Undercover Armies - CIA FOIA - Central Intelligence Agency

C05303949
SQUEEZING ANALLyD
The occasion was solemnized by a baci, a ceremony at which cotton strings
tied around the wrists of the participants symbolized an indissoluble bond of
reciprocal loyalty. A tribal ancient chanted a prayer begging the ancestors of
those present to safeguard them as they fought for Hmong survival. At the
end, Vang Pao and his foreign advisers were required to down a shot of whiskey
with each of the two dozen Hmong attending; as Lair later recalled it; they
were ivenabout an hour to accomplish this feat of conspicuous consumption,
For
the confidence inspired in Vang Pao and the other
Hmong chiefs by
air was a "most eloquent tribute to [the] leadership
and character [at] these two outstanding officers." 34 0 .
In central Laos, where the irregulars were mostly Lao, ethnic tensions were
not a factor, but doubts about a coalition threatened unit cohesion. Of the six
units-about 1,000 men in all-the two largest were the most seriously
affected. Hoping to fend off an epidemic of defeatism, the Thakhek case
officer induced Chao Khoueng (Governor) Sisouphan and a young National
Assembly deputy to get into a Helio for a visit to the joint command post in
the foothills east of the Na Kay Plateau. The impact was hard to judge, but the
.very rarity of this display of engagement by RLG officials probably gave it
some effect. In the event, unit integrity survived the installation of the coalition,
and the program entered a new phase of recruiting villagers from points
along the roads leading into North Vietnam."D
New Tribal AlliesD
Earlier in 1962, when Washington authorized new recruitment at Long
Tieng and Thakhek, it also approved two new programs aimed at securing territory
and people in the far north and in the southern Panhandle. Each of these
used a local resident whose relationships of trust with tribal leaders furnished
access to people even less integrated into Laotian culture than the Hmong.D
The first initiative responded to Pathet Lao efforts over the course of 1961
to expand communist influence in the northwest. I
Ibegan to
look for anticommunist tribal leaders there, and a contact in the National
Assembly-he was one of the rare Lao with a sympathetic interest in the highlanders-suggested
a leader of the Yao. These mountain people, like the
Hmong, had migrated from southern China. Found mostly in the mountains of
northwest Laos, they generally shared the Hmong antipathy for communists
and Vietnamese. They lacked a centralized political.structure but-again, like
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