The USAID has long been regarded, at least unofficially, as a regime change operator of the USA. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was set up in the early 1960s to administer humanitarian aid programmes on behalf of the US government – however, behind the lofty punch words, lies a murky world of regime change operations, clandestine funding and undermining of sovereign nations. 

After Donald Trump took the oath as President of the United States, he tasked billionaire Elon Musk with heading DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) to ensure efficiency in government spending. Musk disbanded USAID and dubbed it a ‘criminal enterprise’. Ever since, there has been intense scrutiny on how USAID and the US State Department have indulged in regime change operations and created chaos in several nations across the world for decades. With the heightened scrutiny, it is perhaps time to revisit a forgotten war by the deep state that evidences the shady, clandestine operations of the US deep state and how it has contributed to destabilising nations across the world.

The Insurgency in Laos and the creation of the Heroin Golden Triangle

At the peak of the Cold War between the West led by America and the Communist bloc, led by the Soviet Union, America prosecuted a war in Laos between March 1964 and March 1973. For close to a decade, the Royal Laotian forces, CIA-trained tribal guerilla forces, CIA-funded Thai mercenaries and US forces waged war against North Vietnam and Pathet Lao (a Laotian Communist Rebel force).

The keynote of the conflict was ‘Operation Barrel Roll’ – an air support campaign in which US Navy and Air Force bombers dropped 260 million bombs on the soil of Laos or roughly 100 bombs for each man, woman and child alive in Laos at the time.

Laos was officially neutral in the Vietnam conflict, so the entire war was waged in secret, as it was in contravention of the Geneva Convention.

In this brief article, we will record the involvement of USAID, a civilian agency of the US Government tasked with development aid. In reality, USAID used the cover of humanitarian aid to fund various aggressive programs in far-flung corners of the world.

Meo Tribes and Irregular Forces

The Hmong or Meo are an ethnicity originating in a contiguous area of Thailand, southern China and Laos, with a small minority in North Vietnam. This community was subject to pressure from the Han majority of China during the Qing Empire and were forced southwards. They are one of the official 56 nationalities in China, registered as Miao. 

Missionaries from the Netherlands and the United States worked in these regions from the 1930s onwards and started finding traction during the 1950s when Hmong people began to convert to Christianity in numbers.

For nearly a century, the Meo of Laos had been largely left to themselves by the majority Buddhist lowland and mountain Lao tribes. However, this changed drastically when the civil war in Vietnam broke out. The United States had been active in Vietnam for decades in combating Communism. Vietnamese influence created a Communist party in Laos that threatened to topple the monarchy. To counter their influence, the United States, through various agencies, began to prop up the Royal Laotian Army. The Army proved fairly ineffective in dealing with a North Vietnamese occupation and in countering the Pathet Lao, a Communist guerilla movement said to be propped up by the Vietnamese.

This is when the CIA began to utilize contacts made with the Hmong/Meo people.

In their hill habitat, Meo were isolated from lowland Lao people, were migrants from China and had less than 200 years of history in the Laos highlands. They were an ideal population to recruit an army –  culturally and by religion, insulated from the rest of the country and malleable to outside influence.

The CIA built an army of Meo insurgents, to which nearly 60% of the adult male population of Meo signed up. A declassified RAND Corporation from 1972 (Balufarb) describes how USAID money for refugee relief was routed towards food security programs for the families of Meo fighters. This security and payments provided to the family by USAID is what gave the men the incentive to enlist in the irregular fighting force. 

USAID funds also went towards creating small airstrips close to the North Vietnamese border.

Opium – An Old Scourge

In the 19th Century, British and American traders flooded China with opium sourced from Indian farmers. The Anglo-American rulers used financial might and the British Navy to prosecute the Opium Wars, designed to keep China open to opium imports. At the same, Britain used its colony India to cultivate poppies. Entire American business and political dynasties were created on the wealth from the opium trade in China.

However, with India’s independence and Mao’s takeover of China, both the supply and demand for the opium trade were affected.

From the 1920s onwards, Indian independence activists struggled and began restricting poppy cultivation. As a result, poppy cultivation was forced to move to the ungovernable regions of the Laos highlands, Thai border regions and Burmese provinces like the mountainous Shan region.

The Meo were among the tribes with whom Chinese traders had maintained contact, due to their habitation of the Chinese provinces of Yunnan, Sichuan and Hunan provinces. Here, they handed out contracts to Meo farmers to cultivate poppy. The Chinese triads provided armed support to this illicit trade. 

In the 1950s, a victorious Mao began a brutal crackdown on opium traders – executing thousands of peddlers, and gang members, destroying poppy crops forcefully and rounding up millions of drug users into re-education programs.

Faced with this loss of livelihood, the drug industry shifted to a new market – American hippies of the 1960s and a new drug – the even more potent heroin, synthesised from opiates. 

The early postwar wave of heroin was in the ghettos of industrial towns in the North-Eastern and Mid-Western United States, dominated by African Americans. Italian organized crime syndicates controlled this trade and law enforcement authorities were somewhat lenient, due to the racist influence of the time.

In the 1950s, heroin entered popular American culture through prevalent use among jazz musicians and then entered the beat culture of the 1950s, precursors to the hippies of the 1960s. Heroin was initially processed and smuggled into America by the Corsican and Sicilian organized crime cartels. 

The Vietnam War brought thousands of American servicemen to these lands where opium had been in use for centuries. The restraint-free environment, the glamour of heroin usage that the musicians and entertainers gave and the stresses of war created the perfect conditions for a market. By the end of the 60s, nearly 10% of American servicemen in Vietnam were addicted to heroin.

Enter the CIA

French, and British colonial powers, as well as the Thai and Vietnamese royal powers, had long used opium production as a means of generating income. Marginal tribes like Shan, Tai and Meo living in remote, ungovernable regions and with few other means of livelihood provided the farming labour to cultivate the crop.

Yunnanese and Hong Kong triads had controlled the trade and distribution. Now, warlords in the Royal Laotian Army and tribal militias moved into this business, with the American Government agencies looking the other way and in some cases, even assisting them. 

The earliest involvement of the CIA in this trade was when they financed the entry of fleeing Kuomintang forces into the Shan region of Burma, in the hope that they would regroup and invade Southern China. As had been their wont, the KMT had no appetite for a real fight. What they did well, was, however, to settle in the Shan hills and take over the poppy cultivation protection and opium trade businesses. They sold the opium to General Phao Sriyanonda of the Thai Police, who was propped up by the CIA as a rearguard for the KMT. General Phao was supplied with aircraft, motor vehicles and boats ostensibly to combat the Communist menace, but which he used to make Bangkok the hub for 30% of the world’s heroin trade. This arrangement lasted until the KMT were evicted by the Burmese military in 1961. The KMT are long gone, but the supply trains established by them, in the mountainous regions of Shan State into northern Thailand form the core of the Golden Triangle to this day.

While the overland route to Bangkok continued, with the creation of the Meo irregular force in the 1960s, a new means of transport was created, air cargo of opium, ferried to Saigon from the airstrips helpfully financed by USAID and constructed by the CIA. Since this was an entirely ‘off-the-books’ operation, aircraft from the World War 2 Chinese operation – again privately run as a corporation – were repurposed for supporting the guerilla war in Laos. General Vang Pao of the Meo Irregulars and General Rattikone of the Royal Laotian Army were the big players in this operation. 

Newspaper reports in the US, vehemently denied, speak of large-scale opium trafficking and even heroin processing laboratories in Laos, run by General Rattikone. Opium and heroin were airlifted using aircraft supplied by the CIA to Saigon, where they were sold to American GIs.

The Party Ends

By 1971, the Nixon administration began to note the dangers of large-scale heroin usage and the alarming rates of addiction in the American military. A war on drugs was launched, with large sums given to the identification of sources of heroin and blocking routes. Though the RAND Corporation assessment notes with approval the utility of tribal guerilla movement as opposed to a conventional force like the Laotian Armed Forces, AID funding was reduced to the tribal program, starting in 1968. In 1972, with Nixon’s rapprochement with China, the importance of Laos in the anti-Communist fight began to reduce. After the exit of the US from Vietnam in 1975, American interest was reduced further. Since the engagement in Laos had always been a secret, this became a forgotten war.

However, the lessons were learned – the creation of informal CIA-funded militias, allowing favored militant groups the benefit of drug profits and use of USAID money for support programs under the guise of relief. This is a template repeated in Colombia in the 1980s and in Afghanistan in the 2000s.

Many former Hmong guerillas and their families were rehabilitated and accepted as refugees in the US.

The Golden Triangle, however, continues to be a source of drugs and is a lawless region racked by ethnic conflicts and ruled by warlords.