US arrests former CIA leader in Laos

Sebastien Berger
Telegraph

The ageing former leader of the CIA’s “Secret Army” in Laos was in an American prison last night, accused of mounting a coup against his and Washington’s old Communist enemy. General Vang Pao, 77, and nine other people were arrested in dawn raids by more than 200 federal agents in dawn raids across California.

The detentions were the culmination of ‘Operation Tarnished Eagle’, a six-month investigation into an attempt to bring down Laos’ Communist government.

According to prosecutors Vang Pao and his co-conspirators planned to spend almost USD 10 million (pounds 5 million) on weaponry including assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, Stinger surface-to-air missiles, mines and C-4 explosives.

They were recruiting a mercenary force to attack government buildings in the Lao capital Vientiane and “reduce them to rubble,” they said.

“This investigation read like a movie script, but turned out to be reality,” said Michael Sullivan, acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

“We’re looking at conspiracy to murder thousands and thousands of people at one time,” assistant US attorney Bob Twiss told a federal court.

The conflict in Laos was an overspill from the Vietnam war and saw Vang Pao’s US-backed secret army, most of them members of the Hmong ethnic minority, fighting the Communist Pathet Lao guerrilla movement which was heavily reinforced by North Vietnam.

Vang Pao’s forces, 40,000-strong at their peak, were largely funded by the heroin trade, with raw opium transported on the airplanes and helicopters of Air America, the private airline of his CIA supporters.

After the fall of Vientiane to the Pathet Lao in 1975 Vang Pao went into exile in the US, but never accepted defeat. “War is difficult, peace is hell,” he once said.

Touby Lyfoung, commander of an earlier French-backed Hmong army, once said of him: “He is a pure military officer who doesn’t understand that after the war there is a peace.”

The last remnants of the Hmong forces and their descendants still hide out in the mountains of Laos, where human rights groups say they are persecuted and attacked by the Lao military.

But the arrests are a measure of how far geopolitical times have changed since the 1970s, and the government in Vientiane, one of the world’s last five Communist dictatorships, which has allegedly sought to assassinate Vang Pao in the past, was delighted.

“This is the great news that Laos has waited for for so long,” said the foreign ministry spokesman Yong Changthalansy. “We hope the United States will prosecute them strictly under the Patriot Act and punish the violators of the law severely.”

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