From spying to killing: how America's "secret war" in Laos transformed the CIA.

• Author: Dakin, Brett
• Position: A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA - Book review

A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA

by Joshua Kurlantzick

Simon & Schuster, 336 pp.

In July of last year, Congress authorized a Medal of Honor for Sergeant Gary Rose. Every such honor is extraordinary, of course, but there was something unique about Rose's, who now leads a quiet life in Alabama: it came more than forty years after the fact. In September 1970, while serving during the Vietnam War as a medic with the Special Forces, Rose bravely cared for fifty-one wounded soldiers, even after a rocket-propelled grenade punched shards of metal into his hand and foot. Rose was put forward for a medal shortly thereafter, but his nomination was shelved, and his service buried, for the next four decades because of where it took place: not in Vietnam, but next door in Laos. In fact, Rose's would be the first such honor to expressly acknowledge the service of a U.S. soldier on the ground in Laos. (In 2010, President Obama awarded a Medal of Honor posthumously to Air Force Sergeant Richard Etchberger, more than forty-two years after he died, in a separate incident in the hills of Laos.)

What were servicemen like Rose doing in Laos? And why was their service in this tiny, landlocked nation kept under wraps for so long? As we learn in Joshua Kurlantzick's A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA, these men were there in part to divert attention from an anticommunist operation, unprecedented in scale, being led by the Central Intelligence Agency elsewhere in the country.

The results of the so-called Secret War in Laos, neither disclosed to the American people nor authorized by their representatives in Congress, were devastating. It lasted more than a decade, leading to the deaths of more than 200,000 Laotians, about one-tenth of the country's total population. Nearly twice as many were wounded, and almost a million Laotians were made refugees in their own country. Laos became the most heavily bombed country, per capita, in history. And when all was said and done, after the United States withdrew, a Communist government quickly assumed power, and rules Laos to this day.

While our servicemen performed countless heroic acts during the Vietnam War, Americans now acknowledge that it was a catastrophe for the U.S.--a foreign policy failure as well as a humanitarian disaster. President Obama himself said of Indochina in 2016, "[U]ltimately, Nixon withdrew, Kissinger went to Paris, and all we left behind was chaos, slaughter, and authoritarian governments that finally, over time, have emerged from that hell.... In what way did that strategy promote our interests?"

And yet, as Kurlantzick shows in his timely new book, the CIA does not share this assessment. In fact, an internal CIA report declared the agency's paramilitary operations in Laos "the most successful ever mounted." The war in Laos marked a turning point for the CIA, changing forever the agency's size and power, and therefore the way the U.S. wages war. According to Kurlantzick, a senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, we need look no further than today's fight against terrorism to discover the enduring legacy of the Secret War in Laos.

When I lived in Laos at the end of the twentieth century, the country barely registered on the U.S. foreign policy establishment's radar, but in the 1950s, Laos was at its very center. As the Cold War heated up, President Dwight Eisenhower...