SHADOW WAR: The CIA's Secret War in Laos.
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Shadow War: The CIA's Secret War in Laos by Kenneth Conboy with James Morrison (Boulder, CO: Paladin Press; 1995) ranks as the definitive work to date about America's largest paramilitary operation of the Cold War. Twelve years in the writing, Shadow War is an important contribution to Indochina War history as well as a compilation of the various special operations employed in Laos. Throughout this so-called secret war (1954-1975), Special Forces played an important but limited adjunct role.
Conboy and Morrison interviewed hundreds of participants in that war including U.S. military and contract civilians, Laotians, Thais, and South and North Vietnamese. The authors combed thousands of previously classified documents from State Department, CIA, and Defense Department archives, along with private papers, Air America records, Thai government after-action reports, and recently released military histories from Hanoi.
The rich information flow from the indigenous participants gives Shadow War a refreshing and all-too-rare Asian perspective. However, its jungle of detail especially concerning actions down to battalion level and its plethora of Asian names and locales gives the book the character of a ponderous official military history, making it laborious at times for the reader.
But Shadow War is worth the extra effort. The U.S. paramilitary undertaking in Laos is instructive because some of its patterns surfaced again in Angola, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua. This book traces unconventional warfare, not in terms of a resistance against an occupier but in the sense of a sponsoring power using indigenous forces for reconnaissance and intelligence, direct action, guerrilla warfare, and other special missions in contested or denied areas. Shadow War highlights campaigns of the irregulars under the resolute and irrepressible Hmong leader, General Vang Pao, and reveals for the first time several successful covert actions.
At the height of the war, five armies fought in Laos, three of them supported by the U.S. These three were the regular Forces Armées Royales (FAR); Lao Special Guerrilla Units (SGUs)--CIA-directed irregulars made up mostly of hill tribesmen, especially Hmong; and Thai SGUs--CIA-directed volunteer Thai battalions augmented by regular Thai military officers and NCOs. On the opposing side were the Pathet Lao (Lao Communists) and their ally, the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN).
Though a fledging Royal Lao Air Force improved over time, much of the airlift and resupply of the entire Lao army came from CIA proprietaries like Air America and from unmarked aircraft of the USAF and the Royal Thai Air Force. As the war escalated, FAR and the SGUs received close air support, much of it from the USAF--making the SGUs the world's only guerrillas with air superiority.
Unconventional warfare began in Laos in the final months of World War II, when a handful of French commandos parachuted into the kingdom to organize Lao marquis bands against the Japanese. During the First Indochina War, French airborne cadre organized minority hill tribesmen under a program called the Groupe de Commandos Mixtes Aéroportés (GCMA, or Mixed Airborne Commando Group). The GCMA was successful in intelligence gathering and in seizing territory from the Pathet Lao. In 1955 the U.S. began to fund and equip the new Lao National Army. Meanwhile the Thais initiated training assistance to their ethnic and linguistic relatives across the Mekong.
In clashes with the North Vietnamese-trained Pathet Lao, the phlegmatic Lao Army performed miserably. The former French colony lacked the tradition of a modern professional military. The amiable and gentle character of the lowland Lao and a politicized leadership, dominated by rival families, combined to produce one of the world's worst armies. In firefights Lao soldiers often chose discretion over valor, though the Hmong guerrillas usually proved gutsy and reliable.
As early as 1955, the CIA provided advisory assistance to the already established irregular militia network in Pathet Lao-controlled areas. In 1959 U.S. military trainers, including Special Forces from the 77th Group, covertly entered Laos. Eventually acquiring the name Project White Star, this program entailed training and combat operations with both the regular Lao Army and with irregular formations of hill tribesmen. White Star ended in 1962 with international agreements that supposedly produced a neutral Laos under a coalition government along with a withdrawal of foreign troops, i.e., U.S. and North Vietnamese.
With its southbound traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail increasing monthly, PAVN never withdrew from Laos. The U.S. did withdraw its military trainers but directed the CIA to assume responsibility for the "secret war" by expanding the nascent guerrilla organization into self-defense units, a downed-pilot rescue network, and trail-watch reconnaissance teams.
By 1965 as the war in South Vietnam intensified, so it did in Laos, having become a joint U.S.-Thai endeavor. During the 1950s, the U.S. formed a very close relationship with the Royal Thai Government (RTG). Far from being U.S. clients, the Thais, in fear of a Chinese- or North Vietnamese-backed Communist Laos on their border, executed for reasons of their own a forward defense strategy which included covert intervention to support Lao anti-communists.
Instrumental to both the U.S. and Thai governments was an elite police airborne commando organization, called the Police Aerial Reinforcement Unit (PARU). As the RTG's special operations arm, highly competent PARUs worked side-by-side with CIA case officers expanding the hill tribesmen into battalions of Special Guerrilla Units. The able Vang Pao commanded most of the SGUs both in his capacity as a Hmong tribal leader and as the Lao army commanding general of the north central Military Region II. Most SGU battalions underwent training in Thailand from the Thais and, after 1966, also from U.S. Special Forces.
The pinnacle of success in Laos came in summer of 1969, when an SGU-spearheaded offensive with massive U.S. air support cleared PAVN from the strategic Plaine des Jarres and most of northern Laos. For a time the U.S. and its allies were beating the Vietnamese Communists at their own game.
However, there was a price tag--the decimation of an entire generation of Hmong, leaving the SGU ranks filled increasingly by old men and by young boys scarcely taller than their M-16s. The SGUs had evolved from hit-and-run guerrilla units to light infantry battalions and regiments attempting to contest PAVN. Commented one Lao general:
The Special Guerrilla Unit project...was probably unique in the history of warfare. Here was a large nation--the U.S.--hiring soldiers of a small nation--Laos--to fight for the objectives of the large nation on the territory of the small nation against an invader--North Vietnam--on behalf of another small nation--South Vietnam.
In late 1969 and 1970 PAVN struck back with vengeance retaking the Plaine des Jarres and battering both FAR and the SGUs. To offset the Lao attrition, the CIA and RTG organized Thai volunteer SGU battalions in a program called Project Unity. Trained at various sites in Thailand by U.S. and Thai Special Forces, the Unity battalions were rushed to Laos. The Thai SGUs reached twenty-seven infantry and three artillery battalions by the war's end.
Some spectacular results came out of individual operations, many accomplished by Commando-Raider Teams (CRT). Intended as a strategic special operations tool, the CRT were the creme de la creme of Lao soldiers and hill tribesmen, who were trained as airborne commando companies by U.S. and Thai SF and PARUs. The CRT concept grew out the earlier trail-watch program.
In January 1967 irregular commandos from Savannakhet in central Laos conducted the most successful prison camp raid of the Indochina War at a site called Ban Naden, where they rescued over 80 Lao and Thai prisoners. After 1971 as reconnaissance missions launched by Military Assistance Command, Vietnam-Studies and Observation Group (MACV-SOG) subsided, CRTs took up the slack. The CRTs also made forays into North Vietnam and in one instance attacked a rear headquarters at Dien Bien Phu.
In late 1972 one team penetrated North Vietnam near Vinh to wiretap telephone lines. Occurring during the Paris peace talks, the wiretap information provided critical intelligence for then National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, revealing the North Vietnamese negotiating strategy and their intention to continue troop movements to the south. (Such information prompted the U.S. to launch Linebacker II, the persuasive Christmas bombing campaign of North Vietnam).
After U.S. and Thai withdrawal in 1973 in accordance with the Paris peace agreements another attempt at a shakey coalition government and a frequently violated cease-fire characterized Laos into 1975. That spring the momentum of Communist victories in Cambodia and South Vietnam brought the PAVN-backed Pathet Lao to power in the last domino of Indochina to fall.
A few more critical observations of Shadow War are in order before laying out some discussion points the book invites. The book should have contained a more comprehensive index. An especially unfortunate omission is the lack of appendices showing Lao and PAVN order of battle and a list of key commanders. Given the way Lao units were reorganized, redesignated, and relocated under rotating commanders, such appendices could have added clarity to the somewhat exacting narrative.
Six discussion points emerge from Shadow War. First, this account shows that the Communists did not have the monopoly on unconventional warfare techniques in Southeast Asia. The scope, and occasional successes, of U.S. unconventional activities in Laos drives home the need for the U.S. to maintain its paramilitary capability--though no one paramilitary cookie cutter exists for all situations. The debate will continue over whether primary paramilitary responsibility should reside in the CIA (augmented by military contingents as needed) or whether it should be transferred to the Department of Defense (or specifically to USSOCOM).
Second, cooperation with a close ally like Thailand sharing mutual objectives can greatly enhance U.S. conduct of paramilitary operations. This is especially true if the ally has a first-rate special operations organization like the PARUs.
Third, the Laos experience highlights once more the difficulties U.S. advisors face in trying to reform an ineffective military in a developing nation. (PAVN had similar frustrations with their Pathet Lao.) One solution is for the U.S. to assume direct control over part of the host nation military, or to create a parallel force, like the SGUs. U.S. purse strings along with the power to hire and fire can bypass--or at least postpone--the problems posed by a corrupt, inept conventional military structure resistant to U.S. influence.
Fourth, Laos never had a truly national army. With most FAR battalions and SGUs wedded to their localities, their performance deteriorated the longer they operated away from their home regions. Creating a national consciousness and national loyalty within a sizable part of the military is essential for a country's security forces.
Fifth, around 1967 the irregular formations were upgraded to light infantry battalions. Though done out of necessity, this change did not correspond with the aforementioned sense of national consciousness necessary for evolvement from Stage II guerrilla to Stage III maneuver warfare. The SGUs, furthermore, became air power-dependent. The fragility and limitations of hill tribesmen as light infantry painfully showed up during protracted engagements with the formidable PAVN after 1969.
Sixth, on the U.S. side a finite number of people managed and supported the paramilitary program and thus represented a significant force multiplier in the use of Lao and Thai soldiers, who in turn tied down a large numbers of PAVN. In context of the Vietnam War, the program in Laos was also an economy of force operation--but only from the U.S. perspective. For the Lao, and especially the Hmong, who were the multiplicand, the sacrifices proved anything but economical.
_________________________________________
1. Shadow War is Conboy's third publication on Laos. His first, The War in Laos, 1960-75 in the Osprey Men-at-Arms Series (London: Osprey Publishing Company; 1989), contains a historical overview with numerous pictures featuring weapons, uniforms, and insignia. This book contained some errors characteristic of an initial draft along with some bogus information, which the author unknowingly accepted from a self-proclaimed U.S. veteran of the war who, in fact, was never there. Conboy's other book is War in Laos, 1954-1975 (Carrollton, TX: Squadron/Signal Publications, Inc; 1994). Intended to accompany Shadow War, it is a 65 page pictorial with a summary text.
2. Kenneth Conboy is a Southeast Asia specialist formerly with a Washington-based think tank, the Heritage Foundation. James Morrison is a former Special Forces officer assigned to Thailand, who served as the operations officer for Project Unity.
3. In the numerous analyses of the Indochina War, the war in Laos has received only peripheral attention, because, being paramilitary in nature, much of the U.S. war effort in Laos was under CIA direction. Furthermore, until recently, most of the documentation about the war was classified or remained untapped within Lao, Thai, and Vietnamese sources. And the Lao arena of the Indochina War involved relatively few Americans (and produced relatively few American casualties) at least in comparison to Vietnam.
4. Shadow War is strictly a military account. For a description of the political decision-making behind the policies in Laos, see Arthur J. Dommen, Conflict in Laos: The Politics of Neutralization (New York: Praeger; 1971) and Norman Hannah, The Key to Failure: Laos and the Vietnam War (Lanham, MD: University Press of America; 1988).
5. One could also add to these five armies several other militaries. Forces Armées Neutralistes (FAN) was a self-styled neutralist faction of Lao army units most of whom by 1966 had re-aligned themselves with FAR. Communist Chinese represented another force. By agreement with the Lao government Chinese engineers were constructing a road in northwest Laos; protecting the engineers were ground and anti-aircraft units, who occasionally engaged allied aircraft and ground patrols. For a brief period in 1961 the CIA inserted a Chinese Nationalist guerrilla battalion in Laos, one originally intended for missions into China's Yunnan Province. (Many of the Nationalists found their way to Burma to make a career change to opium smuggling.) In 1970 the CIA also brought in and trained two irregular Khmer battalions, whose performance in an alien country proved deplorable. Lastly, U.S. and South Vietnamese units under Military Assistance Command, Vietnam-Studies and Observation Group (MACV-SOG) conducted cross-border reconnaissance and direct action in Laos.
6. The French GCMA program also involved North Vietnam hill tribesmen.
7. Project White Star is enshrined in Special Forces legend as the first significant and successful--however brief--display of the training and counterinsurgency prowess that SF would soon demonstrate in other parts of the world. Though some palpable accomplishments and some valorous combat actions came out of the mission, nevertheless, many of the SF teams were not well prepared psychologically or culturally for the realities of Laos nor were they always well received by some of their Lao and hill tribe counterparts. Furthermore, no system existed whereby information gleaned and lessons learned by the earlier teams could be passed on to newly arriving detachments.
8. Hanoi opened the Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1959 initially to infiltrate southern cadre back into South Vietnam. Interestingly in 1960 South Vietnamese and FAR officers met for the first of several conferences concerning the possibility of joint South Vietnamese-Lao operations to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Although such a joint operation never came to fruition, both countries were to establish liaison and communication teams at various locations. American commanders in South Vietnam occasionally dusted off the same concept of a massive campaign by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces, supported by irregulars, to cut the trail from the Demilitarized Zone into Laos all the way to Savannakhet. But political support from Washington was never forthcoming.
9. Some of the CIA case officers had previous experience in a 1964-65 Congo operation involving (former Bay of Pigs) Cuban pilots and white mercenaries, in an abortive Indonesian insurgency, and in support to Khampa guerrillas fighting the Chinese in Tibet.
10. This fear grew after the Communist Party of Thailand launched an armed insurgency in 1965. Though the insurgent leadership took their cues from China, insurgent trainees, escorted through Laos by the Pathet Lao, received training from the North Vietnamese at a camp in Hoa Binh near Hanoi.
11. The Thais also established at the Long Tieng SGU headquarters a command and staff officers course for promising Hmong officers.
12. Named Kou Kiet, this operation captured more food, weapons, and supplies from PAVN than any previous operation in Indochina had netted.
13. The SGUs who represented only 13 percent of the Royal Lao Government forces accounted for 70 percent of the casualties.
14. A limited amount of coordination took place between Vientiane station and MACV-SOG. Some retired Agency case officers have stated that overall cooperation between the U.S. Embassy in Vientiane and the Commanding General, MACV, in Saigon could have been improved considerably.
15. Such a debate is probably academic, as the Defense Department does not want paramilitary responsibility, and never has.
16. Though Shadow War does not make this claim, one officer involved with Project Unity estimated that in the period between the 1968 Tet offensive and the 1972 Easter offensive, PAVN suffered more casualties in Laos from Lao and Thai forces and from U.S. bombing than from combined allied operations in South Vietnam.
Conboy and Morrison interviewed hundreds of participants in that war including U.S. military and contract civilians, Laotians, Thais, and South and North Vietnamese. The authors combed thousands of previously classified documents from State Department, CIA, and Defense Department archives, along with private papers, Air America records, Thai government after-action reports, and recently released military histories from Hanoi.
The rich information flow from the indigenous participants gives Shadow War a refreshing and all-too-rare Asian perspective. However, its jungle of detail especially concerning actions down to battalion level and its plethora of Asian names and locales gives the book the character of a ponderous official military history, making it laborious at times for the reader.
But Shadow War is worth the extra effort. The U.S. paramilitary undertaking in Laos is instructive because some of its patterns surfaced again in Angola, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua. This book traces unconventional warfare, not in terms of a resistance against an occupier but in the sense of a sponsoring power using indigenous forces for reconnaissance and intelligence, direct action, guerrilla warfare, and other special missions in contested or denied areas. Shadow War highlights campaigns of the irregulars under the resolute and irrepressible Hmong leader, General Vang Pao, and reveals for the first time several successful covert actions.
At the height of the war, five armies fought in Laos, three of them supported by the U.S. These three were the regular Forces Armées Royales (FAR); Lao Special Guerrilla Units (SGUs)--CIA-directed irregulars made up mostly of hill tribesmen, especially Hmong; and Thai SGUs--CIA-directed volunteer Thai battalions augmented by regular Thai military officers and NCOs. On the opposing side were the Pathet Lao (Lao Communists) and their ally, the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN).
Though a fledging Royal Lao Air Force improved over time, much of the airlift and resupply of the entire Lao army came from CIA proprietaries like Air America and from unmarked aircraft of the USAF and the Royal Thai Air Force. As the war escalated, FAR and the SGUs received close air support, much of it from the USAF--making the SGUs the world's only guerrillas with air superiority.
Unconventional warfare began in Laos in the final months of World War II, when a handful of French commandos parachuted into the kingdom to organize Lao marquis bands against the Japanese. During the First Indochina War, French airborne cadre organized minority hill tribesmen under a program called the Groupe de Commandos Mixtes Aéroportés (GCMA, or Mixed Airborne Commando Group). The GCMA was successful in intelligence gathering and in seizing territory from the Pathet Lao. In 1955 the U.S. began to fund and equip the new Lao National Army. Meanwhile the Thais initiated training assistance to their ethnic and linguistic relatives across the Mekong.
In clashes with the North Vietnamese-trained Pathet Lao, the phlegmatic Lao Army performed miserably. The former French colony lacked the tradition of a modern professional military. The amiable and gentle character of the lowland Lao and a politicized leadership, dominated by rival families, combined to produce one of the world's worst armies. In firefights Lao soldiers often chose discretion over valor, though the Hmong guerrillas usually proved gutsy and reliable.
As early as 1955, the CIA provided advisory assistance to the already established irregular militia network in Pathet Lao-controlled areas. In 1959 U.S. military trainers, including Special Forces from the 77th Group, covertly entered Laos. Eventually acquiring the name Project White Star, this program entailed training and combat operations with both the regular Lao Army and with irregular formations of hill tribesmen. White Star ended in 1962 with international agreements that supposedly produced a neutral Laos under a coalition government along with a withdrawal of foreign troops, i.e., U.S. and North Vietnamese.
With its southbound traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail increasing monthly, PAVN never withdrew from Laos. The U.S. did withdraw its military trainers but directed the CIA to assume responsibility for the "secret war" by expanding the nascent guerrilla organization into self-defense units, a downed-pilot rescue network, and trail-watch reconnaissance teams.
By 1965 as the war in South Vietnam intensified, so it did in Laos, having become a joint U.S.-Thai endeavor. During the 1950s, the U.S. formed a very close relationship with the Royal Thai Government (RTG). Far from being U.S. clients, the Thais, in fear of a Chinese- or North Vietnamese-backed Communist Laos on their border, executed for reasons of their own a forward defense strategy which included covert intervention to support Lao anti-communists.
Instrumental to both the U.S. and Thai governments was an elite police airborne commando organization, called the Police Aerial Reinforcement Unit (PARU). As the RTG's special operations arm, highly competent PARUs worked side-by-side with CIA case officers expanding the hill tribesmen into battalions of Special Guerrilla Units. The able Vang Pao commanded most of the SGUs both in his capacity as a Hmong tribal leader and as the Lao army commanding general of the north central Military Region II. Most SGU battalions underwent training in Thailand from the Thais and, after 1966, also from U.S. Special Forces.
The pinnacle of success in Laos came in summer of 1969, when an SGU-spearheaded offensive with massive U.S. air support cleared PAVN from the strategic Plaine des Jarres and most of northern Laos. For a time the U.S. and its allies were beating the Vietnamese Communists at their own game.
However, there was a price tag--the decimation of an entire generation of Hmong, leaving the SGU ranks filled increasingly by old men and by young boys scarcely taller than their M-16s. The SGUs had evolved from hit-and-run guerrilla units to light infantry battalions and regiments attempting to contest PAVN. Commented one Lao general:
The Special Guerrilla Unit project...was probably unique in the history of warfare. Here was a large nation--the U.S.--hiring soldiers of a small nation--Laos--to fight for the objectives of the large nation on the territory of the small nation against an invader--North Vietnam--on behalf of another small nation--South Vietnam.
In late 1969 and 1970 PAVN struck back with vengeance retaking the Plaine des Jarres and battering both FAR and the SGUs. To offset the Lao attrition, the CIA and RTG organized Thai volunteer SGU battalions in a program called Project Unity. Trained at various sites in Thailand by U.S. and Thai Special Forces, the Unity battalions were rushed to Laos. The Thai SGUs reached twenty-seven infantry and three artillery battalions by the war's end.
Some spectacular results came out of individual operations, many accomplished by Commando-Raider Teams (CRT). Intended as a strategic special operations tool, the CRT were the creme de la creme of Lao soldiers and hill tribesmen, who were trained as airborne commando companies by U.S. and Thai SF and PARUs. The CRT concept grew out the earlier trail-watch program.
In January 1967 irregular commandos from Savannakhet in central Laos conducted the most successful prison camp raid of the Indochina War at a site called Ban Naden, where they rescued over 80 Lao and Thai prisoners. After 1971 as reconnaissance missions launched by Military Assistance Command, Vietnam-Studies and Observation Group (MACV-SOG) subsided, CRTs took up the slack. The CRTs also made forays into North Vietnam and in one instance attacked a rear headquarters at Dien Bien Phu.
In late 1972 one team penetrated North Vietnam near Vinh to wiretap telephone lines. Occurring during the Paris peace talks, the wiretap information provided critical intelligence for then National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, revealing the North Vietnamese negotiating strategy and their intention to continue troop movements to the south. (Such information prompted the U.S. to launch Linebacker II, the persuasive Christmas bombing campaign of North Vietnam).
After U.S. and Thai withdrawal in 1973 in accordance with the Paris peace agreements another attempt at a shakey coalition government and a frequently violated cease-fire characterized Laos into 1975. That spring the momentum of Communist victories in Cambodia and South Vietnam brought the PAVN-backed Pathet Lao to power in the last domino of Indochina to fall.
A few more critical observations of Shadow War are in order before laying out some discussion points the book invites. The book should have contained a more comprehensive index. An especially unfortunate omission is the lack of appendices showing Lao and PAVN order of battle and a list of key commanders. Given the way Lao units were reorganized, redesignated, and relocated under rotating commanders, such appendices could have added clarity to the somewhat exacting narrative.
Six discussion points emerge from Shadow War. First, this account shows that the Communists did not have the monopoly on unconventional warfare techniques in Southeast Asia. The scope, and occasional successes, of U.S. unconventional activities in Laos drives home the need for the U.S. to maintain its paramilitary capability--though no one paramilitary cookie cutter exists for all situations. The debate will continue over whether primary paramilitary responsibility should reside in the CIA (augmented by military contingents as needed) or whether it should be transferred to the Department of Defense (or specifically to USSOCOM).
Second, cooperation with a close ally like Thailand sharing mutual objectives can greatly enhance U.S. conduct of paramilitary operations. This is especially true if the ally has a first-rate special operations organization like the PARUs.
Third, the Laos experience highlights once more the difficulties U.S. advisors face in trying to reform an ineffective military in a developing nation. (PAVN had similar frustrations with their Pathet Lao.) One solution is for the U.S. to assume direct control over part of the host nation military, or to create a parallel force, like the SGUs. U.S. purse strings along with the power to hire and fire can bypass--or at least postpone--the problems posed by a corrupt, inept conventional military structure resistant to U.S. influence.
Fourth, Laos never had a truly national army. With most FAR battalions and SGUs wedded to their localities, their performance deteriorated the longer they operated away from their home regions. Creating a national consciousness and national loyalty within a sizable part of the military is essential for a country's security forces.
Fifth, around 1967 the irregular formations were upgraded to light infantry battalions. Though done out of necessity, this change did not correspond with the aforementioned sense of national consciousness necessary for evolvement from Stage II guerrilla to Stage III maneuver warfare. The SGUs, furthermore, became air power-dependent. The fragility and limitations of hill tribesmen as light infantry painfully showed up during protracted engagements with the formidable PAVN after 1969.
Sixth, on the U.S. side a finite number of people managed and supported the paramilitary program and thus represented a significant force multiplier in the use of Lao and Thai soldiers, who in turn tied down a large numbers of PAVN. In context of the Vietnam War, the program in Laos was also an economy of force operation--but only from the U.S. perspective. For the Lao, and especially the Hmong, who were the multiplicand, the sacrifices proved anything but economical.
_________________________________________
1. Shadow War is Conboy's third publication on Laos. His first, The War in Laos, 1960-75 in the Osprey Men-at-Arms Series (London: Osprey Publishing Company; 1989), contains a historical overview with numerous pictures featuring weapons, uniforms, and insignia. This book contained some errors characteristic of an initial draft along with some bogus information, which the author unknowingly accepted from a self-proclaimed U.S. veteran of the war who, in fact, was never there. Conboy's other book is War in Laos, 1954-1975 (Carrollton, TX: Squadron/Signal Publications, Inc; 1994). Intended to accompany Shadow War, it is a 65 page pictorial with a summary text.
2. Kenneth Conboy is a Southeast Asia specialist formerly with a Washington-based think tank, the Heritage Foundation. James Morrison is a former Special Forces officer assigned to Thailand, who served as the operations officer for Project Unity.
3. In the numerous analyses of the Indochina War, the war in Laos has received only peripheral attention, because, being paramilitary in nature, much of the U.S. war effort in Laos was under CIA direction. Furthermore, until recently, most of the documentation about the war was classified or remained untapped within Lao, Thai, and Vietnamese sources. And the Lao arena of the Indochina War involved relatively few Americans (and produced relatively few American casualties) at least in comparison to Vietnam.
4. Shadow War is strictly a military account. For a description of the political decision-making behind the policies in Laos, see Arthur J. Dommen, Conflict in Laos: The Politics of Neutralization (New York: Praeger; 1971) and Norman Hannah, The Key to Failure: Laos and the Vietnam War (Lanham, MD: University Press of America; 1988).
5. One could also add to these five armies several other militaries. Forces Armées Neutralistes (FAN) was a self-styled neutralist faction of Lao army units most of whom by 1966 had re-aligned themselves with FAR. Communist Chinese represented another force. By agreement with the Lao government Chinese engineers were constructing a road in northwest Laos; protecting the engineers were ground and anti-aircraft units, who occasionally engaged allied aircraft and ground patrols. For a brief period in 1961 the CIA inserted a Chinese Nationalist guerrilla battalion in Laos, one originally intended for missions into China's Yunnan Province. (Many of the Nationalists found their way to Burma to make a career change to opium smuggling.) In 1970 the CIA also brought in and trained two irregular Khmer battalions, whose performance in an alien country proved deplorable. Lastly, U.S. and South Vietnamese units under Military Assistance Command, Vietnam-Studies and Observation Group (MACV-SOG) conducted cross-border reconnaissance and direct action in Laos.
6. The French GCMA program also involved North Vietnam hill tribesmen.
7. Project White Star is enshrined in Special Forces legend as the first significant and successful--however brief--display of the training and counterinsurgency prowess that SF would soon demonstrate in other parts of the world. Though some palpable accomplishments and some valorous combat actions came out of the mission, nevertheless, many of the SF teams were not well prepared psychologically or culturally for the realities of Laos nor were they always well received by some of their Lao and hill tribe counterparts. Furthermore, no system existed whereby information gleaned and lessons learned by the earlier teams could be passed on to newly arriving detachments.
8. Hanoi opened the Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1959 initially to infiltrate southern cadre back into South Vietnam. Interestingly in 1960 South Vietnamese and FAR officers met for the first of several conferences concerning the possibility of joint South Vietnamese-Lao operations to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Although such a joint operation never came to fruition, both countries were to establish liaison and communication teams at various locations. American commanders in South Vietnam occasionally dusted off the same concept of a massive campaign by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces, supported by irregulars, to cut the trail from the Demilitarized Zone into Laos all the way to Savannakhet. But political support from Washington was never forthcoming.
9. Some of the CIA case officers had previous experience in a 1964-65 Congo operation involving (former Bay of Pigs) Cuban pilots and white mercenaries, in an abortive Indonesian insurgency, and in support to Khampa guerrillas fighting the Chinese in Tibet.
10. This fear grew after the Communist Party of Thailand launched an armed insurgency in 1965. Though the insurgent leadership took their cues from China, insurgent trainees, escorted through Laos by the Pathet Lao, received training from the North Vietnamese at a camp in Hoa Binh near Hanoi.
11. The Thais also established at the Long Tieng SGU headquarters a command and staff officers course for promising Hmong officers.
12. Named Kou Kiet, this operation captured more food, weapons, and supplies from PAVN than any previous operation in Indochina had netted.
13. The SGUs who represented only 13 percent of the Royal Lao Government forces accounted for 70 percent of the casualties.
14. A limited amount of coordination took place between Vientiane station and MACV-SOG. Some retired Agency case officers have stated that overall cooperation between the U.S. Embassy in Vientiane and the Commanding General, MACV, in Saigon could have been improved considerably.
15. Such a debate is probably academic, as the Defense Department does not want paramilitary responsibility, and never has.
16. Though Shadow War does not make this claim, one officer involved with Project Unity estimated that in the period between the 1968 Tet offensive and the 1972 Easter offensive, PAVN suffered more casualties in Laos from Lao and Thai forces and from U.S. bombing than from combined allied operations in South Vietnam.