Not merely playing both sides of this street, the agency took steps to recruit the Hmong tribe in the Annamite mountains. Stewart Methven, who had arrived from Japan in the summer of 1959, met Hmong military commander Vang Pao at the hut of Filipino medical staff. Over a series of visits Methven convinced the Hmong leader to ally with the CIA. This became Project Momentum.

  On the surface Washington supported Vientiane, but secretly it backed Phoumi and recruited a Hmong secret army—actually called that, the “armée clandestine.” Desmond FitzGerald dropped in to survey the scene. Toward the end of 1960, John N. Irwin, representing the Pentagon on the 5412 Group, visited southern Laos and talked with Phoumi. A second Irwin trip occurred before Kennedy took office. The Americans began channeling aid to Phoumi, bypassing the Vientiane government. The CIA induced Phoumi to pass supplies to the Hmong, who swore allegiance to the general. Reports of a North Vietnamese invasion of Laos following a trumped-up border incident were used to justify further aid increases.

  Fleeing Vientiane after Phoumi’s coup, Souvanna Phouma and Kong Le made an alliance with the Pathet Lao. A little over two weeks later, on December 4, 1960, the Soviet Union began to airlift military supplies to the Kong Le–Pathet Lao forces, and the Pathet Lao started an offensive of their own. Political intrigue had turned Laos, the Land of a Million Elephants, into a Cold War battleground. The effect of U.S. actions would be to undercut the delicate political balance in the country, hardly conducive to democracy. Souvanna Phouma said of a senior U.S. official, and by extension of American policy, that he “understood nothing about Asia and nothing about Laos.”

  President Eisenhower’s decisions clearly indicate his concept of Laos as a secret war. Aside from White Star and the Hmong, he approved the movement of B-26 bombers to Thailand, not immediately used in Laos because of the need to assemble non-American crews. Ten lighter T-6 strike aircraft were also approved, initially without bombs, to be flown by Laotian pilots. The aircraft were provided by the Thais, then replaced by the United States. By January 4, 1961, Air America had plans to have mechanics in Vientiane service the Laotian air fleet. Air America also flew White Star troopers around Laos, and enabled CIA officers to shuttle between Phoumi and the Hmong. Fifteen Air America craft at Bangkok were flying one thousand tons of supplies a month into Laos. Ike ordered a naval task force bearing Marines into position for intervention in Laos and placed them on a high state of alert.

  Laos figured among the main topics at Ike’s transition discussions with Kennedy. Eisenhower warned Khrushchev that the United States intended to ensure that the “legitimate government” of Laos stayed in power. At a morning meeting on Laos on December 31, 1960, Ike joked that perhaps the time had come to use existing plans for airborne alert of the Strategic Air Command. In parting he told the group, which included Allen Dulles and Gordon Gray, “We must not allow Laos to fall to the Communists, even if it involves war.”

  President Kennedy thought Laos no place for major conflict. In office he used coercive diplomacy, threatening with U.S. force and briefly converting the Program Evaluation Office into an open advisory group, but he aimed for international accord. With the help of Averell Harriman, Roger Hilsman, and Dean Rusk, Kennedy achieved his aim. When Phoumi Nosavan stood in the way, his American assistance evaporated and his CIA link, Jack Hasey, disappeared, sent to the Congo despite opposition from Desmond FitzGerald and Bill Colby. Kennedy’s Special Group made that decision themselves on February 5, 1962.

  It was Harriman who engineered the cutoff of Phoumi. A loyal Democrat and senior statesman, Harriman carried weight with Jack Kennedy, and he tried for a credible Laotian neutralization agreement. Harriman also knew what he wanted—when CIA officers in Vientiane briefed him on Laotian politics and claimed popular support for Phoumi, the president’s irascible envoy turned off his hearing aid in the middle of the meeting.

  Diplomacy led Harriman to Geneva, where an international conference reached agreement in 1962, though in the end neither side observed it. What also flowed from the accord—the installation of a coalition government in Vientiane under Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma—proved to be the one lasting achievement of the negotiation.

  Washington laughed with scorn at North Vietnamese assertions that all their forces had withdrawn from Laos: only forty enemy soldiers passed the international commission’s border checkpoints. But the United States violated the agreement too, continuing to supply and command the Hmong secret army. Two agency officers, Anthony Poshepny and Vinton Lawrence, established a CIA base at the Hmong center of Long Tieng. In the spring of 1963 the assassination of neutralist Laotian officials led to a fresh outbreak of fighting. Now the Pathet Lao attacked the neutralist forces, who eventually joined the RLAF. The war resumed. Souvanna Phouma secretly asked for U.S. help, and President Kennedy agreed. In late 1963 Kennedy designated the CIA as “executive agent” for the Laotian paramilitary effort.

  The largest tribal mobilization of all, the very foundation of the CIA’s secret war in Laos, was that of the Hmong, or, as they were then known, the Meo. This word is a bastardization of the Chinese name Miao used for this mountain people, but it is a pejorative. The tribes respect no borders and are found in Laos, China, and North Vietnam. Generations of French and American secret warriors knew them as Meo, a proud but friendly people who practiced slash-and-burn farming, raising poppies for opium, with villages in the mountain valleys.

  It was probably inevitable that the Hmong would be dragged into the American war. Their poppies had had hidden effects on conflict in Indochina since the French war, when both sides had used opium money, though the Hmong mostly sided with the French under the leadership of Touby Lyfoung, a pro-French notable and the first of his tribe to graduate college. Touby’s Hmong fought for the French, comprising the bulk of the partisan force that vainly attempted to save Dien Bien Phu. Vang Pao, a veteran of that debacle, led a French commando unit on the fruitless expedition. Where Touby Lyfoung functioned as potentate and tribal politician, Vang remained a military commander. When Stewart Methven met him in 1959, Vang held the allegiance of many (though not all) clans and could deliver on promises of recruits.

  Feeling too old for another war, Touby left the main leadership role to Vang Pao. While some Hmong sided with the Pathet Lao (clan leader Fay Dang becoming a member of the Pathet Lao central committee), Touby and Vang Pao made their alliance with the CIA, not directly supporting Phoumi but waging a parallel war. Before Kennedy took office there were already 2,500 Hmong in the secret army. Within months the number had almost quadrupled. Vang drew his cadres from the half-dozen ethnic Hmong battalions in the RLAF, which merely enraged Laotian officials. Kong Le forces soon attacked. Vang Pao lost his own village, forced to retreat into the surrounding mountains. Worst of all, the Plain of Jars airfield also fell, endangering supplies. The Pathet Lao joined the Kong Le offensive and threatened the entire Hmong tribal area. The spring and summer of 1961 witnessed a Hmong mass exodus. Whole villages moved. More than 70,000 people trekked into the mountains to make new homes. Without a crop already in the ground, the Hmong were threatened with starvation in their new homes.

  Several Americans were vitally important in the Hmong future. When the CIA’s Methven left for South Vietnam—FitzGerald had promised him his choice of posts but reneged at the last moment—Methven handed the Hmong account over to Bill Lair, a thirty-five-year-old officer who spent much of the 1950s in Thailand as a CIA case officer to the Thai Police Aerial Recovery Unit (PARU). He too had watched the French debacle at Dien Bien Phu and thus appreciated Hmong fighting qualities. Lair ran Project Momentum for almost a decade and had the contacts with the Thai that were crucial to secure the assistance of PARU teams, the link between secret army units in the field and distant CIA managers. Known as “Cigar” in agency cable traffic, Lair ran the entire secret army with eight other CIA officers, a White Star team (soon withdrawn), and a hundred PARU Thai.

  A second American organized the system that would revictual the armée clandestine for the next eleven years. Maj. Harry C. Aderholt, commander of the air force’s small, unconventional warfare detachment on Okinawa in 1959–1960, helped the CIA on air operations in Tibet and Southeast Asia. Aderholt went to Vientiane in early 1960 to set up a light plane service from the Laotian capital to Phong Saly town, where a tiny landing strip was carved into the side of a mountain. Working with Vang Pao, “Heinie” Aderholt surveyed northern Laos for a network of similar airstrips, soon called Lima Sites, and stayed for two years to oversee their construction. Aderholt also helped the CIA find suitable aircraft such as the Pilatus Porter (Helio U-10 in U.S. service) that could use the smallest Lima Sites.

  A third American, Edgar M. Buell of the U.S. Agency for International Development, became a legend in Laos. Buell initiated airdrops of rice into the mountains, indiscriminate “blind” drops at first since the whereabouts of the Hmong were unknown for several months. “Pop” Buell left his embassy desk to parachute into the mountains. He spent two months walking the forests, personally contacting Hmong villages. Those that agreed to follow Vang Pao he listed for regular rice drops, supplies of seeds and tools, medicine, and so forth.

  In December 1961 the Hmong opened two new bases farther west, at Long Tieng (LS-30/98) and Sam Thong (LS-20), which became the main centers of the secret army. Long Tieng served as Vang Pao’s headquarters, a major mountain commercial center with a Hmong population of forty thousand. The CIA created a base there initially staffed by Anthony Poshepny and Vint Lawrence, who remained after the 1962 Geneva agreement, told to stay out of sight. Known by its radio “handle,” Sky, Long Tieng became the nerve center of the secret war.

  Sam Thong became the administrative, medical, and education center. Consolidation continued through the mid-sixties. A modern hospital and the first Hmong high school were both established there. The Geneva agreement had little effect on CIA support. Air America continued regular humanitarian flights. Even before fighting resumed in the spring of 1963 the agency had directed Air America to make almost a dozen flights specifically to deliver weapons euphemized as “dirty rice.” Ingeniously, the CIA met requirements for “withdrawal” of foreign troops by pulling its people back to Thailand, from which they would simply fly to their jobs in Laos with Air America shuttles each morning.

  For the CIA, Project Momentum became a model of “nation-building,” the political action approach fostering civic institutions in hopes that grateful clients would then cooperate with American policies. But nation-building among the Hmong, as with the montagnards in South Vietnam, brought political problems. The CIA effectively created nations within nations. Activities were possible only to the degree the central government extended autonomy to tribal peoples. Saigon triggered a montagnard political crisis in 1964–1965 precisely by reducing the autonomy accorded tribes in the Central Highlands. The CIA’s relative success with Vang Pao resulted from Vientiane’s being too weak to exert similar authority. From the American strategic standpoint, however, keeping the Vientiane government weak to enable the secret army flew in the face of fostering a national government that could defeat the Pathet Lao. Rather, in recognition of Hmong autonomy, Vang Pao received repeated RLAF promotions and was treated as the commander of an RLAF military region while Touby Lyfoung became a minister in the Royal Laotian Government. Despite such tokens, the lowland Lao never trusted the Hmong.

  Vang Pao struck his greatest blow to date in 1963, in a raid that destroyed a Pathet Lao supply road, dynamiting a full kilometer and sending sections tumbling down a mountainside. Cable traffic suggests that Vang Pao moved without CIA approval, and ahead of any Pathet Lao attacks. It was not the first time CIA troops acted beyond the secret warriors’ control, nor would it be the last.

  The armée clandestine grew to thirty thousand troops. Vang Pao and the CIA worked out a program to increase striking power: a third of the Hmong formed Special Guerrilla Units (SGUs), partisan battalions supported by bazookas and a few heavy mortars. These became the regular forces in Vang Pao’s army. They were later supplied with 75- and even 105-millimeter guns, the latter usually lifted from mountaintop to mountaintop by Air America helicopters and used to fire down into Pathet Lao posts.

  Air America provided the airlift under contract to USAID. Lima Site techniques were perfected to the point that C-130s could disgorge entire palletized cargoes in quick flybys. Smaller Air America planes relayed cargo to outlying sites. Each morning Sky handed out assignments to the fleet as the planes entered Laotian airspace. Sometimes Air America hauled passengers, often fuel for the stocks at the Lima Sites or additional cargo for distribution. Sky frequently assigned as many as four or five successive missions a day to the light transports.

  Secret warfare in Laos assumed the dynamic, free-wheeling style of Sky air operations. The epitome was embodied by Tony Poe, who attained legendary stature in the war. Identified by his CIA cryptonym “Pin,” Poe (really Anthony Poshepny) went everywhere with a boxer’s mouthguard in his pocket, always ready for a fight. Tony came from the big CIA Thailand base at Takhli to be senior adviser to Vang Pao, or Sky chief. Poe transferred up from the Cambodian border, where he had been working with anti-government rebels. An alumnus of the Camp Peary class of 1953 and a veteran of Indonesia, Saipan, and Camp Hale, Poe had an extensive paramilitary resumé. At Long Tieng he presided over intensification of the struggle. Vint Lawrence manned the base while Poe ranged out with Hmong SGUs. The Laotian operation heated up.

  Status as a CIA project greatly facilitated the armée clandestine mobilization in Laos. Supplies were disguised in aid to Thailand and the RLAF. Money was hidden in military assistance, USAID, and CIA budgets. In fact the main obstacle proved to be funding. The expansion of the secret army after 1964 could not be accomplished without noticeable increases. Although the agency budget remained secret, the small CIA subcommittees of Congress had to approve the higher requests. To obtain that approval the CIA relied on its recognized role in counterinsurgency plus its vital contacts in Laos and Thailand. The agency also spiced up its presentation. Langley desk officer Ralph McGehee, handling Thai matters at headquarters after a tour in the field, recalls being flattered one day when division chief Colby invited him to present parts of the CIA case. Des FitzGerald approved the briefing and asked Congress to fund more than a hundred secret army units. Vang Pao actually had only a couple dozen small-size formations at the time, but at Langley, McGehee and other DO officers performed a paper reorganization, endowing the Hmong overnight with the required number of units, each of just a few men. McGehee felt remorse over the falsification, but the subcommittees approved the money. Congress as a whole never explicitly considered the Laos request. For Richard Helms, who became director of central intelligence in 1966, congressional inattention freed him to do a job. The Central Intelligence Agency settled down to fight a real war in Laos. The question remained how long it could stay secret.

  By now the system had assumed its final form. The ambassador had the last word. Aware of CIA’s major projects, ambassadors were then consulted on each activity that went outside embassy guidelines. He retained specific approval authority for air operations other than armed reconnaissance over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Since Project Momentum relied upon close cooperation between the Hmong and the air force, the CIA was in the ambassador’s office all the time. He became a key player in the Southeast Asia Coordinating Committee, which brought together the American ambassadors, military commanders, and intelligence chiefs in Laos, South Vietnam, and Thailand.

  Ambassador Leonard Unger had the helm during the initial phase of the Laotian war. Fluent in both Thai and Lao, deeply interested in the Land of a Million Elephants, Unger successfully protected Souvanna when coup attempts were made against him. Although his successor calls Unger “a most reluctant militarist,” the escalation of CIA’s secret war came on his watch. William H. Sullivan followed Unger. While Sullivan had been a senior member of the U.S. negotiating team at Geneva, in Laos he became an enthusiastic field marshal of the secret war. “There wasn’t a bag of rice dropped in Laos he didn’t know about,” said William P. Bundy of Sullivan. G. McMurtrie Godley replaced Sullivan in 1969. He actually earned the nickname “field marshal.”

  The embassy had a small air staff that maintained approved target lists, processed requests for new authorities, and coordinated among the ambassador, the CIA, and air force commanders in Thailand and South Vietnam. Emergency requests often came through the station chief. He supervised at least three parallel programs. One, out of the embassy, assisted the Laotian government directly. A second set of initiatives, in tandem with U.S. forces in South Vietnam, sought to obstruct the Ho Chi Minh Trail where it crossed through the southern panhandle of Laos. One of these, Project Hardnose, looked to place roadwatch teams to report on movements along the trail. Two more CIA officers, Michael Deuel and Michael Maloney, died working on Hardnose in October 1965 when their helicopter crashed in the jungle. The third initiative was Project Momentum.

  Although only a few dozen CIA officers labored full time on Momentum, the project actually spun an exceedingly complex web. The command center had been located in Thailand, just across the border at the airfield of Udorn. There Bill Lair and his deputy, Pat Landry, gave orders to Vang Pao’s secret army. They arranged for Air America to support the Hmong and for air strikes to back its operations. Their air boss through the late sixties was Maj. Richard Secord of the air force. For his goals and operational approvals, Lair referred to the CIA station chief in Vientiane. For supplies, Thai volunteers to work with the armée clandestine, and air missions, Lair dealt with the U.S. command and CIA station in Thailand. Through much of this period the station chief in Bangkok was “Red” Jantzen, whom Lair had known for more than a decade. Jantzen would be followed by Peer de Silva and Lou Lapham, both former Saigon chiefs.