A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  After what would have served as a full meal anywhere on earth, a succession of Hmong men, senior people in the community, offered us round after round of fruit, hard-boiled eggs, chunks of chicken, and large slices of suckling pig. It was delicious, but not the best ballast for the extensive briefings that followed.

  An intense session with Agency case officers stationed in the area was followed by a drive to Sam Thong, where AID had established a hospital for the wounded Hmong soldiers and civilians. A lasting memory is that of a boy no more than fourteen with an open abdomen wound. He was still clinging to the carbine he had carried into the firefight. His eyes wide open, he did not make a sound. Guerrilla warfare spares no one, aged or young.

  En route back to Vientiane, our pilot was cleared to give us a glimpse of the Plaine des Jarres and the battlefield. It was late afternoon, and the October sunlight provided a spectacular glimpse of the area where the NVN anti-aircraft batteries were usually dug into the ridgelines. The rainy season had not ended, and the enemy had not yet returned from their rest areas farther east. Ironically, the plain gave me the impression of a vast golf course—soft, lush green fairways dotted with clusters of giant divots where bombs had fallen.

  The light, slow-moving aircraft used for short-distance flights over the contested areas in Laos were near-perfect targets for anti-aircraft artillery, and even vulnerable to small-arms fire. The courage of the aircrews and our operations officers who made flight after flight in these fragile craft remains impressive. During those years, although our officers were expressly forbidden to engage in combat, the Agency personnel losses in Laos exceeded any that we had suffered elsewhere.

  There are no bystanders in guerrilla warfare, and there are enough stars on the memorial wall in the Agency building to prove it.

  In Vientiane I visited Ambassador Mac Godley. He was an action-oriented foreign service officer who had gained some of his considerable experience in the hostilities in Zaire. Mac was upbeat on our chances of preserving the Royal Lao government. He pointed out that the war in Laos had widened considerably, and that although the Royal Lao army did not amount to much, the ethnic elements—the Hmong, Kha, and Lao Theung—were giving a good account of themselves throughout Laos. Also important were the Thai volunteers, a force that eventually numbered some twenty thousand men, deployed throughout Laos. They fought under the direction of General Vang Pao in the north and General Soutchai in the Bolovens Plateau to the south.

  At best, a brief trip into an area totally foreign to one’s experience is little more than an orientation, an opportunity to glimpse working conditions and to touch base with the players. Only those who have spent time on ground as alien as Laos can have any substantive understanding of the work.

  Vinton Lawrence was one of the first young officers CIA sent to Laos. He was not the most obvious candidate for the assignment he welcomed, and I doubt that his Princeton degree in art history fitted the desired profile of a paramilitary warrior. But for four years in the field—until I refused to let him risk another tour—his performance was outstanding.

  When Vint arrived in early 1962, Laos was in a state of flux, verging on anarchy. The Agency’s role was then restricted to providing the small arms requested by the Hmong. Vint’s first task was to reconnoiter the deserted Long Tieng valley and determine if it was suited for an up-country headquarters and landing strip. The continuing peace talks in Geneva had made it desirable to move our existing offices away from the fishbowl that Vientiane was becoming. On his own, and two hundred miles from his supervisors, Lawrence decided that the valley would suffice.

  It was only the arrogance of youth, Vint told me, that carried him through the planning, building, and then organizing of the outpost that within months became a settlement housing several battalion-size paramilitary units and their attendant families. Before our withdrawal from Laos, Long Tieng had become a working village of some thirty-six thousand inhabitants.

  Long Tieng remained an advance post, with its headquarters still in Vientiane. Strategic planning and paramilitary support was centered on a base at Udorn in Thailand. This somewhat extended organization worked, but never quite achieved the status euphemistically referred to by the Pentagon as “the military chain of support.”

  William Lair, a quiet Texan and World War II veteran, was in charge of our Udorn office. He had already been in Thailand long enough to become fluent in Thai. It was Lair who opened our contact with the Hmong and first worked with General Vang Pao. Over the next five years, Bill was the key to our success in organizing the guerrilla force. He recognized Vint as the junior colleague he needed, and they soon learned that instead of relying on old models of paramilitary operation that might have worked elsewhere, they would have to improvise their own structure. This was a distinct advantage over the U.S. military who later arrived with knapsacks full of doctrine, little of which could be fitted to the reality of Laos and the Hmong guerrillas.

  When the way was cleared for renewed military action, Thai paratroop teams took over the organization and training of the Hmong guerrillas. Some forty teams of young Hmong were formed, given as much leadership and military training as possible, and infiltrated into the operational zones surrounding the Plaine des Jarres and beyond. Once in place they watched, listened, and began to recruit local people as resident observers. Daily communication was by radio, and at night Lawrence would summarize the messages and add a daily situation report for Lair in Thailand.

  It took months to develop the order of battle for both the Pathet Lao and NVN units in Laos. In theory, the next task was to organize the Hmong in military zones of operations, with a clear chain of command. Vang Pao pretended that the zone commanders were under his command. In fact, much of his time was spent flying from one area to another, trying to convince one recalcitrant village that it was essential to help a nearby village despite the feud that had existed for half a century. It was not in Hmong nature to conform to anything resembling a chain of command or to cooperate with any form of government beyond that of their immediate village.

  As Vint put it, “Everything came down to families—why they would fight, why they would not fight, why some were straight, why some were crooked, why some became communists, why most supported Vang Pao.”

  The basis of Vang Pao’s power was his ability to keep an anthropological and genealogical chart of these interconnections in his head. This allowed Vang Pao, Vint, and others to organize the zones from the bottom up. As the zones took shape, they turned out to be almost identical with those formed in the nineteenth century when the Hmong helped repel the Vietnamese incursion that threatened Luang Prabang and the Lao royal family.

  Before my briefings were finished, I had a good idea of what a day in the life of an art historian and resident paramilitary advisor was like. The days that began before dawn were filled with meetings, bicycle trips, briefings, debriefings, flights to villages not marked on any map, and arrivals on windswept ridges where each landing was really a controlled crash. Vint admitted to being lucky to have walked away—more or less—from a half dozen “totals.” The long return flights required weaving through the bad weather to reach the home strip before dusk. The courage of the young operatives and flight crews was of the highest order.

  Another fact of life at Long Tieng was the long dinners with Vang Pao and local leaders who came from distant villages in part to see if what they had heard about the foreigners was true. The heavily spiced meals included “ferocious lashings of alcohol” and unique opportunities to practice the local dialects. When the social activity was over, all that remained was to check incoming radio messages and prepare the daily radio report to Udorn headquarters.

  Aside from the operational aspects of life in Long Tieng was the responsibility for working up the infrastructure to support the 15,000 men—later more than 30,000—and their families. There were payrolls to monitor, rice drops for 250,000 people to organize, hospitals to establish, refugees to place and support. It was also nec
essary to establish a judicial system that could cope with the incidents that occurred when essentially nomadic loners were thrust into a melting pot with thousands of other nomadic loners.

  The young men we had in Laos were an extraordinary bunch, sadly less heralded than they deserve.

  —

  In February 1973, at the time the cease-fire agreement was signed, I left the Agency. I did so with the conviction that we had done our job in Laos. The Royal Lao government still held approximately the same territory it had in 1962, when the Agency took to the field with the mission of keeping Laos intact and neutral, and a secondary task of providing support for our forces in South Vietnam. Laos was intact. The NVN troops and Pathet Lao occupied no more Laotian territory than they had in 1962. Some eighty thousand NVN troops, in three first-rate military divisions aided by separate artillery battalions, tank units, combat engineers, and support troops, were effectively tied down in Laos. When South Vietnamese resistance crumbled in 1975, the final assault on Saigon was spearheaded by two of these NVN divisions that had moved from Laos.

  The Royal Lao government was fragile but still in power.

  Our paramilitary operations in Laos were conducted by some two hundred Agency staff and contract employees. We had fulfilled our mission and we remain proud of it. We had won the war!

  —

  The debate in the American press about the “secret CIA war” in Laos comes down, as do many so-called secret things in Washington, to a question of whether or not the writer or his source knew the “secret.” In Congress, Senator Stuart Symington, then a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, probably knew the most about CIA activity in Laos. In October 1967 he chaired a meeting of the Senate Armed Services Committee in Room 212 of the Old Senate Office Building. At Senator Symington’s invitation, Ted Shackley, then CIA station chief in Laos, briefed the committee at length. I sat to one side listening. Senator Symington praised the program as a sensible way to fight a war, and was the first to observe that CIA’s annual budget in Laos was approximately what the U.S. military was spending per day in Vietnam. Ted and I were not surprised by Symington’s remarks. The senator had been briefed several times and had visited Laos, where he stayed as Shackley’s houseguest. Beginning in 1962 and continuing until 1970, some fifty senators had been briefed on CIA’s activity in Laos.

  In 1970 it came as a jolt when, with a group of senators, Senator Symington publicly expressed his “surprise, shock and anger” at what he and the others claimed was their “recent discovery” of “CIA’s secret war” in Laos. At the time I could not understand the reason for this about-face. Nor have I since been able to fathom it.

  The Paris peace agreement which ended American participation in the Vietnam War was signed in January 1973. When President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam balked at accepting the agreement, he was assured that the United States would retaliate if the North violated the cease-fire. In the end, Thieu had little choice but to sign.

  This maneuvering was not lost on the Laotian authorities. They were also very reluctant to sign a similar cease-fire agreement, but in February 1973 they bowed to American pressure and accepted the assurances of U.S. retaliation against any possible North Vietnamese violation of the agreement. The Royal Lao government was then forced to accept a provisional coalition government fronted by the figurehead, King Savang Vatthana. This government included the communist Pathet Lao as a full participant. By 1975, the Pathet Lao had taken complete control. King Vatthana abdicated, and the Pathet Lao proclaimed the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos. This was a sad end for a valiant effort.

  The drastic curtailment of American military assistance which Congress almost immediately imposed signaled the end of resistance to the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese. Because the irregular forces CIA had supported—at the direction of three presidents—were not an official component of the Royal Lao armed forces, it was no longer possible to maintain them. There was no alternative but to disband the only effective fighting force the Lao government had. General Vang Pao was given limited aid in converting to civilian life, but he had no viable way to maintain his army of irregulars.

  The support Vang Pao derived from the American presence in Laos ended in April 1975, when the North Vietnamese overpowered the South Vietnamese government and the United States abdicated its role in Southeast Asia. In Laos, the Pathet Lao, energized by the communist victories in Vietnam and Cambodia, asserted its dominance without opposition. For the Hmong this meant exile abroad or repression at a near-genocidal level at home.

  Dr. Yang Dao said this to the French National Assembly on November 8, 1997: “Since 1975, more than 450,000 lowland Lao and highland Laotians have left their country for Europe, Australia, and America. More than three quarters of these have emigrated to the United States, some 200,000 of this group are Hmong.”*

  When I began this memoir, I realized that it would be impossible to mention any but a handful of Agency colleagues who served with distinction. There were simply too many. But in reviewing what I will always call the war we won, the extraordinary levels of commitment and outright bravery exhibited by so many colleagues were such that I cannot in conscience allow just a few of the many to pass without mention.

  Bill Lair, quiet, soft-spoken, with a deep knowledge of Laos, opened our contact with Vang Pao and nurtured the relationship for years. Pat Landry was also a veteran in that effort. Young Vint Lawrence, with Lair, tried to keep General Vang Pao—who had started his military career as a sergeant in the French army—from overreaching. With others, Vint tried unsuccessfully to remind the Hmong fighters that the Americans would eventually go home.

  Dick Holm pioneered the important Ho Chi Minh Trail-watching operations, and went on to Africa, where he was almost fatally burned in a plane crash. This happened sometime after his best friend—one of the anonymous stars on the memorial plaque—died in a helicopter crash in Laos. Will Greene was a superb paramilitary tactician. His death left an irreplaceable competence in our ranks. Howie Freeman came within inches of losing his life defending an Air Force installation from an NVN assault. After Laos, young Jim Lewis went on to Vietnam. After being wounded he was taken prisoner by the NVN and held in rough circumstances for more than a year. Jim and his wife were subsequently assigned to Lebanon, where they died in the terrorist bombing of our embassy. Jerry “D” worked for more than five years at Vang Pao’s side and at great personal risk. When he left the Agency, Jerry went back to Thailand to help the Hmong refugees fleeing from the Pathet Lao. John “P” was killed when his helicopter was shot down after having infiltrated a team into NVN-held territory in Laos. John Kearns, a close friend of “P,” rappelled from a helicopter in a vain attempt to recover the bodies of “P” and the aircrew. Kearns was killed in a North Vietnamese Army attack in South Laos.* The widows of both these men became CIA officers. Bill Buckley was our operations chief in Luang Prabang until he was transferred to Lebanon. There, he was kidnapped by terrorists and died under torture.

  There are many more stories to be told and so many more comrades yet to be honored.

  *Dr. Yang Dao received his Ph.D. in France. He is the first Hmong to have earned that degree.

  *CIA had no objection to disclosing the full names of the fallen. The abbreviated identifications are used at the request of the families involved.

  Chapter 26

  —

  LOOKING DOWN

  In mid-summer 1966, not long after I was sworn in as DCI, Carl Duckett, then the Agency deputy director for science and technology (DDS&T), undertook to brief me on the Agency’s early effort to develop what he called “an imagery satellite with a real-time readout capability.” The physics I learned at Williams College was of some help, but I realized I was getting only the gist of what Carl was telling me.

  The next day, Carl was back in my office for round two. Before he could begin, I explained that although it might have been my fault, I had not understood many of the terms he used to describe h
is work. “From now on,” I said, “you’ve got to use terms that I can understand well enough to visualize what you and your team are doing. Until then, the whole damn project is in the balance.” Carl assumed—a bit rashly—that I was joking, and shifted gears. With the help of a glossary we created and Carl’s infinite patience, my grasp of the project took shape.

  Before becoming DCI, my knowledge of the science involved in the high-altitude reconnaissance projects came in fragments gleaned at meetings on other topics when Allen Dulles or Dick Bissell made glancing references to these ultra-secret, Eyes Only projects. I was, of course, fully cognizant of the stunning product of these operations.

  During World War II, when he was the commanding general of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force), Eisenhower had become accustomed to the highest levels of intelligence on every aspect of Hitler’s armed forces and government. As president, Eisenhower grasped the postwar espionage problems, and was keenly aware that the vast wartime intelligence sources—broken ciphers, agents in place in Berlin, scores of agents scattered throughout enemy-occupied Europe, and daily aerial photoreconnaissance—were not available. He also understood that Soviet security measures were much more sophisticated and even more pervasive than anything the Nazis had been able to achieve. Eisenhower realized that, at best, it would take time to effect any significant penetration of the USSR.

  President Truman had authorized the Air Force and Navy to fly peripheral collection flights along the USSR borders. The results were useful but marginal. Worse, some two hundred airmen were killed or captured in the course of these hazardous missions. President Eisenhower authorized the effort to continue, but knew that these flights could not be expected to provide the data on Soviet military capability that he considered essential. He was also concerned by the fact that the reconnaissance version of the B-47 looked dangerously like its twin, the nuclear-armed B-47 bomber.