Lost in history’s quagmire
Joshua Kurlantzick’s history of the US’s ‘secret war’ in Laos is inaccurate and poorly sourced
Iwish I could think of something nice to write about this book. In it, the author, Joshua Kurlantzick, praises a book I wrote 20 years ago, Shooting At The Moon, which covered exactly the same war and the same characters as he does. He calls my book (on page 16) “The one truly outstanding popular account of the secret war”.
So as a matter of courtesy I’d like to be able to thank him by reciprocating, and praise him, too. But the facts are the facts. Sad to say, this new book garbles the facts, and recycles the work of too many authors without fully crediting them.
Take his first chapter, which is meant to showcase his mastery of the subject, and is supposed to be a kind of origin story of the Laos secret war (1961-1973).
Here, allegedly at the very beginning of the war, the mastermind of the CIA operation, Bill Lair, is honoured at a so-called baci or string-tying ceremony with his opposite number, the Hmong tribal commander, Vang Pao. It’s meant to be a splendid, colourful scene, with tribespeople coming forward to tie strings around Lair’s wrists, to bestow their good wishes.
But if you know the Laos war and start looking at the details, you will find some of them curiously missing from the account, and others just plain wrong.
First, there is no place or date given, other than the “winter of 1961”, and does this mean 1960-to-1961 or 1961-62? Either way, it means that if this baci ceremony actually took place, it wasn’t actually at the beginning of the war, as claimed.
Second, Lair is described as “lanky”, meaning thin and tall and rangy, when in fact he was an unathletic man of average height, 178cm.
Third, Kurlantzick says Lair had a “buzz cut” and spoke “fluent Lao” when actually Lair wore his hair combed and spoke Lao haltingly, with a limited vocabulary, though his comprehension was good.
Fourth, Kurlantzick claims that “three shamans chanted behind Lair” during the baci ceremony, and that they “writhed and sang and spat as if possessed”. Well, no. Wrong ceremony.
Hmong shamans, when they are in their shamanic roles, wear black clothes with hoods covering the eyes, and preside over shamanic healing ceremonies, not baci ceremonies.
Fifth, claims Kurlantzick, Lair “had flown up to the central highlands of Laos”, to meet with Vang Pao. There are no central highlands in Laos. But there are in neighbouring South Vietnam. Kurlantzick seems to have his countries confused.
For this account, Kurlantzick cites as his sources interviews with a) Vang Pao, who spoke only broken English, and who never would have supplied the level of detail that Kurlantzick includes or elaborates on (or invents); and b) a telephone interview with Bill Lair, who had had a series of strokes and whose memory was pretty much shot by the time Kurlantzick got around to talking with him. (I knew both men well and interviewed them many times).
What is more surprising, since this is supposed to be a book about the CIA in Laos, is that Kurlantzick completely missed how Lair’s operation actually began. It is a revelatory story.
In 1960, another CIA paramilitary operative (not Lair), who didn’t speak the local languages or understand the local culture, trained a Lao military unit in the art of staging a coup. After a long day’s work, the Agency man went off drinking and carousing for the evening, and the Lao troops he had trained staged the coup exactly as they had been taught — only they then demanded that the Americans leave Laos entirely.
It was this astounding Agency blunder that set off a multi-sided civil war in Laos.
Lair, who understood the local cultures thoroughly, was then in Thailand, where he had personally raised and trained a special-operations force of Thais, a tremendous story in itself.
Like a latter-day Lawrence of Arabia, Lair managed to bring his Thai force into Laos, where they helped Lao troops friendly to the US recapture their capital city.
Lair and his Thai team then went off in search of Vang Pao, the highest-ranking military officer in Laos from the Hmong tribe. They finally met him on Jan 4, 1961, in a hamlet called Tha Vieng south of the Plain of Jars in Laos. There was no baci ceremony at the founding. And the operation as Lair originally proposed it to CIA headquarters didn’t call for any American case officers at all, as Kurlantzick should have known.
Lair only wanted the Thais he had already trained, because they blended in and spoke the local languages, which no Americans did. In fact, Lair always saw the operation as a threeway alliance between equals: the Thai paras, Vang Pao and the Agency.
And that is the real story arc of the Laos secret war, how it began with a blunder by another CIA operative, how Lair tried to straighten everything out and actually succeeded for awhile.
Then the US bureaucracy took over and Lair’s small and subtle operation grew into a bloated and ineffective air war, where the B-52 bombs fell like rain, and still the alliance side lost. That was the great true story available for Kurlantzick to tell.
But he didn’t fully understand his subject, and he didn’t stick to the facts. He gave us a muddled account instead.
The danger is that others will quote him, and the mistakes and distortions will be perpetuated in the future.
Roger Warner is an author and journalist specialising in the US “secret war” in Laos, as well as an award-winning historian and documentary filmmaker.