CHIANG MAI - There was hardly a
vacant seat in the Protestant church by the Ping
River in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai for
the funeral. American veterans of the Indochina
war mixed with Thai and foreign residents,
missionaries and intelligence officers, Lahu and
Wa tribesmen, and even some wildlife
conservationists.
Wreaths came from a
group of people who fought in the secret war in
Laos in the 1960s and call themselves the "Unknown
Warriors Association 333", former United States
Agency for International Development (USAID)
workers, the US Drug Enforcement Administration
(DEA), and across the border in Myanmar the rebel
Shan State Army.
All of them had come to
say farewell to former US Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA)
officer William Young, who on April 1 ended his
own life after suffering from severe emphysema and
other ailments, aged 76. He was found dead in is
home in Chiang Mai with a handgun in one hand and
a crucifix in the other. Young was a warrior but
also a devout Christian. As the turnout at the
funeral showed, Young was a legend long before he
died.
His life and that of his family
reflected the ups and downs of more than a century
of American engagement with Southeast Asia, its
most glorious days as well as its most
controversial. At the turn of the last century,
William Young's namesake, his grandfather William
Young, opened a Baptist mission in Kengtung in the
eastern Shan states of Myanmar, then known as
Burma.
While the staunchly Buddhist
plainspeople ignored the Christian gospel he
proselytized, Lahu hill-tribesmen flocked to him
by the thousands. Like many other hill peoples,
the Lahu had a tale about a "white God" with a
book who was destined to save them.
The
older William Young was indeed white and carried a
Bible under his arm. The prophecy seemed to be
fulfilled and a record number of baptisms were
carried out in the Kengtung hills. His sons
carried on his work, Harold among the Lahu and
Vincent among the Wa, who were still headhunters
when the Youngs first ventured into their area
which straddled the border between Burma and
China. They founded churches, missionary schools
and devised the Roman script for both the Lahu and
Wa languages.
Harold's son, William Young,
was born during a family visit to California in
1934 but he grew up in the Shan states and became
fluent in several local languages, including Lahu
and Shan. He later learned Wa, Thai and the
northern Thai dialect as well as some Hindi and
Chinese. Hindi was added after the Young family
was evacuated to India when the Japanese invaded
Burma in 1942, and young William attended the
Woodstock school in Mussoorie in the hills above
Dehra Dun.
When the war was over the
Youngs returned to Burma, and Harold, although an
American, was appointed as administrator of the Wa
Hills by the British colonial power. That lasted
until Burma's independence was achieved in 1948.
The Youngs moved to northern Thailand where the
father, Harold, founded the Chiang Mai zoo and the
mother, Ruth, built up the American University
Alumni (AUA), which is still one of the most
popular places in the city to learn English.
By then, however, Harold Young was already
closely connected with US intelligence, during the
war with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)
and later the CIA. The recruitment of missionaries
into America's spy agencies was not a coincidence.
Britain and France had intelligence agencies which
were well established in different parts of the
world due to their status as global colonial
powers.
The US, in comparison, had no
coordinated external intelligence agency until
World War II, but after the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor in December 1941 Washington realized
that it was of utmost importance to develop one.
The need became even more pressing after the end
of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War,
where espionage was given the highest strategic
priority.
The OSS was formed in 1942 and
the CIA in 1947. But unlike the colonial powers at
the time, the US had no old network of operatives
and local intelligence assets from which to draw.
There was one exception, though: the Christian
missionaries. They had over the years acquired
in-depth knowledge of local cultures and
languages, and some - among them the Youngs -
enjoyed a near-godlike status in their respective
communities of Christian converts.
Like
father, like son From their base in Chiang
Mai, Harold Young and his eldest son Gordon
trained Lahu paramilitary units for intelligence
work inside Burma and, more importantly, China,
where the communists had seized power in 1949. The
younger son, William, was recruited by the CIA
shortly after he had finished service with the US
army in Germany in the mid-1950s.
When the
Indochina war escalated in the early 1960s,
William, with his unique linguistic capabilities,
was ideally placed to help organize the "secret
war" in Laos, which had to be clandestine because
Laos's neutrality was guaranteed under the 1962
Geneva Agreement.
No foreign troops were
supposed to be in Laos but North Vietnamese forces
supported the communist Pathet Lao in the north
and northeast, and in other parts of the country
CIA operatives were active working alongside Thai
special forces known as the Border Patrol Police
Aerial Reinforcement Unit (PARU).
The head
of the operation, William Lair, was equally
legendary and Young became one of his most trusted
officers. Alfred McCoy, the author of the classic
The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia,
wrote that "since Young had grown up in Lahu and
Shan villages in Burma, he actually enjoyed the
long months of solitary work among the hill
tribes, which might have strained the nerves of
less acculturated agents". Author Francis Belanger
referred to Young as "perhaps one of the most
effective agents ever".
Young built up a
pan-tribal army and recruited a remarkable team of
16 Lahu and Shan operatives he called "the Sixteen
Musketeers". He also worked with Vang Pao's ethnic
Hmong army - and a little-known unit of
Nationalist Chinese soldiers called by its French
name, Bataillon Special 111. Manned mainly by
ex-prisoners of war (POWs) from the Korean War who
chose to go to Taiwan rather than being
repatriated to China, they were given special
training by the nationalists.
The most
trustworthy had been chosen for special operations
in the mainland, but to prevent defection they had
slogans like "Death to Communism!" tattooed on
their arms. A group of them was sent to Laos,
where they remained for years as the most
secretive of all the mercenary units that were
deployed there during the so-called "secret war".
Young worked with Bataillon Special 111 in the
Phatang area on the Thai-Lao border, from where
they were sent north into China to wiretap
telephones and collect intelligence.
What
had begun as a relatively small but highly
effective operation turned into a massive war
effort when Theodore Shackley, a new brash CIA
station chief, arrived on the scene in 1966. Fresh
from the Cuban missile crisis and Germany,
Shackley had little or no understanding of local
sensitivities in countries such as Laos. Vang
Pao's Hmong army was built up into a massive force
of tens of thousands of men - and, as Young once
told this writer, "People like me became
thumbtacks on the map on his wall in his Vientiane
office."
Within a year of Shackley's
arrival, Young soon fell out with the CIA and the
inevitable happened: he left the agency, accused
by some of "insubordination". He returned to his
family's farm north of Chiang Mai a bitter man and
felt that the US government had dealt its hand
extremely clumsily in Laos.
Years later he
often talked about how "my country", as he always
said, should be more understanding of local
conditions and cultures. He came across the same
problem when in the 1980s he trained security
personnel for the Chevron Oil Corporation in
Sudan. While Young spent most of his time in the
company of Sudanese officers, his colleagues drank
and played cards together with little or no
interaction with anyone from the host country.
But Young's life was not confined to war
and training security personnel. After leaving the
CIA in the late 1960s he served as an assistant
and interpreter for the American archeologist
Chester Gorman, with whom he excavated ancient
spirit caves in the backwoods areas of Mae Hong
Son and Kanchanaburi provinces in Thailand.
Their findings provided a breakthrough in
Thai archeology and Young was proud to have helped
fill in the gaps of work previously done by the
French in Indochina and the British in Burma. He
also ran a guesthouse in Chiang Rai and in later
years worked as a consultant for the US DEA.
Many locals in Chiang Mai and elsewhere
would argue that Young's passing marked the end of
an era. Today's intelligence operatives come from
entirely different backgrounds and generally don't
have the same experience and local knowledge as
Young provided - as the US's many misadventures
across the globe are clear and glaring testament.
Bertil Lintner is a former
correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic Review
and the author of Burma in Revolt: Opium and
Insurgency Since 1948 and several other books
on Myanmar. He is currently a writer with Asia
Pacific Media Services.
(Michael Black
and David Lawitts, who conducted and compiled
several hours of interviews with William Young,
contributed to this story.)
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