The American wheeling and dealing centered around giving power to the CIAs hand-picked rightist strongman Phoumi Nosavan, ousting Souvanna Phouma and other neutralists, and jailing Pathet Lao leaders, including the movements head, Souphanouvong (the half-brother of Souvanna Phouma, both being princes of the royal family). Souphanouvong insisted that neither he nor the Pathet Lao were communist, but were rather ultra-nationalist .14 Crucial to understanding his statements, of course, is the question of exactly what he meant by the term communist . This is not clear, but neither is it clear what the Stare Department meant when it referred to him as such. The Pathet Lao were the only sizable group in the country serious about social change, a characteristic which of course tends to induce Washington officials to apply the communist label.

In August 1960, Kong Le, a military officer with his own troop following, staged a coup and set up a neutralist government under Souvanna Phouma, rejecting Pathet Lao help.15 But when this government became a casualty of a CIA coup in December, Kong Le allied himself with the Pathet Lao; later he turned to the United States for aid and fought against the Pathet Lao. Such was the way of the Laotian circus.

No study of Laos of this period appears to have had notable success in untangling the muddle of who exactly replaced whom, and when, and how, and why. After returning from Laos, writer Norman Cousins stated in 1961 that if you want to get a sense of the universe unraveling, come to Laos. Complexity such as this has to be respected. 16

One thing that came through unambiguously, however, was the determination of the United States to save Laos from communism and neutralism. To this end, the CIA set about creating its now-famous Armee Clandestine., a process begun by the US Army in the mid-1950s when it organized Meo hill tribesmen (the same ethnic group organized in Vietnam. Over the years, other peoples of Laos were added, reaching at least 30,000 in the mid-1960s, half of them more or less full-time soldiers ... many thousands more from Thailand ... hundreds of other Asians came on board, South Vietnamese, Filipinos, Taiwanese, South Koreans, men who had received expert training from their American mentors in their home countries for other wars, now being recycled ... an army, said the New York Times, armed, equipped, fed, paid, guided, strategically and tactically, and often transported into and out of action by the United States ... trained and augmented by the CIA, and by men

of every branch of the US military with their multiple specialties, the many pilots of the CIAs Air America, altogether some 2,000 Americans in and over Laos, and thousands more in Asia helping with the logistics. A Secret Array, secret, that is, from the American people and Congress-US military personnel were there under various covers, some as civilians in mufti, having resigned from the service for the occasion and been hired by a private company created by the CIA; others served as embassy attaches; CIA pilots were officially under contract to the Agency for International Development (AID); Americans who were killed in Laos were reported to have died in Vietnam17 ... all this in addition to the official government forces, the Royal Laotian Army, greatly expanded and totally paid for by the United States ...18

Laos was an American plantation, a CIA playground. During the 1960s, the Agency roamed over much of the land at will, building an airstrip, a hangar, or a base here, a warehouse, barracks, or a radar site there;19 relocating thousands of people, entire villages, whole tribes, to suit strategic military needs; recruiting warriors through money and/or the threat or use of force and/or promises of independent kingdoms which it had no intention of fulfilling, and then keeping them fighting long beyond the point when they wished to stop; 20 while the legendary pilots of Air America roamed far

and wide as well, hard drinking, daredevil flying, death defying, great stories to tell the guys back home, if you survived.21

Some of the stories had to do with drugs. Flying opium and heroin all over Indochina to serve the personal and entrepreneurial needs of the CIAs various military and political allies, ultimately turning numerous GIs in Vietnam into addicts. The operation was not a paragon of discretion. Heroin was refined in a laboratory located on the site of CIA headquarters in northern Laos. After a decade of American military intervention, Southeast Asia had become the source of 70 percent of the worlds illicit opium and the major supplier of raw materials for Americas booming heroin market.22

At the same time, the hearts and minds of the Laotian people, at least of those who could read, were not overlooked. The US Information Agency was there to put out a magazine with a circulation of 43,000; this, in a country where the circulation of the largest newspaper was 3,300; there were as well USIA wall newspapers, films, leaflet drops, and radio programs.23

In the face of it all, the Pathet Lao more than held their own. The CIA was overextended, and, unlike the motley band of Asians assembled by the Agency, the soldiers of the Pathet Lao had some idea of what they were fighting for. The Soviet Union, aware of what the United States was doing in Laos, even if the American public was not, was alarmed by the establishment of a pro-American government in the country, and acceded to a cold-war knee-reflex by sending military supplies to the Pathet Lao, though nothing remotely on the order of the US commitment.24

Beginning in the early 1960s, the North Vietnamese were aiding them as well. Hanois overriding interest in Laos was not necessarily the creation of a Communist state, but the prevention of a belligerent government on its border. In January 1961, the New York Times reported that Many Western diplomats in Vientiane [capital of Laos] ... feel the Communists would have been content to leave Laos alone provided she remained neutral and outside the United States sphere of influence. 25

Hanoi was concerned not only by the American political and military operations in Laos, but by the actions of US Special Forces teams which were entering North Vietnam to engage in espionage, sabotage, and assassination,26 and by the bombings of the country being carried out by the US Air Force27 at a time when the war in South Vietnam was still but a shadow of what was to come. Later, as the wars in Vietnam and Laos became intertwined, Laos formed part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the principal route by which Hanoi supplied its comrades in South Vietnam, and the North Vietnamese fought to protect it as well as attacking American radar installations in Laos used to aid US bombing of North Vietnam.

The nature and extent of North Vietnams aid to the Pathet Lao before this period is difficult to ascertain from Western sources, because such charges typically emanated from the Laotian government or the State Department. On a number of occasions, their report of a North Vietnamese military operation in Laos turned out to be a fabrication. William Lederer and Eugene Burdick, in A Nation of Sheep, summarized one of these non-events from the summer of 1959:

The people of the United States were led to believe that Laos physically had been invaded by foreign Communist troops from across its northern border. Our Secretary of State called the situation grave; our ambassador to the U.N. called for world action; our press carried scare headlines; our senior naval officer implied armed intervention and was seconded by ranking Congressmen ... The entire affair was a fraud. No military invasion of Laos had taken place ... There seemed no doubt that a war embracing thousands of troops, tanks, planes, and mass battles, was raging.

Regardless of how the accounts were worded, this was the picture given the nation.28

It had all been a ploy to induce Congress not to reduce aid for Laos, something seriously being considered because of the pervasive corruption which had been exposed concerning the aid program.29 The Laotian government and the large American establishment in Laos, each for their own reasons, were not about to let the golden goose slip away that easily.

On the East day of 1960, the Laotian government announced to the world that seven battalions of North Vietnamese troops had invaded the country. By all accounts, and by the utter lack of evidence, this claim as well cannot be taken seriously.30

And in 1962, reported Bernard Fall, the renowned French scholar on Indochina: After a battle between government forces and the Pathet Lao, in spite of the fact that Col. Edwin Elder, the American commander in the area of the battle, immediately stated that there was

no evidence to show that Chinese or [North] Vietnamese had participated in the attack , the Laotians-and much of the U.S. press, and official Washington with them-immediately claimed that they were again faced with a large-scale foreign invasion .31

Shortly after Kennedy became president in January 1961, he made a sustained diplomatic effort to establish a coalition government in Laos, precisely what the Eisenhower administration and the CIA had done their best to sabotage. Although he sometimes fell back on conventional cold-war rhetoric when speaking of Laos, one part of John F. Kennedy realized the absurdity of fighting for the backward country, a land he considered not worthy of engaging the attention of great powers .32 Soviet Premier Khrushchev, for his part, was reportedly bored with the question of Laos, and irritably asked Kennedys emissary why Washington bothered so much about the country.33

Eventually, in July 1962, a multi-nation conference in Geneva signed an agreement for a coalition government in Laos. But in the mountains and the plains of the country, this was no longer a viable option. The CIA had too much time, effort, material and emotion invested in its Secret Army; it was the best war the Agency had going anywhere; it was great adventure. And the Pathet Lao were much stronger now than a few years earlier. They were not about to buy such shopworn, suspect goods again, although everyone went through the motions.

Both sides regularly accused each other of violating the agreement, and not without justification. The North Vietnamese, for example, did not withdraw all of their troops from Laos, while the US left behind all manner of military personnel, American and Asian, who remained under AID and other civilian cover, but this was nonetheless a violation of the agreement. Moreover, Christopher Robbins, in his study of Air America, has noted that US Military advisers and CIA personnel moved across the border into Thailand, where they were flown in every day [to Laos] like commuters by Ait America, whose entire helicopter operation was based in Udorn [Thailand]. 34 Air America, by the early 1970s, had no less than 4,000 employees in Thailand.35

Thus it was that the fighting dragged on, though only sporadically. In April 1964, the coalition government, such as it was, was overthrown by the right wing, with the CIAs man Phoumi Nosavan emerging as part of a rightist government headed by the perennial survivor Souvanna Phouma to give it a neutralist fig leaf.36 The Pathet Lao were once again left out in the cold. For them it was the very last straw. The fighting greatly intensified, the skirmishes were now war, and the Pathet Lao offensive soon scored significant advances. Then the American bombing began.