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6. The Secret War in Laos and Other Vietnam Sideshows: The Clandestine Cold War in Southeast Asia II
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Chapter 6 The Secret War in Laos and Other Vietnam Sideshows The Clandestine Cold War in Southeast Asia II No grand TV exposures, no detailed reporting on the scene by journalists and TV crews, none of the exposure in the media that has plagued the similar American effort in Vietnam. The murder and destruction [in Laos] have been carried out in delightful obscurity. -NOAM CHOMSKY, Laos: War and Revolution, 1970 The Laotian people are killing each other-and the Americans are pulling the strings. - BANNING GARRET, Ramparts, 1970 In the spring of 1959, Paul H. Skuse, a CIA operative working undercover in Laos as a police adviser with the State Department's International Cooperation Administration (ICA), invited two Hmong chiefs, Touby Lyfoung and Toulia Lyfong, to his French-style villa outside Vientiane for dinner with the aim of securing their cooperation in the escalating war against the Pathet Lao1 A deputy in the national assembly, Toulia was openly sympathetic to the Pathet Lao, and had urged the Hmong not to fight their fellow tribesmen. Touby was more fervently anticommunist and amenable to accepting aid from the United States, in part out ofa desire to bolster the power ofhis clan against the rival Lo. Little did Touby realize at the time that in forging an alliance with the United States, he was sowing the seeds of disaster for the Hmong people as well as the country as a whole, which became enmeshed in a destructive civil war. In effect, he was handing his people over to a wolf in sheep's clothing. Skuse was employing a classic colonial strategy of manipulating tribal minorities to serve broader political ends. Left out of previous scholarly accounts because the documents have only recently been declassified, Skuse's role in brokering the U.S. alliance with the Hmong exemplifies the centrality of police training programs to American anticommunist rollback operations, including their function in recruiting intelligence "assets:' As Alfred W McCoy has noted, the secret war in Laos represents one of the least understood yet most cataclysmic developments 121 of the Indochina wars. Many policymakers viewed it as a success because it was waged almost entirely by proxy and without cost to the United States. U. Alexis Johnson, undersecretary of state for Far Eastern Affairs, considered the operation "something of which we can be proud as Americans. It has involved virtually no American casualties. What we're getting for our money out there ... is, I think[,] to use the old phrase, very cost effective:" The consequences, however, were devastating for the Lao population as an estimated 3,500 villages were destroyed, 350,000 people killed, and another million rendered refugees. While local actors drove the conflict, the United States played an important role behind the scenes, pulling the strings. Triggering the onset of civil war, the United States provided modern weapons to security forces under the police programs with the goal of fortifying the Royal Lao Government (RLG) and trained Hmong militias implicated in significant human rights violations. In theory, counterinsurgency experts aimed to minimize "collateral damage" by cultivating effective intelligence networks and building local forces to pinpoint the location of the enemy. In practice, however, levels of violence are impossible to manage in a war zone. The campaign was waged beyond the reach of public scrutiny and international law and served as a laboratory for testing new weapons and psychological warfare techniques. A State Department official commented about Laos: "This is [the] end of nowhere. We can do anything we want here because Washington doesn't seem to know that it exists.'" This attitude more than anything else accounted for the carnage on the ground. Combating "Communist Subversion": Police Training and Foreign Assistance in Laos America's involvement in Laos originated in the mid-1950s after the Pathet Lao, a nationalist and pro-communist organization headed by Prince Souphanouvong , aided the Vietminh in defeating the French at the battle ofDien Bien Phu. The Geneva Accords assigned it temporary control over the northern provinces of Sam Neua and Phong Saly until scheduled elections in 1958 and called for integration of Pathet Lao units into the Laotian armed forces. This worried the Eisenhower administration (which had refused to sign the accords). A blueprint for the 1290-d program warned that "through peaceful legal means, Pathet Lao dissidents will take positions within the Lao Cabinet, army, and civil service enabling them to subvert the entire countrY:'4 On January 1, 1955, a United States Operations Mission headed...