The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (21 page)

Ambassador Leonard Unger, nearing the end of his term in 1964, obtained approval from the Johnson administration to release the fuses on previously delivered U.S. bombs, for use by the Royal Lao Air Force.
[84]
Prince Souvanna Phouma also authorized the use of U.S. fighters to accompany the unarmed reconnaissance jets over Laotian territory, and these missions became code-named Yankee Team.

A Navy Yankee Team plane was lost only days later, and two Air America helicopters were hit when they attempted to make a recovery three hours after the plane went down. They flew into a flak trap (a tactic the enemy were to employ for the next decade: the downed pilot was allowed to survive to call for help while enemy gunners lay in wait for the arrival of vulnerable helicopters).

The two Air America helicopters abandoned their rescue effort when two crew members were critically wounded in the heavy fire. The downed pilot was captured. A second U.S. plane was shot down the following day over the same area, except this time Air America managed to snatch the pilot out of the jungle the very next morning.
[85]

In retaliation, President Johnson ordered a squadron of U.S. jets to attack a Communist antiaircraft installation at Xieng Khouang on the Plain of Jars. News of the downed planes was not officially announced but was learned by the U.S. media through the New China News Agency in Peking, loosing a howl of outrage from the press. ‘What in heaven’s name does the United States think it is doing by trying to keep these air strikes secret?’ the
Washington Post
asked in an angry editorial.
[86]
News reports of the U.S. air operations gained wide circulation for the first time, and one, a UPI story by journalist Arthur Dommen, ‘in effect blew the lid on the entire Yankee Team operation in Laos.’
[87]

Questions were beginning to be asked, both on Capitol Hill and in the press, but with the beginning of the extensive bombing of North Vietnam in late 1964, events in Laos were overshadowed and the public’s attention distracted. They would not be answered for a further five years, when William Sullivan - who had then left Laos after serving from 1964 to mid-1969 to become deputy assistant secretary of state for the Far East - faced an interrogatory closed hearing before a Senate subcommittee. He explained that U.S. activities in Laos had been kept secret because Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma had requested it - the North Vietnamese brazenly violated his country’s neutrality, covering their activities with barefaced lies, but in the circumstances the prime minister could not openly admit to support from the United States without sabotaging his own genuine efforts at obtaining neutrality.

The U.S. government never acknowledged more than ‘armed reconnaissance’ flights in northern Laos until March 1970, and the term itself is a misleading euphemism. Translated from military jargon, ‘armed reconnaissance’ means an attack sortie in search of targets of opportunity.

A major step toward the escalation of the air war was made in early December 1964, when the National Security Council approved a bombing program to complement Yankee Team reconnaissance missions in northern and central Laos. Code-named Barrel Roll, the program introduced twice-weekly missions of four aircraft each carrying bombs, but no napalm. There were to be no public statements about these bombing raids unless a plane was lost, in which case the United States government would ‘continue to insist that we were merely escorting reconnaissance flights as requested by the Laotian government’.
[88]

The next logical step in the escalation of the air war in Laos was to divide it into two. Barrel Roll would concentrate on flying combat support for the Royal Laotian Army and Meo forces ranged against the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese in the north of the country, while a new program - given the code name Steel Tiger - was introduced to organize air strikes against the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the southern Laotian panhandle.

Over the course of the years, as the Ho Chi Minh Trail grew, Steel Tiger was to become very big business indeed, and itself split amoebalike into two. Extra Air Force reserves were put into a new program, Tiger Hound, concentrating on segments of the Trail closest to South Vietnam. Action against the Trail became a war unto itself, with its own FACs flying out of South Vietnam and Thailand. But air support of battles inside Laos remained the exclusive preserve of the Ravens.

* * *

Above all else, Laos was a CIA war. At first this was considered praiseworthy - a minimum of Americans were spending much less money than the big-spending U.S. military in Vietnam next door, and with more effect. ‘I personally feel that although the way the operation has been run is unorthodox, unprecedented, in many ways I think it is something of which we can be proud as Americans,’ was the way U. Alexis Johnson, former under secretary of state, put it when testifying before a Senate committee. ‘It has involved virtually no American casualties. What we are getting for our money is, to use the old phrase, very cost-effective.’
[89]

The parent organization itself - the CIA - was rather smug about Laos and boasted about its success there. After all, the Agency employed only 16,500 people - with a further 11,300 involved in clandestine services and backup - compared to the Pentagon’s two and a half million, In October 1967, Senator Stuart Symington personally invited CIA station chief Ted Shackley, whose houseguest he had been on a trip to Laos, to testify before the Armed Services Committee. At the end of it the senator praised the Laotian program as a suitable way to fight a war - the CIA in Laos was spending in a year what the U.S. Army was spending in a day in Vietnam, Symington said. (Later, he was to reverse his view and express ‘surprise, shock and anger’ over the CIA’s secret war, even though he had been thoroughly briefed on Vang Pao’s Meo army since September 1966, and had also personally witnessed bombers leaving Udorn on missions to Laos.)
[90]

Critics of the CIA saw things differently. The president had, in effect, fielded his own secret army in Laos, complete with tens of thousands of mercenary foot soldiers, Special Forces commandos with sterile (non-attributable) weapons, and sheep-dipped fighter pilots commanding massive air support. After the disclosures of CIA bungling at the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, along with the CIA role in various assassination plots, the idea of the same agency running a decent-sized war as a covert operation was cause for alarm. It was the liberal’s nightmare - the notorious CIA pursuing secret, conspiratorial policies at gunpoint, a rogue elephant gone on a frenzied rampage.

These same critics would have been surprised to learn that people at the very top of the Agency tended to agree. Richard Helms, director of the Agency between 1966 and 1973, disliked large paramilitary operations such as Laos for the very practical reason that they were virtually impossible to keep secret. Leaked information regarding one covert operation threatened all of the Agency’s operational assets - proprietary airlines, funding procedures, identity of agents, etc. - and brought it before the public eye. Exposure brought notoriety, played into the hands of the Agency’s enemies, and led to the imposition of external oversight mechanisms and numerous legal restraints, all of which hampered its ability to pursue its main function - the collection and analysis of intelligence.
[91]

Helms’s successor, William Colby, director of the Agency from 1973 to 1976, held similar views. As onetime head of the CIA’s Far Eastern division he had been intimately involved with affairs in Laos from early on, concluding, ‘A large-scale paramilitary operation does not fit the secret budget and policy procedures of CIA.’
[92]
If the American government wanted to fight a war it ought to use the military - the CIA’s directors resented being saddled with large-scale military commitments which the president dared not undertake openly.

Covert operations in general have always been an area of intense debate within the Agency, and those in Laos caused an eruption. The CIA played a central role in the three-year running battle, between 1958 and 1961, over whom the United States should back in the country. Not only did the CIA and the State Department support different people and favor opposing policies (fueling its critics’ charge that the Agency had slipped its moorings and was pursuing its own policies), but there was a bitter division within the Agency itself. The CIA station chief in Vientiane at the time, Henry Heckscher - who had refused to tell the U.S. ambassador to Laos about some of the Agency’s activities within the country - terminated one angry exchange of cables, ‘Is headquarters still in friendly hands?’
[93]

In fact, the sins of the CIA in Laos should be largely attributed to presidents who often used it without fully informing the State Department what they were doing. The unsatisfactory situation of warring government agencies - and renegade factions battling within each -was resolved by President Kennedy’s ‘Country Team’ directive of May 1961. This placed all agencies operating within a foreign country under the direct supervision of the U.S. ambassador - especially relevant in Laos, where it allowed Ambassador Unger to take control of the CIA.

The signing of the Geneva Accords in 1962 resulted in the president’s decision to use the CIA to fight a clandestine war within the country, and also necessitated that a structure be set up to enable it to do so. While the ambassador remained all-powerful, officially the CIA was just one of several equal agencies. In reality it was more equal than others. The CIA funded all the irregular forces in Laos, which gave it direct control over those forces; it controlled Air America and Continental Air Services; it also exercised operational control over both Army attaché’s and air attaché’s offices. ‘For God’s sake, don’t buck the CIA,’ air attaché Col. Paul Pettigrew told his replacement, Col. Robert Tyrrell, ‘or you’ll find yourself floating facedown on that Mekong River.’
[94]

Almost from the very beginning there was a division between the CIA paramilitary types in the field - the ‘cowboys’ - and the analysts and officers back in the embassy. Douglas Blaufarb, the CIA station chief in Vientiane between 1963 and 1966 - during which time the mechanisms of the secret war were put in place - was decidedly not a cowboy. A graduate of Harvard and the Columbia Journalism School, Blaufarb was a mainstream 1930s-vintage liberal who had gone to war with conviction against the Nazis. He was also prepared to fight covertly what he saw to be the Communist threat to traditional liberal American values (although he was not an anti-communist ideologue, and worked to protect friends from the witch-hunting Senator McCarthy).
[95]

Blaufarb’s considerable knowledge of counterinsurgency was learned from books rather than the battlefield. He became intimately concerned with the Meo resistance, which he saw as an underground
maquis
similar to that in France in World War II.
[96]
However, despite Blaufarb’s scholarly leanings he displayed, along with other CIA operatives, a complete lack of interest in earlier French efforts to organize the Meo into an underground fighting force. (The CIA continues to take credit for discovering Vang Pao and arming the Meo - both of which the French had done before them in the early 1950s.) ‘For better or worse, history for its own sake does not play any part in the lives of active operations officers in the CIA, and I never thought to delve into events of the years before I became involved,’ Blaufarb said.
[97]
Neither, apparently, did anyone else - with the result that the CIA was forever reinventing the wheel in Laos.

But a very different type of CIA man came to dominate the war in Laos. The secret nature of the conflict demanded a logistic chain outside the country, and this was established in Thailand, where ‘volunteers’ were also recruited and trained alongside Lao in special jungle commando camps. The CIA logistics’ office in Thailand - 4802 Joint Liaison Detachment - operated out of a large compound at Udorn Air Force Base. This was headed by Pat Landry, a large, paramilitary type who strutted about Patton-style, flicking his boots with a riding crop. CIA station chiefs in Vientiane and Bangkok came and went, but Pat Landry stayed on and on.

The exact division of duties between Udorn and Vientiane is difficult to evaluate, but Landry’s power grew as the war progressed. It was a power exaggerated by secrecy. Landry and his agents in the field behaved like warlords in their own private fiefdoms. Landry was said to run a personality cult; a man’s face had to fit, and the sort of face he favored was that of a former Green Beret or Special Forces soldier, preferably with a good line in right-wing, anti-communist rhetoric. When the CIA attempted to put a man in above Landry at Udorn he used his connections with the Thai prime minister to have the appointment quashed.

Two Air Force officers also stationed at Udorn who worked in the ‘black’ with the CIA were Martin ‘Quietly’ Kaufman, who handled the extraordinarily complex task of negotiating contracts between the CIA proprietary airline Air America and the U.S. government, and Richard V. Secord, a brilliant clandestine operative who handled the operational and logistical side of the U.S. Air Force’s involvement in the secret war in Laos. Secord, known among his West Point classmates as ‘The Fat Man,’ had previously been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for a rescue mission in the Congo and had also flown two hundred secret combat missions in fighters in South Vietnam before his arrival in Thailand in 1966. He became known as “The Buddha” among the secret warriors, because he was perceived as inscrutable, the fount of great secret powers, and round.