VLVL: Vietnam: stirring up shit, leaving it to ferment, covering up

[pynchonoid]

..."unclassified" by the CIA and thus to be taken with
a grain of salt, it reads as if it's been airbrushed,
or was written as pro-American propaganda from the
get-go:

No Drums, No Bugles
Recollections of a Case Officer in Laos, 
1962-1964

Richard L. Holm

[...] Now, some 35 years later, I lament many of the
unintended results of our efforts from 1961-1973. The
ignorance and the arrogance of Americans arriving in
Southeast Asia during that period were contributing
factors. We came to help, but we had only minimal
understanding of the history, culture, and politics of
the people we wanted to aid. The discussions in Geneva
were about big power issues more than about Laos or
Vietnam. Our strategic interests were superimposed
onto a region where our president had decided to “draw
the line” against communism. And we would do it our
way.

US policies in Laos are largely responsible for the
disaster that befell the Hmong. Vang Pao’s meeting
with Bill Lair in late 1960 was the beginning of more
than a decade of warfare and hardship for his people,
although neither man that day could have foreseen the
outcome. From its origins as an effort to organize and
train the Hmong in guerrilla tactics to resist
communist encroachment, our program gradually evolved
into a direct confrontation not only of the local PL,
but also of North Vietnamese forces. More training,
larger units, increased firepower, and air support
were introduced little by little. But it remained a
mismatch. Despite our best efforts, the Hmong were
slowly decimated. 
US policies in South Vietnam drove decisions in Laos.
The Hmong had to have seen what was happening, but
they pressed on. Vang Pao, confident that with our
support he would carry the day, actually pushed for
many of the offensive actions undertaken as the
conflict wore on. But his decisions were clouded, I
believe, by the “stars” around him—his own, when he
was promoted to lieutenant general, and those of the
generals and ambassadors whom he saw as equals. He
believed that US power ultimately would save him, and
the Hmong.

When the war ended in South Vietnam, it also ended in
Laos, where we forced a political arrangement in
Vientiane that virtually guaranteed communist control.
And then we left.

Many Hmong have come to the United States as refugees,
but thousands still languish in Thai refugee camps.
Their way of life has been destroyed. They can never
return to Laos. In the end, our policymakers failed to
assume the moral responsibility that we owed to those
who worked so closely with us during those tumultuous
years. [...] 

<http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/vol47no1/article01.html>

Speaking of Pynchon's naming, in this piece don't miss
the story of Project HARDNOSE.

See also, re a memoir by Holm:

<http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4629691-110738,00.html>

Spookily empty 

Richard L Holm's account of his time as a
counter-terrorism expert with the CIA, The American
Agent, is hamstrung by an instinct to give little away

Chris Petit
Saturday March 22, 2003
The Guardian

The American Agent: My Life in the CIA 
by Richard L Holm 
462pp, St Ermin's Press, £20 

[...] Richard L Holm features in no indexes in books
about the CIA that I could find, apart from Bob
Woodward's Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA . Woodward
mentions him as a respected operations officer who
once briefed him on the Middle East - off the record,
claims Holm, who was angry that Woodward's namecheck
had blown his cover. By then - this was the mid-1980s
- Holm was an expert in counter-terrorism, one of the
spooky boys off most index lists who worked at the
sharp end, though you would not guess it from these
memoirs, a combination of censored memoranda in need
of expanding and regurgitated domestic diaries in need
of censoring. What he really got up to is left in the
book's elisions; what we get fails to explain the
discrepancies between ideology and practice. 

[... bringing us up to the Iran-Contra scandal of the
_Vineland_ '80s...] 

There is a laughably coy paragraph on the Contra
affair, which "led to a series of problems and many
changes at the top", and the disingenuous assertion
that it began as a "political" problem. There are a
couple of laudatory references to a friend and
colleague, William Buckley, killed by terrorists after
being taken hostage in Beirut. Buckley is a much
mentioned, and admired, figure in CIA legend, with a
lively CV - although you would not know it from Holm's
version, which makes no mention of activities
mentioned by others, including laundering money (a
major CIA pastime) through the BCCI. 

[...] Holm's straight-arrow account admits to little
more than difficult times, with pot-shots at deficient
executives and whistleblowers. Its content is so much
whitewash read alongside Jonathan Kwitney's 1987
Crimes of Patriots , which offers a candid alternative
to operations in which Holm was involved in southeast
Asia. These included 20 months of cross-border work -
again glossed over - where "no one ever queried what I
was doing". What he was up to he won't say, except to
hint that he was working in deniable areas, which
translates as "my cover was backstopped only
minimally". 

Kwitney expands Holm's single reference to opium -
"ideology was not an issue" - pointing out that the
CIA's cultivation of the Hmong hill tribe, with whom
Holm liaised, was indistinguishable from its one
reliable crop, the poppy, which became an essential
commodity in the trade of intelligence. Jungle landing
strips constructed for special short take-off aircraft
served a purpose unmentioned by Holm, which was to
allow CIA transportation of the opium crop. CIA
off-record activities are a subject of such common
knowledge now that it appears to have been operating
as the government's shadow alternative to the Mafia.
[...] 



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<http://www.pynchonoid.org/>

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