86. Hugh Toye, Laos: Buffer State or Battleground (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 126.
87. Leann Grabavoy Almquist, Joseph Alsop and American Foreign Policy: The Journalist as Advocate (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993), 9–10, cf. 76.
88. Almquist, Joseph Alsop and American Foreign Policy, 57.
89. Almquist, Joseph Alsop and American Foreign Policy, 80.
90. Hersh, The Old Boys, 307–8, 438.
91. After I published a reference to “Alsop’s ‘invasion’” in 1970, one of my contacts, probably at the New York Review of Books, had a mutual friend ask Alsop about his 1959 scare article. Alsop allegedly replied in effect that he was just a team player trying to help out. Helping whom to achieve what, one wonders.
92. Fall, Street without Joy, 334–35; cf. Fall, Anatomy of a Crisis, 136; Denis Warner, The Last Confucian (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 210.
93. Leary, “Foreword,” x.
94. Scott, The War Conspiracy, 72. Cf. Leary’s further details about the CIA’s preparations on the CIA’s website: “The summer of 1959 saw the introduction into Laos of a US Special Forces Group, codenamed Hotfoot, under the command of Lt. Col. Arthur ‘Bull’ Simons. Twelve Mobile Training Teams took up duties at Vientiane, Luang Prabang, Savannekhet, and Pakse. The appearance of the Americans coincided with the outbreak of fighting between the FAR and Pathet Lao. In light of these developments, CIA officials in Laos requested additional air transport resources” (William M. Leary, “CIA Air Operations in Laos, 1955–1974,” https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/winter99-00/art7.html, emphasis added).
95. Dulles NSC briefing of December 23, 1959, FRUS, 1958–1960, vol. 16, 491.
96. Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos, 109–10.
97. Arthur J. Dommen, Conflict in Laos: The Politics of Neutralization (New York: Praeger, 1971), 133; Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos, 110–11. Stuart-Fox cites the example of Sam Neua province, where the Pathet Lao was in power, yet their candidate received thirteen votes, while the CDNI’s received 6,508.
98. Castle, At War in the Shadow of Vietnam, 23. I have shown elsewhere that Eisenhower’s approval of the Air America flights, like his earlier approval of the PSB D-23 rollback program, was belated, ratifying flights that had begun months earlier (Scott, The War Conspiracy, 78–85, expanding slightly on Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 133–38).
99. Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos, 114.
100. Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos, 115.
101. Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos, 116. According to Grant Evans, “some 600 people were killed” (A Short History of Laos, 119).
102. Warner, Back Fire, 32–33 (PARU-trained troops); Castle, At War in the Shadow of Vietnam, 38 (PARU technicians). PARU may also have supplied training to the Cambodian Khmer Serai irregulars, recruited in South Vietnam, who according to Wilfred Burchett raided Cambodia from bases in Thailand in 1956 and 1957 (Wilfrid Burchett, The Second Indochina War: Cambodia and Laos [New York: International Publishers, 1970], 41). By 1959, PARU was training South Vietnamese CIDG irregular troops.
103. Leary, “Foreword,” xii.
104. Warner, Back Fire, 32–33.
