117. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 569, citing, in part, Scott, The War Conspiracy, 207–8; Leary, Perilous Missions, 129–31.
118. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Government Operations, U.S. Aid Operations in Laos, House Resolution 546, 86th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959), 2; Goldstein, American Policy toward Laos, 186–90.
119. New York Times, February 2, 1962. As a poet, I see in this as a metonymy for what was happening to America. Willis Bird’s life in Thailand continued undisturbed until his death in 1991—inconvenienced only by his inability to return to the United States. Both the attorney general who had the temerity to indict him and his brother who tried vainly to neutralize Laos were murdered. Meanwhile, in Laos, Bird’s brother-in-law, CIA operative James W. (“Bill”) Lair, negotiated an agreement with Hmong leader Vang Pao that opened up the Hmong opium areas to Air American flights and drug shipments (William Leary, “CIA Air Operations in Laos, 1955–1974”; http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/winter99-00/art7.html).
120. Fall, Anatomy of a Crisis, 99.
121. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 194–95.
122. Kaufman, “Trouble in the Golden Triangle,” 450.
123. Kaufman, “Trouble in the Golden Triangle,” 451.
124. Kaufman, “Trouble in the Golden Triangle,” 452, citing State Department dispatches and telegrams; McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 349.
125. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 352, citing New York Times, August 11, 1971.
126. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 349; Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 235.
127. Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 235.
128. Kaufman, “Trouble in the Golden Triangle,” 451–53.
129. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 177.
130. Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 234.
131. Tzang Yawnghwe, The Shan of Burma: Memoirs of a Shan Exile (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1987), 124–49.
132. Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 202, citing CIA, Office of Current Intelligence, Chinese Irregulars in Southeast Asia (NLK-77-320, July 29, 1961). Victor Kaufman estimates that 2,000 to 3,000 of the irregulars remained in Laos, of which some joined the military (Kaufman, “Trouble in the Golden Triangle,” 453).
133. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 128–38.
134. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 151; Toye, Laos, 182. Both the London Times (May 16, 1962) and the New York Times (May 7, 1962) commented at the time that Phoumi concentrated his troops in Nam Tha, against U.S. advice, “in order to provoke an attack” (Goldstein, American Policy toward Laos, 256).
135. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 151–52.
136. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 151–52, citing London Times, May 24, 1962, and May 31, 1962. I agree with McCoy that in this crisis Phoumi used the drug traffic to finance his army (McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 300). I am not convinced that he could at this time have anticipated profits adequate to make up for the CIA subsidy.
137. Kaiser, American Tragedy, 127–30, 135–38; FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. 23, 936–39, 968–69. Cf. William Shawcross, “How Tyranny Returned to Thailand,” New York Review of Books, December 9, 1976, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/8648: “In 1964 the US began to build in Thailand the bases that were essential to the prosecution of the Vietnam war; the country was transformed into ‘a land-based aircraft carrier.’ The bombing of Vietnam began from Thai bases in 1965; Thai troops (paid by the US) ‘volunteered’ to fight in Vietnam and Laos.”
138. Scott, The War Conspiracy, xiii–xiv, 3–41; Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 109–11, 119–58. For independent corroboration of the role of Laos in leading to the Vietnam War, see Kaiser, American Tragedy, 20–35: “Eisenhower’s . . . policies left his successor facing an immediate decision between war and peace” (34). But like almost all archival historians, Kaiser underestimates the role of the drug traffic and of the CIA’s airline Air America in steering events in Laos; cf. my comments in Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 13–14.
139. Kaufman, “Trouble in the Golden Triangle,” 451.
140. Prados, Lost Crusader, 169. Unlike the Hmong, the lowland Lao were devout Buddhists for whom killing under any circumstances was abhorrent. Their American advisers found this quality to be a mark of the Laotians’ inferior civilization.
