LAOS: SECRET SHAME

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP73B00296R000300080066-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 24
• Document Creation Date: December 14, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 20, 2002
• Sequence Number: 66
• Publication Date: July 12, 1971
• Content Type: OPEN

S 10744
Approved F6Al 1s 4A lJP.14 '-RDP7GBW2-96R000300080066`-'W
alined to advertise publicly or used ads show-
ing only whites some "signal that minority
families were unwelcome."
The commission's criticism of the 235 pro-
grain was ,[L follow-up salvo to a barrage aimed
at the program last year and earlier this year
by the House Banking and Currency Com-
mittee, The committee charged that the poor
were being swindled by unscrupulous specu-
lators who unloaded rundown and frequently
unsafe houses on them at inflated prices.
PLEDGE MADE
HUD Secretary George Romney pledged to
clean up the 235 program, and at one time
early in 1970 suspended purchases of existing
homes with FHA mortgage subsidies until
appraisal and inspection practices could be
perfected to protect the low income buyers.
Later, Romney announced a series of new
rules were being put into effect to safe-
guard the poor against real estate specu-
lators trying to get rid of deteriorated houses
at prices higher than they were worth.
Under the 235 program, the FHA not only
insures long-term mortgages for poor fami-
lies seeking their own homes, but pays part
of the interest charges to keep the payments
low.
r
Mr. SYMINGTON. Mr. President, any-
one who believes in the Christian Ethic
can only read with sadness and shame an
article entitled "Laos" written by H. D. S.
Greenway, and published in the July
Atlantic Monthly.
I would hope that every Senator
would read the article. I ask unanimous
consent that it be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article
was ordered to be printed In the RECORD,
as follows:
LAOS
(By H. D. S. Greenway)
The spingtime in Laos is very dry. Save
for the brief Mango rains, the heat is un-
relieved, and shriveled green leaves lie like
dead frogs in the dusty roads. The sun is
dull red in the smoke and haze, for in the
springtime the hill people slash and burn
the brush off the hillsides. The pilots say
that the haze stretches all across the north-
ern marches of Southeast Asia from North
Vietnam across to Burma. The Air America
helicopters must pick their way carefully
among the fantastic limestone outcroppings
that rise like castles from the wooded hills
tumbling out of China. One realizes that the
misty mountains of the classical Chinese
landscape paintings were not the product of
artistic imaginations, but faithful reproduc-
of them are children. One night, the Pathet
Lao and the North Vietnamese had come to
his village. The soldiers in a nearby govern-
ment outpost had detected no enemies in
the area: "So we went to be happy," the
village chief said.
"But at four o'clock in the morning we
were attacked. Before we knew it, they were
in the village shooting and the houses were
burning." Squatting down on his haunches,
the village chief described with his hands
in the dirt how the enemy had come and the
attack on the outpost-the short, sharp
explosions, the flames, the rifle fire, the
measured hammering of the fifty-calibers,
and then silence. Death had come in the
classic Indochina way: a small, isolated out-
post overrun in the night. It was a scene that
has been played a thousand times in the last
twenty-five years of war.
The villagers escaped into the surround-
ing woods, and for two days they marched
over some of the most Impenetrable and in-
hospitable country on earth. "We were so
sorry to leave everything behind," the chief
said, "and the march was very difficult. We
walked two days, and the people cried and
cried over the mountains. Two people died;
one was an old person and the other was a
child." There was talk that the men might be
conscripted into Vang Pao's army but the
chief did not know for sure, and Is did not
know what would happen to his people. "I
am afraid," he said.
"FOR WHAT?"
At site 272 the Air America planes con-
tinue taking off and landing in a roar of
red dust, bringing rice, pigs, and ducks to
the refugees. But one senses the end of a
decade of American policy In Laos. Ten
years ago, when the Americans first began
to train and equip the Moo tribesmen, Vang
Pao's guerrillas operated all over Northeast-
ern Laos-far behind enemy lines to the
borders of North Vietnam Itself. Fewer than
two dozen American servicemen have been
killed in these mountains. Asians fight Asians.
But ten years of costly, vainglorious offen-
sives and unremitting pressure from North
Vietnamese counteroffensives have pushed
the Moo beyond their endurance. Vang Pao's
losses in the last three years have been so
heavy that the Armee Clandestine is no
longer an exclusively Meo force. Almost half
their numbers are now made up of other
highland peoples. And In the last three or
four years, the Moo have been organized to
fight in battalion-sized units of over five
hundred men'instead of small guerrilla units.
As a result, the slaughter has been mag-
nified. Vang Pao's army can no longer hold
Long Cheng alone, and by early April it
was reliably reported by Lao and American
sources that no fewer than five thousand
Thai troops had been flown in to bolster
the Long Cheng front. (The Thai govern-
ment still denies the presence of Thai troops
,
p
the pilots as site 272. It is the center for in Laos, but their presence is common knowl
American refugee relief in Northern Laos edge in Vietiane.)
and the fall-back point for Long Chong, For ten years the Moo people have been
the secret CIA base twenty-five miles to the running and dying, and today there are few
north. Long Cheng is the headquarters for mountain ranges left into which to escape.
the Meo General yang Pao's "Armee Clande- American officials estimate that fully 15 per-
stine," supported by the CIA. All this past cent of the 250,000 to 300,000 people in the
winter and spring the base has been under military region that makes up Northeast
siege by the North Vietnamese. The hill Laos have died within the last three years.
peoples, the highland Lao and the Meo de- The official Laotian and American Em-
pendents of yang Pao's army, have been bassy position is that the Long Cheng air-
fleeing south by the thousands, pouring into strip must be held at all costs, but there is a
the hills and valleys near site 272. They general realization that the game is almost
make temporary bamboo shelters, and Air played out as far as the Met) are concerned.
America drops rice to them, for they have Officials speak of an eventual accommoda-
no food. There is the despair of uncertainty. tion with the Communists, and say that the
No one can tell them what their future will ? ' Armee Clandestine is all but finished as
be. Like Laos itself, they have long since an effective fighting force.
lost control of their own destiny. Many of the Americans who have worked
In one such makeshift settlement the with the Moo have become profoundly dis-
village chief greets visitors with a gold- illusioned: The senior USAID official in the
toothed smile. There are over nine hundred Northeast, Edgar Buell, the former Indiana
people in his immediate area--=four hundred farmer known as 'Pop," who In ten years
has become a Lawrence of Arc bits figure to
the Meo, is himself a casualty. Recovering
now from a serious heart atti'ek, burdened
by overwork and worry during the last few
years of disasters, Buell said: "All of this
is difficult for us who have worked with
these people since the beginning. Some of
my boys are beginning to won, lee, what was
it all for?"
Some Americans are beginning to wonder
why, If there is to be an accommodation
now, we didn't encourage one ten years ago.
Perhaps the arming and supplying of guer-
rillas so close to the North Vi"tnamese bor-
der provoked greater North Vietnamese re-
taliation in an area that has lothing to do
with the Ho Chi Minh Trail aid the war
in Vietnam. Although it is true that the Moo
had asked for arms in the ffr';t place, some
Americans argue that they were urged to
fight on for U.S. Interests beyond their ca-
pacity and beyond anything i.lmt could be
considered in their own interest.
"You know, over two thirds of the 170,000
people we are supporting in the Northeast
are refugees," said one American with many
years' experience. "Few have been perma-
nently located, and they are milling about
in limbo. Anthropologists call the Meo a
seminomadic people, but befor- the war they
would move only when they ran out of land.
Normally, they might move only ten kilom-
eters or so, and they might take a year to
make the move. But to be up,'o'ted. as they
are now is a great trauma for them,
"In these large refugee moves over the
last four or five years we have found that
about 10 or 15 percent die during the move
or just afterwards," the American said. One
always knew that the long mar-ches were kill-
ers. When whole populations were on the
move, walking for days on end through the
mountains, one knew that the old, the weak,
and the very young died. But, ;;aid the Amer-
ican, experience showed that shout the same
number of people died anyway even If they
had been carried out by plan,- or helicopter.
"We have American doctors writing for them
with mosquito nets, malaria pills, penicillin,
the works. But they die anyway. It is the
move itself-the adjusting to a new area,
different food and water. Of ,+ourse, part of
the problem is that, like all Southeast
Asians, a lot of these peoplr ore sick and
weak to begin with. But a lot of it is psycho-
somatic-bad phi [spirits]. Just. the trauma
of moving kills them. They think they are go-
ing to die, and they do."
Edgar Buell expressed the phenomenon a
little differently. "Just moving causes a kind
of sickness," he said. "I wouldn't go so far
as to say they die of a broken heart or any-
think like that, but, yes-you can just about
say that for a lot of people, moving means
dying."
"UP IN THE SKY"
In the summer of 1969, in chat may prove
to have been yang Pao's last successful of-
fensive, the Armee Clandestine, with Ameri-
can logistical and air support, captured the
Plain of Jars from the overextended North
Vietnamese, But some people thought that
the brilliantly executed offenc;ive was a fool-
ish escalation of the conflict. By February
of 1970, yang Pao had been l+wwhed back off
the plain, with heavy losses.
The raid produced one of the biggest refu-
gee movements of the Laotian war. Fifteen
thousand inhabitants from the Plain of Jars
were reettled in camps near Vientiane. The
last airplaneload left on the tenth of Febru-
ary, 1970. A silver C-130 with the American
markings painted over landed in a rooster
tail of dust on a makeshift. :;trip on the
western edge of the Plain of Jars. The last
terrified refugees-it was their first plane
ride-were herded aboard against the hurri-
can blast of the prop wash; nothing was left
behind except their dogs, forming in packs
and snarling among the refuse of their en-
campment.
OSD HAS NO OBJECTION TO DECLASSIFICATION AND RELEASE.
Approved For Release 2002/10/10 : CIA-RDP73B00296R000300080066-9
OSD review(s) completed.
tions of nature.
Here in these hills, fifty miles northeast
of Vientiane
there is an airstri
known to
 July 12, 1971
. Appro R$ OIZMQOIRDCIAAMNM00296R00030008006ES9107,15
"Some of there have slipped back to the
Pathet Lao," said an American official at the
time, "but we have rounded up most of the
population, and the name of the game is
control of the population."
The refugees were set up in temporary
bamboo barracks. Now, a year later, these
refugees have not yet been permanently re-
settled. Their conditions are good by refu-
gee standards in Indochina, but the mental
fatigue of their impermanent and unsettled
status has begun to engulf them. They long
for the cool uplands where they were born.
To Americans who question them, they speak
of their lives behind the Communist lines
before they came away from the Plain of
Jars. And they describe the role of American
and American-supplied air power.
And old grandfather sits lethargically in
the shade with his son-in-law and talks
about his former life. "Our old house was
big and made of wood, not bamboo,'?' he said.
"But there is just dust there now. All was
burned. We had big, wide rice fields and
many buffaloes. There were few trees and
the rice grew really high-before the planes
came."
In 1067 the grandfather saw only a few
planes in the sky, but in 1968 and 1969:
"Fiwail Maybe we would see two hundred
planes in a day," he said, and he drew child-
ish but recognizable pictures of the Laotian
T-28's and the American jets he had seen.
In August, 1968, his fourteen-year-old
nephew was killed.
"The child was out tending the buffaloes
when the planes came. He ran for a hole to
hide, but he did not run fast enough, for the
bombs killed him. They killed three buf-
faloes at the same time. The bombs cut his
head off and his arm, and his insides came
out on the ground. Many pieces of him went
up in the sky," the grandfather said.
His niece, a woman of thirty, was also
killed. "She was afraid to go out of the
house because the planes shot at anything
that moved," he said. "But the bombs fell
on the house, and she was killed."
Later, in 1969, when many of the houses
in the village had been destroyed, the peo-
ple left their houses and lived iii holes in the
ground. "Every family had a hole, and we
would live in the holes-even cook in the
holes. We tried to plant our rice at night,
but even at night the planes would come.
They would drop flares and make it really
bright-like day. They were trying to shoot
the Pathet Lao soldiers, I suppose, but there
weren't any soldiers on the plain. They all
lived in the woods in the mountains," the
grandfather said,
Periodically the Pathet Lao and the North
Vietnamese cadres would come. "'They would
teach us things and talk about politics. The
children studied and studied, and they would
learn to read. The adults who could not read
were taught, too, and whoever had the
knowledge could go teach someone else,
Sometimes women even taught men," the
grandfather said, When they were hungry
and could not grow their own rice, the Com-
munists would give them rice `and fish from
Vietnam," the grandfather said. "But they
didn't just take things like the government
soldiers, who Just took our animals. Some-
times they the North Vietnamese] would
trade us salt and ducks for dogs because
they ate dogs. Ten or twelve kilos of salt
was the price of a dog."
From time to time, the villagers would be
asked to serve as porters for the Pathet Lao,
which they didn't like. "Sometimes," said the
son-in-law, "we had to carry ammunitions
and guns. If there were twenty of us, ten
might carry the guns and rockets and ten
would carry rice. Sometimes we would have to
go for several days, but if you were old you
did not have to go. In the daytime we would
sleep in the forest and move only at night.
The villagers said that the North Viet-
namese never asked them to serve as porters
because they brought their own porters,
mostly women, from Vietnam.
In the summer of 1969, Vang Pao's Armee
Clandestine came. "We were hiding when
they came," the grandfather said.. "There
were about two hundred of them. They said:
'Whoever is there, come out. Come outl You
cannot stay here. If you stay here, it means
you want to go with the Pathet Lao, and we
will shoot you.'" And so the villagers were
taken away, and the soldiers burned the
houses that were left standing. Were they
taken by force? "Oh, we were glad enough to'
go from there because of the bombing," the
grandfather said, "but you were not able not
to go."
An old woman, also a refugee from the
Plain of Jars, sat with her small grand-
daughter. Her son, the child's father, had
died from disease, and another son had been
killed by the "bombi"-the word Laotians
use for the antipersonnel bombs that spray
flesh-destroying pellets when they explode,
"He was out transplanting rice at-'night," she
said, "when the planes came. They took him
to a hospital in a cave, but be died."
"THE ENEMIES"
"All the houses in our village were de-
stroyed by bombs," the old lady said, "and
all we had left was our own bodies. There
were ten houses in our village and the wet
[temple], and the wet was destroyed, too.
We were always afraid of the planes, and we
lived in deep holes as high as a man's head.
Maybe fifteen planes would come each day,
and we made a place for ourselves In the
holes, and we cooked and slept in the holes.
The children were very afraid when the
planes came, and they cried and cried. The
mosquitoes were very bad, and when the rain
came, the water would come up to our knees
and it was difficult to sleep."
Sometimes the Pathet Lao would ask for
porters from her village, too. "My sons and
daughters had to go, and. I didn't like it. I
did not go myself because I am too old. I am
sixty-three, Sometimes when the enemies
would come near we were really afraid, and
there was lots of firing when they came near.
Old people do not understand the war," said
the old woman,
Many villagers spoke of "the enemies," as
indeed they do in Cambodia as well. They
do not mean their own enemies. Just the
enemies-people who are fighting each other.
The American Embassy, when asked why
the Plain of Jars Villages were bombed, says
that the rules of engagement in the air war
are very strict. The rules are that population
centers cannot be bombed, and that villages
are hit only by accident-the accidents of
war. But in dozens of interviews I had in
1970 and 1971 with people from different
towns around the Plain of Jars, the evidence
led to the conclusion that the population
centers behind the Pathet Lao lines had
frequently been bombed by U.S. and Lao-
tian aircraft.
"ALL WE REALLY HAVE"
There are still backwater villages in Laos where it is possible to believe that there is
no war, and such a village is Ban Xa Phong
Meuk. It Is only twelve kilometers from
Vientiane, and the wooden thatched-roof
houses are built on stilts In the traditional
Laotian way. In the ? heat of the day, chick-
ens, ducks, and sway-backed sows sleep un-
derneath the houses in the shade.
Po Tou Douang was born in the village
around the turn of the century, and he has
never been further than a few kilometers
away. The wooden floor of his open-sided
house has a high polish, the result of de-
cades of bare feet upon it. His body is old
out tough and sinewy. His eyesight is going,
but his hands are still quick and sure at the
old skills of weaving rice baskets out of straw
or making fish traps or copying Buddhist
scriptures onto strips of bamboo leaf. The
invasions that have swept across Laos In his
lifetime have scarcely touched him. He re-
members hearing the guns firing along the
Mekong after the fall of France in 1940,
when the Thais attacked the isolated French
garrisons. Later he heard firing again. and
his little soh ran to tell him that the Ja-
panese had come to Vientiane. "The French
ran away to the North," he said, but he
never saw a Japanese in his village.
To Po Tou Douang the Americans are much
the same as the French and other foreigners
otherworldly and unapproachable b