The war in the shadows

I once spent an evening, back in the mid-1980s, with William Colby, the legendary spy and director of the CIA. I was an undergraduate at the time, and the CIA’s Iran–Contra debacle was in the news. Lured by the agency’s mystique, I was eager to ask him about the fabled Phoenix programme he directed — a top secret initiative to target and eliminate Viet Cong who had infiltrated South Vietnamese villages, often conducted by Americans who had crossed over some invisible line, leaving behind them the normal life that comprised my world.

To my disappointment, Colby demystified Phoenix. He was very proud of the programme, and while he never said so, I distinctly remember feeling convinced by him that the CIA should have run the whole war in Vietnam.

Yet the war the CIA did run at the same time, in next-door Laos, was as much of a failure as the one the military waged in Vietnam. Unlike that epochal conflict in US history, the war in Laos was all but ignored at the time and forgotten afterwards. Forgotten, however, does not mean unimportant. The Laos war’s invisibility served to mask its enduring influence on the way America subsequently fought and lied about its conflicts.

Such is the contention made by Joshua Kurlantzick, in A Great Place to Have a War. A former journalist, now at the Council on Foreign Relations, Kurlantzick traces how a toxic brew of good intentions, unrealistic expectations, geopolitics and egos led to a debacle. His book is a belated companion to Neil Sheehan’s Vietnam saga, A Bright, Shining Lie, whose story of hubris and failure it parallels.

It is hard to remember that for both Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, Laos was far more important than Vietnam, as America succeeded France as the major Western power intervening in south-east Asia.