Spies on the Mekong: CIA Clandestine Operations in Laos

CHAPTER 1

Growing Pains

Laos was a most improbable nation to transfix the superpowers of the mid-20th century. A landlocked patch of mountainous territory roughly the size of Great Britain, it had its heyday six hundred years earlier when local royalty rose to prominence under what was called Lan Xang, the Kingdom of a Million Elephants. Back then it had flourished as a center for the arts and Buddhist theology. Equally impressive was Lan Xang’s military prowess, its warriors extending the kingdom’s reach over most of current-day Laos, northern and central Thailand, and northern Cambodia.

By the 16th century, however, Lan Xang’s fortunes began to wane as it was weakened in a series of wars with the Burmese. Three centuries later, continued foreign pressure, compounded by palace intrigue, split the kingdom in three.

Thus broken, the once-formidable Lan Xang was a sparsely populated backwater when the French traveled up the Mekong River in the latter half of the 19th century. Though the fractured principalities had few economic benefits to offer, France needed a buffer to shield its lucrative Vietnamese holdings from the expansionist Thai and the British in Burma. The French, then, fused the landlocked realms back together into a single protectorate and created Laos. As its titular leader, the king in Luang Prabang was elevated as the unified Lao monarch.

Under French rule, Laos barely developed beyond its frontier status. A handful of dirt roads, passable only in the dry season, were cut on an east–west axis to the Vietnamese coast. A single north–south road, Route 13, was not completed until 1943. While Vietnamese laborers were imported to mine tin, and coffee and corn were grown on the Bolovens Plateau, products from Laos never represented more than 1 percent of total French exports from its Southeast Asian colonies.

With few resources to exploit, the Lao population was all but ignored by the French. And while the king of Laos was allowed to retain nominal control around Luang Prabang, in practice the French ruled Laos as would a benign and indifferent absentee landlord, retaining the existing traditional village structure and introducing hundreds of educated Vietnamese to run the country on a daily basis.

As for the apolitical Lao peasantry, most of whom had little interest in events outside their village, French indifference was matched in kind. Indeed, only two disturbances of any significance—both involving hill tribes—broke the peace during nearly a half century of French rule. These relatively minor events aside, Laos was as close as the French got to a perfect protectorate. At little cost, they had a nearly trouble-free buffer—until World War II.

With the fall of France to Nazi Germany in June 1940, France’s grip on its Southeast Asian colonies quickly degenerated to a toehold. The reason was that Germany’s Axis partner, Japan, had grand plans for Asia that did not include European overlords. Accordingly, Japan’s military forced its way into French Indochina three months after Paris fell. By August 1941, some 40,000 Japanese troops were stationed in France’s Lao, Cambodian, and Vietnamese territories, giving Tokyo de facto control behind a veneer of pro-Axis French administrators.

Across Southeast Asia, the Japanese proved themselves mercurial masters. Initially brutal toward indigenous resistance, they quickly warmed to local nationalist movements when the war started going bad and the Allies looked poised to reenter Indochina. In Laos, they went so far as to kidnap Crown Prince Savang Vatthana in order to force King Sisavang Vong, a dedicated Francophile, to declare on 8 April 1945 an end to French protectorate status.

Taking a cue from the Japanese, the educated upper stratum of Lao society began to flirt with notions of nationalism and independence. Leading the pack of budding nationalists were three brothers from the junior branch of the royal family. The oldest, Prince Phetsarath, was a French-educated viceroy who had been a driving force behind establishment of the Lao civil service and judiciary before World War II; he was widely recognized as the second-most powerful man in Laos after the king. The second brother, Prince Souvanna Phouma, had earned two engineering degrees in France before returning to Vientiane as chief of the Architecture Bureau in the colonial Public Works Service. The third brother, Prince Souphanouvong, was, more correctly, the younger half brother of the other two. Ambitious, vain, and academically gifted, Souphanouvong had earned a reputation as a rebel, his resentment of authority fanned by childhood discrimination because his mother was a commoner.

With Phetsarath and Souvanna Phouma at the forefront, a young nationalist movement, the Lao Issara—or Free Lao—took shape. And with Tokyo’s strong encouragement, it was this group that declared independence in the waning days of World War II.

Not having any of it, the French cobbled together an expeditionary force and rushed it back to Laos. As the French pushed their way into the panhandle in early 1946, the Lao Issara all but melted away. After southern Laos was liberated, on 24 April the French dropped an airborne battalion along the outskirts of Vientiane; the Lao Issara offered no resistance. Fifteen days later, a similar drop put Luang Prabang under French control. Three months after that, the French reincorporated Laos—along with Cambodia and the Vietnamese territories—into an Indochinese federation.

With French authority restored, the Lao Issara leadership regrouped in Thailand. Moping in Bangkok safe houses, the dispirited nationalists began to bicker endlessly among themselves.

That the Lao Issara remained toothless was welcome news for France, which had its hands full combating the fast-growing threat from communist Vietnamese guerrillas known as the Viet Minh. To free more assets for use against the Viet Minh, France transformed Laos in May 1947 into a constitutional monarchy with sufficient autonomy to inaugurate a national assembly in six months’ time. Continuing in the same vein, a July 1949 Franco-Lao agreement granted the Royal Lao Government (RLG) the right to raise a Lao National Army (Armée Nationale Laotienne, or ANL).

As the French now had Laos speeding down the road toward de facto independence, the Lao Issara all but lost its raison d’être. Thus, when the RLG dangled a promise of amnesty, many from the Lao Issara expressed interest. Prince Phetsarath, at odds with the king, chose to sulk in Thailand. Souphanouvong, long known for his unusually close ties to the Vietnamese, had been expelled from the mainstream Lao Issara in May 1949; predictably, he made his way to Vietnam to lobby support from the Viet Minh’s revolutionary godfather, Ho Chi Minh. Alone among the brothers, Souvanna Phouma formally dissolved the Lao Issara in October and then led the bulk of his comrades across the Mekong in peace.

The RLG soon faced a threat from a different quarter. Since the opening of 1949, the Viet Minh had been quietly nurturing a sister wing composed of communist Lao guerrillas in the northeastern province of Sam Neua. Soon after creation of this movement’s first 25-man guerrilla band, Souphanouvong, ousted from the Lao Issara, offered himself up as their ally. For the ambitious Souphanouvong, this guerrilla movement offered greater personal visibility—free of competition from other senior nationalists; for the communist guerrillas, the flamboyant prince was a good publicist, adding appeal and legitimacy to an otherwise obscure, Viet Minh-backed splinter movement.

With hill tribe recruits, Souphanouvong’s imprimatur, and Viet Minh support, the movement made early gains. By August 1950, 150 of its members were on hand for a clandestine rally at Ho Chi Minh’s mountain redoubt in Tuyen Quang, Vietnam. It was there that the resistance was cosmetically reshaped into the Neo Lao Issara (Free Lao Front). The meeting also saw the first use of the term Pathet Lao (Lao Nation), in reference to the Neo Lao Issara’s armed wing; from that point forward, despite several official name changes over the years, the term Pathet Lao became synonymous with both the Lao communist military organization and its associated political front.

Meantime, the French war effort was not going well. By early 1952, the Viet Minh had seized most of the northern border region with China, leaving it free to make raids into northern Vietnam’s fertile Red River delta. Hoping to turn the tide, French forces maneuvered into blocking positions. Rising to the challenge, the Viet Minh responded with some twenty-five thousand troops and grabbed even more swaths of territory by the second week of March.

For the French, things only got worse. Near year’s end, colonial officials were convinced of an imminent Vietnamese invasion of Sam Neua. Garrisoned by two Lao battalions and three local guard companies, the province had already lost a pair of frontier outposts to encroaching elements of two Viet Minh regiments in early December.

Recognizing Sam Neua’s vulnerability, the French high command dispatched Lao paratroopers to Sam Neua town, the provincial capital, during the third week of December 1952. But rising to the challenge once more, Vietnamese forays savaged the Lao paratroopers over the next three months. Then, in a defining moment for the Viet Minh, on 12 April 1953 a massive Vietnamese task force spilled across the Sam Neua frontier. Given less than a day’s lead, the Franco-Lao garrison retreated southwest; only a fraction eventually reached safety on the Plain of Jars (Plaine des Jarres, or PDJ), a grassy plateau between Sam Neua and Vientiane.

As Sam Neua Province was being overwhelmed, a second Viet Minh invasion force massed in the Vietnamese valley of Dien Bien Phu. Composed of one regiment and Pathet Lao auxiliaries, this column crossed the border and pushed south toward Luang Prabang. As an emergency blocking force, a lone company of Lao commandos was parachuted halfway between Dien Bien Phu and Luang Prabang on 14 April. In addition, the French orchestrated a major airlift of reinforcements into the royal capital, pumping the town full of Foreign Legionnaires and Moroccan troops. Still, by 27 April the outlook for Luang Prabang looked grim as the isolated commando company was overrun in less than three hours.

From a purely military perspective, the French top brass would have been right to order a withdrawal from Luang Prabang. But greatly complicating matters, the king of Laos refused to vacate his throne, allegedly influenced by psychic premonitions of a local blind seer who said the Viet Minh would stop short of the town.

Their prestige tied to the monarch’s welfare, the French had no choice but to rush in still more reinforcements. Continuing to roll south, the Viet Minh had moved to within 30 kilometers of Luang Prabang by 10 May. The French forces waited tensely for a final confrontation. The weather, however, proved their salvation as monsoon rains began two days later. With their extended supply lines quickly mired, the Viet Minh troops retraced their steps back toward Dien Bien Phu. Luang Prabang, against long odds, was saved.

As the French were scrambling to hold northern Laos, halfway around the world the United States was paying close attention. Whereas Laos had once been relegated to a footnote in discussions of Indochina, the US government was now breathlessly equating the kingdom’s fate with that of the entire noncommunist bloc south of China. Said newly inaugurated President Dwight Eisenhower during a 28 April 1953 National Security Council meeting, if Laos is lost, we will likely lose the rest of Southeast Asia and Indonesia. The gateway to India, Burma, and Thailand will be open.¹

Matching this sentiment with action, the United States loaned six transport planes (with civilian aircrews) to conduct supply drops as the French rushed reinforcements to the PDJ. By the end of May, the augmented garrison surged forth, beating the Viet Minh column back toward the border. At the cost of 1,569 Lao and French Union soldiers, the Viet Minh offensive had at long last been stopped.

Though the French had won a temporary reprieve, Washington remained deeply concerned. The United States already had diplomatic outposts scattered across Indochina to help keep its finger on the pulse. In 1952, the modest-size legation in the southern Vietnamese city of Saigon had been upgraded to an embassy under Ambassador Donald Heath. This embassy, in turn, oversaw tiny legations in Vientiane and the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, as well as a consulate in the northern Vietnamese city of Hanoi.

To that time, the Vientiane legation, founded in 1950, was almost notional. Junior diplomats from elsewhere in Indochina were rotated through one or two at a time for short stints. Aside from a Thai consulate, they were the only foreign representatives in town.

Continuing the trend, the vice consul in Hanoi, 32-year-old Lloyd Mike Rives, was temporarily shifted to Vientiane in June 1953. Hailing from an affluent New Jersey family, Rives was up to the task. For one thing, he had majored in French at Princeton University and was thus fluent in the lingua franca of the kingdom. For another thing, he was more than familiar with hardship after four years in the Marines, much of it island-hopping in the Pacific.

Arriving at the same time was Ted Tanen, a 27-year-old California native who had just completed a tour as administrative clerk at the embassy in Burma. Tanen’s role in Vientiane was as a proto–public affairs officer, gathering cultural material for use on Voice of America.

While the pair had prior experience in Southeast Asia—Rives in Hanoi, Tanen in Rangoon—Vientiane made those two venues look positively cosmopolitan by comparison. The Lao capital had no running water and only intermittent electricity from generators. Tropical diseases, especially amoebic dysentery, were rampant. Roads had yet to be paved.

The legation itself was located in a spacious French-style villa on the bank of the Mekong. Rives and Tanen, both bachelors, had bedrooms in the villa, setting aside another room to function as the chancery for official business and repurposing an adjacent lavatory as a code room. Electricity was provided by a generator that was used only in the evenings; gasoline was hauled across the Mekong in jerry cans. Water was hand-pumped to a tank on the roof, allowing gravity to funnel it through the shower and toilet.

Making the most of his French language skills, Rives quickly networked across Vientiane’s upper echelon of French administrators and, to a lesser extent, Lao elites. He would then take his notes back to the lavatory-cum-code-room, where he would encrypt them—old school— using one-time pads. The resultant number groups were then brought to the central post office and transmitted either to Saigon or directly to Washington. Reversing the process, each evening a messenger from the post office would arrive with the day’s incoming telegrams, which Rives would decrypt while sitting on the toilet with a one-time pad.

As the State Department had now sent two officers to Laos, the CIA felt compelled to follow suit. Though just six years old, the Agency had inherited an impressive roster of experienced Asia hands from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the other military intelligence outfits that had flourished during the war. The tiny legation in Laos, however, did not rate such a seasoned veteran. Instead, they looked among their recent hires of young bachelors full of postwar optimism and willing to endure a hardship posting.

Getting the nod was 27-year-old Theodore Ted Korbin. Serving in the Naval Air Corps during the war, he had graduated on the GI Bill from the University of Michigan in 1949. During his college days he had been a standout on the school’s baseball team. Contemplating a career in sports, he continued for another two years in the minor leagues. When that did not work out, the Agency was his runner up.

In mid-September 1953, Korbin arrived in Vientiane and was ostensibly assigned as the vice consul. Due to the legation’s spartan amenities, he bunked in the villa with Rives and Tanen. For the time being, he even was forced to share a filing cabinet with Rives. This led to an embarrassing incident that poisoned relations within the legation from the outset. As Rives remembered it,

We shared a filing cabinet at one time, when [Korbin] first got there before his own things came. One day I went down there…his drawer was open, and I did something which I shouldn’t have done, but the yellow pad was sitting there, and I read it. It was a report about me, which they weren’t allowed to do, were not supposed to do, and swore they never did. So I said to the Ambassador in Saigon, Either he goes or I go. So he went.²

Tanen corroborates the tale:

Our relationship with the CIA got off to a very bad start…. Mike [Rives] discovered that Korbin was writing reports on us, which drove him right up the wall. So, we notified Washington, and I think Korbin got slapped on the wrist, but we felt that if he is here to report on something, he should be reporting on the political situation, and not on the staff, the two of us.³

For his indiscretion, Korbin was temporarily shifted to Saigon, only to return to Vientiane in mid-1954. By that time, a protracted siege against the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu in northern Vietnam had been settled in favor of the Viet Minh. Facing a growing anti-war movement on the home front and having suffered the tremendous psychological blow of losing Dien Bien Phu, the French ventured to Geneva to begin negotiating in earnest an end to their colonial rule in Southeast Asia. The ink to this agreement was soon dry, with a ceasefire scheduled for 6 August.

As Laos would now be gaining true independence, the US legation braced for a major boost. On 18 August, seasoned diplomat Charles Yost was appointed as America’s first ambassador to the kingdom. Soon joined by his wife and three children, Yost opened the spigot to a steady stream of fellow Foreign Service officers, aid workers, clerks, and secretaries. Having collectively outgrown its villa, the legation had a US Army field tent set up on the front lawn as a makeshift annex. In addition, two further villas were rented, one for single men and the other for single women.

What Yost and the rest of the legation found was a kingdom that, on a superficial level, appeared to have emerged from the war in good shape. After all, the Geneva accords foisted a mantle of diplomatic neutrality upon Laos, theoretically exempting it from Cold War rivalries.

Beneath the surface, however, Laos was left exceedingly vulnerable. Landlocked at a geographic crossroads, each of its twelve provinces bordered a foreign nation, two of which—the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV)—were openly sympathetic to the Pathet Lao.⁴ Even its capital, Vientiane, faced foreign—Thai—territory, on the opposite bank of the Mekong.

Politically, Laos was equally challenged. Although US government assessments at the time noted that the kingdom—given its sparse, rural, politically apathetic population—was not particularly susceptible to internal rebellion resulting from social, economic, or political grievances, there was fertile ground for future strife.⁵ First, the Geneva agreement’s call for an immediate departure of all Viet Minh from Laos was never carried out in full. In fact, an advisory group from the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) was retained at the Pathet Lao headquarters in the mountains of Sam Neua.⁶

Second, the ANL was still not up to the task of defending the kingdom. As noted in a pessimistic French assessment one month before the ceasefire, more than 500 French officers and non-commissioned officers—including all cadre from ANL technical and support units—were set for immediate repatriation. Moreover, half the 35,000-man ANL was volunteers whose enlistments were up.⁷ As a much-needed stopgap, Geneva had authorized a continued presence of 1,500 French advisors, plus 3,500 French Union combat troops grouped into a half brigade. By December 1954, however, the half brigade was disbanded for budgetary reasons, and only a token battalion was maintained at Seno airbase in the panhandle.⁸ The French stopgap all but gone, the ANL was on its own.

Third, Geneva had dictated (with, in Souvanna Phouma’s words, a dangerous lack of precision) that the Pathet Lao could regroup unmolested for four months in two northern provinces—Sam Neua and Phongsaly—before reintegrating into the RLG. Pathet Lao officials, however, announced three months into the grace period that they intended to keep permanent control over both provinces. Immediately, they began appointing local officials and establishing schools, printshops, and a military academy.

Fourth, mandated with overseeing this imperfect peace was Geneva’s most heinous of pitfalls, the International Control Commission (ICC). Comprising military delegates from pro-Western Canada, communist Poland, and nonaligned India, the ICC theoretically was expected to rush tripartite teams to the scene of ceasefire violations and, with the weight of its office, make objective observations that would presumably lead to peace. In reality the ICC was a paper tiger from the start. Undermanned, short of transportation, and crippled by the need for unanimity among its three politically diverse delegations, the ICC did not assemble in Laos until October 1954, fully two months after the ceasefire and halfway into the Pathet Lao grace period. Once in Laos, it was repeatedly stonewalled by the Pathet Lao in requests for access to northern hot spots. On the rare occasion that an ICC team reached a ceasefire violation and attempted to adjudicate, it lacked means of enforcement.

Fifth, though faced with an impotent ICC and communist insurgents consolidating their hold over two provinces, the RLG focused an inordinate amount of its attention on Vientiane politics. There, intrigue was in abundance with a National Assembly torn by feuds between diehard Francophiles and equally strident nationalists.

Meantime, not five months had passed after the end of the French Indochina War before the ANL, alone, faced its first major test. The Pathet Lao, its four-month integration period having expired, refused to peacefully relinquish control of the two northern provinces. A confrontation looming, RLG and Pathet Lao negotiators met on the PDJ in January 1955. As their talks deadlocked, clashes broke out later that month around Moung Peun, the only RLG-held town in Sam Neua Province. With sporadic fighting continuing through the spring, the ANL ordered two reinforcement battalions to Moung Peun in June.

By the first week of July, with Moung Peun surrounded, the ANL general staff directed more infantry reinforcements to the PDJ. After these marched north to Moung Peun, they were joined by the ANL’s airborne battalion in its first post-ceasefire combat jump.⁹ It was only when summer monsoon rains bogged down the opposing sides in August that fighting around Moung Peun subsided.

Just before the confrontation in Sam Neua went into remission, the CIA decided to ratchet up its representation in Vientiane. After an extended home leave over Christmas of 1954, Korbin had returned to Laos in February 1955 to start a second tour. But with the legation scheduled to be upgraded to embassy status in August, the Agency wanted to add a relatively more senior officer to head a proper station.

Selected for the job was Milton J. Clark, a square-jawed All-American who was six years Korbin’s senior. One of nine siblings born in New York, Clark had left college to enter the US Army in 1942. Directed to the Pacific theater, he was in China at war’s end and, in a moment that left a lasting impression, had the opportunity to peer briefly into the steppes of Inner Mongolia.¹⁰

Returning stateside with the rank of captain, Clark reentered college and completed his degree in 1947. Without pause, he shifted to Harvard University for graduate studies. Completing this in 1951, he became one of the many Ivy Leaguers who answered an early recruitment drive by the CIA.

Before he could start his career as an intelligence officer, however, Clark chanced upon a newspaper article about Kazakh refugees making an arduous one-year trek from China’s Xinjiang to sanctuary in India’s Kashmir.¹¹ Recalling his fleeting glimpse into Mongolia at war’s end, and judging the Kazakh to be an intriguing subject for a doctorate, he got a deferment from the Agency and a research fellowship from the Washington-based Middle East Institute.

The following summer, in August 1952, Clark arrived in Kashmir for a year of field study among the displaced Kazakh. Returning to Cambridge in late 1953, he published an account of his travels in National Geographic, hammered out a fourteen thousand–word English-Kazakh dictionary, and completed his doctoral thesis on Kazakh refugee society. He successfully defended his dissertation in January 1955.¹²

At last ready to join the Agency, Clark partook in expedited training and was in Vientiane by June 1955. As with the rest of the embassy, he was immediately confronted by two limiting factors. First, though Laos was independent on paper, it remained firmly under the French thumb. As of March 1955, there were still upwards of 150 French civilians assigned to RLG cabinet ministries, down only 50 from the 1953 number. In addition, 780 French combat troops were stationed at Seno, and on top of that, a French military mission as of 1955 had 1,192 advisors with the ANL and police.

Second, despite the clashes at Moung Peun, some of the Lao political elite remained convinced they could accommodate the Pathet Lao. This was especially true of Souvanna Phouma, who was named prime minister in March 1956. Fixated on creating a coalition government with his communist brethren, he spent much of his first year in office courting his half brother Souphanouvong.

This all came at a time when Washington was advocating a more aggressive stance against communism. In June 1955, the same month Clark arrived in Laos, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had delivered a pivotal speech in which he labeled diplomatic neutrality an immoral and shortsighted conception. His younger brother Allen Dulles, who headed the CIA, was inclined to implement policies—especially covert operations—that supported this world view. Bottom line: While Washington paid lip service to the neutrality extended to Laos in the Geneva agreement, it wanted the RLG free from communist taint. The CIA—through Clark’s two-man station—was to seek ways to achieve that outcome.

All of that put Clark in a quandary. As was customary when operating in a