Relations between the field command and the CIA station in Vientiane varied. The agency’s chiefs of station had different styles and manners. Gordon Jorgensen left for Saigon in 1962. Charles S. Whitehurst presided over the re-ignition of the Laotian war. He brought the Langley perspective, having headed the FE Division branches for Cambodia and Laos, but much of his field experience had been in China operations. Douglas S. Blaufarb, come to CIA from a career at the Voice of America and the U.S. Information Service, cut his teeth in covert operations setting up radio nets for the Albania project. He believed in adaptive response and mostly gave Lair a free hand. Ted Shackley received the Vientiane posting as reward for his service on the Cuba front. As Shackley arrived in the summer of 1966, the Mekong River suddenly spilled over its banks, inundating Vientiane, in some places rising the equivalent of four stories—an ominous sign. Only incredible ingenuity enabled the Americans to keep the embassy open.

  Shackley viewed covert action as a “third option” and saw Project Momentum as an alternative to using U.S. troops, fielding an army for a fraction of the cost. He wanted to control everything. Shackley hurled the secret army into major confrontations with the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese. On his watch Vang Pao’s Hmong began to sustain serious losses. Lawrence Devlin came to Laos at the end of 1968 when Shackley moved to Saigon. Hugh Tovar helped endow the Hmong with their own miniature air force of T-28s. Vang Pao’s losses continued to accelerate during Tovar’s tenure. Tovar arrived in 1970, when combat had intensified and Hmong force levels were falling. He introduced Thai troops in artillery and even infantry roles, all the while denying there was any secret war, even after reporters revealed the existence of Long Tieng and Sam Thong. During Devlin’s time enemy troops actually threatened Long Tieng, with pitched battles for the ridge that dominated it.

  As Richard Helms puts it, “The agency . . . was flat out in its effort to keep the tribes viable militarily.” In his later memoir Helms would call Laos “the war we won.” Working flat out meant about 250 Americans either in Laos or commuting to their assignments; air force personnel permanently assigned to Long Tieng; and a budget that grew to $300 million a year. In keeping with covert operations etiquette, Ambassador Sullivan issued strict orders for Americans to stay out of combat. He says that “when I found those orders were willfully disobeyed, I peremptorily removed [offenders] from the country.” But despite Sullivan’s orders, the CIA station appears to have taken little action against such “cowboys” as Tony Poe, who reportedly suffered more than a dozen wounds in assorted firefights and once made a fantastic thirty-mile trek to safety carrying a wounded native comrade. Disciplining Poe meant giving him another assignment to a different tribal strike force, the Yao in northern Laos, where he sent patrols into Burma and China.

  Air America made it all happen. In South Vietnam alone, by late 1965 the proprietary moved 1,650 tons of cargo a month with a fleet of more than 50 planes, among them two dozen C-54s, C-46s, and C-47s. The load increased to 2,500 tons a month in 1967–1968. In Laos the relative war effort of the United States and the Royal Laotian Government can be measured in monthly airlift tonnage. The Laotian air force averaged 400 tons a month in 1966; Air America moved 6,000 tons plus 16,000 passengers.

  Air America had facilities at Bangkok, Takhli, and Udorn, with maintenance performed at Vientiane and Udon, the site of a major proprietary base. The Air America helicopter fleet began at Udon with the transfer of sixteen air force H-34s in March 1961. In addition to their general aviation role the helicopters were vital for air rescue. During the first years of U.S. bombing, Air America rescued four times as many airmen as the air force.

  Pilots were supposed to fly during time off from work on regular flight routes. They were paid bonuses, given tax advantages, and could clear upward of $40,000 a year, a huge sum at the time. As in the Congo, Air America folk in Vientiane had their favorite watering hole; here it was the bar called the Purple Porpoise. Hazardous flying, with clouds, sudden mists, and rain, plus enemy guns, justified the pay. Of four Air America C-130 crews trained in the mid-sixties, only one remained in 1970. Destinations—the Lima Sites—were frequently tiny, tricky airfields. Long Tieng, with a paved runway, good navigation beacons, and an all-weather landing system, was an exception, but it was often merely the first stop of the day. Sky had a sophisticated communications center as well as the Hmong propaganda outlet “Radio of the Union of the Lao Races.” The CIA base at Sky funneled orders to Vang Pao, sent others to the Thai teams that accompanied the Hmong Special Guerrilla Units, and ensured supply deliveries. Vint Lawrence left Laos and the CIA for a career as a cartoonist. When Tony Poe went up-country, new blood took over at Long Tieng. By late 1966 press reports of Americans in the field with the Laotians were eroding the plausible deniability of the secret war in Laos.

  With the intensification of the war came growth of the CIA proprietary that fed it. Flying Tiger, by way of comparison, had been the largest private air charter airline in the world when Air America was formed. In 1968 Flying Tiger had twenty-eight aircraft with slightly more than two thousand employees, whereas Air America had almost two hundred planes and four times as many workers. In February 1969 the Air America fleet in Thailand consisted of twenty-nine helicopters, twenty light planes, and nineteen medium transports. That unit alone was larger than Flying Tiger.

  The demand for air tonnage in Laos led to an anomaly in secret warfare—competition. Continental Air Services hired away an Air America manager, then sought some of the same USAID contracts. Because legal action to preserve Air America monopoly threatened to reveal its ownership, Continental Air got some of the work. Continental accumulated a couple of dozen aircraft in Thailand by 1968, including C-46 and C-47 transports. In addition, contract work would be done by Bangkok-based Bird Air, and beginning in late 1967 the CIA and USAID got together to buy Vang Pao two old C-47s, the beginning of the Hmong leader’s private air force.

  “Air America did a magnificent job,” comments division chief Bill Colby, “but it was not a combat air force.” Attacks in support of the Hmong were carried out from Thailand by air force T-28s in “Jungle Jim”–type units. A few of these planes were given to the RLAF to lend credence to the cover. The T-28 force eventually attained a strength of a hundred fighter-bombers in the Fifty-sixth Special Operations Wing. Heinie Aderholt had a further Laotian incarnation as leader of this formation. The fighter-bombers were supplemented by a wide range of U.S. Air Force gunships, first the AC-47, later the improved AC-119 and AC-130 models.

  Vang Pao’s tactical combination remained his Special Guerrilla Units plus “air,” as he called it. Omnipresent airpower did succeed for a long time, and once the Hmong got their own air unit, its pilots’ familiarity with the terrain made “air” even more effective. But Hmong objectives sometimes diverged from American ones. A staff officer with the Thirteenth Air Force in Thailand recalls an occasion when his commander, informed the Hmong had hit a target on his prohibited list, demanded Vang Pao’s immediate appearance so he could be chewed out. Told the United States had no control over Vang’s planes, the general demanded their gasoline and munitions be cut off. The air force had no authority to do that either.

  Apparent success greatly pleased Washington. The Hmong program became something of a showcase. In August 1964 LBJ ostentatiously received Pop Buell at the White House. The Hmong New Year in 1966 was attended by the King of Laos and the diplomatic corps. In 1968, as a gift, Vang Pao gave President Johnson an ornate flintlock musket of Hmong antiquity. On two occasions the Americans rewarded Vang with secret visits to the United States. On one of these trips VP, as Americans affectionately called him, toured the Green Beret training center at Fort Bragg. The agency sent Stewart Methven to be his escort officer. During the other trip, Vang went to colonial Williamsburg and Disneyland. With six wives at Long Tieng, the Hmong chief had a lot of shopping to do. At Disneyland the CIA reciprocated Vang’s gift with a replica Zorro costume. Vang Pao actually wore this outfit to boost morale during a battle in Laos.

  The campaign against the Ho Chi Minh Trail gave the armée clandestine a new mission. Accurate bombing required precise navigation, leading the air force to put a radio beacon atop Phou Pha Thi, a Hmong sacred place and one of the tallest mountains in Laos. Later the United States added a radar and based helicopters there for rescue missions. Phou Pha Thi became Lima Site 85. Pony Express, an air force helicopter lift activity, moved 150 tons of equipment to the site for the radar installation and the dozen Americans necessary to operate the equipment. Vang Pao’s Hmong were to defend the facility. Bill Lair warned that the Lima Site could not be defended against serious attack, but the managers of the air war, who wanted to use the radar’s precision targeting ability, overrode all objections.

  Phou Pha Thi did not escape Hanoi’s attention. It made a concerted effort to neutralize this installation. In one of the few recorded instances of North Vietnamese bombing, in January 1968, two of four Soviet built AN-2 biplanes, modified to carry bombs, were shot down attempting to bomb LS-85, one actually by an Air America pilot firing a rifle from his helicopter.

  This battle punctuated Ted Shackley’s final months as station chief. The blond ghost from Cuba and Berlin rode close herd on Project Momentum, installing his own man, Thomas G. Clines, as deputy chief at Udorn. Bob Blake and Richard Secord still ran the air branch. Secord, who liked to think he and Clines a great team, watched the aerial photography as Hanoi’s troops closed in on the mountaintop. He called repeatedly for air strikes to halt the buildup. Lair took those warnings to heart, but the readout on Clines and Shackley is more confused. Deputy station chief James R. Lilley (who left Laos two months before this battle) records Shackley warning that LS-85 could not be held beyond March 10. Others believe Shackley oddly complacent. Air strikes would be too few and too late. The Hmong SGUs guarding the base were driven off—two of their CIA advisers, a forward air controller, and five of the radar technicians barely escaped in a desperate helicopter evacuation—and the battle unfolded with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. On the night of March 10–11, 1968, the radar base fell. Ten Americans disappeared, and one of those escaping died of gunshot wounds aboard the helicopter. For Jim Lilley, writing thirty years later, the Phou Pha Thi battle “still conjures up wishful thinking of what could have been avoided.”

  Vang Pao’s secret army attained its peak strength during this period. It numbered forty thousand soldiers, mostly local defense forces but about fifteen thousand grouped in Special Guerrilla Units. Yet the North Vietnamese matched their strength. Soon roughly two divisions of Hanoi’s army regularly fought in northern Laos, quite frequently against the Hmong. They made regular forays against Skyline Ridge that overlooked Long Tieng. The spooks had Laos wired for sound and filled its air with photo reconnaissance planes. In at least one case, according to Shackley, CIA even planted radio beacons on a Pathet Lao unit and completely monitored its movements. A cycle of operations developed: during the dry season the North Vietnamese attacked the Hmong in the mountains and the RLAF on the Plain of Jars, capturing many positions. When the wet season came, Vang Pao would counterattack and recapture much of the lost terrain.

  By this time the CIA had an actual barracks and team house at Long Tieng. Vince Shields had become chief of base, Pat Landry succeeded Bill Lair. Lao sources report that the CIA now backstopped Vang Pao with a command team of three. About thirty more Americans assisted in training, and there were a couple of dozen paramilitary specialists with the SGUs, now being brigaded together as mobile groups to increase their firepower. Agency teams with the Special Guerrilla Units varied from four to twelve men. The CIA advisers, mostly contract officers from the U.S. military under what the agency called its “Jewel” Program—men like James L. Adkins, John Stockwell, James Parker, and Wilbur Greene—lived in the team house when at base, then went into the field with the Hmong. Aside from Long Tieng, there were three other CIA indoctrination bases in Laos and a major training facility in Thailand, where Hmong could undergo unit exercises without the danger of combat.

  James R. Lilley puts the total CIA contingent at this point at some 250. Officially the U.S. embassy had 70 “assistant military attachés.” There were also 73 Americans with Continental Air Services and 207 with Air America. In 1970 the Nixon administration admitted to almost a thousand Americans in Laos, including more than 200 military, almost 400 government employees, and more than that number of contractor personnel. According to CIA officer Victor Marchetti, rank-and-file CIA people were becoming less enamored with Laos, not because they objected to the operation but because it had become unwieldy and obvious rather than sophisticated and secret.

  A few were concerned with mounting losses. Until 1969 the air force had been lucky—only three helicopters had been shot down in Laos, and all but one of the aircrew were rescued. Now luck ran out. In a year six large air force CH-3 helicopters were downed and a seventh destroyed on the ground, half the total of choppers of this type lost in Laos during the entire war. The Nixon administration admitted to more than two hundred dead in Laos, with about that number missing. The CIA’s deaths now included Louis Ojibway, Wilbur Greene, Wayne McNulty, John Kearns, and John Peterson, one of them in North Vietnam.

  Richard Helms finally made a visit to Laos in September 1970. Station chief Larry Devlin squired him around the country. He realized the war had grown—Hmong units now had to be larger to move safely; the North Vietnamese had begun using tanks and artillery; Vang Pao was literally running out of men. The wrecked C-47 that Helms and Devlin shot past as their twin-engine Volpar landed at Long Tieng symbolized the danger that lurked if Hanoi should gain control of the Skyline Ridge. Vang Pao impressed Helms with his command presence, but the Hmong leader had been reduced to recruiting “child soldiers,” boys of thirteen or fourteen. Only Thai mercenaries now kept up the numbers of troops in the Hmong mobile groups.

  Perhaps the continuing losses had something to do with the change of heart, a most important one, that occurred in Congress. Political backing for the Indochina war had waned, support for Laos especially. At one time or another fifty senators had been informed of the CIA program, but one by one they jumped off the boat.

  A case in point was Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri, whose help had been especially important given his membership on the CIA subcommittee.

  Symington had backed the Laotian war. On a visit to Laos and Thailand in 1966, the senator said good things to pilots and embassy people about the efficiency of the secret war. He encouraged the CIA to tell its story and listened in the Armed Services Committee on October 5, 1967, when Theodore Shackley palavered for two hours about where fighting took place and how much it cost. The CIA put soldiers on Laotian battlefields for a fraction of the price of the U.S. military effort in South Vietnam. Symington made that observation, and Shackley agreed. Richard Helms sat to one side taking it all in.

  Two years later Stuart Symington steered a different course. At hearings on U.S. worldwide commitments he demanded explanations, asserting that the United States was “waging war” in Laos and had been for years. Said Symington, “It is time the American people were told more of the facts.”

  At this October 1969 hearing, Senator Symington nudged William H. Sullivan into the admission that there was no formal U.S. obligation to the Hmong.

  In his own testimony Richard Helms refused to be drawn out on the authority for this covert “war,” reiterating the “such other functions” language in the 1947 National Security Act. In an October 30, 1969, memorandum to Director Helms, General Counsel Lawrence Houston argued that CIA had “no combatants as such” in Laos, and that “I know of no definition . . . which would consider our activities in Laos as ‘waging war.” ’ Although the CIA lawyer carefully noted that “from 1947 on my position has been that this is a rather doubtful statutory authority on which to hang our paramilitary activities,” he advised Helms, “I think you were exactly right to stick to the language of the National Security Act.”

  Symington felt he had reason to be exasperated with the agency’s disingenuousness. As the senator put it, “I have never seen a country engage in so many devious undertakings as this.”

  Helms, for his part, fastened on Symington’s change of heart as dishonesty. In a 1981 interview, Helms said, “When Senator Stuart Symington got up and started talking about a ‘secret war,’ he knew far better than that.” In his later memoir, Helms adds that the senator had been briefed several times on the CIA program and had even been Ted Shackley’s houseguest during his visit. Others also held out Symington as a blackguard. In the 1980s former Deputy Director for Intelligence R. Jack Smith published a novel in which Senator Symington was the thinly disguised villain. Agency officials had a deaf ear for the corrosive effects of secrecy on public support for their endeavor.

  Drug trafficking in Laos constituted an element that helped sour key figures in Washington. It has already been noted that the Hmong raised poppies. Processed in laboratories, those poppies could become opium, heroin, morphine, or other powerful drugs, some hallucinogenic, many addictive. The lucrative drug trade became pervasive in northern Laos as it was in upper Burma and Thailand. Indeed, the area is known as the Golden Triangle for exactly this reason.

  When the CIA decided to run a war in northern Laos, the drugs came with it; there was no way to avoid them. The Chinese in Burma, the old Li Mi band, bought some of the poppies and moved them across the border in caravans. Lowland Lao and Thai bought more. But when the airplanes came they introduced an incomparably more efficient means of transportation.