Hybrid warfare is as old as they go
Recently relevant case in point: Laos. Obama did try to heal old wounds while visiting the South-East Asian country. He was actually the first US president to visit Laos - ever. Still, the country has half a century old grudge with the US. The American invasion in Laos had all the features of a horror thriller movie from the Vietnam War times. One only with losing sides in it. And the biggest loser of them all was of course the people of Laos.
They were relentlessly bombed by the US between 1964 and 1973. The first 5 years were actually secret war - even the US Congress was kept in the dark about it. The US unloaded over 2 million tons of bombs over Laos, many of them never exploding. 1/3 of the country is still covered with cluster bombs today, many are still taking lives. Some regions will probably never be fully cleaned.
In fact, Laos was just a supplementary battleground during the bigger Vietnam War. The country remained officially neutral all throughout. The 1962 Geneva agreement was supposed to guarantee Laos' neutrality, and the UN was supposed to oversee its implementation. But Laos had become a toy in the paws of the Great Powers long before. Two factors were crucial in this respect: their long border with Vietnam, and America's notion that the domino effect was imminent, and if South Vietnam fell, the entire SE Asia would become communist - and Laos was a major piece in that chess-game.
There was indeed an armed communist militia in Laos at the time, the Pathet Lao. And North Vietnam was supplying the Viet Cong insurgency in the South via the so called Ho Chi Minh Line, part of which was passing through Laos. So Laos became the ground of one of CIA's biggest operations ever. The Americans recruited and trained members of various mountain clans to create an army, then supplied that army, and sent it to fight Pathet Lao and Viet Cong.
A specific place played a particularly important role in all this, and it wasn't even shown on any map: Long Tieng. It's 130 km north of Vientiane, right in the middle of the tropical rainforest, and it's where a 1.3 km plane track and a secret base for 40 thousand people was built. There are books by Roger Warner who has investigated the Laotian Civil War in depth. He has made hundreds of interviews with contemporaries, and has collected thousands of documents. He tells the story of how the US cargo planes were using that track non-stop for many months, nearly 400 landings a day, most of them carried out by Air America, a 100% property of CIA. They were delivering supplies, arms, ammo, and transporting US instructors to train the local friendly clansmen.
Warner describes how James William Lair was the mastermind behind this operation. Before Laos, Lair had worked in Thailand, training spec ops groups for the CIA. In the early 60s he moved to Laos. His people worked as instructors, advisors and agents. Lair established contacts with Vang Pao, the commander in chief of the Laotian military. Vang Pao was impressed by Lair's idea of creating a guerrilla army for him. At its peak, that army numbered 40 thousand, mostly people from Pao's own clan, loyal to the death to him. Still, despite the good equipment and the massive air support from the US, Pao's guerrilla army suffered a series of defeats in an increasingly bloody conflict. The CIA did not relent though, they trained other such groups in the remote mountain regions of Laos. They kept sending agents there, some of whom started their own mini-wars in their respective areas - which they all lost eventually.
It was a bloody mess, and the US would stop at nothing to achieve its goals, regardless of the human cost. There are lots of individual stories from that time that have become inspiration for various books and movies. One example is Anthony Poshepny (Tony Poe), a WW2 veteran who was sent by the CIA to NW Laos. The WSJ describes him in an obituary after his passing in 2003, openly noting he was a CIA agent who had left the civilised world for marrying a local clan princess, and being notorious for collecting the severed heads and ears of his enemies.
Roger Warner had personally met with Poshepny, and he describes him as a weird drunkard who was however a skillful story-teller. And former CIA agent Jim Schofield remembers how once Poshepny showed up dead-drunk at the US embassy in Vientiane, armed with a machine-gun in one hand and a machete in the other. Many recognise the prototype for Col. Kurtz in him, the one from Coppola's Apocalypse Now. A CIA historian, Ahern writes in his foreword to his book about the secret war in Laos that for almost all CIA participants in Laos, that war became the "magnum opus" of their professional career. And while the Western public keeps being thoroughly fascinated and simultaneously horrified by those semi-fictitious stories that have earned literature and cinema awards to their authors, for the people of Laos, such testaments sound extremely cynical even now, as the first US president to visit their country is doing the first timid steps to heal those wounds. Too little, too late?
They were relentlessly bombed by the US between 1964 and 1973. The first 5 years were actually secret war - even the US Congress was kept in the dark about it. The US unloaded over 2 million tons of bombs over Laos, many of them never exploding. 1/3 of the country is still covered with cluster bombs today, many are still taking lives. Some regions will probably never be fully cleaned.
In fact, Laos was just a supplementary battleground during the bigger Vietnam War. The country remained officially neutral all throughout. The 1962 Geneva agreement was supposed to guarantee Laos' neutrality, and the UN was supposed to oversee its implementation. But Laos had become a toy in the paws of the Great Powers long before. Two factors were crucial in this respect: their long border with Vietnam, and America's notion that the domino effect was imminent, and if South Vietnam fell, the entire SE Asia would become communist - and Laos was a major piece in that chess-game.
There was indeed an armed communist militia in Laos at the time, the Pathet Lao. And North Vietnam was supplying the Viet Cong insurgency in the South via the so called Ho Chi Minh Line, part of which was passing through Laos. So Laos became the ground of one of CIA's biggest operations ever. The Americans recruited and trained members of various mountain clans to create an army, then supplied that army, and sent it to fight Pathet Lao and Viet Cong.
A specific place played a particularly important role in all this, and it wasn't even shown on any map: Long Tieng. It's 130 km north of Vientiane, right in the middle of the tropical rainforest, and it's where a 1.3 km plane track and a secret base for 40 thousand people was built. There are books by Roger Warner who has investigated the Laotian Civil War in depth. He has made hundreds of interviews with contemporaries, and has collected thousands of documents. He tells the story of how the US cargo planes were using that track non-stop for many months, nearly 400 landings a day, most of them carried out by Air America, a 100% property of CIA. They were delivering supplies, arms, ammo, and transporting US instructors to train the local friendly clansmen.
Warner describes how James William Lair was the mastermind behind this operation. Before Laos, Lair had worked in Thailand, training spec ops groups for the CIA. In the early 60s he moved to Laos. His people worked as instructors, advisors and agents. Lair established contacts with Vang Pao, the commander in chief of the Laotian military. Vang Pao was impressed by Lair's idea of creating a guerrilla army for him. At its peak, that army numbered 40 thousand, mostly people from Pao's own clan, loyal to the death to him. Still, despite the good equipment and the massive air support from the US, Pao's guerrilla army suffered a series of defeats in an increasingly bloody conflict. The CIA did not relent though, they trained other such groups in the remote mountain regions of Laos. They kept sending agents there, some of whom started their own mini-wars in their respective areas - which they all lost eventually.
It was a bloody mess, and the US would stop at nothing to achieve its goals, regardless of the human cost. There are lots of individual stories from that time that have become inspiration for various books and movies. One example is Anthony Poshepny (Tony Poe), a WW2 veteran who was sent by the CIA to NW Laos. The WSJ describes him in an obituary after his passing in 2003, openly noting he was a CIA agent who had left the civilised world for marrying a local clan princess, and being notorious for collecting the severed heads and ears of his enemies.
Roger Warner had personally met with Poshepny, and he describes him as a weird drunkard who was however a skillful story-teller. And former CIA agent Jim Schofield remembers how once Poshepny showed up dead-drunk at the US embassy in Vientiane, armed with a machine-gun in one hand and a machete in the other. Many recognise the prototype for Col. Kurtz in him, the one from Coppola's Apocalypse Now. A CIA historian, Ahern writes in his foreword to his book about the secret war in Laos that for almost all CIA participants in Laos, that war became the "magnum opus" of their professional career. And while the Western public keeps being thoroughly fascinated and simultaneously horrified by those semi-fictitious stories that have earned literature and cinema awards to their authors, for the people of Laos, such testaments sound extremely cynical even now, as the first US president to visit their country is doing the first timid steps to heal those wounds. Too little, too late?