Undercover Armies - CIA FOIA - Central Intelligence Agency

C05303949
INTRODUCTION
The Cork in the BottleD
The day before his inauguration as president of the United States, John F.
Kennedy met President Dwight D. Eisenhower and several cabinet officers at
the White House. Kennedy had solicited the meeting, partly for cosmetic reasons-"reassuring
the publie as to the harmony of the transition"-but also
because he was, in his own words, "anxious to get some commitment from the
outgoing administration as to how they would deal with Laos." Receiving
Kennedy in the Cabinet Room on 19 January 1961, Eisenhower and his advisers
had more to say about the tiny country's strategic importance than about
specific means of keeping the "cork in the bOtllOe " as they put it, to prevent
communist dominion over most of the Far East I
The Western-oriented Royal Laotian Government (RLG) was tbreatened
both by an army mutiny and by a North Vietnamese-sponsored communist
insurgent movement, the Pathet Lao. The mutinous RLG units were the
army's best, certainly capable of taking on the best of the dissident forces. But
most of the army reflected the lethargy of its officer corps, which was drawn
from the colonial elite that had served the French, and now lacked either the
energy or the legitimacy for effective leadershipD
Well aware of its own military impotence, the RLG feared that asking the
Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) to intercede would only provoke
further North Vietnamese incursions. Eisenhower recognized Laotian
anxiety, but thought that if the country fell to the communists, "it would bring
unbelievable pressure to bear on Thailand, Cambodia, and South Vietnam."
He considered Laos so important that, in the words of one Kennedy adviser,
"If it reached the stage where we could not persuade others to act with us, then
he would be willing, as a last desperate hope, to intervene unilaterally." 2D
It seems that Kennedy had to wait until he took office to learn of the airlift
of weapons and equipment already on its way to a tiny village perched on one
I Memoranda by participants at the meeting, Foreign Relations ofthe United States, 1961-1963,
\/hlume XXiV, The Laos Crisis (hereafter cited as FRUS 196~-1963), 19-25D
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