From the Consul General’s Corner, April 4, 2011
I found Mr. Young’s adventures described in several books on the CIA’s activities in Indochina, including Roger Warner’s Backfire: The CIA’s Secret War in Laos and Its Link to the War in Vietnam. Warner described Mr. Young as “a jungle boy with extraordinary family credentials,” noting his father’s and older brother’s involvement with intelligence activity in Northern Thailand and southern China. With his experiences growing up among hill tribes, Mr. Young could survive in the jungle and communicate with the locals. Warner wrote, “No other American had those skills, but people in the CIA always talked about Bill Young wistfully, in terms of his remarkable potential… For all his flaws, no other American was as gifted at collecting intelligence information.”
Mr. Young is also mentioned in Douglas Valentine’s The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs as putting his childhood Lahu friends into a strategic intelligence network in southern China to photograph Chinese engineers and soldiers building a road to Thailand. His connections to the tribesmen were clearly essential to his success as a CIA officer.
From Bill Young and the CIA in the Drug Industry
The importance of these CIA clients in the subsequent growth of the Golden Triangle's heroin trade was revealed inadvertently, by the Agency itself when it leaked a classified report on the Southeast Asian opium traffic to the New York Times. The CIA analysis identified twenty-one opium refineries in the tri-border area where Burma, Thailand, and Laos converge and reported that seven were capable of producing 90 to 99 percent pure No. 4 heroin. Of these seven heroin refineries, "The most important are located in the areas around Tachilek, Burma; Ban Houei Sai and Nam Keung in Laos; and Mae Salong in Thailand."
Although the CIA did not see fit to mention it, many of those refineries were located in areas totally controlled by paramilitary groups closely identified with American military operations in the Golden Triangle. Mae Salong was headquarters of the Nationalist Chinese Fifth Army, which had been continuously involved in CIA intelligence and counterinsurgency operations since 1950. According to a former CIA operative who worked in the area for a number of years, the heroin laboratory at Na Kueng was protected by Major Chao La, commander of Yao mercenary troops for the CIA in northwestern Laos. One of the heroin laboratories near Ban Huay Sai reportedly belonged to General Ouane Rattikone, former commander in chief of the Royal Laotian Army—the only army in the world, except for the U.S. army itself, to be entirely financed by the U.S. government. The heroin factories near Tachilek were operated by rebel units from Burma and Shan rebel armies who even now control a large
percentage of the narcotics traffic out of Burma. Although few of these Shan groups still have any relation with the CIA, one of the most important chapters in the history of the Shan States' opium trade involves a Shan rebel army under Khun Sa, who is still receiving CIA support, either directly or indirectly.
Other sources have revealed the existence of an important heroin laboratory that operated near Vientiane under the protection of General Ouane Rattikone. And finally, the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics had reports that General Vang Pao, commander of the CIA's 'secret army', had been operating a heroin factory at Long Tieng, headquarters for CIA sponsored operations in northern Laos.
In the fertile minds of the geopolitical strategists in the CIA's Special Operations division, potential infiltration routes stretched from the Shan hills of north-eastern Burma, through the rugged Laotian mountains, and then southward into the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. According to one retired CIA operative, Lt. Col. Lucien Conein, Agency personnel were sent to Laos in 1959 to supervise eight Green Beret teams who were then training Meo guerrillas on the Plain of Jars. In 1960 and 1961 the CIA recruited elements of Nationalist Chinese Paramilitary units based in northern Thailand to inf[i]ltrate into China-Burma border areas; they also sent Green Berets into South Vietnam's Central Highlands to organize hilltribe commando units for intelligence and sabotage patrols along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Finally, in 1962 one CIA operative based in northwestern Laos began sending trained Yao and Lahu tribesmen into the heart of China's Yunnan Province to monitor road traffic and tap telephones.
While the U.S. military required half a million troops to fight a conventional war in South Vietnam, the mountain war had needed only a handful of Americans. American paramilitary personnel in Laos tended to serve long tours of duty, some for a decade or more, and had been given an enormous amount of personal power. If the nature of the conventional war in South Vietnam is best analyzed in terms of the faceless bureaucracies that spewed out jargonized policies, the secret war in Laos is most readily understood through the men who fought it.
THE OPERATIVES
Three men, perhaps more than any of the others, have left their personal imprint on the conduct of the secret war: Edgar Buell, Anthony Poe, and William Young. And each in his own way illustrates a different aspect of America's conscious and unconscious complicity in the Laotian opium traffic.
William Young, perhaps one of the most effective agents ever, was born in the Burmese Shan States, where his grandfather had been a missionary to the hill tribes. A gifted linguist, Young spoke five of the local languages and probably knew more about mountain minorities than any other American in Laos; the ClA rightly regarded him as its "tribal expert." Because of his deep and sophisticated understanding of the hill tribes, he viewed the opium problem from the perspective of a hilltribe farmer. He felt nothing should be done to obstruct the opium traffic. Young explained his views: "As long as there is opium in Burma, somebody will market it." ...
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