Back Fire: The CIA's Secret War in Laos and Its Link to the Vietnam War.

When gleeful Germans took sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall in 1989, a triumphant cry resounded throughout the West. We had won the Cold War, the celebrants crowed, and they continue to crow to this day. But overlooked since the victory party began have been all the pawns who were sacrificed by Oval Office strategists during this battle: the Salvadoran peasants slaughtered by an anti-communist military equipped by the Pentagon; the Kurds egged on and then abandoned in the seventies in their rebellion against Saddam Hussein (the enemy of Washington's anti-Soviet pal, the Shah of Iran).

They and others around the world bore the burdens of a global crusade not their own. But the Cold War dictated--or so its most dedicated warriors thought--that the United States exploit alliances of convenience.

No group was more victimized by American geostrategists in this period than the Hmong tribespeople of Laos. Romanced by the United States in the early sixties, the Hmong were used as anti-communist surrogates and then dumped--all in secrecy, as part of a clandestine war managed by the CIA at the direction of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations.

In Back Fire, Roger Warner, a former Life correspondent, ably chronicles this shameful episode. Warner shrinks back from rendering judgment, but a clear indictment shines through: Cold War bureaucrats, imbued with a blinding anticommunism, put the Hmong in the path of harm to serve a dubious political goal. And they got away with it easily. After all, there are no official victims in a war that does not officially exist.

In the early days of the Kennedy Administration, the major problem in Indochina was not Vietnam but Laos, a tiny pre-industrial nation of three million where the government and national economy barely functioned. There, an armed rightist camp backed by the Americans was facing the Pathet Lao, a nationalist group supported by the communists of North Vietnam. Eventually, the United States and the Soviet Union signed an accord that called for a neutral Laos and the withdrawal of all foreign military personnel. But the North Vietnamese did not leave, remaining in Laos in order to protect the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Kennedy's aides responded by conducting a secret war on the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and their Laotian allies. That is, they made a further mockery of the accord by using CIA persomel to arm, train, supply, and direct their favored combatants. Of course, the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon Administrations didn't trouble the American people--or Congress, for that matter--with the information that they were conducting a secret war next door to Vietnam.

The heart of the operation--and the center of Warner's book--was the agency's effort to support a tribal army comprised mainly of Hmong tribespeople. The Hmong were mountain dwellers who did not fancy lowlanders, neither the native Lao nor the encroaching North Vietnamese. The Hmong wanted to keep the NVA out of their territory and to improve their standing in Laos. Behind their tribal leader, Vang Pao, the Hmong gladly signed up with the Americans. They were hearty fighters and they eagerly mounted guerrilla operations against the larger and better-equipped North Vietnamese Army. The pay-off for helping the Americans was high. From the sky, iron birds controlled by the new American friends dropped rice, kettles, blankets, and pieces of corrugated metal (to be used for roofs). The Hmong believed their new patrons, such powerful men, would watch over and protect them.

The CIA men believed that, too. Much of Warner's account follows Bill Lair, a soft-spoken young case officer from Texas. It was Lair who helped set up the initial CIA contacts with Vang Pao. Lair was aware this was risky business and wanted plans prepared in case the Hmong one day faced defeat and had to flee. But back home--at CIA headquarters, the Pentagon, and Foggy Bottom--no one gave a damn about what might happen to the Hmong. I once asked Ted Shackley, who was the CIA'S Laos station chief in the mid-sixties, about the absence of such contingency plans. With a straight face, he replied, "We had contingency plans, but our contingency plans never envisioned defeat."

At first, the operation went well. A small number of spooks, largely left to their own devices by Washington, guided a tribal army of some 10,000. Vang Pao's men waged small hit-and-run raids against the NVA and occupied some North Vietnamese soldiers who might have otherwise been fighting the South Vietnamese. But then, as the U.S. was to tread further into the muck of Vietnam, national security establishment bureaucrats took over and wreaked havoc on the Hmong.

If such a modest program was achieving modestly good results, the bureaucrats reasoned, an enlarged one would bring still greater successes. Bill Lair's mom-and-pop operation was turned into a guerrilla Walmart. Money was dumped into the program. A large operational center was constructed in Udorn, Thailand. The Americans increasingly prompted the Hmong to conduct more conventional attacks against the mighty NVA. The predictable happened. The Hmong were hit hard again and again. They sustained high casualties. To compensate for the losses, Vang Pao began to recruit younger and younger adolescents as troops. At one point, he thought the war was lost and the Hmong's existence was threatened and he considered evacuating the tribe. The Americans would have none of it and told him to stay put--and he and his people did.

Why would the CIA ruin a perfectly fine operation? The reason lies in the marriage of bureaucratic impulses to geostrategic desires that characterized the Vietnam War overall. A newcomer to any ongoing success gets no credit unless he or she changes it--and expansion is the natural inclination of any turf-minded bureaucrat. So, CIA officials and others wanted a bigger show. Also, by the mid-sixties, foreign policymakers in America were consumed with Vietnam, and actions in Laos were dictated by the demands of Vietnam. Consequently, the White House and the Pentagon pressured the CIA to score Vietnam-related successes in Laos. At the ground level, this translated into directing the Hmong to give up what they did best (fighting guerrilla-style) to battle as a conventional force against a much better conventional force.

Warner writes that those CILA officers most familiar with the program realized that these changes wouldn't work. But Shackley and the others turned a deaf ear to the warnings. Within the CIA--as with most government agencies--there was no real channel for registering dissent without jeopardizing a career.

Vang Pao's army did succeed occasionally. But the NVA probably could have wiped out the Lao government forces and the CIA'S tribal army at any time if it truly desired. But doing so would have advertised its violation of the neutrality accord, and the North Vietnamese were not willing to go that far. Ultimately, Hanoi was more restrained by political considerations than by the CIA'S tribal warriors. Nevertheless, fierce fighting ensued, and the tribespeople suffered staggering losses.

As the Vietnam War slowly ended, the Hmong were left helpless. By the war's finale, about 30,000 of the Hmong had lost their lives in the warfare--more than one-tenth of the entire tribe. Tens of thousands were without homes. Vang Pao and a few of his favored Hmong were granted entry to the United States. The less fortunate of the tribe are still in refugee camps in Thailand.

The tribe was decimated--for for nothing. As Warner writes, "The Hmong hadn't been able to save Laos, and nothing tried in Laos was able to salvage the American effort in South Vietnam."

Warner takes a poke or two at the men who pushed the program beyond what was reasonable But he lets off the hook the early authors of the secret war. He too readily accepts their characterization of the initial few years as a "brilliant success." It is true that in those years this covert project did meet its operational objectives; the CIA's allies for a while irritated the larger forces of the NVA and Pathet Lao, But this was a hollow success, one that could not be sustained and one that placed the Hmong in a perilous position, for eventually they would have to deal with the reality that they were no match for the communist forces.

Such after-the-fact criticism is often dismissed as the product of hindsight. But when the relationship between the Hmong and the Americans started, some prescient observers wondered if they were courting disaster. In 1964, Roger Hilsman, a former State Department official, wrote, "Arming the tribesmen engendered an obligation not only to feed them when they were driven from their traditional homelands but also to protect them from vengeance.... Arming tribesmen sounds like a tough and realistic policy, even a generous one of helping brave fighters defend themselves. But it might in fact be not only unwise but unfair to the tribesmen themselves." Hilsman was correct. The CIA'S support of the Hmong, no matter how good the initial intentions, locked the tribe into a violent conflict that they had no chance of winning.

Warner's reluctance to criticize Lair and other like-minded field officers is understandable. These U.S. government employees honestly believed they were helping tribal comrades for whom they cared. They assumed they were forging a bond in honor with the Hmong, but they were in no position to deliver on that honor. As Henry Kissinger was reported (by William Safire) to have said once, "Covert action should not be confused with missionary work." Lair and his friends learned this the tragic way. They were the best and brightest of a duped generation. And as Robert McNamara's memoirs show, they were far from alone.

One scene from the book provides an elegant metaphor for the U.S. operations in Laos. The Lao, Warner reports, had a custom for dealing with lunar eclipses. As the moon disappeared, Lao police officers, soldiers, and civilians shot guns and mortars into the sky to hit the celestial frog that was supposedly eating the moon. After one such episode, the joke among Americans in Laos was that shooting at the moon worked, for the moon did return. But bullets shot up do come down, and corpses were carted off in the aftermath.

In the crusade against communism, a good many American officials fired weapons without worrying where the bullets would land. They could afford to do so in the comfort of their Washington offices, for when the bullets came down, people like the Hmong would be the ones to catch them. David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation magazine, is author of Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusades.