64. FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 12, pt. 2, deals with Burma, the Philippines, and Thailand. The CIA was at the center of U.S. foreign policy in all three countries during this period. Yet in this 742-page volume, there are only two passing references to the Central Intelligence Agency (39, 681) and none at all to its operations. This is characteristic of the FRUS volumes for 1952–1954, in which the CIA’s overthrow of Mossadeq in Iran is not mentioned.
65. For decades academic books by Americans about Thailand were striking in their determination to mention neither opium nor the CIA. See, e.g., David Wyatt’s otherwise useful Thailand: A Short History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). It may be relevant that “over a thousand books were produced, subsidized or sponsored by the CIA before the end of 1967” and that some of these books were apparently area studies by academics (U.S. Congress, Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Final Report, April 26, 1976, 94th Cong., 2nd sess., Senate Report No. 94-755, bk.1, Foreign and Military Intelligence, 453).
66. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 183.
67. The biggest Hmong immigration into Thailand was after World War II, when with other hill tribes they started “planting poppies all over Thailand’s mountainous northern provinces” (Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 118).
68. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 183.
69. Castle, At War in the Shadow of Vietnam, 36: “Small groups of Lao soldiers had, unofficially, been trained [at U.S. expense] at Thai military bases since 1957.”
70. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 183. According to Warner, it was among the Hmong (“Meo”) of northern Thailand that PARU and Lair first heard of Vang Pao (Warner, Back Fire, 32).
71. For a more detailed account of U.S. interventions in 1958–1960, in which CAT played a significant role, see Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 128–33.
72. William M. Leary, “Foreword,” in Covert Ops: The CIA’s Secret War in Laos, by James E. Parker (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), x. Leary’s account of “CIA Air Operations in Laos, 1955–1974,” is posted on the CIA’s website at https://www.cia
.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/winter99-00/art7.html.
73. Martin E. Goldstein, American Policy toward Laos (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1973), 135: “In 1956, for example, the United States spent $47.7 million on defense support [for Laos] and only $1 million on technical cooperation.”
74. Editorial note, FRUS, 1958–1960, vol. 16, 478.
75. Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base, “Escalation in Laos,” http://udornrtafb
.tripod.com/id15.html.
76. John Morrocco, Thunder from Above: Air War, 1941–1968 (Boston: Boston Press, 1984), 10.
77. Lucian R. W. Pye, “Armies in the Process of Political Modernization,” in The Role of the Military in Underdeveloped Countries, ed. John J. Johnson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 87–89. At the same conference Guy Pauker of RAND urged Indonesian officers present to “strike, sweep their house clean” (224), quoted in Peter Dale Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965–1967,” Pacific Affairs 58, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 239–64. Some of those present played important roles in the subsequent Indonesian coup of 1965.
78. Grant Evans, A Short History of Laos: The Land in Between (Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2002), 113.
79. Martin Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 108. William Leary has written on the CIA’s website that “the appearance of the Americans coincided with the outbreak of fighting between the FAR and Pathet Lao.” But, as we have seen, the first U.S. troops arrived in March, while the fighting began only some time after May.
80. Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos, 104.
81. Paper prepared by Assistant White House Staff Secretary John S. D. Eisenhower, FRUS, 1958–1960, vol. 16, 548.
82. Telegram of August 9, 1959, to the State Department, FRUS, 1958–1960, vol. 16, 555–56.
83. Dulles briefing to National Security Council, August 6, 1959, FRUS, 1958–1960, vol. 16, 553.
84. Bernard Fall, Street without Joy (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1964), 334.
85. Bernard Fall, Anatomy of a Crisis: The Laotian Crisis of 1960–1961 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), 115.
