain Kong Le's parachute battalion seized Vientiane; Chapter Two follows Washington's swing behind Phoumi, the shelling of the capital in mid-December, and the first meetings in January 1961 between the CIA's Bill Lair and Vang Pao, then a major and the highest-ranking Hmong officer in the army1,4.
Chapter Three, "Iron Age Guerrillas," is the core. Weapons for the first 300 volunteers were dropped at Pa Dong on 24 January 1961; on 8 February Kennedy authorized the CIA to arm as many Hmong as Vang Pao could recruit, with a working cap of 5,0001. Ahern describes Lair's rule that Hmong leaders must command Hmong fighters, the radio network, the Helio-Courier airstrips, and the killing of several Hmong and members of an advisory team in their sleep at one outpost, blamed on Pathet Lao infiltrators or turncoat Lao Theung, and Vang Pao's reprisal: he burned nine Lao Theung villages1. Chapter Four turns to the cease-fire offered on 1 May 1961, after the Bay of Pigs had ended talk of open US intervention1,3.
How to read it
This is an agency history written by a participant, from CIA cables and from interviews and notes supplied by Lair between 1996 and 20001. It is sympathetic to the field officers and sharp about the Royal Lao Army and about Washington's shifting instructions. Redaction is heavy: the names of most CIA officers, many footnotes, and some whole passages and photographs are blacked out, though officers such as Lair, Stuart Methven and Pat Landry are named1. Prados judged the series the broadest account of CIA operations in Indochina but thin on intelligence analysis and relations with the military; the Laos volume's appendix on the narcotics trade lies outside these pages2. For the later war, under William Colby and Richard Helms, see the operation page and the full release1.
Sources
- CIA Thomas L. Ahern, Jr., Undercover Armies: CIA and Surrogate Warfare in Laos, 1961–1973 (CIA History Staff, 2006), as released in 2009 (archived copy of the CIA FOIA site PDF), Central Intelligence Agency, Center for the Study of Intelligence (Wayback Machine capture, April 2009) (2006).
- National Security Archive The CIA's Vietnam Histories (Electronic Briefing Book No. 284, by John Prados), National Security Archive (2009-08-26).
- Wikipedia Laotian Civil War, Wikipedia.
- Wikipedia Vang Pao, Wikipedia.