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The U.S. bombing of Laos (1964-1973) was part of a covert attempt by the CIA to wrest power from the communist Pathet Lao, a group allied with North Vietnam and the Soviet Union during the Vietnam War.

The officially neutral country became a battleground in the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union, with American bombers dropping overtwo million tons of cluster bombsover Laosmore than all the bombs dropped during WWII combined. Today, Laos is the most heavily bombed nation in history. Here are facts about the so-called secret war in Laos.

Laos is a landlocked country bordered by China and Myanmar to the North, Vietnam to the East, Cambodia to the South and Thailand and the Mekong River to the West.

Laos' proximity to China made it critical to President Eisenhower to defend against communism.

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Its proximity to Mao Zedongs China made it critical to Dwight D. Eisenhowers Domino Theory of keeping communism at bay. If Laos were lost, the rest of Southeast Asiawould follow,Eisenhower told his National Security Council. On the day of his farewell address in 1961, President Eisenhower approved the CIAs training of anti-communist forces in the mountains of Laos. Their mission: To disrupt communist supply routes across the Ho Chi Minh Trail to Vietnam.

Eisenhowers successors in the White House: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, all approved escalating air support for the guerrilla fighters, but not publicly. The 1962 International Agreement on the Neutrality of Laos, signed by China, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, the United States and 10 other countries, forbid signees from directly invading Laos or establishing military bases there. The secret war in Laos had begun.

Long before the Cold War, Laos had a history of interference from its neighbors. Fa Ngum founded the first recorded Lao state of Lan Xang, or The Kingdom of a Million Elephants, in 1353. From 1353-1371, Fa Ngum went on to conquer most of todays Laos and parts of what is now Vietnam and Northeast Thailand, bringing Theravada Buddhism and Khmer culture from the kingdom of Angkor (in todays Cambodia) with him.

Over the centuries, his conquered neighbors fought back, and the Thai people dominated large swaths of Laos from the late 1700s to the early 1800s. What we know as Laos today was built from an assemblage of different ethnic groups with distinct languages and cultures.

A man walks past a 30+ year-old bomb crater in the middle of a village in Laos. Decades-old craters are all over the village.

Jerry Redfern/LightRocket/Getty Images

Europeans entered the fray in 1893, when France declared Laos part of French Indochina. To the French, having Laos as a protectorate was a means to control the Mekong River, a valuable trade route through Southeast Asia.

Frances grasp on Laos first slipped in 1945, when the Japanese occupied Laos in the closing days of World War II. When atomic bombs fell on Japan, Laos declared its independence under the short-lived Lao Issara (Free Laos) government of Prince Phetsarath in 1945. The French regained power the following year.

Laos achieved full independence in 1954 following the victory of communist Vit Minh leader Ho Chi Minh over the French at the bloody Battle of in Bin Ph. The ensuing Geneva Accords split Vietnam into North and South Vietnam and stipulated that the French relinquish their claims in Southeast Asia. The agreement was not signed by the United States, who feared that in the absence of French influence, Southeast Asia would fall to communist forces.

The United States watched closely as the Pathet Lao gained popularity in newly-independent Laos. The Pathet Lao was a communist group founded at Viet Minh headquarters in 1950 during the French war. Largely dependent on Vietnamese aid, their leader was Prince Souphanouvong, the Red Prince. Born to a prince of Luang Prabang and a commoner, his education in Vietnam led him to become a disciple of Ho Chi Minh and, later, to lead the opposition against his half-brother, Souvanna Phouma, who was Prime Minister of Laos five different times (from 1951-1954, 1957-1958, in 1960 and again from 1962-1972) and preferred a coalition government balancing the Pathet Lao with more conservative forces.

An armed guard (far right) standing next to (L-R)Souvanna Phouma, Neutralist Premier of the Laotian Coalition Government, his pro-communist, half-brother, Souphanouvong, and General Singkapo, commander-in chief of the Pathet Lao Army, 1963.

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Phoumas hold on power was tenuous at best. Under his rule, government troops and the Pathet Lao began to clash in the Northeast along the border of Vietnam. Publicly, President Kennedy announced his support for neutralizing Laosthough what neutralization looked like on paper was far different from what it was in practice.

In 1960, the CIA approached Vang Pao, a major general in the Royal Lao Army and a member of the Hmong minority in Laos, to be the chief of their secret army to push back the communist Pathet Lao. The Hmong made up an ethnic group that had originated in China and lived in the remote mountains of Laos, often in extreme poverty, and had a history of evading authority. They had been at odds with the lowland Lao majority for centuries, and the CIA exploited this history of conflict to their benefit.

Charismatic and prone to pacing while he talked, Vang Pao had experience fighting both the French and the Japanese. His followers praised him for his bravery in fighting alongside his men. The CIAs Operation Momentum armed and trained the Hmong to take on the Pathet Lao in the growing proxy war.

A ground war in Laos with U.S. forces was not on the table. President Kennedy wrote as early as 1961 that, Laosis a most inhospitable area in which to wage a campaign. Its geography, topography, and climate are built-in liabilities. Bombing Laos was seen as a safer means of cutting off communist supply lines into Vietnam before they could be used against American troops.

The U. S. and Laotian governments permitted newsmen a rare glimpse of a military base in Laos with 250-pound bombs used to fight against the North Vietnamese in northern Laos.

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The U.S. Air Force began bombing targets in Laos in 1964, flying planes like AC-130s and B-52s full of cluster bombs on covert missions based out of Thailand. The United States eventually dropped the equivalent of a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years, according to Al Jazeera.

The bombing focused on disrupting communist supply chains on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and Sepon (also spelled Xpn), a village near a former French air base now controlled by North Vietnam. In 1971, Sepon was the target of the failed Operation Lam Son, when the U.S. and South Vietnam attempted to block access to the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Dave Burns, a member of the U.S. Air Forces 16 Special Operations Squadron, flew missions over Laos out of Ubon, Thailand. He recalls, Sepon was the one place in Laos that we did not want to fly into. The village was at a crossroads of three highways leading in from Vietnam: the Mu Gia Pass, the Ban Karai Pass, and the Barthelme Pass. The highways then headed south to the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It was highly defended with all sorts of anti-aircraft guns. Going there was a guarantee of being hit or being shot down.

Air America was the lifeblood of the CIAs Laos operation, transporting personnel, food and supplies to and from remote bases. As a former CIA officer explained: Wed negotiate with the tribal groups. If you dont make a deal with them, give them aid, the communists will do it, and then theyll join with the communists. The CIA set up medical facilities with doctors, started schools and offered protection from rivals.

Air America was also transporting more illicit goods. In the 1979 book Air America by Christopher Robbins, later immortalized in the fictional "Air America" movie starring Mel Gibson and Robert Downey, Jr., Robbins reports on how opium from Lao poppies was transported on American planes.

By 1975, one-tenth of the population of Laos, or 200,000 civilians and members of the military, were dead. Twice as many were wounded. Seven hundred and fifty thousand, a full quarter of the population, had become refugeesincluding General Vang Pao himself. Declassified documents show that 728 Americans died in Laos, most of whom were working for the CIA. The secret war in Laos, or the Laos Civil War to many who lived through it, set a precedent for a more militarized CIA with the power to engage in covert conflicts around the world.

Cooperative Orthotic and Prosthetic Enterprise (also known as COPE) is a learning center where visitors can inform themselves about the UXO problem in Laos.

John S Lander/LightRocket/Getty Images

In Laos, the legacy of U.S. bombs continues to wreak havoc. Since 1964, more than 50,000 Lao have been killed or injured by U.S. bombs, 98 percent of them civilians. An estimated 30 percent of the bombs dropped on Laos failed to explode upon impact, and in the years since the bombing ended, 20,000 people have been killed or maimed by the estimated 80 million bombs left behind.

In 2016, President Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Laos. He pledged an additional $90 million in aid to remove unexploded ordnance on top of the $100 million that had been spent previously. The work of cleaning out unexploded bombs from the soil continues.

Jessica Pearce Rotondi is the author of What We Inherit: A Secret War and a Familys Search for Answers.

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Why Laos Has Been Bombed More Than Any Other Country - History

PUTRAJAYA: Bukit Aman's Special Branch is investigating a recent meeting in Kajang allegedly involving former Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) members.

Home Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin (pic) said the authorities were looking into whether the gathering was an attempt to revive the old partys ideology in the country.

The police and the Special Branch have been instructed to investigate the meeting. We want to find out what was the objective of the meet.

Is it merely to celebrate the Hat Yai peace agreement? Is it an attempt to revive an old spirit of communism from back then?

We cannot take these things lightly, as our country has enjoyed peace for a long time.

Let the authorities investigate first, and once we have the report, we will know if the meeting was unlawful or if it is just a harmless event, he told a press conference after attending the Immigration Department Day celebrations here Monday (Dec 2).

Muhyiddin added that as an independent country, Malaysians are not prevented from gathering but certain sentiments should not be revived.

People are free to believe in certain sentiments, I do not think we can stop that.

But we have been a peaceful nation for a long time. Is it a good thing to revive something from the past that was linked to wars and killings? he said.

A recent news report revealed that former members of the CPM had met in Kajang in conjunction with the 30th anniversary of the Hat Yai Peace Accord, which was signed on Dec 2,1989, by the Malaysian government and the party.

The meeting came close on the heels of the controversial return of CPM leader Chin Pengs ashes to Malaysia.

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Special Branch to probe 'communist gathering' - The Star Online

The statement reads:

"As of its establishment in 1949, NATO became one of the headquarters of anti-communism and an imperialist alliance aimed to stop the rise of the working class. NATO was responsible for criminal attacks against communists in its member states and was the center of counter-guerilla organizations.

NATO, as the armed wing of the United Sates and the European Union, is expanding further to the east to safeguard its control of energy resources and pipelines, spheres of influence and markets for the sake of big capital and the transnational corporations. The European Union, in particular, is advancing alone or/and with NATO to its further militarization with the Permanent Structural Cooperation (PESCO) and its powerful EU army.

All governments of the member states of NATO bear direct individual responsibility for NATOs aggressive policies, and the increase of their military budgets to the 2% of the GDP while their people are suffering under severe austerity measures and the economic crisis caused by their militaristic policies.

The NATO states military bases in other countries are NOT in defense of their national or global security. They are the military expression of imperialist intrusion in the lives of sovereign countries on behalf of their dominant financial, political, and military interests of the ruling elite.

In recent years, NATO has fulfilled its own murderous role in the imperialist wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya. Its member states intervene in Africa and other regions. It expands its military bases into the Balkans, Central and Eastern Europe, establishes new command centres, creates dangerous infrastructure in Europe, including infrastructure related to the storage of nuclear weapons.

Peoples of Serbia are united in the position that NATO is the enemy of our country and best proof for it was military intervention in 1999 which had catastrophic consequences for Serbian civilians. More than 3,000 civilians, of which 70 children were killed by the NATO bombs and more than 10,000 people, were wounded. The cost of the damage was assessed at 100 billion dollars.

Our unity is our strength in the fight for the world of peace, solidarity and progress - for the world without NATO!

Lets strengthen the struggle against imperialist war, the EU, the NATO and all imperialist alliances!

End the system of exploitation that breeds wars, crises, refugees, exploitation!

Belgrade, December 4, 2019".

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Serbian communists blast NATO as an "enemy of peace and progress" - In Defense of Communism

Shortly before the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989, marking the last days of the Cold War, Irish communists attended East Germanys 40th anniversary celebration.

Possibly the smallest member of the Soviet Unions global network, the Communist Party of Ireland (CPI) under Michael ORiordan had to compete with an Irish rival seeking the Russians attention. The Workers Party, with seven TDs in Dil ireann, was going places in ultra-conservative Ireland, at least in the eyes of the Soviet embassy in Dublin. Over the course of the decade, leading political figures, both Fianna Fil and Fine Gael, accused it of having a Moscow-directed agenda aiming to turn Ireland into another Cuba.

Earlier in 1989 the dominant figure in the WP, Sen Garland, asked the embattled East German regime for financial help. He had previously appealed to Moscow for 1 million, warning that special activities a euphemism for Official IRA fundraising damaged the partys public image.

Before Mikhail Gorbachev took over in the Kremlin, Garland had good reason to believe the Soviets could give him urgently-needed funds. Imprisoned during the IRAs Border campaign in the 1950s, Garland, with Cathal Goulding, afterwards led the republican movement in a leftwards political direction.

Garland and Goulding had much in common with ORiordan. The latter had been interned with Goulding and other republicans during the second World War, and, like Garland, had seen military action and been wounded (in ORiordans case during the Spanish civil war).

The three men acquired a simplistic pro-Soviet, anti-American world view when competition between the two superpowers dominated global politics. In the 1950s, when Ireland was described as the most viscerally anti-communist country in the world, the public saw imprisoned churchmen in Hungary and Yugoslavia Cardinal Mindszenty and Archbishop Stepinac as Cold War martyrs. With the help of the Garda Special Branch, Dublins Catholic archbishop, John Charles McQuaid, kept detailed dossiers on communists such as ORiordan.

Neither British nor Irish officials believed these reds were harmless. They saw the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) as providing their link with Russia: directing them, and, more importantly, the Connolly Association, which attempted to politicise the many Irish exiles in Britain. The authorities in Dublin did not allow the Irish States non-aligned status, its military neutrality, to prevent them joining the Wests struggle against Soviet communism.

Col Dan Bryan of G2, the army intelligence directorate, argued that Ireland should assist the Ntto powers. In the Department of Justice, Peter Berry did the same.

If Moscows express adherents were too isolated to pose a threat in either Irish jurisdiction, the republican movement was a different matter. The authorities, north and south, saw that a communist-influenced IRA had potential appeal. Berry proposed towards the end of the 1960s that the Fianna Fil government should attempt to split the IRA, to drive a wedge between the rural members the old faithfuls and the Dublin-based cohort advocating a workers socialist republic.

The British ambassador in Dublin saw Northern Irelands civil rights crisis through a Cold War lens: the Marxist-influenced IRA, its leaders looking towards Moscow, had manipulated the agitation on the streets.

But the clamour for guns in Belfasts Catholic ghettos in August 1969, following the outbreak of sectarian violence, provided republican traditionalists with a reason to split the republican movement. Disturbed at the left-wing rhetoric of Garland and Goulding perceived to be a Marxist or alien ideology the believers in the physical-force tradition set up the Provisional IRA.

In 1970 the American embassy quoted a senior Garda officer as saying that communism had advanced further in the past two or three years than in the previous 40. The embassy followed Washingtons instructions and monitored left-wing activity. Details in these reports were supplied by an authoritative Irish security source. Washington heard that communists who wanted a republic friendly to Russia had attempted to take control of the pre-split republican movement.

The outbreak of armed conflict in the North created an opportunity for the Soviet Union to make trouble for Britain, its Nato adversary, and Moscow looked with increasing sympathy on the post-split Official IRA as another liberation movement.

Whitehall feared Dublin could become a Soviet espionage hub, with the Official republican organisation acting as a proxy. Using ORiordan as an intermediary, the Official IRA later received arms shipments from the Soviets. Northern Irelands violence spilling over the Border led to fears of instability on the scale of an Irish Cuba.

Following the Bloody Sunday killings and the burning of the British embassy in Dublin, in January 1972, the British appealed to President Nixon -to put pressure on the Irish government to act decisively against the IRA. Otherwise, according to the Foreign Office, a Western democracy might plunge into anarchy.

Russian diplomats arrived in Dublin in 1974. The papal nuncio and other dignitaries mingled with old revolutionaries such as Peadar ODonnell when the embassy threw a party. Times had changed since people had said the rosary outside Dalymount Park when Yugoslavia played. Dublin did not become an espionage hub, and Soviet mischief-making about Northern Ireland consisted mainly of propaganda attacks against British colonialism.

If it was ironic that Ireland could host two tiny Marxist parties, one more pro-Soviet than the other, it was doubly so that they should fall out with each other. In the late 1970s the CPI criticised its rivals U-turn on the national question which depicted the Provisional IRAs war in the same light as the Black and Tans campaign.

Garland then found himself at odds with the Soviet blocs enthusiastic support for republican hunger strikers in Long Kesh who were seeking restoration of political status for paramilitary prisoners.

Abandoning traditional republican demands cost the Official movement dear in the North. On the other hand, in the South, the Workers Party enjoyed limited electoral success in the 1980s. British and American diplomats kept an eye on it, but there was no question of it playing a leading role in creating an Irish Cuba.

Garland had few friends at home, as the British embassy astutely observed, and his partys friendships abroad withered when the Soviet-led world fell asunder. The fallout from this 1989 earthquake did not do ORiordan much damage; his party had little or no political presence. Garlands party, however, lost everything when six of its seven TDs walked out following two years of fractious debate. The Cold War in Ireland was all over now.John Mulqueen is the author of An Alien Ideology: Cold War Perceptions of the Irish Republican Left, published by Liverpool University Press

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Another Cuba? Irish republicanism and the Cold War - The Irish Times

FOLLOWING the long tenure of the late Derek Foster, Helen Goodman was parachuted into a safe Labour seat, so safe, that even through Tony Blairs 11 year reign, Bishop Auckland was not regarded as worthy of investment.

When I was a boy, my father would quote my grandmother Labour will promise all sorts of goodies but where is the money coming from? Sixty years down the road, Labour is promising all sorts of goodies but where is the money coming from?

They will say anything to get into power then make a total mess if they do.

Socialism is diluted communism, a rose by another name, and there is no place for it in this, one of the most advanced nations in the world the clue is in the title, Great Britain.

We got to this level through hard graft, innovation, entrepreneurial skills and being prepared to put our heads above the parapet. This is the Tory ideology.

Socialism smothers and suppresses these virtues, as does communism. This is the Labour ideology.

Do not support Labour because we have always been Labour. Think outside the box and vote Conservative.

Harold MacKenley, Cockfield

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Letters: 'Socialism is diluted communism, a rose by another name' - The Northern Echo