12. Texas Tech University, Vietnam Archive Oral History Project, interview with Bill Lair, December 11, 2001, http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/star/images/OH/OH0200/OH0200-part1.pdf, 83–85.
13. Chairman of the Operations Coordinating Board Walter Bedell Smith (the former CIA director) to Cutler, September 11, 1953, in Office of the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (SPANSA) Papers, NSC Series, Briefing Notes Subseries, SEA folder, box 16, Eisenhower Library, quoted in Fineman, A Special Relationship, 179. The quoted words do not occur in the truncated version of this memo reproduced in FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 12, pt. 2, 687–88. However, they are consistent with the thrust of that memo and still more with the document, PSB D-23, which it transmitted. We shall see below that there are questions whether in fact the National Security Council (NSC) had authorized the document’s proposed cross-border operations, which led to the Vietnam War.
14. Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 130.
15. Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 131.
16. Burton Hersh, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA (New York: Scribner’s, 1992), 410.
17. Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 514, quoting British Foreign Service report of interview with Donovan.
18. Anthony Cave Brown, The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan (New York: Times Books, 1982), 822–23.
19. Brown, The Last Hero, 824–25, emphasis added. In the same pages Brown notes that Donovan was “heading rapidly towards penury” (825) and that he was assisted by a cash gift from the CIA and Allen Dulles by January 1954 (828). Donovan also persuaded Allen Dulles to build up the local CIA station into “a miniature OSS” with “a number of ex-OSS men, among them [the controversial anthropologist and racial theorist] Carleton Coon and Gordon Browne” (825). Coon and Browne had worked with Muslim tribes in Morocco for the OSS. Coon’s wartime service for Donovan had also included a report “in which he advocated the formation of an elite corps of assassins” (252–53, 269).
20. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 181.
21. Interview with Bill Lair, 62.
22. Lobe, United States National Security Policy and Aid to the Thailand Police, 24.
23. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 134, 181. Fineman says that Donovan’s visits were “not so much to oversee Sea Supply’s work as to relive old times with his buddies.” But Fineman’s source for this questionable downplaying of Donovan’s interest (cf. Brown, The Last Hero, 825) is a personal interview with Bill Lair. The next paragraph contains one of the very few errors in Fineman’s excellent book: the claim that the BPP was “formed during Donovan’s tenure.” In fact, by nearly all accounts it had been formed back in 1951.
24. The camp was also visited by Desmond FitzGerald, by then head of the CIA’s Far Eastern Division, and by CIA Director Allen Dulles. Lair dates the Dulles visit as “probably ’53” (Interview with Bill Lair, 84).
25. Paul M. Handley, The King Never Smiles: A Biography of Thailand’s Bhumipol Adulyadej (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 124.
26. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 141.
27. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 179–80, emphasis added; cf. FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 12, pt. 1, 689–90. Although it is clear that the opposition in the NSC was voiced by Admiral Radford on behalf of the Joint Chiefs, Donovan appears to have voiced all his frustration at the timid policies of Eisenhower (“not a great man”), the Dulles brothers, and Bedell Smith, who had “ruined” the CIA (Brown, The Last Hero, 826).
28. FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 12, pt. 1, 685–86.
29. FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 12, pt. 1, 732.
30. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 135.
31. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 182, emphasis added. Fineman cites a personal interview with Lair from which I deduce that “Washington” here means the CIA. Cf. Roger Warner, Back Fire: The CIA’s Secret War in Laos and Its Link to the War in Vietnam (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 31–32. The date that the BPP school relocated from Lopburi to Hua Hin was 1953.
32. Gareth Porter, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 72, citing FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 13, 981–82.
