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    A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA
    A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA
    A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA
    Audiobook9 hours

    A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA

    Written by Joshua Kurlantzick

    Narrated by Tim Campbell

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    In 1960, President Eisenhower was focused on Laos, a tiny Southeast Asian nation few Americans had ever heard of. Washington feared the country would fall to communism, triggering a domino effect in the rest of Southeast Asia. So in January 1961, Eisenhower approved the CIA's Operation Momentum, a plan to create a proxy army of ethnic Hmong to fight communist forces in Laos. While remaining largely hidden from the American public and most of Congress, Momentum became the largest CIA paramilitary operation in the history of the United States. The brutal war, which continued under Presidents Kennedy and Nixon, lasted nearly two decades, killed one-tenth of Laos's total population, left thousands of unexploded bombs in the ground, and changed the nature of the CIA forever.

    Joshua Kurlantzick gives us the definitive account of the Laos war and its central characters, including the four key people who led the operation-the CIA operative who came up with the idea, the Hmong general who led the proxy army in the field, the paramilitary specialist who trained the Hmong, and the State Department careerist who took control over the war as it grew.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJan 24, 2017
    ISBN9781515980391
    Author

    Joshua Kurlantzick

    Joshua Kurlantzick is a senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has been a correspondent in Southeast Asia for The Economist, a columnist for Time, the foreign editor of the New Republic, a senior correspondent for the American Prospect, and a contributing writer for Mother Jones. He has written about Asia for publications ranging from Rolling Stone to The New York Times Magazine. He is the winner of the Luce Scholarship and was selected as a finalist for the Osborn Elliot prize, both for journalism in Asia. He is the author of multiple books on Asia, including A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA. For more information on Kurlantzick, visit CFR.org.

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    • 3/5
      5482. A Great Place to Have a War America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA, by Joshua Kurlantzick (read 3 Jul 2017) This 2017 book tells of a not much publicied war which the CIA ran in Laos while the Vietnam War was going on. The CIA supplied money and air support but the ground forces were Laotian--largely Hmong. So since Americans were not dying in Laos there was not much publicity about the fighting there--in fact the CIA lied about the involvment of the CIA. Even when it became known it did not cause the firestorm which for instance the extension of the war to Cambodia did. The war was being lost in Laos and when the Vietnam peace accord was reached the CIA gave up on Laos as well. It is a sad story, and one has to feel sorry for the Laotians who fought and died so profusely for the the cause of non-communism in Laos. Now Laos is communist as is Vietnam but one cannot help but feel the people are better off than they were during the long years of war. The book is well-written and tells its sad story ably, though I could not get overly engrossed in the account.