[NYTr] Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley: Old CIA Mercenaries on the Run in Laos

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[Years before the vicious US War on Vietnam and Cambodia, the CIA
and their priests and other agents were mixing it up in Laos. -NYTr]


The New York Times - Dec 17, 2007  (photos at the URL below)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/world/asia/17laos.html

Old U.S. Allies, Still Hiding in Laos

Men who say they fought a secret war for the C.I.A. are still on the
run with their families in the mountain jungles of Laos

By THOMAS FULLER

VIENTIANE PROVINCE, Laos — They call themselves America’s forgotten
soldiers.

Four decades after the Central Intelligence Agency hired thousands of
jungle warriors to fight Communists on the western fringes of the
Vietnam War, men who say they are veterans of that covert operation are
isolated, hungry and periodically hunted by a Laotian Communist
government still mistrustful of the men who sided with America.

“If I surrender, I will be punished,” said Xang Yang, a wiry
58-year-old still capable of crawling nimbly through thick bamboo
underbrush. “They will never forgive me. I cannot live outside the
jungle because I am a former American soldier.”

In a small hillside clearing about nine miles east of the Mekong River,
Mr. Yang and four other veterans scratch out a primitive existence with
their wives and 50 children and grandchildren. Their hidden jungle
encampment is a 15-hour walk up and down low-lying mountains from the
nearest paved road, across streams that are knee-deep in the dry season
but can become roaring torrents when the monsoon comes.

Mr. Yang said his group had been attacked by the Laotian Army twice
this year. In September, soldiers killed a 5-year-old boy, whose grave
is on the outskirts of the camp. In May, a predawn raid killed a woman
and her 2-year-old child. The group moves camp every few weeks to avoid
attack, he said.

They are often miles from any rice paddies or hamlets, but sometimes
they travel at night, with their AK-47s, to get supplies from
sympathetic farmers. They say they got their guns and uniforms from
Laotian troops who fled a firefight in 1999.

The C.I.A. operation, from 1961 until 1975, became known as the secret
war because, unlike in Vietnam, America’s military involvement in Laos
was covert. Instead of sending American ground troops to prevent a
Communist takeover here, the C.I.A. hired tens of thousands of
mercenaries, most of whom were Hmong, a hill-dwelling ethnic minority.

Today, the number of Hmong veterans and their families who remain
hidden in the jungle is somewhere in the hundreds to low thousands,
estimates Amy Archibald, a spokeswoman for the United States Embassy in
Vientiane, the capital.

Their plight, though little known, has received more attention in
recent years, as human rights groups have issued reports condemning the
Laotian government for attacking Hmong who worked with the Americans.

Still, finding the veterans in their camps is an arduous undertaking,
requiring hours of trekking through the jungle. A recent visit to Mr.
Yang’s remote hide-out by this reporter was the first by an American
newspaper, one of about a dozen people to have visited any camp of
veterans of the C.I.A. operation in Laos.

The former fighters and their progeny clearly welcomed the visit. When
this reporter and a photographer arrived at the camp, many of the group
began weeping and saying, in Laotian, “America help us, America help
us.”

Many in the group said they had not seen a Westerner since the war
ended in 1975.

Each of the five veterans in the camp has relatives in the United
States; they say their fading dream is to be reunited with them. Mr.
Yang’s hope is that Washington will “come back to help old soldiers
like me to leave Laos and make it to America.”

“We want America to give us a place to live,” said another veteran, Va
Chang, 60. “We want America to give us food and medicine.

“If the Americans don’t want to do that,” he said, “they should drop a
big bomb on us and end our misery.”

Reports of Attacks

Human rights groups describe a mostly one-sided fight between the
lightly armed and ragged former C.I.A. fighters and a Laotian Army
eager to dislodge them from their jungle hide-outs.

An Amnesty International report released in March said that Laotian
troops had been involved in numerous attacks on the veterans and their
families across northern Laos in recent years, an assessment shared by
American diplomats.

“We find these reports very credible, and we know that there are human
rights abuses by security forces,” Ms. Archibald said. “What we can’t
tell you is who fired the first bullet.”

The State Department’s annual human rights report, released in March,
cited increased efforts by security forces to eliminate scattered
pockets of Hmong fighters. Pressure by the Laotian Army, the report
said, “was intended to starve the remnants of insurgent families from
their jungle dwellings.”

The Laotian government, perhaps wary of the effect the conflict might
have on the country’s thriving tourism industry, denies that any
clashes have occurred or that any C.I.A. veterans are still in hiding.

“There are no Hmong C.I.A. in the jungles,” said Yong Chanthalangsy, a
Foreign Ministry spokesman. “There are no clashes. As you may notice by
traveling in our country, there is a peaceful atmosphere.”

He said Mr. Yang and his group were probably just “bandits.”

On the run for the past three decades, the five men have no documents
proving they fought in the war. But they can cite the code names of
C.I.A. landing strips they guarded and some of the Americans they
served with, including a “Mr. Tony,” possibly Tony Poe, the onetime
leader of the C.I.A.’s operations here who died in 2003.

Shrapnel is still visibly embedded in some of their bodies, and one
veteran, Jangwang Xiong, 57, has a damaged leg, from a clash in 1971
with forces backed by North Vietnam, he said.

Missions for the C.I.A.

The C.I.A. initially hired the Hmong to back the Laotian government in
its fight against a Communist insurgency. Later, during the course of
the Vietnam War, the Hmong were instructed to intercept convoys of
supplies on the series of jungle paths known as the Ho Chi Minh trail,
much of which ran through Laos.

Mr. Chang said he was ordered to defend Lima Site 258, one of dozens of
mountaintop landing strips that the C.I.A. used to hopscotch around the
country with supplies and men.

The group is indigent even by the standards of rural Indochina. Its
members’ diet consists mainly of wild yams collected from the jungle,
bamboo shoots and small animals hunted with bows and arrows.
Occasionally they obtain rice from villagers willing to risk secretive
association with them.

Surrounded by their worn-looking children and grandchildren, the five
men appear older than their years and today bear little resemblance to
the young Hmong tribesmen who collectively earned a reputation as
capable fighters.

Colin Thompson, a C.I.A. officer in Laos from 1963 to 1966, remembers
the Hmong recruits as rugged and loyal.

“There were some extraordinarily brave Hmong,” he said in a telephone
interview from his home in Maryland. “They were a little tougher to
beat back than were the other tribal groups. They stood their ground.”

Mr. Thompson’s job included carrying stacks of Laotian currency for the
Hmong soldiers’ salaries. He is sympathetic to the plight of the
remaining fighters but said Washington need not feel obligated to bring
them to America.

“It wasn’t as if we dragooned them into anything,” he said. “Their
choice was to defend themselves and we provided the means. We provided
the weapons and the courage.”

That view is not shared by the Hmong, many of whom felt betrayed by the
United States when the war ended. Using battered radios, the veterans
here have followed what to them are the confusing events of recent
years: the friendship proclaimed between Vietnam and the United States
and the arrest in June of Vang Pao, the former Hmong general who faces
charges in the United States of plotting to attack the Laotian
government.

Mr. Pao’s indictment in California, after a federal sting operation in
which a government agent posing as an arms dealer offered him weapons,
is bewildering to the veterans here. Attacking Communists was the very
job Mr. Pao was paid to do by the C.I.A.

Mr. Yang and his group say they still hope for a democratic Laos but
have given up any notion that they can assist in the overthrow of the
Communist government.

Mr. Yang said he occasionally spoke with one of his daughters, Mao, a
postal clerk in California, who moved to the United States 27 years ago
after a year in a refugee camp in Thailand.

“I love my father,” Mao Yang said in a phone interview from her home in
Yuba City in the Sacramento Valley. “He is hungry and he says he has no
clothes.”

She said she that recently sent him $1,200 through intermediaries but
that he received only $600.

About 250,000 Laotian refugees moved to the United States in the
decades after the 1975 Communist takeover, including more than 115,000
Hmong. Many Hmong stayed in Laos after the war, living normal lives in
cities or as farmers. And others, including some members of the group
visited here, had the opportunity to seek refugee status in Thailand in
the years after the war but chose to remain in the jungle. With the
newfound friendship between Thailand and Laos, that window has now
closed.

Thousands on the Run

Boon Thang Van, a veteran of the C.I.A. operation who is an adviser to
a United States-based Hmong activist group, the Fact Finding
Commission, says 5,060 people — veterans and their families — are still
in the jungles, most of them in northern Laos.

The group keeps track of them through 12 satellite phones it has
distributed. It has compiled a list of clashes with government troops
and has video showing the bodies of five Hmong children after what it
says was an attack by government troops in May 2004.

Many Hmong have left the jungles in recent years and fled to Thailand,
including 7,800 refugees now in a camp in Phetchabun Province. Of
those, 181 have battlefield-type injuries, according to Doctors Without
Borders, the international aid group.

“It’s clear that the wounds are recent and caused by guns,” said Gilles
Isard, chief of the group’s mission in Thailand. Mr. Isard said many of
the people in the camp who claimed to be former C.I.A. fighters had
photographs of themselves as young soldiers and documents from the
1960s and 1970s that they say confirm their service.

But their renowned fighting spirit has all but disappeared. Nou Chue
Xiong, 68, another of the veterans here, seemed resigned to die in the
jungle.

“I guess you will leave here and try to help us,” Mr. Xiong told his
visitor. “But if you can’t, don’t be sad.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company