By Andrew
Wells-Dang
Expanded version, August
2002
The
1962 Geneva Accords proclaimed Laos a neutral country and forbade outside
military involvement there. As the war in Vietnam escalated, however, neither the
US nor North Vietnam was able to resist intervening. Local Laotian
revolutionaries and their Vietnamese allies built a network of paths along the
border, later termed the “Ho Chi Minh Trail,” and covert US operations used
every means available to try to stop them. One of the earliest of these
efforts, Operation Tiger Hound, began in November 1965 and set out to “combine
in one program [all] the air tactics and techniques developed thus far in Laos
and South Vietnam.”
Among
these methods was “defoliating jungle growth along selected routes,” using
herbicides such as Agent Orange “to improve visibility.” Already being sprayed
in South Vietnam, herbicides had a military purpose of clearing land around
roads and trails so that enemy movements could be detected and stopped. The
environmental and human consequences never entered the calculation; nor, with
few exceptions, did the international legality of spraying ever trouble
American leaders. By far the greater concern was preservation of secrecy, in
case evidence of chemical use might be turned to Communist propaganda
advantage.
The primary tactic
in the “secret war” was bombing, which caused immense damage in almost every
province of Laos. The use of herbicides, a sideshow to a sideshow, was reported
on during the conflict but officially denied until 1982, when Air Force
historian William Buckingham’s draft of the Operation Ranch Hand study was made
public under a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Veterans Task
Force on Agent Orange. In a subsequent New
York Times interview, former US Ambassador William Sullivan said that
“secret” was not the right word to describe the herbicide program: “Rather, it
was not admitted or confirmed.”
In response to a
November 1969 Congressional query, the Military Assistance Command-Vietnam
provided a classified summary of 434 sorties in Laos from flight records
beginning on December 3, 1965 and ending September 7, 1969. Additional mission
reports from the HERBS database, made public through the Environmental Support
Group, continue until October 1, 1970. In total, missions were flown on 209
dates, spraying 537,495 gallons—a figure that is surely incomplete, but already
significant, though far short of the approximately 21 million gallons sprayed
on South Vietnam.
Air Force spraying
was heaviest during the first half of 1966, with more than 200 sorties spraying
approximately 200,000 gallons of Agent Orange.[i][6] Spraying continued at a relatively rapid
rate until February 1967, when with the exception of one mission listed in May
1967 it ceased until November 1968. Buckingham’s Ranch Hand study lists a
condensed version of spraying over the same period, totaling 419,850 gallons
over 163,066 acres. Agent Orange was the primary herbicide used (about 75%),
followed by Agents Blue (15%) and White (10%).
No complete list
of targets and locations has been found; detailed records from some periods
have been handed over to the demining agency, UXO Lao, while others may be
scattered in military archives. The limited number of maps and coordinates
found at the National Archives suggest that the greatest concentration of
spraying occurred north and south of the Demilitarized Zone near the Vietnamese
border in Savannakhet and Attapeu provinces. After the chemicals had been applied
for 1-2 weeks, fighter-bombers would return to strike any targets revealed in
the area.
Declassified
documents do record the aircraft used for Air Force operations: mostly C-123s
from the Ranch Hand operations in South Vietnam, as well as a limited number of
F-4s. Both types were flown from Bien Hoa air base as well as off ships in the
South China Sea. At one point, military authorities proposed establishing a
Thailand-based spray capability;[ii][10] whether this ever occurred is unknown,
although herbicide tests were conducted at Thai air bases as early as 1964-65.
As with bombing
runs on North Vietnam, Laos was also a secondary target: on at least one
occasion in October 1966, when adverse weather conditions hampered spraying
near the DMZ in South Vietnam, Operation Ranch Hand’s planes sprayed Laos
instead. A January 1969 memo from the Chemical Operations Division at MACV
headquarters in Saigon notes that “the legality of these out-of-country
operations is uncertain” and cites increasing risks from ground fire near the
DMZ. The author, Maj. Gen. Elias Townsend, recommends that herbicides be used
only in “high risk” areas and in conjunction with “suppressive fighter
attacks.” As the bombing of Laos increased dramatically after the “bombing
pause” on North Vietnam starting in late 1968, the role of herbicides in Laos
declined, as they fell short of the total war the US was beginning to wage.
The use of
herbicides was quickly expanded to the destruction of enemy crops. Citing
effective use in South Vietnam, Gen. William Westmoreland first proposed crop
destruction in Laos in May 1966. Records from MACV list 64 crop destruction
missions in Laos from September 1966-September 1969, targeting a total of
20,485 acres. Agent Blue was the most frequently used chemical on these
flights. US Admiral McCain later attributed part of Gen. Vang Pao’s short-lived
1969 capture of the Plain of Jars to crop destruction missions there. And after
the Lao government banned opium cultivation in 1971, herbicides were used to destroy
hilltribe poppy crops as late as 1974. One mission report from 1969 describes
“a highly successful attack on enemy rice crops in North Laos…almost four
thousand acres destroyed just before harvest.” One wonders if the “enemy rice
crops” were able to fight back.
The “experimental”
use of herbicides outside of South Vietnam had been under consideration by the
Department of Defense since October 1962 for a broad, undefined area around
“the Cambodian-Laotian-North Vietnam border”—a difficult task given that
Cambodia and North Vietnam had no common border, with several southern Laotian
provinces in between. This excessive plan was never implemented in full, but it
gives a sense of what was to follow.
Ambassador
Sullivan expressed nervous opposition at first, citing “allegations concerning
earlier [US] uses of chemical weapons in Laos.” Exactly what those allegations
were is unclear, but they presumably refer to chemicals other than herbicides.
The increasing sense of alarm over the movements of personnel and materials
along the “Ho Chi Minh Trail,” however, soon removed his scruples over the
program. Sullivan recognized that interdiction would require “massive amounts
of defoliants,” along with “Washington discussion at high levels,” since
herbicide use “would involve the overt violation of the 1962 agreements on
Laos.”
In November 1965,
soon before the Air Force spraying program was to begin, Sullivan wrote in a
memo to Washington, “I am convinced that our efforts in Laos, particularly
along infiltration route, are critical to US forces engaged in South Vietnam…We
can carry on these efforts only if we do not, repeat do not, talk about them,
and when necessary, if we deny that they are taking place.”
Not everyone
followed the ambassador’s suggestions. The first stories in the US press broke
in December 1965. In February 1966, the Washington
Post and New York Times ran
stories on defoliation operations in Laos, claiming that 12-16 UC-123s had been
diverted from the Ranch Hand program in Vietnam. To the State Department’s
consternation, the Times quoted one
American official in Saigon saying, “We’re going to turn the Ho Chi Minh Trail
brown. We’re mounting a maximum effort over there every day.” A telegram from Gen. William Westmoreland
later that year put the same message in more formal language: “During all
phases, there will be an intensification of psychological warfare and herbicide
operations…through the Laotian Panhandle…We must use all assets at our disposal
to block, deny, spoil and disrupt this infiltration.”
Former chief Air
Force historian Richard Kohn claims that spraying in Laos took place “with the
permission of the Laotian government” headed by then-President Souvanna Phouma.
However, archival documents make it clear that Ambassador Sullivan and other
officials provided very little specific information to the Lao, who may have
preferred to remain uninformed of the details of covert US operations carried
out in their country. Sullivan wrote to the State Department in August 1965
that “Much of what we are now doing in the [Ho Chi Minh Trail] corridor is
known only in vague outline to Souvanna and I’m sure he prefers it that way.
Later, however, Assistant Secretary of State Bundy wrote to Acting Secretary
Ball that Prime Minister Souvanna specifically requested the use of herbicides.
Congress was also
kept in the dark. When details of the “secret war” first began to emerge in
1969, Sen. William J. Fulbright told Amb. Sullivan, by then promoted to State
Department undersecretary, that “this is not the way to do business…I do not
really see any justification for keeping [operations in Laos] secret from the
American people. At the same hearing, however, the cover-up continued, as the
US air attaché in Laos, Col. Robert Tyrell, testified that the reconnaissance
and defoliation flights conducted almost daily since 1965 were flown “on
occasion.” When asked specifically about herbicides, Tyrell answered, “I
believe that since I returned to Laos in June of last year [1968] we have had
four defoliation missions. In fact, there had been at least 19.
Whether
defoliation continued after 1970 remains an open question. As a result of
increased public outcry, restrictions began to be placed on herbicide use by
the US military. In March 1971, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird requested
that he personally approve any herbicide operations in “Laos, Cambodia, or
Thailand. Air Force records show that UC-123 planes, whose sole purpose had
been listed as “defoliation,” conducted 860 sorties over Laos from January-June
1971, but no further details are given.
All of the above data refers only to spraying carried out by the US Air Force using fixed-wing aircraft. It may not be a complete record even of these operations, although the start and end date can be confirmed by multiple sources in the declassified record. What is not included here is any spraying conducted by helicopter or directly from the ground. Both the Air Force as well as other units had this capability.
Also unconfirmed
is herbicide use by Air America or the CIA, whose records are still closed. In
an April 1968 interview, the vice-president of Air America declared that his
company had been contracted by the Department of Defense to defoliate
vegetation in Vietnam, Laos, and southern Thailand, based from the Udon Thani
airbase. The 1971-3 opium destruction missions were probably carried out on
this basis, and secondary sources also report that the CIA had spray mission
capability. Air Force records do not list any UC-123 aircraft at Udon Thani
during this period, suggesting that other aircraft might have been used;
however, 7 UC-123’s were present at the Nakhon Phanom airbase in 1970 and 1971,
presumably for defoliation purposes. Further research is needed to confirm the
extent of additional herbicide use in Laos.
See Endnotes and
reference original web page: http://www.ffrd.org/indochina/laosao.htm
MORE INFO ON (a friends page), AGENT ORANGE: Outside of Vietnam:
http://www.vetshome.com/agent_orange_use_outside_of_viet.htm
