Back Fire: The CIA's Secret War in Laos and Its Link to the Vietnam War.

• Author: Corn, David

When gleeful Germans took sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall in 1989, a triumphant cry resounded throughout the West. We had won the Cold War, the celebrants crowed, and they continue to crow to this day. But overlooked since the victory party began have been all the pawns who were sacrificed by Oval Office strategists during this battle: the Salvadoran peasants slaughtered by an anti-communist military equipped by the Pentagon; the Kurds egged on and then abandoned in the seventies in their rebellion against Saddam Hussein (the enemy of Washington's anti-Soviet pal, the Shah of Iran).

They and others around the world bore the burdens of a global crusade not their own. But the Cold War dictated--or so its most dedicated warriors thought--that the United States exploit alliances of convenience.

No group was more victimized by American geostrategists in this period than the Hmong tribespeople of Laos. Romanced by the United States in the early sixties, the Hmong were used as anti-communist surrogates and then dumped--all in secrecy, as part of a clandestine war managed by the CIA at the direction of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations.

In Back Fire, Roger Warner, a former Life correspondent, ably chronicles this shameful episode. Warner shrinks back from rendering judgment, but a clear indictment shines through: Cold War bureaucrats, imbued with a blinding anticommunism, put the Hmong in the path of harm to serve a dubious political goal. And they got away with it easily. After all, there are no official victims in a war that does not officially exist.

In the early days of the Kennedy Administration, the major problem in Indochina was not Vietnam but Laos, a tiny pre-industrial nation of three million where the government and national economy barely functioned. There, an armed rightist camp backed by the Americans was facing the Pathet Lao, a nationalist group supported by the communists of North Vietnam. Eventually, the United States and the Soviet Union signed an accord that called for a neutral Laos and the withdrawal of all foreign military personnel. But the North Vietnamese did not leave, remaining in Laos in order to protect the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Kennedy's aides responded by conducting a secret war on the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and their Laotian allies. That is, they made a further mockery of the accord by using CIA persomel to arm, train, supply, and direct their favored combatants. Of course, the Kennedy, Johnson, and...