A Great Place To Have A War America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA 1st Edition by Joshua Kurlantzick ISBN 1451667868 978-1451667868

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Product details:  

ISBN 10: 1451667868 

ISBN 13: 978-1451667868

Author: Joshua Kurlantzick 

The untold story of how America’s secret war in Laos in the 1960s transformed the CIA from a loose collection of spies into a military operation and a key player in American foreign policy.

In 1960, President Eisenhower was focused on Laos, a tiny Southeast Asian nation few Americans had ever heard of. Washington feared the country would fall to communism, triggering a domino effect in the rest of Southeast Asia. So in January 1961, Eisenhower approved the CIA’s Operation Momentum, a plan to create a proxy army of ethnic Hmong to fight communist forces in Laos. While remaining largely hidden from the American public and most of Congress, Momentum became the largest CIA paramilitary operation in the history of the United States. The brutal war, which continued under Presidents Kennedy and Nixon, lasted nearly two decades, killed one-tenth of Laos’s total population, left thousands of unexploded bombs in the ground, and changed the nature of the CIA forever.

Joshua Kurlantzick gives us the definitive account of the Laos war and its central characters, including the four key people who led the operation—the CIA operative who came up with the idea, the Hmong general who led the proxy army in the field, the paramilitary specialist who trained the Hmong, and the State Department careerist who took control over the war as it grew.

The Laos war created a CIA that fights with real soldiers and weapons as much as it gathers secrets. Laos became a template for CIA proxy wars all over the world, from Central America in the 1980s to today’s war on terrorism, where the CIA has taken control with little oversight. Based on extensive interviews and CIA records only recently declassified, A Great Place to Have a War is a riveting, thought-provoking look at how Operation Momentum changed American foreign policy forever.

Table of contents: 

Chapter 1 Baci 1

Chapter 2 The CIA’s First War 16

Chapter 3 Vang Pao, Bill Lair, Tony Poe, and Bill Sullivan 21

Chapter 4 Laos Before the CIA, and the CIA Before Laos 46

Chapter 5 The CIA Meets Laos 69

Chapter 6 Operation Momentum Begins 78

Chapter 7 Kennedy Expands Momentum 83

Chapter 8 The Not-So-Secret Secret: Keeping a Growing Operation Hidden 101

Chapter 9 Enter the Bombers 107

Chapter 10 The Wider War 123

Chapter 11 Massacre 134

Chapter 12 Going for Broke 147

Chapter 13 The Victory and the Loss 157

Chapter 14 The Secret War Becomes Public 173

Chapter 15 Defeat and Retreat 189

Chapter 16 Skyline Ridge 211

Chapter 17 Final Days 228

Chapter 18 Laos and the CIA: The Legacy 245

Chapter 19 Aftermath 256

Acknowledgments 277

Notes 279

Index 311

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