.ahrchk.net/statements/mainfile.php/2008statements/1359.
Chapter 4: Rollback, PARU, and Laos
1. Richard Helms to American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1971, quoted in Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review Press, 2001), 477.
2. Interview with Alfred McCoy by David Barsamian, February 17, 1990, http://www.lycaeum.org/drugwar/DARKALLIANCE/ciah3.html.
3. Eisenhower, in his first State of the Union Address in January 1953, threatened to “unleash Chiang.” But two years of problems over the KMT drug forces in Burma meant that both Chiang Kai-shek and his friend Chennault had lost favor with Washington bureaucrats. By 1953 an emerging consensus in Washington feared that the KMT scandal was contributing to the influence of communism in Burma and damaging U.S. interests. See FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 12, pt. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office), 13–19, 46–49, 53–62.
4. Pentagon Papers, Gravel Edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), vol. 1, 85; cf. David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/Belknap Press, 2000), 11.
5. Summary of PSB D-23, Top Secret, “U.S. Psychological Strategy Based on Thailand,” September 14, 1953, FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 12, pt. 2, 688–91. The complete document has never been published. It is contained in NARA, PSB Files, lot 62 D 333, file PSB D-23, also in the C. D. Jackson Records, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Series I, PSB-OCB Series, 1953–1954, box 1. Fineman summarizes and quotes from an earlier version of PSB D-23 in the Eisenhower Library, dated July 2; this copy is still sanitized with respect to Indochina (Daniel Fineman, A Special Relationship: The United States and Military Government in Thailand, 1947–1958 [Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997], 170–73, 299–300).
6. William O. Walker III, Opium and Foreign Policy: The Anglo-American Search for Order in Asia, 1912–1954 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 209.
7. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 170 (drafted); Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977, 63, quoted in Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 55 (Luce).
8. This reflects the Gladio strategy of stay-behind forces that was already being instituted in Europe and Turkey.
9. FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 12, pt. 2, 689; Fineman, A Special Relationship, 172. In Fineman’s words, PSB D23 is “based on a variety of truths, half-truths, misconceptions, and outright falsehoods.” As he points out, the PSB D-23 strategy ended up supporting the non-Thai Hmong against the Tai-speaking lowland Lao. In retrospect this talk of the “ethnic bonds of the Thai peoples” makes about as much sense as developing a World War II strategy based on the “ethnic bonds” of the Dutch and the Germans or the French and the Italians. But at the time it did reflect Phibun’s nationalist vision of reuniting with Thai-related areas in Burma, Laos, and Cambodia, which the Japanese had allowed him to occupy in World War II.
10. Other explanations of the acronym PARU are Police Aerial Resupply Unit, Police Airborne Rescue Unit, and so on. All the titles tend to obscure the fact that PARU forces were paratroopers trained with an increasingly offensive military capacity.
11. Thomas Lobe, United States National Security Policy and Aid to the Thailand Police (Denver: Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver, 1977), 24, emphasis added. Lobe indicates that PARU had already been organized before Donovan’s arrival in 1953; this claim was later corroborated by Bill Lair in his Texas Tech interview (65: “The PARU? When I first went there [in March 1951], I opened this training school for guerilla warfare including parachute training”). In contrast, Fineman writes that “Donovan helped Phao found [PARU] in 1953” (A Special Relationship, 182). Another historian writes that PARU was created in 1958 (Timothy N. Castle, At War in the Shadow of Vietnam: United States Military Aid to the Royal Lao Government, 1955–1975 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1993], 37–38).
