Download A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA AudioBook Free
In 1960 Chief executive Eisenhower was focused on Laos, a tiny Southeast Asian region few Americans experienced ever heard of. Washington feared the united states would land to Communism, triggering a domino effect in the rest of Southeast Asia. So in January 1961, Eisenhower approved the CIA's Procedure Momentum, a plan to create a proxy military of cultural Hmong to fight Communist causes in Laos. While remaining largely covered from the American community and almost all of Congress, Momentum became the largest CIA paramilitary operation in the annals of the United States. The brutal war, which continuing under Presidents Kennedy and Nixon, lasted practically two decades, killed one-tenth of Laos' total human population, left a large number of unexploded bombs in the bottom, and changed the nature of the CIA forever. Joshua Kurlantzick offers us the definitive consideration of the Laos war and its central characters, like the four key people who led the operation - the CIA operative who developed the theory, the Hmong general who led the proxy military in the field, the paramilitary specialist who trained the Hmong, and the STATE DEPT. careerist who took control over the war as it grew.
