Undercover Armies - CIA FOIA - Central Intelligence Agency

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GOING THE WAY OF VIETNAMD
occasion fell something short of a reunion of cowades-in-arms, as neither
Bill Lair nor Pat Landry was present. Nor wasl
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'Meanwhile, a presidential determination of early August had acknowledged
that many Laotian refugees were fated never to find new homes in Thailand.
Skeptical of both the capability and the intentions of the United Nations High
Commission for Refugees,I
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At first hostile to any substantial Hmong immigration, most of official
Washington came to accept it as an equitable solution to the refugee problem.
The exception was Gen. Leonard Chapman, commissioner of the INS, who
believed that most Hmong were "active in narcotics" as well as "culturally
unadaptable." And he had a point: It was not long before Yang Pao, frustrated
by intractable problems of assimilation' afflicting the Hmong refugees already
in the United States, began warning his people in Thailand against such relocation.
Nevertheless, when INS finally softened its grudging stance on Hffi10ng
immigration, the flow increased, and some 35,000 arrived by mid-1980. 24
Having at least formally abjured the practice of polygamy, Vang Pao
became a US citizen in 1981.\
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Hmong hostility toward the lowland Lao and their Vietnamese patrons did
not die, and it appeared that well into the 1990s the Bouam Long enclave, for
example, was still holding out. But Vang Pao's hopes to recapture the tribe's
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A later estimate put the Hmong population in the United States in 1989 at IOO,OrO,""E. Hammond,
"Sad Suspicions of a Refugee Ripoff," Washington Post, 16 April 1989.
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