Operation stealth, p.4
Operation Stealth, page 4
‘I do not know,’ he answered in guttural English, ‘but I too am the military representative for the other, the Soviet, Co-Chairman,’ a slight pause, ‘and I think it was some imperial provocation.’
‘No,’ countered the British colonel with heavy humour, ‘I expect it was a scare put about by your agents acting for the Pathet Lao or the North Vietnamese Army …’ He broke off as he saw the Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Lao Army, a podgy, foxy man of small stature, a born intriguer and cold-bloodedly ambitious to become the next prime minister after Prince Souvanna Phouma.
‘Excuse me, Mon Général, but can you please tell me what the firing was this afternoon?’ he continued in fluent French. The Russian, who pretended not to understand French, looked on impassively.
The General smiled momentarily, with his lips, but his eyes remained brownly impassive. ‘It was firing at the moon to dispel the wind demons,’ he explained as casually as though he were pointing out something of no significance to a wayward child. ‘To make sure that it did not rain tonight,’ he added, ‘rather a lot of ammunition was expended but that is of little matter.’ Here he glanced at the impassive Russian. ‘The Americans will doubtless give us more. Translate, please, Colonel,’ he ordered.
The Russian listened and asked, through the Englishman, ‘What did you do, General?’
‘Nothing at all. I didn’t hear any of it as I was asleep. My wife told me about it later. She knows better than to wake me up just because firing is heard,’ he said, moving off to meet somebody else.
‘Ah well,’ said the British Colonel, ‘this is my last New Year boun. I’ll be away before the next one and some other poor sucker will have taken my place to try and make head or tail of it.’ He said it in a tone of voice that was meant to imply that, whoever that might be, the task would be beyond him.
The French Defence Attaché, who had joined them during the conversation, sniffed disparagingly. ‘I was a Lieutenant in 1946 when we French came back to Indo-China after the war. Then the brave General was an idle Sergeant. Still should be just that,’ he added disdainfully.
To meet Their Majesties and the royal family, a member of the palace staff called the guests into the large audience chamber and formed them up in protocol seniority, Lao guests on one side of the room and foreigners on the other. The French Ambassador, having been longer in the country than any other Head of Mission, was the doyen of the Diplomatic Corps and so the first foreigner to be presented to the royal entourage as well as having to give the loyal address. On his left stood his wife and behind them the First Secretary with his wife by his side and, at the rear, the Defence Attaché, also with his. Next to the French, likewise arranged, were the South Vietnamese. There was no North Vietnamese representation. There were fourteen groups of diplomats, some of whom had come from Bangkok, as well as representatives of the United Nations Organisation and the International Control and Supervision Commission.
The Communist world was represented by the Soviets, the Poles and the Chinese, to say nothing of any fellow traveller, recognised or not.
The King made his address in impeccable French. He clasped his hands in front of his body, looked around and started to speak. ‘Altesses, Excellences, Mesdames, Messieurs; la Reine et Moi …’ he continued, ‘thank you all for your presence here tonight and the loyal address of welcome and warm wishes for a happy New Year that you have extended to the Queen and Ourself.’ He outlined the general situation and blandly ended up, ‘Indeed We hope for a just and lasting peace for Our united kingdom, a return to homelands and of Our loyal subjects – now refugees and soldiers – and, as soon as practicable after peace has returned, Our coronation which We regard as indispensable to lasting unity and Our political identity and freedom.’ He turned and smiled at the Queen before leading the way out, smiling no more.
The fact that there was no mention of any date for the coronation was noted by the Communists who passed the information on to their fraternal colleagues, just in case their own palace spies had not told them.
Then came a procession of lights descending to the palace from the Phou Si wat at the top of the sacred hill. After a banquet the long evening finished with an exquisite presentation of Lao classical dancing, based on the ancient Ramayanas.
In the remote, jungle-covered hills some eighty kilometres from the Laos-Tonkin border, at Bien Dien Phu, where the French colonial death knell in Indo-China had sounded on Easter Monday, 1954, was a small army camp. Dispersed, equipped with underground shelters, well camouflaged and surrounded by barbed wire and booby traps, it had escaped nothing worse than superficial damage during the interdictory attacks by B-52 bombers and F-111 fighters of the United States Air Force. It was in Military Region 959 and it contained the highly secret Office 95, guarded by the People’s Army of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, more commonly alluded to as the North Vietnamese Army or NVA, controlled from the country’s capital Hanoi, and PL, whose capital was in the limestone hills, honeycombed with caves, at Sam Neua, not far away over the border in Laos. It was staffed by dedicated Political Commissars and civilian functionaries.
Office 95 was so called because the chief Vietnamese representative worked in room number 9 while his Lao counterpart was in room number 5. It was responsible for planning, coordinating and directing clandestine activities, such as subversion, sabotage, the running of intelligence and counter-intelligence networks, disinformation and brazen strong-arm tactics designed to further the revolution by exerting political pressure wherever necessary. It had tentacles all over Laos, especially in the eastern part of the country that was dominated by North Vietnamese men and supplies moving to South Vietnam and Cambodia down the infamous Hồ Chí Minh trail. North Vietnamese influence was strong, too, in the small strip of Laos still in government hands. Only in the northwest of Laos was it nugatory because the Chinese, Communist or otherwise, historically antipathetic to the Vietnamese, dominated that region. Vietnamese uniforms showed Soviet influence: they wore badges of rank and regimental insignia aping the Soviet armed forces, whereas the Pathet Lao, Chinese-style, wore neither. As for the teaching side of Office 95, it was based on Marxist-Leninist principles as dilated and modelled on the KGB Training School No 311 in Novosibirsk, Siberia’s largest town. Various courses and seminars were also run in the camp, as was now the case.
Despite their outwardly cosy political relationship, the North Vietnamese looked down on the Lao and had done for centuries. Being harder, more resilient, more dogmatic and more stubborn themselves, they despised their softer, less fervent and more happy-go-lucky neighbours, criticising them for their lack of ideological stamina and condescendingly regarding them as the children of Asia, the hyphen between ‘Indo’ and ‘China’, who never took anything, except merry making and flirting, seriously. For their part, the Lao were brought up on the saying that ‘the day a Lao is born is the day he starts to hate the Vietnamese’. The Lao resented the Vietnamese superiority but were not strong enough to counter it. The new bonds of Communism were still only strong enough for an outward show of solidarity so, although the Lao were contemptuously disdainful of Vietnamese priggish rectitude, their fervency of purpose and the sparrow-like twittering of their speech, they feared and respected their ‘elder brothers’ who, resilient as lacquered bamboo, had had any natural spontaneity knocked out of them by the dour Puritanism and unimaginative rigidity of their Communist faith.
The ‘imperialists of the western world’ were the main target of North Vietnamese vituperation but even so they kept the most poisonous of their venom for use against any American combat personnel who came into their hands. The North Vietnamese Political Commissar in Office 95, Nga Sô Lựự – secretly nicknamed the Black-eyed Butcher because of his inscrutably dark, glassy eyes and his cold-blooded killer instinct – was giving his closing address to a course of ranking Pathet Lao cadres who had been studying Political Solidarity. He was objectionable and narrow-minded, a short-statured, humourless man with close-cropped hair and rimless glasses; he spoke Lao with a Hanoi accent and sometimes made himself difficult to understand by rendering Lao grammatical constructions as though they were Vietnamese. This sounded amusing to the less intense Pathet Lao but they refrained from showing any amusement as, with good reasons, they were dead scared of him.
He walked with a limp, the result of being captured and tortured by the French. He hated all fair-skinned races but swallowed his pride to realise that Soviet Communists were of help for promoting the cause.
The previous day he had had an opportunity to impress his students by demonstrating what to do to any enemy caught and proving that his actions matched his revolutionary teachings. Two American airmen, who had had to bale out of an aircraft damaged by a surface-to-air missile, were brought into the camp on their way to Hanoi for imprisonment. Both men were tired, thirsty, hungry, unwashed, afraid, dazed and in need of urgent medical treatment. One had a broken leg, the other a shattered knee. They had been carried into the lecture room where there was a cage, so restrictive in shape that they could not stand, sit or lie naturally. Into this they had been forced and, making matters worse, had been handcuffed together behind their backs. Both were pain racked and the man with the shattered knee passed out in sheer agony as he was being stuffed into the cage. An English-speaking Vietnamese cadre had vilified them mercilessly for about an hour in front of the students, recounting their heinous crimes against the peoples of Indo-China and threatening them with even worse treatment unless they recanted their crimes by signing a full confession of their guilt. The second airman, beside himself in pain breaking his code of conduct, managed to croak, with a look of utter disdain, ‘Go get stuffed, you cock-sucking son of a syphilitic bitch.’ The fury of Nga Sô Lựự was such that he yanked his pistol from its holster and shot him through the head, killing him outright. He then shot the other captive, still unconscious, in the gut, letting him bleed slowly to death.
‘Those Americans are worse than the arrogant and feckless French: they wound themselves by indulging in what our revered Helmsman calls “sugar-coated bullets”, such as condoms and talcum powder in their Mess supplies,’ and he spat his disgust.
Now seated on benches the course listened as the Political Commissar was giving them long-term political instructions. ‘Today is 5 April 1972. Our armed struggle has been waged for the last twenty-seven years and may continue for another four or five but the political struggle will be with us for always. You, Comrades, will have these three aims always in mind during the political struggle whenever that supersedes present conditions.
‘The first is to maintain combat readiness – notably against the USA imperialists and the Lao reactionaries and Thai feudalists – always having regard for the importance in this respect for political study. The second is to be good at increasing production and practising thrift, bearing in mind the community of interest between the Lao people and their armed forces, and the need to encourage self-reliance and self-sufficiency.’[1]
He paused in his dissertation and looked around at his class. The students looked back at him, showing neither enthusiasm nor boredom at the meaningless clichés that were the staple of all such lectures. Nga Sô Lựự continued, ‘The third aim is to mobilise the people to build up the basic political organisations, prior to and after the forming of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. The present reactionary and feudalist clique must be replaced as soon as we are prepared to implement the change. You are revolutionaries and you must never forget what your business is, namely destruction – terrible, complete, universal and pitiless – like I showed you yesterday with relentless planning, remorseless opportunism and a ruthless all-pervading fear.’ He paused, panting slightly with the effort of his proselytising zeal. ‘I have taught that since 1945.’
The senior Lao student, a man in his thirties named Bounphong Sunthorn, said, ‘Comrade Political Commissar, may I ask you two questions?’
‘By all means.’
‘Comrade, yesterday you more than adequately demonstrated how to deal with US imperialists in the framework of being a true revolutionary. But how about their friends the British in the context of their being the right-wing Co-Chairman of the 1954 Geneva Accords for Indo-China and the 1962 Accords for Laos? You have already explained what we have to do in relation to our Soviet comrades, who have, earlier on in the course, told us how they are manipulating their part of the Co-Chairmanship to the advantage of the socialist camp. The Soviet Defence Attaché also hinted broadly but was not particularly enlightening when he referred to the danger of pro-Chinese tendencies among our cadres.’
Bounphong Sunthorn was, by now, used to working in a milieu he inwardly loathed but outwardly tolerated. In the heart of his heart he lived in hope, still not understanding the code in which the abbot at Sam Neua had spoken those years ago: ‘I see right not left, blue not red, white not brown as being helpful and in sympathy with the quest for salvation’. But the abbot had certainly been correct in saying ‘above all I see delusion, pain, suffering and great hardship.’
Comrade Nga studied a piece of paper in a file on his desk close by. ‘Comrade, our Soviet comrades are looking after the economic and political aspects by working against the British when it comes to Co-Chairmanship matters and, I may add, highly successfully too. I am given to understand that the present British Ambassador is a true socialist and also indiscrete enough to be positively enlightening, whilst the British Defence Attaché is a useful link, although he doesn’t realise it, to the Americans. Certainly, the British brand of socialism is full of fallacies and inconsistencies. As regards the military side of your question, our military representative can tell you about somebody studying the British methods right now. Colonel?’ He asked his military counterpart.
‘Comrade, yes. British jungle warfare tactics and teaching are of a much higher order than ever the French or the Americans could evolve. It will be no secret to let you know that a most keen comrade, a Major Mana Varamit, now masquerading in the Royal Thai Army, is even now at the British Jungle Warfare School in Malaysia, acting as Guiding Officer to a course of Thai students.’ He sat down with a smug look on his face, not having given away any details that mattered. He had no idea the inward jolt that gave the grave-looking questioner.
‘And your second question, please,’ invited the Political Commissar.
‘Comrade, this may not be completely relevant to this discussion but it is something that has been troubling me since the lecture given by the Soviet Defence Attaché: why did he stress the danger of pro-Chinese tendencies when both fraternal countries are aiding the struggle in Indo-China?’
The Political Commissar tried to hide his inner vexation at the question before answering. ‘The Chinese aspect doesn’t concern this course but you may rest assured that it is constantly receiving our attention. Let us say that our Soviet comrades are worried lest, after the war has been won, the Chinese try and make Southeast Asia into a carbon copy of their old dreams of a Nanyang Empire, a Southern Seas Suzerainty,’ he mockingly concluded.
‘Thank you, Comrade. Most helpful and clear answers.’ Stealthy enough? and he grinned inside himself.’
Bounphong Sunthorn was an enigma to his Vietnamese superiors and his own Lao classmates. He seemed to have an insatiable appetite for work and a most unLao-like habit of studying Vietnamese personalities and their methods. His background was a mystery: some said he was an orphan from a village, Ban Liet, near the border of Laos and Vietnam but others said that that was impossible. Ban Liet and its inhabitants had been mysteriously wiped out soon after the Japanese war had ended. The new Ban Liet was a military staging post, not a village as such. Others said he came from the ancient kingdom of Champassak, ruled over by a hugely fat, rapacious and utterly corrupt prince whose proud cousin was even now the Minister of Defence in right-wing Vientiane. Bounphong spoke, at times, with a northern accent, not a southern one, but no Communist ever showed too much interest in others lest they themselves became a target of too much interest.
But although he was an enigma to the Vietnamese, they had no doubts as to his devotion to the cause, his dedication and his capabilities. He had been marked out to go to Vientiane, that den of right-wing imperialist, reactionary depravity and iniquity, that was the administrative capital of Laos, and where, alongside the Morning Market, the Boulevard Circulaire and the Rue Mahasot, lived the small, virtually beleaguered group of his own people, the Lao Patriotic Front, LPF, representatives, still nominally and legitimately part of the Royal Lao Government. Headed by Soth Petrasy, an ageing schoolmaster, it was due for reinforcement towards the end of the year. Comrade Bounphong Sunthorn was obviously the man to send there. Such a move would redound on the Political Commissar who had recommended him to the Politburo. If only the wretched fellow would stop twiddling that large ring he wore on the little finger of his right hand when he was deep in thought, as he was so obviously now.
A few kilometres into the jungle from the north bank of the River Mekong in northwest Laos, near the riverine town of Pak Beng, was an old road construction camp that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Engineers had used when they rebuilt Route Nationale 46 from a narrow laterite track to an all-weather two-lane highway in the 1960s. As the whole area was deemed of strategic significance and tactical importance to the Chinese, Route 46 was heavily guarded by Chinese infantry and anti-aircraft artillery, the only units of the Chinese Army operationally deployed outside China, less Tibet, at that time. The infantry supported the Pathet Lao and kept pro-Government ground forces away while the anti-aircraft guns had proved effective against USAF U-2 reconnaissance planes flying as high as sixty-thousand feet. No USAF B-52s or F-111s had been used against any target in the area but the Royal Lao Air Force T-28s had, on occasions, been used on local tactical missions, nor had any civil aircraft overflown it since a Dakota of the internal Lao Air Lines, piloted by a Corsican opium smuggler, had been shot down, the wreckage being covered with soil almost immediately afterwards.
