Laos: The Unseen Presence

It sometimes seems as if the U.S. Government would like to make the very existence of Laos classified information. Thus, when the country’s Premier, Prince Souvanna Phouma, flew into Washington last week, the White House said as little as possible about his meeting with President Nixon. The U.S. these days is anxious to get out of Southeast Asia, not to get in deeper. Reflecting that mood, Senator Stuart Symington next week will begin hearings on the American involvement in Laos. To gauge the U.S. presence there, TIME Correspondents David Greenway and William Marmon visited the kingdom twice in recent weeks. Their report:

The depth of the U.S. involvement in Laos is not immediately apparent in the seedy, down-at-the-heels capital of Vientiane. There is none of the neon nightmare that Americans have brought to Bangkok, and the town does not creak under the weight of the U.S. military as does Saigon. One sees few Americans, and none in uniforms. In a few bars one may find the freewheeling, CIA-paid Air America pilots, the Lord Jims of Laos. But the main accent is French. The old ochre-colored colonial buildings with their big windows and high ceilings set the architectural style. Citron pressé outsells Coca-Cola, and hamburgers hardly exist. The pace is as slow-moving as the ceiling fans, and Vientiane exudes a decadent charm that is extinct where Americans have made a more obvious invasion.

But appearances are misleading. The U.S. Embassy telephone book is as thick as the one for all of Laos. Of the more than 2,100 Americans (including dependents) now stationed in Laos, most live in all-American compounds outside Vientiane and very much out of sight. The largest is KM6 (six kilometers from town), a U.S. suburb transplanted to Asian soil. There American families live in two-and four-bedroom ranch-style houses laid out with barbecue pits and with swings, ponies and bicycles on their grassy lawns. KM6 has its own electric power generators, water supply and sewage system, plus tennis courts and a 450-student school.

Though there are no U.S. ground troops fighting in Laos, the country has become even more of a client state than Viet Nam. Laos receives more U.S. aid per capita than any other country—over $250 million a year in a country of 2,825,000 people, one-third of whom live in Communist-held areas.

The Americans admit to the presence of 75 military personnel serving as advisers in the capital and the six military regions. There are also more than 200 CIA agents. “Laos is an agency country,” a longtime Vientiane observer notes. The silver fleets of the CIA contract carriers, Air America and Continental Airlines, have for years provided tactical support for the most effective government force in Laos—General Vang Pao’s Meo tribesmen. The CIA men and the military advisers train, equip, support and transport the entire Royal Laotian military effort. Americans have been known to advise on tactics on the battalion level.

The Americans justify their involvement in Laos on the ground that the North Vietnamese were there first. It is largely clandestine because, like the North Vietnamese presence, it violates the 1962 Geneva accords, which supposedly neutralized Laos. The military-aid program, for example, is not run by the military-assistance group (MAG) but by USAID through a euphemistically titled “requirements office.”

Towns Flattened. The U.S. officially admits only to flying “armed reconnaissance” missions over Laos (i.e., firing only when fired upon). But in fact, besides bombing the Ho Chi Minh trail, Thai-based American planes provide considerable tactical air support for the Royal Laotian Army, flattening whole towns in the Communist Pathet Lao zone. In the last eleven months the bombing of Laos has increased fivefold. “We’ve creamed that place,” allowed a U.S. Air Force pilot recently, “some places even worse than Viet Nam.” Said one woman who escaped from Muong Phine, a town recently captured by government forces: “We were afraid of the airplanes that came all the time. We learned to stand still in the fields when the planes came because if we ran the planes would shoot.”

The U.S. has obvious reasons for not admitting the extent to which American air power plays a role in Laos. “If we did,” said an American official in Vientiane, “every dove in the U.S. would hit us over the head with it like they did with Johnson and the bombing of North Viet Nam. The North Vietnamese don’t admit the presence of their 47,000 troops. Why should we give them the advantage of admitting the bombing?”