De V.S. arresteren de vroegere leider van de CIA in Laos

Sebastien Berger
Telegraaf

De verouderende vroegere leider van het „Geheime Leger“ van de CIA in Laos was vorge nacht in een Amerikaanse gevangenis, die van het opzetten van een staatsgreep tegen zijn en van Washington oude Communistische vijand wordt beschuldigd. De algemene negen andere mensen van Vang Pao, 77, werden en gearresteerd in dageraadinvallen door meer dan 200 federale agenten in dageraadinvallen over Californië.

Detentions waren het hoogtepunt van Verrichting Aangetaste Adelaar `', een halfjaarlijks onderzoek van een poging de Communistische overheid om van Laos' neer te halen.

According to prosecutors Vang Pao and his co-conspirators planned to spend almost USD 10 million (pounds 5 million) on weaponry including assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, Stinger surface-to-air missiles, mines and C-4 explosives.

They were recruiting a mercenary force to attack government buildings in the Lao capital Vientiane and “reduce them to rubble,” they said.

“This investigation read like a movie script, but turned out to be reality,” said Michael Sullivan, acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

“We’re looking at conspiracy to murder thousands and thousands of people at one time,” assistant US attorney Bob Twiss told a federal court.

The conflict in Laos was an overspill from the Vietnam war and saw Vang Pao’s US-backed secret army, most of them members of the Hmong ethnic minority, fighting the Communist Pathet Lao guerrilla movement which was heavily reinforced by North Vietnam.

Vang Pao’s forces, 40,000-strong at their peak, were largely funded by the heroin trade, with raw opium transported on the airplanes and helicopters of Air America, the private airline of his CIA supporters.

After the fall of Vientiane to the Pathet Lao in 1975 Vang Pao went into exile in the US, but never accepted defeat. “War is difficult, peace is hell,” he once said.

Touby Lyfoung, commander of an earlier French-backed Hmong army, once said of him: “He is a pure military officer who doesn’t understand that after the war there is a peace.”

The last remnants of the Hmong forces and their descendants still hide out in the mountains of Laos, where human rights groups say they are persecuted and attacked by the Lao military.

But the arrests are a measure of how far geopolitical times have changed since the 1970s, and the government in Vientiane, one of the world’s last five Communist dictatorships, which has allegedly sought to assassinate Vang Pao in the past, was delighted.

“This is the great news that Laos has waited for for so long,” said the foreign ministry spokesman Yong Changthalansy. “We hope the United States will prosecute them strictly under the Patriot Act and punish the violators of the law severely.”

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