Page 1 of 2 Loose tongues foil 'Laos plot'
By Richard S Ehrlich
BANGKOK - After a US Justice Department undercover agent displayed a Stinger
surface-to-air missile in a bugged Hilton hotel room in Sacramento, California,
the motley crew of would-be revolutionaries began to suspect that they might be
the victims of a "sting" operation. They were right.
A mysterious woman named Lisa - "last name unknown", as it appears on the
indictment - was allegedly tasked to find out who the man with the Stinger
really was and whether a gang of
desperate Americans in California, and ethnic Hmong from Laos, were about to be
busted.
The furtive Americans and Hmong allegedly boasted that the US Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) was "standing by and ready to roll" to ensure success
for their clumsy coup attempt in Laos.
They didn't realize that their California restaurant meetings, anxious
telephone conversations, and hurried chats in urban parking lots would appear
this Monday in a 90-page affidavit by the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms and Explosives (ATF). The government takes a dim view of plotters
using US soil to overthrow governments of nations "with which the US is at
peace".
Weapons and ammunition, bought for US$100,000, were to be smuggled into Bangkok
next Tuesday, June 12, followed by delivery of at least two Stinger missiles
designed to shoot down aircraft, the ATF affidavit said.
To gain military-style training so they could overthrow the communist regime
and rule the Southeast Asian nation, some of the men allegedly hoped to join
the California Highway Patrol's Sacramento academy to learn "internal security,
operations, and road control", because the campus has one of "the best
law-enforcement training programs available".
After 10 men were arrested in California, where they were charged with a slew
of felonies on Monday, attention focused on two of the jailed Americans who had
undergone US military training, plus combat experience in Southeast Asia during
the Vietnam War era.
The CIA had run a bloody "secret war" in Laos after turning much of the country
into a vast graveyard, gouged by massive US aerial bombardments. The country
fell to the communist Pathet Lao about the same time that the North Vietnamese
conquered the South and the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia.
The Vietnamese ousted the Khmer Rouge from Cambodia in 1979, and a decade later
it became a multi-party democracy under United Nations-supervised elections.
Laos, however, has remained a communist country, and thus a tempting target for
Americans and Hmong bent on reversing history.
According to the ATF, the most prominent suspect is a 1968 graduate of the US
Military Academy in West Point, New York, and Vietnam War veteran, Harrison
Ulrich Jack. He left the US Army in 1977, and eventually retired from the
California National Guard as a lieutenant-colonel, settling in Woodland, near
Sacramento, where he ran "a consulting business focusing on environmental
issues".
The ATF's other main suspect is the CIA's infamous former Hmong mercenary
leader, General Vang Pao. Vang Pao became a US citizen as a reward for killing
communists and others in Laos during the Vietnam War, when Washington paid a
pittance to thousands of impoverished minority ethnic Hmong to fight and die so
Americans would not be killed.
"Jack said he works directly for General Vang Pao and had worked for the Hmong
community for the past 10 years," the undercover ATF agent said in the
affidavit.
The group's alleged clandestine strategy, financing, and choice of weaponry
provide an eerie look at how a group of wanna-be warriors in California
attempted illegally to invade and occupy a country on the other side of the
world.
Thailand, a US military ally, was to be the unwitting launching pad for the
"military expedition" by the Americans and Hmong to infiltrate Laos. The
alleged target was Vientiane, the languid capital of Laos, just across the
Mekong River from Thailand.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Thailand provided the US with airbases, Thai
troops, "rest and recreation" facilities and other assistance to fight in Laos,
but Bangkok now deals with Laos as a friendly commercial partner and trendy
tourist destination.
Last month, the California plotters said they had "a man on the ground [in
Vientiane], walking around like a tourist with his digital camera, trying to
get whatever pictures he can" of government buildings to obliterate, the ATF
said.
Jack is portrayed as the gang's blabbermouth, relentlessly pushing the plot
along while mindlessly providing the latest details to an undercover agent.
Jack also allegedly told the agent that the CIA was in on the plot. "I
understood his statement to mean that the CIA was preparing
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