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103. Leary, “Foreword,” xii.

104. Warner, Back Fire, 32–33.

105. According to Hmong sources, General Harry C. Aderholt was also present at the Lair-Vang Pao meeting, which produced a signed agreement with the Hmong on behalf of the U.S. government. See Hmong International Human Rights Watch’s Thamkrabok Support Group Proposal Presented before the State Department’s Bureau for Population, Refugees, and Migration in Washington, D.C., October 15, 2003, http://www.hmongihrw.org/october_15_2003.htm. So, according to John Prados, was CIA officer Stuart Methven, who had previously contacted the Hmong for political purposes (John Prados, Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby [New York: Oxford University Press, 2003], 97). Prados writes that it was CIA officer Stewart Methven who convinced Vang Pao “over a series of visits . . . to ally with the CIA” (John Prados, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA [Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006], 346). But Tim Weiner agrees with Warner that it was Bill Lair who “discovered” Vang Pao (Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 212). So do Arthur J. Dommen (The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001], 432) and Keith Quincy (Harvesting Pa Chay’s Wheat: The Hmong and America’s Secret War in Laos [Spokane: Eastern Washington University Press, 2000], 176–77). Cf. finally United States, Central Intelligence Agency, Center for the Study of Intelligence (U.S.), Studies in Intelligence, 1999, 77.

106. Interview with Bill Lair, 85; Warner, Back Fire, 36–47; cf. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 308. Citing a personal interview with former Ambassador Leonard Unger, Fineman writes (A Special Relationship, 183) that “the CIA, with Thai help” began forming and training Vang Pao’s army “around 1958” (i.e., not in 1960 as alleged by Lair, Warner, Weiner, Castle, and McCoy).

107. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 184.

108. Warner, Back Fire, 377. Starting in 1963, Hmong and PARU troops were also used by Lair in support of Lao neutralist troops under Kong Le. In August 1963, Lair sent in PARU demolition specialists with Hmong to destroy the strategic route N7 linking North Vietnam to the Plaine des Jarres. See Quincy, Harvesting Pa Chay’s Wheat, chap. 8.

109. Time, March 17, 1961; discussion in Scott, The War Conspiracy, 78.

110. Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos, 116.

111. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 290, cf. 317–27. McCoy portrays Vang Pao as the personal financier of at least one shipment of heroin refined in a laboratory at Long Tieng, the CIA-Hmong base (284–85, cf. 290–91).

112. Interview with Bill Lair, 58.

113. Fineman, A Special Relationship, 133. As noted earlier, their common Thai brother-in-law, Sitthi Savetsila, had been recruited by Bird in 1950 into his “secret committee of leading military and political figures to develop an anticommunist strategy,” bypass the U.S. embassy, and lobby the United States for increased military assistance. The committee also included Phao, Phao’s father-in-law Phin Choonhavan, and Sarit. As a result, Sitthi “began his long service as one of Phao’s closest aides-de-camp and translator.” Later, from 1980 to 1990, Sitthi served as Thailand’s foreign minister under General Prem, Thailand’s last military ruler (Fineman, A Special Relationship, 133).

114. Warner, Back Fire, 31; interview with Bill Lair, 67.

115. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 184. My statement is not intended as a personal innuendo against Lair, who unlike Phao, ended his days without great wealth. I am persuaded of Lair’s personal idealism both by the sympathetic portrait of him in Warner and by his own words in his oral history interview, cited previously.

116. I was told years ago by an American from Asia that William and Willis Bird were cousins but have never found further corroboration of it. According to a monograph on C-46 aircraft, “Bird and Sons was a proprietary company of the US Central Intelligence Agency, operating a variety of aircraft, mainly light types, in South-East Asia. . . . In fact Bird & Sons, Inc, a private airline run by William H. Bird, was the aviation division of A Bird and Sons, the San Francisco heavy construction company operating in Vietnam and Laos” (http://www.laoveterans.com/about.html). I can find nothing more about A Bird and Sons. But after retiring from Thailand in the 1970s, William Bird purchased and operated the Hotel Leamington in Oakland, California.

117. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 569, citing, in part, Scott, The War Conspiracy, 207–8; Leary, Perilous Missions, 129–31.

118. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Government Operations, U.S. Aid Operations in Laos, House Resolution 546, 86th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959), 2; Goldstein, American Policy toward Laos, 186–90.

119. New York Times, February 2, 1962. As a poet, I see in this as a metonymy for what was happening to America. Willis Bird’s life in Thailand continued undisturbed until his death in 1991—inconvenienced only by his inability to return to the United States. Both the attorney general who had the temerity to indict him and his brother who tried vainly to neutralize Laos were murdered. Meanwhile, in Laos, Bird’s brother-in-law, CIA operative James W. (“Bill”) Lair, negotiated an agreement with Hmong leader Vang Pao that opened up the Hmong opium areas to Air American flights and drug shipments (William Leary, “CIA Air Operations in Laos, 1955–1974”; http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/winter99-00/art7.html).

120. Fall, Anatomy of a Crisis, 99.

121. Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 194–95.

122. Kaufman, “Trouble in the Golden Triangle,” 450.

123. Kaufman, “Trouble in the Golden Triangle,” 451.

124. Kaufman, “Trouble in the Golden Triangle,” 452, citing State Department dispatches and telegrams; McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 349.

125. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 352, citing New York Times, August 11, 1971.

126. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 349; Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 235.

127. Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 235.

128. Kaufman, “Trouble in the Golden Triangle,” 451–53.

129. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 177.

130. Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 234.

131. Tzang Yawnghwe, The Shan of Burma: Memoirs of a Shan Exile (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1987), 124–49.

132. Lintner,