Undercover Armies - CIA FOIA - Central Intelligence Agency

C051303949
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did his interpreter. Dedicated and intense,Dsaw Yang Pao's one-man-band
style of leadership as hopelessly inadequate, involving an impossibly broad
span of control. His constant hectoring of Yang Pao to set up a conventional
four-part military staff strained the relationship between the two, especially
when it took place with Hmong or Lao subordinates present. In fact, Yang Pao
lacked people qualified to function like professionals in a Western army. More
importantly, the Hmong leader was as much tribal leader as military commander,
and his political authority rested on a charisma that needed constant
exercise if it were not to decay."D
An adviser had to deal not only with YangPao and his rudimentary staff but
with the volunteer irregulars as well. Nearly all illiterate and with only rudimentary
training, they displayed astonishing speed and endurance as they traversed
mountain ridges carrying weapons and ammunition. Their cheerful
acceptance of extraordinarily harsh conditions and their abiding hatred of the
Vietnamese had to compensate for their lack of conventional military discipline
and their indifference to any goal broader than securing their families
and their way of life."0
For a few advisers, cultural disparities like these were to be ignored--eradicated,
if possible-as they converted their tribal clients into a smaller version
of US Marines.1
lattempt to do this ran up against both the
cultural barrier and a charismatic leader's need never to lose face with his
inferiors. D
I
IThe officers who followed, most of
them requested by Bill Lair, had a beller capacity for cross-cultural empathy
and,I
Irequired only cursory
briefing before being dispatched into the mountains. Several had been
recruited, like Lair in the early 1950s, out of Texas A&M University, where
two or three-including Lloyd "Pat" Landry-had played varsity football.
Another,I
Ihad been a master sergeant in the US Army Special
Forces before joining the Agency. Still another, Jack Shirley, was a New
England native who, like Lair, had married a Thai girl and made a career of
paramilitary wor~" I
IRON AGE GUERRIUAS0"
5S Ibid,'§nterview.
36 Bill Lair
D
57 Ibid; interview; author's recollection. One of the A&M men.1 ~laYed
brieflyfor the NFL'sDetroitLionsbeforejoining the Agency. ( ]intervlew.) Both ir and
Shirley married into the families~rominent members of the Free Thai resistance to the Japanese
occupation in World War II.l-J
SEC1T/fMR
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