The untold story of how America’s secret war in Laos in the 1960s transformed the CIA from a loose collection of spies into a military operation and a key player in American foreign policy. January, 1961: Laos, a tiny nation few Americans have heard of, is at risk of falling to communism and triggering a domino effect throughout Southeast Asia. This is what President Eisenhower believed when he approved the CIA’s Operation Momentum, creating an army of ethnic Hmong to fight communist forces there. Largely hidden from the American public—and most of Congress—Momentum became the largest CIA paramilitary operation in the history of the United States. The brutal war lasted more than a decade, left the ground littered with thousands of unexploded bombs, and changed the nature of the CIA forever. With “revelatory reporting” and “lucid prose” (The Economist), Kurlantzick provides the definitive account of the Laos war, focusing on the four key people who led the operation: the CIA operative whose idea it was, the Hmong general who led the proxy army in the field, the paramilitary specialist who trained the Hmong forces, and the State Department careerist who took control over the war as it grew. Using recently declassified records and extensive interviews, Kurlantzick shows for the first time how the CIA’s clandestine adventures in one small, Southeast Asian country became the template for how the United States has conducted war ever since—all the way to today’s war on terrorism.

At the same time the Vietnam War was being broadcast into the living rooms of Americans across the country the CIA was conducting a large-scale secret war in northeastern Laos that few heard about. Agency case officer Jim Parker's five years of combat and immersion in Southeast Asian culture had a lasting influence on him and his family. His dramatic, provocative reminiscence of those years is the first account by a participant to portray America's involvement in Laos.

“An incredibly powerful account of a little-known chapter in the Vietnam War saga” written by a CIA veteran who fought in the Secret War (Booklist, starred review). In the 1960s and ’70s, the Laotian Civil War became a covert theater for the conflict in Vietnam, with the US paramilitary backing the Royal Lao government in what came to be known among the CIA as the Secret War. In late 1971, the North Vietnamese Army launched Campaign Z, invading northern Laos on a mission to defeat the Royal Lao Army. General Giap had specifically ordered the NVA troops to kill the CIA army and occupy its field headquarters in the Long Tieng valley. The NVA faced the small rag-tag army of Vang Pao, mostly Thai irregulars recruited to fight for the CIA. But thousands more were quickly recruited, trained, and rushed into position in Laos to defend against the impending NVA invasion. Despite overwhelming odds in the NVA’s favor, the battle raged for more than one hundred days—the longest battle in the Vietnam War. In the end, it all came down to Skyline Ridge. Whoever won Skyline, won Laos. Historian James E. Parker Jr. served as a CIA paramilitary officer in Laos. In this authoritative and personal account, Parker draws from his own firsthand experience as well as extensive research into CIA files and North Vietnamese after-action reports in order to tell the full story of the battle of Skyline Ridge.

Tragic Mountains tells the story of the Hmong's struggle for freedom and survival in Laos from 1942 through 1992. During those years, most Hmong sided with the French against the Japanese and Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh, and then with the Americans against the North Viemamese.

The story of special air warfare and the Air Commandos who served for the ambassadors in Laos from 1964 to 1975 is captured through extensive research and veteran interviews. The author has meticulously put together a comprehensive overview of the involvement of USAF Air Commandos who served in Laos as trainers, advisors, and clandestine combat forces to prevent the communist takeover of the Royal Lao Government. This book includes pictures of those operations, unveils what had been a US government secret war, and adds a substantial contribution to understanding the wider war in Southeast Asia.

The tale of a young Green Beret medic, Vietnam combat veteran with the top secret Studies and Observations Group (SOG) who was recruited by the US Agency for International Development (USAID).Schofield worked 51/2 years providing medical support for the Hmong and other Hill Tribes who fought the CIA's secret war in Northern Laos, and was among the last Americans to leave SE Asia in May 1975.It was a surreal time and place that would be impossible to even imagine today."Schofiled's book reflects a genuine love for the Hmong and their culture, as well as a vast knowledge of their efforts during our 'secret war' in Laos in the 1960s and 1970s. Read and learn some actual facts; not overblown rhetoric from another barstool hero." -Stephen R. Leopold is Colonel, SF, USA (Ret)"Schofield's book will be a welcome, informative addition to recent books released on the early days of Green Beret history in Southeast Asia. De Oppresso Liber." -John Stryker Meyer is author of SOG Chronicles, Across the Fence and On the Ground

From 1960 to 1973, the United States and the communist powers waged a hidden war in Laos, which led ultimately to the catastrophe of the Vietnam War. Warner's groundbreaking book offers the first full account of this secret war, based on his access to previously closed files and to interviews with intelligence players, military officers and government officials who have not spoken out before.

In Shooting at the Moon, Roger Warner chronicles a covert operation that used Hmong villagers as guerrilla fighters against the North during the Vietnamese War. Thought to be an expendable resource by Central Intelligence Agency strategists, the Hmong died by the thousands fighting the North Vietnamese. Those who survived were abandoned to their fate when the United States pulled out of the war. Warner's history is the moving and tragic story of how America's 'secret war' devastated its own allies in Southeast Asia.

Karen Coates and Jerry Redfern spent more than seven years traveling in Laos, talking to farmers, scrap-metal hunters, people who make and use tools from UXO, people who hunt for death beneath the earth and render it harmless. With their words and photographs, they reveal the beauty of Laos, the strength of Laotians, and the commitment of bomb-disposal teams. People take precedence in this account, which is deeply personal without ever becoming a polemic.

If war really is an extension of politics by other means, as Carl von Clausewitz declared back in 1827, then few wars have served as better examples than the Secret War in Laos from 1961-1975. A clandestine conflict fought in parallel with the Vietnam War, the Laotian Secret War ostensibly set the United States, Thailand, and various Laotian factions against Ho Chi Minh's North Vietnamese Army (NVA). In practice, the conflict was as much a civil war as an invasion; and ultimately, it devolved into a slow-motion act of suicide on the part of the Lao nation itself. The U.S. military and its Laotian Hmong allies, led by the resourceful General Vang Pao, made a disciplined effort to prosecute the warthough from beginning to end, that effort was steeped in self-serving politics, and hamstrung by factional infighting, irrational decision-making, and self-imposed constraints that ultimately hurt more than they helped. Micromanagement by officers and clueless politicians far from the front was bad enough; far worse was the corruption of the head-butting Lao factions, who seemed unable to see beyond their own immediate needs and certainly had no vision for a strong, united Laos. The so-called Rightists, Leftists, and Neutralist factions simply could not wrap their heads around the concept that their only hope of survival lay in coming together against the relentless, well-equipped NVA. In fact, one faction, the Pathet Lao, repeatedly allied with the NVA against their own countrymen. But the Americans and Vang Pao's Hmong, those who repeatedly found themselves on the sharp end of the spear in the face of waffling, lack of discipline, and, occasionally, sheer cowardice on the part of their allies, refused to give upuntil, finally, their political leadership turned their backs on them. This is the story of those brave men, and the civilians who helped them fight an increasingly painful and mismanaged war. It was a war in which the political leaders involved proved conclusively that they had learned nothing from historyor simply didn't care. Through ineptitude and back-room politicking, the leadership of both Laos and the United States eventually gave Laos to the Communistswho proceeded to crush the Lao people into the dust, in the name of a morally bankrupt ideology that they themselves neither practiced nor truly believed in. Billy G. Webb lays out their story with both great precision and compassion in this lively, well-researched book, outlining the events that led us into the morass of the Secret War, and then detailing each bloody campaign of each bloody year. In addition to following the key characters on the U.S./Laotian side, especially the charismatic Vang Pao, he peppers the story with tales of courageous individuals who fell victim to the NVA and the Pathet Laoand, occasionally, the stupidity, incompetence, and gutlessness of people they trusted. Some survived to fight again; but many of these men, military and otherwise, paid the ultimate sacrifice in their fight to keep Laos free. Webb takes special care to showcase two organizations: the brave Forward Air Controllers who called themselves "the Ravens," and Air America, a civilian company (run by the CIA) that supported the military effort and aided the Lao populace whenever they were called upon. Few people have ever heard of the Ravens, those USAF and Army airmen who risked life and limb in tiny Cessna aircraft to locate targets for bombers and fighters to strike. Air America is more famous, due to the 1990 movie of the same namea film that unfairly maligned Air America as a parcel service for Laotian powerbrokers moving drugs and gold out of the country. Webb sets the record emphatically straight. That's not to say that such things weren't happening in Laos; they were. In hindsight, it's easy to condemn the CIA and the U.S. military leadership for allowing the corruption to spread; but as Nietzsche has pointed out, when you look long in