Shadow Warrior (39 page)

The Americans found life in Ban Pa Dong beyond exotic. The village was an old opium-trading base with a grass landing strip and a few wooden buildings. The Hmong fighters were inevitably accompanied by their wives and children; as a result, scores of thatched huts sprang up virtually overnight. Vang Pao hosted a dinner every evening for thirty to thirty-five tribal leaders, visiting Americans, and Thai. His newest wife, a seventeen-year-old beauty from the Moua clan, nicknamed “Field Wife” by Lair and Methven, cooked daily meals for the guests. One evening, the visiting CIA men—they were under strict orders not to get captured or killed in combat—were awakened by volleys of gunfire. They ran out of their tents to find Hmong—men, women, and children—shooting at the moon, which was then being eclipsed. “What's happening?” Lair shouted to a nearby woman. “The frog is eating the moon! The frog is eating the moon!” she cried.
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As of 1961, the communists and neutralists still controlled the all-important Plain of Jars; besides being relatively populous and agriculturally
productive, it served as the nexus for the road system of northern Laos. Nevertheless, the Kennedy administration on March 23 endorsed the British proposal for a cease-fire and the reconvening of the 1954 Geneva Conference. The object of the exercise was to establish a stable, neutralist government in Laos.

As the date for the conclave approached, hardliners within the Kennedy administration insisted that, at the very least, the United States must assist the FAR and Vang Pao's forces in taking the Plain of Jars. Admiral Arleigh Burke, chief of naval operations, declared that unless the United States was prepared to intervene militarily in Laos, all of Southeast Asia would be lost. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara seconded him: it was essential that Laos not become another link in the “present Soviet chain of successes.” Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs Averell Harriman, who had been placed in charge of the American delegation to the Geneva Conference scheduled for mid-May, vigorously dissented; pressed, the JCS admitted that successful intervention in the land of the “Million Elephants and White Parasol” might require sixty thousand troops. When, on May 1, Kong Le and the Pathet Lao suddenly proposed a cease-fire, the Kennedy administration dropped any immediate plans for a US military intervention.
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The cease-fire, as it turned out, was honored more in the breach than the observance. The first week in June 1961, as Kennedy was having his famous encounter with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, elements of the Pathet Lao overran Vang Pao's base at Ban Pa Dong. The Hmong called for a new infusion of American aid, including air support, to retake Pa Dong, but Washington demurred. Frustrated, Vang Pao established a new headquarters at Long Tieng, some 12 miles to the west.
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Meanwhile, in the southern Laotian panhandle, which bordered the northern part of South Vietnam, Hanoi's special engineering battalion, Group 559, had started improving the network of jungle trails that came to be known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The increasingly isolated and oppressive regime of Ngo Dinh Diem was losing control of the South Vietnamese countryside, which made it even easier for the communists to dominate the border with Laos. The CIA proposed organizing a force of a thousand Hmong guerrillas to gather intelligence and harass Group 559, but from Geneva, Harriman blocked the plan. The Soviets had promised him that they would “keep communist forces in line in Laos” and end the infiltration
through Laos into South Vietnam. In return, the United States would have to comply, “spirit and letter,” with the pact that was being hammered out.
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In July 1962, the Geneva conferees finally signed a comprehensive agreement regarding Laos—a “good bad deal,” as Harriman subsequently described it to President Kennedy. Prince Souvanna Phouma would head a coalition government that included neutralists (Kong Le), Pathet Lao, and Royal Laotian Government representatives. All foreign military personnel—US, Soviet, and North Vietnamese—were to leave the country. A revived International Control Commission (ICC) would police the arrangement. At this point, there were approximately nine thousand North Vietnamese troops in Laos; Vang Pao had eleven thousand tribesmen under arms.
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There was a schizophrenic quality to American policy toward Laos. Harriman and his aide, and subsequent ambassador to Laos, William Sullivan, were absolutely committed to living up to the letter of the Geneva Accords. They would, until presented with irrefutable proof, deny the continued presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos. The CIA, with the approval of the National Security Council, would continue to supply and advise the Hmong guerrilla force.

In the wake of the Geneva settlement, Vang Pao and his tribal leaders needed reassuring. Lair and Methven helicoptered into Long Tieng for a powwow. Joining the communists in a coalition “was like going to bed with a tiger,” one of Vang Pao's lieutenants observed. “Everyone would have to stay awake all night.” The Hmong leader predicted that any government headed by Souvanna Phouma would quickly fall under communist control. The Americans declared that they would not desert the Hmong. Stay armed, gather intelligence, hold your ground, and we will continue to supply you with arms and rice, the Hmong were told. If worse came to worst, the nomadic Hmong could settle in western Thailand. Resignedly, Vang Pao assented, and his tribal elders voted to stand by him.
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Bill Colby arrived in Washington to take up his new post as head of the Far East Division just as the ink was drying on the 1962 Geneva Accords on Laos. For the next five years, he would oversee all CIA operations from Indonesia to Japan. The secret war in Laos would be his pride and joy.

Like South Vietnam, Laos was not a denied area. Large portions of the population were determined to resist communist tyranny. In both countries,
but especially in Laos, with its weak central government, there would be abundant opportunity for the Agency to conduct paramilitary operations. Colby would kick against Harriman, Sullivan, and the Geneva Accords on one level, but on another he would welcome them. As long as the United States kept its uniformed personnel out of Laos and concealed its aid to the Hmong tribal army, the Soviet Union was content to look the other way. Moscow even kept its embassy in Vientiane open. In violation of the “ground rules” established by the Geneva agreements, North Vietnam would increase its forces in Laos from nine thousand to seventy thousand over the next ten years. As Colby later wrote, “the CIA's capabilities for covert action became the key to our position with respect to Laos. Since its activities were officially secret, they could be conducted without official exposure or admission to the world. As a result, the Soviets could officially ignore them.” And, in fact, Colby observed, the secret war in Laos was exactly the model that the United States should employ in fighting communism throughout the developing world. The Far East Division chief would view the subsequent decisions by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to put main force military units in South Vietnam with dismay. The United States was not a traditional imperial power, he observed. America's goal, as it had been in the Philippines, was to help indigenous peoples become economically, militarily, and politically strong enough to stand on their own feet and assume the principal burden of resisting communist aggression.
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“The Crocodile,” as Harriman was dubbed by his associates—in recognition not only of his weathered, craggy features but also his toughness and snappishness—would not be easy to deal with. Harriman had been “present at the creation,” that is, at the time of the new international order that emerged following World War II, and he never let his colleagues forget it. Colby and DCI John McCone were made to understand that all CIA operations in Laos would have to be cleared with the ambassador-at-large. Initially, the Far East chief had to journey to Foggy Bottom and beg for every arms drop to the increasingly beleaguered Hmong. “During some of our weekly meetings,” Colby recalled, Harriman “would ostentatiously turn off his hearing aid in the middle of my arguments, or bait me mercilessly until we engaged in a shouting match.”
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Two of the Agency's top field men in Laos, Colby said, were reporting that the communists were overrunning Hmong villages, beheading Hmong elders, and killing all the
young men. Only after several of these encounters did Harriman agree to a single 100-ton ammunition drop.

One of the operatives Colby brought up in his conversations with the Crocodile was Tony Poe; the other was a young Ivy Leaguer named James Vinton Lawrence, who would become a protégé of Colby's and one of the Agency's most trusted operatives in Laos. Like Colby, Lawrence was a Princeton graduate; he had been recruited during his senior year by Dean Oliver Lippincott IV, the CIA's on-campus spotter.
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In February 1962, Lawrence departed for Vientiane and his first assignment. Bill Lair immediately took him under his wing. Lawrence was bright and inquisitive—his pleasure reading included Friedrich Nietzsche, Arnold Toynbee, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Barbara Tuchman. He wanted to learn as much as he could about the Hmong and Lao as quickly as possible. Nothing gets done by ordering these people around, Lair told him. Personal relationships made things happen. Control your emotions. Do not threaten. And, above all, patience.

A few days later, the novice flew upcountry and met with Vang Pao. Like Tony Poe, with whom he was to partner, Lawrence was to coordinate supply drops to the Hmong, help train new militiamen, and supervise the building and maintenance of airstrips. His radio kept him in touch with the Hmong command structure and with Bill Colby in Washington. “It is true that Tony Poe was the Kurtz [the antihero of Francis Ford Coppola's
Apocalypse Now
, Colonel Kurtz was a US Army officer who has gone native, gone mad, and become a savage] and I was the anti-Kurtz,” Lawrence later recalled. “We shared this hut at the end of the runway at Long Tieng. It got cold up there. He would drink himself into a stupor by the fire while I wrote my reports and read Nietzsche and Tolstoy. I would have to haul him to his bunk without dropping him in the fire. But he was up at 5:30 ready to train the Hmong recruits how to fire, maneuver, and fight hand-to-hand.”
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Lawrence was entranced by the physical beauty of northern Laos. Ensconced in a trench dug out of orange laterite, he could look down on the blue-green verdancy of the mountainsides as they fell away to the valleys below. And he was intrigued with Vang Pao. The Agency had instructed Lawrence to eat, sleep, and live with him. The Hmong leader was “strategically simple-minded but tactically brilliant,” Lawrence reported. Years later, he told an interviewer, “He thought I was a prince in my own country. . . .
He thought I was a prince because I didn't fuck the local girls and because I wasn't a drunk like Tony.” (Lawrence was following Lair's requirement that upcountry operatives remain celibate in order to avoid entanglement in local rivalries and jealousies.) “We had a wonderful joking relationship, and one in which rank was rarely pulled. In some ways there was no rank to be pulled. The choice of operations was his. He could pull rank on me, but I could cut off his money. The trade-off was that I never tried to influence [him] except in the large issues[,] . . . and he never bothered me when I was poking my nose around trying to find out what was going on within the Meo [Hmong] community.”
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Lawrence succeeded because, like the famous Englishman with whom he shared a surname, T. E. Lawrence, he showed respect. He would sit for hours with individual tribesmen, listening to them talk about their lineage and learning their language. He collected and cataloged specimen plants from an ancient female herbal healer. He asked the local shamans, who would jump up and down for hours in their trances, chanting and clanging cymbals, why they “rode so hard.” The medicine men explained that this helped them better communicate with the spirit world. “Relationships explained everything,” he said. “Family relationships explained why some Hmong turned communist and some did not. . . . In order to get anything done . . . you had to know who is related to who and the history. . . . If you don't respect it, you won't know even what questions to ask, never mind the answers.” Lawrence's awareness and the knowledge he gained as a result enriched his detailed reports to Colby on the course of military operations. The content of those reports, however, grew increasingly ominous.
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Armed with Lawrence's specific, on-the-ground observations, Colby kept at Averell Harriman to approve increased aid to Vang Pao's army. Initially, the Crocodile had feared that the CIA would train and deliver a Hmong army to General Phoumi Novasan, who would then use it to oust the neutralist Souvanna Phouma and establish a rightwing military dictatorship. First, Colby set about convincing Harriman that the Agency viewed him and him alone as the administration's point man on Laos. And second, he repeated the assurances that Vang Pao had given regarding the Hmong's willingness to remain loyal to the government in Vientiane. At his direction, Colby told Harriman, Lawrence had set up a powerful radio station, named The Union of the Lao Races, to communicate with and hopefully unify the Hmong, Lao, and other ethnic groups. Helping
Colby's cause was the defection of Kong Le from his alliance with the Pathet Lao, and the departure of Prince Souphanouvong, a half-brother to Prince Souvanna Phouma and the chief Pathet Lao figure in the coalition government. These developments, coupled with International Control Commission reports of North Vietnamese Army–Pathet Lao violations of the cease-fire, led Souvanna Phouma to tacitly endorse the CIA's private war. As a result of all this, Harriman authorized larger and larger supply drops to Vang Pao's forces. In addition, dozens of the CIA's best operatives flooded into Long Tieng. By April 1963, full-scale fighting had returned to Laos.
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