Shadow Warrior (38 page)

The Geneva Accords of July 1954, which recognized Viet Minh control of North Vietnam, also provided for a neutralized Laos under a regime to be safeguarded by the International Control Commission. The United States did not sign the accords but promised not to use force to alter them. The Pathet Lao had refused to lay down its arms and entrenched itself in the north. Then, in November 1957, the newly named prime minister,
Souvanna Phouma, reached a short-lived agreement with the Pathet Lao.
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Washington did not approve of Souvanna Phouma's collaboration with the communists—dalliances with the devil never turned out well, John Foster Dulles believed. In 1959 General Phoumi Novasan proposed to the CIA that he and the Laotian military “engineer” the next round of parliamentary elections to produce an anticommunist majority. This would be followed by “directed democracy,” a system that observed constitutional, parliamentary forms but excluded “masses too ignorant for normal democracy.”
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The National Assembly's mandate duly ran out in December 1959, and King Sri Savang Vatthana authorized the military to supervise the ensuing elections. The PL was virtually shut out of the new assembly, and General Phoumi Novasan assumed the post of minister of defense in Souvanna Phouma's new government.

On August 9, 1960, the twenty-six-year-old commander of the elite 2nd Parachute Battalion, Captain Kong Le, staged a mutiny that quickly blossomed into a full-fledged coup. Kong Le was an able, patriotic man dismayed by a corrupt government, an entrenched privileged class, the heavy US hand in Laos, and the interminable internecine warfare between the Pathet Lao and the Royal Laotian Government (RLG). Souvanna Phouma and most of his ministers fled Vientiane for Bangkok, Thailand, but Phoumi Novasan took up residence at Savannakhet, in the Laotian panhandle, where he appealed to the Americans for help in driving the insurgents out of the capital. The embassy, including its CIA station, demurred; Kong Le had evidenced no pro-communist leanings. At this point the king accepted the coup and called on Souvanna Phouma to return to Vientiane and set up a new government that would include communists, neutralists, and rightists.

During the next few weeks, the State Department became convinced that under a government headed by Souvanna Phouma, and including the PL and Kong Le, Laos would soon go communist. Undersecretary of State Douglas Dillon now described the paratroop commander as “a Castro communist-type individual.” But Washington was unwilling to unleash Phoumi Novasan for fear of bringing North Vietnam into the conflict on one side and South Vietnam and Thailand in on the other. Washington did agree to continue paying and supplying troops loyal to Phoumi Novasan, however. At this point Souvanna Phouma fled to Cambodia. Kong
Le's troops still held Vientiane, but Phoumi Novasan's forces reached the outskirts of the city on December 13. The insurgents chose to abandon the city, retreating to the north. Thereupon, Phoumi Novasan, Laos's self-appointed dictator, occupied the capital.
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On December 21, the crew of an Air America Beechcraft photographed a twin-engine Soviet supply aircraft dropping supplies to Kong Le's columns. On New Year's Day 1961, Kong Le's soldiers, allied with Pathet Lao forces, drove the unprepared Royal Laotian defenders from the strategically and economically vital Plain of Jars. Soviet supply aircraft subsequently began landing at the military airfield that had been built there by the French. The Laotian imbroglio left the Eisenhower administration few options. The US embassy continued to report that the RLG could not be counted on. The Lao, he informed Foggy Bottom, “suffered from disorganization and lack of common purpose within the government, the Army, and the society generally.” On January 3, at a meeting with his foreign policy advisers, Eisenhower declared that “if the communists establish a strong position in Laos, the West is finished in the whole southeast Asian area.” As a stopgap measure, the 303 Committee authorized the CIA to organize and arm the indigenous peoples of the north, who, it was believed, wanted to preserve their independence and way of life.
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Except for concentrations of Lao on the Plain of Jars and in some valleys, northeastern Laos was inhabited by tribes driven up from the lowlands over the centuries by more numerous and better-organized rivals. As of 1961 they inhabited a succession of mountain ranges (the highest peak rising to 10,000 feet).The largest and most cohesive was the Hmong. Animists without a written language, they practiced slash-and-burn agriculture on the high ridges and plateaus of the mountains overlooking the Plain of Jars. The Hmong were originally Chinese—hill people from Yunan—who, like the ethnic Vietnamese, had been pushed south by the Han Dynasty. They had borrowed the Lao language, but had otherwise refused to assimilate. In Xieng Khouang Province, they created a thriving economy based on silver mining and cattle-raising. The Hmong were content to live and work at higher altitudes in part because they did not possess the lowlanders' inherited immunity to the bite of the anopheles mosquito, which can carry a deadly strain of malaria. Dutch missionaries introduced the Hmong to steel knives and flintlock muskets, and every village boasted a family of metalworkers who hammered scrap into weapons and jewelry. Most important,
as far as the CIA was concerned, the Hmong were fierce warriors who would fight to the death to protect their families and way of life. In 1959 and 1960, the US Mission in Vientiane delivered 2,000 light weapons to the tribespeople to help them protect their villages from the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese Army. True to form, the CIA looked for a Laotian Magsaysay, a charismatic but sensitive leader who could unify and mobilize the Hmong.
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The leading candidate was the newly promoted commander of the Royal Laotian Army contingent in Xieng Khouang Province, a young Hmong major named Vang Pao. Life in the Laotian Army was not demanding, and Vang Pao was left free to politic among the Hmong communities of northern Laos. A fiery orator and ardent Hmong nationalist, he soon attracted a wide following. During the coups and countercoups of the 1950s, Vang Pao had sided with Phoumi Novasan and the rightists, not out of ideology, but because the North Vietnamese and their Pathet Lao clients were his people's mortal enemies. When Kong Le revolted, fled to the Plain of Jars, and allied with the Pathet Lao, Vang Pao, still in command of a Forces Armées Royales battalion, had his tribesmen retreat into the heavily forested mountains to bide their time. “This is the man we have been looking for,” the CIA team in Vientiane concluded.
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By this point, Stuart Methven, a paramilitary expert attached to the Saigon station, was the CIA's point man for dealing with Laos's version of the Montagnards. He epitomized the OSS-CIA operative—a cultivated man who jumped out of airplanes and spoke several languages. “After he moved to Saigon,”journalist Zalin Grant recalled, “he lived in a large villa with a duck-eating boa constrictor as a pet. Many would come to see him as a smoother version of Lou Conein.”
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Methven arranged for a rendezvous with Vang Pao for himself and his deputy, Bill Lair, at the Laotian's bivouac site. Lair was a fifth-generation Texan who had been recruited out of Texas A&M by the CIA. His first assignment in 1951 was Thailand, where the Agency was trying to build up guerrilla forces to contain China's southern flank, should fighting from the Korean War spread. Following the 1953 armistice, Lair convinced his superiors in Washington, along with the Thai government, to allow him to organize an elite paramilitary group named the Police Aerial Resupply Unit, or PARU for short. The Thais commissioned him a major in the Thai Army, and the Agency picked a wife for him—the sister of the Thai foreign
minister at the time. She and Lair would remain wedded for twenty-five years. Methven and Gordon Jorgenson, the CIA station chief in Vientiane, decided that Lair and his PARU would be perfect for training a Hmong guerrilla force commanded by Vang Pao.
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Flying in on an H-34 helicopter operated by Bird & Sons Airlines—another CIA front—Lair and Methven met with Vang Pao at Muong Om on a bank high above the River Sane. Lair was immediately struck by the Hmong chieftain's appearance and presence. Five foot five, but sturdily built, with a rounded face; even, white teeth; and narrow, intense eyes, Vang Pao exuded charisma—and ruthlessness.
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He and his people could either flee to the west or stay and fight, he told the Americans; if the Hmong chose to stay, Methven said, the Agency would equip and feed them. The Hmong leader nodded and declared that he could recruit ten thousand fighters; adequately armed and trained, they would be able to hold the mountains in most of Xieng Khouang and even Sam Neua Province, harassing enemy traffic along the mountain roads and valleys.

Vang Pao confided in Methven about his people's fear of being abandoned by the Americans as they had been by the French in 1954. Would the United States stay the course, once it began supplying and arming the Hmong, or was there a risk that at some point it would leave him and his people to the tender mercies of the North Vietnamese? Methven assured the Hmong chieftain that an American commitment would be honored as long as his people were threatened by the communists. The CIA men voiced their own concerns. What were the Hmong's long-range plans, Lair asked? Did his people ultimately seek independence? Vang Pao acknowledged a history of mistrust between the Hmong and the ethnic Lao, but he observed that the Lao had not, like the Chinese and the North Vietnamese, tried to forcibly assimilate the Hmong. The National Assembly had a Hmong member, Touby Lyfoung; his people had no separatist aspirations, Vang Pao declared.
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The Hmong were fine marksmen with their homemade flintlock rifles, and a few had been trained as militia by the French, but they would have to master new weapons and at least the basics of guerrilla tactics. Vang Pao proposed to bring the first three hundred volunteers to Ban Pa Dong, a tiny Hmong hamlet about 8 miles south of the Plain of Jars; the training would take place under the very noses of the enemy.
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Ban Pa Dong, 4,500 feet above sea level, typified the beautiful and dangerous terrain in which
the CIA operatives and their Hmong soldiers were to operate. With neighboring peaks hidden behind towers of cumulus clouds, the village stood in crystalline air on a ridgeline that sloped, first gradually and then precipitously, until it disappeared in the stratus clouds that concealed the valley below. During the rainy season, thunderstorms swept the valleys, and those perched in their mountain villages could observe the lightning and torrential rains from above. The thin air would make it difficult for the H-34 transport and resupply helicopters to take off and land. But at this point, Washington saw the Hmong irregulars as a temporary expedient, a stopgap force that would hold off the neutralists and Pathet Lao until the FAR could get its act together.

On February 8, 1961, President Kennedy authorized the arming and training of up to five thousand Hmong tribesmen. Weapons were prepackaged on wooden pallets and flown in to Ban Pa Dong from a CIA warehouse on Okinawa. Unfortunately, Phoumi Novasan's army—its commander more a petty warlord than an authentic leader—reverted to its customary indolence following the capture of Vientiane. Meanwhile, Prince Souvanna Phouma bided his time in Phnom Penh, while the Soviets and North Vietnamese continued their air drops to the Kong Le–Pathet Lao forces ensconced on the Plain of Jars. The CIA personnel in Laos were well aware that the fortunes of war had not placed them and their country on the side of the angels. Many anticommunist Lao regarded Phoumi Novasan as a “crook.” Kong Le, in the CIA's own judgment, was a “highly competent professional soldier,” an essentially apolitical “born leader” whose motivation, when he launched the August 1960 coup, was hostility toward the admittedly “corrupt bureaucracy” of his own government.
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Methven and Lair were in constant touch with Colby (then still Saigon station chief) and their other CIA colleagues in Saigon. Both men would look upon Colby's rapidly evolving Civilian Irregular Defense Group operation among the Montagnards as something of a model. The Americans wanted to run Operation Momentum, as the Laotian project was code-named, through the Hmong leadership structure. They were determined to keep the number of white westerners to an absolute minimum; in this regard, the Thai trainers of PARU were a blessing. Operation Momentum's first field operative was Anthony Alexander Poshepny, or Tony Poe, as he called himself. Poe was a balding paramilitary specialist who carried all of his belongings in a duffel bag. He spent his spare time devising homemade
explosive devices. Poe had run behind-the-lines operations in Korea and subsequently trained Tibetan Khampa tribesmen for a projected rebellion against the mainland Chinese. Poe's assignment in Laos was to open up dirt airstrips north and northeast of the Plain of Jars. Moving from site to site, recruiting Hmong soldier-laborers as he went, he would drink himself into a stupor every night and then rise at 5
A.M
. to train local militia and supervise construction. As he had done in Korea, Tony Poe had his Hmong patrols prove their victories by turning in the enemy's ears threaded on a lanyard. Poe would eventually become the model for Colonel Kurtz in the film
Apocalypse Now
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Kong Le's soldiers rarely attacked the Hmong, but the Pathet Lao immediately began trying to encircle Ban Pa Dong. Vang Pao's irregulars not only repulsed them but began conducting successful night ambushes up to the very edge of the Plain of Jars situated but two ridgelines away. The Hmong proved to be natural guerrilla warriors. Their strategy was to control the high ground, and they did by means of speed and endurance. Living off the land and carrying heavy loads of weapons and ammunition, they would descend to strike the enemy and then withdraw to higher elevations where their foe found it very difficult to follow. By mid-April, operating out of their high-elevation bases, Vang Pao's soldiers had blocked all the exit routes from the Plain of Jars. The next step was to take the offensive.
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