Hog’s Exit: Jerry Daniels, the Hmong, and the CIA

6. Laos, Part II: Long Cheng (1968–73)

70 || 6 Laos, Part II: Long Cheng (1968–73) T HE importance of Long Cheng during the secret war in Laos; Daniels as operations officer; smokejumpers working in Laos; Richard Helms visits Long Cheng; Daniels at work; the intensity of war in Laos, especially Military Region 2 (MR2); some letters; bar stories. [See Maps 1 and 2 on pages 33 and 39.] Excerpt from the English-language BANGKOK POST SUNDAY MAGAZINE, December 9, 1973 The “forbidden valley” by Bangkok Post correspondent and photographer Don Ronk In early 1967 it was from volunteers in Laos I first heard of Long Cheng. Not that they gave it a name, nor that they were certain it even existed. A “secret city” was rumoured to exist in the mountains of Laos from which the then-mounting Laos war was being directed and conducted by the American Central Intelligence Agency. The whole idea of a secret city was preposterous to this cynic in those days. Reason asked, how could a city be secret? Someone would have stumbled across it. Nothing could be so distant from where people could see and talk. I did not know the vast wilderness that northern Laos is. I was wrong, of course. There was a city. It was called Long Cheng, and although it took years for its precise location to become generally known even in Vientiane (only about 70 miles away by airplane), it did slowly emerge from the mists that shroud the vastness of up-country Laos, mists created both by act of God and the CIA. Even after I moved to Vientiane in 1969 as a journalist and began reporting developments in Laos, Long Cheng remained a vague entity, still not precisely locatable on available maps. BILL LAIR, former CIA paramilitary officer, Thailand and Laos When I first went to Thailand in 1951 I began to think about what were the total problems over there. Communism was coming, and as we put people in the field, we began to realize that the local people living in the remote areas in Thailand—and Laos, too—along the border and everywhere else, had very little contact with any government. They were isolated and at the mercy of anybody who comes along with Laos, Part II || 71 a gun. And that’s what the communists were going to do: Come along. Those people were going to have to go along with whoever had the gun. They needed physical security for themselves and their family and their village. The people who were going to be coming in there were trying to spread communism —that was our enemy, too. So if someone goes in and trains the villagers and arms them, they’re just going to take care of themselves because there’s nobody else who’s going to protect them. They’re going to do it themselves. So our requirements meet right there, see? That’s what I saw coming. That’s why I started the idea of creating in Thailand a unit of PARU, the Police Aerial Resupply Unit.1 See, at that time, it wasn’t like Laos was a different country from Thailand. If you were on the Mekong River, the people on the Thai side of the river all knew everybody on the Lao side. Ethnically it’s the same people, so you could find out a lot about what was going on in Laos. More than if you went to the capital city of Vientiane. That was how we studied the situation before the PARU ever went to Laos. In 1960 I already knew who VP was. I knew that he was an officer in the Lao Army and was the highest ranking of any Hmong. I knew VP was a pretty obvious leader that we needed to get in touch with if the PARU had to go into Laos. And after Already paratroopers, a special unit of thirty Thai PARU were trained to jump into jungle/timber for special operations, and to use power saws and explosives to construct STOL airstrips in remote areas. The trainers were former U.S. Forest Service smokejumpers, left to right: Ken Hessel, George “Pappy” Smith, and Miles Johnson. The Helio Courier was one of several aircraft used for jump training at Pitscamp, Thailand, 1964. Ken Hessel collection. 72 || Hog’s Exit we studied the situation we were looking for a way to get there. So when Laos...