"The Laos Fraud"
The American government, the American press, and you and I along with them, swallowed The Big Deception from Laos, hook, line, and sinker; and when the truth appeared at last, we made scarcely a gulp of protest.
William J. Lederer
A Nation of Sheep
Norton, 1961
The Early Phase
What followed the successful escape of UCPL Battalion No. 2 into North Viet-Nam was probably one of the worst fiascos of Western policy in Laos or, for that matter, in the Far East. What makes this crisis even worse than some of the other recent American fiascos, such as the U-2 or Cuba, is that it has remained largely unreported or erroneously related in the American press, while the press of most of the other non-Communist countries—notably that of Great Britain, France, Australia, and Canada-reported a story that was almost diametrically opposed to that fed the American public, and, apparently, even to American officialdom. It was left to a few more enterprising and imaginative American journalists and to Captain William J. Lederer (USN, Retired), the co-author of The Ugly American and the author of A Nation of Sheep, finally to bring out the truth of the story to the American public as well. Unfortunately, this was done far too late to do any good for public understanding of what was at issue in Laos, with the result that for almost two years the American view of what was happening in that remote part of Asia had a rather curious quality of "everybody-is-out-of-step-but-me" when compared with what other responsible Western sources, both official and in the news media, had to say about the situation.
Basically, the two versions of the facts can be boiled down to the following: The official American version, also shared by the Royal Laotian government and in fact based very often on information released by the latter, accused the Pathet Lao of having started the hostilities and of having continued them with the help of not only Communist North Vietnamese equipment but of a North Vietnamese invasion force whose size was variously estimated as ranging from between three to eleven battalions (2000 to 9000 men);1 the British-French view of the situation was that, politically, the Laotian government and its American supporters had largely themselves to blame for the outbreak of the fighting and that the Royal Laotian Army was so demoralized that the Pathet Lao could defeat it piecemeal without Viet-Minh assistance save for some ammunition and equipment and a few communications and other technicians.
In fact, as calmer counsel began to prevail in the United States, the British-French view of the initial phase of the crisis began to be accepted here even among government specialists—although nowhere was a correct version of the facts ever issued publicly for the information of the average citizen and of Congress, as was done later in the case of the U-2 and the Cuban crisis. Americans specializing in Chinese Communist affairs, who studied the 1959 crisis strictly from the technical viewpoint and without any particular axes to grind, summed up the situation as follows:
In retrospect it is apparent that the Sananikone government precipitated the final crisis that led to war in Laos; it also is apparent that while the Sananikone government knew, at the time, that it was running a serious risk of open conflict with the NLHX and its mentors in Hanoi, the pattern of Communist behavior up through mid-May had not been sufficiently belligerent to deter it. To each of the successive crises the Communist replies bad been primarily verbal.2
Certainly, there is no reason to believe the Pathet Lao's objective in Laos had ever been anything but a complete take-over. This does not mean, however, that the Pathet Lao, having reverted to the "legal struggle" pattern in November 1957 and having made a good showing in the 1958 election, had any particular reason to resort again to revolutionary warfare in May 1959—the more so as its whole political and military leadership was in the royal capital of Vientiane, a virtual hostage of the royal government. That it indeed was in such an exposed position was amply proven when, in the sole successful operation of the whole Laos crisis of 1959, in July the royal government arrested and jailed all the major Pathet Lao leaders. It is highly unlikely that as experienced and wily a group of guerrilla leaders as Prince Souphanouvong and his aides would have started the rebellion without at least taking adequate measures for their own safety. Thus, it is not difficult to agree with Sisouk na Champas-sak (certainly no friend of the Pathet Lao as a member of the COIN and General Phoumi's regime) when he states:
Although the Neo Lao Hak Xat leaders in Vientiane launched the rebellion, they soon were powerless to stop it, even if they wanted to. They lost all control over it. Not only were they from the beginning under surveillance and completely cut off from their troops, but with the start of guerrilla warfare, the military leaders naturally held the reins. After May 15, it was no longer Souphanouvong who led the rebellion, but men like Kayson and Charo Nien and their lieutenants.8
According to Sisouk, Souphanouvong even tried to "reverse the trend," offering to intercede with the rebels in order to induce them to lay down their arms, bat the Lao government rejected his offers. Curiously, Sisouk avers that the Communists in Peking and Hanoi were probably happy at the removal of Souphanouvong from the scene and the temporary transfer of power to the "young wolves" of the UCPL who were thirsting for battle —for exactly that same picture could now be seen in the Royal Laotian camp, where the "young wolves" of the CDIN and the as yet largely untried military leaders of the Royal Laotian Army now seemed extremely eager to test their mettle with the UCPL.
On the face of it, there was truly no reason why the Laotian Army should not have thought itself sufficiently strong to destroy the Pathet Lao in battle: The only Pathet Lao force in the field was about 500 men strong who had among them less than 400 weapons, and they had to face a "national army of 25,000, trained and staffed for modem warfare, and supported by air transport." The only thing that was wrong with that appraisal of the situation was that the kind of war about to be fought was not "modern warfare" but a far more insidious kind of war that, for want of a better term, is best described as "revolutionary war."
Much has been said lately, both by specialists and laymen alike, about various types of covert operations designed to bring about the collapse °f an enemy without resorting to the horrors of nuclear war. The tactics to achieve such an end have been variously dubbed: guerrilla warfare, special warfare, unconventional warfare, sublimited warfare, and most recently, "internal war." As in the case of some mysterious diseases its name became the fancier as the extent of our ignorance about the subject became better known. Yet that old specialist in that kind of warfare, Mao Tse-tung, had given it its proper name as early as 1936: That name was "revolutionary warfare." It was left to French Army officers whose dire experience with the subject in Indo-China and Algeria is a matter of record, to give the problem more than passing attention. In particular, one Colonel Gabriel Bonnet made it the subject of a well-researched book—Les Guerres insurrectionnelles et revolutionnaires (1958)—which, although almost completely unknown in the United States, is the "bible" on that particular subject. Bonnet defines revolutionary warfare as "the application of guerrilla warfare principles to the furtherance of an ideology or the extension of effective political control." In other words, in the kind of war which the West had been fighting against the Soviet bloc since the first Berlin blockade of 1948, the major target is not square miles of Laotian jungle or the beach-front hotels of Havana but the minds and allegiance of billions of people who have yet to make up their minds as to whether the Communist system or our way of life is more likely to fulfill their aspirations. For that kind of war—the only kind of "modern war" that continues to pay handsome dividends even in the face of nuclear arsenals—the Royal Laotian Army was woefully unprepared and no lavish amounts of American surplus weaponry were likely to close the psychological armament gap.
In addition, the very technology of guerrilla warfare made the task of the Royal Laotian Army a hopeless one. In a study prepared by the United States Army Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, which included a survey of all guerrilla wars fought throughout the world over the past twenty years, it was found that a single guerrilla fighter can tie down ten or more conventional soldiers, can kill fifteen conventional soldiers for every guerrilla fatality, and will only spend twenty percent of the ammunition required to effect a casualty as compared to the conventional soldier's expenditure, thanks to the guerrilla's motivation, training, and courage.4 Those hard statistical factors have proved correct in the case of the Soviet partisans behind German lines in Russia, of the French maqitis and of the Yugoslav partisans, of Fidel Castro's followers and of the Viet-Minh, and finally of the Pathet Lao. Once the Pathet Lao rebellion hit its stride in the late summer of 1959, and its fighting swelled to over 2500 men, as a result of reinforcements by large parts of UCPL 1 battalion No. 1, which, as will be seen, slipped out of Xieng-Ngeun on x August 8, 1959, and by Black T'ai mountaineers from both sides of the North Vietnamese border, it would have taken (on the basis of the tie-down ratios established at Fort Bragg) the whole Laotian Army merely to break even in a fight with them.
Unfortunately, it was very obvious that the Laotian Army could not be entirely concentrated in the northern areas where most of the Pathet Lao were operating because—and this is a fact that was hidden from the American public at least until late 1961-much of southern Laos was as badly infiltrated as the better publicized north. Furthermore, the problem of feeding and supplying 25,000 men in the roadless jungles of northern Laos would have far exceeded the logistical capabilities of the Laotian Army. Another fact that had to be taken into consideration was that no one knew exactly what the size of the Laotian Army really was; in all likelihood, it was probably closer to a figure of 20,000 men than to the theoretical 25,000 who were supported by United States aid. (Later, as the crisis got worse, defections and desertions, along with the disaffection of some of the paratroops and other units under the command of Captain Kong-LS, reduced the combat strength of the royal Laotian troops under the effective control of Premier Boun Oum to about 10,000—although at one time the United States paid salaries for almost 40,000 Lao troops and policemen).
While the equipment of the Laotian Army certainly was "modem," i.e., composed of standard-issue infantry weapons and field artillery, little effort had been made to adapt either the equipment or the troops to the missions they most likely would have to fulfill in case of an armed conflict. Here, the French, who, by virtue of die 1954 Geneva Agreements, were the only foreign instructors allowed to remain in Laos, cannot escape a certain measure of blame. Falling from one extreme into the other, the French, in order not to be accused of exercising command prerogatives in an army which no longer was theirs, allegedly also failed in providing the Laotians with sufficient training leadership. Moreover, in order to avoid any possible clashes of national pride, most of the officers with previous experience in Laos were transferred out of the country and replaced by training personnel largely devoid of fighting experience in Indo-China.
But there existed, aside from the training problem, a definite morale problem in the Laotian Army. The widespread corruption which prevailed m the civilian government circles in Laos also had contaminated the military; soon, most of the senior army officers owned newly built villa, in the $50,000-plus class and even the simple lieutenants at least enjoyed the illicit use of an army vehicle for their private needs. With such little moral guidance to go on, the troops reacted in kind: In 1959 it was discovered that all the paratroops boots in stock had been sold on the black market, and the commanding general of the northern army area had to take money out of his headquarters funds to buy basketball sneakers from the Chinese merchants in Vientiane as substitute paratroop boots until new ones could be found. In another instance, verified by American observers, Laotian paratroopers refused to carry out a particular operation, announcing that "they would not march through the jungle like common infantry,"5 because they could not be parachuted directly on the target. If one couples to those observations the fact that the bulk of the troops were raised from among the lowland Laotians whose experience with the jungle highlands was slight, one has here all the makings of a military defeat regardless of the amount of foreign aid and the quality of the foreign military advisers. Thus, it can be said fairly that the Sananikone government and its American advisers definitely overestimated the ability of the Laotian armed forces to solve by military means a politically unsound situation.