This is what the Americans are saying. Choose what to believe and what
not to believe.
------------------------------
The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia
Secret War, Secret Strategy in Laos

Noting with alarm the renewed guerrilla activity in South Vietnam and
Laos in the late 1950s, American intelligence analysts interpreted
these reports as the first signs of Communist plans for the subversion
and conquest of Southeast Asia. And so CIA operations with Meo
guerrillas in Laos began in 1959 as a part of a regional intelligence
gathering program. General Edward G. Lansdale, who directed much of the
Defense Department's strategic planning on Indochina during the early
years of the Kennedy administration, recalls that these hill tribe
operations were set up to monitor Communist infiltration:

"The main thought was to have an early warning, trip-wire sort of thing
with these tribes in the mountains getting intelligence on North
Vietnamese movements. This would be a part of a defensive strategy of
saving the riceproducing lowlands of Thailand and Vietnam by scaling
off the mountain infiltration routes from China and North Vietnam."
(73)

In the minds of geopolitical strategists in the CIA's Special
Operations division, potential infiltration routes stretched from the
Shan hills of northeastern Burma, through the rugged Laotian mountains,
and southward into the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. According to
one retired CIA operative, Lt. Col. Lucien Conein, Agency personnel
were sent to Laos in 1959 to supervise eight Green Beret teams then
training Meo guerrillas on the Plain of Jars. (74) In 1960 and 1961 the
CIA recruited elements of Nationalist Chinese paramilitary units based
in northern Thailand to patrol the ChinaBurma border area (75) and sent
Green Berets into South Vietnam's Central Highlands to organize hill
tribe commando units for intelligence and sabotage patrols along the Ho
Chi Minh Trail. (76) Finally, in 1962 one CIA operative based in
northwestern Laos began sending trained Yao and Lahu tribesmen into the
heart of China's Yunnan Province to monitor road traffic and tap
telephones. (77)

While the U.S. military sent half a million troops to fight a
conventional war in South Vietnam, the mountain war has required only a
handful of American personnel. "I always felt," said General Lansdale,
"that a small group of Americans organizing the local population was
the way to counter Communist wars of national liberation." (78)

American paramilitary personnel in Laos have tended to serve long tours
of duty, some of them for a decade or more, and have been given an
enormous amount of personal power. If the conventional war in South
Vietnam is best analyzed in terms of the impersonal bureaucracies that
spewed out policies and programs, the secret war in Laos is most
readily understood through the men who fought it.

Three men, perhaps more than any of the others, have left their
personal imprint on the conduct of the secret war: Edgar Buell, Anthony
Poe, and William Young. And each in his own way illustrates a different
aspect of America's conscious and unconscious complicity in the Laotian
opium traffic.

William Young, perhaps one of the most effective agents ever, was born
in the Burmese Shan States, where his grandfather had been a missionary
to the hill tribes. Arriving in Burma at the turn of the century,
Grandfather Young opened a Baptist mission in Kengtung City and began
preaching to the nearby Lahu bill tribes. Although they understood
little of his Christian message, a local oracle had once prophesied the
coming of a white deity, and the Lahu decided that Reverend Young was
God. (79) His son, Harold, later inherited his divinity and used it to
organize Lahu intelligence gathering forays into southern China for the
CIA during the 1950s. When William was looking for a job in 1958 his
father recommended him to the CIA, and he was hired as a confidential
interpreter-translator. A skilled linguist who spoke five of the local
languages, he probably knew more about mountain minorities than any
other American in Laos, and the CIA rightly regarded him as its "tribal
expert." Because of his sophisticated understanding of the hill tribes,
he viewed the opium problem from the perspective of a hill tribe
farmer. Until a comprehensive crop substitution program was initiated,
he felt nothing should be done to interfere with the opium traffic. In
a September 1971 interview, Young explained his views:

"Every now and then one of the James Bond types would decide that the
way to deal with the problem was to detonate or machine-gun the
factories. But I always talked them out of it. As long as there is
opium in Burma somebody will market it. This kind of thing would only
hurt somebody and not really deal with the problem." (80)

If William Young was too sympathetic toward the hill tribes to
interfere with the opium trade, Anthony Poe was indifferent to the
problem. A marine in the Pacific during World War 11, Poe joined the
CIA's Special Operations division sometime after the war and quickly
earned a reputation as one of its crack clandestine warfare operatives
in Asia. (81) Just prior to his arrival in Southeast Asia, he played an
important role in the CIA's Tibetan operations. When the CIA decided to
back Tibet's religious ruler, the Dalai Lama, in his feud with Peking,
Anthony Poe recruited Khamba tribesmen in northeastern India, escorted
them to Camp Hate in Colorado for training, and accompanied them into
Tibet on long-range sabotage missions. (82) His first assignment in
Indochina was with anti-Sihanouk mercenaries along the Cambodian border
in South Vietnam, and in 1963 Poe was sent to Laos as chief adviser to
Gen. Vang Pao. (83) Several years later he was transferred to
northwestern Laos to supervise Secret Army operations in the
three-border area and work with Yao tribesmen. The Yao remember "Mr.
Tony" as a drinker, an authoritarian commander who bribed and
threatened to get his way, and a mercurial leader who offered his
soldiers 500 kip (one dollar) for an ear and 5,000 kip for a severed
head when accompanied by a Pathet Lao army cap. (84) His attitude
toward the opium traffic was erratic. According to a former Laos USAID
official, Poe refused to allow opium on his aircraft and once
threatened to throw a Lao soldier, with half a kilo of opium, out of an
airborne plane. At the same time, he ignored the prospering heroin
factories along the Mekong River, and never stopped any of Ouane
Rattikone's officers from using U.S.-supplied facilities to manage the
drug traffic.

The most curious of this CIA triumvirate is Edgar "Pop" Buell,
originally a farmer from Steuben County, Indiana. Buell first came to
Laos in 1960 as an agricultural volunteer for International Voluntary
Services (IVS), a Bible Belt edition of the Peace Corps. (85) He was
assigned to the Plain of Jars, where the CIA was building up its secret
Meo army, and became involved in the Agency's activities largely
through circumstance and his own God-given anti-Communism. As CIA
influence spread through the Meo villages ringing the Plain of Jars,
Buell became a one-man supply corps, dispatching Air America planes to
drop rice, meat, and other necessities the CIA had promised to
deliver."(86) Buell played the innocent country boy and claimed his
work was humanitarian aid for Meo refugees. However, his operations
were an integral part of the CIA program.

As part of his effort to strengthen the Meo economy and increase the
tribe's effectiveness as a military force, Buell utilized his
agricultural skills to improve Meo techniques for planting and
cultivating opium. "If you're gonna grow it, grow it good," Buell told
the Meo, "but don't let anybody smoke the stuff." Opium production
increased but, thanks to modern drugs that Buell supplied the Meo,
local consumption for medicinal purposes declined. (87) Thus, more
opium than ever was available for the international markets.

Since there were too few U.S. operatives to assume complete
responsibility for daily operations in the hills of Laos, the CIA
usually selected one leader from every hill tribe as its surrogate
commander. The CIA's chosen ally recruited his fellow tribesmen as
mercenaries, paid their salaries with CIA money, and led them in
battle. Because the CIA only had as much influence with each tribe as
its surrogate commander, it was in the agency's interest to make these
men local despots by concentrating military and economic power in their
hands. During the First Indochina War, French commandos had used the
same technique to build up a force of six thousand Meo guerrillas on
the Plain of Jars under the command of Touby Lyfoung. Recognizing the
importance of opium in the Meo economy, the French flew Meo opium to
Saigon on military transports and reinforced Touby Lyfoung's authority
by making him their exclusive opium broker.

But when the CIA began organizing its Meo army in 1960, only six years
after the French disbanded theirs, it found Touby unsuitable for
command. Always the consummate politician, Touby had gotten the best of
the bargain from the French and had never committed his troops to a
head-on fight. As one Meo veteran fondly remembers, "Touby always told
us to fire a few shots and run." The CIA wanted a real slugger who
would take casualties, and in a young Meo officer named Vang Pao they
found him.

Touby had once remarked of Vang Pao, "He is a pure military officer who
doesn't understand that after the war there is a peace. And one must be
strong to win the peace." (88), For Vang Pao, peace is a distant,
childhood memory. Vang Pao saw battle for the first time in 1945 at the
age of thirteen, while working as an interpreter for French commandos
who had parachuted onto the Plain of Jars to organize anti-Japanese
resistance. (89) Although he became a lieutenant in the newly formed
Laotian army, Vang Pao spent most of the First Indochina War on the
Plain of Jars with Touby Lyfoung's Meo irregulars. In April 1954 he led
850 hill tribe commandos through the rugged mountains of Sam Neua
Province in a vain attempt to relieve the doomed French garrison at
Dien Bien Phu.

When the First Indochina War ended in 1954, Vang Pao returned to
regular duty in the Laotian army. He advanced quickly to the rank of
major and was appointed commander of the Tenth Infantry Battalion,
which was assigned to the mountains east of the Plain of Jars. Vang Pao
had a good enough record as a wartime commando leader; in his new
command Vang Pao would first display the personal corruption that would
later turn him into such a despotic warlord.

In addition to his regular battalion, Vang Pao was also commander of
Meo self-defense forces in the Plain of Jars region. Volunteers had
been promised regular allotments of food and money, but Vang Pao
pocketed these salaries, and most went unpaid for months at a time.
When one Meo lieutenant demanded that the irregulars be given their
back pay, Vang Pao shot him in the leg. That settled the matter for the
moment, but several months later the rising chorus of complaints
finally came to the attention of Provincial Army Commander Col. Kham
Hou Boussarath. In early 1959, Colonel Kham Hou called Vang Pao to his
headquarters in Meng Khouang, and ordered him to pay up. Several days
later thirty of Vang Pao's soldiers hidden in the brush beside the road
tried to assassinate Colonel Kham Hou as he was driving back from an
inspection tour of the frontier areas and was approaching the village
of Lat Houang. But it was twilight and most of the shots went wild.
Kham Hou floored the accelerator and emerged from the gantlet
unscathed.

As soon as he reached his headquarters, Colonel Kham Hou radioed a full
report to Vientiane. The next morning Army Chief of Staff Ouane
Rattikone arrived in Meng Khouang. Weeping profusely, Vang Pao
prostrated himself before Ouane and begged for forgiveness. Perhaps
touched by this display of emotion or else influenced by the wishes of
U.S. special forces officers working with the Meo, General Ouane
decided not to punish Vang Pao. However, most of the Laotian high
command seemed to feel that his career was now finished. (90)

But Vang Pao was to be rescued from obscurity by unforeseen
circumstances that made his services invaluable to the Laotian right
wing and the CIA.

About the same time that Vang Pao was setting up his abortive ambush,
Gen. Phoumi Nosavan was beginning his rise to power. In the April 1959
National Assembly elections, Phoumi's candidates scored victory after
victory, thus establishing him as Laos's first real strong man.
However, the election was blatantly rigged, and aroused enormous
resentment among politically aware elements of the population. The
American involvement in election fixing was obvious, and there were
even reports that CIA agents had financed some of the vote buying. (91)

Angered by these heavy-handed American moves, an unknown army officer,
Capt. Kong Le, and his paratroop battalion launched an unexpected and
successful coup on August 8, 1960. After securing Vientiane and forcing
Phourni's supporters out of power, Kong Le turned the government over
to the former neutralist prime minister, Souvanna Phouma, on August 16.
Souvanna announced that he would end the simmering civil war by forming
a neutralist government that would include representatives from left,
right, and center. The plan was on the verge of success when General
Phoumi suddenly broke off negotiations in early September and returned
to his home in Savarmakhet, where he announced the formation of the
Revolutionary Committee. (92) Perhaps not altogether unexpectedly,
dozens of unmarked Air America transports began landing at Savarmakhet
loaded with arms, soldiers, and American advisers (93) and Laos was
plunged into a threeway civil war. The CIAbacked right wing was in
Savarmakhet, the neutralists were in Vientiane, and the leftist Pathet
Lao was in the forests of Sam Neua Province (the extreme northeast).
Everything in between was virtually autonomous, and all three factions
competed for territory and influence in the undeclared provinces.

While the right-wingers quickly consolidated their hold over the south,
the neutralists initially gained the upper hand in Xieng Khouang
Province, which included the Plain of Jars. This success strengthened
the neutralist position considerably; with three major roads meeting on
the plain, Xieng Khouang was the strategic key to northeastern Laos.
The influential Meo leader Touby Lyfoung was minister of justice for
the neutralist government, and seemed to be working closely with Prime
Minister Souvanna Phouma. (94) The neutralist position in the northeast
further improved when the newly appointed commander of Military Region
11 (Sam Neua and Xieng Khouang provinces), Col. Kham Hou, declared his
loyalty to the neutralist government on September 28. (95)

General Phourni's camp was extremely worried about its lack of support
in strategic MR 11. After Col. Kham Hou rebuffed their overtures,
Phourni's agents reportedly contacted Vang Pao in late September. They
promised him financial support if he would lead a Meo coup against the
neutralists, thus bringing MR It into the rightist orbit. According to
Laotian army sources, Vang Pao radioed Savarmakhet on October 1 or 2,
requesting money and arms from General Phourni. On October 5, an
unmarked Air America transport from Savannakhet dropped thirty rightist
paratroopers and several hundred rifles to Vang Pao's supporters on the
Plain of Jars. Later that day Vang Pao called a meeting of local Meo
leaders at the village of Lat Houang. Surrounded by the paratroopers,
Vang Pao told a crowd of about three hundred to four hundred Meo that
he supported General Phourni and promised guns for all those who joined
him in the fight against the neutralists. (96)

When word of the incipient Meo revolt reached Vientiane, Prime Minister
Souvanna Phourna sent his minister of justice, Meo leader Touby
Lyfoung, up to the Plain of Jars to negotiate with Vang Pao. Instead of
dissuading Vang Pao, however, Touby diplomatically bowed to superior
force and joined him. Using his considerable talents as a negotiator,
Touby met with Col. Kham Hou and urged him not to interfere with the
Meo revolt. Unwilling to engage in unnecessary slaughter and somewhat
sympathetic to the right wing, Col. Kham Hou agreed not to fight, (97)
thus effectively conceding control of the Plain of Jars to the right
wing.

Confused by the murky situation, Souvanna Phourna dispatched another
emissary, General Amkha, the inspector general of the neutralist army,
on October 7. But the moment General Amkha stepped off the plane, Vang
Pao arrested him at gunpoint and had him flown to Savannakhet, aboard
an unidentified transport, where he remained in prison for almost three
years on General Phourni's orders. That same day Touby was "invited" to
Savarmakhet and left on a later flight. When Col. Kham Hou resigned
from command shortly thereafter, General Phoumi rewarded Vang Pao by
appointing him commander of Xieng Khouang Province. (98)

In late November General Phourni's army began its drive for Vientiane,
Laos's administrative capital. Advancing steadily up the Mekong River
valley, rightist forces reached the outskirts of the city on December
14 and evicted Capt. Kong Le's paratroopers after three days of
destructive street fighting. While Kong Le's Paratroopers beat a
disciplined retreat up Route 13 toward the royal capital of Luang
Prabang, General Phoumi was a bit lax in pursuit, convinced that Kong
Le would eventually be crushed by the rightist garrisons guarding the
royal capital.

About a hundred miles north of Vientiane there is a fork in the road:
Route 13 continues its zigzag course northward to Luang Prabang, while
Route 7 branches off in an easterly direction toward the Plain of Jars.
Rather than advancing on Luang Prabang as expected, Kong Le entered the
CIA-controlled Plain of Jars on December 31, 1960. While his troops
captured Muong Soui and attacked the airfield at Phong Savan, Pathet
Lao guerrillas launched coordinated diversionary attacks along the
plain's northeastern rim. Rightist defenses crumbled, and Phourni's
troops threw away their guns and ran. (99) As mortar fire came crashing
in at the end of the runway, the last Air America C-47 took off from
the Plain of Jars with Edgar Buell and a contingent of U.S. military
advisers. (100)

Lt. Col. Vang Pao was one of the few commanders who did not panic at
the Kong Le and Pathet Lao coordinated offensive. While Phourni's
regular army troops ran for the Mekong, Vang Pao led several thousand
Meo soldiers and refugees out of the plain on an orderly march to
Padoung, a four-thousand-foot mountain, twelve miles due south. Vang
Pao was appointed commander of Military Region II and established his
headquarters at Padoung. (101)

With General Phourni once more in control of Vientiane and a joint
Pathet Laoneutralist force occupying the strategic Plain of Jars, the
center of CIA activity shifted from Savannakhet to Padoung. In January
1961 the CIA began sending Green Berets, CIA-financed Thai police
commandos, and a handful of its own agents into MR 11 to build up an
effective Meo guerrilla army under Vang Pao. William Young was one of
the CIA operatives sent to Padoung in January, and because of his
linguistic skills, he played a key role in the formation of the Secret
Army. As he recollected ten years later, the basic CIA strategy was to
keep the Pathet Lao bottled up on the plain by recruiting all of the
eligible young Meo in the surrounding mountains as commandos.

To build up his army, Vang Pao's officers and the CIA operatives,
including William Young, flew to scattered Meo villages in helicopters
and light Heliocourier aircraft. Offering guns, rice, and money in
exchange for recruits, they leapfrogged from village to village around
the western and northern perimeter of the Plain of Jars. Under their
supervision, dozens of crude landing strips for Air America were hacked
out of the mountain forests, thus linking these scattered villages with
CIA headquarters at Padoung. Within a few months Vang Pao's influence
extended from Padoung north to Phou Fa and east as far as Bouam Long.
(102) However, one local Meo leader in the Long Pot region west of the
Plain of Jars says that the Meo recruiting officers who visited his
village used threats as well as inducements to win a declaration of
loyalty. "Vang Pao sent us guns," he recalled. "If we did not accept
his guns he would call us Pathet Lao. We had no choice. Vang Pao's
officers came to the village and warned that if we did not join him he
would regard us as Pathet Lao and his soldiers would attack our
village." (103)

Meo guerrilla operations on the plain itself had begun almost
immediately; Meo sappers blew up bridges and supply dumps while snipers
shot at neutralist and Pathet Lao soldiers. After four months of this
kind of harassment, Capt. Kong Le decided to retaliate. (104) In early
May 1961, Pathet Lao and neutralist troops assaulted the northern flank
of Padoung mountain and began shelling the CIA base camp. After
enduring an intense enemy mortar barrage for over two weeks, the CIA
decided to abandon the base, and Vang Pao led his troops to a new
headquarters at Pha Kbao, eight miles to the southwest. (105) Following
close behind came Edgar Buell, leading some nine thousand Meo
civilians. While Vang Pao's hardy troops made the transfer without
incident, hundreds of civilians, mainly children and elderly, died in a
forced march through the jungle. (106)

The only official report we have on Meo operations was written by Gen.
Edward G. Lansdale of the CIA in July 1961 for foreign policy officials
in the Kennedy administration. In it he discusses the Agency's
clandestine warfare potential in Indochina. "Command control of Meo
operations is exercised by the Chief CIA Vientiane with the advice of
Chief MAAG Laos [U.S. army advisers]," reported Lansdale. Although
there were only nine CIA operations officers and nine Green Berets in
the field, "CIA control in the Meo operations has been reported as
excellent." In addition, there were ninety-nine Thai police commandos
working with the Meo under CIA control. So far nine thousand Meo had
been "equipped for guerrilla operations," but Lansdale felt that at
least four thousand more of these "splendid fighting men" could be
recruited. However, there was one major problem:

"As Meo villages are over-run by Communist forces and as men leave
foodraising duties to serve as guerillas, a problem is growing over the
care and feeding of non-combat Meos. CIA has given some rice and
clothing to relieve this problem. Consideration needs to be given to
organized relief, a mission of an ICA ["humanitarian" foreign aid]
nature, to the handling of Meo refugees and their rehabilitation."
(107)

To solve this critical problem, the CIA turned to Edgar Buell, who set
out on a fifty-eight-day trek around the perimeter of the plain to
arrange for delivery of "refugee" supplies. (108)

In July 1962 the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Geneva
Agreements on Laos, and thus theoretically terminated their military
operations in that chaotic kingdom. Although American Green Berets and
military advisers were withdrawn by October as specified, the CIA
devised a number of clever deceptions to continue its clandestine
activities. All of the CIA operatives moved to adjacent areas of
Thailand, but returned almost every day by helicopter or plane to
direct guerrilla operations. Civilian personnel (not covered by the
Geneva Agreements) were recruited for clandestine work. In December
1962, for example, Buell trained Meo guerrillas in demolition
techniques and directed the dynamiting of six bridges and twelve
mountain passes along Route 7 near Ban Ban. (109) The U.S. Embassy
declared that Air America flights to Meo villages, which carried
munitions as well as refugee supplies, were "humanitarian" aid and as
such were exempted from the Geneva Agreements. (110)

After a relatively quiet year in 1962, the CIA went on the offensive
throughout northern Laos in 1963-1964. In the northwest, William Young,
assisted by IVS volunteer Joseph Flipse, led Yao commandos in an attack
on Pathet Lao villages east of Ban Houei Sai. One American who took
part in the offensive recalls that Pathet Lao troops had been inactive
since the Geneva Agreements were signed and feels that the CIA
offensive shattered the cease-fire in the northwest. In the northeast
the CIA took the war to the enemy by expanding Meo commando operations
into Sam Neua Province, a Pathet Lao stronghold for nearly fifteen
years. (111)

Anthony Poe became the new CIA man at Long Tieng, Vang Pao's
headquarters since mid 1962, and organized the offensive into Sam Neua
Province. Rather than attacking towns and villages in the valleys where
the Pathet Lao were well entrenched, the CIA concentrated on the
mountain ridges populated by Meo tribesmen. Using Air America's fleet
of helicopters and light aircraft, Anthony Poe led hundreds of Meo
guerrillas in a lightning advance that leaped from mountain to mountain
into the heart of Sam Neua Province. As soon as a village was captured
and Pathet Lao cadres eliminated, the inhabitants were put to work
building a crude landing strip, usually five hundred to eight hundred
feet long, to receive the airplanes that followed in the conqueror's
wake carrying Edgar Buell's "refugee" supplies. These goods were
distributed in an attempt to buy the hearts and minds of the Meo.

Within a matter of months a fifty-mile-long strip of
territory-stretching from the northeastern rim of the Plain of Jars to
Phou Pha Thi mountain, only fifteen miles from the North Vietnamese
border-had been added to Vang Pao's domain. Over twenty new aircraft
landing strips dotted the conquered corridor, linking Meo villages with
CIA headquarters at Long Tieng. Most of these Meo villages were perched
on steep mountain ridges overlooking valleys and towns controlled by
the Pathet Lao. The Air America landing strip at Hong Non, for example,
was only twelve miles from the limestone caverns near Sam Neua City
where the Pathet Lao later housed their national headquarters, a
munitions factory, and a cadre training school. (112)

As might be expected, the fighting on the Plain of Jars and the opening
of these landing strips produced changes in northeastern Laos's opium
traffic. For over sixty years the Plain of Jars had been the hub of the
opium trade in northeastern Laos. When Kong Le captured the plain in
December 1960, the Corsican charter airlines abandoned Phong Savan
Airport for Vientiane's Wattay Airport. The old Corsican hangout at
Phong Savan, the Snow Leopard Inn, was renamed "Friendship Hotel." It
became headquarters for a dozen Russian technicians sent to service the
aging Ilyushin transports ferrying supplies from Hanoi for the
neutralists and Pathet Lao. (113)

No longer able to land on the Plain of Jars, the Corsican airlines
began using Air America's mountain landing strips to pick up raw opium.
(114) As Vang Pao circled around the Plain of Jars and advanced into
Sam Neua Province, leaving a trail of landing strips behind him, the
Corsicans were right behind in their Beechcrafts and Cessnas, paying
Meo farmers and Chinese traders a top price for raw opium. Since Kong
Le did not interfere with commercial activity on the plain, the Chinese
caravans were still able to make their annual journey into areas
controlled by Vang Pao. Now, instead of delivering their opium to
trading centers on the plain, most traders brought it to Air America
landing strips serviced by the Corsican charter airlines. (115) Chinese
caravans continued to use the Plain of Jars as a base until mid 1964,
when the Pathet Lao drove Kong Le off the plain and forced them into
retirement.

When the Laotian government in the person of Ouane Rattikone jealously
forced the Corsicans out of business in 1965, a serious economic crisis
loomed in the Meo highlands. The war had in no way reduced Meo
dependence on opium as a cash crop, and may have actually increased
production. Although thousands of Meo men recruited for commando
operations were forced to leave home for months at a time, the impact
of this loss of manpower on opium production was minimal. Opium farming
is women's work. While men clear the fields by slashing and burning the
forest, the tedious work of weeding and harvesting is traditionally the
responsibility of wives and daughters. Since most poppy fields last up
to five or ten years, periodic absences of the men had little impact on
poppy production. Furthermore, the CIA's regular rice drops removed any
incentive to grow rice, and freed their considerable energies for
full-time poppy cultivation. To make defense of the civilian population
easier, many smaller refugee villages had been evacuated, and their
populations concentrated in large refugee centers. Good agricultural
land was at a premium in these areas, and most of the farmers devoted
their labors to opium production simply because it required much less
land than rice or other food crops. (116)

Meo villages on the southern and western edges of the plain were little
affected by the transportation problem caused by the end of the
Corsican flights. Following the demise of the Chinese merchant caravans
in mid 1964, Vang Pao's commandos dispatched Meo military caravans from
Long Tieng into these areas to buy up the opium harvest. Since there
were daily flights from both Sam Thong and Long Tieng to Vientiane, it
was relatively easy to get the opium to market. However, the distances
and security problems involved in sending caravans into the northern
perimeter of the plain and in the Sam Neua area were insuperable, and
air transport became an absolute necessity. With the Corsicans gone,
Air America was the only form of air transport available. (117) And
according to Gen. Ouane Rattikone, then commander in chief of the
Laotian army, and Gen. Thao Ma, then Laotian air force commander, Air
America began flying Meo opium to markets in Long Tieng and Vientiane.
(118)

Air logistics for the opium trade were further improved in 1967 when
the CIA and USAID (United States Agency for International Development)
gave Vang Pao financial assistance in forming his own private airline,
Xieng Khouang Air Transport. The company's president, Mr. Lo Kham Thy,
says the airline was formed in late 1967 when two C-47s were acquired
from Air America and Continental Air Services. The company's schedule
is limited to shuttle flights between Long Tieng and Vientiane that
carry relief supplies and an occasional handful of passengers.
Financial control is shared by Vang Pao, his brother, his cousin, and
his father-in-law. (119) According to one former USAID employee, USAID
supported the project because officials hoped it would make Long Tieng
the commercial center of the northeast and thereby reinforce Vang Pao's
political position. The USAID officials involved apparently realized
that any commercial activity at Long Tieng would involve opium, but
decided to support the project anyway. (120) Reliable Meo sources
report that Xieng Khouang Air Transport is the airline used to carry
opium and heroin between Long Tieng and Vientiane. (121)

Despite repeated dry season offensives by the Pathet Lao, the CIA's
military position in the northeast remained strong, and Vang Pao's army
consolidated and expanded upon gains it had made during the early years
of the war. However, in January 1968 Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese
forces mounted a general offensive that swept Vang Pao's mercenaries
out of Sam Neua Province. The key to the Pathet Lao victory was the
capture of the CIA's eagle-nest bastion, Phou Pha Thi, on March 11. The
U.S. air force had built a radar guidance center on top of this
5,680-foot mountain in 1966 "to provide more accurate guidance for
all-weather bombing operations" over North Vietnam. (122) Only
seventeen miles from the North Vietnamese border, Pha Thi had become
the eyes and ears of the U.S. bombing campaign over Hanoi and the Red
River Delta. (123) (Interestingly, President Johnson announced a
partial bombing halt over North Vietnam less than three weeks after the
radar installation at Pha Thi was destroyed.) Vang Pao attempted to
recapture the strategic base late in 1968, but after suffering heavy
losses he abandoned it to the North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao in
January 1969. (124)

The loss of Sam Neua in 1968 signaled the first of the massive Meo
migrations that eventually made much of northeastern Laos a depopulated
free fire zone and drastically reduced hill tribe opium production.
Before the CIA-initiated Meo guerrilla operations in 1960, MR 11 had a
hill tribe population of about 250,000, most of them Meo opium farmers
evenly scattered across the rugged highlands between the Vientiane
Plain and the North Vietnamese border. (125) The steady expansion of
Vang Pao's influence from 1961 to 1967 caused some local concentration
of population as small Meo villages clustered together for selfdefense.
However, Meo farmers were still within walking distance of their poppy
fields, and opium production continued undiminished.

When Vang Pao began to lose control of Sam Neua in early 1968, the CIA
decided to deny the population to the Pathet Lao by evacuating all the
Meo tribesmen under his control. By 1967 U.S. air force bombing in
northeastern Laos was already heavy, and Meo tribesmen were willing to
leave their villages rather than face the daily horror of life under
the bombs. Recalling Mao Tse-tung's axiom on guerrilla warfare, Edgar
Buell declared, "If the people are the sea, then let's hurry the tide
south. (126) Air America evacuated over nine thousand people from Sam
Neua in less than two weeks. They were flown to Buell's headquarters at
Sam Thong, five miles north of Long Tieng, housed temporarily, and then
flown to refugee villages in an adjacent area west of the Plain of
Jars. (127)

During the next three years repeated Pathet Lao winter-spring
offensives continued to drive Vang Pao's Meo army further and further
back, forcing tens of thousands of Meo villagers to become refugees. As
the Pathet Lao's 1970 offensive gained momentum, the Meo living north
and west of the plain fled south, and eventually more than 100,000 were
relocated in a crescent-shaped forty-mile-wide strip of territory
between Long Tieng and the Vientiane Plain. When the Pathet Lao and the
North Vietnamese attacked Long Tieng during the 1971 dry season, the
CIA was forced to evacuate some fifty thousand mercenary dependents
from Long Tieng valley into the overcrowded Ban Son resettlement area
south of Long Tieng. By mid 1971 USAID estimated that almost 150,000
hill tribe refugees, of which 60 percent were Meo, had been resettled
in the Ban Son area. (128)

After three years of constant retreat, Vang Pao's Meo followers are at
the end of the line. Once a prosperous people living in small villages
surrounded by miles of fertile, uninhabited mountains, now almost a
third of all the Meo in Laos, over ninety thousand of them, are now
packed into a forty-mile-long dead end perched above the sweltering
Vientiane Plain. The Meo are used to living on mountain ridges more
than three thousand feet in elevation where the temperate climate is
conducive to poppy cultivation, the air is free of malarial mosquitoes,
and the water is pure. In the refugee villages, most of which are only
twenty-five hundred feet in elevation, many Meo have been stricken with
malaria, and lacking normal immunities, have become seriously ill. The
low elevation and crowded conditions make opium cultivation almost
impossible, and the Meo are totally dependent on Air America's rice
drops. If the North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao capture Long Tieng and
advance on Vientiane, the Meo will probably be forced down onto the
Vientiane Plain, where their extreme vulnerability to tropical disease
might result in a major medical disaster.

The Ban Son resettlement area serves as a buffer zone, blocking any
Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese enemy advance on Vientiane. If they
choose to move on Vientiane they will have no choice but to fight their
way through the resettlement area. Meo leaders are well aware of this,
and have pleaded with USAID to either begin resettling the Meo on the
Vientiane Plain on a gradual, controlled basis or shift the
resettlement area to the east or west, out of the probable line of an
enemy advance. (129)

Knowing that the Meo fight better when their families are threatened,
USAID has refused to accept either alternative and seems intent on
keeping them in the present area for a final, bloody stand against the
North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao. Most of the Meo have no desire to
continue fighting for Gen. Vang Pao. They bitterly resent his more
flamboyant execsses-person ally executing his own soldiers, massive
grafting from the military payroll, and his willingness to take
excessive casualties -and regard him as a corrupt warlord who has grown
rich on their suffering. (130) But since USAID decides where the rice
is dropped, the Meo have no choice but to stand and fight.

Meo losses have already been enormous. The sudden, mass migrations
forced by enemy offensives have frequently exceeded Air America's
logistic capacity. Instead of being flown out, many Meo have had to
endure long forced marches, which produce 10 percent fatalities under
the best of conditions and 30 percent or more if the fleeing refugees
become lost in the mountain forests. Most of the mercenary dependents
have moved at least five times and some villages originally from Sam
Neua Province have moved fifteen or sixteen times since 1968. (131)
Vang Pao's military casualties have been just as serious: with only
thirty thousand to forty thousand men under arms, his army suffered
3,272 men killed and 5,426 wounded from 1967 to 1971. Meo casualties
have been so heavy that Vang Pao was forced to turn to other tribes for
recruits, and by April 1971 Lao Theung, the second largest hill tribe
in northern Laos, comprised 40 percent of his troops. (132) Many of the
remaining Meo recruits are boy soldiers. In 1968 Edgar Buell told a New
Yorker correspondent that:

"A short time ago we rounded up three hundred fresh recruits. Thirty
per cent were fourteen years old or less, and ten of them were only ten
years old. Another 30 per cent were fifteen or sixteen. The remaining
40 per cent were forty-five or over. Where were the ones in between?
I'll tell you-they're all dead." (133)

Despite the drop in Meo opium production after 1968, General Vang Pao
was able to continue his role in Laos's narcotics trade by opening a
heroin laboratory at Long Tieng. According to reliable Laotian sources,
his laboratory began operations in 1970.When a foreign Chinese master
chemist arrived at Long Tieng to supervise production. It has been so
profitable that in mid 1971 Chinese merchants in Vientiane reported
that Vang Pao's agents were buying opium in Vientiane and flying it to
Long Tieng for processing.(134)

Although American officials in Laos vigorously deny that either Vang
Pao or Air America are in any way involved, overwhelming evidence to
the contrary challenges these pious assertions. Perhaps the best way of
understanding the importance of their role is to examine the dynamics
of the opium trade in a single opium-growing district.