The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (46 page)

The battle to retake Sam Thong now got underway. The enemy were pounded by air and ground artillery, and Meo units moved out in the afternoon of March 24 to clear them from the ridge. They beat off an enemy counterattack, and after the 7th Air Force managed to launch 185 sorties the enemy finally withdrew two days later.

By the end of the month, Gen. Vang Pao had retaken Sam Thong. Morrison wrote in his journal: ‘A bad six days; these last have been. A tally of 3 T-28s, 2 O-1 s and 1 U-17 with two dead or presumed so (Hank and Dick) and one hurt rather badly. But we’ve retaken Sam Thong - is it worth the cost I wonder?’
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The misstatements included in the presidential pronouncement on Laos were spice to the media. There had never been a great deal of interest in Laos before, except as a charming, exotic side trip to be tagged onto a stint in Vietnam. Suddenly the world’s press corps was attracted to the country.

In Sullivan’s time the press had been mostly sympathetic to American goals and were surprisingly compliant to the ambassador’s request that they observe discretion in their reporting of the ‘secret’ war. The Soviet Union was sensitive to publicity given to American activities in the country, he explained, and it could sabotage the agreement between them. ‘It’s one of the few areas of agreement we have with them.’
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The political situation in Laos was complex, and the press corps had to operate without the benefit of helicopters laid on for them by the military, so most visiting journalists settled for a ‘color’ piece and a visit to Madame Lulu’s oral sex parlor.

‘I did not consider the press a problem,’ Sullivan said. ‘They were always pleading to be allowed to go up to Long Tieng and all these exotic places where they knew things to be going on, but of course we would jolly them along and not let them go.’
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In the war next door in Vietnam a fluctuating press corps of around five hundred men and women covered the story, while in Laos there were rarely more than half a dozen visiting journalists, and only one permanent American correspondent. (There was also a Frenchman from Agence France Presse, whose reports went largely ignored by monoglot foreign editors in America - press reports of life under the Pathet Lao and the bombing had appeared in the French press in mid-1968, but had been ignored in the United States.)
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The news agencies were covered by stringers: a Chinese who worked for UPI, and a native Lao who wrote for Associated Press. Both had wives and children in the country, which obliged them not to rock the boat.

The single American had ended up in Laos by accident. T.D. Allman had applied to the
Bangkok Post
for a job and was sent to Laos on the sole qualification of being able to speak French. He was paid seventy-five dollars a month - an adequate amount in Vientiane at the time, and a fortune after the forty dollars he had received as a member of the Peace Corps in Nepal. Laos, where Allman had an entire war to himself and a secret one at that, was a young reporter’s dream.

He had arrived in July 1968, and while no one from the outside world read his reports in the
Bangkok Post
, other journalists did. Allman was a clever young man and wrote well, and before long he was the stringer for
Time-Life
, the
New York Times
, and the
Washington Post
, various Australian newspapers and magazines, and the
Far Eastern Economic Review
. ‘Nobody had ever really told the story and I started writing it. I was the right person in the right place at the right time. I was sitting there and every word I wrote was published everywhere in the world.’
[193]

Unlike previous journalists, who were sympathetic to the American position and complied with the embassy’s requests for restraint, Allman was opposed to the war. ‘I wound up being a war correspondent because I didn’t want to get drafted.’

By 1970 the embassy had turned into a sieve full of disaffected foreign service officers ready and willing to leak. There had been plenty of press reports over the years on the war, but none of substance. The success of Operation About-Face in 1969 had attracted outside press interest and raised questions about the extent of U.S. involvement in the country, but it was extraordinary that the ‘secret’ war had remained secret for as long as it had.

It was Allman who followed up rumors of the B-52 raid on the Plain of Jars and reported the sea of refugees supposedly created by the raids, and both stories were published in the
New York Times
. (Agence France Presse had carried the first report of the B-52 raid, in a low-key, unsensational story. Again, this was not picked up in the States.) Allman had gone to his own sources inside the U.S. embassy and had the story wrapped up in twelve hours.

The official spokesman, Jerry Doolittle, explained the new policy to the journalist. ‘Pssst, got a big secret for you.’ He spread his arms to underline the irony. ‘We fight a wider war with fewer troops -
we can’t lose.’

It was Allman who had been at the embassy briefing which had announced forty thousand enemy troops the night before the president announced a much higher figure. (When Allman went back to the embassy the following day for an explanation he was told, ‘The president must have access to information we don’t have.’) It was Allman who had filed stories of Americans killed in Laos. ‘It wasn’t difficult to get the stories. I spoke French and a little Lao. The Lao are very nice people. You would ask them what a building was and they would say,’ ‘Oh, that’s where the OLA work - they direct the bombing of the PDJ from there.”’

Reporters who had been told for years that only ‘armed reconnaissance’ was being conducted in Laos - and who had failed to understand the true meaning of the military euphemism - now began to see for themselves the extent of U.S. bombing in the country. They were appalled. ‘The continuous hell of bombing compelled them to live in caves,’ an English reporter wrote about life on the Plain of Jars. ‘Anything that moved was hit... by 1969 the bombing became so heavy that they had to abandon their villages
....
As one villager put it, “the bombs fell like a man sowing seed.” ‘ Journalists who interviewed refugees from the plain were given a horrific picture of life under the bombing. Other writers contrasted the breathtaking natural beauty of the plain against the destruction wrought by the bombing. ‘Xieng Khouang was mostly rubble and Khang Khay was a shell of houses.’
[194]

The press now discovered Laos with a vengeance, and a swarm of 150 of them flew up from Saigon. They were taken to Pakse in the panhandle, but clamored to go to the north; they were flown up to Luang Prabang, but soon grew bored with the temples. In an effort to placate them, they were taken to Sam Thong to see the 200-bed hospital and schools of the civic action program, which would at least allow them a Plain of Jars dateline. Pop Buell, the local celebrity, was wheeled out, but things seemed disappointingly peaceful. It was all something of an anticlimax. They wanted the war.

Among the correspondents was T. D. Allman, who was accompanying John Saar,
Life
bureau chief from Saigon, and Max Coffait, from Agence France Presse. The three men found the trip exceedingly dull. ‘I’m so bored I wish I’d never got out of bed,’ Allman complained. Coffait nodded toward a track which climbed into the mountains - it was the road to Long Tieng, the secret city.

No pressman had ever visited the base, and Coffait suggested they try to walk to it. What did they have to lose? The men, festooned with cameras, began to walk toward the road, trying to look casual, as if going for a stroll, and expecting to be stopped at any moment. They reached the end of the valley and began to trudge up the hill. No voices shouted from behind them, and there were no running feet. As they crested the hill they could see Long Tieng a long way off below them. Allman knew from the first glimpse of the place that he was on to a big story. ‘There it was - this gigantic, secret base. It wasn’t New York - but it was the busiest American base I had seen anywhere.’

A jeep came along the road, driven by a native soldier. They flagged it down and were given a lift into the town (they must have looked much like CIA men to the soldier). The first thing they saw in Long Tieng was a sign in English on a barber shop, ‘Welcome.’ They walked around the town and runway area for forty-five minutes, attempting to talk to Americans. But they did not need to speak to anyone to get their story. Here was a base bristling with antennae and Americans, Thai troops (who were not supposed even to be in Laos], and numerous war planes. From the journalists’ viewpoint it was ample proof that Americans were actively involved in violating the Geneva Accords.

A portly, casually dressed American walked up to the journalists. He seemed amused by their presence. Allman knew he was CIA and took his photograph.

‘You’re T.D. Allman, aren’t you?’ the CIA man asked good-naturedly.

‘Of course I am! What’s your name?’

‘You know I can’t tell you that.’ He took the cameras. ‘We’ll give them back to you after we’ve exposed the film.’ He also confiscated Coffait’s notebook. He then told them an embassy official would fly up from Vientiane to escort them back.

The journalists settled down to wait, enjoying themselves in what they knew to be the greatest caper any reporter had ever pulled in Laos. ‘We were in no way mistreated,’ Allman said. ‘Treated perfectly courteously. It was fun.’

But Gen. Vang Pao had heard of the journalists’ intrusion into his secret world and was not amused. Foreign reporters had gatecrashed the base, and according to his CIA advisers, no one could stop them from leaving and publishing their stories, which, without doubt, would have far-reaching political consequences. He was furious.

In the general’s eyes, the journalists were no more than spies, and he wanted them dealt with as spies. He gave the order to have them killed. The idea was to set the journalists up in a jeep and blast them, and to attribute their deaths to enemy action. It would have been easy enough to stage. The general waved his hand toward the mountains. ‘Many, many enemy.’

His CIA advisers drew deep breaths. They had seen the general summarily execute prisoners, directly against their wishes, just to demonstrate who was in charge. To provoke him when angry could be disastrous. They spoke quietly, trying to change his mind, arguing that to kill the men would make enemies of the entire press corps, who would remain in Laos to cause even more trouble. The citizens of three countries - America, France, and Britain - were involved, and their deaths would invoke an outcry. Much as they sympathized with the general’s feelings, killing foreign journalists was more trouble than it was worth.

Perhaps the general accepted the political arguments put forward, or perhaps he thought it was yet another example of the half-cocked American way of doing things. Journalists had infiltrated his secret compound, uninvited and unwanted, and the CIA met them with smiles and arranged for a plane to take them home, where they would expose Long Tieng to the world. But he let them live, and they boarded an Air America plane to fly back to Vientiane - the 160-kilometer ride back to Vientiane cost $450, which the journalists complained about bitterly (they might have thought it cheap had they realized the fate which almost befell them).

The story the journalists filed in 1970 blew the cover on Long Tieng and the secret war for good. The Ravens had been seen in their O-1s and were described: ‘There were several O-1E reconnaissance planes, flown by U.S. pilots and used to mark targets for American jet bombers we heard roaring overhead ... Farther down the runway were three Jolly Green helicopters ... living proof that the U.S. bombs Laos ... their American crews wore US Air Force flight uniforms ... We calculated an American aircraft landed or took off each minute. U.S. helicopters were stacked in a holding pattern above the valley, waiting to land. Long Tieng, with 40,000 people, is one of Laos’ largest settlements, but because its existence is supposed to be a secret it appears on few maps ... There are more radio antennae in Long Tieng than trees ... Most ... sprout from CIA houses which are easily recognized by the air conditioners protruding from windowless buildings.’
[195]

The secret war was out in the open, and one of the consequences of almost a decade of secrecy would be an almost permanent bad press from now on. Embassy attempts to balance the picture with press releases on enemy activity were not believed and were mostly ignored. It was the inevitable price of secrecy disclosed. The press, once so indulgent, now became a scourge. It began to seem that Laos, forgotten and ignored for so long, was now to be featured regularly on the front pages of the world’s newspapers. But a coup against Sihanouk in Cambodia (another country the press had mostly ignored throughout the war), followed by a U.S. invasion, shifted interest to the sideshow war there. Laos, it seemed, was never able to capture the world’s imagination for long.

Adding gasoline to the flames of controversy over Laos back in Washington, the wily antiwar senators who had held the hearings on Laos in which Sullivan, Tyrrell, and two Army attachés had given evidence the previous October now released a large part of the transcript to the press, timing the release to do the administration the maximum amount of damage, while at the same time attracting the maximum amount of publicity. Newspapers ran the story under front-page banner headlines - even the military’s own
Stars and Stripes
: ‘U.S. War Role in Laos Disclosed for First Time.’
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