ប្រវត្តិសាស្រ្តបិទមុខ

Between 1966 and 1975, Laos, the country a former king had called "the most peaceful in the world," morphed into a proxy battlefield, where the same sides that were openly fighting in the neighboring country of Vietnam struggled to gain control of the small Asian nation. On one side were the Ravens, a team of crack U.S. Air Force pilots who were "sheep-dipped" — that is, discharged by the Pentagon and given civilian identities to act as CIA operatives — and the native Hmong ethnic group. On the other were the Pathet Lao, a communist group backed by the North Vietnamese. Their lives intersected during prolonged and vicious jungle warfare that was fought outside the headlines, in a land most Americans had barely heard of.... But the secret war in Laos reached all the way to the White House, directed over time by three different U.S. presidents working through the CIA

POLITICAL FIGURES: President John F. Kennedy


The day before Kennedy's inauguration in 1961, he met with predecessor Dwight Eisenhower, who warned him that Laos was the domino that could lead to the loss of all of Southeast Asia to communism. Ike told JFK to be prepared to intervene unilaterally if necessary, and JFK took his advice. That same year, he began building up a covert U.S. presence in Laos, sending the CIA in to recruit the Hmong as a secret U.S-backed army. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, before he had to deal with the secret war's consequences.


President Lyndon B. Johnson:

In January 1965, Johnson proclaimed that "the problem of Laos is the refusal of the communist forces to honor the Geneva accords," even as his administration was ramping up its own clandestine violation of Laotian neutrality. During LBJ's five years in the Oval Office, he escalated the secret war in Laos, stepping up aerial bombardment in an attempt to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Hanoi's supply route to insurgents in South Vietnam. Johnson died in 1973, the same year that Nixon extricated the United States from Vietnam and left the Laotians to their fate.


President Richard M. Nixon: President Nixon and Mr Brezhnev met on the first day of the American visit.


He inherited the secret war in Laos from Johnson, but was less successful in keeping it quiet. Eager to pursue "Vietnamization" of the ground war that would enable him to pull out U.S. troops, Nixon blundered by trying to use Laos as a test run. He approved a plan for LAMSON 17, an invasion of Laos by South Vietnamese troops in early 1971. The operation turned into a debacle in which a retreating South Vietnamese army left behind 1,800 casualties. Nevertheless, in an April 1971 speech, Nixon portrayed this military disaster as proof that the South Vietnamese "could fight effectively against the very best troops North Vietnam could put in the field." He died in 1994.

Prince Souvanna Phouma
He was the son of high-ranking Laotian nobility, a French-educated engineer and political moderate who served as prime minister of the U.S.-backed constitutional monarchy. In the early 1960s he tried, unsuccessfully, to sustain a coalition government that included the Pathet Lao faction headed by his half-brother, Prince Souphanouvong. "I am a good friend to communists abroad, but I do not like them at home," he told Life magazine in 1961. After the Pathet Lao's takeover of Laos, he actually became an adviser to the new government. Souvanna Phouma died in 1984, and his former residence in the city of Luang Prabang became a luxury hotel.


Prince Souphanouvong

Unlike his half-brother Souvanna Phouma, the "Red Prince" had a commoner for a mother. The intellectually gifted Souphanouvong, who was fluent in ancient Greek and seven other languages, studied in France and Vietnam, where he became a follower of Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh. He served as chairman of the Hanoi-backed communist rebel movement, the Pathet Lao, and became Laos' first communist president after the 1975 takeover. A decade later, he was pushed out and relegated to a figurehead role until his death in 1995