12
SOF IS SUCKED INTO THE HUNT
In April ‘81, after visiting George Brooks of the League of Families at my own expense (but of course that was the reason Monaghan called me), and convincing him to no longer fund Gritz, the now former Gritz loyalists and I returned to Boulder to hash out some plans for launching our own POW mission.
Once word got around that SOF was heavily involved in the Yellow Rain and the POW search, Bill Guthrie, who was with SOF wearing many hats from 1981—86, fielded a parade of resistance movement chiefs who came begging.
“The POW search was something that needed to be done and finished at the time, and you and Perot were the only people with money who had the balls for it,” Guthrie said.
“Your involvement in Laos drew to the office a parade of people who either represented resistance movements, many of which we’d never heard of, or in some cases more frauds who wanted money for nonexistent campaigns. We were approached by Karen splinter organizations, other Burmese tribes, and Armenian and Kurdish organizations, largely because of the fame of the POW and Yellow Rain searches.” Guthrie had to help ward off the stampede while he held down the fort.
GENERAL VANG PAO COMES ON BOARD
After making a whirlwind estimate of the situation, I flew to Washington, DC with a couple of my guys to brief Rear Admiral Allan G. Paulson, the director of the POW/MIA office of the Inter-Agency Group, and the Deputy Director of Collection Management of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) of the SOF teams’ research and buy-out plan.
Berent had first been the assistant air attaché, then the air attaché at the American Embassy, Phnom Penh, Cambodia in the ‘70s. Through some of his contacts, he introduced me to Admiral Paulson.
“I was at the initial meetings with Paulson and I remember him being an absolutely superb guy, and I remember also that he was kind enough to give you a Pentagon china cup so you could spit your chewing tobacco into it,” Berent recalled wryly.
Admiral Paulsen gave me the green light to hunt for American POWs in Laos. He never promised U.S. Government support, but he did promise to provide identifying questions to ask the POWs to vet them once we had a list of names.
“I think that you should contact General Vang Pao, the Hmong general who led the CIA-sponsored war against the communists in Laos. Hopefully he can provide a source of reliable intelligence through his anti-communist contacts still deep inside Laos,” Paulson suggested.
The General and his Laotian entourage, including bodyguards, were eager to come to Boulder. I had already met the General when I invited him to be a banquet speaker at the 1st SOF Convention in Columbia, Missouri a few months earlier in September 1980. His visit to Boulder clinched the SOF mission to search for POW/MIAs.
“Gentlemen,” the small, dark, round-faced, tough-as-nails General began, as he leaned forward on my black phony leather rocker in my den and stared at me with his steely black eyes. I braced myself. His words were more of a calculated command than a request. “I realize what you really want is information about your missing comrades in Southeast Asia. I can help to provide such aid. But I want the following before my side can give you anything, and what I want will have to be in three phases. First, I want the issue of chemical and biological warfare against my people in Laos by the Vietnamese brought before the United Nations. Second, in exchange, I will have my organization turn over 17 sets of remains of missing Americans to you. Third, you must assist me in arming and equipping a battalion of my men in Laos who, in turn, will form the nucleus of a fighting force which will eventually throw the Vietnamese out of Laos.”
He drove a tough if not impossible bargain, but the General was the one to open the door for getting SOF firmly established in Southeast Asia. Rather than antagonize him by asking why he had not turned over the remains of the Americans to the U.S., the country that supported his “Secret War” efforts and had given him asylum, I decided to play.
Aha, he had given me a tall order, but at what cost? SOF could hardly convince the world that a Laotian Revolution was feasible—or fund the purchase of arms for a battalion to overthrow the commies in Laos and eject the Vietnamese occupiers. But his was the best offer on the table thus far.
“I will agree to your conditions, but I have to have hardcore proof of the POWs,” I told the General, my mind swiftly stacking up the cost in terms of time, manpower and funds for the multi-faceted mission.
“I can do that,” the wily General said as he handed Zabitosky a letter of introduction to one of his agents in Santa Ana, California.
Zabitosky and Bleacher flew to the west coast to meet with Gen. Vang Pao’s agent on 13 April 1981. The General’s contact produced a letter to be given to the chief of staff of the Laotian resistance forces covertly headquartered in a Lao refugee camp on the Thai-Laotian border. SOF staffer Jim Coyne, rugged, bearded, mocking blue-eyed, a Huey door gunner in Nam and former 12-year National Geographic photographer, joined them in LA. The three flew to Bangkok on 26 April 1981.
INTO THE WILDS OF THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE
For the next two years SOF POW/MIA teams journeyed to the mysterious and treacherous environs of the “Golden Triangle” of Thailand, Laos and Burma, and into the wild, foggy hills of communist-occupied Laos. Our Lao sources confirmed sightings of some of the 534 missing Americans, mainly air crewmen who had been shot down over Laos and never seen or heard from again.
The hard core SOF team, Zabitosky, Coyne and Tom Reisinger, a former SF medic, all of them seasoned Nam vets and familiar with the smoggy, over-populated city of Bangkok which had been a popular playground for those on R&R during the war, knocked around the old familiar city for days.
Bangkok, like many other Southeast Asian cities, was a melting pot for Chinese, Indians and other nationalities. It very much had a European influence, although Thailand had escaped European colonialism. Thailand had become a neutral playing field with seaside resorts and cosmopolitan shopping districts that catered to worldly tourists and other fat cats. East met West in Bangkok, where hit men, gold, drug and weapons traffickers and other nefarious characters met and plotted. The streets were lined with small ethnic shops and upscale designer boutiques. Fashionable men and women drove or shoved each other through the streets or were driven in rickety carts pedaled by humans in baggy pants and sandals. The smell of roasting coffee and chickens hanging in the marketplaces, rotting, mixed with the scents of exotic spices and freshly cooked hot Thai cuisine floating out from the many restaurants that lined the streets and backed up into alleyways. Thailand was the “Land of Smiles,” not counting the periodic palace coups by the military, and the Thais were outwardly quiet and gentle. That reputation is all well and good as long as you’d never dealt with them, and even then learned to watch your back.
Whether in smoky bars on the infamous Pat Pong Street in Bangkok, where for many years clandestine legitimate and illicit rendezvous and plans had been hatched, at the Bangkok Foreign Press Club, or through the “old boy” network, the SOF team established contacts. Some of those included U.S. Embassy officials and various indigenous personnel. Others were Americans in the expat community in Thailand up to one shenanigan or another.
Having gotten as much as they could of the POW scoop in Bangkok, the SOF team slipped up north toward the Laotian border to meet up with Vang Pao’s contacts. They reported to home base after getting a feel for the lay of the land and for the dicey political situation that had changed considerably in the decade since the war had ended.
“Brown, this mission is not going to go far unless we have a launching pad in Laos, right across from the Thai border in the north. From there, we can conduct training of local Lao United Liberation Front (LULF) troops. Recon teams and intelligence agents could infiltrate Laos to search for U.S. POW/MIAs or provide security if a cash-for-POWs plan came through,” they told me.
“What about crossing the Thai-Laotian border?” I asked.
Coyne said, “No country likes folks crisscrossing its border without so much as a greeting to immigration control and customs. But there are places in the world where governments can’t do much about it. Laos and along the Mekong River are obviously one of those places.
“We’ve laid contingency plans to make a wild dash back into Thailand from Laos and a quick lawyering-up in case hostile Americans or Thai officials pursue us. Just imagine vastly outnumbered Thai border security forces and their Kuomintang Chinese irregulars trading fire with totally pissed-off Vietnamese and/or Pathet Lao chasing after our “round eye” scalps. Large-scale hostilities heating up between the two Southeast Asian rivals would put the names of SOFers at the top of the American Embassy’s bad guy list. Or worse yet, we could end up in some rat infested Thai or Lao slam, or spend a few seconds against a cold concrete wall facing a firing squad.” The team, concerned about our shifting Thai and American “allies,” sounded the alarm regarding the shaky political landscape.
I gave their fears due thought—for a couple of seconds. After all, the two tall, blue eyed, English-only-speaking Vikings who towered over the natives, TR and Coyne, and the mean and tough-looking, dagger-eyed Zabitosky, conducting all sorts of irregular activities made a very visible target among the smaller even more dark-complexioned locals.
“Continue to march,” I said. “Build the bloody camp. I’ll finance it myself.”
The Thai officials, who played their cards close to their vests, never openly approved of our highly trafficked safe house in Chiang Mai or our trekking across their border with arms and supplies; but they did not stop us either. That is, until five months later when, out of the blue, they ordered us to shut our operation down.
The intervening five months, until we were ordered to shut down the site, were some of the most eventful in the magazine’s history. One bizarre event after the other kept our heads spinning. We found ourselves so en-trenched in other projects that we kept on operating in Thailand for the next two years. We recruited 125 armed ethnic tribesmen to man the camp we established and called “Liberty City” (FOB ‘81), the only permanent anti-communist installation in Laos in the early ‘80s.
Now some good intentions are just that, while others cost a bundle, and this one almost sucked me dry. I doled out at least $250,000 (probably $680,000 in today’s currency) from SOFcoffers to fund the command center in Laos and other POW/MIA related projects. The various cunning actors whose support I needed demanded that we operate on several fronts before they would cooperate.
Remember, to get General Vang Pao on board, we had to produce a sample of Yellow Rain, a chemical warfare agent allegedly being used against the Hmong. His second condition was to train a local hostage rescue force. We were strong-armed by a former CIA agent in Thailand into helping support a Laotian revolutionary movement in exchange for a hoped-for recovery of American prisoners. But it got better. We planned to take down an opium lab.
I dished out over $72,000 alone just to William Young, the American mastermind of a Laotian Resistance revolution plot, a clever former CIA operative and a man of great intrigue. Little did I know that he was a Lahu tribesman in a white man’s body. Skilled in the Thai/Lao way, he used bribes, cut underhanded deals, and, knowing just how to trigger my lust for adventure, kept me hanging on with fantastic plots so he could keep the purse strings open. But as you will soon see, he wasn’t the only villain. Thailand and Laos were full of them, both native and Western. I admit that I was completely seduced by the adrenalin-raising adventures and missions impossible. But first let me get to the search for Yellow Rain, the first hoop we had to jump through in order to meet General Vang Pao’s bargaining conditions.