Drug Abuse

7 . The Golden Triangle: Heroin Is Our Most Important Product

"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN," announced the genteel British diplomat, raising his glass to offer a toast, "I give you Prince Sopsaisana, the uplifter of Laotian youth." The toast brought an appreciative smile from the lips of the guest of honor, cheers and applause from the luminaries of Vientiane's diplomatic corps gathered at the send-off banquet for the Laotian ambassador-designate to France, Prince Sopsaisana. His appointment was the crowning achievement in a brilliant career. A member of the royal house of Meng Khouang, the Plain of Jars region, Prince Sopsaisana was vice-president of the National Assembly, chairman of the Lao Bar Association, president of the Lao Press Association, president of the Alliance Francaise, and a member in good standing of the Asian People's Anti-Communist League. After receiving his credentials from the king in a private audience at the Luang Prabang Royal Palace on April 8, 1971, the prince was treated to an unprecedented round of cocktail parties, dinners, and banquets.(1) For Prince Sopsaisana, or Sopsai as his friends call him, was not just any ambassador; the Americans considered him an outstanding example of a new generation of honest, dynamic national leaders, and it was widely rumored in Vientiane that Sopsai was destined for high office some day.

The send-off party at Vientiane's Wattay Airport on April 23 was one of the gayest affairs of the season. Everybody was there: the cream of the diplomatic corps, a bevy of Lao luminaries, and, of course, you-know who from the American Embassy. The champagne bubbled, the canapes were flawlessly French, and Mr. Ivan Bastouil, charge d'affaires at the French Embassy, Lao Presse reported, gave the nicest speech. (2) Only after the plane had soared off into the clouds did anybody notice that Sopsai had forgotten to pay for his share of the reception. When the prince's flight arrived at Paris's Orly Airport on the morning of April 25, there was another reception in the exclusive VIP lounge. The French ambassador to Laos, home for a brief visit, and the entire staff of the Laotian Embassy had turned out. (3) There were warm embraces, kissing on both cheeks, and more effusive speeches. Curiously, Prince Sopsaisana insisted on waiting for his luggage like any ordinary tourist, and when the mountain of suitcases finally appeared after an unexplained delay, he immediately noticed that one was missing. Angrily Sopsai insisted his suitcase be delivered at once, and the French authorities promised, most apologetically, that it would be sent round to the Embassy just as soon as it was found. But the Mercedes was waiting, and with flags fluttering, Sopsai was whisked off to the Embassy for a formal reception.

While the champagne bubbled at the Laotian Embassy, French customs officials were examining one of the biggest heroin seizures in French history: the ambassador's "missing" suitcase contained sixty kilos of high-grade Laotian heroin worth $13.5 million on the streets of New York,(4) its probable destination. Tipped by an unidentified source in Vientiane, French officials had been waiting at the airport. Rather than create a major diplomatic scandal by confronting Sopsai with the heroin in the VIP lounge, French officials quietly impounded the suitcase until the government could decide how to deal with the matter.

Although it was finally decided to hush up the affair, the authorities were determined that Sopsaisana should not go entirely unpunished. A week after the ambassador's arrival, a smiling French official presented himself at the Embassy with the guilty suitcase in hand. Although Sopsaisana had been bombarding the airport with outraged telephone calls for several days, he must have realized that accepting the suitcase was tantamount to an admission of guilt and flatly denied that it was his. Despite his protestations of innocence, the French government refused to accept his diplomatic credentials and Sopsai festered in Paris for almost two months until he was finally recalled to Vientiane late in June.

Back in Vientiane the impact of this affair was considerably less than earthshaking. The all-powerful American Embassy chose not to pursue the matter, and within a few weeks everything was conveniently forgotten (5) According to reports later received by the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics, Sopsai's venture had been financed by Meo Gen. Vang Pao, commander of the CIA's Secret Army, and the heroin itself had been refined in a laboratory at Long Tieng, which happens to be the CIA's headquarters for clandestine operations in northern Laos.(6) Perhaps these embarrassing facts may explain the U.S. Embassy's lack of action.

In spite of its amusing aspects, the Sopsaisana affair provides sobering evidence of Southeast Asia's growing importance in the international heroin trade. In addition to growing over a thousand tons of raw opium annually (about 70 percent of the world's total illicit opium. (7) Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle region has become a mass producer of high-grade no. 4 heroin for the American market. Its mushrooming heroin laboratories now rival Marseille and Hong Kong in the quantity and quality of their heroin production.

As America confronted the heroin epidemic in mid 1971, governme t leaders and massmedia newsmen reduced the frightening complexities of the international drug traffic to a single sentence. Their soothing refrain ran something like this: 80 percent of America's heroin begins as raw opium on the slopes of Turkey's craggy Anatolian plateau, is refined into heroin in the clandestine laboratories of Marseille, and smuggled into the United States by ruthless international syndicates.

If any of the press had bothered to examine this statement they might have learned that it was based largely on a random guess by the French narcotics police,(8) who had eleven officers, three automobiles, and a miserable budget with which to cover all of southern France! (9) If they had probed further they might have discovered this curious anomaly: that although Southeast Asia produced 70 percent of the world's illicit opium, it was credited with being the source of only 5 percent of America's heroin supply, while Turkey, with only 7 percent of the world's illicit opium, was allegedly responsible for 80 percent of our heroin.(10)

The truth, as it often is, was rather embarrassing. To summarize, Turkey's opium production had declined sharply in the late 1960s, and international drug syndicates had turned to Southeast Asia as an alternate source of raw materials. Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle-comprising the rugged Shan hills of northeastern Burma, the mountain ridges of northern Thailand, and the Meo highlands of northern Laos-had become the world's largest source of opium, morphine, and heroin. Its narcotics were flooding into the United States through Hong Kong, Latin America, and Europe. The sudden increase in Southeast Asian heroin exports to the United States was fueling a heroin epidemic among American youth. Since some American allies in Southeast Asia were managing the traffic and U.S. policies had contributed to its growth, the Nixon administration was hardly anxious to spark a heated political controversy by speculating openly on Southeast Asia's growing importance in America's heroin traffic.

In the 1960s a combination of factors-American military intervention, corrupt national governments, and international criminal syndicates -pushed Southeast Asia's opium commerce beyond self-sufficiency to export capability. Production of cheap, low-grade no. 3 heroin (3 to 6 percent pure) had started in the late 1950s when the Thai government launched an intensive opium suppression campaign that forced most of her opium habitues to switch to heroin. By the early 1960s large quantities of cheap no. 3 heroin were being refined in Bangkok and northern Thailand, while substantial amounts of morphine base were being processed in the Golden Triangle region for export to Hong Kong and Europe. However, none of the Golden Triangle's opium refineries had yet mastered the difficult technique required to produce high-grade no. 4 heroin (90 to 99 percent pure).

In late 1969 opium refineries in the Burma-Thailand-Laos tri-border region, newly staffed by skilled master chemists from Hong Kong, began producing limited supplies of high-grade heroin for the tens of thousands of alienated GIs serving in South Vietnam. The U.S. military command in Saigon began getting its first reports of serious heroin addiction among isolated units in early 1970. By September or October the epidemic was fully developed: seemingly unlimited quantities of heroin were available at every U.S. installation from the Mekong Delta in the south to the DMZ in the north.

When rapid U.S. troop withdrawls in 1970-1972 reduced the local market for the Golden Triangle's flourishing heroin laboratories, Chinese, Corsican, and American syndicates began sending bulk shipments of no. 4 heroin directly to the United States. As a result of these growing exports, the wholesale price for a kilo of pure no. 4 heroin at Golden Triangle laboratories actually increased by 44 percent-from $1,240 in September 1970 to $1,780 in April 1971-despite a 30 percent decline in the number of GIs serving in Vietnam during the same period. (11) Moreover, the rapid growth of exports to the United States has spurred adramatic leap in the price of raw opium in the Golden Triangle. One American trained anthropologist who spent several years studying hill tribes in northern Thailand reports that "between 1968 and early 1970 . . . the price of raw opium at the producing village almost doubled from $24 to $45 a kilogram. (12) While the growing rate of addiction among remaining U.S. troops in Vietnam probably accounted for some increased demand, increased exports to the American domestic market provided the major impetus behind the price rise. Significantly, it was in April 1971 that the first bulk shipments of Laotian heroin were intercepted in Europe and the United States. On April 5 U.S. customs officials seized 7.7 kilos of Double U-0 Globe brand heroin at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, (13) and on April 25 French authorities seized Prince Sopsaisana's 60 kilos at Orly Airport.

In 1970-1971 U.S. law enforcement officials became alarmed over the greatly increased heroin supplies available to America's addict population. Massive drug seizures of unprecedented size and value did not even make the "slightest ripple" in the availability or price of heroin .(14) Knowing that Turkey's opium production was declining, U.S. narcotics experts were mystified and began asking themselves where all this heroin was coming from. (15) The answer, of course, is the Golden Triangle.

The CIA, in its 1971 analysis of narcotics traffic in the Golden Triangle reported that the largest of the region's seven heroin factories, located just north of Ban Houei Sai, Laos, "is believed capable of processing some 100 kilos of raw opium per day."(16) In other words, the factory is capable of producing 3.6 tons of heroin a year-an enormous output, considering that American addicts only consume about 10.0 tons of heroin annually. Moreover, none of this production is intended for Asian addicts: as we have already mentioned, high-grade no. 4 heroin is too expensive for them; and they either smoke opium or use the inexpensive low-grade no. 3 heroin. In Bangkok, for example, one gram of no. 4 heroin costs sixteen times more than one gram of no. 3. (17) The only market outlets for these heroin laboratories are in the well-heeled West: Europe, with a relatively small addict population, and the United States, which has a large and rapidly increasing addict population.

U.S. military and political activities had played a significant role in shaping these developments. Although opium production continued to increase in Burma and Thailand, there were no major changes in the structure of the traffic during the 1960s. Still enjoying tacit CIA support for their counterinsurgency work, Nationalist Chinese (KMT) military caravans continued to move almost all of Burma's opium exports into northern Thailand, where they were purchased by a Chinese syndicate for domestic distribution and export to Hong Kong or Malaysia. The Shan national revolutionary movement offered a brief challenge to KMT hegemony over the opium trade, but after their most powerful leader was defeated in the 1967 Opium War, the Shan threat evaporated.

After the 1967 Opium War, the KMT solidified its control over the BurmaThailand opium trade. Almost none of the seven hundred tons of raw opium harvested annually in Burma's Shan and Kachin states reaches world markets through any of Burma's ports: instead, it is packed across the rugged Shan hills by mule caravan to the tri-border junction of Burma, Thailand, and Laos. This area is the beginning of two pipelines into the illicit international markets: one shoots across Laos to Saigon, the other heads due south through central Thailand to Bangkok." (18)(For smuggling routes,see Map)

Although Shan rebel bands and Burmese self-defense forces collect a heavy tax from tribal opium farmers and itinerant small merchants who transport raw opium to major Shan States market towns, they control very few of the caravans carrying raw opium south to refineries in the tri-border area, In 1967 one CIA operatiye reported that 90 percent of Burma's opium harvest was carried by Nationalist Chinese army mule caravans based in northern Thailand, 7 percent by Shan armed bands, and about 3 percent by Kachin rebels.(19)

Thailand's northern hill tribes harvest approximately two hundred tons of opium annually, according to a 1968 U.S. Bureau of Narcotics estimate. (20) The Thai government reports that KMT military units and an allied group of Chinese hill traders control almost all of the opium commerce in northern Thailand.

In Laos, CIA clandestine intervention produced changes and upheavals in the narcotics traffic. When political infighting among the Lao elite and the escalating war forced the small Corsican charter airlines out of the opium business in 1965, the CIA's airline, Air America, began flying Meo opium out of the hills to Long Tieng and Vientiane. CIA cross-border intelligence missions into China from Laos reaped an unexpected dividend in 1962 when the Shan rebel leader who organized the forays for the agency began financing the Shan nationalist cause by selling Burmese opium to another CIA protege, Laotian Gen. Phoumi Nosavan. The economic alliance between General Phoumi and the Shans opened up a new trading pattern that diverted increasingly significant quantities of Burmese opium from their normal marketplace in Bangkok. In the late 1960s U.S. air force bombing disrupted Laotian opium production by forcing the majority of the Meo opium farmers to become refugees. However, flourishing Laotian heroin laboratories, which are the major suppliers for the GI market in Vietnam, simply increased their imports of Burmese opium through already established trading relationships.

The importance of these CIA clients in the subsequent growth of the Golden Triangle's heroin trade was revealed, inadvertently, by the agency itself when it leaked a classified report on the Southeast Asian opium traffic to The New York Times. The CIA analysis identified twenty-one opium refineries in the tri-border area where Burma, Thailand, and Laos converge, and reported that seven were capable of producing 90 to 99 percent pure no. 4 heroin. Of these seven heroin refineries, "the most important are located in the areas around Tachilek, Burma; Ban Houei Sai and Nam Keung in Laos; and Mae Salong in Thailand." (21)

Although the CIA did not bother to mention it, many of these refineries are located in areas totally controlled by paramilitary groups closely identified with American military operations in the Golden Triangle area. Mae Salong is headquarters for the Nationalist Chinese Fifth Army, which has been continuously involved in CIA counterinsurgency and intelligence operations since 1950. According to a former CIA operative who worked in the area for a number of years, the heroin laboratory at Nam Keung is protected by Maj. Chao La, commander of Yao mercenary troops for the CIA in northwestern Laos. One of the heroin laboratories near Ban Houei Sai reportedly belongs to Gen. Ouane Rattikone, former commander in chief of the Royal Laotian Army-the only army in the world, except for the U S. army, entirely financed by the U.S. government.(22) The heroin factories near Tachilek are operated by Burmese paramilitary units and Shan rebel armies who control a relatively small percentage of Burma's narcotics traffic. Although few of these Shan groups have any relation to the CIA today, one of the most important chapters in the history of the Shan States' opium trade involves a Shan rebel army closely allied with the CIA. (For location of these laboratories, see Map )

Other sources have revealed the existence of an important heroin laboratory operating in the Vientiane region under the protection of Gen. Ouane Rattikone. Finally, the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics has reports that Gen. Vang Pao, commander of the CIA's Secret Army, has been operating a heroin factory at Long Tieng, headquarters for CIA operations in northern Laos. (23)

Thus, it is with something more than idle curiosity that we turn to an examination of CIA clandestine operations and the concurrent growth of the narcotics traffic in the Golden Triangle.

Laos: Land of the Poppy

Laos is one of those historical oddities like Monaco, Andorra, and Lichtenstein which were somehow left behind when petty principalities were consolidated into great nations. Although both nineteenth-century empire builders and cold war summit negotiators have subscribed to the fiction of Laotian nationhood out of diplomatic convenience, this impoverished little kingdom appears to lack all of the economic and political criteria for nationhood. Not even the Wilsonian principle of ethnic determinism that Versailles peacemakers used to justify the carving up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I validate Laos's existence. Some 8.0 million Lao live in northeast Thailand, but there are only about 1.5 million Lao in Laos. With a total population of between 2 and 3 million and singularly lacking in natural resources, Laos has been plagued by fiscal problems ever since independence in 1954. Unable to finance itself through corporate, mineral, or personal taxes, the Royal Laotian government has filled its coffers and lined its pockets by legalizing or tolerating what its neighbors have chosen to outlaw, much like needy principalities the world over. Monaco gambles, Macao winks at the gold traffic, and the Laotian government tolerates the smuggling of gold, guns, and opium.

While the credit card revolution has displaced paper currency in most of suburban America, peasants and merchants in underdeveloped countries still harbor a healthy distrust for their nations' technicolor currency, preferring to store their hard-earned savings in gold or silver. Asian governments have inadvertently fostered illicit gold trafficking either by imposing a heavy revenueproducing duty on legal gold imports or else limiting the right of most citizens to purchase and hold gold freely; thus, an illicit gold traffic flourishes from Pakistan to the Philippines. Purchased legally on the European market, the gold is flown to Dubai, Singapore, Vientiane, or Macao, where local governments have imposed a relatively low import duty and take little interest in what happens after the tax is paid.

Laos's low duty on imported gold and its government's active participation in the smuggling trade have long made it the major source of illicit gold for Thailand and South Vietnam. Although Laos is the poorest nation in Southeast Asia, Vientiane's licensed brokers have imported from thirty-two to seventy-two tons of gold a year since the American buildup in Vietnam began in 1965. As thousands of free-spending GIs poured into Vietnam during the early years of the war, Saigon's black market prospered and Laos's annual gold imports shot up to seventytwo tons by 1967.(24) The 8.5 percent import duty provided the Royal Lao government with more than 40 percent of its total tax revenues, and the Finance Ministry could not have been happier. (25) However, in 1968 the Tet offensive and the international gold crisis slowed consumer demand in Saigon and plunged the Laotian government into a fiscal crisis. Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma went before the National Assembly and explained that because of the downward trend in the gold market, "one of our principle sources of income will not reach our expectations this year." Faced with what the prime minister described as "an extremely complex and difficult situation," Finance Minister Sisouk na Champassak privately suggested that the government might seek an alternate source of revenue by taxing the clandestine opium trade. (26) When the establishment of a gold market in Singapore in 1969 challenged Laos's position as the major gold entrepot in Southeast Asia and forced the Finance Ministry to drop the import duty from 8.5 to 5.5 percent in 1970, (27) Sisouk na Champassak told a BBC reporter, "The only export we can develop here is opium, and we should increase our production and export of it." (28)

As minister of finance and acting minister of defense, Sisouk is one of the most important government officials in Laos, and his views on the opium trade are fairly representative of the ruling elite. Most Laotian leaders realize that their nation's only valuable export commodity is opium, and they promote the traffic with an aggressiveness worthy of Japanese electronics executives or German automobile manufacturers. Needless to say, this positive attitude toward the narcotics traffic has been something of an embarrassment to American advisers serving in Laos, and in deference to their generous patrons, the Laotian elite have generally done their best to pretend that opium trafficking is little more than a quaint tribal custom.(29) As a result, violent coups, assassinations, and bitter political infighting spawned by periodic intramural struggles for control of the lucrative opium traffic have often seemed clownlike or quixotic to outside observers. But they suddenly gain new meaning when examined in light of the economics and logistics of the opium trade.

Since the late 1950s the opium trade in northern Laos has involved both the marketing of the locally grown produce and the transit traffic in Burmese opium. Traditionally most of Laos's domestic production has been concentrated in the mountains of northeastern Laos, although it is now greatly reduced because of massive U.S. bombing and a vigorous opium eradication program in Pathet Lao liberated zones.(30) Designated on Royal Lao Army maps as Military Region 11, this area comprises the Plain of Jars and most of the Meo highlands that extend from the northern rim of the Vientiane Plain to the border of North Vietnam. While northwestern Laos also has extensive poppy cultivation, opium production has never achieved the same high level as in the northeast; soil conditions are not as favorable, the traffic has not been as well organized, and tribal populations are more scattered. For example, there are between 150,000 and 200,000 Meo living in the northeast, but only about 50,000 Meo in the northwest. As a result, the opium trade in northwestern Laos, now known as Military Region 1, was always secondary in importance during the colonial era and the early years of the postcolonial opium traffic. However, in the mid 1960s Shan and Nationalist Chinese opium caravans began crossing the Mekong into Laos's extreme northwest with large quantities of Burmese opium. As dozens of refineries began springing up along the Laotian bank of the Mekong to process the Burmese opium, the center of Laos's opium trade shifted from the Plain of Jars to Ban Houei Sai in northwestern Laos.

The mountains of northern Laos are some of the most strikingly beautiful in the world. Shrouded with mile-high clouds during the rainy season, they are strongly reminiscent of traditional Chinese scroll paintings. Row upon row of sharp ridges wind across the landscape, punctuated by steep peaks that conjure up images of dragons' heads, towerin monuments, or rearing horses. The bedrock is limestone, and centuries of wind and rain have carved an incredible landscape from this porous, malleable material. And it is the limestone mountains that attract the Meo opium farmers. The delicate opium poppy, which withers and di s in strongly acidic soil, thrives on limestone soil. Tribal opium farmers are well aware of the poppy's need for alkaline soil, and tend to favor mountain hollows studded with limestone outcroppings as locations for their poppy fields.

But the mountain terrain that is so ideal for poppy cultivation makes long-range travel difficult for merchant caravans. When the French tried to encourage hill tribe production during the colonial era, they concentrated most of their efforts on Meo villages near the Plain of Jars, where communications were relatively well developed, and they abandoned much of the Laotian highlands to petty smugglers. Desperate for a way to finance their clandestine operations, French intelligence agencies expropriated the hill tribe opium trade in the last few years of the First Indochina War and used military aircraft to link the Laotian poppy fields with opium dens in Saigon. But the military aircraft that had overcome the mountain barriers for Laotian merchants were withdrawn in 1954, along with the rest of the French Expeditionary Corps, and Laos's opium trade fell upon hard times.

Corsican Aviation Pioneers: "Air Opium," 1955-1965

After France's military withdrawal in 1954, several hundred French war veterans, colonists, and gangsters stayed on in Laos. Some of them, mainly Corsicans, started a number of small charter airlines, which became colorfully and collectively known as "Air Opium." Ostensibly founded to supply otherwise unavailable transportation for civilian businessmen and diplomats, these airlines gradually restored Laos's link to the drug markets of South Vietnam that had vanished with the departure of the French air force in 1954. At first, progress was hampered by unfavorable political conditions in South Vietnam, and the three fledgling airlines that pioneered these new routes enjoyed only limited success (31)

Perhaps the most famous of the early French opium pilots was Gerard Labenski. His aircraft was based at Phong Savan on the Plain of Jars, where he managed the Snow Leopard Inn, a hotel that doubled as a warehouse for outgoing opium shipments (32).Another of these aviation pioneers was Rene "Babal" Enjabal, a former French air force officer whose airline was popularly known as "Babal Air Force" (33) The most tenacious member of this shadowy trio was Roger Zoile. His charter airline was allied with Paul Louis Levet's Bangkok-based Corsican syndicate.

Levet was probably the most important Marseille underworld figure regularly supplying European heroin laboratories with morphine base from Southeast Asia in the late 1950s. Levet arrived in Saigon in 1953-1954 and got his start smuggling gold and piasters on the Saigon-Marseille circuit. After the gold traffic dried up in 1955, he became involved in the opium trade and moved to Bangkok, where he established the Pacific Industrial Company. According to a U.S. Bureau of Narcotics report filed in 1962, this company was used as a cover to smuggle substantial quantities of morphine base from northern Thailand to heroin laboratories in Europe. Through a network of four prominent Corsican gangsters based in Vientiane, Phnom Penh, and Saigon, Levet used Zoile's airline to move morphine base from the Golden Triangle region to seaports in Thailand and Indochina (34) There was an enormous amount of shipping between Southeast Asia and Europe, and so arranging for deliveries presented no problem. Saigon was particularly convenient as a transshipment point, since substantial numbers of French freighters carrying corsican crews still sailed direct to Marseille. Even though Levet's syndicate was preoccupied with the European traffic, it also had a share of the regional opium trade.(35)

Although all these men were competent pilots and committed opium smugglers, the South Vietnamese government had adopted an intolerant attitude toward the opium traffic that seriously hampered their operations. In 1955 South Vietnam's puritanical President Diem closed most of Saigon's opium dens and announced his determination to eradicate the drug traffic. Denied secure access to Saigon, the Corsican air smugglers had to devise an elaborate set of routes, transfers, and drop zones, which complicated their work and restricted the amount of narcotics they could ship. However, only three years later President Diem's chief adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu, reopened the dens to finance his secret police and became a silent partner in a Corsican charter airline.(36)

Named Air Laos Commerciale, the airline was managed by the most powerful member of Saigon's Corsican underworld, Bonaventure "Rock" Francisci. Tall and strikingly handsome, Francisci sported a thin, black moustache and a natural charm that won friends easily. Beginning in 1958 Air Laos Commerciale made daily flights from its headquarters at Vientiane's Wattay Airport, picking up three hundred to six hundred kilos of raw opium from secondary, Laotian airports (usually dirt runways in northern Laos) and delivering the cargo to drop points in South Vietnam, Cambodia, and the Gulf of Siam. While these opium deliveries were destined for Southeast Asian consumers, he also supplied Corsican heroin manufacturers in Marseille. Although a relative latecomer to the field, Bonaventure Francisci's airline had important advantages that other Corsican airlines lacked. His rivals had to take elaborate precautions before venturing into South Vietnam, but, thanks to his relationship with Nhu, Francisci's aircraft shuttled back and forth to convenient drop zones just north of Saigon. (37)

With easy access to Saigon's market restored, opium production in northern Laos, which had declined in the years 1954-1958, quickly revived. During the opium season, Corsican charter companies made regular flights from Phong Savan or Vientiane to isolated provincial capitals and market towns scattered across northern Laos-places such as Sam Neua, Phong Saly, Muong Sing, Nam Tha, Sayaboury, and Ban Houei Sai. Each of these towns served as a center for local opium trade managed by resident Chinese shopkeepers. Every spring these Chinese merchants loaded their horses or mules with salt, thread, iron bars, silver coins, and assorted odds and ends and rode into the surrounding hills to barter with hundreds of hill tribe opium farmers for their tiny bundles of raw opium. (38) Toward the end of every harvest season Corsican aircraft would land near these towns, purchase the opium, and fly it back to Phong Savan or Vientiane, where it was stored until a buyer in Saigon, Singapore, or Indonesia placed an order. (39)

Francisci also prospered, and by 1962 he had a fleet of three new twin-engine Beechcrafts making hundreds of deliveries a month. With his debonair manner he became something of a local celebrity. He gave interviews to the Vientiane press corps, speaking proudly of his air drops to surrounded troops or his services for famous diplomats. When asked about the opium business, he responded, "I only rent the planes, I don't know what missions they're used for."(40)

But unfortunately for Francisci's public relations, one of his pilots was arrested in 1962 and Air Laos Commerciale's opium smuggling was given international publicity. The abortive mission was piloted by Rene Enjabal, the retired air force officer who had founded Babal Air Force. In October 1962 Enjabal and his mechanic took off from Vientiane's Wattay Airport and flew south to Savannakhet where they picked up twenty-nine watertight tin crates, each packed with twenty kilos of raw opium and wrapped in a buoyant life belt. Enjabal flew south over Cambodia and dropped the six hundred kilos to a small fishing boat waiting at a prearranged point in mid-ocean. On the return flight to Vientiane, Enjabal fell asleep at the controls of his plane, drifted over Thailand, and was forced to land at a Thai air force base by two Thai T-28 fighters. When his "military charter" orders from the Lao government failed to convince Thai authorities he was not a spy, Enjabal confessed that he had been on an opium run to the Gulf of Siam. Relieved that it was nothing more serious, his captors allowed him to return to Vientiane after serving a nominal six-week jail sentence. While Enjabal was being browbeaten by the Thai, the opium boat moved undisturbed across the Gulf of Siam and delivered its cargo to smugglers waiting on the east coast of the Malayan peninsula. Although Enjabal had earned a paltry fifteen dollars an hour for his trouble, Francisci may have grossed up to twenty thousand dollars for his role in this nautical adventure.(41)

While this -unfortunate incident cost Francisci most of his legitimate business, it in no way hampered his opium smuggling. Even though Enjabal's downfall was the subject of a feature article in Life magazine, Francisci continued to operate with the same brash self-confidence. And with good reason. For not only was he protected by South Vietnam's most powerful politician, Ngo Dinh Nhu, he was allied with the allpowerful Guerini syndicate of Marseille. During the period these Corsican airlines operated in Laos, the Guerini brothers were the unchallenged masters of the French underworld, and lords of a criminal empire that stretched across the globe. (42) All of Francisci's competitors suffered mysterious accidents and sudden arrests, but he operated with absolute impunity. These political connections gave him a decisive advantage over his competitors, and he became Indochina's premier opium smuggler. Like the Guerini brothers in Marseille, Francisci despised competition and used everything from plastique explosives to the South Vietnamese police to systematically eliminate all his rivals.

Francisci's first victim was none other than the catnapping Rene Enjabal. On November 19, 1959, Vietnamese police raided a remote dirt runway near Ban Me Thuot in the Central Highlands shortly after a twin-engine Beechcraft belonging to Rene Enjabal landed carrying 293 kilos of Laotian opium. After arresting the pilot and three henchmen waiting at the airstrip, the Vietnamese impounded the aircraft. (43) With the loss of his plane, Enjabal had no alternative. Within several months he was flying for the man who in all Probability was the architect of his downfall-Bonaventure "Rock" Francisci. (44) The Vietnamese took no legal action against Enjabal and released the pilot, Desclerts, after a relatively short jail term. Desclerts returned to France and, according to a late 1971 report, is working with Corsican syndicates to ship bulk quantities of heroin to the United States. (45)

After Enjabal's airline collapsed, Francisci's most important competitor for the lucrative South Vietnamese market was Gerard Labenski, one of Air Opium's earliest pioneers, whom many considered the best bush pilot in Laos. Francisci bitterly resented his competition, and once tried to eliminate Labenski by blowing up his Cessna 195 with plastique as it sat on the runway at Phong Savan. When that failed, Francisci used his contacts with the South Vietnamese government to have his rival's entire seven-man syndicate arrested. On August 25, 1960, shortly after he landed near the town of Xuan Loc, fortyfive miles north of Saigon with 220 kilos of raw opium, Vietnamese police descended on Labenski's entire syndicate, arrested him and impounded his aircraft. Labenski and his chief Saigon salesman, Francois Mittard, were given five-year jail sentences, the others three years apiece. (46)

After languishing in a Vietnamese prison for more than two years, Labenski and Mittard were so embittered at Francisci's betrayal that they broke the Corsican rule of silence and told U.S. narcotics investigators everything they knew about his syndicate, claiming that their arrests had been engineered by Francisci to force them out of business. But Francisci was too well protected to be compromised by informers, and Air Laos Commerciale continued flying until 1965, when political upheavals in Laos forced all the Corsican airlines out of business. As for Mittard and Labenski, they were released from prison in 1964 and left Saigon almost immediately for Laos. (47)

While Enjabal and Labenski concentrated on local markets, Paul Louis Levet's Bangkok-based syndicate competed directly with Francisci for the European market. His Corsican rivals always considered Levet the "most shrewd of all the persons smuggling opium out of Laos," but he, too, was forced out of business by police action. On July 18, 1963, Levet received a telegram from Saigon that read, Everything OK. Try to have friend meet me in Saigon the 19th. Am in room 33 Continental Hotel. [signed] Poncho.

The wire was a prearranged signal. Levet and his assistant, Michel Libert, packed eighteen kilos of Burmese opium into a brown suitcase, put it in the trunk of Levet's blue Citroen sedan, and drove out to Bangkok's Don Muang Airport. Just as they were making the transfer to a courier who was ticketed on a regular commercial flight to Saigon, Thai police closed in. The unfortunate Libert was given five years in prison, but Levet was released for "lack of evidence" and deported. Levet disappeared without a trace, while Libert, after serving his full jail term, left for Laos, where he resumed an active role in Indochina's Corsican underworld.

While Francisci is the only one of these Corsican racketeers believed to have been allied with Ngo Dinh Nhu, all of the charter airlines had to reach an accommodation with the Laotian government. All airports in Laos are classified as military terminals, and permission to take off and land requires an order from the Royal Laotian Army. Opium runs were usually classified as requisition militaire-military charters-and as such were approved by the Laotian high command. One Time correspondent who examined Air Laos Commerciale's log books in November 1962 noted that a high percentage of its flights were listed as requisition militaire. (48)

Despite the destructive infighting of the various Corsican airlines, they proved to be reliable opium suppliers, and the Laos-Saigon opium commerce flourished. Guaranteed reliable access to international markets, Laos's opium production climbed steadily during the ten-year period that the Corsicans controlled its opium economy; in 1953 Laos's annual harvest was estimated at 50 tons of raw opium, but in 1968 it had expanded to 100-150 tons. (49) Moreover, these syndicates, most notably Francisci's and Levet's, made regular morphine base shipments from Southeast Asia to heroin laboratories in Italy, Germany, and Marseille. Although Southeast Asian morphine still accounted for a relatively small proportion of European heroin production in the late 1950s and early 1960s, these shipments established the first links of what was to be a veritable pipeline between the Golden Triangle's poppy fields and Marseille's heroin laboratories-links that would take on added importance as Turkey's opium production ebbed toward abolition in the late 1960s.

Although they were forced out of business in 1965 when Laotian Gen. Ouane Rattikone decided to monopolize the trade, these syndicates later served as the link between Laotian heroin laboratories and American distributors when Golden Triangle laboratories began producing no. 4 heroin in the early 1970s.

Gen. Phourni Nosavan: "Feudalism Is Still with US"

According to Gen. Ouane Rattikone, the man who issued the "requisition militaire" and controlled much of the opium traffic was Gen. Phoumi Nosavan, CIA protege and political leader of the Laotian right wing. (50) Phoumi Nosavan was just another ambitious young colonel in 1958 when an unexpected electoral victory by the leftist Pathet Lao movement brought a neutralist government to power and panicked the U.S. mission. Horrified at the thought that Laos might eventually go left, the U.S. mission decided that special measures were called for. Almost immediately the CIA financed the formation of a right-wing coalition, and several weeks later the State Department plunged the neutralist government into a fiscal crisis by cutting off all aid. Little more than three months after the elections Prime Minister Souvanna Phourna and his neutralist government resigned. When a right-wing government took office the new prime minister, Phoui Sananikone, declared, "We are anticommunists." (51)

Col. Phoumi Nosavan was one of the bright young men the CIA picked to organize the right wing. Backed by the CIA, Phourni became a cabinet minister in February 1959 and a general several months later. (52) With his personal CIA agent always by his side, General Phoumi went on to plot coups, rig elections, and help the CIA build up its Secret Army; in short, he became the major pawn in the CIA's determined effort to keep Laos's government militantly antiCommunist. However, in 1961 the Kennedy administration opted for a neutralist coalition rather than risk an armed confrontation with the Soviet Union over Laos, and General Phoumi was ordered to merge his right-wing government into a tripartite coalition. When General Phoumi refused despite personal appeals from President Kennedy and the assistant secretary of state, the State Department had his personal CIA agent transferred out of the country and in February 1962 cut off the $3 million a month aid it had been supplying his government.(53)

Desperate for funds but determined not to resign, Pboumi turned to the opium traffic as an alternate source of funds for his army and government. Although he had controlled the traffic for several years and collected a payoff from both Corsican and Chinese smugglers, he was not actively involved, and his percentage represented only a small share of the total profits. Furthermore, Laotian opium merchants were still preoccupied with marketing locally grown opium, and very little Burmese opium was entering international markets through Laos. The obvious solution to General Phoumi's fiscal crisis was for his government to become directly involved in the import and export of Burmese opium. This decision ultimately led to the growth of northwest Laos as one of the largest heroin-producing centers in the world.

Adhering to his nation's feudal traditions, General Phoumi delegated responsibility for the task to Gen. Ouane Rattikone, commander of Military Region I and warlord of northwestern Laos. General Ouane recalls that he was appointed chairman of the semiofficial Laotian Opium Administration in early 1962 and charged with the responsibility of arranging Burmese opium imports. (54) Working through a commander in the Secret Army in Ban Houei Sai, he contacted a Shan rebel leader employed by the Agency in the Golden Triangle region who arranged the first deliveries of Burmese opium several months later.(55) General Ouane is proud of this historic achievement, for these were the first major opium caravans to cross the Mekong River into Laos.

When asked whether he exported the Burmese opium by dropping it in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam, General Ouane responded:

No, that is stupid and done only by small merchants and not great merchants. . . . We rented Dakotas [C-47s] from the civil aviation companies and then dropped the opium into the Gulf of Siam. The opium was wrapped in four or five layers of plastic and then attached to floats. It was dropped to small fishing boats, taken to fishing ports in South Vietnam, and then it disappeared. We are not stupid; we are serious merchants. (56)

General Ouane says these early shipments were quite profitable, and claims that they provided General Phourni with an average income of about $35,000 a month during 1962.

But despite General Ouane's best efforts, a series of military and financial reverses soon forced General Phourni to merge his right-wing government into the tripartite coalition. Phoumi's government had simply ordered the National Bank to print more money when American aid was cut off in February; the foreign exchange backing for Laotian currency declined by 30 percent in six Months and consumer prices in Vientiane jumped by 20 percent. General Phoumi had gone on a whirlwind tour of Asia's anti-Communist nations to appeal for aid, but only South Korea was willing to help. (57) When his rightist troops suffered a disastrous defeat at Nam Tha, northwestern Laos, in May 1962, General Phourni acknowledged his failure and in June merged his government into a neutralist coalition headed by Prime Minister Souvanna Phourna.

But the price of General Phourni's compliance came high. Although he yielded some of his political power, he demanded compensatory economic concessions from the neutralist government. Bartering away several powerful ministries, Phourni retained control over the Finance Ministry and won the right to monopolize much of Vientiane's thriving consumer economy. With the prime minister's tacit consent, he established a variety of lucrative monopolies over the capital's vice trades and legitimate commercial activities. (58)

One of his enterprises was an offensive but profitable gambling casino in downtown Vientiane that one journalist described as "an ugly, fivestory building that stank like an Indonesian urinal." When he announced plans to erect similar monstrosities in every major Laotian city, the king categorically refused to allow one in Luang Prabang, the royal capital, and local authorities in Thakhek raised equally vehement objections. But Phourni was not daunted by these minor reverses in the establishment of his financial empire. Gold trafficking was even more lucrative than gambling, and the Ministry of Finance granted General Phourni's Bank of Laos a monopoly on the import of gold, which netted him from $300,000 to $500,000 a year. (59)

The opium trade, however, was the most profitable of all ventures. General Phoumi opened a seedy, ramshackle opium den in Vientiane that could accommodate 150 smokers. To ward off any possible criticism from his free world allies, Phourni had a sign hung over the entrance to his palace of dreams "Detoxification Clinic." When a French journalist asked Prime Minister Souvanna Phourna why this eyesore was allowed to remain open, he replied, "Feudalism is still with US." (60)

Although Phoumi had abandoned his plans for fiscal independence from the United States, Gen. Ouane Rattikone continued to manage the Laotian Opium Administration with considerable success. Larger Shan caravans were entering northwestern Laos every year, and from 1962 to 1964 profits on exports to South Vietnam tripled. According to the Laotian Opium Administration's ledger, which General Ouane now stores in an upstairs closet of his Vientiane villa, November 1963 was a typical month: 1,146 kilos of raw opium were shipped to South Vietnam, netting $97,410. (61)

But Phourni's parsimonious management of his monopolies produced serious tensions in the right-wing camp, and were a major cause of the April 19, 1964, coup that toppled him from power. Not only did he monopolize the most lucrative portions of Vientiane's economy, but he refused to share his profits with the other right-wing generals.

The commander of the Vientiane Military Region, Gen. Kouprasith Abbay, considered the capital his rightful economic preserve, and was bitterly resentful toward Phourni. Gen. Ouane Rattikone harbored somewhat similar feelings: more than seven years after the coup, the genial, rotund General Ouane still knits his brow in anger when he recalls that Phourni paid him a monthly salary of two hundred dollars to manage an opium administration making more than a million dollars a year. (62) Moreover, Phourni's "understanding" with Prime Minister Souvanna Phourna had softened his hostility toward the neutralist government; and this cost him a great deal of political influence among the extreme right wing, which included both Kouprasith and Ouane.

Although the ostensible motivation for the right-wing coup of April 19, 1964, was to eliminate the neutralist army and make the prime minister more responsive to the right wing, the generals seem to have devoted most of their energy to breaking up Phourni's financial empire. (63) The coup began at 4:00 A.m. as General Kouprasith's troops seized the city, captured most of the neutralist army officers, and placed the prime minister under house arrest. There was no resistance and virtually no bloodshed. While the threat of a U.S. aid cutoff convinced Kouprasith and Ouane to release the prime minister from house arrest, nothing could deter them from stripping Phourni of his power. (64) On May 2 General Phourni resigned his portfolio as minister of defense. That same day, the Ministry of Finance cancelled the import license for Sogimex Company, one of Phourni's businesses, which had enjoyed a monopoly on the import of all alcoholic beverages. The Revolutionary Committee closed his gambling casino, and the Ministry of Finance broke the Bank of Laos's monopoly on gold imports. (65)

But in the best comic opera tradition, General Phoumi tried to recoup his lost empire by launching a countercoup on February 2, 1965. After four separate groups of soldiers wearing three different color-coded scarves charged about Vientiane firing off heavy artillery and machine guns for four or five days, Phourni finally gave up and fled to Thailand. (66) The situation was so confusing that General Ouane and General Kouprasith held a press conference on February 8 to proclaim their victory and to explain that there had most definitely been a coup-their coup.(67)

As the victors, Kouprasith and Ouane divided up what remained of General Phourni's financial empire. While Kouprasith inherited most of the fallen general's real estate holdings, brothels, and opium dens in the Vientiane region, General Ouane assumed full control over the opium trade in northwestern Laos.

Ouane's accession to Phourni's former position in the drug trade brought an end to the activities of the Corsican "Air Opium" charter airlines. Unwilling to tolerate any competition, General Ouane refused to issue them requisitions militaires, thereby denying them access to Laotian airports. This made it impossible for the Corsican airlines to continue operating and forced them out of the opium transport business. (68) However, General Ouane had seriously overestimated his air logistic capabilities, and the move produced a major crisis for Laos's opium trade.

As it turned out, Ouane probably could not have picked a worse time to force the Corsicans out of business. Laotian military airpower was at a premium in 1964 and 1965: bombing operations along the Ho Chi Minh Trail were just getting underway; Lao T-28 fighters were being used in clandestine reprisal raids against North Vietnam; and renewed fighting on the Plain of Jars required lavish air support. (69) The commander of the Laotian air force was determined to give these military operations top priority, and refused to allocate air transports for General Ouane's opium runs to Ban Houei Sai.

In the Meo highlands of northeastern Laos the situation was even more critical. Capture of the Plain of Jars by Pathet Lao rebels in 1964 restricted government aircraft to temporary dirt landing strips on the surrounding mountain ridges. Heavy C-47 transports were almost useless for this kind of flying, and the Laotian air force had almost no light observation planes. Wartime conditions had increased Meo dependence on poppy cultivation, and the lack of air transport created serious economic problems for hill tribe opium farmers. Since the CIA was using the Meo population to combat Pathet Lao forces in the mountains of northeastern Laos, the prosperity and well being of this tribe was of paramount importance to the agency's success. By 1965 the CIA had created a Meo army of thirty thousand men that guarded radar installations vital to bombing North Vietnam, rescued downed American pilots, and battled Pathet Lao guerrillas.

Without air transport for their opium, the Meo faced economic ruin. There was simply no form of air transport available in northern Laos except the CIA's charter airline, Air America And according to several sources, Air America began flying opium from mountain villages north and east of the Plain of Jars to Gen. Vang Pao's headquarters at Long Tieng. (70)

Air America was known to be flying Meo opium as late as 1971. Meo village leaders in the area west of the Plain of Jars, for example, claim that their 1970 and 1971 opium harvests were bought up by Vang Pao's officers and flown to Long Tieng on Air America UH-lH helicopters. This opium was probably destined for heroin laboratories in Long Tieng or Vientiane, and ultimately, for GI addicts in Vietnam. (71)

The U.S. Embassy in Vientiane adopted an attitude of benign neglect toward the opium traffic. When one American journalist wrote the Embassy complaining that Laotian officials were involved in the drug trade, U.S. Ambassador G. McMurtrie Godley responded in a letter dated December 2, 1970:

"Regarding your information about opium traffic between Laos and the United States, the purchase of opium in Southeast Asia is certainly less difficult than in other parts of the world, but I believe the Royal Laotian Government takes its responsibility seriously to prohibit international opium traffic. . . . However, latest information available to me indicated that all of Southeast Asia produces only 5% of narcotics which are, unfortunately, illegally imported to Great Britain and the US. As you undoubtedly are already aware, our government is making every effort to contain this traffic and I believe the Narcotics Bureau in Washington D.C. can give you additional information if you have some other inquiries."(72)

But the latest information available to Ambassador Godley should have indicated that most of the heroin being used by American GIs in Vietnam was coming from Laotian laboratories. The exact location of Laos's flourishing laboratories was common knowledge among even the most junior U.S. bureaucrats.

To Americans living in cities and suburbs cursed with the heroin plague, it may seem controversial, even shocking, that any U.S. government agency would condone any facet of the international drug traffic. But when viewed from the perspective of historical precedent and the demands of mountain warfare in northern Laos, Air America's involvement and the U.S. Embassy's tolerant attitude seem almost inevitable. Rather than sending U.S. combat troops into Laos, four successive American Presidents and their foreign policy advisers worked through the CIA to build the Meo into the only effective army in Laos. The fundamental reason for American complicity in the Laotian opium traffic lies in these policy decisions, and they can only be understood in the context of the secret war in Laos.

Secret War, Secret Strategy in Laos

Noting with alarm the renewed guerrilla activity in South Vietnam and Laos in the late 1950s, American intelligence analysts interpreted these reports as the first signs of Communist plans for the subversion and conquest of Southeast Asia. And so CIA operations with Meo guerrillas in Laos began in 1959 as a part of a regional intelligence gathering program. General Edward G. Lansdale, who directed much of the Defense Department's strategic planning on Indochina during the early years of the Kennedy administration, recalls that these hill tribe operations were set up to monitor Communist infiltration:

"The main thought was to have an early warning, trip-wire sort of thing with these tribes in the mountains getting intelligence on North Vietnamese movements. This would be a part of a defensive strategy of saving the riceproducing lowlands of Thailand and Vietnam by scaling off the mountain infiltration routes from China and North Vietnam."(73)

In the minds of geopolitical strategists in the CIA's Special Operations division, potential infiltration routes stretched from the Shan hills of northeastern Burma, through the rugged Laotian mountains, and southward into the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. According to one retired CIA operative, Lt. Col. Lucien Conein, Agency personnel were sent to Laos in 1959 to supervise eight Green Beret teams then training Meo guerrillas on the Plain of Jars. (74) In 1960 and 1961 the CIA recruited elements of Nationalist Chinese paramilitary units based in northern Thailand to patrol the ChinaBurma border area (75) and sent Green Berets into South Vietnam's Central Highlands to organize hill tribe commando units for intelligence and sabotage patrols along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. (76) Finally, in 1962 one CIA operative based in northwestern Laos began sending trained Yao and Lahu tribesmen into the heart of China's Yunnan Province to monitor road traffic and tap telephones.(77)

While the U.S. military sent half a million troops to fight a conventional war in South Vietnam, the mountain war has required only a handful of American personnel. "I always felt," said General Lansdale, "that a small group of Americans organizing the local population was the way to counter Communist wars of national liberation." (78)

American paramilitary personnel in Laos have tended to serve long tours of duty, some of them for a decade or more, and have been given an enormous amount of personal power. If the conventional war in South Vietnam is best analyzed in terms of the impersonal bureaucracies that spewed out policies and programs, the secret war in Laos is most readily understood through the men who fought it.

Three men, perhaps more than any of the others, have left their personal imprint on the conduct of the secret war: Edgar Buell, Anthony Poe, and William Young. And each in his own way illustrates a different aspect of America's conscious and unconscious complicity in the Laotian opium traffic.

William Young, perhaps one of the most effective agents ever, was born in the Burmese Shan States, where his grandfather had been a missionary to the hill tribes. Arriving in Burma at the turn of the century, Grandfather Young opened a Baptist mission in Kengtung City and began preaching to the nearby Lahu bill tribes. Although they understood little of his Christian message, a local oracle had once prophesied the coming of a white deity, and the Lahu decided that Reverend Young was God.(79) His son, Harold, later inherited his divinity and used it to organize Lahu intelligence gathering forays into southern China for the CIA during the 1950s. When William was looking for a job in 1958 his father recommended him to the CIA, and he was hired as a confidential interpreter-translator. A skilled linguist who spoke five of the local languages, he probably knew more about mountain minorities than any other American in Laos, and the CIA rightly regarded him as its "tribal expert." Because of his sophisticated understanding of the hill tribes, he viewed the opium problem from the perspective of a hill tribe farmer. Until a comprehensive crop substitution program was initiated, he felt nothing should be done to interfere with the opium traffic. In a September 1971 interview, Young explained his views:

"Every now and then one of the James Bond types would decide that the way to deal with the problem was to detonate or machine-gun the factories. But I always talked them out of it. As long as there is opium in Burma somebody will market it. This kind of thing would only hurt somebody and not really deal with the problem."(80)

If William Young was too sympathetic toward the hill tribes to interfere with the opium trade, Anthony Poe was indifferent to the problem. A marine in the Pacific during World War 11, Poe joined the CIA's Special Operations division sometime after the war and quickly earned a reputation as one of its crack clandestine warfare operatives in Asia. (81) Just prior to his arrival in Southeast Asia, he played an important role in the CIA's Tibetan operations. When the CIA decided to back Tibet's religious ruler, the Dalai Lama, in his feud with Peking, Anthony Poe recruited Khamba tribesmen in northeastern India, escorted them to Camp Hate in Colorado for training, and accompanied them into Tibet on long-range sabotage missions.(82) His first assignment in Indochina was with anti-Sihanouk mercenaries along the Cambodian border in South Vietnam, and in 1963 Poe was sent to Laos as chief adviser to Gen. Vang Pao. (83) Several years later he was transferred to northwestern Laos to supervise Secret Army operations in the three-border area and work with Yao tribesmen. The Yao remember "Mr. Tony" as a drinker, an authoritarian commander who bribed and threatened to get his way, and a mercurial leader who offered his soldiers 500 kip (one dollar) for an ear and 5,000 kip for a severed head when accompanied by a Pathet Lao army cap. (84) His attitude toward the opium traffic was erratic. According to a former Laos USAID official, Poe refused to allow opium on his aircraft and once threatened to throw a Lao soldier, with half a kilo of opium, out of an airborne plane. At the same time, he ignored the prospering heroin factories along the Mekong River, and never stopped any of Ouane Rattikone's officers from using U.S.-supplied facilities to manage the drug traffic.

The most curious of this CIA triumvirate is Edgar "Pop" Buell, originally a farmer from Steuben County, Indiana. Buell first came to Laos in 1960 as an agricultural volunteer for International Voluntary Services (IVS), a Bible Belt edition of the Peace Corps.(85) He was assigned to the Plain of Jars, where the CIA was building up its secret Meo army, and became involved in the Agency's activities largely through circumstance and his own God-given anti-Communism. As CIA influence spread through the Meo villages ringing the Plain of Jars, Buell became a one-man supply corps, dispatching Air America planes to drop rice, meat, and other necessities the CIA had promised to deliver."(86) Buell played the innocent country boy and claimed his work was humanitarian aid for Meo refugees. However, his operations were an integral part of the CIA program.

As part of his effort to strengthen the Meo economy and increase the tribe's effectiveness as a military force, Buell utilized his agricultural skills to improve Meo techniques for planting and cultivating opium. "If you're gonna grow it, grow it good," Buell told the Meo, "but don't let anybody smoke the stuff." Opium production increased but, thanks to modern drugs that Buell supplied the Meo, local consumption for medicinal purposes declined. (87) Thus, more opium than ever was available for the international markets.

Since there were too few U.S. operatives to assume complete responsibility for daily operations in the hills of Laos, the CIA usually selected one leader from every hill tribe as its surrogate commander. The CIA's chosen ally recruited his fellow tribesmen as mercenaries, paid their salaries with CIA money, and led them in battle. Because the CIA only had as much influence with each tribe as its surrogate commander, it was in the agency's interest to make these men local despots by concentrating military and economic power in their hands. During the First Indochina War, French commandos had used the same technique to build up a force of six thousand Meo guerrillas on the Plain of Jars under the command of Touby Lyfoung. Recognizing the importance of opium in the Meo economy, the French flew Meo opium to Saigon on military transports and reinforced Touby Lyfoung's authority by making him their exclusive opium broker.

But when the CIA began organizing its Meo army in 1960, only six years after the French disbanded theirs, it found Touby unsuitable for command. Always the consummate politician, Touby had gotten the best of the bargain from the French and had never committed his troops to a head-on fight. As one Meo veteran fondly remembers, "Touby always told us to fire a few shots and run." The CIA wanted a real slugger who would take casualties, and in a young Meo officer named Vang Pao they found him.

Touby had once remarked of Vang Pao, "He is a pure military officer who doesn't understand that after the war there is a peace. And one must be strong to win the peace." (88), For Vang Pao, peace is a distant, childhood memory. Vang Pao saw battle for the first time in 1945 at the age of thirteen, while working as an interpreter for French commandos who had parachuted onto the Plain of Jars to organize anti-Japanese resistance.(89) Although he became a lieutenant in the newly formed Laotian army, Vang Pao spent most of the First Indochina War on the Plain of Jars with Touby Lyfoung's Meo irregulars. In April 1954 he led 850 hill tribe commandos through the rugged mountains of Sam Neua Province in a vain attempt to relieve the doomed French garrison at Dien Bien Phu.

When the First Indochina War ended in 1954, Vang Pao returned to regular duty in the Laotian army. He advanced quickly to the rank of major and was appointed commander of the Tenth Infantry Battalion, which was assigned to the mountains east of the Plain of Jars. Vang Pao had a good enough record as a wartime commando leader; in his new command Vang Pao would first display the personal corruption that would later turn him into such a despotic warlord.

In addition to his regular battalion, Vang Pao was also commander of Meo self-defense forces in the Plain of Jars region. Volunteers had been promised regular allotments of food and money, but Vang Pao pocketed these salaries, and most went unpaid for months at a time. When one Meo lieutenant demanded that the irregulars be given their back pay, Vang Pao shot him in the leg. That settled the matter for the moment, but several months later the rising chorus of complaints finally came to the attention of Provincial Army Commander Col. Kham Hou Boussarath. In early 1959, Colonel Kham Hou called Vang Pao to his headquarters in Meng Khouang, and ordered him to pay up. Several days later thirty of Vang Pao's soldiers hidden in the brush beside the road tried to assassinate Colonel Kham Hou as he was driving back from an inspection tour of the frontier areas and was approaching the village of Lat Houang. But it was twilight and most of the shots went wild. Kham Hou floored the accelerator and emerged from the gantlet unscathed.

As soon as he reached his headquarters, Colonel Kham Hou radioed a full report to Vientiane. The next morning Army Chief of Staff Ouane Rattikone arrived in Meng Khouang. Weeping profusely, Vang Pao prostrated himself before Ouane and begged for forgiveness. Perhaps touched by this display of emotion or else influenced by the wishes of U.S. special forces officers working with the Meo, General Ouane decided not to punish Vang Pao. However, most of the Laotian high command seemed to feel that his career was now finished. (90)

But Vang Pao was to be rescued from obscurity by unforeseen circumstances that made his services invaluable to the Laotian right wing and the CIA.

About the same time that Vang Pao was setting up his abortive ambush, Gen. Phoumi Nosavan was beginning his rise to power. In the April 1959 National Assembly elections, Phoumi's candidates scored victory after victory, thus establishing him as Laos's first real strong man. However, the election was blatantly rigged, and aroused enormous resentment among politically aware elements of the population. The American involvement in election fixing was obvious, and there were even reports that CIA agents had financed some of the vote buying. (91)

Angered by these heavy-handed American moves, an unknown army officer, Capt. Kong Le, and his paratroop battalion launched an unexpected and successful coup on August 8, 1960. After securing Vientiane and forcing Phourni's supporters out of power, Kong Le turned the government over to the former neutralist prime minister, Souvanna Phouma, on August 16. Souvanna announced that he would end the simmering civil war by forming a neutralist government that would include representatives from left, right, and center. The plan was on the verge of success when General Phoumi suddenly broke off negotiations in early September and returned to his home in Savarmakhet, where he announced the formation of the Revolutionary Committee.(92) Perhaps not altogether unexpectedly, dozens of unmarked Air America transports began landing at Savarmakhet loaded with arms, soldiers, and American advisers (93) and Laos was plunged into a threeway civil war. The CIAbacked right wing was in Savarmakhet, the neutralists were in Vientiane, and the leftist Pathet Lao was in the forests of Sam Neua Province (the extreme northeast). Everything in between was virtually autonomous, and all three factions competed for territory and influence in the undeclared provinces.

While the right-wingers quickly consolidated their hold over the south, the neutralists initially gained the upper hand in Xieng Khouang Province, which included the Plain of Jars. This success strengthened the neutralist position considerably; with three major roads meeting on the plain, Xieng Khouang was the strategic key to northeastern Laos. The influential Meo leader Touby Lyfoung was minister of justice for the neutralist government, and seemed to be working closely with Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma. (94) The neutralist position in the northeast further improved when the newly appointed commander of Military Region 11 (Sam Neua and Xieng Khouang provinces), Col. Kham Hou, declared his loyalty to the neutralist government on September 28. (95)

General Phourni's camp was extremely worried about its lack of support in strategic MR 11. After Col. Kham Hou rebuffed their overtures, Phourni's agents reportedly contacted Vang Pao in late September. They promised him financial support if he would lead a Meo coup against the neutralists, thus bringing MR It into the rightist orbit. According to Laotian army sources, Vang Pao radioed Savarmakhet on October 1 or 2, requesting money and arms from General Phourni. On October 5, an unmarked Air America transport from Savannakhet dropped thirty rightist paratroopers and several hundred rifles to Vang Pao's supporters on the Plain of Jars. Later that day Vang Pao called a meeting of local Meo leaders at the village of Lat Houang. Surrounded by the paratroopers, Vang Pao told a crowd of about three hundred to four hundred Meo that he supported General Phourni and promised guns for all those who joined him in the fight against the neutralists.(96)

When word of the incipient Meo revolt reached Vientiane, Prime Minister Souvanna Phourna sent his minister of justice, Meo leader Touby Lyfoung, up to the Plain of Jars to negotiate with Vang Pao. Instead of dissuading Vang Pao, however, Touby diplomatically bowed to superior force and joined him. Using his considerable talents as a negotiator, Touby met with Col. Kham Hou and urged him not to interfere with the Meo revolt. Unwilling to engage in unnecessary slaughter and somewhat sympathetic to the right wing, Col. Kham Hou agreed not to fight, (97) thus effectively conceding control of the Plain of Jars to the right wing.

Confused by the murky situation, Souvanna Phourna dispatched another emissary, General Amkha, the inspector general of the neutralist army, on October 7. But the moment General Amkha stepped off the plane, Vang Pao arrested him at gunpoint and had him flown to Savannakhet, aboard an unidentified transport, where he remained in prison for almost three years on General Phourni's orders. That same day Touby was "invited" to Savarmakhet and left on a later flight. When Col. Kham Hou resigned from command shortly thereafter, General Phoumi rewarded Vang Pao by appointing him commander of Xieng Khouang Province. (98)

In late November General Phourni's army began its drive for Vientiane, Laos's administrative capital. Advancing steadily up the Mekong River valley, rightist forces reached the outskirts of the city on December 14 and evicted Capt. Kong Le's paratroopers after three days of destructive street fighting. While Kong Le's Paratroopers beat a disciplined retreat up Route 13 toward the royal capital of Luang Prabang, General Phoumi was a bit lax in pursuit, convinced that Kong Le would eventually be crushed by the rightist garrisons guarding the royal capital.

About a hundred miles north of Vientiane there is a fork in the road: Route 13 continues its zigzag course northward to Luang Prabang, while Route 7 branches off in an easterly direction toward the Plain of Jars. Rather than advancing on Luang Prabang as expected, Kong Le entered the CIA-controlled Plain of Jars on December 31, 1960. While his troops captured Muong Soui and attacked the airfield at Phong Savan, Pathet Lao guerrillas launched coordinated diversionary attacks along the plain's northeastern rim. Rightist defenses crumbled, and Phourni's troops threw away their guns and ran. (99) As mortar fire came crashing in at the end of the runway, the last Air America C-47 took off from the Plain of Jars with Edgar Buell and a contingent of U.S. military advisers. (100)

Lt. Col. Vang Pao was one of the few commanders who did not panic at the Kong Le and Pathet Lao coordinated offensive. While Phourni's regular army troops ran for the Mekong, Vang Pao led several thousand Meo soldiers and refugees out of the plain on an orderly march to Padoung, a four-thousand-foot mountain, twelve miles due south. Vang Pao was appointed commander of Military Region II and established his headquarters at Padoung. (101)

With General Phourni once more in control of Vientiane and a joint Pathet Laoneutralist force occupying the strategic Plain of Jars, the center of CIA activity shifted from Savannakhet to Padoung. In January 1961 the CIA began sending Green Berets, CIA-financed Thai police commandos, and a handful of its own agents into MR 11 to build up an effective Meo guerrilla army under Vang Pao. William Young was one of the CIA operatives sent to Padoung in January, and because of his linguistic skills, he played a key role in the formation of the Secret Army. As he recollected ten years later, the basic CIA strategy was to keep the Pathet Lao bottled up on the plain by recruiting all of the eligible young Meo in the surrounding mountains as commandos.

To build up his army, Vang Pao's officers and the CIA operatives, including William Young, flew to scattered Meo villages in helicopters and light Heliocourier aircraft. Offering guns, rice, and money in exchange for recruits, they leapfrogged from village to village around the western and northern perimeter of the Plain of Jars. Under their supervision, dozens of crude landing strips for Air America were hacked out of the mountain forests, thus linking these scattered villages with CIA headquarters at Padoung. Within a few months Vang Pao's influence extended from Padoung north to Phou Fa and east as far as Bouam Long. (102) However, one local Meo leader in the Long Pot region west of the Plain of Jars says that the Meo recruiting officers who visited his village used threats as well as inducements to win a declaration of loyalty. "Vang Pao sent us guns," he recalled. "If we did not accept his guns he would call us Pathet Lao. We had no choice. Vang Pao's officers came to the village and warned that if we did not join him he would regard us as Pathet Lao and his soldiers would attack our village." (103)

Meo guerrilla operations on the plain itself had begun almost immediately; Meo sappers blew up bridges and supply dumps while snipers shot at neutralist and Pathet Lao soldiers. After four months of this kind of harassment, Capt. Kong Le decided to retaliate. (104) In early May 1961, Pathet Lao and neutralist troops assaulted the northern flank of Padoung mountain and began shelling the CIA base camp. After enduring an intense enemy mortar barrage for over two weeks, the CIA decided to abandon the base, and Vang Pao led his troops to a new headquarters at Pha Kbao, eight miles to the southwest. (105) Following close behind came Edgar Buell, leading some nine thousand Meo civilians. While Vang Pao's hardy troops made the transfer without incident, hundreds of civilians, mainly children and elderly, died in a forced march through the jungle. (106)

The only official report we have on Meo operations was written by Gen. Edward G. Lansdale of the CIA in July 1961 for foreign policy officials in the Kennedy administration. In it he discusses the Agency's clandestine warfare potential in Indochina. "Command control of Meo operations is exercised by the Chief CIA Vientiane with the advice of Chief MAAG Laos [U.S. army advisers]," reported Lansdale. Although there were only nine CIA operations officers and nine Green Berets in the field, "CIA control in the Meo operations has been reported as excellent." In addition, there were ninety-nine Thai police commandos working with the Meo under CIA control. So far nine thousand Meo had been "equipped for guerrilla operations," but Lansdale felt that at least four thousand more of these "splendid fighting men" could be recruited. However, there was one major problem:

"As Meo villages are over-run by Communist forces and as men leave foodraising duties to serve as guerillas, a problem is growing over the care and feeding of non-combat Meos. CIA has given some rice and clothing to relieve this problem. Consideration needs to be given to organized relief, a mission of an ICA ["humanitarian" foreign aid] nature, to the handling of Meo refugees and their rehabilitation."(107)

To solve this critical problem, the CIA turned to Edgar Buell, who set out on a fifty-eight-day trek around the perimeter of the plain to arrange for delivery of "refugee" supplies.(108)

In July 1962 the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Geneva Agreements on Laos, and thus theoretically terminated their military operations in that chaotic kingdom. Although American Green Berets and military advisers were withdrawn by October as specified, the CIA devised a number of clever deceptions to continue its clandestine activities. All of the CIA operatives moved to adjacent areas of Thailand, but returned almost every day by helicopter or plane to direct guerrilla operations. Civilian personnel (not covered by the Geneva Agreements) were recruited for clandestine work. In December 1962, for example, Buell trained Meo guerrillas in demolition techniques and directed the dynamiting of six bridges and twelve mountain passes along Route 7 near Ban Ban. (109) The U.S. Embassy declared that Air America flights to Meo villages, which carried munitions as well as refugee supplies, were "humanitarian" aid and as such were exempted from the Geneva Agreements. (110)

After a relatively quiet year in 1962, the CIA went on the offensive throughout northern Laos in 1963-1964. In the northwest, William Young, assisted by IVS volunteer Joseph Flipse, led Yao commandos in an attack on Pathet Lao villages east of Ban Houei Sai. One American who took part in the offensive recalls that Pathet Lao troops had been inactive since the Geneva Agreements were signed and feels that the CIA offensive shattered the cease-fire in the northwest. In the northeast the CIA took the war to the enemy by expanding Meo commando operations into Sam Neua Province, a Pathet Lao stronghold for nearly fifteen years. (111)

Anthony Poe became the new CIA man at Long Tieng, Vang Pao's headquarters since mid 1962, and organized the offensive into Sam Neua Province. Rather than attacking towns and villages in the valleys where the Pathet Lao were well entrenched, the CIA concentrated on the mountain ridges populated by Meo tribesmen. Using Air America's fleet of helicopters and light aircraft, Anthony Poe led hundreds of Meo guerrillas in a lightning advance that leaped from mountain to mountain into the heart of Sam Neua Province. As soon as a village was captured and Pathet Lao cadres eliminated, the inhabitants were put to work building a crude landing strip, usually five hundred to eight hundred feet long, to receive the airplanes that followed in the conqueror's wake carrying Edgar Buell's "refugee" supplies. These goods were distributed in an attempt to buy the hearts and minds of the Meo.

Within a matter of months a fifty-mile-long strip of territory-stretching from the northeastern rim of the Plain of Jars to Phou Pha Thi mountain, only fifteen miles from the North Vietnamese border-had been added to Vang Pao's domain. Over twenty new aircraft landing strips dotted the conquered corridor, linking Meo villages with CIA headquarters at Long Tieng. Most of these Meo villages were perched on steep mountain ridges overlooking valleys and towns controlled by the Pathet Lao. The Air America landing strip at Hong Non, for example, was only twelve miles from the limestone caverns near Sam Neua City where the Pathet Lao later housed their national headquarters, a munitions factory, and a cadre training school. (112)

As might be expected, the fighting on the Plain of Jars and the opening of these landing strips produced changes in northeastern Laos's opium traffic. For over sixty years the Plain of Jars had been the hub of the opium trade in northeastern Laos. When Kong Le captured the plain in December 1960, the Corsican charter airlines abandoned Phong Savan Airport for Vientiane's Wattay Airport. The old Corsican hangout at Phong Savan, the Snow Leopard Inn, was renamed "Friendship Hotel." It became headquarters for a dozen Russian technicians sent to service the aging Ilyushin transports ferrying supplies from Hanoi for the neutralists and Pathet Lao. (113)

No longer able to land on the Plain of Jars, the Corsican airlines began using Air America's mountain landing strips to pick up raw opium. (114) As Vang Pao circled around the Plain of Jars and advanced into Sam Neua Province, leaving a trail of landing strips behind him, the Corsicans were right behind in their Beechcrafts and Cessnas, paying Meo farmers and Chinese traders a top price for raw opium. Since Kong Le did not interfere with commercial activity on the plain, the Chinese caravans were still able to make their annual journey into areas controlled by Vang Pao. Now, instead of delivering their opium to trading centers on the plain, most traders brought it to Air America landing strips serviced by the Corsican charter airlines.(115) Chinese caravans continued to use the Plain of Jars as a base until mid 1964, when the Pathet Lao drove Kong Le off the plain and forced them into retirement.

When the Laotian government in the person of Ouane Rattikone jealously forced the Corsicans out of business in 1965, a serious economic crisis loomed in the Meo highlands. The war had in no way reduced Meo dependence on opium as a cash crop, and may have actually increased production. Although thousands of Meo men recruited for commando operations were forced to leave home for months at a time, the impact of this loss of manpower on opium production was minimal. Opium farming is women's work. While men clear the fields by slashing and burning the forest, the tedious work of weeding and harvesting is traditionally the responsibility of wives and daughters. Since most poppy fields last up to five or ten years, periodic absences of the men had little impact on poppy production. Furthermore, the CIA's regular rice drops removed any incentive to grow rice, and freed their considerable energies for full-time poppy cultivation. To make defense of the civilian population easier, many smaller refugee villages had been evacuated, and their populations concentrated in large refugee centers. Good agricultural land was at a premium in these areas, and most of the farmers devoted their labors to opium production simply because it required much less land than rice or other food crops. (116)

Meo villages on the southern and western edges of the plain were little affected by the transportation problem caused by the end of the Corsican flights. Following the demise of the Chinese merchant caravans in mid 1964, Vang Pao's commandos dispatched Meo military caravans from Long Tieng into these areas to buy up the opium harvest. Since there were daily flights from both Sam Thong and Long Tieng to Vientiane, it was relatively easy to get the opium to market. However, the distances and security problems involved in sending caravans into the northern perimeter of the plain and in the Sam Neua area were insuperable, and air transport became an absolute necessity. With the Corsicans gone, Air America was the only form of air transport available. (117) And according to Gen. Ouane Rattikone, then commander in chief of the Laotian army, and Gen. Thao Ma, then Laotian air force commander, Air America began flying Meo opium to markets in Long Tieng and Vientiane. (118)

Air logistics for the opium trade were further improved in 1967 when the CIA and USAID (United States Agency for International Development) gave Vang Pao financial assistance in forming his own private airline, Xieng Khouang Air Transport. The company's president, Mr. Lo Kham Thy, says the airline was formed in late 1967 when two C-47s were acquired from Air America and Continental Air Services. The company's schedule is limited to shuttle flights between Long Tieng and Vientiane that carry relief supplies and an occasional handful of passengers. Financial control is shared by Vang Pao, his brother, his cousin, and his father-in-law. (119) According to one former USAID employee, USAID supported the project because officials hoped it would make Long Tieng the commercial center of the northeast and thereby reinforce Vang Pao's political position. The USAID officials involved apparently realized that any commercial activity at Long Tieng would involve opium, but decided to support the project anyway. (120) Reliable Meo sources report that Xieng Khouang Air Transport is the airline used to carry opium and heroin between Long Tieng and Vientiane. (121)

Despite repeated dry season offensives by the Pathet Lao, the CIA's military position in the northeast remained strong, and Vang Pao's army consolidated and expanded upon gains it had made during the early years of the war. However, in January 1968 Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese forces mounted a general offensive that swept Vang Pao's mercenaries out of Sam Neua Province. The key to the Pathet Lao victory was the capture of the CIA's eagle-nest bastion, Phou Pha Thi, on March 11. The U.S. air force had built a radar guidance center on top of this 5,680-foot mountain in 1966 "to provide more accurate guidance for all-weather bombing operations" over North Vietnam. (122) Only seventeen miles from the North Vietnamese border, Pha Thi had become the eyes and ears of the U.S. bombing campaign over Hanoi and the Red River Delta. (123) (Interestingly, President Johnson announced a partial bombing halt over North Vietnam less than three weeks after the radar installation at Pha Thi was destroyed.) Vang Pao attempted to recapture the strategic base late in 1968, but after suffering heavy losses he abandoned it to the North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao in January 1969. (124)

The loss of Sam Neua in 1968 signaled the first of the massive Meo migrations that eventually made much of northeastern Laos a depopulated free fire zone and drastically reduced hill tribe opium production. Before the CIA-initiated Meo guerrilla operations in 1960, MR 11 had a hill tribe population of about 250,000, most of them Meo opium farmers evenly scattered across the rugged highlands between the Vientiane Plain and the North Vietnamese border. (125) The steady expansion of Vang Pao's influence from 1961 to 1967 caused some local concentration of population as small Meo villages clustered together for selfdefense. However, Meo farmers were still within walking distance of their poppy fields, and opium production continued undiminished.

When Vang Pao began to lose control of Sam Neua in early 1968, the CIA decided to deny the population to the Pathet Lao by evacuating all the Meo tribesmen under his control. By 1967 U.S. air force bombing in northeastern Laos was already heavy, and Meo tribesmen were willing to leave their villages rather than face the daily horror of life under the bombs. Recalling Mao Tse-tung's axiom on guerrilla warfare, Edgar Buell declared, "If the people are the sea, then let's hurry the tide south. (126) Air America evacuated over nine thousand people from Sam Neua in less than two weeks. They were flown to Buell's headquarters at Sam Thong, five miles north of Long Tieng, housed temporarily, and then flown to refugee villages in an adjacent area west of the Plain of Jars. (127)

During the next three years repeated Pathet Lao winter-spring offensives continued to drive Vang Pao's Meo army further and further back, forcing tens of thousands of Meo villagers to become refugees. As the Pathet Lao's 1970 offensive gained momentum, the Meo living north and west of the plain fled south, and eventually more than 100,000 were relocated in a crescent-shaped forty-mile-wide strip of territory between Long Tieng and the Vientiane Plain. When the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese attacked Long Tieng during the 1971 dry season, the CIA was forced to evacuate some fifty thousand mercenary dependents from Long Tieng valley into the overcrowded Ban Son resettlement area south of Long Tieng. By mid 1971 USAID estimated that almost 150,000 hill tribe refugees, of which 60 percent were Meo, had been resettled in the Ban Son area.(128)

After three years of constant retreat, Vang Pao's Meo followers are at the end of the line. Once a prosperous people living in small villages surrounded by miles of fertile, uninhabited mountains, now almost a third of all the Meo in Laos, over ninety thousand of them, are now packed into a forty-mile-long dead end perched above the sweltering Vientiane Plain. The Meo are used to living on mountain ridges more than three thousand feet in elevation where the temperate climate is conducive to poppy cultivation, the air is free of malarial mosquitoes, and the water is pure. In the refugee villages, most of which are only twenty-five hundred feet in elevation, many Meo have been stricken with malaria, and lacking normal immunities, have become seriously ill. The low elevation and crowded conditions make opium cultivation almost impossible, and the Meo are totally dependent on Air America's rice drops. If the North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao capture Long Tieng and advance on Vientiane, the Meo will probably be forced down onto the Vientiane Plain, where their extreme vulnerability to tropical disease might result in a major medical disaster.

The Ban Son resettlement area serves as a buffer zone, blocking any Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese enemy advance on Vientiane. If they choose to move on Vientiane they will have no choice but to fight their way through the resettlement area. Meo leaders are well aware of this, and have pleaded with USAID to either begin resettling the Meo on the Vientiane Plain on a gradual, controlled basis or shift the resettlement area to the east or west, out of the probable line of an enemy advance. (129)

Knowing that the Meo fight better when their families are threatened, USAID has refused to accept either alternative and seems intent on keeping them in the present area for a final, bloody stand against the North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao. Most of the Meo have no desire to continue fighting for Gen. Vang Pao. They bitterly resent his more flamboyant execsses-person ally executing his own soldiers, massive grafting from the military payroll, and his willingness to take excessive casualties -and regard him as a corrupt warlord who has grown rich on their suffering.(130) But since USAID decides where the rice is dropped, the Meo have no choice but to stand and fight.

Meo losses have already been enormous. The sudden, mass migrations forced by enemy offensives have frequently exceeded Air America's logistic capacity. Instead of being flown out, many Meo have had to endure long forced marches, which produce 10 percent fatalities under the best of conditions and 30 percent or more if the fleeing refugees become lost in the mountain forests. Most of the mercenary dependents have moved at least five times and some villages originally from Sam Neua Province have moved fifteen or sixteen times since 1968. (131) Vang Pao's military casualties have been just as serious: with only thirty thousand to forty thousand men under arms, his army suffered 3,272 men killed and 5,426 wounded from 1967 to 1971. Meo casualties have been so heavy that Vang Pao was forced to turn to other tribes for recruits, and by April 1971 Lao Theung, the second largest hill tribe in northern Laos, comprised 40 percent of his troops. (132) Many of the remaining Meo recruits are boy soldiers. In 1968 Edgar Buell told a New Yorker correspondent that:

"A short time ago we rounded up three hundred fresh recruits. Thirty per cent were fourteen years old or less, and ten of them were only ten years old. Another 30 per cent were fifteen or sixteen. The remaining 40 per cent were forty-five or over. Where were the ones in between? I'll tell you-they're all dead." (133)

Despite the drop in Meo opium production after 1968, General Vang Pao was able to continue his role in Laos's narcotics trade by opening a heroin laboratory at Long Tieng. According to reliable Laotian sources, his laboratory began operations in 1970.When a foreign Chinese master chemist arrived at Long Tieng to supervise production. It has been so profitable that in mid 1971 Chinese merchants in Vientiane reported that Vang Pao's agents were buying opium in Vientiane and flying it to Long Tieng for processing.(134)

Although American officials in Laos vigorously deny that either Vang Pao or Air America are in any way involved, overwhelming evidence to the contrary challenges these pious assertions. Perhaps the best way of understanding the importance of their role is to examine the dynamics of the opium trade in a single opium-growing district.

Long Pot Village: Rendezvous with Air America

Long Pot District, thirty miles northwest of Long Tieng, was one of the last remaining areas in northeastern Laos where the recent history of the opium traffic could be investigated. Located forty miles due west of the Plain of Jars, it was close enough to Long Tieng to be a part of Gen. Vang Pao's domain but far enough away from the heavy fighting to have survived and tell its story. Viewed from Highway 13, which forms its western boundary, Long Pot District seems a rugged, distant world. Phou Phachau mountain, casting its shadow over the entire district, juts more than sixty-two hundred feet into the clouds that perennially hover about its peak during the misty rainy season from May to October. Steep ridges radiate outward from Phou Phachau and lesser peaks, four thousand and five thousand feet high, form hollows and valleys that gouge the district's hundred square miles of territory. The landscape was once verdant with virgin hardwood forests, but generations of slash-and-burn agriculture by hill tribe residents have left many of the ridges and valleys covered with tough, chest-high savanna grass.(135)

The district's twelve villages, seven Meo and five Lao Theung, cling to ridges and mountain crests, where they command a watchful view of the surrounding countryside. The political center of the district is the village of Long Pot, a Meo community of fortyseven wooden, dirtfloored houses and some three hundred residents. It is not its size, but its longevity which makes Long Pot village important. Founded in the latter half of the nineteenth century, it is one of the oldest Meo villages in northeastern Laos. Its leaders have a tradition of political power, and the highest-ranking local official, District Officer Ger Su Yang, resides in Long Pot village. While most Meo are forced to abandon their villages every ten or twenty years in search of new opium fields, Long Pot village is surrounded by a surplus of fertile, limestone-laden slopes that have allowed its inhabitants to remain in continuous residence for three generations. Moreover, Long Pot village's high altitude is ideal for poppy cultivation; the village itself is forty-two hundred feet high and is surrounded by ridges ranging up to fifty-four hundred feet. The Yunnan variety of the opium poppy found in Southeast Asia requires a temperate climate; it can survive at three thousand feet, but thrives as the altitude climbs upward to five thousand feet.

Despite all the damage done by over ten years of constant warfare, opium production in Long Pot village had not declined. In an August 1971 interview, the district officer of Long Pot, Ger Su Yang, said that most of the households in the village had been producing about fifteen kilos of opium apiece before the fighting began, and had maintained this level of production for the last ten years. However, rice production had declined drastically.(136)During a time of war, when the Meo of Long Pot might have been expected to concentrate their dwindling labor resources on essential food production, they had chosen instead to continue cash-crop opium farming. Guaranteed an adequate food supply by Air America's regular rice drops, the villagers were free to devote all their energies to opium production. And since Vang Pao's officers have paid them a high price for their opium and assured them a reliable market, the farmers of Long Pot village have consistently tried to produce as much opium as possible.

In the past rice has always been the Meo's most important subsistence crop and opium their traditional cash crop. However, opium and rice have conflicting crop cycles and prosper in different kinds of fields. Because the average Meo village has a limited amount of manpower, it is only capable of clearing a few new fields every year, and therefore must opt for either opium or rice. When the opium price is high Meo farmers concentrate their efforts on the opium crop and use their cash profits to buy rice, but if the price drops they gradually reduce poppy cultivation and increase subsistence rice production. With rice from Air America and good opium prices from Vang Pao's officers, the farmers of Long Pot had chosen to emphasize opium production. (137)

Every spring, as the time for cutting new fields approaches, each household sends out a scouting party to scour the countryside for suitable field locations. Since Long Pot Meo want to plant opium, they look for highly alkaline soil near the ridgeline or in mountain hollows where the opium poppies prosper, rather than mid-slope fields more suitable for rice. The sweeter "taste" of limestone soil can actually be recognized by a discriminating palate, and as they hike around the nearby mountains Meo scouts periodically chew on a bit of soil to make sure that the prospective site is alkaline enough. (138)

Meo farmers begin clearing their new fields in March or April. Using iron-bitted axes, the men begin chopping away at timber stands covering the chosen site. Rather than cutting through the thick roots or immense trunks of the larger trees, the Meo scale the first twenty feet of the trunk, balance themselves on a slender notched pole, and cut away only the top of the tree. A skilled woodsman can often fell three or four smaller trees with a single blow if be topples a large tree so that it knocks down the others as it crashes to the ground. The trees are left on the ground to dry until April or early May, when the Meo are ready for one of the most awesome spectacles in the mountainsthe burn-off.(139)

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When the timber has become tinderbox dry, the villagers of Long Pot form fire brigades and gather near the fields on the chosen day. While the younger men of the village race down the slope igniting the timber as they come, others circle the perimeter, lighting stacked timber and brush on the edge of the field. The burn-off not only serves the purpose of removing fallen timber from the field, but it also leaves a valuable layer of ash, which contains phosphate, calcium, and potassium, scattered evenly across the field. (140)

Even though the fields are ready for planting as soon as the burn-off is completed, the poppy's annual cycle dictates that its planting be delayed until September. If the land is left unplanted, however, it loses valuable minerals through erosion and becomes covered with a thick crop of weeds. Here it might seem logical to plant dry upland rice, but since rice is not harvested until November, two months after the poppies should have been planted, the Meo instead plant a hardy variety of mountain corn that is harvested in August and early September. The corn keeps the ground clear of weeds during the summer, and provides fodder for the menagerie of hogs, mountain ponies, chickens, and cows whose wanderings turn Long Pot village into a sea of mud every rainy season.(141)

Once the corn has been picked in August and early September, Meo women begin chopping and turning the soil with a heavy, triangular hoe. Just before the poppy seeds are sown broadcast across the surface of the ground in September, the soil must be chopped fine and raked smooth with a bamboo broom. In November women thin out the poppies, leaving the healthier plants standing about six inches apart. At the same time tobacco, beans, spinach, and other vegetables are planted among the poppies; they add minerals to the soil and supplement the Meo diet. (142)

The poppies are thinned again in late December and several weeks later the vegetables are picked, clearing the ground and allowing the poppy to make its final push. By January the bright red and white poppy flowers will start to appear and the harvest will begin, as the petals drop away exposing an eggshaped bulb containing the resinous opium. Since most farmers stagger their plantings to minimize demands on their time during the busy harvest season and reduce the threat of weather damage, the harvest usually continues until late February or early March.(143)

To harvest the opium, Meo farmers tap the poppy's resin much like a Vermont maple sugar farmer or a Malaysian rubber farmer harvest their crops. An opium farmer holds the flower's egg-sized bulb with the fingers of one hand while he uses a three-bladed knife to incise shallow, longitudinal slits on its surface. The cuttings are made in the cool of the late afternoon. During the night the opium resin oozes out of the bulb and collects on its surface. Early the next morning, before the sun drys the moist sap, a Meo woman scrapes the surface of the bulb with a flexible rectangular blade and deposits the residue in a cup hanging around her neck. When she has finished harvesting a kilo of the dark, sticky sap she wraps it in banana leaves and ties the bundle with string.

By the time the harvest is finished, the forty-seven households in Long Pot village have collected more than seven hundred kilos of raw opium. (144) Since Golden Triangle opium is usually 10 percent morphine by weight, the Long Pot harvest will yield roughly seventy kilos of pure morphine base after it has been boiled, processed, and pressed into bricks. Once the morphine has been chemically bonded with acetic anhydride in one of the region's many heroin laboratories, Long Pot's innocent opium harvest becomes seventy kilos of highgrade no. 4 heroin.

While international criminal syndicates reap enormous profits from the narcotics traffic, the Meo farmers are paid relatively little for their efforts. Although opium is their sole cash crop and they devote most of their effort to it, Meo farmers only receive $400 to $600 for ten kilos of raw opium. After the opium leaves the village, however, the value of those ten kilos begins to spiral upward, Ten kilos of raw opium yield one kilo of morphine base worth $500' in the Golden Triangle. After being processed into heroin, one kilo of morphine base becomes one kilo of no. 4 heroin worth $2,000 to $2,500 in Bangkok. In San Francisco, Miami, or New York, the courier delivering a kilo of heroin to a wholesaler receives anywhere from $18,000 to $27,000. Diluted with quinine or milk sugar, packaged in forty-five thousand tiny gelatin capsules and sold on the streets for $5 a shot, a kilo of heroin that began as $500 worth of opium back in Long Pot is worth $225 '000. (145)

In the 1950s Long Pot's farmers had sold their opium to Chinese caravans from the Plain of Jars that passed through the area several times during every harvest season. Despite the occupation of the plain by neutralist and Pathet Lao forces in 1960 and 1961, Chinese caravans kept coming and opium growers in Long Pot District continued to deal with them.

According to Long Pot's district officer, Ger Su Yang, the Chinese merchant caravans disappeared after the 1964-1965 harvest, when heavy fighting broke out on the plain's western perimeter, But they were replaced by Meo army caravans from Long Tieng. Commanded by lieutenants and captains in Vang Pao's army, the caravans usually consisted of half a dozen mounted Meo soldiers and a string of shaggy mountain ponies loaded with trade goods. When the caravans arrived from Long Tieng they usually stayed at the district officer's house in Long Pot village and used it as a headquarters while trading for opium in the area. Lao Theung and Meo opium farmers from nearby villages, such as Gier Goot and Thong Oui, carried their opium to Long Pot and haggled over the price with the Meo officers in the guest corner of Ger Su Yang's house. (146) While the soldiers weighed the opium on a set of balance scales and burned a small glob to test its morphine content (a good burn indicates a high morphine content), the farmer inquired about the price and examined the trade goods spread out on the nearby sleeping platform (medicines, salt, iron, silver, flashlights, cloth, thread, etc.). After a few minutes of carefully considered offers and counteroffers, a bargain was struck. At one time the Meo would accept nothing but silver or commodities. However, for the last decade Air America has made commodities so readily available that most opium farmers now prefer Laotian government currency. (Vang Pao's Meo subjects are unique in this regard. Hill tribesmen in Burma and Thailand still prefer trade goods or silver in the form of British India rupees, French Indochina piasters, or rectangular bars.)(147)

To buy up opium from the outlying areas, the Meo soldiers would leave Long Pot village on short excursions, hiking along the narrow mountain trails to Meo and Lao Theung villages four or five miles to the north and south. For example, the headman of Nam Suk, a Lao Theung village about four miles north of Long Pot, recalls that his people began selling their opium harvest to Meo soldiers in 1967 or 1968. Several times during every harvest season, five to eight of them arrived at his village, paid for the opium in paper currency, and then left with their purchases loaded in backpacks. Previously this village had sold its opium to Lao and Chinese merchants from Vang Vieng, a market town on the northern edge of the Vientiane Plain. But the Meo soldiers were paying 20 percent more, and Lao Theung farmers were only too happy to deal with them.(148)

Since Meo soldiers paid almost sixty dollars a kilo, while merchants from Vang Vieng or Luang Prabang only paid forty or fifty dollars, Vang Pao's officers were usually able to buy up all of the available opium in the district after only a few days of trading. Once the weight of their purchases matched the endurance limits of their rugged mountain ponies, the Meo officers packed it into giant bamboo containers, loaded it on the ponies and headed back for Long Tieng, where the raw opium was refined into morphine base. Meo army caravans had to return to Long Pot and repeat this procedure two or three times during every season before they had purchased the district's entire opium harvest.

However, during the 1969-1970 opium harvest the procedure changed. Long Pot's district officer, Ger Su Yang, described this important development in an August 19, 1971, interview:

"Meo officers with three or four stripes [captain or major] came from Long Tieng to buy our opium. They came in American helicopters, perhaps two or three men at one time. The helicopter leaves them here for a few days and they walk to villages over there [swinging his arm in a semicircle in the direction of Gier Goot, Long Makkhay and Nam Pac], then come back here and radioed Long Tieng to send another helicopter for them. They take the opium back to Long Tieng.

Ger Su Yang went on to explain that the helicopter pilots were always Americans, but it was the Meo officers who stayed behind to buy up the opium. The headman of Nam Ou, a Lao Theung village five miles north of Long Pot, confirmed the district officer's account; he recalled that in 1969-1970 Meo officers who had been flown into Tam Son village by helicopter hiked into his village and purchased the opium harvest. Since the thirty households in his village only produced two or three kilos of opium apiece, the Meo soldiers continued on to Nam Suk and Long Pot." (149)

Although Long Pot's reluctant alliance with Vang Pao and the CIA at first brought prosperity to the village, by 1971 it was weakening the local economy and threatening Long Pot's very survival. The alliance began in 1961 when Meo officers visited the village, offering money and arms if they joined with Vang Pao and threatening reprisals if they remained neutral. Ger Su Yang resented Vang Pao's usurpation of Touby Lyfoung's rightful position as leader of the Meo, but there seemed no alternative to the village declaring its support for Vang Pao.(150) During the 1960s Long Pot had become one of Vang Pao's most loyal villages. Edgar Buell devoted a good deal of his personal attention to winning the area over, and USAID even built a school in the village.(151) In exchange for sending less than twenty soldiers to Long Tieng, most of whom were killed in action, Long Pot village received regular rice drops, money, and an excellent price for its opium.

But in 1970 the war finally came to Long Pot. With enemy troops threatening Long Tieng and his manpower pool virtually exhausted, Vang Pao ordered his villages to send every available man, including even the fifteen-year-olds. Ger Su Yang complied, and the village built a training camp for its sixty recruits on a nearby hill. Assisted by Meo officers from Long Tieng, Ger Su Yang personally supervised the training, which consisted mainly of running up and down the hillside. After weeks of target practice and conditioning, Air America helicopters began arriving late in the year and flew the young men off to battle.

Village leaders apparently harbored strong doubts about the wisdom of sending off so many of their young men, and as early rumors of heavy casualties among the recruits filtered back, opposition to Va g Pao's war stiffened. When Long Tieng officials demanded more recruits in January 1971 the village refused. Seven months later Ger Su Yang expressed his determination not to sacrifice any more of Long Pot's youth:

"Last year I sent sixty [young men] out of this village. But this year it's finished. I can't send any more away to fight.... The Americans in Long Tieng said I must send all the rest of our men. But I refused. So they stopped dropping rice to us. The last rice drop was in February this year."(152)

In January Long Tieng officials warned the village that unless recruits were forthcoming Air America's rice drops would stop. Although Long Pot was almost totally dependent on the Americans for its rice supply, hatred for Vang Pao was now so strong that the village was willing to accept the price of refusal. "Vang Pao keeps sending the Meo to be killed," said Ger Su Yang. "Too many Meo have been killed already, and he keeps sending more. Soon all will be killed. but Vang Pao doesn't care." But before stopping the shipments Long Tieng officials made a final offer. "If we move our village to Ban Son or Tin Bong [another resettlement area] the Americans will give us rice again," explained Ger Su Yang. "But at Ban Son there are too many Meo, and there are not enough rice fields. We must stay here, this is our home."153

When the annual Pathet Lao-North Vietnamese offensive began in January 1971, strong Pathet Lao patrols appeared in the Long Pot region for the first time in several years and began making contact with the local population. Afraid that the Meo and Lao Theung might go over to the Pathet Lao, the Americans ordered the area's residents to move south and proceeded to cut off rice support for those who refused to obey.(154) A far more powerful inducement was added when the air war bombing heated up to the east of Long Pot District and residents became afraid that it would spread to their villages. To escape from the threat of being bombed, the entire populations of Phou Miang and Muong Chim, Meo villages five miles east of Long Pot, moved south to the Tin Bong resettlement area in early 1971. At about the same time, many of the Meo residents of Tam Son and eight families from Long Pot also migrated to Tin Bong. Afraid that Pathet Lao patrols operating along Route 13 might draw air strikes on their villages, the Meo of Sam Poo Kok joined the rush to Tin Bong, while three Lao Theung villages in the same general area-Nam Suk, Nam Ou and San Pakau-moved to a ridge opposite Long Pot village. Their decision to stay in Long Pot District rather than move south was largely due to the influence of Ger Su Yang. Determined to remain in the area, he used all his considerable prestige to stem the tide of refugees and retain enough population to preserve some semblance of local autonomy. Thus rather than moving south when faced with the dual threat of American air attacks and gradual starvation, most of the villagers abandoned their houses in January and hid in the nearby forest until March.

While U.S. officials in Laos claim that hill tribes move to escape slaughter at the hands of the enemy, most of the people in Long Pot District say that it is fear of indiscriminate American and Laotian bombing that has driven their neighbors south to Tin Bong. These fears cannot be dismissed as ignorance on the part of "primitive" tribes; they have watched the air war at work and they know what it can do. From sunrise to sunset the mountain silence is shattered every twenty or thirty minutes by the distant roar of paired Phantom fighters enroute to targets around the Plain of Jars. Throughout the night the monotonous buzz of prowling AC-47 gunships is broken only when their infrared sensors sniff warm mammal flesh and their miniguns clatter, spitting out six thousand rounds a minute. Every few days a handful of survivors fleeing the holocaust pass through Long Pot relating their stories of bombing and strafing. On August 21, 1971, twenty exhausted refugees from a Lao Theung village in the Muong Soui area reached Long Pot village. Their story was typical. In June Laotian air force T-28s bombed their village while they fled into the forest. Every night for two months AC-47 gunships raked the ground around their trenches and shallow caves. Because of the daylight bombing and nighttime strafing, they were only able to work their fields in the predawn hours. Finally, faced with certain starvation, they fled the Pathet Lao zone and walked through the forest for eleven days before reaching Long Pot. Twice during their march the gunships found them and opened fire.(155)

When Ger Su Yang was asked which he feared most, the bombing or the Pathet Lao, his authoritative confidence disappeared and he replied in an emotional, quavering voice, The bombs! The bombs! Every Meo village north of here [pointing to the northeast] has been bombed. Every village! Everything! There are big holes [extending his arms] in every village. Every house is destroyed. If bombs didn't hit some houses they were burned. Everything is gone. Everything from this village, all the way to Muong Soui and all of Xieng Khouang [Plain of Jars] is destroyed. In Xieng Khouang there are bomb craters like this [stretching out his arm, stabbing into the air to indicate a long line of craters] all over the plain. Every village in Meng Khouang has been bombed, and many, many people died. From here . . . all the mountains north have small bombs in the grass. They were dropped from the airplanes.(156)

Although opium production in Long Pot village had not yet declined, by August 1971 there was concern that disruption caused by the escalating conflict might reduce the size of the harvest. Even though the village spent the 1970-1971 harvest season hiding in the forest, most families somehow managed to attain their normal output of fifteen kilos. Heavy fighting at Long Tieng delayed the arrival of Air America helicopters by several months, but in May 1971 they finally began landing at Long Pot carrying Meo army traders, who paid the expected sixty dollars for every kilo of raw opium. (157)

However, prospects for the 1971-19 2 opium harvest were looking quite dismal as planting time approached in late August. There were plenty of women to plant, weed, and harvest, but a shortage of male workers and the necessity of hiding in the forest during the past winter had made it difficult for households to clear new fields. As a result, many farmers were planting their poppies in exhausted soil, and they only expected to harvest half as much opium as the year before.

However, as the war mounted in intensity through 1971 and early 1972, Long Pot District's opium harvest was drastically reduced and eventually destroyed. USAID officials reported that about forty-six hundred hill tribesmen had left the district in January and February 1971 and moved to the Tin Bong refugee area to the south, where there was a shortage of land. (158) Some of the villages that remained, such as the three Lao Theung villages near Long Pot village, were producing no opium at all. Even Long Pot village had lost eight of its households during the early months of 1971. Finally, on January 4, 1972, Allied fighter aircraft attacked Long Pot District. In an apparent attempt to slow the pace of a Pathet Lao offensive in the district, the fighters napalmed the district's remaining villages, destroying Long Pot village and the three nearby Lao Theung villages. (159)

 

Gen. Ouane Rattikone: The Vientiane Connection

Gen. Ouane Rattikone could not have foreseen the enormous logistical problem that would be created by his ill-timed eviction of the Corsican charter airlines in 1965. While use of Air America aircraft solved the problem for Gen. Vang Pao by flying Meo opium out of northeastern Laos, in the northwest Ouane had to rely on his own resources. Eager to establish an absolute monopoly over Laos's drug traffic, he had been confident of being able to expropriate two or three C-47s from the Laotian air force to do the job. But because of the intensification of the fighting in 1964-1965, Ouane found himself denied access to his own military aircraft. Although he still had control over enough civilian air transport to carry the local harvest and some additional Burmese imports, he could hardly hope to tap a major portion of Burma's exports unless he gained control over two or three air force C-47 transports. General Ouane says that in 1964 he purchased large quantities of Burmese opium from the caravans that entered Laos through the Ban Houei Sai region in the extreme northwest, but claims that because of his transportation problem no large Shan or Nationalist Chinese opium caravans entered northwestern Laos in 1965. (160)

Shortly after Gen. Phoumi Nosavan fled to Thailand in February 1965, General Ouane's political ally, General Kouprasith, invited the commander of the Laotian air force, Gen. Thao Ma, to Vientiane for a friendly chat. Gen. Thao Ma recalls that he did not learn the purpose of the meeting until he found himself seated at lunch with General Ouane, General Kouprasith, and Gen. Oudone Sananikone. Gen. Kouprasith leaned forward and, with his friendliest smile, asked the diminutive air force general, "Would you like to be rich?" Thao Ma replied, "Yes. Of course." Encouraged by this positive response, General Kouprasith proposed that he and General Ouane pay Thao Ma I million kip ($2,000) a week and the air force allocate two C-47 transports for their opium-smuggling ventures. To their astonishment, Thao Ma refused; moreover, he warned Kouprasith and Ouane that if they tried to bribe any of his transport pilots he would personally intervene and put a stop to it. (161)

Very few Laotian generals would have turned down such a profitable offer, but Gen. Thao Ma was one of those rare generals who placed military considerations ahead of his political career or financial reward. As the war in South Vietnam and Laos heated up during 1964, Laotian air force T-28s became the key to clandestine air operations along the North Vietnamese border and the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Gen. Thao M took personal command of the squadrons bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail and providing close air support for Secret Army operations in the northeast. (162) But his proudest accomplishment was the invention of an early version of what later became the AC-47 gunship. Aware that the Pathet Lao often attacked at night when his T-28 fighters were grounded, Thao Ma began looking for a way to provide nighttime air support for government forces and came up with the idea of arming his C-47 transports with .50 caliber machine guns. In 1964 he reduced the air force's logistic capacity by converting a number of his transports into gunships. Thus, when Kouprasith and Ouane demanded two C-47s in early 1965, Thao Ma felt there were none to spare and refused. (163)

Despite further offers and heavy political pressure, Thao Ma's intransigence continued. In 1966 Ouane was still without access to air transport and again no major Shan or Nationalist Chinese opium caravans entered northwestern Laos. Evidently the economic loss of two successive Burmese opium harvests, and the dire prospect of continued losses, convinced Ouane and Kouprasith that the Laotian air force badly needed a new commander.

In May 1966 Gen. Thao Ma was summoned to Vientiane from his headquarters in Savannakhet for a harsh dressing down by the high command. The transport section of the air force was severed from his command and he was ordered to move his headquarters to Vientiane. (164) Fearing assassination at the hands of General Kouprasith if he moved to Vientiane, Thao Ma appealed for a six-month delay and began spending most of his time at the air base in Luang Prabang.(165) As the transfer date approached, Thao Ma sought desperately for an alternative. He begged the Americans, Capt. Kong Le, and the king to intercede on his behalf, but to no avail. (166) Friend and foe alike report that he was in a state of near panic by October, and Thao Ma himself remembers that he was functioning in a dazed stupor.(167) Thus, a coup seemed his only way out.

At 7:00 A.M. on October 22, six T-28 fighters took off from Savannakliet and headed north for Vientiane. At 8:20 A.M. the squadron reached the Laotian capital and the first bomb scored a direct hit on General Kouprasith's office at general staff headquarters. The T-28s strafed and bombed the headquarters compound extensively. Two munitions dumps at Wattay Airport on the outskirts of Vientiane were destroyed. The squadron also rocketed General Kouprasith's home at Chinaimo army camp, but all the missiles were wide of the mark and the general was unharmed. (168) Over thirty people were killed and dozens more were wounded.(169)

The squadron flew back to Savarmakhet, and Vientiane waited nervously for a second round of attacks. After receiving numerous appeals from both Lao and American officials to end his revolt and go into exile, Gen. Thao Ma and ten of his best pilots took off from Savannakhet at 1:45 A.M. October 23, and flew to Thailand, where they were granted political asylum. (170)

Although his coup was primarily an act of revenge, Thao Ma had apparently expected that his friend Kong Le, the neutralist army general, would seize Vientiane and oust the generals once Kouprasith was dead.(171) However, Kong Le was having his own problems with Kouprasith and, unknown to Thao Ma, had left for Bangkok five days before to meet with CIA officials. Shortly after the T-28s struck Vientiane, Thai officials placed Kong Le under house arrest in Bangkok and Kouprasith ordered Laotian border guards to arrest him if he tried to return. Kong Le became a political exile in Paris, and his neutralist army fell under rightist control. (172) Soon after Thao Ma flew into exile, a pliant, right-wing general was appointed air force commander.

With an ample supply of C-47 transports and helicopters now assured, General Ouane proceeded to contact Chinese and Shan opium brokers in the tri-border area, and placed a particularly large order with a fastrising young Shan warlord named Chan Shee-fu.(173) near Ban Houei Sai, Laos, about two hundred miles away, its three hundred pack horses and five hundred armed guards marched single file in a column that extended over a mile along the narrow mountain trails. As the Lahu and Wa hill tribes of northeastern Burma finished harvesting opium in the early months of 1967, Chan Shee-fu's traders and brokers began buying up all the opium they could find. By June he had assembled one of the largest single shipments on recordsixteen tons of raw opium. When the caravan set out across the rugged Shan highlands for its destination

But this monumental caravan was to spark off a bloody confrontation that made headlines all over the world as the " 1967 Opium War." While the war in the papers struck most readers as a colorful anachronism, the war in reality was a struggle for control of Burma's opium exports, which at that time amounted to about five hundred tons of raw opium annually-more than one-third of the world's total illicit supply. Consequently, each group's share of Burma's opium exports and its role in the Golden Triangle's heroin trade were largely determined by the war and its aftermath. All of the combatants were well aware of what was at stake, and threw everything they could muster into the battle.

The confrontation started off with the KMT (Nationalist Chinese army units) based in northern Thailand deciding to send more than a thousand soldiers into Burma to head off Chan Shee-fu's caravan. The KMT had been worried for some time that the rising young Shan warlord might threaten their fifteen-year domination of the opium trade, and this mammoth caravan was a serious threat. But the Shan caravan eluded Nationalist Chinese forces, fled across the Mekong into Laos, and dug in for a fight at Ban Khwan, a lumber town twenty miles northwest of Ban Houei Sai. After several days of indecisive fighting between he Chinese and Shans, Gen. Ouane Rattikone entered the lists. Displaying an aggressiveness rare among Laotian army commanders, General Ouane bombed both sides with a squadron of T-28s and swept the field of battle with the Second Paratroop Battalion. While his friends and enemies fled in disorder, General Ouane's troops scooped up the sixteen tons of raw opium and delivered it to the victorious general, presumably free of charge. Almost two hundred people, mainly Shans and Chinese, died in the fighting.

As a result of General Ouane's victory, the KMT lost many of i s profitable prerogatives to the general. They had nevertheless crushed Chan Shee-fu's bid for supremacy, even though they had not completely destroyed him. After the battle General Ouane emerged as one of the most, important heroin manufacturers in the Golden Triangle, since his share of the Burmese opium trade increased considerably.

Although it was a relatively minor military action compared to the battles raging elsewhere in Indochina, the 1967 Opium War captured the imagination of the American press. However, all of the accounts studiously avoided any serious discussion of the Golden Triangle opium trade, and emphasized the sensational. Using a cliche-studded prose usually reserved for the sports page or travel section, the media rambled on about wild animals, primitive tribes, desperadoes of every description, and the mysterious ways of the Orient. But despite its seductively exotic aspects, the 1967 Opium War remains the most revealing episode in the recent history of the Golden Triangle opium trade.

After the abolition of government opium monopolies in the 1940s and 1950s, the Golden Triangle's drug trade disappeared behind the velvet curtain of government secrecy and it became increasingly difficult to verify official involvement or the extent of the traffic. Suddenly the curtain was snatched back, and there were eighteen hundred of the distinguished General Ouane's best troops battling fourteen hundred well-armed Nationalist Chinese soldiers (supposedly evacuated to Taiwan six years before) for sixteen tons of opium. But an appreciation of the subtler aspects of this sensational battle requires some background on the economic activities of the KMT units based in Thailand, the Shan rebels in Burma, and in particular, the long history of CIA operations in the Golden Triangle area.

The CIA in Northwest Laos: Prelude to the 1967 Opium War

CIA paramilitary operations in northwestern Laos began in 1959, but they were poorly planned and achieved far less than the ambitious Meo program in the northeast. During the five-month battle for Nam Tha City in early 1962, a team of twelve U.S. Green Berets were active in the area as advisers to the beleaguered rightist army. What little work they did with the local hill tribes was cut short in May 1962 when the frightened garrison abandoned the city and retreated toward the Mekong River in complete disorder.(174)

Afraid that the Communists were about to overrun all of Nam Tha Province, the CIA assigned William Young to the area in mid 1962. Young was instructed to build up a hill tribe commando force for operations in the tri-border area since regular Laotian army troops were ill-suited for military operations in the rugged mountains. Nam Tha's ethnic complexity and the scope of clandestine operations made paramilitary work in this province far more demanding than Meo operations in the northeast.(175)

Nam Tha Province probably has more different ethnic minorities per square mile than any other place on earth, having been a migration crossroads for centuries for tribes from southern China and Tibet. Successive waves of Meo and Yao tribesmen began migrating down the Red River valley into North Vietnam in the late 1700s, reaching Nam Tha in the mid nineteenth century.(176) Nam Tha also marks the extreme southeastern frontier for advancing Tibeto-Burman tribes, mainly Akha and Lahu, who have been moving south, with glacierlike speed, through the China-Burma borderlands for centuries. Laotian officials believe that there may be as many as thirty different ethnic minorities living in the province.

Nam Tha Province itself was tacked onto Laos in the late nineteenth century when Europe's imperial real estate brokers decided that the Mekong River was the most convenient dividing line between British Burma and French Indochina. Jutting awkwardly into Thailand, Burma, and China, it actually looks on maps as if it had been pasted onto Laos. There are very few Lao in Nam Tha, and most of the lowland valleys are inhabited by Lu, a Tai- peaking people who were once part of a feudal kingdom centered in southern Yunnan.

With thirty tribal dialects and languages, most of them mutually unintelligible, and virtually no Lao population, Nam Tha Province had been a source of endless frustration for both French and American counterinsurgency specialists.

With his knowledge of local languages and his remarkable rapport with the mountain minorities, William Young was uniquely qualified to overcome these difficulties. Speaking four of the most important languages-Lu, Lao, Meo, and Lahu-Young could deal directly with most of the tribesmen in Nam Tha. And since Young had grown up in Lahu and Shan villages in Burma, he actually enjoyed the long months of solitary work among the hill tribes, which might have strained the nerves of less acculturated agents. Rather than trying to create a tribal warlord on the Vang Pao Young decided to build a pan-tribal army under the command of a joint council composed of one or two leaders from every tribe. Theoretically the council was supposed to have final authority on all matters, but in reality Young controlled all the money and made all the decisions. However, council meetings did give various tribal leaders a sense of participation and greatly increased the efficiency of paramilitary operations. Most importantly, Young managed to develop his pan-tribal council and weaken the would-be Yao warlord, Chao Mai, without alienating him from the program. In fact, Chao Mai remained one of Young's strongest supporters, and his Yao tribesmen comprised the great majority of the CIA mercenary force in Nam Tha. (177)

Although his relationships with hill tribe leaders were quite extraordinary, William Young still used standard CIA procedures for "opening up" an area to paramilitary operations. But to organize the building of runways, select base sites, and perform all the other essential tasks connected with forging a counterguerrilla infrastructure, Young recruited a remarkable team of sixteen Shan and Lahu operatives he called "the Sixteen Musketeers," whose leader was a middle-aged Shan nationalist leader, "General" U Ba Thein.(178)

With the team's assistance, Young began "opening up" the province in mid 1962. By late 1963 he had built up a network of some twenty dirt landing strips and a guerrilla force of six hundred Yao commandos and several hundred additional troops from the other tribes. But the war in northwestern Laos had intensified and large-scale refugee relocations had begun in late 1962 when Chao Mai and several thousand of his Yao followers abandoned their villages in the mountains between Nam Tha City and Muong Sing, both of Which were under Pathet Lao control, and moved south to Ban Na Woua and Nam Thouei, refugee centers established by the Sixteen Musketeers. (179) (See Map 9, page 303, for locations of these towns.) The outbreak of fighting several months later gradually forced tribal mercenaries and their families, particularly the Yao, out of the Pathet Lao zone and into refugee camps. (180)

Instead of directing rice drops and refugee operations personally, Young delegated the responsibility to a pistol-packing community development worker named Joseph Flipse (who, like Edgar Buell, was an IVS volunteer). While Flipse maintained a humanitarian showplace at Nam Thouei complete with a hospital, school, and supply warehouse, William Young and the Sixteen Musketeers opened a secret base at Nam Yu, only three miles away, which served as CIA headquarters for cross-border intelligence forays deep into southern China. (181) The Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde relationship between Nam Thouei and Nam Yu in northwestern Laos was very similar to the arrangement at Sam Thong and Long Tieng in northeastern Laos: for almost a decade reporters and visiting Congressmen were taken to Sam Thong to see all the wonderful things Edgar Buell was doing to save the poor Meo from Communist genocide, but were flatly denied access to CIA headquarters at Long Tieng. (182)

However, just as the operations were getting under way, CIA policy decisions and local opium politics combined to kill this enthusiasm and weaken the overall effectiveness of bill tribe operations. A series of CIA personnel transfers in 1964 and 1965 probably did more damage than anything else. When Young became involved in a heated jurisdictional dispute with Thai intelligence officers in October 1964, the CIA pulled him out of Nam Tha and sent him to Washington, D.C., for a special training course. High-ranking CIA bureaucrats in Washington and Vientiane had long been dissatisfied with the paucity of "Intel-Coms" (intelligence communications) and in-depth reports they were getting from Young, and apparently used his squabble with the Thais as a pretext for placing a more senior agent in charge of operations in Nam Tha. After Young's first replacement, an operative named Objibway, died in a helicopter crash in the summer of 1965, Anthony Poe drew the assignment. (183)

Where William Young had used his skill as a negotiator and his knowledge of minority cultures to win compliance from hill tribe leaders, Anthony Poe preferred to use bribes, intimidation, and threats. The hill tribe leaders, particularly Chao Mai, were alienated by Poe's tactics and became less aggressive. Poe tried to rekindle their enthusiasm for combat by raising salaries and offering cash bonuses for Pathet Lao ears. (184) But as a former USAID official put it, "The pay was constantly going up, and the troops kept moving slower."(185)

Gen. Ouane Rattikone's monopolization of the opium trade in Military Region 1, northwestern Laos, dealt another major blow to Chao Mai's enthusiasm for the war effort. Chao Mai had inherited control over the Yao opium trade from his father, and during the early 1960s he was probably the most important opium merchant in Nam Tha Province. Every year Chao Mai sold the harvest to the Chinese merchants in Muong Sing and Ban Houei Sai who acted as brokers for the Corsican charter airlines. With his share of the profits, Chao Mai financed a wide variety of social welfare projects among the Yao,. from which he derived his power and prestige. However, when General Ouane took over the Laotian opium trade in 1965, he forced all of his competitors, big and little, out of business. One USAID official who worked in the area remembers that all the hotels and shops in Ban Houci Sai were crowded with opium buyers from Vientiane and Luang Prabang following the 1963 and 1964 harvest seasons. But in 1965 the hotels and shops were empty and local merchants explained that, "there was a big move on by Ouane to consolidate the opium business." General Ouane's strategy for forcing his most important competitor out of business was rather simple-, after Chao Mai had finished delivering most of the Yao opium to General Ouane's broker in Ban Houei Sai, who had promised to arrange air transport to Vientiane, the Lao army officer simply refused to pay for the opium. There was absolutely nothing Chao Mai could do, and he was forced to accept the loss. Needless to say, this humiliating incident further weakened his control over the Yao, and by the time he died in April 1967 most of his followers had moved to Nam Keung where his brother Chao La was sitting out the war on the banks of the Mekong.(186)

After Chao Mai's death, Anthony Poe tried in vain to revitalize tribal commando operations by appointing his brother, Chao La, commander of Yao paramilitary forces. Although Chao La accepted the position and participated in the more spectacular raids, such as the recapture of Nam Tha city in October 1967, he has little interest in the tedium of day-to-day operations which are the essence of counterguerrilla warfare. Unlike Chao Mai, who was a politician and a soldier, Chao La is a businessman whose main interests are his lumber mill, gunrunning and the narcotics traffic. In fact, there are some American officials who believe that Chao La only works with the CIA to get guns (which he uses to buy opium from Burmese smugglers) and political protection for his opium refineries.(187)

Although William Young was removed from command of paramilitary operations in 1964, the CIA had ordered him back to Nam Tha in August 1965 to continue supervising the Yao and Lahu intelligence teams, which were being sent deep into Yunnan Province, China. Wedged between China and Burma, Nam Tha Province is an ideal staging ground for cross-border intelligence patrols operating in southern China. The arbitrary boundaries between Burma, China, and Laos have absolutely no meaning for the hill tribes, who have been moving back and forth across the frontiers for centuries in search of new mountains and virgin forests, As a result of these constant migrations, many of the hill tribes that populate the Burma-China borderlands are also found in Nam Tha Province. (188) Some of the elderly Lahu and Yao living in Nam Tha were actually born in Yunnan, and many of the younger generation have relatives there. Most importantly, both of these tribes have a strong sense of ethnic identity, and individual tribesmen view themselves as members of larger Yao and Lahu communities that transcend national boundaries.(189) Because of the ethnic overlap between all three countries, CIA-trained Lahu and Yao agents from Nam Tha could cross the Chinese border and wander around the mountains of Yunnan tapping telephone lines and monitoring road traffic without being detected.

After a year of recruiting and training agents, William Young had begun sending the first Lahu and Yao teams into China in 1963. Since the CIA and the Pentagon were quite concerned about the possibility of Chinese military intervention in Indochina, any intelligence on military activity in southern China was valued and the cross-border operations were steadily expanded. By the time Young quit the CIA in 1967, he had opened three major radio posts within Burma's Shan States, built a special training camp that was graduating thirty-five agents every two months, and sent hundreds of teams deep into Yunnan. While Young's linguistic abilities and his understanding of hill tribe culture had made him a capable paramilitary organizer, it was his family's special relationship with the Lahu that enabled him to organize the cross-border operations. The Sixteen Musketeers who recruited most of the first agents were Lahu, the majority of the tribesmen who volunteered for these dangerous missions were Labu, and all the radio posts inside the Shan States were manned by Lahu tribesmen.(190)

This special relationship with the Lahu tribe dates back to the turn of the century, when the Rev. William M. Young opened an American Baptist Mission in the Shan States at Kengtung City and began preaching the gospel in the marketplace. While the Buddhist townspeople ignored Reverend Young, crowds of curious Lahu tribesmen, who had come down from the surrounding hills to trade in the market, gathered to listen. None of the Lahu were particularly interested in the God named Jesus Christ of which he spoke, but were quite intrigued by the possibility that Reverend Young himself might be God. A popular Lahu prophet had once told his followers:

"We may not see God, no matter how we search for him now. But, when the time is fulfilled, God will search for us and will enter our homes. There is a sign and when it appears, we will know that God is coming. The sign is that white people on white horses will bring us the Scriptures ofGod."(191)

Reverend Young was a white American, wore a white tropical suit, and like many Baptist missionaries, carried his Bible wherever he went. As word of the White God spread through the hills, thousands of Lahu flocked to Kengtung, where Reverend Young baptized them on the spot. When Reverend Young reported 4,419 baptisms for the year 1905-1906 (an all-time conversion record for the Burma Baptist Mission), mission officials became suspicious and a delegation was sent to investigate. Although the investigators concluded that Reverend Young was pandering to pagan myths, Baptist congregations in the United States were impressed by his statistical success and had already started sending large contributions to "gather in the harvest." Bowing to financial imperatives, the Burma Baptist Mission left the White God free to wander the bills. (192)

After twenty years of work in Kengtung, Reverend Young turned the mission over to younger missionaries and carried the gospel on to the Lahu of Yunnan. Lahu tribesmen from Yunnan had been coming to Kengtung for a number of years to 4 see the White God, and Reverend Young was eager to harvest the waiting souls in China. After opening two missions in western Yunnan and converting thousands, he retired and left Burma in 1932. When he died four years later one of his fellow missionaries hailed him as a pioneer who single-handedly "pushed back the frontiers of Baptist Mission work to cover an area of 100,000 square miles." (193)

His sons remained to carry on his work, and in 1935 Harold Young established a mission in the Wa States. He had inherited his father's semidivine charisma and quickly added thousands of Wa to the lists of instant Christians. (194) After World War II, the newly independent Burmese government became suspicious of his relations with minority dissidents and he was forced to leave the country. He moved to Chiangmai, Thailand, where he became curator of the local zoo.(195) Despite the superficiality of many Lahu conversions, two generations of missionary work by the Young family left behind a strong church; in 1950 the American Baptist Mission estimated that out of sixty-six thousand Lahu in northeastern Burma, twenty-eight thousand were Christians. (196)

Harold's move to Chiangmai marked the beginning of the second chapter in the history of the Young family's special relationship with the Lahu tribe. After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the CIA rearmed remnants of the Nationalist Chinese army who had fled into the Shan States and launched three abortive invasions into western Yunnan on the theory that the Chinese masses would rally to their banners. The CIA needed detailed information on Chinese troop movements in Yunnan's border areas and hired Harold Young to gather this intelligence. Young contacted a Shan Christian in Kengtung named U Ba Thein, and asked him to organize a team of Lahu Christians for intelligence work inside China. Since U Ba Thein had commanded a Lahu paramilitary unit for British intelligence during World War II, he was more than competent to direct the operation. U Ba Thein recruited a group of Christian Lahu and sent them to Chiangmai where Harold Young's eldest son, Gordon, trained them in radio transmission and repairs. Once the training was completed, they hiked back into the Shan States and began the operation in the Burma-China borderlands, paying particular attention to a Chinese telecommunications base at Meng-Lien that was then under construction. All the intelligence information was radioed back to Chiangmai in Lahu, translated by Gordon Young and handed over to a local CIA operative who was working undercover as the American vice-consul. (197)

The Lahu intelligence operations continued for almost six years until the outbreak of the Shan national revolution forced U Ba Thein to leave Burma in 1958. During the last twenty-five years of their colonial rule, the British had separated the Shan States from the rest of Burma and administered them as an autonomous federation, governing indirectly through the sawbwas, the traditional feudal princes. (198) In order to induce the sawbwas to join the newly independent Union of Burma, the government's 1947 constitution reconfirmed their traditional prerogatives and granted them administrative autonomy with the right to secession after ten years. However, the Burmese began to revoke some of the sawbwas' prerogatives during the early 1950s, and as the constitutionally guaranteed secession date approached (January 4, 1958) many of the sawbwas began to advocate independence. (199)The Burmese response was forceful repression, and by late 1958 there were small Shan rebel guerrilla armies in the hills. When the Burmese government abolished the last of the sawbwas' prerogatives in 1959, the rebellion intensified. The final break came in 1962 when the commander in chief of the Burmese army, Gen. Ne Win, who had just seized power through a military coup, arrested many of the sawbwas who were then negotiating with the civilian government.(200)

As treasurer of Kengtung State, U Ba Thein was intensely loyal to its popular young sawbwa, Sao Sai Long, and played an important role in the early stages of the Shan independence movement. Burmese intelligence officials became suspicious of his activities, and U Ba Thein soon realized that it was only a matter of time until they arrested him. (201) After closing the treasury offices one Friday afternoon in January 1958, he stuffed the state pension funds into a canvas sack and fled into the hills. (202)

When U Ba Thein showed up at Harold Young's home in Chiangmai several weeks later, Gordon found him a hiding place in the nearby mountains and supplied him with food. After he came out of hiding four months later, he decided that there were too many Burmese agents in Chiangmai and moved to Muong Sing, Laos, where he remained for the next three and a half years, buying arms for Shan insurgents with the Kengtung pension funds, and trying, without much success, to organize an effective guerrilla army. (203)

Through his work for the CIA, U Ba Thein's cross-border intelligence missions became inextricably interwoven with the fabric of the Burmese opium trade, and he became involved in a series of arms-for-opium deals between General Ouane and the Shans.

Since the Pathet Lao occupied the entire Laotian-Chinese frontier area, CIA tribal intelligence teams had to pass through the Burmese Shan States before entering Yunnan (instead of crossing the border directly from Nam Tha Province). As a result, the CIA had to depend on Shan rebels to guide its teams up to the Chinese border, protect its forward radio posts inside the Shan States and provide transportation between these radio posts and its forward bases in Nam Tha. Almost every aspect of these intelligence missions was somehow involved with the logistics of the Burmese opium trade.

A brief review of the cross-border missions' operating procedures illustrates the peculiar symbiosis between opium and espionage in the Burmese Shan States. In general, the modus operandi of cross-border patrols changed very little from the time William Young initiated them in 1962 until President Nixon ordered them stopped in August 1971. (204)

Once prospective agents were recruited, they were sent to secret camps not far from Nam Yu for two months of rigorous training. While the CIA planned the curriculum, Thai special forces provided most of the actual instructors.(205) After that the prospective agents were sent to the Thai special forces camp at Phitsanulok for four to five months of instruction in codes, radio transmission, and radio repair. (206)

Finally, the tribal agents were flown back to Nam Yu, the nerve center of cross-border espionage, and divided into five- to fifteen-man teams. From Nam Yu the teams were flown fifty-five miles due north and dropped off on the Laotian bank of the Mekong River. After inflating their rubber rafts, the teams paddled across the Mekong and hiked three miles through the Burmese jungle until they reached the joint Nationalist ChineseCIA base near Mong Hkan. Of the five bases the CIA maintains along the Burma-China border, Mong Hkan is by far the most exotic. It was originally established by a KMT intelligence force, the First Independent Unit, to serve as a base for its own cross-border forays into Yunnan, and as a radio post for transmitting information on the availability of opium to KMT military caravans based at Mae Salong in northern Thailand. When the CIA began sending its reconnaissance patrols into Yunnan, the First Independent Unit agreed to share the base and Young opened a radio post manned by Lahu agents. According to Young, Mong Hkan was something of a "little Switzerland." Soon after the CIA arrived, British, Thai, Laotian, and even a few Indian intelligence agents began showing up to "see what they could skim off the top."(207)

From Mong Hkan, the CIA teams hiked north for several days to one of two forward bases only a few miles fro m the border-a joint CIAKMT radio post at Mong He and a CIA station at Mong Mom. The teams usually spent about three or four months inside China.

Using light-weight, four-pound radios with a broadcast radius of four hundred miles, the teams transmitted their top priority data directly to a powerful receiver at Nam Yu or to specially equipped Air America planes that flew back and forth along the LaotianChinese border. Once these messages were translated at Nam Yu, they were forwarded to Vientiane for analysis and possible transmission to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The radio messages also served to pinpoint every team's position, all carefully recorded on a huge relief map of Yunnan Province mounted in a restricted operations room at Nam YU.(208)

During the period that William Young directed cross-border espionage, the CIA maintained two independent listening posts much deeper inside the Shan States, in addition to the bases it operated jointly with the KMT. Both of these posts-one located ten miles north of Mong Yang and the other five miles east of Ving Ngun-were extremely close to the Chinese border. Each was manned by twenty to thirty Lahu and Wa operatives who mounted lateral patrols along the border, went into China on reconnaissance missions, and maintained radio contact with Nam Yu.(209)

Since Mong Yang is about 80 miles from CIA headquarters at Nam Yu and Ving Ngun is over 180 miles away, the Agency found it had to rely on U Ba Thein's guerrilla armies to protect these bases from Burmese army patrols and government self-defense forces. U Ba Thein feels that his guerrillas provided an invaluable service for the CIA, pointing out that these posts were maintained with only twenty to thirty men, whereas KNIT radio posts in the same areas that were not protected by the rebels needed a minimum of a hundred men.

Rather than sending Air America helicopters so far into unknown, hostile territory to keep these bases supplied, the CIA relied on Shan rebel opium caravans. Since these caravans usually returned from their frequent trips to northern Thailand and Laos with a relatively lighter load of arms and ammunition, they were happy to pick up some extra money by carrying suppliesarms, ammunition, money, and radiosto the CIA's forward listenin post, thus saving the CIA the risk of sending Air America helicopters into far-off, unknown, and hostile territory.(210)

 

Gen. U Ba Thein: Reaping the Whirlwind

Unlike many of the minority leaders who serve the CIA in the Golden Triangle region, U Ba Thein is not a mere mercenary. At the peak of his power in the mid 1960s, he was one of the most important Shan revolutionary leaders. Most of the things he did, including his work for the CIA, were designed to further the cause. While most guerril a leaders in the Third World would hardly consider the CIA a partner in national liberation, U Ba Thein viewed the Agency as his natural ideological ally. Most of the Shan rebels are anti-Communist monarchists, and the Burmese government they are fighting is Marxist oriented and socialistic. The Shan rebel leaders look on the Burmese as aggressors who have expropriated their mineral wealth, but they remember the British colonial administrators with a certain fondness for having built schools and kept the Burmese at a safe distance. Like many of his generation, U Ba Thein was educated in British schools, converted to Christianity, and learned to think of white men as his protectors. He said he was fighting for Shan independence, but he also wanted to place his independent nation under the protection of Britain or the United States. in September 1971 he told the authors of his political aspirations:

"We want to be independent from the Burmese, but we are very poor and will need help. We have many minerals in the Shan States and perhaps the British or Americans will come and help develop these for us. You know, sir, we have given Bill Young twenty mineral samples to send to the U.S. to be analyzed. Then if we can get Britain or the U.S. to come in and hold hands with us we can stand independent."(211)

U Ba Thein enjoyed organizing commando operations for British intelligence during World War 11 because he was secure in the knowledge that a great white empire was behind him. When he began building up a Shan revolutionary movement in 1958, his first thought was to seek aid from the Americans.

Soon after U Ba Thein fled from Burma and arrived in Muong Sing, Laos, in mid 1958, he contacted Dr. Tom Dooley, a sort of middle American Albert Schweitzer who was operating a free clinic for the natives in nearby Nam Tha, and asked him to get aid for the Shans from the U.S. Embassy or the CIA. But although Dr. Dooley was fast becoming the patron saint of America's antiCommunist crusade in Southeast Asia, he was no gunrunner. U Ba Thein eventually became associated with a fledgling rebel group called the Youth party, but in general he accomplished very little during his first two years in Muong Sing. (212)

However, in 1961 U Ba Thein and another leader of the Youth party, "General" Sao Gnar Kham, decided to break with the party's incompetent leader and form the Shan National Army, a loose coalition that eventually included most of the rebel bands operating in Kengtung State. While U Ba Thein was not an exceptional leader, Sao Gnar Kharn was one of the very few genuinely charismatic commanders the Shan rebellion has yet produced. Before joining the rebel movement, he was a practicing Buddhist monk in Kengtung City. There he used his remarkable personal magnetism to solicit donations for the construction of orphanages. When the Shan secessionist movement began in 1958, Gnar Kharn made the mistake of openly expressing his sympathies for the dissidents and was arrested. After receiving a hideously severe beating he fled into the hills to join the guerrillas, taking the orphanage donations with him.(213) When the Shan National Army (SNA) was formed, Gnar Kham's leadership abilities made him the obvious choice for commander, and U Ba Thein became deputy commander,

During its first year, SNA operations were severely hampered by a lack of money and arms. In late 1961 their fortunes were at a low ebb: their absconded funds were running low, few of the independent rebel bands seemed willing to join the SNA, and they desperately needed modern automatic weapons. At this particular moment in history the interests of the Shan National Army complemented those of Gen. Ouane Rattikone, and the opium-arms traffic that later made Laos a major heroin -processing center was born. As head of General Phoumi's secret Opium Administration, Ouane was charged with the responsibility for importing large quantities of Burmese opium. General Phourni had an ample supply of surplus weapons, since the rightist army was receiving large shipments of modem arms from the CIA, and its generals inflated the troop roster in order to pad the payroll. For their part, Gnar Kham and U Ba Thein had contacts with rebel groups in Kengtung State who were trading the local opium they collected as taxes for overpriced World War I rifles and would welcome a better bargain.

What role, if any, did William Young and the CIA play in bringing the two parties together? First, it is important to note that the Kengtung rebels and General Ouane had known of each other for a number of years. When General Ouane was Pathet Lao commander in northwestern Laos during the 1940s, he was once forced to retreat into Kengtung State, where he was given asylum by the sawbwa. The incident left General Ouane with a lasting affection for the Shans, and he kept in sporadic contact over the years. William Young says that Gnar Kham pleaded with him to arrange air transportation to Vientiane so that he could meet with General Ouane, but Young insists that he had no authorization for such trips and denied the request. Young adds, however, that General Ouane found out about the situation independently and ordered the Secret Army commander for northwestern Laos to begin making arms available to the SNA in exchange for Burmese opium. Sometime later Ouane himself flew up to Ban Houei Sai and met with Gnar Kharn to finalize the arrangements. (214) U Ba Thein generally concurs with Young's account, but adds that Young knew about the arrangement, saw the stolen arms and opium being exchanged, and never made any move to stop it. Since the Americans had denied his formal requests for military aid, U Ba Thein assumed that their benign neglect of the opium-arms trade was another form of repayment for all the services the SNA was providing the Agency. (215) In fact, the security of CIA's listening posts near Mong Yang and Ving Ngun did depend on the Shans having good automatic weapons and the Agency's logistics link with these two bases was the SNA opium caravans. Young admits that he adopted a posture of benign neglect toward the traffic, but denies any personal wrongdoing, claiming that this was the CIA policy throughout northern Laos. The CIA was afraid that pressure on local mercenary commanders to get out of the traffic might damage the effectiveness of paramilitary work.(216)

Once matters were finally settled with General Ouane and a steady stream of Shan opium and U.S. arms began moving in and out of Ban Houei Sai, Gnar Kham and U Ba Thein launched an ambitious attempt to forge a unified guerrilla army out of Kengtung State's potpourri of petty warlords. In late 1962 Gnar Kham and U Ba Thein left Ban Houei Sai and moved across the Mekong River into Thailand where they laid the foundation for their modern, unified army.(217) (See Map 9 on page 303.)

Under Gnar Kham and U Ba Thein's supervision, the opium-arms commerce produced a marked improvement in Shan military capabilities and a dramatic shift in the balance of forces in Kengtung State. In 1962 most of the rebel units in Kengtung were little more than bands of outlaws hiding in the most remote mountains. After gathering opium taxes from the few villages under their control, each of the local commanders led a caravan to Gnar Kham's forward caravan camp at Huei Krai, Thailand, and used the opium to buy U.S. automatic weapons from the Laotian army. With more weapons, the rebel groups were able to take control of additional opium-growing villages before the next year's harvest was in. More opium taxes meant more automatic weapons from U Ba Thein's rear-area headquarters near Ban Houei Sai, which in turn meant control over more villages and still more opium. The symbiotic cycle of opium and arms spiraled upward into a military whirlwind that swept the Burmese army out of the countryside into a few wellguarded cities. By 1965 the SNA's seven major local commanders had an estimated five thousand soldiers under their command and controlled most of Kengtung State's twelve thousand square miles.(218)

The importance of the opium-arms dynamic in building up the SNA is illustrated by the military impact of the 1964-1965 opium harvest in Mong Yang and Kengtung districts. The two SNA commanders who controlled the mountains around Kengtung City, Major Samlor and Maj. Tsai Noie, finished collecting the first round of their opium tax in January 1965. To protect themselves from the Burmese army and the KNIT, they merged into a single caravan of ten mules carrying 650 kilos of raw opium and set off for northern Thailand with a combined force of two hundred armed men. After crossing the border into Thailand, they unloaded their cargo at Gnar Kham's camp in the mountains and sold it to a merchant in the nearby town of Mae Sai for $28 a kilo, a rather low price. Then they purchased sixty rifles in Ban Houei Sai (paying $125 for an ordinary rifle and $150 for a U.S. M-1 or M-2), and had them smuggled across the river into Chiang Khong and delivered to Gnar Kham's camp. While the group's leader was in Chiang Khong supervising the opium-arms transfer, they visited William Young at the CIA bungalow and briefed him on the situation in their areas of the Shan States. (219) When the caravan returned to Kengtung District in March, the two commanders divided the sixty rifles evenly. These thirty rifles represented an important addition to Major Samlor's arsenal of eighty rifles, four Bren automatics, and one mortar, and an equally important supplement to Maj. Tsai Noie's collection of fifty rifles, two Brens, and a homemade bazooka.

During the 1964-1965 harvest the SNA commander for the Mong Yang region, Maj. Saeng Wan, sent two large caravans to northern Thailand, which earned over $25,000 and brought back 120 rifles, some mortars, and several heavy machine guns. Before these two caravans returned, he had had only 280 armed men, one heavy machine gun, and four Bren automatics to protect the entire Mong Yang region, which included the nearby CIA listening post. (220)

While opium was indeed the miracle ingredient that rushed vital arms and money into the SNA's system, it was also a poison that weakened its military effectiveness and finally destroyed the fragile coalition. There was enough opium in even the smallest district in Kengtung State to buy arms and equipment for a rebel army and make its leader a wealthy man. As a result, rebel commanders became preoccupied with protecting territorial prerogatives and expanding their personal fiefs. Instead of sending troops into an adjoining area to launch a joint operation against the Burmese, SNA commanders kept every man on patrol inside his own territory to collect the opium tax and keep his greedy comrades at a safe distance. A British journalist who spent five months in Kengtung State with the SNA in 1964-1965 reported that:

". . . it would be far more accurate to describe the SNA as a grouping of independent warlords loosely tied into a weak federation with a president as a figurehead. This president has influence through the facilities he offers for selling opium and buying guns and because he presents a front to the outside world, but it is unlikely he will ever wield effective power unless he becomes the channel for outside aid in the forms of guns or money."(221)

The lucrative opium traffic turned into a source of internal corruption alienating commanders from their troops and prompting ranking officers to fight each other for the spoils. Shan troops frequently complained that they were left at Gnar Kham's mountain camp to feed the mules, while their leaders were off in the fleshpots of Chiangmai wasting opium profits on whores and gambling instead of buying arms. Often, as soon as a rebel group grew large enough to be militarily effective, the second in command killed his leader or else split the force in order to increase his personal share of the profits.

Not surprisingly, it was this type of dispute that ultimately destroyed the Shan National Army. U Ba Thein had been concerned about Sao Gnar Kham's enormous popularity and his control over the opium traffic for several years. Evidently there were repeated disagreements among various leaders over the opium profits. In December 1964 the charismatic commander in chief of the SNA was shot and killed at the Huei Krai caravan station. Some sources claim that it was an opium profit dispute that led to the murder. (222)

U Ba Thein was selected commander in chief of the SNA at a meeting of the local commanders in February 1965, but he lacked the personal magnetism and leadership abilities that Gnar Kham. had used to maintain some semblance of unity within the strife-torn coalition. Afraid that he would suffer a fate similar to Gnar Kham's, U Ba Thein refused to venture out of his headquarters either to meet with subordinates or to travel through Kengtung State for a firsthand look at the military situation. Local commanders began to break away from the coalition and the SNA gradually dissolved; by 1966 these leaders were marketing their own opium and U Ba Thein had become a forgotten recluse surrounded by a dwindling number of bodyguards. Six years after Gnar Kham's death, five of his seven local commanders had either been captured, forced into retirement, or killed by their own men, while the remaining two have become mercenary warlords, professional opium smugglers.

But even well before Gnar Kham's death, other Shan rebel armies had already begun to play an even more important role in the region's opium trade. While the history of the SNA's involvement in the opium traffic is important because of its relationship with Gen. Ouane Rattikone, its caravans probably never carried more than I percent of the Burmese opium exported to Thailand and Laos. (223) In fact, the only Shan warlord who ran a truly professional smuggling organization capable of transporting large quantities of opium was the notorious Chan Shee-fu. A halfShan, half-Chinese native of Lashio District in the northern Shan States, Chan Shee-fu became involved in opium trafficking in 1963, when the Burmese government began authorizing the formation of local self-defense forces (called Ka Kwe Ye [or KKYJ, in Burmese) to combat the Shan rebels. While the Burmese government gave its militia no money, rations, or uniforms, and only a minimum of arms, it compensated for this stinginess by giving them the right to use all government-controlled roads and towns in the Shan States for opium smuggling.

In 1963 Chan Shee-fu was authorized to form a militia of several hundred men, and being a young man of uncommon ambition, he quickly parlayed a number of successful opium shipments to Thailand into a well-armed militia of eight hundred men. After severing his ties with the Burmese army in 1964, Chan Sheefu abandoned his bases at Lashio and Tang Yang and shifted his headquarters eastward to Ving Ngun in the Wa States (one of the most bountiful opiumgrowing regions in Burma), where he established an independent fiefdom. He ruled the Ving Ngun area for two years, and his ruthlessness commanded the respect of even the wild Wa, whose unrelenting headhunting habits had forced both the British and Burmese to adopt a more circumspect attitude. To increase his share of the profits, he built a crude refinery (one of the very few then operating in the Shan States) for processing raw opium into morphine bricks. In 1966 he rejoined the government militia, and using the government's laissez passer to increase his opium shipments to Thailand, he expanded his army to two thousand men. Unlike the SNA, which could never mobilize more than two hundred or three hundred of its troops at any one time, Chan Shee-fu ruled his army with an iron hand and could rely on them to do exactly what he ordered. (224)

Despite the size and efficiency of his army, Chan Shee-fu still controlled only a relatively small percentage of the total traffic. In fact, a CIA study prepared by William Young in 1966-1967 showed that Shan caravans carried only 7 percent of Burma's exports, the Kachin Independence Army (the dominant rebel group in Burma's Kachin State) 3 percent, and the KMT an overwhelming 90 percent. (225) Even though the KMT's position seemed statistically impregnable, Chan Shee-fu's precipitous rise had aroused considerable concern among the KMT generals in northern Thailand. And when his massive sixteen-ton opium caravan began rolling south toward Ban Houei Sai in June 1967, the KMT realized that its fifteen-year monopoly over the Burmese opium trade was finally being challenged. The situation provoked a serious crisis of confidence in the KMT's mountain redoubts, which caused a major internal reorganization.

The KNIT in Thailand: Guardian at the Northern Gate

Although KMT armies control about 90 percent of Burma's opium trade, they have not maintained any major bases inside the Shan States since 1961. After five thousand Burmese army troops and twenty thousand Communist Chinese troops launched a "surprise assault" on KMT headquarters at Mong Pa Liao, Kengtung State, in January 1961, most of the ten thousand KMT defenders fled across the Mekong into northwestern Laos and took refuge at Nam Tha City. Five tons of U.S. ammunition were discovered at Mong Pa Liao, and on February 16 the Burmese air force shot down an American-made Liberator bomber making supply drops to KMT holdouts inside Burma. (226) Apparently embarrassed by these incidents, the U.S. State Department offered to assist in the repatriation of KMT troops to Taiwan, and on March 14 the evacuation began. About forty-two hundred KMT regulars were flown from Nam Tha City to Ban Houei Sai, ferried across the Mekong, and trucked to Chiangrai, where they boarded flights for Taiwan. On April 12 the airlift came to an end, and Taiwan disclaimed any responsibility for the "few" who remained. (227)

Actually, some two thousand to three thousand KMT regulars had been left behind in Laos and they were hired by the CIA to strengthen the rightist position in the area. According to William Young, these troops were placed under the nominal command of General Phourni Nosavan and became the "Bataillon Speciale I I 1." They remained at Nam Tha until the rightist garrison began to collapse in mid 1962, and then they moved across the Mekong River into Thailand. With the full knowledge and consent of the Thai government, the KMTestablished two new bases on the top of jungle-covered mountains just a few miles from the Burmese border and resumed their involvement in the opium trade. (228)

Instead of hampering their commercial activities, the move to Thailand actually increased the KMT's overall importance in the Golden Triangle's opium trade. Not only did the KMT maintain their hold on Burma's opium, but they increased their share of the traffic in northern Thailand. In 1959 the Thai government had outlawed the growing and smoking of opium, and many Thai hill traders, fearful of police action, were in the process of quitting the opium trade. Most small towns and villages in the foothills of northern Thailand that had prospered as opium-trading centers for the last twelve years experienced a microrecession as their local opium merchants were forced out of business. While the lack of reliable data and official obfuscation makes it difficult to describe this transition for the whole of northern Thailand, an Australian anthropologist has provided us with a portrait of the rise and fall of a Thai opium-trading village named Ban Wat. (229)

Situated about three miles from the base of Thailand's western mountain range, with easy access to two mountain trails leading upward into the opium-growing villages, Ban Wat was an ideal base of operations for wandering mountain traders. Moreover, the village was only fifteen miles from Chiangmai, Thailand's northernmost rail terminus, so it was also accessible to merchants and brokers coming up from Bangkok.

Ban Wat's merchants first became involved in the opium trade in the 1920s, when four or five Meo villages were built in the nearby mountain districts. However, the Meo population was quite small, and their poppy cultivation was still secondary to subsistence rice production. Most of Ban Wat's traders were buying such small quantities of opium from the Meo that they sold it directly to individual addicts in the nearby valley towns. No big brokers came to Ban Wat from Bangkok or Chiangmai, though one Ban Wat trader occasionally bothered to smuggle a bit of opium down to Bangkok on the train. (230)

Once the Thai government decided to encourage poppy cultivation in 1947, however, the opium trade began to boom, and the village experienced unprecedented prosperity, becoming one of the largest opium markets in northern Thailand. The edict drew many Meo farmers into the nearby mountains, giving Ban Wat traders access to a large supply. Much of Ban Wat's active male population became involved in the opium trade as porters, mule skinners, or independent merchants. During the harvesting and planting season the Meo needed rice to feed themselves. The Ban Wat traders purchased rice in the Chiangmai market and sold it to the Meo on credit. When the opium harvest began, the traders returned to the Meo villages to collect their debts and also to trade silver, salt, rice, and manufactured goods for Meo opium.

While the abolition of legalized opium trading in 1959 has in no way hindered the continued expansion of Thailand's production, it was a disaster for Ban Wat. At the height of the opium boom there were twenty major opium traders operating out of Ban Wat; by 1968 there was only one. Two local merchants went broke when the police confiscated their opium, and another was ruined when his Meo customers moved to another province without paying their debts. These examples served to chasten Ban Wat's merchant community, and many traders quit the opium trade.(231)

The vacuum was not filled by other Thai traders, but by the KMT armies and an auxiliary of Yunnanese mountain traders. When the KMT and its civilian adherents were forced completely out of Burma in 1961, the entire commercial apparatus moved its headquarters into northern Thailand.(232) In 1965 a census of the most important Yunnanese villages in northern Thailand showed a total population of sixty-six hundred.(233) As the Thai traders were gradually forced out of business after 1959, the KMT and its civilian auxiliaries were uniquely qualified centrally organized military to take over the opium trade. With their structure, the KNIT was in an ideal position to keep track of migrating Meo clans and make sure that they paid their debts in full. With their military power, the KNIT could protect the enormous capital tied up in the merchant caravans from bandits and keep the exactions of the Thai police to a minimum.

The Yunnanese traders were the vanguard of the KMT's commercial conquest, infiltrating the mountain villages and imposing a form of debt slavery on hill tribe opium farmers. They opened permanent stores in most of the large opium-producing villages and sold such tantalizing items as flashlights, canned goods, silver ornaments, cloth, salt, and shoes. A 1962 report by the Thai Ministry of the Interior described the impact of this "commercial revolution":

"The increasing demand for merchandise deriving from outside has given a corresponding impetus to the raising of cash crops. There can be no doubt that the cultivation of poppy and the production of raw opium is by far the most profitable economic activity known to the hill peoples at present.... The shopkeepers and travelling merchants in the hills compete with each other to get hold of the product, readily granting credit for later sales of opium."(234)

Toward the end of the harvest season, when the Yunnanese merchants have finished buying up most of the opium in their area, armed KNIT caravans go from village to village collecting it. American missionaries who have seen the KMT on the march describe it as a disconcerting spectacle. As soon as the caravan's approach is signaled, all the women and children flee into the forest, leaving the men to protect the village. Once the opium is loaded onto the KMT's mules, the caravan rides on and the people come back out of the forest. The Ministry of the Interior's 1962 report described the KMT-Yunnanese logistics in some detail:

The key men of the opium traffic in the hills of Northern Thailand are the traders who come from outside the tribal societies.... On the basis of our observations in numerous villages of the 4 tribes we studied we have proof that the overwhelming majority of them are Haw [Yunnanesel....

Usually the Haw traders know each other personally, even if living in hill villages 200 km. [125 miles) and more apart. Most we encountered regard the village of Ban Yang, near Amphur Fang, as their central place [near KMT Third Army headquarters]. Quite a few of them will return to this place, after the closing of the trading season....

There seems to be a fair understanding among all the Haw in the hills and a remarkable coherence or even silent organization.

The Haw traders keep close contacts with the armed bands [KM'fl that dwell in fortified camps along the Burmese frontier. It is reported that they (the KMTJ give armed convoy to opium caravans along the jungle trails to the next reloading places.(235)

The fortified camps mentioned in the Ministry of the Interior's report above are the KNIT Fifth Army headquarters on Mae Salong mountain, about thirty miles northwest of Chiangrai, and the KNIT Third Army headquarters at Tam Ngop, a rugged mountain redoubt fifty miles west of Chiangrai. Although KNIT forces had always maintained a unified command structure in Burma, it established these two separate headquarters after moving to Thailand; this was symptomatic of deep internal divisions. For reasons never fully explained, Taiwan ordered its senior commander home in 1961 and subsequently cut back financial support for the remaining troops. Once external discipline was removed, personal rivalries between the generals broke the KNIT into three separate commands: Gen. Tuan Shi-wen formed the Fifth Army with eighteen hundred men; Gen. Ly Wen-huan became commander of the Third Army, a lesser force of fourteen hundred men; and Gen. Ma Ching-kuo and the four hundred intelligence operatives under his command broke away to form the First Independent Unit. (236) Since Gen. Ma Ching-kuo's First Independent Unit remained under the overall supervision of President Chiang Kai-shek's son, Chiang Chingkuo, in Taiwan, financial support for its intelligence operations inside China and Burma was continued. (237) As a result, its commander General Ma could afford to remain above the bitter rivalry between General Tuan and General Ly, and came to act as mediator between the two.(238)

After Taiwan cut off their money, Generals Tuan and Ly were forced to rely exclusively on the opium traffic to finance their military operations. "Necessity knows no law," General Tuan told a British journalist in 1967. "That is why we deal with opium. We have to continue to fight the evil of Communism, and to fight you must have an army, and an army must have guns, and to buy guns you must have money. In these mountains the only money is opium." (239)To minimize the possibility of violence between their troops, the two generals apparently agreed to a division of the spoils and used the Salween River to demarcate their respective spheres of influence inside the Shan States; General Tuan sends his caravans into Kengtung and the southern Wa States east of the Salween, while General Ly confines his caravans to the west bank of the river. (240)

While the SNA's local commanders were little more than petty smugglers, General Tuan and General Ly have become the robber barons of one of Southeast Asia's major agro-businesses. Their purchasing network covers most of the Shan States' sixty thousand square miles, and their caravans haul approximately 90 percent of Burma's opium exports from the Shan highlands to entrepots in northern Thailand. To manage this vast enterprise, the KMT generals have developed a formidable private communications network inside the Shan States and imposed a semblance of order on the once chaotic bill trade. On the western bank of the Salween General Ly has organized a string of seven radio posts that stretch for almost 250 miles from Third Army headquarters at Tam Ngop in northern Thailand to Lashio in the northern Shan States. (241) On the eastern bank, General Tuan maintains a network of eleven radio posts supplemented by the First Independent Unit's four forward listening posts along the Burma-China border.(242)

Each radio post is guarded by eighty to one hundred KMT soldiers who double as opium brokers and purchasing agents; as the planting season begins, they canvass the surrounding countryside paying advances to village headmen, negotiating with Shan rebels, and buying options from local opium traders. By the time the KMT caravans begin rolling north from Tam Ngop and Mae Salong in October or November, each of the radio posts has transmitted an advance report on the size and value of the harvest in its area to their respective KMT headquarters. Thus, KMT commanders are in a position to evaluate the size of the upcoming harvest in each district and plan a rough itinerary for the caravans.(243)

The enormous size of the KMT caravans makes this advance planning an absolute necessity. While most Shan rebel caravans rarely have more than fifty pack animals, the smallest KMT caravan has a hundred mules, and some have as many as six hundred. (244) The commander of a Shan rebel army active in the area west of Lashio reports that most KMT Third Army caravans that pass through his area average about four hundred mules. (245) Since an ordinary pack animal can carry about fifty kilos of raw opium on one of these long trips, a single caravan of this size can bring back as much as twenty tons of raw opium. Despite the large number of Shan rebels and government militia prowling the mountains, KMT caravans can afford to travel, with a minimum of armed guards (usually about three hundred troops, or only one man for every one or two mules) because they carry portable field radios and can signal their scattered outposts for help if attacked. Scouts are sent out well ahead of the column to look for possible trouble. Since most of the mule drivers and guards are vigorous young tribesmen recruited from northern Thailand, KMT caravans are able to move fast enough to avoid ambush. Moreover, the KMT carry an impressive arsenal of 60 mm. mortars, .50 caliber machine guns, 75 mm. recoilless rifles, and semiautomatic carbines, which is usually ample deterrence for both poorly armed Shan rebels and crack Burmese army units.

The caravans begin moving south in October or November and stopping at large hill tribe villages, market towns, and KMT outposts to pick up waiting shipments of opium. Although there are KMT caravans plodding across the Shan highlands throughout most of the year, most caravans seem to be going north from October through March (which includes the harvest season) and riding south from March through August. General Ly's Third Army caravans usually go as far north as Lashio District, about 250 miles from Tam Ngop, where they pick up opium brought down from Kachin State and northern Shan districts by itinerant merchants. (246) General Tuan's Fifth Army caravans used to go all the way to Ving Ngun, about 170 miles north of Mae Salong, until 1969, when the Burmese Communist party began operating in the southern Wa States. Since then KMT caravans have been relying on itinerant merchants to bring Kokang and Wa states opium out of these Communist-controlled areas.(247)

When the KMT caravans begin to head back to Thailand, they are often joined by smaller Shan rebel or merchant caravans, who travel with them for protection. Predatory bands of Shan rebels, government militia (KKY), and Burmese army troops prowl the hills. According to one Shan rebel leader, a caravan has to have an absolute minimum of fifty armed men to survive, but with two hundred armed men it is completely safe unless something unusual happens. Since the smaller groups cannot afford a sufficient quantity of automatic weapons to protect themselves adequately (in mid 1971 an M-16 cost $250 to $300 in Chiangmai), many prefer to ride with the KMT even though they have to pay a protection fee of $9 per kilo of opium (a high fee considering that a kilo of opium retailed for $60 in Chiangmai in 1967). (248)

As a service to the Thai government, the KMT Third and Fifth armies act as a border patrol force along the rugged northern frontier and use their authority to collect a "duty" of $4.50 on every kilo of opium entering Thailand. (249) In 1966-1967 the CIA reported that KMT forces patrolled a seventy-five-mile stretch of borderland in Chiangmai and Chiangrai provinces (250) but in mid 1971 Shan rebel leaders claimed that KMT revenue collectors covered the entire northern border all the way from Mae Sai to Mae Hong Son. Although the rugged mountain terrain and maze of narrow horse trails would frustrate the best ordinary customs service, very few Shan caravans can ever enter Thailand without paying tax to the KMT. With their comprehensive radio and intelligence network, the KMT spot most caravans soon after they begin moving south and usually have a reception committee waiting when one crosses into Thailand. (251) (See Map 11, page 335.)

Not having to rely on opium for funds like the Third and Fifth armies, the First Independent Unit gives top priority to its military mission of cross-border espionage, and regards opium smuggling as a complementary but secondary activity. Most importantly from Taiwan's perspective, the First Independent Unit has helped perpetuate the myth of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's imminent "return to the mainland" by launching repeated sabotage raids into southern China. (252)

General Tuan's Fifth Army has provided considerable support for General Ma's intelligence operations, and on at least one occasion his troops participated in a full-scale raid into southern China. In exchange for such assistance, General Tuan's troops were allowed to use the First Independent Unit's listening posts as opium-trading centers. (253) While Gen. Tuan is rather tight-lipped about his involvement in the opium trade, he is extremely proud of his vanguard position in the anti-Communist crusade. Describing himself as the "watchdog at the northern gate," General Tuan likes to regale his visitors with stories about his exploits battling Mao Tse-tung during the 1930s, fighting the Japanese during World War 11, and raiding Yunnan Province in more recent years. Although the sixty-one-year-old general spends most of his time in Chiangmai enjoying the vast personal fortune he has amassed from the opium business, he still likes to think of himself as a diehard guerrilla fighter and launches an occasional raid into China to polish up his image. (254)

Since General Ma was the only one of the three generals who enjoyed Taiwan's full support, he emerged as the senior KNIT commander in the Golden Triangle region. Although a number of serious disputes had poisoned relations between General Tuan and General Ly, General Ma had remained on good terms with both. At the urging of high command on Taiwan, General Ma began acting as a mediator shortly after the KNIT moved to Thailand, but with little success. Taiwan was hoping to reestablish a unified command under General Ma, but Generals Tuan and Ly saw little to be gained from giving up their profitable autonomy.(255) Although the battle at Ban Khwan would heal this rift, for the moment, the situation remained static.

Battle at Ban Khwan: The Challenge of Chan Shee-Fu

General Ma had his chance as mediator in early 1967 when Generals Tuan and Ly began receiving disturbing information about Chan Sheefu's activities in the Shan States. The KMT's radio network was sending back reports that the Shan warlord's brokers were buying up unprecedented quantities of opium in the northern Shan and Wa states. In February, Chan Shee-fu had delivered a de facto declaration of war when he demanded that KNIT caravans trading in the Wa States pay him the same transit tax that his caravans had to pay the KNIT whenever they crossed into Thailand or Laos.(256) When Chan Shee-fu's caravan of three hundred mules assembled in June it was carrying sixteen tons of raw opium worth $500,000 wholesale in Chiangmai.(257) With his share of the profits, Chan Shee-fu could purchase at least one thousand new carbines and expand his army from two thousand to three thousand men-a force almost equal in size to the combined thirty-two hundred troops of the KMT Third and Fifth armies. If Chan Shee-fu's caravan reached Laos, the fifteen-year dominance of the KNIT would be in jeopardy. The point was not lost on the KNIT generals, and through General Ma's mediation, the two feuding generals agreed to resolve their differences and form a combined army to destroy Chan Shee-fu. (258)

In June the main body of Chan Shee-fu's convoy left Ving Ngun and set out on a two-hundred-mile trek toward Ban Khwan, a small Laotian lumber town on the Mekong River which Gen. Ouane Rattikone had designated the delivery point when he placed an advance order for this enormous shipment with Chan Sheefu's broker, a Chinese merchant from Mae Sai, Thailand. The caravan was to deliver the opium to the general's refinery at Ban Khwan. As the heavily loaded mules plodded south through the monsoon downpours, the convoy was joined by smaller caravans from market towns like Tang- Yang, so that by the time it reached Kengtung City its single-file column of five hundred men and three hundred mules stretched along the ridgelines for over a mile.(259)

From the moment the caravan left Ving Ngun, it was kept under surveillance by the KMT's intelligence network, and the radio receivers at Mae Salong hummed with frequent reports from the mountains overlooking the convoy's line of march. After merging their crack units into a thousand-man expeditionary corps, Generals Tuan and Ly sent their forces into the Shan States with orders to intercept the convoy and destroy it. (260) Several days later the KNIT expeditionary force ambushed Chan Shee-fu's main column east of Kengtung City near the Mekong River, but his rearguard counterattacked and the opium caravan escaped.(261) After crossing the Mekong into Laos on July 14 and 15, Chan Shee-fu's troops hiked down the old caravan trail from Muong Mounge and reached Ban Khwan two days later. (262)

Shortly after they arrived, the Shan troops warned the Laotian villagers that the KMT were not far behind and that there would probably be fighting. As soon as he heard this news, the principal of Ban Khwan's elementary school raced downriver to Ton Peung, where a company of Royal Laotian Army troops had its field headquarters. The company commander radioed news of the upcoming battle to Ban Houei Sai and urged the principal to evacuate his village. During the next ten days, while Ban Khwan's twenty families moved all their worldly possessions across the Mekong into Thailand, Chan Shee-fu's troops prepared for a confrontation. (263)

Ban Khwan is hardly a likely battlefield: the village consists of small clearings hacked out of a dense forest, fragile stilted houses and narrow winding lanes, which were then mired in knee-deep, monsoon-season mud. A lumber mill belonging to General Ouane sat in the only large clearing in the village, and it was here that the Shans decided to make their stand. In many ways it was an ideal defensive position: the mill is built on a long sand embankment extending a hundred feet into the Mekong and is separated from the surrounding forest by a lumberyard, which had become a moatlike sea of mud. The Shans parked their mules along the embankment, scoured the nearby towns for boats, and used cut logs lying in the lumberyard to form a great semicircular barricade in front of the mill.(264)

The KNIT expeditionary force finally reached Ban Khwan on July 26 and fought a brief skirmish with the Shans in a small hamlet just outside the village. That same day the Laotian army's provincial cornmander flew up from Ban Houei Sai in an air force helicopter to deliver a personal message from General Ouane: he ordered them all to get out of Laos. The KNIT scornfully demanded $250,000 to do so, and Chan Shee-fu radioed his men from Burma, ordering them to stay put. After several hundred reinforcements arrived from Mae Salong, the KNIT troops attacked the Shan barricades on July 29 Since both sides were armed with an impressive array of .50 caliber machine guns, 60 mm. mortars, and 57 mm. recoilless rifles, the firefight was intense, and the noise from it could be heard for miles. However, at 12:00 noon on July 30 the staccato chatter of automatic weapons was suddenly interrupted by the droning roar of six T-28 prop fighters flying low up the Mekong River and then the deafening thunder of the fivehundredpound bombs that came crashing down indiscriminately on Shans and KNIT alike.

General Ouane, apparently somewhat disconcerted by the unforeseen outcome of his dealings with Chan Shee-fu, had decided to play the part of an outraged commander in chief defending his nation's territorial integrity. With Prime Minister Souvanna Phourna's full consent he had dispatched a squadron of T-28 fighters from Luang Prabang and airlifted the crack Second Paratroop Battalion (Capt. Kong Le's old unit) up to Ban Houei Sai. General Ouane took personal command of the operation and displayed all of the tactical brilliance one would expect from a general who had just received his nation's highest state decoration, "The Grand Cross of the Million Elephants and the White Parasol" (266)

Once the Second Paratroop Battalion had gone upriver to Ban Khwan and taken up a blocking position just south of the battlefield, the T-28s began two solid days of bombing and strafing at the rate of four or five squadron sorties daily. To ensure against a possible retaliatory attack on Ban Houei Sai, General Ouane ordered two marine launches to patrol the upper reaches of the Mekong near Ban Khwan. Finally, two regular Laotian infantry battalions began moving down the old caravan trail from Muong Mounge to cut off the only remaining escape route. (267)

Under the pressure of the repeated bombing attacks, the four hundred surviving Shans piled into the boats tied up along the embankment and retreated across the Mekong into Burma, leaving behind eighty-two dead, fifteen mules, and most of the opium.(268) Lacking boats and unwilling to abandon their heavy equipment, the KMT troops fled north along the Mekong, but only got six miles before their retreat was cut off by the two Laotian infantry battalions moving south from Muong Mounge. When the Shans and KMT had abandoned Ban Khwan, the Second Paratroop Battalion swept the battlefield, gathered up the opium and sent it downriver to Ban Houei Sai. Reinforcements were flown up from Vientiane, and superior numbers of Laotian army troops surrounded the KMT.(269) Following two weeks of tense negotiations, the KNIT finally agreed to pay General Ouane an indemnity of $7,500 for the right to return to Thailand.(270) According to Thai police reports, some seven hundred KMT troops crossed the Mekong into Thailand on August 19, leaving behind seventy dead, twenty-four machine guns, and a number of dead mules. Although the Thai police made a pro forma attempt at disarming the KMT, the troops clambered aboard eighteen chartered buses and drove off to Mae Salong with three hundred carbines, seventy machine guns, and two recoilless rifles. (271)

Gen. Ouane Rattikone was clearly the winner of this historic battle. His troops had captured most of the sixteen tons of raw opium, and only suffered a handful of casualties. Admittedly, his lumber mill was damaged and his opium refinery had been burned to the ground, but this loss was really insignificant, since General Ouane reportedly operated another five refineries between Ban Khwan and Ban Houei Sai.(272) His profits from the confiscated opium were substantial, and displaying the generosity for which he is so justly famous, he shared the spoils with the men of the Second Paratroop Battalion. Each man reportedly received enough money to build a simple house on the outskirts of Vientiane. (273) The village of Ban Khwan itself emerged from the conflagration relatively unscathed; when the people started moving back across the Mekong River three days after the battle, they found six burned-out houses, but other than that suffered no appreciable JOSS.(274)

At the time it was fought, the 1967 Opium War struck most observers, even the most sober, as a curious historical anachronism that conjured up romantic memories of China's warlords in the 1920s and bandit desperadoes of bygone eras. However, looking back on it in light of events in the Golden Triangle over the last five years-particularly the development of large-scale production of no. 4 heroin-the 1967 Opium War appears to have been a significant turning point in the growth of Southeast Asia's drug traffic. Each group's share of Burma's opium exports and its subsequent role in the growth of the Golden Triangle's heroin industry were largely determined by the historic battle and its aftermath. KMT caravans still carry the overwhelming percentage of Burma's opium exports, and Shan caravans have continued to pay the KMT duty when they enter Thailand. Chan Shee-fu, of course, was the big loser; he left $500,000 worth of raw opium, thousands of dollars in arms and mules, and much of his prestige lying in the mud at Ban Khwan. Moreover, Chan Shee-fu represented the first and last challenge to KNIT control over the Shan States opium tradeand that challenge was decisively defeated. Since the destruction of Chan Sheefu's convoy, Shan military leaders have played an increasingly unimportant role in their own opium trade; Shan caravans usually have less than a hundred mules, and their opium refineries are processing only a small percentage of the opium grown in the Shan States. However, General Ouane's troops won the right to tax Burmese opium entering Laos, a prerogative formerly enjoyed by the KMT, and the Ban Houei Sai region later emerged as the major processing center for Burmese opium.

Survival of the Fittest

Although the 1967 Opium War strengthened the KMT's position inside the Shan States, it complicated the KMT's amicable relations with its host, the Thai government. Ever since the mid 1950s, when the Thai police commander, General Phao, became notorious as one of the major opium traffickers in Southeast Asia, the Thai government has been extremely sensitive about covering up its involvement in the opium trade. When the KMT moved to Thailand in 1962, the government labeled them "civilian refugees" and claimed that their organized military units had been broken up.(275)The KMT reinforced this face-saving fiction by isolating themselves in their mountain redoubts and wearing civilian clothes whenever they went into nearby towns. On the whole, the Thai government was quite successful in convincing the world that the KMT Third and Fifth armies no longer existed. Only five months before the battle, for example, a full-fledged U.N. investigating team spent two months examining the drug problem in Thailand without discovering any substantial evidence of KMT activity.(276) When the 1967 Opium War shattered this carefully constructed myth, the Thai government claimed that it was being "invaded" by the KMT and dispatched several thousand troops to Chiangmai to defend the northern frontier. (277)

In order to ensure that it would not be similarly embarrassed in the future, the Thai government placed the KMT's fortified camps under the supervision of the Royal Army, and KMT generals became accountable to the high command in Bangkok for every move in and out of their headquarters. Aside from these rather limited gestures, however, the Thai government made no effort to weaken the KMT. In fact, the Thai military has moved in the opposite direction by granting the Third and Fifth armies official status as legitimate paramilitary forces. Although the KMT had been responsible for security in the northern frontier areas for a number of -years without receiving official recognition, the recent outbreak of the "Red" Meo revolt in Nan and Chiangrai provinces has brought about a gradual reversal of this nonrecognition policy.

The "Red" Meo revolt began in May 1967 when Thai officials visited the same Meo village in Chiangrai Province on three separate occasions to collect pavoffs; for letting the Meo farmers clear their opium fields. The Meo paid off the first two visitors, but when the Provincial Police showed up to collect their rake-off the Meo attacked them. The next day sixty police returned to the village and burned it to the ground. Although there was no further violence, this incident apparently convinced counterinsurgency strategists in Bangkok that the Meo in Chiangrai and adjoining Nan Province were about to revolt. (278) In October the Thai army and police initiated a series of heavy-handed "Communist suppression operations" that provoked a major uprising. To reduce its mounting casualties, the army began napalming selected villages and herding their inhabitants into guarded relocation centers in early 1968. The revolt spread rapidly, and as the army had to withdraw into a series of fortified positions in June, the air force was unleashed over the insurgent areas, which had been declared free fire zones. By 1970 guerrillas were beginning to sortie out of their mountain "liberated zones," attacking lowland villages and ambushing cars along the highways.(279)

It was obvious to many Thai and American counterinsurgency planners that troops had to go in on the ground to clean up guerrilla mountain sanctuaries before the insurgency spread into the lowlands, However, as their earlier performances had shown, the Thai army was ill suited for mountain warfare.(280) The Thai military, with American financial support, turned to the KMT for help. In the past, General Tuan had claimed credit for keeping Chiangrai. Province free from "communist terrorists. (281)The KMT had all the necessary skills for mountain warfare that the Thai army so obviously lacked: they understood small unit tactics, had twenty years' experience at recruiting hill tribe paramilitary forces, and could converse with the hill tribes in their own languages or Yunnanese, which many tribesmen spoke fluently.(282) But most important of all, the KMT knew how to pit tribe against tribe. While the Thai military had tried to get Meo to fight Meo with little success, General Tuan recruited Akha, Lisu, and Lahu from western Chiangrai Province and sent them to fight Meo in eastern Chiangrai. In December 1969 General Tuan ordered five hundred of these polyglot Fifth Army troops into the mountains just north of Chiang Khong, near the Mekong, to attack the "Red" Meo, and General Ly sent nine hundred of his Third Army troops in an adjoining clump of mountains to the east of Chiang Kham. (283) By mid 1971 two Thai air force UH-IH helicopters were shuttling back and forth between the KMT camps and Thai army bases in eastern Chiangrai. A special photo reconnaissance lab was working round the clock, and a ranking Thai general had been placed in command. When asked what he was doing in Chiang Khong, General Krirksin replied, "I cannot tell you, these are secret operations." (284) However, the senior KMT officer at Chiang Khong, Col. Chen Mo-sup, insisted that his forces had the "Red" Meo on the run and claimed that his troops had killed more than 150 of them.(285)

Even though the KMT have now been integrated into the Thai counterinsurgency establishment, the government has made no appreciable effort to reduce their involvement in the opium trade. In mid 1971 the CIA reported that Mae Salong, KMT Fifth Army headquarters, was the home of one of the "most important" heroin laboratories in the Golden Triangle, and in April 1972 NBC news reported that a laboratory was operating at Tam Ngop, the KMT Third Army headquarters .286 In addition, reliable Shan rebel leaders say that KMT caravans are still operating at full strength, the opium duty is being collected, and no Shan army is even close to challenging the KMT's hegemony.

The Shan Rebellion: The Road to Chaos

For Chan Shee-fu the 1967 Opium War marked the beginning of the end. Far more importantly for the Shan movement as a whole, his defeat represented the last significant attempt by any rebel leader to establish himself as something more than just another petty warlord. After his troops retreated across the Mekong from Ban Khwan, Chan Shee-fu remained in the mountains near the Thai border, reportedly waiting for another crack at the KMT. (287)However for reasons never satisfactorily explained, the second battle never took place, and he returned to the northern Shan States in late 1967. Since Chan Shee-fu had lost a considerable amount of money, arms, and prestige at Ban Khwan, his troops began to drift away, and by late 1968 he had considerably less than a thousand men under arms.(288)(289) Many of his officers and men were arrested as well, but Shan rebel leaders claim that several hundred more are still actively battling government forces in the northern Shan States. (290) Apparently convinced that another stint as a guerrilla would revive his sagging fortunes, Chan Shee-fu began making contact with a number of Shan rebel leaders. When Burmese military intelligence learned that he was engaged in serious negotiations with the rebels, they had him arrested and sent off to a Rangoon jail for an indefinite period of confinement.

But there is a moral to this story. The rise and fall of Chan Shee-fu and the Shan National Army shows how difficult it is going to be for any Shan military leader to restore order in the strife-torn Shan States. Rather than producing an independent, unified Shan land, the Shan rebellion seems to have opened a Pandora's box of chaos that has populated the countryside with petty warlords and impoverished the people. When the rebellion began in 1958, there were only three or four rebel groups active in the entire Shan States. In mid 1971 one Shan rebel leader estimated that there were more than a hundred different armed bands prowling the highlands. But he cautioned that this was probably a conservative estimate, and added that "it would take a computer to keep track of them all. (291) Most of these armed groups are extremely unstable; they are constantly switching from rebel to militia (KKY) status and back again, splitting in amoebalike fashion to form new armies, or entering into ineffectual alliances. Moreover, the situation gets more chaotic every year as succeeding opium harvests pump more and more weapons into the Shan States. In the early 1960s the SNA was content with semiautomatic U.S. M-1 or M-2 carbines, but seven years later every armed band has to have its quotient of fully automatic M16s in order to survive. Although the SNA never managed to impose effective discipline on its local commanders, it achieved a level of unity that has yet to be equaled. Since its demise in 1965-1966, the military situation in the Shan States has become much more chaotic. In 1968 another faction made an attempt at drawing the movement together by establishing "the Shan Unity Preparatory Committee." It issued a few pompous communiques warning about threats of communism or offering a cease-fire, but collapsed after a few acrimonious meetings in Chiangmai, Thailand. (292)

Although most Shan rebel leaders speak loftily about millions of oppressed peasants flocking to their side, a few of the franker ones admit that people have become progressively alienated from the independence movement. Repeated taxation at gunpoint by roving Shan warlords has discouraged most forms of legitimate economic activity and reduced the peasants to a state of poverty. Salt prices have skyrocketed in the hills, and goiter is becoming a serious problem. In some of the more distant areas essential medicines like quinine have not been available for years. Vaccination programs and qualified medical treatment have almost disappeared.

Ironically, the political chaos, which has damaged most other forms of agriculture and commerce, has promoted a steady expansion of opium production in the Shan States. Since opium buys more guns and am munition in Thailand than any other local product, Shan rebels and the local militia (KKY) have imposed a heavy opium tax on mountain villages under their control. While mountain farmers sell all the opium they can produce to merchants who regularly visit their villages, the insurgency makes it difficult and dangerous to venture into the market towns to sell other agricultural commodities. Moreover, the Burmese government controls very few of the poppy-growing areas, and is therefore in no position to discourage opium production. Other nations can be pressured into abolishing poppy cultivation, but Burma can honestly claim that it is powerless to deal with the problem. If the present political situation continues, and there is every indication that it will, the Shan States will be growing vast quantities of opium long after the poppy has disappeared from Turkey or Afghanistan.

The Shan States' political tradition of being divided into thirty-four small principalities ruled over by autocratic sawbwas is only partly responsible for the lack of unity among present-day rebel leaders. Laos, for example, shares the same tradition of small valley principalities, but the Pathet Lao have managed to form a strongly unified national liberation movement.

Indeed, there are more important reasons for the chaotic political conditions inside the Shan States. The Shan rebellion and its accompanying chaos could not have survived had not the CIA, the KMT, and the Thai government intervened. None of these groups is particularly interested in the establishment of an independent Shan nation. However, each of them has certain limited political or military interests that have been served by providing the Shans with a limited amount of support and keeping the caldron bubbling. Although it is most definitely not in the KMT's interests for a powerful Shan leader like Chan Shee-fu to develop, the chaotic conditions promoted by dozens of smaller rebel groups are absolutely vital to their survival. The KMT Third and Fifth armies are only able to send their large, lightly guarded caravans deep into the Shan States because the Burmese army is tied down fighting the insurgents. The KMT recognizes the importance of this distraction and has financed a number of small Shan rebel groups. However, the KMT tries to keep the Shan armies small and weak by explicitly refusing to allow any Shan opium caravan larger than one hundred mules to enter Thailand. This policy was evidently adopted after the 1967 Opium War. (293) Perhaps the most notable victim of this new policy was the Shan State Army (SSA). Founded by students from Mandalay and Rangoon Universities, it began operating in the mountains west of Lashio in 1958 (294) but did not start smuggling opium until five years later. After shipping 160 kilos of raw opium to Thailand in 1964, the Shan State Army increased its shipments year by year, reaching a peak of 1,600 kilos in 1967. But with the exception of 80 kilos it managed to slip by the KMT in 1969, this was its last shipment of opium to Thailand. Relations between the KMT and SSA had never been good, but the KMT embargo on SSA opium smuggling brought relations to a new low. When the KMT Third Army tried to establish a radio post in SSA territory in late 1969, the two groups engaged in a series of indecisive running battles for over three months. (295)

The CIA has played an equally cynical role inside the Shan States. Although it too has no real interest in an independent Shan land, the CIA has supported individual rebel armies in order to accomplish its intelligence gathering missions inside China. Without the CIA's tolerance of its opium-arms traffic, the Shan National Army could never have occupied so much of Kentung State. However, the CIA refused to grant the SNA enough direct military aid to drive the Burmese out of the state and reestablish public order. During the 1950s the CIA had tried to turn the eastern Shan States into an, independent strategic bastion for operations along China's southern frontier by using KMT troops to drive the Burmese army out of the area. But after the KMT were driven out of Burma in 1961, the CIA apparently decided to adopt a lower profile for its clandestine operations. While direct military support for the SNA might have produced new diplomatic embarrassments, an informal alliance and the resulting breakdown of public order in Kengtung were entirely compatible with CIA interests. After the SNA forced the Burmese army into the cities and towns, the CIA's forward radio posts floated securely in this sea of chaos while its cross-border espionage teams passed through Burma virtually undetected. (296)

In the final analysis, the Thai government probably bears the major responsibility for the chaos. Most Thai leaders have a deep traditional distrust for the Burmese, who have frequently invaded Thailand in past centuries. No Thai student graduates from elementary school without reading at least one gruesome description of the atrocities committed by Burmese troops when they burned the royal Thai capital at Ayuthia in 1769. Convinced that Burma will always pose a potential threat to its security, the Thai government has granted asylum to all of the insurgents operating along the Burma-Thailand border and supplied some of the groups with enough arms and equipment to keep operating. This low level insurgency keeps the Burmese army tied down defending its own cities, while the chaotic military situation in Burma's borderland regions gives Thailand a reassuring buffer zone. Although Thai leaders have given Rangoon repeated assurances that they will not let Burmese exiles "abuse their privileges" as political refugees, they have opened a number of sanctuary areas for guerrillas near the Burmese border.(297) The Huei Krai camp north of Chiangrai has long been the major sanctuary area for Shan rebels from Kengtung State. The area surrounding KMT Third Army headquarters at Tam Ngop is the most important sanctuary for rebel armies from northeastern Burma: Gen. Mo Heng's Shan United Revolutionary Army, Brig. Gen. Jimmy Yang's Kokang Revolutionary Force, Gen. Zau Seng's Kachin Independence Army, Gen. Jao Nhu's Shan State Army, and General Kyansone's Pa-0 rebels are all crowded together on a few mountaintops under the watchful eye of KMT General Ly. Entrances to these camps are tightly guarded by Thai police, and the guerrillas have to notify Thai authorities every time they enter or leave. Even though activities at these camps are closely watched, Shan rebel leaders claim that Thai authorities have never made any attempt to interfere with their opium caravans. While foreign journalists are barred, Chiangmai opium buyers are free to come and go at will. (298)

In an effort to cope with an impossible situation, the Burmese government has adopted a counterinsurgency program that has legitimized some aspects of the opium trade and added to the general political instability. The Burmese army has organized local militia forces (KKY), granted them the right to use government-controlled towns as opiumtrading centers and major highways as smuggling routes and has removed all restrictions on the refining of opium. It is their pious hope that the local militias' natural greed will motivate them to battle the rebels for control of the opium hills. The logic behind this policy is rather simple; if the local militia control most of the opium harvest, then the rebels will not have any money to buy arms in Thailand and will have to give up their struggle. Despite its seductive simplicity, the program has had a rather mixed record of success. While it has weaned a number of rebel armies to the government side, just as many local militia have become rebels. On the whole, the program has compounded the endemic warlordism that has become the curse of the Shan States without really reducing the level of rebel activity.

In addition, the Burmese government has sound economic reasons for tolerating the opium traffic. After seizing power from a civilian government in 1962, Commander in Chief of the Army Gen. Ne Win decreed a series of poorly executed economic reforms, which crippled Burma's foreign trade and disrupted the consumer economy. After eight years of the "Burmese Way to Socialism," practically all of the consumer goods being sold in Burma's major cities--everything from transistor radios and motor bikes to watches, pens, and toothpaste-were being smuggled across the border from Thailand on mule caravans. On the way down to Thailand, Shan smugglers carry opium, and on the way back they carry U.S. weapons and consumer goods. By the time a bottle of Coca-Cola reaches Mandalay in northern Burma it can cost a dollar, and a Japanese toothbrush goes for $3.50 in Rangoon.(299) Afraid of straining the patience of its already beleaguered consumers, the Burmese government has made no real effort to close the black markets or stop the smuggling. Opium has become one of the nation's most valuable export commodities, and without it the consumer economy would grind to a complete halt.

The opium traffic itself has contributed to the chaotic conditions inside the Shan States by changing the military leaders from legitimate nationalist rebels into apolitical mercenaries. The case of Maj. On Chan is perhaps the most striking example. During the early 1960s he joined the Shan National Army and remained one of its more effective local commanders until the coalition split apart in 1965-1966. After deserting from the SNA, On Chan and about three hundred of his men were hired as mercenaries by the CIA and moved across the Mekong into northwestern Laos, where they fought in the Secret Army, disguised as local Lu militia. Two or three years later On Chan and his men deserted the Secret Army and moved back into the Shan States. With the ample supply of arms and ammunition be brought back to Burma, On Chan carved an independent fief out of eastern Kengtung. He has remained there ever since, trading in opium and fighting only to defend his autonomy. (300)

Since the Burmese army offers such convenient opium-trading facilities, corrupted rebel leaders frequently desert the cause for the more comfortable life of a government militia commander. While Chan Sheefu is the most notorious example of this kind of Shan military leader, the case of Yang Sun is much more typical. Yang Sun started his career in the opium trade as a government militia leader, but switched to the rebel side in the mid 1960s and opened a base camp in the Huei Krai region of northern Thailand. Several years later he changed his allegiance once more and soon became the most powerful government militia leader in Kengtung State. Although rebel leaders have tried to woo him back to their side, he is making so much money from the opium traffic as a militia leader that he has consistently brushed their overtures aside.

Thanks to the good graces of the Burmese army, Yang Sun patrols a strategic piece of geography between Kengtung City and the Thai border. Caravans traveling along government-controlled roads from the opium-rich Kokang and Wa states to the north have to pass through this area on their way to opium refineries in the three-border region to the south. Caravans belonging to both Law Sik Han, a powerful militia leader from Kokang, and Bo Loi Oo, the influential Wa States' militia commander, are required to stop in Kengtung City to have their opium weighed and taxed by Yang Sun before they can proceed down the road to their private opium refineries in Tachilek. In addition, Yang Sun's troops provide armed escorts between Kengtung City and the border for private merchant caravans out of the Kokang and Wa states. For a nominal fee of six dollars per kilo of opium, merchants are guaranteed safe conduct by the Burmese government and protection from bandits and rebels. (301)

Although some of the opium carried by Shan rebels and the KMT is smuggled across the border in raw form, most of the militia's opium is processed into smoking opium, morphine, or heroin at Shan militia (KKY) refineries in the Tachilek 'area before being shipped into nearby Thailand. Yang Sun operates a large opium refinery about six miles north of Tachilek capable of producing both no. 3 and no. 4 heroin.(302) This laboratory is only one of fourteen in the Tachilek region, which, according to a 1971 CIA report, processed a total of thirty tons of raw opium during 1970. (303) While this represents a considerable increase from the mid 1960s when Chan Shee-fu's morphine factory at Ving Ngun was the only known refinery, thirty tons of raw opium is still only a tiny fraction of Burma's total estimated exports of five hundred tons. The relative weakness of Burma's processing industry is one of the legacies of Chan Shee-fu's defeat in the 1967 Opium War. Since KMT caravans have continued to ship about 90 percent of the Shan States' opium to Thailand and Laos for processing in their own refineries or transshipment, the growth of Tachilek's laboratories has been hampered by a shortage of raw materials.

Until public order is restored to the Shan States, there is absolutely no chance that Burma's opium production can be eradicated or its heroin laboratories shut down. It seems highly unlikely that the squabbling Shan rebels will ever be capable of driving the Burmese army completely out of the Shan States. It seems even more unlikely that the profitoriented militia commanders would ever be willing to divert enough effort from their flourishing opium businesses to make a serious effort at cleaning the rebels out of the hills. Despite its claim of success, the Burmese army is even further away from victory than it was a decade ago.

If we eliminate the Burmese army and the Shan military groups, there are only two possible contenders for ultimate control over the Shan States-the Burmese Communist party and a coalition of right-wing rebels led by Burma's former prime minister U Nu. A year after he fled to Thailand in April 1969, U Nu concluded an alliance with Mon and right-wing Karen insurgents active in the Burma-Thailand frontier areas and announced the formation of a revolutionary army, the United National Liberation Front (UNLF). (304) To raise money U Nu and his assistants (among them William Young, now retired from the CIA) circled the globe, contacting wealthy financiers and offering future guarantees on lucrative oil and mineral concessions in exchange for cash donations. Burma's future was mortgaged to the hilt, but by the end of 1970 U Nu had a war chest of over $2 million.(305)

With the tacit support of the Thai government, U Nu built up his guerrilla army inside Thailand: three major bases were opened up along the Thailand-Burma border at Mae Hong Son, Mae Sariang and Mae Sot. (306) Recognizing Burma's ethnic diversity, U Nu divided the eastern part of the country into three separate military zones: the Mon and Burmese areas in the southeast, the Karen region in the east, and the Shan and Kachin states in the northeast. (307)

While the UNLF alliance gave U Nu a strong basis for operations in the Mon and Karen areas, he has almost no influence in the northeast. There are so many Shan armies that it would be meaningless to ally with any one of them, and they arc so divided among themselves that forming a coalition required special tactics.(308) Instead of allying with established rebel groups as they had done with the Mons and Karens, U Nu and his assistants assigned William Young and Gen. Jimmy Yang the task of building an independent rebel force inside the Shan States.

A member of Kokang State's royal family, Jimmy Yang began organizing guerrilla resistance in 1962. Since his family had worked closely with the KMT for more than a decade, he was able to finance his infant rebellion by sending caravans loaded with Kokang opium to Thailand under the protection of General Ly's Third Army. After three years of fighting in Kokang, Jimmy and some of his men moved to northern Thailand and built a base camp in the shadow of General Ly's headquarters at Tam Ngop. While his men raised chickens and smuggled opium in the mountains, Jimmy moved down to Chiangmai and became assistant manager of the most luxurious tourist hotel in northern Thailand, the Rincome Hotel.

Jimmy had known U Nu in Rangoon, and when the former prime minister first arrived in Thailand Jimmy renewed the friendship by soliciting a $10,000 contribution for democracy's cause from General Ly. (309) U Nu returned the favor several months later by appointing Brig. Gen. Jimmy Yang commander of the UNLF's northern region, the Kachin and Shan States, and reportedly allocated $200,000 from the war chest to build up an effective Shan army. (310)

Rather than trying to build up the five-thousand-man army he thought would be necessary to steamroll the hundred or so armed bands that roamed the hills, Jimmy decided to forge an elite strike force of about a hundred men to guarantee his security while he traveled through the strife-torn Shan States negotiating with bandits, opium armies, rebels, and government militia. In exchange for their allegiance, he planned to offer them officers' commissions and government jobs in U Nu's administration-to-be. By scrupulously avoiding the opium traffic and relying on U Nu's war chest for financial support, Jimmy hoped to remain aloof from the opium squabbles and territorial disputes that had destroyed past coalitions. Once the fighting was over, Jimmy intended to return the sawbwas to power. They would appeal to their dutiful subjects to come out of the hills; the rebels would lay down their arms and order would be restored.(311)

To implement his plan, Jimmy recruited about a hundred young Shans and equipped them with some of the best military equipment available on Chiangmai's black market: U.S. M-2 carbines at $150 apiece, M-16 rifles at $250 each, U.S. M-79 grenade launchers at $500 apiece, highgrade U.S. jungle uniforms, and Communist Chinese tennis sneakers. General Ly contributed some Nationalist Chinese training manuals on jungle warfare. Confidently, Jimmy set September 1971 as his target date for jumping off into the Shan States, but almost from the beginning his program was hampered by the same problems that had destroyed similar efforts in the past. When September 1971 finally arrived, Jimmy's men were deserting, potential alliances had fallen through, and he had been forced to postpone his departure indefinitely.(312)

Jimmy Yang's men deserted because of the same type of racial and political conflicts that had promoted disunity among previous Shan armies. While almost all his troops were Shans, Jimmy's instructors, like himself and most residents of Kokang, were ethnic Chinese. Since ethnic chauvinism is the most important tenet of Shan nationalist ideology, internal discord was almost inevitable.

In April 1971 Jimmy's deputy commander, a Shan named Hsai Kiao, met with members of U Nu's revolutionary government in Bangkok and presented Shan grievances. U Nu's assistants offered no major concessions, and several weeks later Hsai Kiao moved to Chiangrai, opening his own camp in the Huei Krai area. Shan recruits continued to desert to Hsai Kiao, and by September U Nu's northern command was a complete shambles. Jimmy was losing his men to Hsai Kiao, but Hsai Kiao, lacking any financial backing whatsoever, was sending them off to work in the mines at Lampang to raise money, Hsai Kiao plans to save enough money to buy a shipment of automatic weapons in Laos, pack them into the Shan States, and trade them for opium. With the profits from the opium-arms trade he eventually hopes to build up a large enough army to drive the Burmese out of Kengtung State.(313)

While Jimmy Yang's troop training program had its problems, his attempts at forging political alliances with local warlords encountered an insuperable obstacle-William Young. After he finished a fund-raising tour in the United States, William Young returned to Chiangmai and began building support for U Nu among the hill tribes of the eastern Shan States. Prior to making contact with Lahu and Wa leaders, Young spent months gathering precise data on every armed band in the eastern Shan States. He concluded that there were about seventeen thousand Lahu and Wa tribesmen armed with modern weapons. If only a fraction of these could be mobilized, U Nu would have the largest army in eastern Burma. (314)

Young began sending personal representatives to meet with the more important tribal leaders and arranged round table discussions in Chiangmai. In the mountains north of Kengtung City, the Young name still commands respect from Lahu and Wa Christians, and the enthusiastic response was to be expected.(315) However, Young's success among the animist Lahu south and west of Kengtung City was unexpected. The Young family's divinity in these areas had been preempted by an inno vative Lahu shaman, known as the "Man God" or "Big Shaman." In mid 1970, when William Young convened an assembly of Lahu chiefs at Chiangmai, the "Man God" sent one of his sons as a representative. When it was his turn to speak, the son announced that the "Man God" was willing to join with the other Lahu tribes in a united effort to drive the Burmese out of the Shan States.(316)

After receiving similar commitments from most of the important Lahu and Wa leaders in Burma, Young approached U Nu's war council without Jimmy's knowledge and requested $60,000 for equipment and training. The council agreed with the proviso that the money would be channeled through Jimmy Yang. In August 1970 Young arranged a meeting between himself, Jimmy, and the tribal leaders to reach a final understanding. When Jimmy adopted a condescending attitude toward the Lahu and Wa, they conferred privately with Young, and he advised them to withhold their allegiance. Young says that all the chiefs agreed to boycott the UNLF until they were confident of full support and claims that none of them are willing to work with Jimmy. (317)

Given these enormous problems, neither U Nu nor Jimmy Yang seems to have a very promising future in the Shan States. In fact, Jimmy feels that the Burmese Communist party and its leader Naw Seng are the only group capable of restoring order to the Shan States. According to Jimmy, Naw Seng and the Communists have all the assets their rivals seem to lack. First, Naw Seng is one of the best guerrilla strategists in Burma. During World War II he fought behind Japanese lines with General Wingate's British commando unit, the Chindits, and was awarded the Burma Gallantry Medal for heroism. Like many Kachin veterans, he enlisted in the First Kachin Rifles after the war, and quickly rose to the rank of captain and adjutant commander. (318) The First Kachin Rifles were sent into Communist-controlled areas, and Naw Seng played such an important role in the pacification program that one British author called him "the terror of the Pyinmana Communists." However, many prominent Burmese took a dim view of Kachins attacking Burmese villages under any circumstances, and there were reports that Naw Seng was about to be investigated by a court of inquiry. Faced with an uncertain future, Naw Seng and many of his troops mutinied in February 1949 and joined with Karen rebels fighting in eastern and central Burma. (319)After leading a series of brilliant campaigns, Naw Seng was driven into Yunnan by the Burmese army in 1949. Little was heard of him until 1969, when he became commander of a Communist hill tribe alliance called the Northeast Command and went on the offensive in the Burma-China borderlands.(320) In March 1970 the Communists captured three border towns, and by mid 1971 they controlled a fourhundred-mile-long strip of territory paralleling the Chinese border.

While Naw Seng's tactical skills are an important asset, Jimmy Yang feels that the Communists' social policies are the key to their success. Instead of compromising with the warlords, the Communists have driven them out of all the areas under their control. This policy has apparently resulted in a number of violent confrontations with the Kachin Independence Army, the remnants of Chan Shee-fu's forces, and government militi leaders such as Law Sik Han and Bo Loi Oo. In each case, the Communists have bested their rivals and pushed them steadily westward. Once in control of some new territory, the Communists have abolished the opium tax, which has impoverished the hill tribes for the last fifteen years, and encouraged the people to substitute other cash crops and handicraft work. In addition, the Communists have distributed salt, started a public health program, and restored public order. As a result of these measures, they have been able to develop a mass following, something that has eluded other army groups for so long. However, a crop substitution program takes up to five years to develop fully even under the best of circumstances, and so opium production has continued. Hill traders buy opium from villagers inside the Communist zones and transport it to such market towns as Lashio and Kengtung, where it is sold to government militia, KMT buyers, pnd private opium armies.(321)

Gen. Ouane Rattikone: Winner Takes Something

In the aftermath of General Ouane's victory in the 1967 Opium War, Laos emerged as the most important processing center of raw opium in the Golden Triangle region. The stunning defeat General Ouane dealt his enemies on the Ban Khwan battlefield forced the KMT to drop its duties on Burmese opium destined for Laos. Freed from the KMT's discriminatory taxation, the Laotian army was able to impose its own import duties. Subsequently, opium refineries in the Ban Houei Sai region increased their processing of Burmese opium.

General Ouane's prominent role in the battle attracted a good deal of unfavorable publicity in the international press, and in 1967 and 1968 he was visited by representatives from Interpol, a multinational police force that plays a major role in combating narcotics smuggling. The authorities were upset that the commander in chief of a national army was promoting the international drug traffic with such enthusiasm, such vigor. Wouldn't the good general consider retiring from the opium business? General Ouane was stunned by the naivete of their request and gave them a stern lecture about the economic realities of opium. Recalling the incident several years later, General Ouane said:

"Interpol visited me in 1967 and 1968 about the opium. I told them there would be commerce as long as the opium was grown in the hills. They should pay the tribesmen to stop growing opium....

I told Interpol that opium was grown in a band of mountains from Turkey to the Tonkin Gulf. Unless they stopped the opium from being grown all their work meant nothing. I told Interpol to buy tractors so we could clear the trees off the plains. Then we would move the montagnards out of the mountains onto the plains. It's too warm there, and there would be no more opium growing. In the mountains the people work ten months a year to grow 100,000 kip [$200] worth of opium and rice. And if the weather is bad, or the insects come, or the rain is wrong they will have nothing. But on the plains the people can have irrigated rice fields, grow vegetables, and make handicrafts. On the plain in five months of work they can make 700,000 kip [$1,400] a year.

I told Interpol that if they didn't do something about the people in the mountains the commerce Would continue. Just as the Mekong flows downstream to Saigon, so the opium would continue to flow. But they simply wanted me to stop. And when I explained this reality to them they left my office quite discontented."(322)

Despite his apparent cockiness, General Ouane interpreted the visit as a warning and began to exercise more discretion. When the authors inquired about his current involvement in the opium traffic he admitted his past complicity but claimed that he had given up his interest in the business.

Before 1967 opium caravans had followed Chan Shee-fu's route entering Laos north of Muong Mounge, traveling down the old caravan trail, and crossing the Mekong into Thailand at Chiang Saen. To conceal Laos's growing role in the traffic, General Ouane apparently discouraged caravans from crossing into Laos and ordered them to unload their cargoes on the Burmese side of the Mekong River. Residents of Chiang Saen, Thailand, report that the heavily armed caravans that used to ford the Mekong and ride through the center of town in broad daylight several times a year have not passed through since 1967. (323) Some Laotian air force officers have described an opium-arms exchange they carried out in 1968 that illustrates the complexity of the new system: they loaded crates of weapons (M- Is, M- I 6s, M-79 grenade launchers, and recoilless rifles) into an air force C-47 in Vientiane; flew to Ban Houei Sai, where they transferred the crates to a Laotian air force helicopter; and then flew the weapons to a group of Shans camped on the Burmese side of the Mekong north of Ban Khwan. The opium had already been sent downriver by boat and was later loaded aboard the C-47 and flown to Vientiane.(324)

When Golden Triangle refineries began producing high-grade no. 4 heroin in 1969-1970, access to seemingly limitless supplies of Burmese opium enabled Ban Houei Sai manufacturers to play a key role in these developments. At the time of the 1967 Opium War, morphine and no. 3 heroin were being processed at a large refinery near Ban Houei Sai and at five smaller ones strung out along the Mekong north of that city. In August 1967 one Time-Life correspondent cabled New York this description of these refineries:

"The opium refineries along the Mekong mentioned in Vanderwicken's take [earlier cable] are manned almost entirely by pharmacists imported by the syndicate from Bangkok and Hong Kong. They live moderately good lives (their security is insured by Laotian troops in some locations) and are paid far above what they would receive working in pharmacies in their home cities. Most apparently take on the job by way of building a stake and few are believed to get involved personally in the trade. Except, of course, to reduce the raw opium to morphine."(325)

At the same time another Time-Life correspondent reported that "the kingpin of the Laotian opium trade is General Ouane.... He is reputed to own one of Laos' two major opium refineries, near Houei Sai, and five smaller refineries scattered along the Mekong. (326)

As the demand for no. 4 heroin among GIs in South Vietnam grew, skilled Chinese chemists were brought in from Hong Kong to add the dangerous ether-precipitation process and upgrade production capability. After the five smaller laboratories along the Mekong were consolidated into a single operation, General Ouane's refinery at Ban Houei Tap, just north of Ban Houei Sai, became the largest, most efficient heroin laboratory in the tri-border area and its trade-mark, the Double U-0 Globe brand, soon became infamous. (327)(328) Under the supervision of a skilled chemist, this output would yield ten kilos of no. 4 heroin per day and exceed thecombined production of all fourteen opium refineries in Tachilek, Burma. Although belated American gestures forced the chemists to abandon the building in Ban Houei Tap in July 1971, it reportedly moved to a more clandestine location. The refinery operating under Maj. Chao La's protection north of Nam Keung was also forced to move in July, but it, too, has probably relocated in a more discreet area. (329) According to a CIA report leaked to the press in June 1971, it was capable of processing a hundred kilos of raw opium per day.

Moreover, Ban Houci Sai opium merchants have become the major suppliers of morphine base and raw opium for heroin laboratories in Vientiane and Long Tieng. As the massive bombing campaign and the refugee relocation program reduced the amount of Meo opium available for heroin in northeastern Laos, Gen. Vang Pao's officers were forced to turn to northwestern Laos for supplies of Burmese opium in order to keep the Long Tieng laboratory running at full capacity.(330) In addition, there are reliable reports that Gen. Ouane Rattikone has been supplying the raw materials for a heroin laboratory operating in the Vientiane region managed by a Sino-Vietnamese entrepreneur, Huu Tim Heng.(331)

Despite the rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, Laotian prospects for continuing success in the international heroin traffic appear to be excellent. Although most American narcotics officials hope that the Golden Triangle's flourishing heroin laboratories will be abandoned and become covered over with dense jungle once the GIs have left Vietnam, there is every indication that Laotian drug merchants are opening direct pipelines to the United States. In 1971, two important shipments of Double U-0 Globe brand heroin, which Saigon police say is manufactured in the Ban Houei Sai area, were seized in the United States:

1. On April 5 a package containing 7.7 kilos of Double U-0 Globe brand heroin was seized in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. It had been sent through the military postal service from Bangkok, Thailand.

2. On November 11, a Filipino diplomat attached to his nation's embassy in Vientiane and a Chinese merchant from Bangkok were arrested in New York City with 15.5 kilos of Double U-0 Globe brand heroin shortly after they arrived from Laos.

While these seizures established the fact that Laotian heroin was reaching the United States, they were otherwise unexceptional cases. However, the seizure of Prince Sopsaisana's sixty kilos in Paris provided ominous evidence of connections between Laotian heroin manufacturers, Corsican gangsters in Vientiane, Corsican syndicates in France, and American heroin distributors. American narcotics officials are convincedthat Corsican syndicates in France and Latin America are the most important suppliers of heroin for American distributors. But, hopelessly addicted to the myth of Turkey's importance, they have never investigated the links between Corsican syndicates in France and Corsican-French gangsters in Vientiane. This has been a costly oversight. For, in fact, Vientiane's Corsican gangsters are the connection between Laos's heroin laboratories and heroin distributors in the United States.

When the Corsican charter airlines were forced out of business in 1965, most of the Corsican and French gangsters stayed in Vientiane waiting for something new to turn up. "Doing less well than previously," reported a Time-Life correspondent in September 1965, "are opium traders, mainly Corsicans who since the fall of grafting Phourni have found operations more difficult. Some opium exporters have even opened bistros in Vientiane to tide them over until the good bad old days return-if they ever [do]." (332) A few of the bosses managed to stay in the drug business by serving as contact men, other Corsicans found jobs working for the Americans, and some just hung around.

After months of drinking and carousing in Vientiane's French bars, five downand-out Corsican gangsters decided to make one last, desperate bid for the fortunes that had been snatched out of their grasp. Led by a Corsican named Le Rouzic, who had reportedly owned a piece of a small charter airline, and his mechanic, Housset, the five men planned and executed the boldest crime in the history of modern Laos-the Great Unarmored Car Robbery. On the morning of March 15, 1966, two clerks from the Banque de I'Indochine loaded $420,000 cash and $260,000 in checks into an automobile, and headed to Wattay Airport to put the money aboard a Royal Air Lao flight for Bangkok. As soon as the bank car stopped at the airport, a jeep pulled up alongside and three of the Corsicans jumped out. Throwing handfuls of ground pepper into the clerks' faces, they fled with the money while their victims floundered about, sneezing and rubbing their eyes.

Laotian police showed a rather uncharacteristic efficiency in their handling of the case; in less than twenty-four hours they recovered almost all the money and arrested Le Rouzic, his mistress, and three of his accomplices. Acting on information supplied by Vientiane police, Thai police arrested Housset in Bangkok and found $3,940 hidden in his socks. (333) At a press conference following these arrests, the Laotian police colonel in charge of the investigation credited his astounding success to "honest citizens" and thanked the French community for "immediate cooperation." (334) Or, as one informed observer later explained, Vientiane's Corsican bosses informed on Le Rouzic and Housset in order to avoid a police crackdown on their involvement in the narcotics traffic.

Unlike these unsavory riffraff, most of Vientiane's Corsican-French bosses have respectable jobs and move in the best social circles. Roger Zoile, who owned one of the three largest Corsican charter airlines, is now president of Laos Air Charter. (335) During the 1950s and early 1960s, Zoile worked closely with the Paul Louis Levet syndicate, then smuggling morphine base from Southeast Asia to heroin laboratories in Germany, Italy, and France. Two other "Air Opium" pioneers still reside in Vientiane: Rene Enjabal, the former manager of "Babal Air Force," is now a pilot for one of Laos's many civil air lines, while Gerard Labenski, the former proprietor of the Snow Leopard Inn, "retired" to Laos in 1964 after serving four years in a Vietnamese prison for international narcotics smuggling. The co-managers of Vientiane's swingingest nightclub, The Spot, have a long history of involvement in the international drug traffic: Frangois Mittard headed one of the most powerful drug syndicates in Indochina until he was arrested for narcotics smuggling in 1960 and sentenced to five years in a Vietnamese prison; his co-manager, Michel Libert, was Paul Louis Levet's righthand man, and he served five years in a Thai prison after being arrested for drug smuggling in 1963. "My opium days are all in the past," Libert told a Thai undercover policeman in Vientiane some time after his release from prison. "Let me convince you. I'll work for you as an informer and help you make arrests to show you I'm honest." But the Thai policeman knew Libert too well to be taken in, and not wanting to become a pawn in some Corsican vendetta, refused the offer. (336) In addition, the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics has identified another Vientiane resident, Lars Bugatti, a former Nazi officer, as a drug trafficker with close ties to Corsican international syndicates.(337) All of these men have been linked to the clandestine Corsican narcotics networks that ring the globe. Through the efforts of these syndicates large quantities of Laotian heroin are finding their way toFrance and from there to the United States.

The Prince Sopsaisana affair has provided us with a rare glimpse into the machinations of powerful Laotian politicians and French heroin syndicates. When the King of Laos announced Prince Sopsaisana's appointment as ambassador-designate to France on April 7, 1971, he set in motion a chain of events that led to Sopsaisana's downfall and the lossof $13.5 million of top-grade Laotian heroin. Confident that his diplomatic passport would protect him from the prying eyes of French customs Sopsaisana apparently decided to bankroll his stay in Paris by smuggling this cache of heroin into France. According to reliable diplomatic sources in Vientiane, Gen. Vang Pao entrusted Sopsaisana, his chief political adviser, with sixty kilos of pure no. 4 heroin from his laboratory at Long Tieng and a local French hotel manager and civic leader who is on intimate terms with many of the Lao elite found a connection in Paris. (338)

Before Sopsaisana's flight landed in Paris, however, a reliable Laotian source warned the French Embassy in Vientiane that the new ambassador would be carrying heroin in his luggage. After a discreet search by airport customs officials turned up the sixty kilos, the French Foreign Ministry asked the Laotian government to withdraw its arnbassadordesignate. Prime Minister Souvanna Phourna, repaying his political debts, tried to keep Sopsaisana in Paris, and it took the French weeks of intricate negotiations to secure his removal. When Sopsaisana returned to Vientiane in late June, he made a public statement claiming that his enemies had framed him by checking the heroinfilled suitcase onto the flight without his knowledge. Privately, he accused Khamphan Panya, the assistant foreign minister, of being the villain in the plot. Sopsaisana's assertion that Khamphan framed him is utterly absurd, for Khamphan simply does not have $240,000 to throw away. However, until the ambitious Sopsaisana interfered, Khamphan had been assured the ambassadorship and had spent months preparing for his new assignment. He had even ordered the staff in Paris to have the Embassy refurbished and authorized a complete overhaul for the Mercedes limousine.(339)

Diplomatic sources in Vientiane report that he was outraged by Sopsaisana's appointment. And, only a few weeks after Sopsaisana returned in disgrace, the Laotian government announced that Khamphan Panya would be the new ambassador to France.(340)

If the heroin shipment had gotten through, the profits would have been enormous: the raw opium only cost Vang Pao about $30,000; Sopsaisana could sell the sixty kilos for $240,000 in Paris; Corsican smugglers could expect $1.5 million from American distributors; and street pushers in urban America would earn $13.5 million.

The important question for the United States, is, of course, how many similar shipments have gotten through undetected? Obviously if someone had not informed on Sopsaisana, his luggage would have been waved through French customs, the heroin delivered as planned to a Corsican syndicate, and Sopsaisana would be a respected member of Paris's diplomatic community. Another sixty kilos of "Marseille" heroin would have reached the United States and nobody would have been the wiser. But mighthave-beens did not happen, and suddenly here was more evidence of French gangsters in Vientiane finding ways to connect with Corsican syndicates in France. Unfortunately, the evidence was generally disregarded: the French government covered up the affair for diplomatic reasons, the international press generally ignored it, and the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics regarded it as a curiosity.

However, the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics was not entirely to blame for its woeful ignorance about the logistics of the Laotian heroin trade. Throughout the 1950s and most of the 1960s, the bureau had concentrated its efforts in Europe and paid almost no attention to Southeast Asia, let alone Laos. However, as thousands of GIs serving in Vietnam became addicted to Laotian heroin, the bureau tried to adjust its priorities by sending a team of agents to Laos, but its investigations were blocked by the Laotian government, the State Department, and the CIA. (341) Although the Royal Laotian government had told the U.N. it was enforcing a "policy of absolute prohibition" of narcotics, it was in fact one of the few governments in the world with no laws against the growing, processing, and smoking of opium. Laos had become something of a free port for opium; convenient opium dens are found on every city block and the location of opium refineries is a matter of public knowledge. Laos's leading citizens control the opium traffic and protect it like a strategic national industry. Under these circumstances, the Laotian government could hardly be expected to welcome the Bureau of Narcotics with open arms.

While the Laotian government's hostility toward the bureau is understandable, the reticence shown by the CIA and the U.S. Embassy requires some explanation. According to U.S. narcotics agents serving in Southeast Asia, the bureau encountered a good deal of resistance from the CIA and the Embassy when it first decided to open an office in Vientiane. The Embassy claimed that American narcotics agents had no right to operate in Vientiane, since Laos had no drug laws of its own. The Embassy said that investigative work by the bureau would represent a violation of Laotian sovereignty, and refused to cooperate.(342) The U.S. Embassy was well aware that prominent Laotian leaders ran the traffic and feared that pressure on them to get out of the narcotics business might somehow damage the war effort. In December 1970- thousands of GIs in Vietnam were becoming addicted to heroin processed in laboratories protected by the Royal Laotian Army-the U.S. Ambassador to Laos, G. McMurtrie Godley 111, told an American writer, "I believe the Royal Laotian Government takes its responsibility seriously to prohibit international opium traffic." (343)

When President Nixon issued his declaration of war on the international heroin traffic in mid 1971, the U.S. Embassy in Vientiane was finally forced to take action. Instead of trying to break up drug syndicates and purge the government leaders involved, however, the Embassy introduced legal reforms and urged a police crackdown on opium addicts. A new opium law, which was submitted to government ministries for consideration on June 8, went into effect on November 15. As a result of the new law, U.S. narcotics agents were allowed to open an office in early November-two full years after GIs started using Laotian heroin in Vietnam and six months after the first large seizures were made in the United States. Only a few days after their arrival, U.S. agents received a tip that a Filipino diplomat and Chinese businessman were going to smuggle heroin directly into the United States.(344) U.S. agents boarded the plane with them in Vientiane, flew halfway around the world, and arrested them with 15.5 kilos of no. 4 heroin in New York City, Even though these men were carrying a large quantity of heroin, they were still only messenger boys for the powerful Laotian drug merchants. But so far political expediency has been the order of the day, and the U.S. Embassy has made absolutely no effort to go after the men at the top.(345)

In the long run, the American antinarcotics campaign may do more harm than good. Most of the American effort seems to be aimed at closing Vientiane's hundreds of wide-open opium dens and making life difficult for the average Laotian drug user (most of whom are opium smokers). The Americans are pressuring the Laotian police into launching a massive crackdown on opium smoking, and there is evidence that the campaign is getting underway. Since little money is being made available for detoxification centers or outpatient clinics, most of Vientiane's opium smokers will be forced to become heroin users. In a September 1971 interview, Gen. Ouane Rattikone expressed grave doubts about the wisdom of the American antiopium. campaign:

Now they want to outlaw opium smoking. But if they outlaw opium, everyone in Vientiane will turn to heroin. Opium is not bad, but heroin is made with acid, which kills a man. In Thailand Marshal Sarit outlawed opium [1958-19591, and now everybody takes heroin in Thailand. Very bad.(346)

Although General Ouane's viewpoint may be influenced by his own interests, he is essentially correct.

In Hong Kong, Iran, and Thailand repressive antiopium. campaigns have driven the population to heroin and magnified the seriousness of the drug problem in all three nations. Vientiane's brand of no. 3 heroin seems to be particularly high in acid content, and has already produced some horribly debilitated zombie-addicts. One Laotian heroin pusher thinks that Vientiane's brand of no. 3 can kill a healthy man in less than a year. It would indeed be ironic if America's antidrug campaign drove Laos's opium smokers to a heroin death while it left the manufacturers and international traffickers untouched.

Conclusion

In the Yao village of Pa Dua, not far from the KMT headquarters at Mae Salong, there is a crude opium den in one corner of the village's general store. At almost any time during the day, three or four Yao tribesmen and KMT soldiers can be found there, flopped on the platform sucking away at their opium pipes Occasionally as they drift off into an opium dream one of them fixes a quizzical gaze at the fading emblem of the United States Navy Scabees, a combat engineering unit, which is tacked to the wall. And the caricatured bumblebee-with a sailor's caperched on its head and a submachine gun clutched in its gloved fistslooks down on the dreamers with the frenetic glare of an aggrieved icon. This emblem and a rotting cluster of buildings a few miles down the road are the only tangible remains of a Seabee construction team that recently spent a year in this area building a road linking Mae Salong with the major provincial highway. According to local Thai officials, the Seabees' construction work was done under the auspices of USAID's Accelerated Rural Development program (ARD). Despite its neutralsounding title, ARD is a counterinsurgency program designed to give the Thai army's cumbersome U.S.-style armored and infantry units easy access to rugged mountain areas in times of insurgency.

 

While this road has not been much help to the Thai army so far, it has been a boon to the KMT's involvement in the international narcotics traffic. Before the KMT caravans leave for Burma, arms, mules, and supplies are shipped up this road. And after they return, opium, morphine base, and no. 4 heroin come down the road on their way to the international drug markets. The road has reduced the KNIT's transportation costs, increased its profit margin, and improved its competitive position in the international heroin trade. At the time the road was built, the KMT's role in the narcotics traffic was well known, but apparently USAID officials felt that the road's military advantages outweighed its positive contribution to the international drug traffic.

In many ways, this road is a typical example of the most innocent form of American complicity in Southeast Asia's narcotics traffic. After pouring billions of dollars into Southeast Asia for over twenty years, the United States has acquired enormous power in the region. And it has used this power to create new nations where none existed, handpick prime ministers, topple governments, and crush revolutions. But U.S. officials in Southeast Asia have always tended to consider the opium traffic a quaint local custom and have generally turned a blind eye to official involvement. A Laotian or Vietnamese general who so much as whispers the word "neutralism" is likely to find himself on the next plane out of the country, but one who tells the international press about his role in the opium trade does not even merit a raised eyebrow. However, American involvement has gone far beyond coincidental complicity; embassies have covered up involvement by client governments, CIA contract airlines have carried opium, and individual CIA agents have winked at the opium traffic.

As an indirect consequence of American involvement in the Golden Triangle region, opium production has steadily increased, no. 4 heroin production is flourishing, and the area's poppy fields have become linked to markets in Europe and the United States. Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle already grows 70 percent of the world's illicit opium and is capable of supplying the United States with unlimited quantities of heroin for generations to come.

1. Lao Presse (Vientiane: Ministry of Information, #1448/71), April 8, 1971.

2. Ibid. (#1459/71), April 24, 1971.

3. Ibid. (#1460/71), April 26, 1971.

4. The New York Times, August 11, 1971, p. 1.

5. Interview with diplomatic officials, Vientiane, Laos, August and September 1971.

6. Interview with an agent, U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, New Haven, Connecticut, November 18, 1971.

7. Report of the United Nations Survey Team on the Economic and Social Needs of the Opium-Producing Areas in Thailand (Bangkok: Government House Printing Office, 1967), pp. 59, 64, 68; The New York Times, September 17, 1963, p. 45; June 6, 1971, p. 2.

8. Interview with John Warner, Washington, D.C., October 14, 1971. (John Warner is chief of the Strategic Intelligence Office of the S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.)

9. John Hughes, The Junk Merchants (Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Company, 1970), pp. 13-14.

10.The New York Times, April 3, 1970, p. 3; the director of the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics, John E. Ingersoll, has testified that the 80 percent figure "has been handed down from very obscure beginnings" and admitted that he has not been able to verify the figure. (U.S. Congress Senate Committee on Appropriations, Foreign Assistance and RelaQ Proqrams Appropriations for Fiscal Year 1972, 92nd Cong., Ist sess., 1971, p. 610.)

11. The New York Times, June 6, 1971, p. 2.

12. Alain Y. Dessaint, "The Poppies Are Beautiful This Year," Natural History, February 1972, p. 31.

13. Morgan F. Murphy and Robert H. Steele, The World Heroin Problem, 92nd Cong., Ist sess. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, May 1971), p. 20.

14. The Milford Citizen (Milford; Connecticut), September 28, 1971.

15. Interview with an agent, U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Washington, D.C., October 21, 1971.

16. The New York Times, June 6, 1971, p. 2.

17. Interview with Police Col. Smith Boonlikit, Bangkok, Thailand, September 17, 1971. In mid 1971 the going price for a gram of no. 4 heroin in Bangkok was about $2 (40 baht), compared to about 120 (2.5 baht) for no. 3 heroin.

18. About sixty-five tons of opium are smuggled into the major cities in upper and central Burma for local consumption, but almost none gets beyond these cities into the international markets (interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971. William Young worked for the CIA from 1958 until 1967).

19. Ibid.

20. U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, "The World Opium Situation," mimeographed (Washington, D.C., October 1970), p. 10.

21. The New York Times, June 6, 1971, p. 2.

22. The Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), June 19, 1972.

23. Interview with Elliot K. Chan, Vientiane, Laos, August 15, 1971. (Elliot K. Chan is a USAID police adviser to the Royal Laotian government.) Interview with an agent, U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, New Haven, Connecticut, November 18, 1971.

24. Interview with Edward Fillingham, Vientiane, Laos, September 5, 1971. (Edward Fillingham is the director of the Foreign Exchange Operations Fund.)

25. Louis Kraar, "Report from Laos," Fortune, September 1, 1968, p. 52.

26. Ibid., p. 54.

27. Far Eastern Economic Review, 1971 Yearbook (Hong Kong), p. 216; Straits Times (Singapore), August 22, 1969; Eastern Sun (Singapore), February 24, 1971.

28. British Broadcasting Corporation interview with Sisouk na Champassak, Vientiane, Laos, 1970. (The quotation is filed at BBC Lime Grove Studios, London, England.)

29. For example, Sisouk himself made this statement before the U.N. Commission on Narcotic Drugs in 1957:

"The Royal Government is determined, as it always has been:
1. to prohibit the production or consumption of opium derivatives throughout the national territory under its control;
2. to take vigorous measures to combat illicit traffic;
3. to ensure effective and complete enforcement of the prohibition of the consumption of opium"

(United Nations, Economic and Social Council, Commission on Narcotic Drugs, Illicit Traffic, 12th sess., agenda item no. 4 [E/CN.7/1_1691, May 28, 1957; [no. 295/MPL/ONU] May 29, 1957).

30.The Washington Post, July 8, 1971.

31. Interview with Police Col. Smith Boonlikit, Bangkok, Thailand, September 21, 1971. (Colonel Boonlikit allowed the authors to read and copy reports from U.S. customs, U.S. Bureau of Narcotics, and Interpol relating to Corsican syndicates in Southeast Asia. Practically all of the following information is based on these reports unless otherwise noted.)

32. Interview with Touby Lyfoung, Vientiane, Laos, September 4, 1971; Time, February 29, 1960, p. 35.

33. Paule Bernard, Lotus, Opium et Kimonos (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1959), p. 90; telephone interview with an agent, Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Washington, Dr.., December 20, 1971.

34. Paul Louis Levet's syndicate consisted of six men, including himself:

1. Jacques Texier.
2. Jean "Jeannot" Giansily, who reportedly arrived in Indochina from France in 1954-1955 and first worked for Bonaventure Francisci. Later hired by Levet.
3. Barth6lemy "M6m6" Rutilly, Levet's contact man in Saigon.
4. Charles Orsini, an elderly Corsican resident of Phnom Penh who served as the contact man in Cambodia.
5. Tran Hung Dao, an alias for a Vietnamese member of the syndicate.

35. In late 1959 or early 1960, for example, a small Beaver aircraft chartered from Roger Zoile picked up three hundred kilos of opium at Muong Sing, in northwestern Laos, for Levet's "account." The aircraft landed at a small strip on the western edge of Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia, where the opium was repacked in orange crates and trucked to the Cambodian seaport of Kompot. From there half was shipped to Hong Kong and the other half to Singapore.

36. Interview with Lt. Col. Lucien Conein, McLean, Virginia, June 18, 1971.

37. Interview with Gen. Ouane Rattikone, Vientiane, Laos, September 1, 1971.

38. Joel "alvern, "The Role of Chinese in Lao Society," Journal of the Siam Society 49, pt. I (July 1961), 31-34.

39. Joel M. Halpern, Economy and Society of Laos (New Haven: Southeast Asian Studies, Yale University, 1964), pp. 117-118.

40. Stanley Karnow, "The Opium Must Go Through," Life, August 30, 1963, pp. 11-12; Hong Kong Dispatch 4222, from Jerry Rose to Time, Inc. (November 9, 1962).

41. Ibid.

42. L'Express, no. 1052 (September 6-12, 1971), p. 18. (This article identified JeanBaptiste Andr6ani, a Guerini partisan during the vendetta discussed in Chapter 2, as an associate of Antoine Guerini and Bonaventure Francisci.)

43. U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs has the following information on this incident:

1. Owners of the aircraft: René Enjabal and Lucien Don Carlini.
2. Vientiane opium dealers: Roger Lasen, Maurice Lecore, Ao Thien Hing (Chinese resident of Laos), and Thao Shu Luang Prasot (Chinese resident of Laos).
3. Waiting for the opium on the ground in Ban Me Thuot were: Charles Merelle (French), Padovani (French Corsican) and Phan Dao Thuan (Vietnamese).
4. Opium was destined for two Chinese distributors in Cholon: Ky Van Chan and Ky Mu.
5. Also believed to be involved as financiers: Roger Zoile and Francois Mittard
(telephone interview with an agent, U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Washington, D.C., December 20, 1971).

44. Karnow, "The Opium Must Go Through," p. 12.

45. Telephone interview with an agent, U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Washington, D.C., December 20, 1971.

46. Also arrested were Mme. Isabela Mittard, Roger Boisviller, Roger Paul Jean, Etienne Kassubeck, and Jean Roger Barbarel. Barbaret escaped from prison in 1960 and has never been apprehended.

47. According to Vietnamese Passport Control, Frangois Mittard visited Laos briefly from December 28 to 30, 1964, and left Saigon for Laos on January 31, 1965. He has never returned to Vietnam (interview with Ton That Binh, Vietnamese Passport Control, Saigon, Vietnam, September 10, 1971).

48. Hong Kong Dispatch #222, from Jerry Rose (November 9, 1962).

49. The New York Times, May 8, 1953, p. 4; U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, "The World Opium Situation," p. 10.

50. Interview with Gen. Ouane Rattikone, Vientiane, Laos, September 1971.

51. Len E. Ackland, "No Place for Neutralism: The Eisenhower Administration and Laos," in Nina S. Adams and Alfred W. McCoy, eds., Laos: War and Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 149.

52. Arthur J. Dommen, Conflict in Laos (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1971), p. 116; Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1967), pp. 114-115.

53. David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The Invisible Government (New York: Random House, 1964), p. 153.

54. Interview with Gen. Ouane Rattikone, Vientiane, Laos, September 1, 1971.

55. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 14, 1971.

56. Interview with Gen. Ouane Rattikone, Vientiane, Laos, September 1, 1971.

57. Dommen, Conflict in Laos, p. 219.

58. Le Monde (Paris), May 24-25, 1964.

59. Far Eastern Economic Review, May 28, 1964, p. 421.

60. Le Monde, May 24-25, 1964.

61. General Ouane gave the authors the following statistics:

Contróle du Opium au Laos

Month	Report No.	Amount exported	Profits	Equivalent (Dollar)
November 1963	Report I/A	1,146 kgs.	1,948,200 baht	$97,410
December 1963	Report 2/V	1,128 kgs.	1,917,000 baht	$95,880
January 1964	Report 2/V	1,125 kgs.	1,912,500 baht	$95,625

(Interview with Gen. Ouane Rattikone, Vientiane, Laos, September 1, 1971.)

62. Ibid.

63. General Kouprasith told one reporter that, "some of the things he [Phoumi] has done with the economy of the nation are wrong, including the introduction of gambling and the monopolies. Some of the things he has done have helped to support and strengthen the Communists in their attack on us" (Dommen, Conflict in Laos, p. 265); Lao Presse (Vientiane: Ministry of Information, #3764), April 20, 1964.

64. D. Gareth Porter, "After Geneva: Subverting Laotian Neutrality," in Adams and McCoy, eds., Laos: War an,~Revolution, p. 204.

65. Far Eastern Economic Review, May 28, 1964, p. 421.

66. Dommen, Conflict in Laos, pp. 286-287.

67. Lao Presse (Vientiane: Ministry of Information, #3998), February 8, 1965.

68. Cabled dispatch from Shaw, Vientiane (Hong Kong Bureau), to Time, Inc., received September 16-17, 1965.

69. The New York Times, The Pentagon Papers (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1971), pp. 313-314.

70. Interview with Gen. Ouane Rattikone, Vientiane, Laos, September 1, 1971; interview with Gen. Thao Ma, Bangkok, Thailand, September 17, 1971; Don A. Schancbe, Mister Pop (New York: David McKay Company, 1970), pp. 240-245.

71. The authors visited Long Pot village in the region west of the Plain of Jars in August 1971 and interviewed local officials, opium farmers, and soldiers who confirmed Air America's role in the local opium trade.

72. James Hamilton-Paterson, The Greedy War (New York: David Mckay, 1971), pp. 275-276.

73. Interview with Gen. Edward G. Lansdale, Alexandria, Virginia, June 17, 1971.

74. Interview with Lt. Col. Lucien Conein, McLean, Virginia, June 18, 197 1.

75. Interview with Gen. Edward G. Lansdale, Alexandria, Virginia, June 17, 1971.

76. Peter Kunstadter, "Vietnam: Introduction," in Peter Kunstadter d., Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities, and Nations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 681-682; Howard Shochurek, "Americans in Action in Vietnam," National Geographic 127, no. I (January 1965), 38-64.

77. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971.

78. Interview with Gen. Edward G. Lansdale, Alexandria, Virginia, June 17, 1971.

79. Genevieve Sowards and Erville Sowards, Burma Baptist Chronicle (Rangoon: Board of Publications, Burma Baptist Convention, 1963), pp. 411-414.

80. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971.

81. The Boston Globe, September 3, 1970.

82. The CIA's Tibetan operations began in August 1959, when twenty Khamba tribesmen from southern Tibet arrived in Camp Hale, Colorado, for special training. These men, and others like them, served as cadres in the CIA's guerrilla army, which devoted most of its resources to mining the two major roads between Tibet and China. Through these operations the CIA hoped to slow the flow of Chinese men and materiel moving into Tibet, and thereby strengthen the political position of the exiled Dalai Lama. When the operations were curtailed in May 1960, there were an estimated forty-two thousand Khamba guerrillas fighting for the CIA inside Tibet (L. Fletcher Prouty, article in The Empire Gazette [Denver, Colorado], February 6, 1972).

83. Interview with Don A. Schanche, Larchmont, New York, February 12, 1971. Don Schanche is the author of Mister Pop.

84. Interview with Maj. Chao La, Ban Nam Keung, Laos, September 12, 1971. (Maj. Chao La is commander of Yao mercenary troops in Nam Tha Province for the CIA.)

85. Schanche, Mister Pop, p. 5.

86. John Lewallen, "The Reluctant Counterinsurgents: International Voluntary Services in Laos," in Adams and McCoy, eds., Laos: War and Revolution, pp. 361362; for an official USAID admission of the military character of these "humanitarian" refugee operations, see U.S. Congress, Senate Committee of the Judiciary, Refugee and Civilian War Casualty Problems in Indochina, 91st Cong., 2nd sess., 1970, pp. 22-24.

87. Schanche, Mister Pop, pp. 241-242.

88. Interview with Touby Lyfoung, Vientiane, Laos, September 1, 1971.

89. Dommen, Conflict in Laos, pp. 294-295.

90. Interview with a Royal Laotian Army officer, Vientiane, Laos, August 1971. (This interview is the basis for the foregoing description of Vang Pao's early career.)

91. Dommen, Conflict in Laos, pp. 133-134.

92. Lao Presse (Vientiane: Ministry of Information, #2,700), September 12, 1960.

93. Dommen, Conflict in Laos, p. 154.

94. Lao Presse (Vientiane: Ministry of Information, #2,692), September 1, 1960.

95. Ibid. (#2,716), September 29, 1960.

96. Interview with a Royal Laotian Army officer, Vientiane, Laos, August 1971.

97. Interview with Touby Lyfoung, Vientiane, Laos, September 1, 1971.

98. Dommen, Conflict in Laos, pp. 161, 296; interview with Touby Lyfoung, Vientiane, Laos, September 1, 1971.

99. Hugh Toye, Laos: Bufler State or Battleground (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 161.

100. Schanche, Mister Pop, pp. 75-76.

101. Dommen, Conflict in Laos, pp. 179, 207.

102. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971.

103. Interview with Ger Su Yang, Long Pot village, Laos, August 19, 1971.

104. Interview with Capt. Kong Le, Paris, France, March 22, 1971.

105. Dommen, Conflict in Laos, p. 207.

106. Schanche, Mister Pop, pp. 97-100.

107. Brig. Gen. Edward G. Lansdale, "Resources for Unconventional Warfare, S.E. Asia," in The New York Times, The Pentagon Papers, pp. 138-140.

108. Schanche, Mister Pop, pp. 103, 115-116.

109. Ibid., pp. 162-163.

110. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on United States Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad, United States Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad, Kingdom of Laos, 91 st Cong., I st sess., 1970, pt. 2, p. 473.

111. Interview with William Young, Chianginai, Thailand, September 8, 1971; interview with a former USAID official in Nam Tha Province, Laos, June 1971.

112. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 197 1; Schanche, Mister Pop, pp. 171-173.

113. Dommen, Conflict in Laos, p. 183.

114. The New York Times, April 25, 1963, p. 7.

115. Interview with Capt. Kong Le, Paris, France, March 22, 1971.

116. An Australian anthropologist working in northern Thailand has shown that the high price of opium enabled the Meo in one village to support themselves on only onethird of the land it would have required to produce an adequate amount of rice for the village's subsistence (Douglas Miles, "Shifting Cultivation-Threats and Prospects," in Tribesmen and Peasants in North Thailand, Proceedings of the First Symposium of the Tribal Research Center [Chiangmai, Thailand: Tribal Research Center, 1967], p. 96.)

117. Schanche, Mister Pop, pp. 240-245.

118. Interview with Gen. Ouane Rattikone, Vientiane, Laos, September 1, 1971; interview with Gen. Thao Ma, Bangkok, Thailand, September 17, 1971.

119. Inter-view with Lo Kham Thy, Vientiane, Laos, September 2, 1971.

120. Interview with a former USAID official, Washington, D.C., June 1971.

121. Interview with high-ranking Meo officials, Vientiane, Laos, September 1971.

122. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee

on United States Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad, Kingdom of Laos, pt. 2, p. 465.

123. Ibid., pp. 470, 490.

124. Dommen, Conflict in Laos, pp. 297, 299.

125. A Meo social scientist of Paris now working for his doctorate at the University of Paris estimates that there were eighty thousand Meo in Meng Khouang Province and fifty-five thousand in Sam Neua Province before the mass migrations began (interview with Yang Than Dao, Paris, France, March 17, 1971). One USAID refugee official at Ban Son estimates that there are a total of about 250,000 hill tribesmen living in the mountains of these two provinces (interview with George Cosgrove, Ban Son, Laos, August 30, 1971 ).

126. Schanche, Mister Pop, pp. 294-295; Senate Committee of the Judiciary, Refugee and Civilian War Casualty Problems in Indochina, pp. 24-28.

127. Interview with George Cosgrove, Ban Son, Laos, August 30, 1971.

128. Ibid.; U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on the Judiciary, War-Related Civilian Problems in Indochina, Part II: Laos and Cambodia, 92nd Cong., Ist sess., 1971, p. 48.

129. Interview with Lyteck Lynhiavu, Vientiane, Laos, August 28, 1971. (Lyteck Lynhiavu is a member of one of the most prestigious Meo clans in Laos and director of administration in the Ministry of the Interior.)

130. Ibid.; interviews with Meo villagers, Long Pot village, Laos, August 1971. The Royal Laotian government conducted an investigation of Vang Pao's regular infantry - battalions in September 1970 and found that all of them were far belO*w their reported payroll strength of 550 men: the Twenty-first Battalion had 293 men, the Twentyfourth Battalion had 73, the Twenty-sixth Battalion had 224, and the Twentyseventh Battalion had 113. According to Laotian army sources, Vang Pao was pocketing the difference.

131. Interview with George Cosgrove, Ban Son, Laos, August 30, 19 1. (George Cosgrove is a USAID refugee officer for Military Region II.)

132. James G. Lowenstein and Richard M. Moose, U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on U.S. Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad, Laos: April 1971, 91st Cong., Ist sess. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, August 1971), p. 16.

133. Robert Shaplen, Time Out of Hand (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 352.

134. Interview with Chinese merchants, Vientiane, Laos, August 1971. It is very difficult to measure the exact impact of the U.S. bombing campaign and refugee movements on Laotian opium production. However, the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics has made an attempt. In 1968 the Bureau estimated Laos's production at 100-150 tons. In mid-1971 it estimated Laos's total production at 35 tons. (U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, "The World Opium Situation," p. 10; U.S. Congress, Senate Committeee on Appropriations, Foreign Assistance and Related Programs Appropriations for Fiscal Year 1972, 92nd Cong., Ist sess., 1971, p. 583.)

135. The authors visited Long Pot District from August 18 to August 23,

1971. Most of the following information is based on these six days in Long Pot unless otherwise noted.

136. Interview with Ger Su Yang, Long Pot village, Laos, August 19, 1971.

137. For a detailed examination of the problem of "choice" in a Meo village in Thailand, see W. R. Geddes, "Opium and the Miao: A Study in Ecological Adjustment," in Oceania 41, no. I (September 1970).

138. One Thai government study reported that "tasting" is an important part of opium cultivation:

"In each village, one or a few men are able to determine the suitability of the terrain for poppy by tasting the soil; apparently a highly respected qualification. When the ph [soil acidity index], after several years of continual use, begins to decrease, these men can 'taste' when the soil becomes unsuitable for further poppy cultivation" (F. R. Moormann, K. R. M. Anthony, and Samarn Panichapong, "No. 20: Note on the Soils and Land Use in the Hills of Tak Province," in Soil Survey Reports of the Land Development Department [Bangkok: Kingdom of Thailand, Ministrv of National Development, March 19641, p. 5).

139. F. B. G. Keen, The Meo of North-West Thailand (Wellington, New Zealand: Government Printer, 1966), p. 32.

140. For a description of the burn-off in other hill tribe villages, see Paul J. Zinke, Sanga Savuhasri, and Peter Kunstadter, "Soil Fertility Aspects of the Lua Forest Fallow System of Shifting Cultivation," Seminar on Shifting Cultivation and Economic Development in Northern Thailand (Chiangmai, Thailand, Janu~iry 18-24, 1970), pp. 910.

141. Geddes, "Opium and the Miao: A Study in Ecological Adjustment," pp. 8-9.

142. Keen, The Meo of North-West Thailand, p. 35.

143. Ibid., p. 36; Dessaint, "The Poppies Are~Beautiful This Year," p. 36.

144. In comparison, Professor Geddes found that the Meo village of seventyone houses he surveyed in northern Thailand produced a minimum of 1,775 kilos, or over 11/4 tons of raw opium. This is an average of 25 kilos per household compared to an estimated 15 kilos for Long Pot villaee (Geddes, "Opium and the Miao: A Study in Ecological Adjustment," P. 7).

145. Interview with an agent, U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Southeast Asia, August 1971.

146. Interview with Ger Su Yang, Long Pot village, Laos, August 19, 1971.

147. A Report on Tribal Peoples of ChianRrai Province North of the Mae Kok River, Bennington-Comell Anthropological Survey of the Hill Tribes in Thailand (Bangkok: The Siam Society, 1964), pp. 28-29; Delmos Jones, "Cultural Variation Among Six Lahu Villages, Northern Thailand," (Ph.D. thesis, Cornell University, 1967), pp. 40-41, 136.

148. Interview with the headman of Nam Suk village, refugee village, Long Pot Divrict, Laos, August 21, 1971.

149. Interview with the headman of Nam Ou village, refugee village, Long Pot District, Laos, August 21, 1971.

150. Many Meo clan leaders regard Vang Pao as something of an uncultured usurper. According to a number of influential Meo, Vang Pao is acutely aware of his low social stature and has tried to compensate for it by marrying his relatives into Touby's family. In 1967 Vang Pao's daughter,

May Ken, married Touby's son, Touxa Lyfoung. In 1969 Vang Pao's son, Franqois Vangchao, married Touby's daughter, May Kao Lyfoung. Finally, in 1970 Vang Pao's nephew, Vang Gen, married Touby's niece, May Choua Lyfoung. Vang Pao was threatened by military setbacks and mounting opposition from the Lynhiavu clan, and so felt compelled to arrange this last marriage to shore up his declining poli ical fortunes.

151. Interview with Edgar Buell, Ban Son, Laos, August 31, 1971.

152. Interview with Ger Su Yang, Long Pot village, Laos, August 22, 1971.

153. Ibid.

154. When the authors left Long Pot District on August 23, a number of village headmen explained that their people would begin dying from starvation in several months and urged us to somehow force the Americans into making a rice drop. Upon return to Vientiane, we explained the situation to the local press corps and an article appeared several days later in The Washington Post and on the Associated Press wires. As might be expected, many American officials denied that the rice had been cut off.

Edgar Buell was incensed and told the authors, "When you're saying that no f-- rice gets into that village you're not saying that Charlie Mann [USAID director] won't send it in. And sending or not sending soldiers don't make any difference. Hell, hippies, yippies and every other thing won't go. Now if they won't send soldiers we don't take 'em out of college or pL4 'ern in jail; we give 'em rice. . . .

"You shouldn't have snuck into that village and then talked to Charlie Mann. You should have come here right off and talked to Pop Buell and got the real story. You've caused a lot of trouble for people here. Hell, I'd kill anybody who'd say old Pop Buell would let somebody starve" (interview with Edgar Buell, Ban Son, Laos, August 30, 1971).

On September 2 Norman Barnes, director of United States Information Service, and Charles Mann, director of USAID/Laos, flew to Long Pot village to make a report on the situation for USAID/Washington. Norman Barnes later contradicted Edgar Buell's assertion that the rice drops had not been cut off and admitted that there had been no deliveries since early March. Mr. Barnes denied that there were any ulterior motives and explained that the presence of Pathet Lao troops in the immediate area from early March until August 20 made it impossible for aircraft to operate in Long Pot District. But, Mr. Barnes was now happy to report that deliveries had been restored and a rice drop had been made on August 30 (interview with Norman Barnes, Vientiane, Laos, September 3, 1971).

However, the authors saw an Air America UH-lH helicopter land at Long Pot on the afternoon of August 19 and were told by villagers at the time that Air America's helicopters had been flying in and out of the village since the rice drops stopped. Moreover, villagers reported that Pathet Lao forces had left the area several months earlier.

155. Interview with the assistant headman of Ban Nam Muong Nakam, Long Pot village, Laos, August 21, 1971.

156. Interview with Ger Su Yang, Long Pot village, Laos, August 19, 1971. In late 1971 one American reporter flew over the Plain of Jars and described what he saw:

"A recent flight around the Plain of Jars revealed what less than three years of intensive American bombing can do to 6 rural area, even after its civilian population has been evacuated. In large areas, the primary tropical color-bright green-has been replaced by an abstract pattern of black, and bright metallic colors. Much of the remaining foliage is stunted, dulled by defoliants.

"Today, black is the dominant color of the northern and eastern reaches of the Plain. Napalm is dropped regularly to burn off the grass and undergrowth that covers the Plain and fills its many narrow ravines. The fires seem to burn constantly, creating rectangles of black. During the flight plumes of smoke could be seen rising from bombed areas. . . .

"From an enlarged negative of a photograph covering one small, formerly grass-covered hill about 100 feet high, I spotted several hundred distinct craters before losing count. In many places it is difficult to distinguish individual craters; the area has been bombed so repeatedly that the land resembles the pocked, churned desert in stormhit areas of the North African desert" (T. D. Allman, "Plain Facts," Far Eastern Economic Review, January 8, 1972, p. 16); for a description of life under the bombs in northern Laos, see Fred Branfman, ed., Voices from the Plain of Jars (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

157. Interview with Ger Su Yang, Long Pot village, Laos, August 19, 1971.

158. Interview with George Cosgrove, Ban Sop, Laos, August 30, 1971.

159. The bombing has seriously disrupted opium production even in villages that manage to survive the attacks and remain in their original location. In August 1971 the authors visited the Yao village of Pha Louang. in the mountains eighty miles north of Vientiane. Residents reported that their village had been bombed in August 1964 by a squadron of T-28s bearing Royal Laotian Air Force markings. When the planes first appeared over the village, people hid in their houses. But as the bombs began hitting the houses they tried to flee into the forest. The aircraft strafed the village, shooting the people as they tried to climb up the steep ridges that surround the village. All the houses were destroyed, most of the livestock was killed and twelve people (about 20 percent of the inhabitants) were killed. There were five Pathet Lao soldiers hiding in a cave about a mile away and villagers feel they might have been the cause of the attack. Once the planes left, the Pathet Lao emerged from the cave unharmed and marched off. Villagers report that the mid 1971 opium harvest will equal the harvests before the bombing attack. However, intervening harvests have been much smaller because of the material and human losses they suffered.

Long Pot itself is no longer producing opium. In late 1971 Roval Laotian Army troops turned the village into a forward combat base in preparation for the upcoming dry season offensive by Pathet Lao forces. When the offensive got underway in December, Pathet Lao forces attacked the area and reportedly "overran" Long Pot on January 10, 1972. This dispatch appeared in a NLF newspaper:

"Meantime, at Salaphoukhoun [junction of Route 13 and Route 7], 70 km west of the Plain of Jars, LPLA [Laotian Peoples' Liberation Army] overran the Phouphaday, Phouvieng and Ban Long Pot positions, knocked down hundreds of enemy troops, captured many others, and seized a great deal of weapons."(South Vietnam in Struggle [Hanoi, DRVN], January 17, 1972, p. 7.)

160. Interview with Gen. Ouane Rattikone, Vientiane, Laos, September 1, 1971.

161. Interview with Gen. Thao Ma, Bangkok, Thailand, September 17, 1971.

162. The New York Times, The Pentagon Papers, pp. 313-314, 362.

163. Interview with Gen. Thao Ma, Bangkok, Thailand, September 17, 1971.

164. The New York Times, October 22, 1966, p. 2.

165. Gen. Thao Ma had good reason to fear Kouprasith. Following the February 1965 coup, General Phourni's right-hand man, General Siho, fled to Thailand. After consulting with a monk in Ubol, Thailand, who told him that it would be good luck to go home, General Siho returned to Laos. General Kouprasith had him arrested and imprisoned at Phou Khao Kquai, where he was shot while "attempting to escape" (Dommen, Conflict in Laos, p. 287). According to a former USAID official, Loring Waggoner, Kouprasith's right-hand man, Gen. Thonglith Chokbengboung, told him at a funeral for one of Thonglith's relatives several years after the incident, "Siho was dirty and corrupt," and that he was "glad" that he had a hand in eliminating him (interview with Loring Waggone~, Las Cruces, New Mexico, June 23, 1971).

166. Interview with Capt. Kong Le, Paris, France, March 22, 1971.

167. Ibid.; interview with Gen. Ouane Rattikone, Vientiane, Laos, August 21, 1971; interview with Gen. Thao Ma, Bangkok, Thailand, September 17, 1971.

168. Lao Presse (Vientiane: Ministry of Information, #232/66), October 22, 1966.

169. Dommen, Conflict in Laos, p. 290.

170. Interview with Gen. Thao Ma, Bangkok, Thailand, September 17, 1971; The New York Times, October 22, 1966, p. 1; ibid., October 24, 1966, p. 4.

171. Dommen, Conflict in Laos, p. 29 1.

172. Interview with Capt. Kong Le, Paris, France, March 22, 1971.

173. Interview with Jimmy Yang, Chiangmai, Thailand, August 12, 1971.

174. Dommen, Conflict in Laos, pp. 217-218.

175. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 1971.

176. Interview with Maj. Chao La, Nam Keung, Laos, September 12, 1971; Peter Kandre, "Autonomy and Integration of Social Systems: The In Mien ('Yao' or 'Man') Mountain Population and Their Neighbors," in Kunstadter, ed., Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities, and Nations, 1. 11, p. 585.

177. Interview with a former USAID official in Nam Tha Province, Laos, June 1971.

178. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971.

179. Interview with a former USAID official in Nam Tha Province, Laos, June 1971.

180. J. Thomas Ward, "U.S. Aid to Hill Tribe Refugees in Laos," in Kunstadter, ed., Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities, and Nations, vol. 1, p. 297.

181. Inter-view with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971.

182. Fred Branfman, "Presidential War in Laos, 1964-1970," in Adams and McCoy, eds., Laos: War and Revolution, p. 270.

183. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971.

184. Interview with Maj. Chao La, Nam Keung, Laos, September 12, 1971.

185. Interview with a former USAID official in Nam Tha Province, Laos, June 1971.

186. Ibid.

187. Interview with a former USAID official in Nam Tha Province, Laos, New York, June 1971; interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971.

188. In the early 1950s for example, anthropologists estimated that there were 139,000 Lahu in China's Yunnan Province, 66,000 in northeastern Burma, and 2,000 in Nam Tha. Currently, there are 16,000 Yao in Nam Tha and probably over 100,000 in Yunnan, most of whom dwell in the border regions. (Frank M. Lebar, Gerald C. Hickey, and John K. Musgrave, Ethnic Groups of Mainland Southeast Asia [New Haven, Human Relations Area Files Press, 19641, pp. 31, 82; interview with Maj. Chao Lao, Nam Keung, Laos, September 12, 1971; Peter Kunstadter, "China: Introduction," in Kunstadter, ed., Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities, and Nations, vol. 1, p. 1~4.)

189. Kandre, "Autonomy and Integration of Social Systems," p. 607.

190. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 14, 1971.

191. Sowards and Sowards, Burma Baptist Chronicle, p. 409. (Emphasis added.)

192. Ibid., p. 411.

193. Ibid., pp. 412-413; for one of Reverend Young's early reports from China, see Lizbeth B. Hughes, The Evangel in Burma (Rangoon: American Baptist Mission Press, 1926), pp. 124-129.

194. Sowards and Sowards, Burma Baptist Chronicle, pp. 413-414.

195. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 14, 1971.

196. Lebar et al., Ethnic Groups of Mainland Southeast Asia, p. 32.

197. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 14, 1971.

198. Hugh Tinker, The Union of Burma (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), pp. 159-160.

199. Josef Silverstein, "Politics in the Shan State: The Question of Secession from the Union of Burma," Journal of Asian Studies 18, no. 1 (November 1958), 54.

200. F. K. Lehman, "Ethnic Categories in Burma and the Theory of Social Systems," in Kunstadter, ed., Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities, and Nations, vol. 1, pp. 94-95. The vehemence of the Shan reaction to these arrests by Ne Win can be seen in these paragraphs from a communiqué by the Shan State Army:

"Our leaders secretly and fervently hoped against hope that they would come out successful and save Union of Burma from plunging into Racial Wars and eventually forced into a potentially hot-spot for the stability of Southeast Asian Countries. Their dreams turned into a nightmare, and their hopes shattered but shaping up of events and situation developments shows that what they had forseen [sic] are materializing and we are witnessing it. Everything proved to the Shan people's suspicions on the Burmese or rather Newin and the only choice we had in wanting to own our own rights proved to be correct. This armed struggle that they did not want was the only choice after all" (Communiqué from the Central Executive Committee, Shan State Progress Party, typescript [Chiangmai, Thailand, September 1971, pp. 1-2).

201. Interview with U Ba Thein, Chiang Khong District, Thailand, September 11, 1971.

202. Interview with Rev. Paul Lewis, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 7, 1971. (Reverend Lewis was working in Kengtung at the time of the U Ba Thein's departure.)

203. Interview with U Ba Thein, Chiang Khong District, Thailand, September 11, 1971. departure.)

204. The Washington Post, August 6, 1971. departure.)

205. One of the first camps used for training was located in a river valley about twelve miles due north of Nam Keung, but this was closed in 1965 when Chao La arxd a group of Chinese opium smugglers opened an opium refinery nearby. Young was afraid that the constant movement of mule caravans and boats in and out of the area would compromise the base's security; eventually it was moved across the Mekong River into Thailand and rebuilt in an uninhabited mountain valley, known only by its code name, "Tango Pad" (interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971). departure.)

206. Interview with a former USAID official in Nam Tba Province, New York, June 1971. departure.)

207. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 14, 1971; interview with U Ba Thein, Chiang Khong District, Thailand, September 11, 1971. departure.)

208. The Boston Globe, September 3, 1970; interview with a former USAID official in Nam Tha Province, Laos, New York, June 1971. In general, the security on these cross-border operations was terrible, and almost every hill tribesman in the Golden Triangle region knew about them. In mid 1971 the authors met several Yao tribesmen in northern Thailand who knew the names of five or six Yao who had been on the forays and could recite their itinerary with remarkable accuracy. Both the Chinese and Burmese governments knew about the operations, since they have captured a number of teams. In fact, it seems that the American public were the only interested party ignorant of their existence. departure.)

209. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 14, 1971; interview with U Ba Thein, Chiang Khong District, Thailand, September 11, 1971. (Since Young's resignation from the CIA in 1967, these bases have declined in importance and may no longer be in operation.) departure.)

210. Interview with U Ba Thein, Chiang Khong District, Thailand, September 11, 1971. There have been a number of reports that Air America helicopters have been forced to land in Burma because of mechanical failure. According to one report by Dispatch News Service International correspondent Michael Morrow, an Air America helicopter was forced to make an emergency landing in May 1971 in the eastern Shan States. The helicopter had been chartered from Air America and was reportedly carrying a CIA operative (Dispatch News Service International, November 8, 1971 ). departure.)

211. Interview with U Ba Thein, Chiang Khong District, Thailand, September 11, 1971.

212. Ibid.

213. Interview with Rev. Paul Lewis, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 7, 1971; interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971.

214. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 14, 1971.

215. Interview with U Ba Thein, Chiang Khong District, Thailand, September 11, 1971.

216. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 14, 1971.

217. Interview with U Ba Thein, Chiang KhoUg District, Thailand, September 11, 1971.

218. Adrian Cowell, "Report on a Five Month Journey in the State of Kengtung with the Shan National Army," typescript (1965).

219. Ibid.; For Eastern Economic Review, July 24, 1971, p. 40; interview with Adrian Cowell, London, England, March 9, 1971.

220. Cowell, "Report on a Five Month Journey in the State of Kengtung"; Far Eastern Economic Review, July 24, 1971, p. 40.

221. Cowell, "Report on a Five Month Journey in the State of Kengtune."

222. Interview with Jimmy Yang, Chianamai, Thailand, September 14, 1971. (This story was confirmed by several former members of the SNA, leaders of other Shan armies, and residents of the Huei Krai area.)

223. Out of the seven hundred tons of raw opium produced in northeastern Burma, approximately five hundred tons are exported to Laos and Thailand. A maximum of 15 percent of the opium harvest is consumed by hill tribe addicts before it leaves the village (Gordon Young, The Hill Tribes of Northern Thailand, The Siam Society, Monograph no. 1 [Bangkok, 19621, p. 90). In addition, an estimated sixty-five tons are smuggled into Burma's major cities for local consumption (interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971).

224. Interview with Jimmy Yang, Chiangmai, Thailand, August 12, 1971.

225. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971.

226. The New York Times, February 17, 1961, p. 4; ibid., February 18, 1961, p. 1.

227. Dommen, Conflict in Laos, p. 193; according to President Kennedy's Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern affairs, Roger Hilsman, Kennedy pressured Taiwan to withdraw the KNIT forces from Burma in order to improve relations with mainland China. However, Taiwan insisted that the evacuation be voluntary and so "a few bands of irregulars continued to roam the wilds (Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation,pp. 304-305).

228. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971.

229. Paul T. Cohen, "Hill Trading in the Mountain Ranges of Northern Thailand" (1968).

230. Ibid., pp. 2-3.

231. Ibid., pp. I 1- 14.

232. Young, The Hill Tribes of Northern Thailand, p. 83.

233. F. W. Mote, "The Rural 'Haw' (Yurmanese Chinese) of Northern Thailand," p. 489.

234. Ministry of the Interior, Department of Public Welfare, "Report on the SocioEconomic Survey of the Hill Tribes in Northern Thailand," mimeographed (Bangkok, September 1962), p. 23.

235. Ibid., p. 37.

236. Interview with Col. Chen Mo-su, Chiang Khong District, Thailand, September 10, 1971; The New York Times, August 11, 1971, p. 1.

237. Interview with Col. Chen Mo-su, Chiang Khong District, Thailand, September 10, 1971.

238. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971.

239. The Weekend Telegraph (London), March 10, 1967, p. 25.

240. Interview with Jimmy Yang, Chiangmai, Thailand, August 12, 1971; interview with Jao Nhu, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971; interview with U Ba Thein, Chiang Khong District, Thailand, September 11, 1971.

241. The New York Times, August 11, 1971, p. 1; interview with Jao Nhu, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971.

242. The New York Times, August 11, 1971, p. 1; interview with U Ba Thein, Chiang Khong District, Thailand, September 11, 1971.

243. Interview with Jao Nhu, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971.

244. Interview with Jimmy Yang, Chiangmai, Thailand, August 12, 1971.

245. Interview with Jao Nhu, Chiangmai, Thailand, August 12, 1971.

246. Ibid.; The New York Times, June 6, 1971, p. 2.

247. The New York Times, June 6, 1971, p. 2; interview with Jimmy Yang, Chiangmai, Thailand, August 12, 1971.

248. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971.

249. Ibid.

250. The New York Times, August 11, 1971, p. 1.

251. Interview with Jimmy Yang, Chiangmai, Thailand, August 12, 1971.

252. In May 1965, for example, The New York Times reported that General Ma was operating in a mountainous area of western Yunnan about twenty miles across the border from Ving Ngun and said that unmarked aircraft were making regular supply drops to his troops (The New York Times, May 18, 1965, p. I).

253. Interview with U Ba Thein, Chiang Khong District, Thailand, September 11, 1971.

254. The Weekend Telegraph (London), March 10, 1967, pp. 27-28. In September 1966 four hundred of General Tuan's best troops left their barren wooden barracks on top of Mae Salong mountain, saluted the gaudy, twenty-foot-high portrait of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek that decorates the parade ground and marched off into the jungle. After plunging across the Burma-China border into western Yunnan Province, General Tuan's troops fled back across the border, leaving eighty casualties behind (The New York Times, September 9, 1966, p. 3; The Weekend Telegraph, March 10, 1967, p. 27).

255. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971.

256. "Opium War-Take Three," dispatch from McCulloch, Hong Kong, filing from Saigon, to Time World, New York (August 22, 1967), p. 10.

257. Jeffrey Race, "China and the War in Northern Thailand" (1971), p. 26.

258. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971.

259. Interview with Jimmy Yang, Chiangmai, Thailand, August 12, 1971; "Opium War Add," dispatch from McCulloch, Hong Kong, filing from Saigon, to Time World (August 23, 1967), p. 2.

260. "Opium War-Take Two," dispatch from Vanderwicken, Hong Kong, filing from Saigon, to Time World, New York (August 22, 1967), p. 4.

261. The New York Times, August 11, 1971, p. 1.

262. Race, "China and the War in Northern Thailand," p. 27; interview with Lawrence Peet, Chiangrai, Thailand, August 9, 1971. (Lawrence Peet is a missionary who was working in Lahu villages near the caravan trail at the time of the Opium War.)

263. Interview with the principal of Ban Khwan public school, Ban Khwan, Laos, August 9, 1971.

264. Ibid.; interview with Gen. Ouane Rattikone, Vientiane, Laos, September 1, 1971.

265. Race, "China and the War in Northern Thailand," p. 27.

266. Interview with Gen. Ouane Rattikone, Vientiane, Laos, September 1, 1971.

267. Ibid.

268. "Opium War-Take Two," dispatch from Vanderwicken, p. 5.

269. Interview with Gen. Quane Rattikone, Vientiane, Laos, September 1, 1971.

270. The New York Times, August 11, 1971, p. 1.

271. Race, "China and the War in Northern Thailand," p. 28.

272. "Opium War-Take Two," dispatch from Vanderwicken, pp. 4, 6; The Evening Star, Washington, D.C., June 19, 1972.

273. The New York Times, AuPust 11, 197 1, p. 1.

274. Interview with the principal of Ban Khwan Public School, Ban Khwan, Laos, August 9, 1971.

275. Race, "China and the War in Northern Thailand," p. 28; Mote, "The Rural 'Haw' (Yunnanese Chinese) of Northern Thailand," pp. 488, 492-493.

276. Report of the United Nations Survey Team on the Economic and Social Needs of the Opium-Producing Areas in Thailand, p. 64.

277. Race, "China and the War in Northern Thailand," pp. 21-23.

278. Ibid.

279. Ibid., pp. 29-3 1; the insurgency in northern Thailand is regarded as the "most serious" military problem now facing the Thai government. (A Staff Report, U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia: January 1972, 92nd Cong., 2nd sess., 1972, p. 14.)

280. Alfred W. McCoy, "Subcontracting Counterinsurgency: Academics in Thailand, 1954-1970," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, December 1970, pp. 64-67.

281. The Weekend Telegraph, p. 27.

282. According to a 1961 report by Gordon Young, 50 percent of the Meo, 20 percent of the Lahu, 75 percent of the Lisu, and 25 percent of the Akha tribesmen in northern Thailand have some fluency in Yunnanese. In contrast, only 5 percent of the Meo, 10 percent of the Lahu, 50 percent of the Lisu, and 25 percent of the Akha speak Thai or Laotian (Young, The Hill Tribes of Northern Thailand, p. 92).

283. Interview with Col. Chen Mo-su, Chiang Khong District, Thailand, September 10, 1971.

284. Interview with General Krirksin, Chiang Khong District, Thailand, September 10, 1971.

285. Interview with Col. Chen Mo-su, Chiang Khong District, Thailand, September 10, 1971.

286. The New York Times, June 6, 1971, p. 2; NBC Chronolog, April 28, 1972.

287. "Opium War-Take Three," dispatch from McCulloch, pp. 1-2.

288. Interview with Jimmy Yang, Cb~angmai, Thailand, August 12, 1971.

289. Interview with Hsai Kiao, ChiaNrai, Thailand, September 13, 1971.

290. Interview with Jao Nhu, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971.

291. Inter-view with Jimmy Yang, Chiangmai, Thailand, August 12, 1971.

292. The Shan Unity Preparatory Committee was a coalition of the rightwing Shan rebel groups formed mainly to provide effective joint action against the Burmese Communist party. This quotation from one of their communiqués conveys the group's conservative character and its anti-Communist first principles:

"In the areas bordering Communist China in the Kachin and Northern Shan States particularly, armed bands trained and armed by the Communist Chinese composed mostly of China born Kachins and Shans are now very active.... The Shan Unity Preparatory Committee (SUPC) believes unity within the Union of Burma is definitely attainable and there is no reason why unity based on anti-communism, a belief in Parliamentary democracy and free economy, and last but not least, a unity based on the principles of Federalism cannot be achieved..." (The Shan Unity Preparatory Committee, "Communiqué No. 5," mimeographed [Shan State, March 14, 1968], pp. 12).

293. Interview with Jimmy Yang, Chiangmai, Thailand, August 12, 1971.

294. Communiqu6 from the Central Executive Committee, Shan State Progress Party, September 1971, pp. 1-2.

295. The Shan State Army admits to having transported the following quantities of raw opium from the northern Shan States to northern Thailand: 160 kilos in 1964, 290 kilos in 1965, 960 kilos in 1966, 1,600 kilos in 1967, nothing in 1968, and 80 kilos in 1969 (interview with Jao Nhu, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971).

296. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971.

297. Far Eastern Economic Review, 1968 Yearbook (14ong Kong), p. 123; Far Eastern Economic Review, 1971 Yearbook (Hong Kong), p. 108.

298. In September 1971, for example, the authors were invited to visit a Shan rebel camp near Huci Krai. However, on the morning of the visit (September 13) the authors received the following note:
"Sorry to inform you that your trip with us to Mae Sai is not approved by the Thai authorities. Because it is near the Burmese border and it might be possible for the Burmese to know it.
"It is better to stay within the regulations since the host, the Thais, is giving us a warm and friendly reception. [signed] Hsai Kiao"

299. Far Eastern Economic Review, May 1, 1971, pp. 47-49; ibid., April 17,1971,pp.19-20.

300. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971; interview with Jao Nhu, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971.

301. Interview with Hsai Kiao, Chiangrai, Thailand, September 12, 1971; interview with Jimmy Yang, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 14, 1971.

302. Interview with Psai Kiao, Chiangrai, Thailand, September 12, 1971.

303. The New York Times, June 6, 1971, p. 2.

304. Far Eastern Economic Review, December 12, 1970, p. 22; ibid., April 17, 1971, p. 20.

305. Newsweek, March 22, 1971, p. 42,1 interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971.

306. The New York Times, January 3, 1971, p. 9; ibid., January 31, 1971, p. 3.

307. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971.

308. It was not possible for U Nu to ally with the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), which controls much of Kachin State. Its leaders are Bantist Christians who resented U Nu's establishment of Buddhism as a state religion. The head of the KIA is a Baptist Christian named Zau Seng. He founded the Kachin Independence Army with his brothers in 1957, and with the exception of brief negotiations with Ne Win in 1963, he has been fighting ever since. When he is in Thailand trading in opium and buying arms, his brothers, Zau Dan and Zau Tu direct military operations in Kachin State. Unlike the Shans, Zau Seng is the undisputed leader of the conservative Kachins, and his troops control most of Kachin State. Relations between Zau Seng and the Kachin Communist leader, Naw Seng, are reportedly quite hostile.

309. Interview with Jimmy Yang, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 14, 1971.

310. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971.

311. Interview with Jimmy Yang, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 14, 1971.

312. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 14, 1971.

313. Interview with Hsai Kiao, Chiangrai, Thailand, Sentember 13, 1971; interview with Brig. Gen. Tommy Clift, Bangkok, Thailand, September 21, 1971.

314. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971.

315. Interview with Hsai Kiao, Chiangrai, Thailand, September 13, 1971.

316. It appears that the Young family is revered mainly by the Black Lahu of northern Kengtung State and western Yunnan. The original prophecy of the White God was made by a Black Lahu, and the Youngs had a remarkable conversion rate among them. In contrast, the Red Lahu have generally remained animist and regard the "Man God" as their living deity. The "Man God" has his headquarters west of Mong Hsat and is influential among the Red Lahu of southern Kengtung State. The terms "red" and "black" derive from the fact that different Lahu subgroups wear different-colored clothes. On the other hand, the term "Red" Meo is a political term used to designate Communist Meo insurgents. Many Red Lahu tribesmen have now become afraid that their ethnolinguistic designation may be misinterpreted as a political label. Red Lahu tribesmen in northern Thailand usually claim to be Black Lahu when questioned by anthropologists. Thus, when the "Man God's" son spoke, he said that the Red Lahu were not Communists as many people thought and would willingly join their brother Lahu in the struggle against Ne Win (interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971).

317. Ibid.

318. Tinker, The Union of Burma, pp. 38, 395.

319. Ibid., pp. 40-41.

320. Pacific Research and World Empire Telegram 2, no. 3 (March-April 1971), 6.

321. The Burmese Communist party's (BCP) reasons for abolishing the opium trade are very pragmatic:

1. Since the BCP is a political enemy of the Burmese government, the KMT, and the Shan rebels, it would be impossible for it to send an opium caravan into Thailand even if it wanted to.

2. Continuing the exploitative opium tax would alienate the BCP from the people.

3. Since Shan rebels and government militia are only interested in occupying opiumproducing territories, opium eradication weakens their desire to retake lost territory (interview with Jimmy Yang, Chiangmai, Thailand, August 12, 1971).

322. Interview with Gen. Ouane Rattikone, Vientiane, Laos, September 1, 1971.

323. Interview with residents of Chiang Saen, Thailand, August 1971.

324. Interview with officers in the Royal Laotian Air Force, Vientiane, Laos, JulyAugust 1971.

325. "Opium War Add," dispatch from McCulloch, p. 2.

326. "Opium War-Take 2," dispatch from Vanderwicken, p. 6.

327. According to a U.S. narcotics analyst, General Ouane's control over the opium traffic in the Ban Houei Sai region was further improved in 1968 when Colonel Khampay, a loyal Ouane follower, was appointed regional commander. Colonel Khampay reportedly devoted most of his military resources to protecting the Ban Houei Tap refinery and moving supplies back and forth between Ban Houei Sai and the refinery (interview with an agent, U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, New Haven, Connecticut, May 3, 1972); The Evening, Star, Washington, D.C., June 19, 1972.

328. The New York Times, June 6, 1971, p. 2.

329. Interview with William Young, Chiangmai, Thailand, September 8, 1971.

330. The attack on Long Tieng in early 1972 has inevitably created problems for narcotics dealings among Vang Pao's troops. It is entirely possible that they are no longer in the heroin business, but it will require time before we know whether they have reopened their laboratory somewhere else.

331. Interview with Elliot K. Chan, Vientiane, Laos, August 15, 1971.

332. Cabled dispatch from Shaw, Vientiane (Hong Kong Bureau), to Time, Inc., received September 16-17, 1965.

333. Lao Presse (Vientiane: Ministry of Information, #56/66), March 16, 1966.

334. Lao Presse (Vientiane: Ministry of Information, #58/66), March 18, 1966.

335. Direction du Protocole, Ministre des Affaires ttrang6res, "Liste des Personnalit6s Lao," mimeographed (Rovaume du Laos: n.d.), p.155.

336. Interview with a Thai police official, Bangkok, Thailand, September 1971.

337. Interview with an agent, U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, New Haven, Conn., May 3 - 1972.

338. Interview with Western dir)lomatic official, Vientiane, Laos, August 1971; interview with Third World diplomatic official, Vientiane, Laos, August 1971 (this account of the incident has been corroborat(-.d by reports received by the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs [Interview with an agent, U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, New Haven, Connecticut, November 18, 19711) -, interview with a Laotian political observer, Vientiane, Laos, August 1971.

339. Interview with a Laotian political observer, Vientiane, Laos, August 1971.

340. Lao Presse (Vientiane: Ministry of Information, #1566/71), September 6, 1971.

341. Interview with an agent, U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Southeast Asia, September 1971.

342. Ibid.

343. Hamilton-Paterson, The Greedy War, p. 194.

344. Far Eastern Economic Review, December 4, 1971, pp. 40-41.

345. In its July 19, 1971, issue, Newsweek maga7ine hinted that the United States had used its "other means of persuasion" to force Gen. Ouane Rattikone into retirement. This suggestion is based only on the imagination of Newsweek's New York editorial staff. According to the Vientiane press corps, Newsweek cabled its Vientiane corresnondent for confirmation of this story and he replied that Ouane's retirement had been planned for over a year (which it was). Reliable diplomatic sources in Vientiane found Newsweek's suggestion absurd and General Ouane himself flatly denied that there had been any pressure on him to retire (Newsweek, July 19, 1971, pp. 23-24).

346. Interview with Gen. Ouane Rattikone, Vientiane, Laos, September 1, 1971.

 

 

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