By Jeremy Kuzmarov
Return to the Vietnam War
Fighting on the Vague Frontier: The Secret War in Laos

Fred Branfman was an educational adviser in Laos in 1969 who interviewed refugees from US bombing and helped reveal the secret war. Shown here in his Washington office with photos of bombing victims in 1972 (George Tames, New York Times)
Branfman was a 27-year old International Voluntary Service (IVS) worker who taught agricultural principles in a southern Lao village. Lacking the paternalism and cold warrior mentality of many of his contemporaries, Branfman had integrated well into the culture, learned the Lao language and became particularly close to the village elder, Paw Thou Douang whom he later discovered was the local representative of the Pathet Lao. After coming into contact with refugees in the north, he was shocked to hear their stories of seeing relatives burned and buried alive, their livestock killed, and their homes and pagodas demolished. Many had been bombed for five years straight, and survived by living in caves and holes, and farming their fields at night.

Illustration drawn by a Laotian child refugee who experienced American bombing during the Secret War in Laos, from Branfman’s Voices from the Plains of Jars (1972)
Military planners and “defense intellectuals” saw Laos as a testing ground for new forms of counterinsurgency and automated warfare the Pentagon had been developing, unencumbered by media or congressional scrutiny. A State Department official said: “This is [the] end of nowhere. We can do anything we want here because Washington doesn’t seem to know that it exists.”[4] While USAID provided rice drops in the effort to win “hearts and minds,” the military pioneered computer-directed bombing along with drone surveillance and dropped over 270 million cluster bombs, 80 million of which did not detonate.[5] The CIA molded its own Hmong army as a means of minimizing U.S. casualties and evading diplomatic treaties. CIA operative Heine Aderholt noted: “it’s easier to lose your Hmong people than to lose Americans. It doesn’t make as bad publicity at home.”[6] These strategies helped to delay the victory of the Pathet Lao revolutionary forces by over a decade, while providing a template for the automated warfare of the 21st century.

Disappointed by the election results, the State Department and CIA proceeded to subvert the coalition government. As Ambassador Graham Parsons candidly stated in congressional hearings in 1959, “I struggled for 16 months to prevent a coalition.”[9] The CIA financed and helped plan a series of coup d’états that brought to power General Phoumi Nosavan, a cousin of Thai dictator Marshal Sarit Thanarat who used his power to amass a fortune of $137 million through control of casinos, a pork monopoly, and the traffic in gold and opium.[10] Elections in April 1960 were crudely rigged in Phoumi’s favor, with “innumerable examples” of bribery, voter fraud, and intimidation. A U.S. embassy officer reported that he had seen CIA agents distribute bagsful of money to village headmen. The Pathet Lao recorded 1,927 votes, a figure arbitrarily derived from the year in which CIA agent Stuart Methven was born. CIA director Allen Dulles considered the fraud a “youthful prank.”[11] Prince Souphanouvong was condemned to death for treason, though he won over his guards and escaped on the eve of his executions during a rainstorm.[12]
Also in 1962, the CIA began to build up a clandestine army among the Hmong which was designed to get around the “woeful performance” of the regular army, as CIA station Chief Douglas Blaufarb noted, and to circumvent the Geneva Accords’ prohibition on direct military assistance.[20] Negotiating without incurring any formal diplomatic obligations, the U.S. embassy sought to exploit splits between the Ly and Lo clans among the Hmong who had migrated to Laos in the 18th century. Lo Faydang was a founding member of the Pathet Lao, while his French educated-cousin, Touby Lyfoung, who had viewed collaboration as a means of obtaining more rights for his people, initiated resistance activities in the communist-controlled provinces of Sam Neua and Phong Saly. Touby was succeeded as Hmong chief by Gen. Vang Pao, for whom alliance with the U.S. provided guns and food which would enable him to solidify his power and protect the Hmong’s poppy fields, a key source of their livelihood.
A skilled commander respected by his men though capable of considerable brutality, Washington’s “little guerrilla General,” as Vang Pao was called, had served in the RLA in charge of a school for noncommissioned officers near Phonasavan and had fought like Touby with the French against the Vietminh, receiving the Legion of Honor. Because of an intimate knowledge of the jungle terrain and effective intelligence, his troops proved difficult to subdue deep inside Pathet Lao–controlled territory and were used for covert forays into North Vietnam.[21]
From 1964 to the end of the war in 1975, American Special Forces trained and supplied Vang Pao’s men from the CIA’s Jungle Base at Long Tieng under USAID cover. Chinese Guomindang, Thai Police Aerial Reconnaissance Units (PARU) and other CIA-backed tribal militias provided further combat support, making it “possible for a rather large program to be handled by very few Americans.”[22]

Laotian Gen. Vang Pao calling in air strikes from the Long Cheng Command Post in January 1972 (Bettmann Archives)
Vang Pao’s principal liaison, Vint Lawrence, was a Princeton graduate who liked to read Nietsche and Tolstoy. He provided a striking contrast to Anthony Poshepny (Tony Poe), a hard-drinking veteran of the Pacific War who issued bounties for cutting off enemy ears and sustained more than a dozen wounds in firefights undertaken in violation of orders to stay out of combat. Lawrence noted that “Tony Poe was the Kurtz [reference to Apocalypse Now character] and I was the anti-Kurtz.”[23]
Military operations in Laos coincided with the dropping of over 1.7 million tons of bombs along the Ho Chi Minh Trail under the operation Steel Tiger and 321,000 on the northern Plain of Jars under the operation Barrel Roll. Monteagle Stearns, deputy chief of mission in Laos from 1969 to 1972 told Congress that the U.S. had rapidly escalated its bombing after President Johnson had ordered a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam in November 1968. “We had all those planes sitting around and couldn’t just let them stay there with nothing to do.”[25]
One woman proclaimed her life had become like that of a “hunted animal desperately trying to escape their hunters…. Human beings, whose parents carefully brought them into the world and carefully raised them with overflowing love, these human beings would die from a single blast.” Another refugee lamented, “What terrible sadness, so many loved ones killed, because of the huge bombs the airplanes rained down upon us, so many loved ones forced to leave their native villages, leaving behind spacious rice-fields and gardens now turned to dust.”[28]
After he had infiltrated the main air base at Nakhon Thanom, Branfman interviewed pilots who told him that only one of ten bombs hit near a military target and that, as in Korea, they dumped unused ordinance on villages. In a testament to the banality of evil, Branfman found that most airmen wanted to pad their kill ratios and then enjoy the nightlife, thinking little of the Lao people being devastated below.[29] Much of northeastern Laos was turned into a “wasteland” reminiscent of “the pocked, churned earth in storm-hit areas of the North African desert,” according to the journalist T. D. Allman. Branfman wrote that “after a recorded history of 700 years, civilized society had ceased to exist…. a new type of warfare had been developed fought not by men but machines and which could erase distant and unseen societies clandestinely, unknown to and even unsuspected by the world outside.”[30]
For all the devastation, the bombing did little to diminish the revolutionary movement, whose cadres hid deep in the forest and made use of effective spying networks.[31] The Pathet Lao won the war in 1975 and have ruled Laos ever since. G. McMurtrie Godley, the U.S. ambassador from 1969-1973, acknowledged that “we used the Meo [Hmong]. The rationale then which I believed in, was that they tied down three first rate North Vietnamese divisions that otherwise would have been used against our men in South Vietnam…. It was a dirty business.”[32]
Laotian civilians continue to suffer. More than 50,000 have been killed or maimed since the war ended from undetonated bomblets that explode when kids pick them up thinking they are toys, or farmers think they are rocks.[36] According to the U.S.-based non-governmental organization, Legacies of War, less than 1% of the unexploded ordnance has been cleared in more than four decades since the bombing stopped. “Each year there are now just under 50 new casualties in Laos, down from 310 in 2008. Close to 60% of the accidents result in death, and 40% of the victims are children.“[37]
On September 6, 2016, President Barack Obama arrived in in Vientiane, Laos, for a three-day U.S.-ASEAN summit – the first sitting president to visit Laos. Speaking to an audience of over one thousand, Obama acknowledged that the United States had dropped more than two million tons of bombs on Laos during the Vietnam War. “Villages and entire valleys were obliterated,” said Obama, “Countless civilians were killed. That conflict was another reminder that, whatever the cause, whatever our intentions, war inflicts a wrenching toll, especially on innocent men, women and children.” [38]
Obama pledged $90 million in bomb clearance assistance. “The remnants of war continue to shatter lives here in Laos,” Obama said. “Many of the bombs dropped never exploded. Over the years, thousands of Laotians have been killed or injured, farmers tending fields, children playing. The wounds, a missing leg or arm, last a lifetime. That’s why I’ve dramatically increased or funding to remove these unexploded bombs.” Efforts to find the bombs will be aided by the Pentagon, who will supply records of where they were dropped.[39]
* * *
Unleashing a “Decade of Genocide”: The Sideshow in Cambodia
The devastation in Laos was replicated in Cambodia, another sideshow of the Vietnam War where ferocious air-power killed and maimed tens of thousands while again, inadvertently helping to empower the forces the U.S. was bent on suppressing. In the fall of 2000, President Bill Clinton released extensive Air Force data which showed that the United States dropped far more ordinance on Cambodia than was previously thought; 2,756,941 tons, dropped in 230,516 sorties, with 3,580 of the sites being listed as “unknown targets.” The database shows that the bombings began in 1965, four years earlier than was previously thought, in support of Special Forces incursions targeting alleged NLF sanctuaries; and designed to overthrow Prince Norodom Sihanouk who leaned towards the non-aligned and communist bloc and was popular among the peasantry.[40] These attacks were accompanied by defoliation by Agent Orange of Cambodian rubber plantations, the chief source of Cambodia’s export revenue.[41]

Much of the U.S. bombing of Cambodia originated from the Takhli Royal Thai Air Force Base (Thailand)
In March 1970, while visiting China, the Prince was deposed in a coup led by Prime Minister Lon Nol, an admirer of Indonesia’s General Suharto who led a genocidal campaign against communists that killed upwards of 500,000 people in 1965. Lon signed an oil exploration agreement with Unocal and Chevron following years of unauthorized geomagnetic exploration of off-shore waters by the U.S. Navy under the cover of a UN mission. The coup was backed by U.S. military intelligence and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as well as Japan. Having installed him as a new ruler, the CIA ironically concluded that Nol, whose neo-Khmer philosophy combined vague political and economic theories, possessed “personal ambition restrained neither by good political judgment nor moral scruples.” Ambassador Emory Swank came to believe by 1973 that his rule was inept and unsustainable; a conclusion that led to Swank’s firing by Henry Kissinger.[43]
Nixon’s secret bombing campaign further tipped the political tide in favor of the Khmer Rouge, whose troops displayed greater motivation and discipline than Lon Nol’s forces and the ARVN.[49] Chhit Do, a former Khmer Rouge official, explained bombing affected people:
the ordinary people sometimes literally shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came. Their minds just froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told. It was because of their dissatisfaction with the bombing that they kept on co-operating with the Khmer Rouge, joining up with the Khmer Rouge, sending their children to go off with them…. Sometimes when the bombs fell and hit little children, their fathers would be all for the Khmer Rouge.[50]
Kissinger claimed in his memoir that the U.S. bombing targeted military bases unpopulated by civilians near the border. However, declassified White House tapes reveal that Nixon told Kissinger to “go in there and I mean really go in…. I want everything that can fly to go in there and crack the hell out of them.” Kissinger told his deputy, Gen. Alexander Haig, that “[Nixon] wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia…. Anything that flies on anything that moves.”[51]
“Methodical” devastation was subsequently heaped across the Cambodian countryside, with thousands of civilians killed and hundreds of villages leveled. The usual mix of napalm and Willie Peter was deployed, some on runs by Cambodian pilots trained at Bien Hoa. As a reflection of public anger, at least one downed American pilot was nailed to a cross with his feet to the ground, dying in agony. Journalist William Shawcross reported in 1973 that Cambodian “refugees [were] swarming into the capital from [bomb] target areas,” with “dozens of villages, both east and southwest of Phnom Penh destroyed and as much as half their population killed or maimed.”[52] The area of the temples of Angkor was hit almost daily, including the South Side of Angkor Wat with bas reliefs which told the story of the ancient Khmers who built the temple – masterpieces of art.[53]
In an ironic twist in early 2017, the Trump administration demanded repayment of an old loan to Cambodia, an amount that has grown to more than half a billion dollars, according to the New York Times. In February, Prime Minister Hun Sen responded, “Oh, America and U.S. President Donald Trump, how can this be? You attacked us and demand that we give money.” The United States, notes the Times, “dropped 500,000 tons of explosives on eastern Cambodia…. Rice farmers fled the fighting and the bombs in large numbers, abandoning their fields for Phnom Penh, the capital. As food shortage ensued, the United States – which was backing the anti-Communist government led by Lon Nol – lent the country $274 million to buy American rice, wheat, oil and cotton.” The American ambassador, William Heidt, told Cambodian journalists that the U.S. wanted to “work out a deal that works for both sides” but that completely canceling the debt was not an option.[59]
* * *
[1] Fred Branfman, ed., Voices From the Plain of Jars: Life Under an Air War, 2nd ed., with essays and drawings by Laotian villagers, foreword by Alfred W. McCoy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), p. 8.
[2] Interview with Fred Branfman by Jeremy Kuzmarov, Tulsa, Oklahoma, March 5, 2014. The features of the top-secret base are also described in Robert Corman, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (Boston: Little & Brown, 2002).
[3] Fred Branfman, “The New Totalitarianism,” Liberation, February-March-April, 1971, pp. 1-2.
[4] Len E. Ackland, “No Place for Neutralism: The Eisenhower Administration and Laos,” in Laos: War and Revolution, ed. Nina S. Adams and Alfred W. McCoy (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 139–40; Charles A. Stevenson, The End of Nowhere: American Policy toward Laos since 1954 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), pp. 1, 29.
[5] Secret War in Laos,” Legacies of War, http://legaciesofwar.org/about-laos/secret-war-laos.
[6] Branfman, Voices From the Plain of Jars, p. 8
[7] Quoted in Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), p. 482.
[8] Internal Security Police Program, NSC 1290-d, Laos, February 19, 1957, OCB, box 40, folder Laos; Department of State, Memo of Conversation, January 13, 1958, RG 59 Records of the Department of State, Laos, National Archives College Park Maryland; and Frederic C. Benson, “Genesis of the Hmong-American Alliance ,1949-1962,” Hmong Studies Journal 16 (2015), p. 9.
[9] Quoted in Noam Chomsky, At War with Asia (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), p. 154.
[10] See Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, rev ed. (New York: Lawrence Hills Books, 1991); and Jeremy Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (Massachusetts, 2012), ch. 6.
[11] Thomas L. Ahern Jr. , Undercover Armies: Undercover Armies: CIA and Surrogate Warfare in Laos, 1961–1973(Washington, DC: CIA, Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2006), pp. 10,11; Stuart E. Methven, Laughter in the Shadows: A CIA Memoir (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2008), p. 77; Arthur J. Dommen, Conflict in Laos: The Politics of Neutralization, rev. ed. (New York: Praeger, 1971), p. 134; Seth Jacobs, The Universe Unraveling (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), p. 79. Methven claims that the figure was 3,927 votes, derived from his birth date, September 3, 1927. Later elections were rigged by James Lilley, a Yale graduate nicknamed by Ambassador William Sullivan “Mr. Tammany Hall.” James Lilley, China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage and Diplomacy in Asia (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), p. 120.
[12] Wilfred Burchett, The Furtive War: The United States in Vietnam and Laos (New York: International Publishers, 1963), pp. 175–76; Philippe Devillers, “The Laotian Conflict in Perspective,” in Adams and McCoy, Laos: War and Revolution, pp. 44–45; and Martin Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 111–12.
[13] William Lederer, A Nation of Sheep (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1967), pp. 12–13; Bernard B. Fall, Anatomy of a Crisis: The Laotian Crisis of 1960-1961 (New York: Doubleday, 1969), p. 137; Mervyn Brown, War in Shangri-la: A Memoir of Civil War in Laos (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001), p. 25; Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), p. 99; and “Question of Vietminh Presence,” American embassy, Vientiane, to Secretary of State, February 10, 1964, LBJL, NSF, box 265
[14] American embassy to Secretary of State, “Question of Vietminh Presence,” February 10, 1964, LBJL, NSF, Laos, box 266.
[15] Victor B. Anthony and Richard R. Sexton, “The U.S. Air Force in Southeast Asia: The War in Northern Laos,” 1954–1973, AFHRA, 1993,” p. 35; Oudone Sananikone, The Royal Lao Army and U.S. Army Advice and Support (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center for Military History, 1981), p. 77.
[16] Keith W. Nolan, Into Laos: The Story of Dewey Canyon III, Lam Son 719, Vietnam 1971 (San Francisco: Presidio, 1986), pp. 1-2; and Kenneth Conboy, with James Morrison Shadow War: The CIAs Secret War in Laos (Boulder, CO: Paladin Press, 1995).
[17] Conboy and Morrison, Shadow War; and Gary Rust, So Much to Lose: JFK and American Policy in Laos (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), 20.
[18] See Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression, ch. 6. On Kennedy policy, see also Rust, So Much to Lose.
[19] “Comment Les Imperialistes Americains Ont Perpetré L’Aggression et Sabote la Paix et La Neutralité du Laos au Lendemain de la Signature des Accords de Genève de 1962 Sur le Laos,” Neo Lao Haksat, Committée Centrale, Janvier, 1965, British National Archives, Kew Gardens, London, FO 371 1802 71.
[20] McCoy, The Politics of Heroin; and Douglas S. Blaufarb, Organizing and Managing Unconventional War in Laos, 1962–1970 (McLean, Va.: Human Resources Research Organization, 1972).
[21] Alfred W. McCoy, “The Secret War in Laos, 1955-1975,” in Marilyn B. Young and Robert Buzzanco, eds., A Companion to the Vietnam War (UK: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 283-315; Mai Na M. Lee, Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom: The Quest for Legitimation in French Indochina, 1850-1960 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015); and Frederic C. Benson, “Genesis of the Hmong-American Alliance, 1949-1962: Aspirations, Expectations and Commitment During an Era of Uncertainty,” Hmong Studies Journal 16 (2015).
[22] Col. Michael E. Haas, Apollo’s Warriors: U.S. Air Force Special Operations During the Cold War (Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama: Air University Press, 1997).
[23] Randall B. Woods, Shadow Warrior: William Egan Colby and the CIA (New York: Basic Books, 2013), p. 228; Fred Branfman, “The President’s Secret Army: A Case Study – The CIA in Laos, 1962-1972” in Robert Borosage and John Marks, eds., The CIA File (New York: Viking, 1976); and Ahern Jr., Undercover Armies. See also Dan Schanche, Mister Pop (New York: David McKay, 1970), for a profile of another CIA clandestine warrior who dispensed refugee relief aid and also took up arms as a Hmong guerrilla.
[24] Ahern, Undercover Armies, p. 458; McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, p. 318; Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA and the Legacy of America’s Private Intelligence Network (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005), p. 38; Bertil Lintner, Blood Brothers: The Criminal Underworld of Asia (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2002), p. 248; and Conboy, Shadow War, p. 68.
[25] Branfman, Voices From the Plain of Jars.
[26] Col. Michael E. Haas, Apollo’s Warriors: U.S. Air Force Special Operations During the Cold War (Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama: Air University Press, 1997). While American pilots were given a party and medals at end of their year tour, the locals flew into their deaths, with sixteen of the nineteen Hmong pilots dying, including Lee Lue, one of the war’s most skilled aviators.
[27] Noam Chomsky, Introduction to Adams and McCoy, Laos: War and Revolution, p. xviii; Branfman, Voices from the Plain of Jars, p. 23; Decornoy quoted in Noam Chomsky, “After Pinkville,” in At War with Asia (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), p. 96; and Branfman, Unpublished Memoirs, p. 888.
[28] Branfman, Voices from the Plain of Jars, pp. 38–39.
[29] Fred Branfman, “A Visit to a Refugee Camp,” Liberation, March 1972; Branfman, Voices from the Plain of Jars rev ed., pp. 16, 17; and Branfman, Unpublished Memoirs, p. 248.
[30] T. D. Allman, “Ruined Town a Vignette of War in Laos,” New York Times, October 17, 1969; T. D. Allman, “The War in Laos: Plain Facts,” Far Eastern Economic Review, January 8, 1972, p. 16; Fred Branfman, “A Lake of Blood,” New York Times, April 7, 1971; and Branfman, Voices from the Plain of Jars, p. 4.
[31] Ahern, Unconventional Armies, p. 181; Branfman, Voices from the Plain of Jars, pp. 48–49, 81; Wilfred G. Burchett, The Second Indochina War: Cambodia and Laos (New York: International Publishers, 1970); and Garrett, “Subversion and Revolution in Laos,” p. 97.
[32] Roger Warner, Shooting at the Moon: The Story of America’s Clandestine War in Laos (London: Steerforth, 1998), p. 380. See also, Robert Shaplen, Time Out of Hand: Revolution and Reaction in Southeast Asia (New York: Harper & Row, 1969); Ahern, Unconventional Armies; and McCoy, The Politics of Heroin.
[33] Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights, vol. 1; Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1979), p. 240; and Anthony Lewis, “Another Senate Test,” New York Times, July 9, 1973, p. 33.
[34] Recounted by Branfman in Voices From the Plain of Jars; and “Ambassador William Sullivan, Testimony before the US Senate Subcommittee on Refugees, April 22, 1971.
[35] McCoy, foreword, in Voices from the Plain of Jars, 2nded, p. xv.
[36] See Karen J. Coates, with photos by Jerry Redfern, Eternal Harvest: The Legacy of American Bombs in Laos (Things Asian Press, 2013).
[37] “Secret War in Laos,” Legacies of War, http://legaciesofwar.org/about-laos/secret-war-laos. This website offers a detailed description of leftover ordnance in Laos.
[38] Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Thanks Obama, For Acknowledging Lao War Victims, But Stop Creating More War Victims,” The Huffington Post, September 12, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-kuzmarov/obama-thanks-for-acknowle_b_11970512.html
[39] Elise Labott, “Obama announces $90 million to clear Laos’ unexploded bombs,” CNN, September 6, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/06/asia/laos-obama-aid-package.
[40] Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, “Bombs Over Cambodia: New Information Reveals that Cambodia was Bombed far More Heavily Than Previously Believed,” The Walrus, October 2006, https://gsp.yale.edu/sites/default/files/walrus_cambodiabombing_oct06.pdf.
[41] Peter Dale Scott, “Cambodia and Oil” in The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11/, and the Deep Politics of War (Delaware: Skyhorse, 2013), 223; “A Report on Herbicide Damage to Rubber and Fruit Trees in Cambodia,” June 2, 1969, RG 472, Military Assistance Command Vietnam, NA, box 197.
[42] Scott, The War Conspiracy, 224; Burchett, The Second Indochina War; Daniel Marvin, Expendable Elite: One Soldier’s Journey into Covert Warfare (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2003); Kenton Clymer, Troubled Relations: The US and Cambodia Since 1870 (DeKalb: North Illinois University Press, 2007); “Memo for the Executive Officer,” July 20, 1955, Operations Coordinating Board, Records of the National Security Council Staff, Dwight Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene Kansas, Box 17 .
[43] Scott, The War Conspiracy, 228; Kenneth Conboy, The Cambodian Wars: Clashing Armies and CIA Covert Operations (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2013), p. 40; Greg Grandin, Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2015), p. 63; Wilfred P. Deac, Road to the Killing Fields: The Cambodian War of 1970-1975 (College Station: Texas A & M Press, 1997), pp. 152, 180.
[44] Scott, The War Conspiracy; Noam Chomsky, At War with Asia (New York: Pantheon, 1970), 137, 152;Conboy, The Cambodian Wars, pp. 39, 56; Deac, Road to the Killing Fields, p. 82. The deputy of one of Nol’s key associates, Lim Sasaath, was caught smuggling heroin from Laos into Cambodia.
[45] See William Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia (New York; Pocket Books, 1979).
[46] Benedict Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930-1975, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
[47] See François Ponchaud, Cambodia: Year Zero, transl. Nancy Amphoux (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1977), pp. 155-165, 167; Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power; and Clymer, Troubled Relations.
[48] Andre Vltchek, “Cambodia and Western Fabrication of History,” August 1, 2014, http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/08/01/cambodia-and-western-fabrication-of-history. Vltchek quoting Khmer Rouge soldier San Reoung who was 17 at the time.
[49] Conboy, The Cambodian Wars, p. 56. Deac, Road to the Killing Fields, pp. 86, 163.
[50] Owen and Kiernan, “Bombs Over Cambodia.”
[51] Owen and Kiernan, “Bombs Over Cambodia;” and Henry A. Kissinger, White House Years (London: George Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979), p. 254.
[52] Shawcross, Sideshow; Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power, p. 350; Malcolm Caldwell with Lek Tan, Cambodia in the Southeast Asia War (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970); Noam Chomsky, At War with Asia: Essays on Indochina (New York: Vintage, 1970); Richard Wood, Call Sign Rustic: The Secret Air War Over Cambodia, 1970-1973 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 2002); Grandin, Kissinger’s Shadow, p. 137; and Deac, Road to the Killing Field, p. 86.
[53] “Report from Cambodia: Thiounn Prasith,” in Frank Browning and Dorothy Foreman, eds., The Wasted Nations: Report of the Enquiry of the International Commission of Enquiry Into the United States Crimes in Indochina (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 242. Hospitals were also targeted.
[54] Owen and Kiernan, “Bombs Over Cambodia.” See Kimmo Kiljunen, ed. Kampuchea: Decade of the Genocide: Report of a Finnish Inquiry Commission (London: Zed Books, 1984); and Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology (Boston: South End Press, 1979).
[55] Quoted in Donald J. Mrozek, “The Limits of Innovation: Aspects of Airpower in Vietnam,” Air University Review, January-February 1985, p. 67.
[56] Ben Kiernan, “Cambodia’s Twisted path to Justice,” The History Place, 1999, http://www.historyplace.com/pointsofview/kiernan.htm. See also, Kenneth Conboy, The Cambodian Wars: Clashing Armies and CIA Covert Operations (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2013).
[57] Grandin, Kissinger’s Shadow, pp. 137, 139.
[58] Ouch Sony and Zsombor Peter, “Casualties from UXO Drop in 2015,” The Cambodian Daily, February 1, 2016, https://www.cambodiadaily.com/news/casualties-from-a-drop-in-2015-106967.
[59] Julia Wallace, “Cambodia, Appealing War-Era Debt, Tells U.S.: You Owe Us,” New York Times, April 3, 2007, p. A4.