CIA-assisted plot to overthrow
Laos foiled
Former Air America/CIA asset Vang
Pao arrested
by Larry Chin
Global Research, June 6, 2007
http://globalresearch.ca/
Vang Pao, prominent Laotian exile leader
and legendary CIA asset during the CIA's clandestine Indochinese
wars of the 1960s and 1970s was among 10 men arrested on June
4, 2007, and accused of plotting a catastrophic military strike
against the Laotian government using mercenary forces. According
to US attorney Bob Twiss, the ten individuals are the plot leaders,
but "thousands of co-conspirators remain at large, many in
other countries."
The other leading co-conspirator arrested
was Harrison Ulrich Jack, a member of the California National
Guard, and a retired Army officer who was a CIA covert operative
in Southeast Asia before leaving active duty in 1977. According
to the ATF agent, Jack quoted Lo Cha Thao, the president of the
nonprofit organization United Hmong International, and one of
the other Hmong co-conspirators, as saying that "the CIA
was preparing to assist the Hmong insurgency once the takeover
of Laos had begun".
According to the San Francisco Chronicle
report, "the complaint says Jack was hired as an arms broker
and organizer by the other men because of his 'contacts in the
American defense, homeland security and defense contractor community".
An arsenal, including Stinger anti-aircraft
missiles, AK-47 machine guns, C-4 explosives, Claymore land mines,
night-vision goggles, and other automatic weapons had already
been purchased. The weapons, which were seized by undercover agents
from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives
(ATF), were to be used against military and civilian targets in
Laos, including "an attack on the nation's capital intended
to reduce government targets to rubble, and make them look like
the results of the attack upon the World Trade Center in New York
on Sept. 11, 2001", federal authorities said. The group had
agents in the Laotian capital of Vientiane.
Back to the future: General Vang Pao and
Air America redux The return of Vang Pao (in any active political
capacity whatsoever), and any CIA role whatsoever behind the aborted
coup, is yet another ominous sign that the Bush administration
is hellbent on imposing its geopolitical will, through criminal
covert operations and manufactured holocausts, which include violent
black operations in Asia that are not only reminiscent of the
most brutal operations of the Vietnam War era, but far worse.
General Vang Pao, a CIA "cutout",
led a guerrilla army of CIA-backed Hmong tribesmen in the secret
Laos proxy wars in the 1960s, and in the 1970s as a general in
the Royal Army of Laos. When the US finally left Vietnam in 1975,
Pao, with assistance from the American intelligence community,
fled to the United States, with many of his associates in a mass
exodus. The former general, 77, has been a resident of Orange
County, California, but has reportedly "never given up the
fight" to retake Laos. Pao heads various Hmong "liberation"
groups, such as Neo Hom and the United Laotian Liberation Front,
which have been recipients of money from Hmong expatriates and
exiles, designated for guerrilla activities, and the eventual
overthrow of the communist government in Laos.
The CIA's Air America military/intelligence/narco-trafficking
operation, and Vang Pao, are richly detailed in two definitive
histories, Alfred McCoy's The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity
in the Global Drug Trade and Peter Dale Scott's Drugs, Oil and
War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia and Indochina.
Air America was one of the most notorious
of CIA proprietary airlines and a key component in the US government's
notorious Golden Triangle heroin trafficking operations in the
1960s and 1970s. Air America began in 1950 as CAT (Civil Air Transport),
and was the largest CIA proprietary in Asia. CAT itself was a
proprietary with roots to the OSS-China and joint US-Kuomintang
operations during World War II. According to Scott, "the
CIA owned 40 percent of the company; the KMT bankers owned 60
percent. The planes had been supplying the KMT opium bases continuously
since 1951.
The CIA, primarily through Air America,
owned a monopoly over this traffic until 1960 (after which an
expansion took place, behind many CIA proprietary fronts, including
Air America, and, according to Scott "the opium-based economy
of Laos continued to be protected by a coalition of opium-growing
CIA mercenaries, Air America planes and Thai troops."). Air
America was involved in various aspects of the Indochinese war
and clandestine operations, including (but not limited to) narcotics
trafficking, false flag operations, logistics, tactical support,
troop (guerrilla) transport and defoliation.
Furthermore, Air America was not just
a CIA front, but a complex apparatus with deep intelligence roots,
as noted by Scott:
"Underlying Southeast Asian history
in these years was the politically significant narcotics traffic.
The CIA was intimately connected to this traffic, chiefly through
its proprietary Air America. But it was not securely in control
of this traffic and probably did not even seek to be. What it
desired was 'deniability', achieved by the legal nicety that Air
America, which the CIA wholly owned, was a corporation that hired
pilots and owned an aircraft maintenance facility in Taiwan. Most
of its planes, which often carried drugs, were 60 percent owned
and frequently operated by Kuomintang (KMT) Chinese.
"The CIA was comfortable in this
deniable relationship with people it knew were reorganizing the
postwar drug traffic in Southeast Asia. The US government was
determined to ensure that drug-trafficking networks and triads
in the region remained under KMT control, even if this meant logistic
and air support to armies in postwar Burma whose chief activity
was expanding the local supply of opium. The complex legal structure
of the airline CAT---known earlier as Civil Air Transport and
later as Air America---was the ideal vehicle for this support."
"Air America, whose managers overlapped
with those of the CIA in one direction and Pan Am [the airline-LC]
in another, was thrust into an escalating role in Laos that was
contrary to US interests but supplied Pan Am with the needed military
airlift business to survive in the Far East.
Scott also noted that Air America and
its personnel "did contract work in Southeast Asia for the
large oil companies, many of which maintain their own 'intelligence'
networks recruited largely from veterans of the CIA".
"Air America itself had a private
stake in Southeast Asia's burgeoning oil economy, for it flew
'prospectors looking for copper and geologists searching for oil
in Indonesia, and provided pilots for commercial airlines such
as Air Vietnam and Thai Airways, and took over CAT's passenger
services.'
McCoy summarizes the Air America/Vang
Pao relationship in the following excerpt [my emphasis in bold-LC]:
"The CIA ran a series of covert warfare
operations along the China border that were instrumental in the
creation of the Golden Triangle heroin complexin Laos from 1960
to 1975, the CIA created a secret army of Hmong tribesmen to battle
Laotian Communists near the border with North Vietnam. Since Hmong's
main cash crop was opium, the CIA adopted a complicitous posture
toward the traffic, allowing the Hmong commander General Vang
Pao, to use the CIA's Air America to collect opium from his scattered
highland villages. In late 1969, the CIA's various covert action
clients opened a network of heroin laboratories in the Golden
Triangle. In their first years of operation, these laboratories
exported high grade no. 4 heroin to US troops fighting in Vietnam.
After their withdrawal, the Golden Triangle laboratories exported
directly to the United States, capturing one-third of the American
heroin market."
Factoring in the military-intelligence
aspect, Scott noted:
"In the 1960s, the largest of these
operations was the supply of the fortified hilltop positions of
the 45,000 Hmong tribesmen fighting against Pathet Lao behind
their lines in northeast LaosAir America's planes also served
to transport the Hmong's main cash crop, opium.
"The Hmong units, originally organized
and trained by the French, provided a good indigenous army for
the Americans in Laos. Together with their CIA and US Special
Forces 'advisors', the Hmong were used to harass Pathet Lao and
North Vietnamese supply lines. In the later 1960s, they engaged
in conventional battles in which they were transported by Air
America's planes and helicopters. The Hmong also defended, until
its capture in 1968, the key US radar installation at Pathi near
the North Vietnamese border; the station had been used in the
bombing of North Vietnam.Farther south in Laos, Air America flew
out of the CIA operations headquarters at PakseOriginally the
chief purpose of these activities was to observe and harass the
Ho Chi Minh trail, but ultimately the fighting in the Laotian
panhandle, as elsewhere in the country, expanded into a general
air and ground war. Air America's planes were reported to be flying
arms, supplies and reinforcements into this larger campaign as
well."
Vang Pao: CIA murderer Vang Pao was not
only a CIA favorite, but a ruthless killer. McCoy wrote:
"With his flair for such cost-effective
combat, Vang Pao would become a hero to agency bureaucrats in
Washington. 'CIA had identified an officeroriginally trained by
the French, who had not only the courage but also the political
acumenfor leadership in such a conflict,' recalled retired CIA
director William Colby. 'His name was Vang Pao, and he had the
enthusiastic admiration of the CIA officers, who knew himas a
man who knew how to say no as well as yes to Americans.' Many
CIA field operatives admired his ruthlessness. When agent Thomas
Clines, commander of the CIA's secret base at Long Tieng, demanded
an immediate interrogation of six prisoners, Vang Pao ordered
them executed on the spot. Clines was impressed." [Clines
was both a legendary CIA operative and a lifelong friend and political
associate of the Bush family.-LC]
"For 'several years'", according
to Scott, "seven hundred members of the 'civilian' USAID
mission (working out of the mission's 'rural development annex'
had been former Special Forces and US Army servicemen responsible
to the CIA station chief and working in northeast Laos with CIA-supported
Hmong guerrillas of General Vang Pao. Vang Pao's Armee Clandestine
was not even answerable to the Royal Lao government or the army,
being entirely financed and supported by the CIA."
"(Hmong commander) Touby Lyfoung
had once remarked of Vang Pao, 'He is a pure military officer
who doesn't understand that after the war there is peace. And
one must be strong to win the peace.'"
It appears that today, decades later,
the general still does not understand the need for peace.
Towards new warfare and instability in
Asia In addition to questions about the return of Golden Triangle/CIA
cutout Vang Pao, this development raises new and disturbing questions
about the Bush administration's Pacific-Southeast Asia geostrategy.
Initial reports suggest that this aborted
coup was not simply a rogue operation, but one that was supported
by CIA and other US agencies, and US defense contractors. Who
would have benefited from this pure Cold War/Vietnam War-era insurrection
and coup? What interests would have been served by a 9/11-type
catastrophe in Vientiane, and the installation of a regime headed
by CIA-supported military-intelligence figures and narco-trafficking
expatriates?
Does the agenda involve Golden Triangle
narco-trafficking, and new attempts to revitalize or restructure
heroin traffic, and laundered funds into a fragile world economy?
Does the control of oil and oil transport
routes, a perennial US objective in Southeast Asia, play a role?
How about the "war on terrorism"? Southeast Asia has
been the target of numerous real and fabricated "terror"
operations (such as the bombing of Bali). A major event in Laos
would have triggered similar political effects.
Then there is the larger agenda aimed
at containing or competing with nearby China---a return to the
same confrontational politics of the Cold War era. In Drugs, Oil,
and War, Scott wrote that the CIA's role in deliberately fomenting
conflict in Laos in the 1960s may have been aimed at provoking
a war with China, and polarizing the various factions. "What
made the Pentagon, CIA and Air America hang on in Laos with such
tenacity? at least as late as 1962, there were those in the Pentagon
and the CIA 'who believed that a direct confrontation with Communist
China was inevitable'" and the expectation that "Laos
was sooner or later to become a major battleground in a military
sense between the East and the West". The aim, according
to Scott, "was achieved" the country became a battlefield
where U.S. bombings, with between four hundred and five hundred
sorties a day in 1970, generated 600,000 refugees."
Is the US looking to create a similar
conflict again, this time against a new emerging Chinese superpower
threat?
"Vietnam, in other words, was not
an isolated event", as emphasized by Scott. "It was
the product of ongoing war-creating energies located chiefly in
this country, which to this day have not yet been properly identified
and countered. Of these forces, none is deeper and more mysterious
than the involvement yet again of the CIA, and airlines working
for it, with major drug traffickersSuch forces will continue to
haunt us until they are better understood."
While the details of this case continue
to be revealed, what is abundantly clear and obvious is that the
CIA's many criminal operations, directly authorized and/or tacitly
endorsed by a Bush administration, continue to intensify, in every
corner of the world.
Larry Chin is a frequent contributor to
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