Home Page : News Last Updated June 21, 2007 On exaggeration, context and the wages of a covert war
by ROGER WARNER On June 4, about 200 law enforcement agents in California launched what initially appeared to be a spectacular raid, arresting nine in an alleged plot to overthrow the government of Laos. Eight of those arrested originally came from Laos, a country in the interior of Southeast Asia. They are members of the Hmong hilltribe, and their leader is a man who is legendary in CIA and national security circles, Vang Pao. Born in a thatched hut, Vang Pao rose to become a Laotian major general, thanks in part to his CIA mentor, a soft-spoken Texan named Bill Lair. Starting in 1961, the Hmong and the CIA operative created a tribal guerilla army that fought successfully against Laotian and North Vietnamese communists - for a while. Later, when Laos became a sideshow of the bigger war in neighboring Vietnam, the program started falling apart. In 1975, when the U.S. pulled out of Laos and Vietnam, more than 10,000 Hmong were slaughtered by Laos' new communist regime. Many survivors fled the country and went to the U.S. as refugees. Today there are about 200,000 Hmong-Americans; and although Vang Pao, now 77, is no longer their undisputed leader he is still their most famous name. As it happens, I have spent many hours recently with both Bill Lair and Vang Pao, the Laos covert war's main two figures, for a documentary film project. The two men are not personally close, but they recognize that their legacies are intertwined; and Lair has volunteered to testify for Vang Pao at his upcoming trial. Lair and I have also traveled to Southeast Asia, to visit the sites of his covert war, and to look into claims that Hmong are still fighting against their old enemies in Laos. We found those reports true on a small scale. Scattered bands of ragged fighters subsist off wild plants, trying to evade the Laotian army ... and almost every day, the leaders of these Hmong bands talk on satellite phones with their Hmong-American relatives. There is no doubt that some Hmong-Americans have been up to their eyeballs in supporting and guiding the Hmong resistance in Laos, but there are different ways of interpreting this fact. Some might say it is heroic and steadfast for old allies to continue the fight for years after the U.S. forces went home. Others might say that the old Hmong-American leaders are like exiled White Russians in Paris after World War I, plotting and scheming to return to power and not doing a good job of it. Human rights workers have another angle: Go to the Amnesty International Web site, they say, search under "Hmong" and start reading about all the violence done against tribespeople by the Laotian regime. You can frame the arguments any way you want, but the more I learn about the Hmong resistance in Laos, the more I find it ambiguous and troubling. There's a cycle of violence in the boondocks of Laos, and all sides are keeping it going. Personally, I put the blame first and foremost on the Lao People's Democratic Republic, which is doing the actual killing; the Hmong-Americans rank a distant second. But almost everyone I've talked to who is deeply knowledgeable about Laos is dismayed by the indictments and accompanying press releases coming out of the U.S. Attorney's office in Sacramento. The feds boast about having stopped a massive attack on the Laotian government. The Hmong resistance in Laos is too scattered and beaten down for that, and the Hmong-Americans are simply too disorganized. And the feds don't exactly advertise that the leaders of the Lao People's Democratic Republic are buddies with the North Koreans, because that would weaken their moral argument. If you read the prosecution's papers on the Web, you also will find that the government's case is typical of the post-9/11 John Ashcroft-Alberto Gonzales Justice Department. You've seen the pattern before: At first, big, ringing announcements of a clear victory over evil are made. Later, it turns out the charges have been exaggerated or distorted. Months or years later, the cases are dismissed or the charges are greatly reduced. And that is probably what is going to happen with Vang Pao and the Sacramento group. The government's case against the Hmong suffers from two weaknesses. The first is that the feds' undercover operative, who works for the ATF (the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms), was the co-creator of the so-called plot. A former Navy Seal, he offered a stupendous array of weapons, including Stinger missiles, and American-trained mercenaries. He brainstormed extensively with the only non-Hmong defendant, a retired Army colonel named Harrison Jack, who stood to benefit financially if the deal went through. The Hmong-Americans didn't hatch the idea for this plot, or at least anything this ambitious. They just made the mistake of liking the sound of it when the others proposed it. They also made the mistake of putting their new, Stinger-fueled fantasies on paper, which is the heart of the prosecution's case. According to the Sacramento Bee, a Hmong-American who had no military experience was promised $5,000 to write an action plan for the so-called coup. His memo, called Operation Popcorn, reads like the outline for a bad movie script. ("Mission One: Bring Down the Power of Leaders ... Mission Two: Take Over the Government.") It's a delusional fantasy, with no logistics to speak of, no plans for getting those black-market weapons and mercenaries to Asia, no way to get from A to B. The guy who wrote it, one David Vang, who was unemployed and months behind in his mortgage payments, never even got the five grand he was promised. He's been locked up, too. The second weakness in the feds' case is that it does not take into account the cultural reality of the Hmong, a tribe that was living in the Iron Age when the CIA arrived in the early 1960s. Though many younger Hmong-Americans today are U.S. college graduates and fully competitive in the marketplace, the elders of Vang Pao's generation still don't speak fluent English. They don't know how to "read" the intentions or sincerity of mainstream Americans, and they don't fully understand U.S. government rules. Whether they have been smart to support and guide the resistance in Laos or not - and I think they haven't - the Hmong-Americans are going to claim the right of ethnic self-defense against their old enemies. Who else would help the Hmong in Laos? The U.S. government abandoned them in 1975. Rumor has it that the Hmong-Americans who were recently arrested hoped the undercover agent worked for the American government - and he did, just not for the right agency. This case is already causing collateral damage abroad. Laos and its neighbor, Thailand, have cited Vang Pao's arrest as a so-called terrorist to end a tradition of sanctuary for Hmong refugees in Thailand. About a thousand legitimate war refugees are at risk of being forcibly repatriated, including Hmong women who have been raped and tortured by Laotian forces and others who have seen family members killed. The first 160 were repatriated soon after Vang Pao's arrest. Nobody has heard from them since. They will not get trials or visits from neutral international monitors. By contrast, I suppose, those arrested in Sacramento are lucky. They will get trials, and under American blind justice the worst they can expect is prison for life. The shame is that much of the problem could have been avoided if the U.S. government had taken a radically different approach 20 or 30 years ago. Bill Lair says he gladly would have worked with the Hmong elders to keep them on the straight-and-narrow once they came to this country, but the CIA doesn't provide long-term counseling to refugees, and neither does any other branch of the U.S. government. What these Hmong-Americans are most guilty of is acting like Hmong, instead of acting like Americans. But they don't deserve prison for that. Roger Warner is author of "Shooting At the Moon: The Story of America's Clandestine War in Laos" which won the book of the year award from the Overseas Press Club and is available on amazon.com. His current projects include a documentary film called "Once Upon A Time In The CIA" about Bill Lair and Vang Pao. Warner lives in Massachusetts.
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