15

DETOURING INTO A LAOTIAN REVOLUTION

I am sure you are wondering how I got bamboozled into wanting to support a Lao revolutionary force and how I allowed my head to spin with a whole roulette wheel of con artists who had been on the take. Right after I got back from Nam, in June 1975, after the communist defeat of South Vietnam and Cambodia, communist-sponsored riots ripped through the center of Vientiane, capital of Laos. U.S. dependents and the USAID (United States Agency for International Development) staff were evacuated.

USAID had provided cover and support for clandestine military operations in which the U.S. had supported since 1961. General Vang Pao, commander of the U.S.-backed army of Hmong tribesmen, who had convinced us of this mission in the SOF office in Boulder, a few members of the Laotian royal family were the go-betweens. On 23 August 1975, the commies proclaimed Vientiane a “liberated” city. Kaysone Phoumvihane was named prime minister of the new Lao People’s Democratic Republic (LPDR). Kaysone for years had been one of the leaders of Doan 959 (Group 959, the Laotian political infrastructure, which had a forward base in Sam Neua Province, Laos, but was headquartered four kilometers outside Hanoi).

He had his time in the sun, but darkness had descended on the people of Laos. Six years after the fall, when we were in Laos, it was the communist governments of Southeast Asia, particularly those in Laos and Cambodia, that faced growing problems of insurgency. Anti-communist resistance had increased and become more powerful and effective. Although factionalized by regional and ethnic differences, the anti-communist resistance in Laos had the broad-based support of all Lao peoples. The Vietnamese were considered as occupiers, not “friends of the revolution.” If a spare tire was stolen in Laos, the people blamed the Vietnamese for it, most often with justification, always with hate. The economy of Laos was a shambles, largely because of the high cost of garrisoning the Vietnamese occupation army. (The Vietnamese did not supply essential foodstuffs to their troops in the field; they were “provided for” by their “hosts.”) The baggage of monumental bureaucratic and economic mismanagement, which seems to follow closely behind every communist government, was about to destroy Laos. Defections among lower-ranking Pathet Lao troops were commonplace. Rumors floated that many high-ranking members of the government were looking for ways out, or were under virtual house arrest by their Vietnamese “friends.” People were becoming refugees for economic reasons.

PLANS TO TAKE OUT A HEROIN LAB

Bill Young kept TR and me abreast of alleged goings-on within the resistance via convincing cables, phone calls and elaborate MOPSUMS (Monthly Operational Summaries). Wishful thinking ruled, so there was a chance, however slim, that Young now was flying straight. I could not abandon the POWs, so I bit the bullet and continued forwarding monthly pay and expense checks (covering everything from new tires for Bill’s pick-up, down to the last bowl of rice and copy of Time).

SOF’s other financial obligations were formidable, but Young’s fledgling proposal of supporting the Resistance “on a very limited scale” to the tune of only $10,500 monthly (plus, of course, his salary and expenses). For the average 30-day period, I was laying out about $13,500 minimum.

From financing a POW hunt to backing construction of Liberty City and supporting more than 130 armed troops, to this new nest of snakes—the Lao Resistance Movement!

I sensed we were being shafted big time, but I opted to saddle us up for another Southeast Asian go-round. It’s hard to pull out of quicksand.

Young was very clever about coming up with some project or ploy to keep his hook in me if I became restless. For instance, on one occasion, he suggested we cross over the border into Burma with some of his Wa tribesman buddies, take out a bunch of druggies running a heroin lab, blow up the lab and turn the dope over to the DEA.

“Of course,” he continued in a conspiratorial voice, “We will need to buy half a dozen M-16s on the black market at $600 each.”

I gave him $3,000 to get the guns. We never saw the opium lab or the guns. Young should have been writing comic books, and I should have had my head examined. But it did sound like a great way to spend a sunny Sunday afternoon.

But I vetoed Young’s next “viable” backburner project percolating in the wings—the backing of a no-lie, sure-thing Wa tribal insurrection over in Burma. “My resources are limited,” I told him, “so I trust you’ll understand that I can finance only one fucking revolution at a time!”

Wanting to pursue to the nth degree all potential routes to information on living American POWs, I decided we would head to Bangkok for only a short period.

I had, indeed given our loyal Liberty City troops their “discharges,” placed Mingo on waivers and had him shipped out of country. I also gave Buni and Tor unceremonious heave-hos before expanding Young’s dual role as SOF liaison and gentleman schemer.

ZABITOSKY RETURNS

Unbeknownst to us, Fred Zabitosky, no longer on the SOF payroll due to downsizing and my being warned that he was on the take, as were most of the players by that time, had returned to Thailand, still in a snit over being replaced by Young, but more than eager to get things to a rolling boil up at what was left of Liberty City. He believed that Young and the Thais had orchestrated its demise.

Zabitosky was still hanging around with Tor, scrounging for hard MIA intel. This time he was being funded by PROJECT FREEDOM, another activist POW/MIA outfit I liked, and to which I from time to time contributed. SOF had its show to run and Zabitosky had his, both of us with Muong Sai still very much on our minds.

So again, Zabitosky trekked up to Liberty City, where, surprisingly, 20 to 30 troops were still hanging about. Talk of POW rescues and Lao insurrections was still thick in the air. However, Zab’s stay in Thailand was short-lived. After several weeks, Project Freedom opted to stand down his activities due to extreme financial pressures back in CONUS. Out of luck and ready cash, Zabitosky was forced to head home.

Before his departure, TR ran into Zabitosky at the Nana Hotel, where he sprang some new info on us: The previous summer, after I’d departed, Zabitosky arranged/convinced the CIA to send over an interrogator, a “Dave Klaxton,” and a polygraph technician who did some studies on the hand-drawn maps produced by our two Lao. According to SR-71 aerial shots of Muong Sai, our witnesses’ diagrams were only one building off. If the CIA had already gotten hold of photos of Muong Sai, there had to be something hot up there—and our Laotian eyewitnesses had to have been there.

In addition, the previous winter, while leafing through some files at a member of Project Freedom’s New Mexico home, he discovered a 1969 CIA document pertaining to a Pathet Lao prisoner of war camp—at Muong Sai, Laos!

Why Zabitosky didn’t drop this on us before, we were not sure. We could only surmise that it was because he was bitter about being replaced as SOF’s in-country Project Director.

Zabitosky said that the Agency couldn’t get near Muong Sai during the Vietnam War; that it was completely controlled by the Red Chinese and that they had poured people into that vicinity. It was and still might be loaded with high tech communications and radar gear, and maybe some anti-aircraft systems.

The road north of Muong Sai leads into Yunnan Province, PRC, and was constructed completely by the Chinese. For some strange reason, it was put off-limits to American bombers during the war.

There had been one aircraft that went down right at Muong Sai, and the pilot had been a Taiwanese civilian, Chi-Yuen. His name appears on the Alpha Roster where he was listed as Category I (i.e. missing). What Zabitosky could not confirm—but strongly suspected—was that the crash sites within our 1981 area of operations were where aircraft with civilian crews only were downed (i.e. Air America planes).

Was there a possibility that we were secretly being utilized by the Agency to go after some of their missing personnel—something they hadn’t been able to do? Klaxton never insinuated that we’d been wasting our efforts in focusing on Muong Sai.

There were six civilian MIAs in the area from three different aircraft, with one being listed as KIABNR (Killed In Action Body Not Recovered). With other crash sites so close to Pak Beng it would make sense to take all prisoners north up the highway to Muong Sai.

The two missing Americans closest to Muong Sai were James Ackley and Clarence Driver, who went down in a C-123-K near Pak Beng on 7 March ‘73. At a second site another C-123-K crashed; its missing being Roy F. Townley (his daughter, Janet, was part of the Gritz operation) and George L. Ritter. Presumed dead was Edward J. Weissenback. They went down in Sayaboury Province on 27 December ‘71.

Two Americans were spotted working on Vietnamese or Russian light aircraft that flew into Muong Sai. Whether they were housed at the prisoner compound, or at a holding area three to five kilometers away at a cave complex called Na Do, was undetermined.

Zabitosky said, “I waited for a report that one of those Americans was black (Driver was an African-American) but neither came up with that. Since I’d seen a recent photo purporting to be Roy Townley in a hospital bed, gut feeling told me that the two Americans were Townley and Ritter. See why the Company was so interested in Muong Sai? They were their boys.”

But what then of the “4” or “10” or “ 18” or “22” other POWs that we heard about in the beginning, which motivated us to push on? We may never know, since Dave Klaxton, if that was his real name, zippered his mouth, secured his wallet in-pocket, and kept his massive ego firmly engaged.

The CIA did not shell out a single dollar to Zabitosky or to our witnesses to even defray personal travel expenses to Chiang Mai, where interrogation sessions were conducted at the Prince Hotel and polygraph exams at the Railway Hotel—all of which Zabitosky was not allowed to attend, Congressional Medal of Honor recipient or not.

Zabitosky, one irate and disenchanted CMH recipient, left Bangkok just days after.

A “BOUN” TO YOUNG’S EFFORTS: I BECOME A MAJOR GENERAL

Young, meanwhile, was polishing up his icing-atop-the-cake scam. One “Colonel” Bounleuth Saycocie, Young’s designated “future savior of Laos,” had just returned from China with an alleged bevy of troops aching to utilize their recent training. He laughed off any comparison to Zabitosky’s former rabble at Liberty City, crowing that Colonel Bounleuth’s guerrillas (yet to be seen) were the only officially ordained and feasible unit to take Sayaboury Province.

Changing Laotian politics was not my main objective. I wanted to liberate some POWs and generating articles for SOF (in that order). Sucked in again, I decided to play another round with Young, on the off-chance that supporting Bounleuth would finally pay off. Bounleuth graciously made me an honorary Major General in the LULF. Being the modest soul that I am, I accepted the honor but suggested that the title Colonel would do.

Long time friend, retired Air Force Brigadier General C. “Heinie” Aderholt, paid a visit to Bangkok on a furniture-buying expedition, and again threw in with us for a few days. Heinie, who came just to my shoul-ders but had a very commanding presence, had an impressive military record. Skeptical of Young, he contacted some in the know, who warned me to be wary. Heinie had been CO of MACTHAI at Nakon Phanom, Thailand. He spent 7 years in S.E. Asia, where he flew 240 combat missions and was one of the founding members of the Air Commandos. He was an expert in unconventional warfare and had received the prestigious Air Commandos’ Bull Simons Award.

Young had given us a professional looking “position paper” that looked so credible that it could have been written by the NSC to substantiate his belief that an insurgency was not only imminent but would succeed.

The plan laid out in the paper was that SOF was to cough up the seed money for an eventual takeover of Sayaboury Province, Laos, by Young and Bounlueth’s LULF. SOF would then be positioned to run further forays into remote AOs where American POWs might be held. The paper presented a brilliant spin of optimism. “How can a Lao insurgency have any chance of success? Vietnam has 50 million people with one of the most powerful and experienced armies in the world, with massive support from the Soviets. It would certainly seem that encouraging an insurgency in a small country of 3,500,000 people that is poor and undeveloped and which lost a war against the Vietnamese only seven years ago will only cause more suffering and death. But the Lao insurgency is an established fact that is ongoing and will not cease until it is successful.” Translation: “Jump in boys, and don’t forget your credit cards.”

General Aderholt warned us that Young’s whole concept was based on a false assumption. There never was any established Lao insurgency. The Lao did not fight during that war, even with unlimited United States as-sistance. The mountain Hmong did most of the fighting, but they had not, since 1975, been a factor in any significant resistance because there were no stay-behinds or caches of weapons or resupply. Aderholt’s bottom line assessment: “This paper is a well-conceived and concealed plan to get financing.”

In other words, I had been conned. But the game wasn’t over yet.

Promising that Bounleuth’s “army” was just about to conquer Sayaboury Province, Young again had us playing his waiting game while, as always, coming up with one excuse or another to prevent us from actually seeing any of the LULF units and cautioning us against meeting directly any of the key Thai or Laotian players. Bob Moberg was still vouching for Young, as were others, so we checked our attitudes at the door and allowed Bill to deal his hand.

He stuck to his game plan, bringing to Bangkok from Chiang Mai an intel operative named “Sam,” and then began chairing lengthy, nightly roundtable meets with the esteemed “Colonel” Bounleuth.

The revolt in Laos was put on “indefinite hold” and, when I questioned him, he said, “No, it’s not possible to visit the areas and involved players. That might upset the Thais, you know.”

That did it.

As I tend to do before giving anyone their marching papers, I agonized repeatedly about canning Young, while wading through a mountain of bullshit paperwork that Young & Co. had produced. Whatever the guy was, he was an efficient typist whose volumes of imaginative monthly summaries (MOPSUMS), were pouring forth with regularity. But never with tangible proof or second party confirmation.

Though his operation was stalled, Young and his boys’ salaries and expenses mounted until I decided, during a late-afternoon parley with TR in the summer of 1982, that Young and cronies would be jettisoned forthwith. And SOF’s pricey entanglements in POW and Lao Resistance projects would be re-evaluated.

TR recalled my agony in reviewing the straw that broke the camel’s back:

Brown: Okay, T.R., what’ve we given Young?

Reisinger: To date, $72,000 and change.

Brown (gulps): Okay, what’s he given us?

Reisinger: Close to zip. You brought him aboard to gather MIA Intel. Then . . .

Brown (blood pressure rises): When I talked of shutting things down he latched onto that bullshit revolt in Laos. My money’s accomplished nothing!

Reisinger: No, Bob, it has.

Brown (eyebrow arches): Yeah? Enlighten me.

Reisinger: Just found out from Young himself. Ya know that safe-house you were payin’ $275 a month for?

Brown (eyebrow arches higher along than his blood pressure): Yeah, yeah, up-country somewhere.

Reisinger (pause): It’s his family home . . . the one in Chiang Mai.

Brown (goes absolutely ballistic): I’ve been paying that rat bastard’s mortgage?

The narcissist Young was outraged that I would be attacking his self-righteous reputation, but I had a final card to play.

Jim Coyne had become friendly with a retired Thai military officer and gently broached the subject of our renowned LULF “Colonel” and was assured a background check would be run. I decided to host a dinner party at my favorite upscale eatery, the “Twin Vikings.” Where it got its name, I’ll never know because there was nothing “Viking” about it. It was just my favorite because it was the only restaurant in the entire world where the maitre’d not only remembered my name but the vintage wine I guzzled. I intended to put an end to this charade. It was arranged that Coyne’s contact would unexpectedly show up at the dinner.

The lot of us, including Bob Moberg, listened while Young prattled on about Bounleuth’s potential of becoming virtual emperor of Laos, when Coyne’s Thai contact showed up. I became livid, blood pressure spiking.

Drinks and dinner were a tad strained but I had Young in a vice. Young and Bounleuth avoided our looks, scarfing down their entrees with feigned gusto.

Our Thai guest confirmed that Bounleuth was an out-and-out fraud. No question.

I remained remarkably self-controlled as I ordered the death knell to the projects and with great relief and some sadness, booked a flight home. TR stayed on for another few months, tying up assorted loose ends including the closing of our Bangkok headquarters.

In August 1982, SOF’s Bangkok penthouse closed.

A few years later, Coyne told us of a dinner he had in Bangkok with an American ex-pat very familiar with Young. He recounted the Young affair.

“A real shame,” sighed the retired operator. “What he promotes always has its grain of truth but this is expanded upon until, I think, he really starts to believe his own tales; that his projects will succeed if sufficiently nurtured and financed. The man is many things . . . he’s just not like us. He’s just not an American.”

He was right. Young was born in a mission station in Burma when his father was evangelizing the natives, and interestingly enough, was on the CIA payroll while the agency exploited his insider information. Bill Young’s grandfather had also served as a missionary to the tribal people. The Lahu tribesmen became Young’s people, and the hills where he wandered as a child became his home. Rumor had it that he had married an American beauty and moved to America at one point but could not adjust to the culture and went back in a short time to his tribesmen and his fetish for young girls.

He reportedly commanded a whole army of Lahu warriors during the Vietnam War to fight the communists for the CIA. In 2011, he was found shot to death in his home in Chiang Mai at the age of 76, in a very unnerving scenario that symbolized his conflicted life—a gun in one hand and a crucifix in the other. The tortured soul had eaten his gun, putting an end to whatever misery or shadowy demons that had driven the brilliant, one-time alcoholic CIA agent and womanizing preacher’s son over the brink.

Hundreds of tribesmen showed up to mourn their adopted son. Rest in peace wherever you might have gone, old boy; you gave me one of the wildest rides of my life.

A FINAL WORD FROM THE DIA

I left the mission frustrated. SOF continued to investigate and then publish articles on the POW situation for the next decade. In 1990 I met up with Colonel Mike Peck, chief of the POW-MIA Office, a division of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who was as frustrated as I was.

Peck, who had two tours in Nam, characterized by General Henry “The Gunslinger” Emerson as the “best combat officer I have had serve under me,” recounted, “I had been a reader of SOF from its very beginning, and had followed with great interest the articles that chronicled Brown’s efforts to find and rescue American prisoners of war that had not been released after the end of the Vietnam conflict. What truly impressed me, other than the amount of time and effort he personally expended in this search, was the fact that he financed the entire endeavor, which was not cheap, out of his own resources. In addition, he was not afraid to risk life, limb and jail to trek into a lawless and primitive environment to set up a base of operations, recruit his own force, and develop his own intelligence.

“I had been hired to run the office because my predecessor had lost a great deal of credibility with many of the families of the prisoners and the missing, who were clamoring for a real investigation and an honest effort at finding them, while he was feeding them canned platitudes. I was in training to be the Inspector General (IG) of DIA, but I suspect I was given the job as POW-MIA Chief because I was Infantry, had a bunch of combat medals, and looked nice in my uniform, which it was assumed would give me a certain standing with the families. The other heads of the POW-MIA Office had been Military Intelligence types, most of whom had not seen any real combat—unlike all of the prisoners and missing.

“Although new to the office, I was immediately impressed with Robert K. Brown, who knew a great deal more about the issue than I did. I still had an open mind at that point, although throughout my tenure with DIA I had heard nothing but unfavorable things about the Office and ‘its mindset to debunk.’

“Bob Brown and I discussed how he had spent his own money attempting to discover the truth while the government was wasting billions of dollars on extraneous projects all over the globe, of dubious value to the American people. We generally agreed that a number of politicos in Washington were responsible for the fact that not everyone came home, and they were hiding behind the phony organizations infiltrated by insiders, the POW-MIA flags, the postage stamps, and insincere commemoratives. What a crock! It was especially disheartening that the Office insiders had nothing but disparaging comments to make about Bob and his selfless efforts, which told me a great deal early in the game, and, of course, since everything was a great secret, there was no chance of passing along any intelligence that might have been helpful to his contacts that were still active in SE Asia. Though new to the job, I was already feeling the pressure to be a good boy and read my carefully prepared scripts. After meeting and talking with Bob Brown, I felt a little like Diogenes sans lantern—I finally found an honest man.

“After I left that dreadful place in disgust, Bob and I continued to work together on the POW-MIA issue. I felt I was successful in prompting a Senate Select Committee to convene (in 1992) in order to investigate the POW-MIA miasma. Quite sadly, its efforts were generally subverted by its chairman, (Senator John Kerry) as well as by a sellout senator (John McCain) who had been a prisoner himself, but who acted like a lawyer for the North Vietnamese. The entire Asian POW-MIA story is a sad one, and, as was stated at the time, the only way to get our prisoners back would be to give the VC what had been promised to them in the ‘Peace with Honor’ deal, which Congress refused to do, or start the Vietnam War up again, which wasn’t going to happen. The Vietnamese eventually got everything they asked for in an interesting twist of events, but it is a ‘dead’ issue now. ‘We’ll never forget!’ Right.”

POSTSCRIPT

While researching SOF’s Southeast Asian POW-MIA project for this book, I by chance ran across a fascinating article on the subject that reminded me that our POW investigations and research did not end with SOF’s withdrawal of personnel and funds from Thailand and Laos. Quite the contrary. SOF continued to research and publish articles on the issue on an irregular basis up to 1997. No doubt more than a couple of dozen top articles combined. SOF exposed the phonies, the frauds, and the charlatans while the self-serving government bureaucrats and politicians twiddled their thumbs.

One of the most thought provoking pieces of original research on the subject came from close a friend who wishes to remain anonymous so I’ll call him “Cicero.”

I met him a couple of decades ago in a short-lived, but spirited bangbang in a rather dismal part of the world. His credentials, experience and investigative skills as well as his patriotism were beyond question. He exposed how the Russians took some 20-plus selected American aircrew POW’s from the North Vietnamese army to Russia where they were brutally interrogated with drugs, overdosed and their bodies cremated. What follows are summaries of the intel he obtained and from whom. Even now, he will not reveal the real identities for fear of reprisal in case some may still be living.

1. A retired Russian officer, “General Pavlovich” provided much of “Ci- cero’s” scoop.
      “In the 20 years I’d been researching this subject, I’d interviewed a dozen similar sources . . . but none had ever been able or willing to provide detailed, firsthand information . . . several Soviet and Warsaw Pact sources had presented compelling evidence that either the KGB and/or the GRU had taken American prisoners from North Vietnamese control . . . for interrogation and eventual execution in the USSR.” In his 3 6 years of military service, he compiled a notebook of stark statistics: incidents of American pilots being airlifted to Moscow for brutal, drug-induced interrogations, then they were overdosed and cremated. Keep in mind the USG had records on around 200 air crew who were known to have survived their shootdowns, but never appeared in the NVA prison system. As an example of the type of info amongst several others, the Russkies were seeking, “Pavlovich” detailed info regarding the U.S. Airforce Low Altitude Bombing System which was a low-level, high-airspeed approach to releasing a battlefield atomic weapon, which he claimed was obtained from a U.S. POW
2. In May 1989, Soviet Air Force Captain Alexander Zuyev defected to the West in a sophisticated MiG-29. Zuyev, who was a guest at a SOF convention, confirmed essentially what “Pavlovich” reported about the atomic weapon delivery. Zuyev died in a small plane accident.
3. “Bill Jones,” a former Pentagon official was familiar with the intelligence take of Task Force Russia (TFR), the Defense Department’s part of a Joint Commission, formed with the Russians to investigate Soviet abductions of American POW’s during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Jones confirmed, saying, “To the best of my knowledge and experience . . . everything that officer (“Pavlovich”) told you was true . . . unfortunately, TFR was getting close when everything just dried up in 1993.” From the fall of the Soviet empire in ‘91 to the abortive coup in ‘93, the files were open. After ‘93, the Russian files were snapped shut and TFR, courtesy of President Clinton, was folded into another bureaucracy.

When you think about it, why wouldn’t the Russians want to interrogate U.S. aircrews on their latest techniques, tactics and equipment? Through the initial efforts of TFR in accessing KGB and GRU files, it was proven that American aircrews were transported, during the Korean War, to Russia. And if the Russkies did it during the Korean War, why would they not do it again during the Vietnam War?