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RECOLLECTIONS: Before Contragate There Was Laos

By Bob Anderson

When I flew out of Saigon in 1968 I thought I had left the Vietnam War behind me. But the war has had a way of reappearing in my life. Many vets experience the same thing.

Although I didn't know it at the time, the missions I was flying were test programs for what was to become a massive CIA operation in Southeast Asia, code-named the Phoenix program. Phoenix was later expanded to South Vietnam where an estimated 60,000 non-combatants were killed. It is disgusting to know I was used for that.

Following the Iran-contra hearing brought some of the bitterness of the experience back. I learned that retired Air Force Major General Richard Secord was the head of the covert operations group to which I was assigned in Laos. He was later joined there by a young associate, a second lieutenant named Oliver North. U.S. military involvement in Laos at that time was forbidden by Congress, so everything we did was secret—and illegal.

Since Tahket is closer to Hanoi than Saigon it was a jumping-off point for the Plain of Jars battlefield and interdiction of the Ho Chi Minh trail. Tahket was a laid-back town, sparsely populated with the typical open-air farmers' market full of fruit and hanging meat selections. I can still smell the odor and feel the flies. Fisherman sold fish caught in the muddy Mekong and merchants displayed clothes, watches and soap powders. A few kilometers out of town, preparations for the surprise Tet Offensive were in full swing, and we knew nothing about it.

I was part of the demolition team of two that flew from Thailand to Laos in an unmarked gray turbo-prop Porter PC-6 short landing and take-off brush plane. A nameless pilot picked us up at Nakhom Phanom AFB, Thailand.

I knew the big brass was around that day from the way other GIs were acting. The high-ranking officers used code names and wore special aviator sunglasses. Lower-ranking men knew when the big chiefs were around. They came and went in a twin-engine Cessna 401. It was a beautiful plane, painted blue and white just like Air Force 1. In red paint it was marked Air America, the CIA airline. The Cessna flew out of the big U.S. Air Force base at Udorn, Thailand—CIA headquarters for the covert war.

We parked the awkward looking Porter next to the Cessna. We had GI crew cuts covered with various floppy hats, and wore blue jean, tee-shirts and boots in an attempt to look non-military. Since most American are taller than the average Lao, we naturally stood out. Another American and several Laotians were refueling the Cessna with a hand pump from 55-gallon drums stacked nearby.

We went into the tin-roofed building which served as Tahket headquarters Maps hung on the walls. Radio operators were busy talking. I counted the pins on the map. Tahket was one of 73 such sites in Laos.

The international Control Commission, a United Nations peace-keeping patrol, and a U.S. TV crew were due in town, so all Americans had to leave the air field while the Laotians remained in charge. The brass took off in the Cessna and were out of sight. The rest of us went to the CIA safe house, a new bungalow built high off the ground on a back street of town. That night we partied in the cooler air at a caf? with other pilots and ground crew members. This was to by my routine for a year. Fly in, get briefed and go out on assignment.

The next morning another Porter Pc-6 arrived at the air field. It was the mail run plane for daily supply flights and mail service, and in-country CIA taxi service. The ICC and media had come and gone and the base was back to normal. WE hung around while the plane fueled up and we were off to the crash site down country.

The operation in Laos was run by active duty pilots and cooks and people like me "on loan' to the CIA. There were no orders or files to record any of this. A top secret security clearance had us sworn to secrecy. We could be punished for speaking out. I thought it was an adventure, right out of some move. The criminal nature of it didn't even occur to me. The operation was so extensive I figured it was authorized by the commander-in-chief.

The radio code name for Laos was "Texas," taken from a popular western frontier movie of the period called "Texas Across the River." And just like the movies, things change fast in secret wars. As our flight banked for the landing approach a caller on the radio warned us to pull up fast. They had just lost control of the field we were to land in. We circled around trying to see what was going on. The turbo engine was very noisy so we couldn't determine the direction of ground fire. The radio had gone silent.

We stayed high out of rifle and rocket range. At another site overrun like this one, some of my fellow demo teammates were awarded Bronze Stars for recovering bodies. Not being armed yet ( we were to pick up weapons after we landed) and low on fuel, we flew to Pakse, Laos, near the Cambodian-Vietnamese border.

The runway at Pakse was a field of bushed and part of a road. We taxied up to a group of Laotian men at the edge of a clearing. A meeting was in progress. As we unloaded our demolition equipment, a couple of Americans were talking to a translator. About a dozen Meo tribesmen—young men and boys not more than 10 or 12 years old—were lounging about. There were backpacks, rifles, and boxes of ammunition scattered on the ground.

One of the advisors was demonstrating an Instamatic-type cameras, telling the group leader that if they wanted credit for their kills they must take photos. After practicing with the camera while, the group got up, pulled on their backpacks and headed off into the jungle. We picked up our gear, and went off with the advisors (who turned out to be Green Berets) to a new camp built under the jungle canopy.

For the next week we worked with some of the Meo tribesmen at this forward base camp, instructing them in demolition techniques and general explosives safety. We received more bombs and rockets from another plane that had been shot down. I thought the Meo were supposed to be interdicting the Ho Chi Minh trail. Later some Green Berets told me that the assassination of village leaders, record keepers and opponents was their main job. This was a new area being pacified and those opposed or thought to be Communist were being eliminated. I thought we were training warriors; instead we were training assassins. This was pacification—CIA style; search out and destroy.

I never expected the embassy ID to protect us. I didn't think this line of reasoning would convince the North Vietnamese or Pathet Lao not to kill us. We knew if we were killed and our bodies not recovered, our families would be told we were missing in action. I four bodies were recovered, like some we did recover, it would be said we were killed in a construction accident in Thailand where we were officially assigned.

Around this time I took an R & R leave to a missionary settlement in Chaing Mai, Thailand in the golden triangle area of Burma, Laos and Thailand. We toured a valley where opium flourished.

The missionaries were trying to help the farmers convert to some other crop. A long struggle had been going on among three local warlords for control of the region. At the time I didn't connect opium with what I was doing, but later back in Laos I found myself sitting on an unmarked C-47 between some big bundles of poppy plants.

But in reports on the Iran-contra hearing I found out that the CIA was involved in helping warlord Vang Pao eliminate his competitors to gain control of the opium trade. In return Van Pao used the profits to pay Meo tribesmen like those I had trained in southern Laos. Air America was actually helping to transport the opium around Indochina and into the U.S. market for sale. There are echoes of this in Central America today, according to incidents brought to light in the Christie Institute lawsuit. The suit charges that the Contras have been operating a cocaine transportation network through the northern jungles of Costa Rica. In addition, the suit claims that members of the drug conspiracy attempted to assassinate renegade Contra leader Eden Pastora. Instead, they killed eight bystanders. Reporter Tony Avirgan, one of the plaintiffs in the suit, was injured.

At the time I didn't think too much of it. I was just doing my job. Laos was the training ground for using official military networks as a cover to run an illegal shadow government. It was easy in the 1980's to take up supplying the Contras when Congress tried to contain the war with the Boland amendment. They had all the pieces in place. And I had been a part of it, unknowingly.

Major General Richard Secord is a West Point graduate and a veteran of 285 combat missions. During the war, men like him were my great heroes, and I followed them without question, often flying to unknown risk at great peril.

Like General Secord I went to college on the GI Bill when I came home from the war. While I was writing papers for my BA in American Studies and English Literature, Second wrote a thesis for the War College entitled "Unconventional Warfare/Covert Operations as an Instrument of U.S. Foreign Policy" in which he said, "...bureaucratic obstacles (like Congressional oversight) should be dismissed out of hand" (New York times, May 5, 1987). General Secord to my knowledge has never repudiated his War College.

Lyndon Johnson was another hero I followed without question at the time. I was on duty at Ubon AFB. Thailand, the night President Johnson secretly flew from Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam to pep talk the F-4 fighter pilots under Col Cappie James, the first black to later make general in the U.S. Ubon's pilots tangled with MIG's bombarding the Red River Valley Bridge around Hanoi. Their target, despite official announcements to the contrary, was the river dikes. When broken these would flood the rice-growing plains causing mass starvation.

Covert policy means assassination, invasions and war. Covert warfare as in Laos or Central America today cannot function without presidential approval; it is simply too massive and complex. The Vietnamese and Russians in Laos were targets, so they knew almost everything going on in the secret war. It has become apparent to me that the target of covert war is the American Congress and public's right to know and to be educated—and to make decisions.

The debate is not about who is to conduct foreign policy, but rather who is going to run this country; a set of checks and balances or a covert government. What we are seeing now is U.S. foreign policy being formulated and conducted covertly, as opposed to using covert methods to implement democratically debated foreign policy.

The Congressional Committee investigating the Iran-Contra deal cannot assign responsibility by focusing on Secord or North alone. This is not Watergate—it is much more serious. It's about whether or not we as a nation continue the democratic process started 200 years ago. The issue is who can make war in the name of the American people. Will it be left to renegades, war profiteers and self-righteous patriots? Let's hope Congress wakes up before it is too late. Otherwise history may record they key battle to defend 200 years of Constitutional checks and balances will be lost to ideological bandits claiming their brand of patriotism is more important than the democratic process. Oliver North may as well have shredded the Constitution if Congress lets these crimes pass.

—Bob Anderson
VVAW Pittsburgh