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00:005 de septembro 2016
00:09President Barack Obama became the first ever sitting president in U.S. history to visit Laos
00:20and he went there to pledge U.S. support
00:23Over 9 years, from 1964 to 1973, the United States dropped more than 2 million tons of
00:32bombs here in Laos.
00:34More than we dropped on Germany and Japan combined during all of World War II.
00:40It made Laos per person the most heavily bombed country in history.
00:45As one Laotian said, the bombs fell like rain.
00:53The fact that the war extended into Laos in such a cruel way had a massive effect on civilians.
01:10For decades, there had been rumors about America's actions in Laos.
01:15Amidst fighting a bloody and public war in Vietnam, stories emerged of a brutal bombing campaign,
01:29unprecedented in size and scale, but kept entirely secret.
01:34It wasn't until 1997, 22 years after the conflict ended, that the U.S. government formally acknowledged
01:46that it had fought a war in Laos.
01:48This was a high-risk, high-gain mission, to a point where it lays the foundations for future CIA missions.
01:58It shows that they can conduct the most covert warfare in CIA interests and do the job well.
02:06How did the CIA keep its largest ever paramilitary operation hidden for almost two decades?
02:13Why were they fighting a secret war in the Laotian jungle?
02:17For much of the early 20th century,
02:46France ruled large swathes of Southeast Asia.
02:51But by the 1950s, its colony of Indochina was breaking apart.
02:58In 1953, the royal kingdom of Laos formed.
03:03The Vietnamese nationalist party, the Vietnamese nationalist party, the Viet Minh, led a long-running insurgency
03:15against the French forces in neighboring Vietnam.
03:18Their leader, Ho Chi Minh, hoped to make his country into a communist state.
03:23In 1950, he agreed to support his red comrades in Laos.
03:28In 1950, he agreed to support his red comrades in Laos.
03:32They formed their own insurgency, called Pathet Laos.
03:35When American President Eisenhower took office in January 1953, he was determined to stop the spread of Soviet influence.
03:47Covertly, his State Department sought to finance other countries who were engaged in territorial disputes with communist forces.
03:54France's fight to reclaim its colonial past in Laos was the perfect testing ground.
04:13In the light of the Geneva agreements, the main superpowers in the Soviet Union and the United States agreed to respect the neutrality of the new governments that were put in place in both Laos and Vietnam.
04:29And in this context, against this backdrop, it really would have been unwise for the CIA to fight the communists in Laos using planes with a big US flag on the tail.
04:41It had to be done much more covertly than that.
04:46In the late 1950s, a group of American researchers arrived in Laos.
04:52They claimed to be from the US National Geodetic Survey, interested in making maps of the region.
05:01Their top secret mission, codenamed Hot Foot, was to stop the spread of communism.
05:09These elite fighting men were the beginning of America's clandestine intervention in Laos.
05:17What we see by the 1950s going into the early 1960s is that covert actions is starting to dominate CIA culture and CIA thinking.
05:30By early 1954, it was clear to President Eisenhower that France was not going to re-establish control over Indochina.
05:39The French had tried to cut off the Viet Cong supply lines in Laos by building a base in Dien Bien Phu in Northwest Vietnam.
05:52Communist forces besieged the base.
05:56They used anti-aircraft guns to prevent the French from resupplying their men.
06:03The entire French garrison were killed or captured.
06:09The defeat brought a century of French colonial rule to an end.
06:15In an historic address in 1954, Eisenhower warned of the dangers of letting Laos fall to communism.
06:28His speech was to define US foreign policy towards Southeast Asia for decades.
06:34All of that weakening position around there is very ominous for the United States.
06:40Because finally, if we lost all that, how would the free world hold the rich empire of Indonesia?
06:48There was a great fear in Washington.
06:50People, presidents like Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, they worried that if Laos was to fall into communist hands,
06:59the United States ally, Thailand, would be next.
07:02The worry was that if Laos fell, then there would be a domino effect,
07:07and you'd have the fall of Cambodia, of Vietnam,
07:10but even broader of a communist imperialism that would go through to Bangladesh and even India.
07:19Finally, a ceasefire line was agreed along the 17th parallel,
07:24dividing Vietnam into a communist north and a westernized south.
07:29Meanwhile, as part of the agreement, all communist forces were to withdraw from Laos and neighboring Cambodia,
07:37and free elections were to be held in 1955.
07:41Laos was classified as a neutral state and was prohibited from forming military alliances with other nations.
07:53Yet, even as the peace treaty was being signed, Washington was taking steps to subvert it.
08:00One of the many ironies of the whole of the Southeast Asia conflict was that the Americans thought they were defending a domino theory.
08:11They said if South Vietnamese Vietnam goes, that will be the first domino, the next domino fall, then the next.
08:16And in fact, that was right, but it was the wrong way around. The dominoes actually fell backwards.
08:21Because in fact, the Laotian domino fell, and the Cambodian domino fell, and finally the South Vietnamese domino fell.
08:28In 1954, to try to protect its allies in the region, it established the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization, or CETO, a regional defense organization similar to NATO.
08:44CETO nations ran joint military exercises across the Indian Ocean.
08:55But away from the public glare, its members disagreed on how best to use their troops to stop the communists,
09:02and whether and when to deploy boots on the ground.
09:07After Vietnam was split in two, America provided financial assistance to the South Vietnamese government,
09:13in Saigon. American GIs were increasingly deployed to prop up the fledgling democracy.
09:24When a North Vietnamese torpedo boat attacked two US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, CETO gave Washington the legal justification to go to war.
09:39Soon, America was committed to a bloody and high-profile campaign in the former French colony.
09:48Publicly, Britain and France refused to sanction CETO deployments in Vietnam, or Laos.
09:57Secretly, however, the CIA and MI5 were able to use CETO to exchange information and plan covert missions.
10:06They didn't want Lao to fall to communism, to this imperialist communism, as they called it, because Lao was a vital piece in the puzzle.
10:19And if it was a fall, like a domino, then they argued that a lot of other countries in the region would fall as well.
10:26Then, in 1959, their hard work to deter communism was undone.
10:34The Laotian government demanded that battalions made up of communist Pathet Lao fighters integrate with the rest of the military,
10:45forming, in effect, their own Red Army.
10:49Laos descended into a bitter civil war.
10:54Soldiers on both sides were trained by the CIA.
11:00It's a secret war buried deep in the jungle.
11:06Not spoken of for more than 20 years, the covert campaign fought by the CIA in the Kingdom of Laos was wiped from the history books.
11:19So how did America end up secretly carpet bombing a small Southeast Asian nation that few had heard of?
11:28When President John F. Kennedy entered the White House in 1961, he was surprised to learn that the U.S. had 700 soldiers and CIA operatives in Laos.
11:46The secret war in Laos was off the books.
11:49One of the advantages of using an intelligence agency like the CIA to run a secret war is you don't necessarily need congressional approval.
12:00Faced with a communist uprising, his predecessor, President Eisenhower, had sanctioned the deployment of covert military trainers to wage a clandestine war.
12:15But the Americans were not the only ones turning a blind eye towards the Geneva Accords.
12:21The Soviet Union and China were also sending supplies to different groups in the Laos Civil War.
12:29The country was heading towards a precipice.
12:34The United States, when it got involved in Southeast Asia, was determined that it would fight a war in a different way.
12:41That it would actually be more subtle, that it would use its undercover forces cleverly and subtly.
12:48Startled by the red advances and still reeling from the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
12:54An attempt to remove communist Fidel Castro from Cuba.
12:58President Kennedy sanctioned a secret bombing campaign in Laos, Operation Millpond.
13:07Operation Millpond was the plan by the CIA to take their B-26 bombers that were flown out of Thailand and to fly them into Laos and to bomb Soviet military arms dumps.
13:20But also Soviet supported forces that were in the country.
13:25And this is all taking place at the same time as the Bay of Pigs incidents in 1961.
13:29And it was all organized by the same people.
13:32This marked the first direct covert commitment of US military forces to the region.
13:42In 1961, Kennedy met with his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev, in Vienna.
13:51They agreed to force all sides in Laos to negotiate.
13:56It is our hope that from all these negotiations,
14:00will come a genuinely independent and neutral Laos, which is the master of its own faith.
14:08As the US military drew back, the CIA seized its chance.
14:13CIA director Alan Dulles proposed a secret proxy war.
14:20Laotians would fight the communists on the ground.
14:24And American bombers would provide cover support.
14:28The CIA really altered because of the Laotian elements of the Vietnam War,
14:33because it just became so much more extensive.
14:37It began to involve itself not just in intelligence gathering,
14:42but in some real war-like operations.
14:48The Geneva Accords prevented Laos from forming military alliances with other nations.
14:56The CIA scheme allowed Kennedy to claim he was keeping to the agreement.
15:01The CIA, he hoped, could be freed by covert force and influence from communism.
15:09Kennedy authorized a classified US military aid program to establish a secret army in Laos.
15:18JFK told the CIA to find exclusively Asian recruits.
15:24American men were not to be wasted on the effort.
15:27In a country where few could read or cared about the Cold War, this was not an easy venture.
15:40The CIA headquarters, Langley, tasked their Southeast Asia branch director, Bill Lair,
15:46with finding an army in Laos.
15:49He knew just where to look.
15:51In December 1960, he meets with General Vang Pau of the Hmong Hill people.
16:00Living in the remotest northern hills, the Hmong were a small tribe of some 400,000 people.
16:07They had a fearsome reputation and were very cheap.
16:11The tribesmen were happy to receive $3 a month in pay.
16:18A US Army private at the time made more than $300.
16:24What does the CIA do with the Hmong?
16:27They train them, and they arm them, and they give them operational missions to conduct.
16:34Pau would recruit 39,000 Hmong soldiers, with children as young as 10 being called up to fight.
16:45We know that this was a conflict that saw the use of child soldiers.
16:50In fact, we have evidence that the use of child soldiers by the Hmong and by the Communists was reported to the White House.
16:59The CIA had the soldiers they needed, but there was another weapon they were ready to deploy.
17:06In 1950, the CIA had bought a civilian airline known internally as Air America.
17:16Air America is perhaps one of the most surprising aspects of the Lao conflict,
17:22because it was a commercial arm of the CIA.
17:25It was a front that allowed them to run covert operations in the country.
17:28Air America was a proper airline in the late 1940s that used to run on a lot of the Chinese routes.
17:36It was connected to the Kuomintang during the War of the 1940s.
17:41The CIA took it over in 1950 in order to start running its operations around Southeast Asia.
17:48And the famous phrase of Air America was anything, anywhere, anytime, professionally.
17:54They would carry anything, and they would get it there, come what many.
17:58So, they had their B-26 bombers that were scrubbed of all identifiable markings.
18:04But they also had twin-engine transporters, large planes that moved troops into the country and back out.
18:11They also had smaller planes that had a shorter take-off and landing.
18:16And this meant they could provide close air support on the ground, but also medivac any troops that needed medical attention.
18:24From a handful of poorly maintained planes, Air America now employed more than 2,000 people at its main base in Thailand.
18:34Its planes kept the Hmong supplied with weapons and food.
18:41Air America's top secret missions in the region were unconventionally managed by the US ambassador to Laos.
18:47William Sullivan had once been a peace negotiator for Kennedy. Now, he was asked to wage war.
18:56Ambassador Sullivan, who was implicated in all of this, he was sort of co-opted to a degree into what the CIA was doing with Operation Momentum in Laos and would go to Senate Foreign Relations committee hearings on Capitol Hill.
19:14And when asked what was going on in Laos, he would talk about the civil war that was erupting and taking place, but he would never acknowledge CIA activity.
19:21Though they had to say to the public and to the world that we are only fighting in South Vietnam, in reality they knew that to fight the war effectively, as they saw it, they had to fight the war in the north, in Laos and increasingly in Cambodia.
19:36So that led them into using more covert methods.
19:41Thousands of troops engaged in pitch battles along the 17th parallel.
19:46The line which had divided the country in two a decade earlier.
19:51The Viet Cong, the North Vietnamese fighting force, dug tunnels deep underground, beyond what American bombers could reach.
20:04They needed supplies to survive.
20:06The Ho Chi Minh Trail was a military and logistical supply line, a supply path between North Vietnam into South Vietnam, encompassing parts of Laos and Cambodia.
20:21The CIA in their operations in Laos wanted to disrupt the passage of troops and military equipment from North Vietnam into South Vietnam.
20:33As the American troops ramped up the pressure on North Vietnam, the Viet Cong moved their trail deeper into the Laotian jungle.
20:42So every time that the U.S. would bomb choke points, the North Vietnamese would simply go around them or they'd fill in the holes.
20:51And before they knew it, the Ho Chi Minh Trail was moving through once again.
20:56This was vital. It was the core part of their entire military operations.
21:04Even when the Americans thought they blocked it, the Ho Chi Minh Trail had delivered between 60 and 70,000 Vietnamese troops.
21:12North Vietnamese troops into South Vietnam.
21:16Soon there was a well-established system for directing war in Laos.
21:22Instructed by the U.S. Ambassador, the CIA directed Ho Chi Minh troops and received intelligence, which the Air Force then responded to.
21:32Air America planes kept the Hamong supplied, but vastly outnumbered from the start.
21:42The Hamong were decimated when they engaged the Viet Cong.
21:46General Vang Pao increasingly pushed his CIA handlers for more and more airstrikes to help his beleaguered tribesmen.
21:54Ten percent of the Laotian population would be dead when the bombs stopped falling.
22:07The classified U.S. bombing campaign in the skies above Laos began in December 1964.
22:18The public wouldn't be told about this secret war for another two decades.
22:24In Laos, you have to feel for the individual Laotians. They were caught up in a war between the Patek Laos and the government.
22:33They then found themselves caught up in a war between the United States, the South Vietnamese government and the North Vietnamese.
22:39They could only lose from that situation.
22:41In contrast, the well-publicized bombing campaign against North Vietnam, known as Operation Rolling Thunder, began with great fanfare the following March.
22:55Air Force fighter pilots in Vietnam were asked to volunteer for a covert operation known as the Butterflies.
23:05These men were stripped of all identifiable military insignia.
23:11They then flew as civilian co-pilots on Air America flights, identifying targets for bombing.
23:20The group was so successful that in 1966, CIA branch director Bill Lair arranged for them to have their own aircraft.
23:30Codenamed the Ravens, these teams of two, an American pilot and her Hmong co-pilot, swept over the Ho Chi Minh trail, guiding the bombers to their deadly intent.
23:45They flew low and slow over the conflict, and their aim was to pinpoint where the enemy targets were, to help US forces guide in their missiles and to strike with deadly precision.
24:03But this put them at great risk because flying low and slow meant they were vulnerable to enemy fire.
24:10And in fact, it was the Ravens who took some of the highest casualty rates in the war in that region during the entire period.
24:18Bombing campaigns carried out by US fighter pilots in neighboring Vietnam made headline news.
24:25As we go through the 1960s and as the body bags start to mount and the casualty figures are reported back home and people are losing members of their family as they're drafted up and sent halfway across the world.
24:42The public support for the war invariably starts to fade and it's at this point you start to get the peace movements and the protests in the streets of the United States.
24:55In 1967, some 100,000 anti-war protesters gathered at the Lincoln Memorial.
25:05This is an extraordinarily cruel, mean, ugly war. We are taking our boys, our government is, some of them with unformed opinions, some of them with more formed opinions, and we are forcing them to kill, kill, kill.
25:20A year later, the Viet Cong launched the brutal Tet Offensive in Vietnam, killing thousands of American soldiers.
25:33This dirty war was very, very dirty indeed and gave license, gave freedom, gave oxygen to some of the worst elements of sort of human behavior.
25:43The death toll kept rising. By February, 500 GIs were dying every week.
25:58The protests led President Lyndon Johnson to order a complete halt to bombing in North Vietnam in November 1968.
26:08The United States realized that it could not win the war, and President Johnson realized he didn't have enough support to carry on.
26:17The longer the conflict went on, the CIA's objectives changed with respect to that.
26:23The primary objective became trying to make life as difficult as they could for the North Vietnamese in the larger Vietnam conflict.
26:32The objective became trying to divert North Vietnamese troops into Laos, so that these North Vietnamese troops were not on the battlefield, fighting to help South Vietnamese forces, but also American troops.
26:47But as Johnson cut back the attacks in Vietnam to appease American public opinion, he secretly increased the vigorous bombing campaign in Laos.
27:00Although the world could see that the United States was looking to withdraw, that it wasn't going to creep away, and it had to, as it were, it increased the bombing, it increased the offensives in Laos, in order to get a better deal when that peacemaking began.
27:17The planes are diverted to the north, where the Ho Chi Minh trails steadily increases in scale and strategic significance.
27:27Between 1965 and 1968, the US averaged between 10 to 20 sorties a day over Laos.
27:36In 1969, this number had risen to 300 a day.
27:46And the fact that the United States couldn't ever block the trail, they thought they had, but they never did.
27:51And the trail itself became part of the mythology of the victory of the North Vietnamese over the whole Vietnam War.
27:59But even as the bombs rained down, back in Washington, few knew of the relentless bombardment of the Laotian jungle.
28:10The CIA at this time was very much the personal agency of the president.
28:15So the use of the CIA in this capacity as the president's personal foreign policy tool, it's a very clever way of avoiding congressional scrutiny and congressional acquiescence for the action that took place.
28:31Conscious of the increasing public scrutiny surrounding America's role in Vietnam,
28:44CIA officers took steps to cover up their activities.
28:48They created a fake headquarters for General Vang Pao, where he received visiting congressmen and other US dignitaries.
28:56Despite the deaths of hundreds of Americans, operatives, contractors and soldiers who were all linked to the agency, the CIA's war in Laos remained secret for more than 20 years.
29:13It was very real to the people of Laos. It was very real to the people of North Vietnam.
29:19And it was very real to the Air America pilots that the CIA was using. It was not very real to the American public.
29:28In fact, there was very little knowledge of this war that was taking place in Laos back home in the United States.
29:36But some journalists were getting uncomfortably close to the story.
29:39The Bangkok Post and the New York Times both featured reports of the fighting in Laos.
29:50But news from this remote kingdom barely attracted the public's interest.
29:56As the Vietnam War became a cause célèbre, it drowned out the CIA's actions in Laos.
30:03A number of journalists at this time we now know were actually working hand in glove with the agency at the time.
30:11So these were journalists who the CIA was feeding tidbits of information.
30:15There was an incestuousness to journalists and spies during this time.
30:20In November 1968, Richard Nixon was elected president. The fourth president to oversee the war in Laos.
30:33It would later be revealed that Nixon played a key role in sabotaging Johnson's peace talks with the Viet Cong in order to ensure his election.
30:44Nixon understood there had to be a way of getting out of Vietnam. They could not win in conventional military ways.
30:55In 1969, he took office promising to pull America out of Vietnam.
31:02But even as publicly, President Nixon refused to sanction calls from his army chiefs to take US troops into Laos.
31:11Privately, his White House pushed for more bombing raids in the country.
31:15In a candid conversation caught on tape between Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, Nixon asked,
31:27How many did we kill in Laos?
31:30Kissinger replied, We killed about 10 to 15.
31:34He was referring to 10 to 15 thousand people in Laos.
31:38Both Kissinger and Nixon went to great lengths to keep the bombing campaign in Laos a secret.
31:50When news reports of the classified raids started to leak in 1970, Nixon ordered illegal phone taps on several White House staff.
31:59Both men were very aware that public scrutiny could quickly bring an end to their secret war in Laos.
32:08The Nixon White House was determined to keep it under wraps.
32:12So in dealing with the CIA, their attitude was, well, I'm kind of going to sign the checks, but not ask any questions.
32:21So there was no real public pressure for accountability on the CIA's actions in Southeast Asia and Laos specifically.
32:29At the end of the 1960s, public protest against the Vietnam War had reached a crescendo.
32:39The massacre of innocent villages by American soldiers in the Vietnamese village of My Lai, exposed by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, led to massive protests.
32:51But it was the deaths of four unarmed students at Kent State University in Ohio in May 1970, which truly turned the tide against the Vietnam War.
33:06The ensuing outcry caused Nixon to promise he would bring American troops home.
33:13There was no such fuss about the war in Laos. Deep in the jungle, the Hmong were losing the fight.
33:24CIA operatives began to report to Langley that their leader, Wang Pao, was becoming increasingly deluded about the state of his forces.
33:35Thousands of Hmong died, but Wang Pao continued to push for more battles.
33:44The longer that the conflict went on, the more Pao showed political ambitions of his own.
33:51And the more Pao actually wanted to turn this secret war into more of a conventional military conflict,
33:57more and more requests eventually came in to the CIA from power for secret bombing.
34:06And this made it very difficult for the CIA because they'd given him their word that they would support him in his efforts to defeat the communists.
34:15Langley now had no further use for the Hmong.
34:18The mountain tribes' illicit activities were becoming an inconvenient embarrassment for the CIA.
34:29Narcotics had been grown by the tribesmen for decades, but always in small quantities.
34:36The Hmong's home territory straddled the border between Laos, Thailand and Burma.
34:42Dubbed the Golden Triangle, for more than a decade, it became the world's largest source of heroin, opium and morphine.
34:53The Hmong Hill people who live up in the Golden Triangle were regularly supplying narcotics, poppies, heroin, to the army and the army chiefs in Laos.
35:05Courtesy of the CIA, these supplies were invariably making their way to mainland United States.
35:15In 1970, the US military command in Saigon was forced to acknowledge a full-scale heroin epidemic.
35:23That dynamic between narcotics and warfare and narcotics and Western youth cultures really begins in the Vietnam era and it's never ended.
35:38As the US troops started to withdraw from Vietnam, Laotians started sending bulk shipments of high-quality narcotics to America.
35:47In 1971, President Nixon announced his war on drugs back home.
35:55Privately, his officials knew that much of the heroin which now flooded America's cities was grown in Laos, Thailand and Burma.
36:05And shipped back home, courtesy of the CIA and US military.
36:10There's a great irony when you look at the Vietnam War that the people who protested most against the wars were consuming the drugs that were produced, that were keeping the wars going.
36:25The CIA were implicated in this growing drugs trade.
36:29In the summer of 1972, a Yale University researcher, Alfred McCoy, testified that CIA operatives knew that the Hmong were actively smuggling narcotics.
36:44Now, Air America vehemently denied that this was narcotics.
36:49It's one of the elements of the whole war in Southeast Asia, which has attracted a certain amount of attention, but the political significance has never really been understood.
36:58But narcotics from the Golden Triangle kept money flowing to the government of Laos long after they would have collapsed into bankruptcy if they'd had to rely on official taxation.
37:09The American bombing campaigns of the 1960s disrupted Laotian opium production by forcing the majority of farmers to become refugees.
37:24Poppies were left to rot in the fields as the bombs fell from the sky.
37:29With their American allies withdrawing from Laos, the Hmong faced up to a devastating defeat.
37:38Wang Pao always believed that if the war went badly, then the Americans would evacuate his people and provide refuge in mainland USA.
37:47Despite more than 15 years of covert operations, when the end finally came, in May 1975, the CIA had no such evacuation plan for the Hmong.
38:01After this conflict was over, hundreds of thousands of Hmong fighters who'd been promised sanctuary in the United States in return for fighting a U.S. war, they never made it back to the United States.
38:18They were left to the mercy of an angry communist enemy.
38:25Tens if not hundreds of thousands were forced to flee Laos, leave their homes, leave their families to enter the neighbouring country of Thailand.
38:33A select few, including Wang Pao himself, were lucky enough to be granted asylum in the United States.
38:43But the majority were left destitute, surrounded by the wreckage of their shattered nation.
38:50I think if you want to understand what it was like for the Laotian population to live under that bombardment,
38:56and some of the testimonies state that it felt like rain, and that makes sense. It's no surprise, because the U.S. dropped 2 million tons of bombs on that country.
39:08When you break that down, over nine years of conflict, that works out at a sortie of bombardments every 18 minutes, 24 hours a day.
39:18Since 1964, at least 50,000 Laos have been killed or injured by American bombs. 98% are civilians.
39:33There was a sense, I think, amongst the civilians that they didn't understand what this war was about.
39:39They didn't understand why this fight was taking place, because as far as they were concerned, they just wanted to be left alone.
39:45They were drawn into it.
39:48For the following two decades, between 1970 and 1990, the U.S. government sent barely any aid to Laos.
39:57Because most Americans were unaware of the terrible legacy of the Laotian war.
40:04An official record of the bombing campaign was only declassified by President Clinton in 2000.
40:11It was not until 2016 that Laos was honored with a presidential visit.
40:18President Barack Obama became the first ever sitting president in U.S. history to visit Laos.
40:25And he went there to pledge U.S. support. He didn't apologize, but he wanted to say to the people that the U.S. would invest money to help clear a country.
40:34288 million cluster munitions and 75 million unexploded bombs were left in Laos.
40:43And this has had a dramatic impact on the lives of the people since the end of the conflict.
40:49These unexploded bombs led to the loss of tens if not hundreds of thousands of civilian lives long after the conflict had concluded.
41:05Despite the scale of the human tragedy, for many, the war in Laos was the making of the modern CIA.
41:12The war was a success for the CIA because it gave the CIA kudos, it gave them gravitas, it gave them respect within the dog-eat-dog world of Beltway politics.
41:26And the fact is that the CIA always comes away from these sorts of operations saying, we did a good job.
41:31Well, tactically, they did do a pretty good job, but strategically, the fact is, history shows that they failed.
41:37Strategically, they didn't have success. They did not stop the North being able to strangle the South.
41:43America may want to forget its war in Laos, but it has not lost sight of the lessons learned there.
42:03Secretive drone strikes against forces in Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan are a direct result of a proxy war pushed by the CIA.
42:19The CIA's pioneering use of contractors like Air America was to be repeated by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
42:27From small beginnings, the war in Laos turned the CIA into the world's leading covert paramilitary organization.
42:41And for more than two decades, this deadly campaign remained a complete secret, buried deep in the Laotian jungle.
42:52The CIA was president of Lisa F Subritory at the KMI to U.S.
43:00.
43:22Legenda Adriana Zanotto
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