Laos Falls to the Communists: I Was There

The author (left) in Vientiane with Hunter S. Thompson.

(Courtesy of Bruce Palling)

Thirty years ago today, the Kingdom of Laos ceased to exist. The nation that replaced it, the Peoples’ Democratic Republic of Laos, was the last of the three nations of Indochina to fall under control of the native communists who had battled American forces and before them the French for more than a quarter century.

I happened to be the last American correspondent in Laos as it “went communist,” and I was fortunate to witness some of the final days of a wonderful, gentle land that was being transformed into a nation devoted to the prosperity of a small group of rulers who had just emerged from years in the jungles of Indochina.

My first taste of this beautiful country came on the heels of a Friday afternoon message from the foreign desk of The New York Times, where I worked as a correspondent: Leave for Vientiane on Saturday morning and tell us what is happening for Sunday’s editions.

So on May 11, 1975, I joined Bruce Palling of The Times of London on the once-daily flight out of Bangkok on Royal Air Lao, and just before lunchtime we were tooling slowly along the narrow road from the one-runway airport to the stately residence of the British Ambassador, Alan Davidson.

Ambassador Davidson knew more about this country than any other living Westerner. He was a close friend of Savang Vatthana, the King of Laos. Thanks to many long, intimate dinners presided over by the king’s personal chef in the royal palace at Luang Prabang, Davidson had succeeded in penning an extraordinary work, Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos, which, with his signature, still occupies a proud place in my library. But he also accumulated a deep well of understanding of the history, culture, and politics of this remote but troubled mountain kingdom.

At this lunch I learned, first, that there is one Laotian fish, the Giant Mekong Catfish, that has weighed in as large as 646 pounds. And there was much more. Laos was struggling at that moment for its life. It had never been a centerpiece of attention in Indochina throughout the period of warfare between the Communists of North Vietnam and the American-backed governments of South Vietnam and Cambodia.

Still, Laos, especially its remote eastern hills and valleys, were of critical strategic importance to the war in Vietnam. Large stretches of the fabled Ho Chi Minh Trail ran through this territory and were used to resupply Viet Cong and North Vietnamese main-force units battling the Americans in the south. So the so-called secret war, financed and run by the Central Intelligence Agency and using a force of some 30,000 warriors drawn from the Hmong and Meo mountain tribes, spent over a decade harassing North Vietnamese units and their Pathet Lao communist allies, seeking to close down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The air war had been directed by two key CIA operatives, Hugh Tovar and Daniel Arnold, who, with his blonde wife Shirley, was often a visitor to our home in Bangkok after the United States threw in the towel. By that time the Hmong leader Gen. Vang Pao and a host of his Meo hill-tribe followers had been evacuated to Minnesota and California. But by the time I first pitched up in Laos, in May 1975, this part of the war was over. The Pathet Lao were closing in on Vientiane and, as it turned out, could have moved in to take over the country whenever they pleased.

That they held off, officially, for seven months was a tribute to the Laotian royal family and the whole way of life of this ancient nation. It was the start of a long and what turned out to be quite painful process that I chronicled during the spring and into the summer of 1975.

When I arrived in Laos, a Western-styled coalition government was still in shaky control. It was led by a politically astute member of the royal family, Prince Souvanna Phouma, who I had the good fortune to meet while he still had enough control of things to chat with a New York Times correspondent. He was seeking to steer a difficult course between an uneasy neutrality for his country, in which he deeply believed, and the veiled demands of a tough Pathet Lao communist leadership that was still somewhere in the jungles. Ironically one of the Pathet Lao’s top leaders, Souphanouvong, was also Souvanna Phouma’s half brother. Clearly they wanted no part of neutrality. They were determined that Laos should become a puppet state of Hanoi. And they remain in control to this day.

My first weekend in Laos was clearly the beginning of the end. Two right-wing cabinet ministers, Defense Minister Sisouk na Champassak and Finance Minister Ngon Sananikone submitted their “resignations” to the prime minister. Within hours, more than 300 members of their families had joined an exodus of thousands fleeing across the Mekong River to Thailand or on Royal Air Lao flights to Bangkok, which were booked solid for weeks. Within two days the defense minister’s deputy, a Pathet Lao sympathizer, promptly ordered the entire Laotian air force grounded and forbade all movement of troops or military equipment.

Pathet Lao sympathizers in Vientiane quickly began to pick up the pace, particularly their efforts to rid the nation of the last remnants of an American presence. The most visible remnant, after the embassy, was the sprawling compound housing the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was often a Third World lighting rod for anti-American sentiment, especially during the Cold War.

Pressure built rapidly. On Thursday, May 14, anti-American demonstrators stormed U.S. mission buildings in the provincial capitals of Luang Prabang and Savannakhet as the Pathet Lao demanded a pullout of all American presence in the provinces. They hadn’t yet gotten around to a complete American withdrawal—which eventually would cost the nation $27 million a year in aid funds, about $100 million in today’s dollars. That was to come soon enough. A week later, Pathet Lao main-force troops rolled into both towns, completing the takeover of the provinces. Only Vientiane was left.

The next week, it was the turn of the capital. Pathet Lao-backed student demonstrators scaled walls and smashed into the Agency for International Development compound in Vientiane, which led on May 23 to the U.S. government’s agreeing to negotiate an end to the aid program. Henry Kissinger’s Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs, Philip C. Habib, showed up a week later—the first visit by a senior American official to Indochina since the fall of Saigon, and what turned out to be the last visit to Laos by a senior American official. The 14 Americans held by “student demonstrators” in Savvanakhet had just been released and flown to Vientiane, en route out of the country.

I still have on my office wall a photo of Habib in the departure lounge of Vientiane Airport surrounded by a gaggle of correspondents, including Ed Bradley of CBS News. The photo sits next to another at the Vientiane boat landing, where I was accompanied by Hunter Thompson. The gonzo journalist had decided to chronicle the end of the nation that was his preferred supplier of what he described as the “finest weed ever produced on the planet.”

On May 24, 1975, caught up in the cult of a quiet, peaceful Laos, I penned the one story that I still regret: “Whatever chances this country had even a month ago to maintain a coalition government—the last truly neutral one in Indochina—have vanished in a confusing welter of events that is expected to leave behind a blend of Communism and nationalism in control.” What blend? How about a pure Communist regime that has persisted in the shadow of big brother in Hanoi to the present day?

By May 30 the fiction of a peaceful transition had been exploded forever. Purges began throughout the Laotian administration and, as I reported that day, People’s Courts were convened in key ministries. A score of frightened Laotian employees cowered outside the door of Boutsabong Souvannayong, the Pathet Lao official who had become the Minister of Finance, while pistol-wielding Pathet Lao soldiers patrolled the corridor. Periodically young men or women would emerge, often in tears, and flee down the stairs, their careers and their lives shattered. The Pathet Lao were digging in.

If there was any doubt, it was removed the next Saturday evening. Peter Kann, then a Wall Street Journal correspondent, today chairman of Dow Jones, and I strolled over to the White Rose Café. It was at the time, and had been for decades, one of Southeast Asia’s renowned watering holes, a must-drop-by rendezvous for spies, adventurers, soldiers of fortune, foreign correspondents, and diplomats of all stripes. It was empty but for us and a handful of the barely cheerful bar girls who were both hostesses and the floor show alike. They had just received the official order that all bars and nightclubs would be closed, orders from the Pathet Lao, who saw them as degenerate symbols of Western imperialism and exploiters of the Laotian people. Balderdash. The girls were heartbroken. But the next morning they would slip across the river to seek refuge in Thailand. This was the last night of the White Rose—a bittersweet moment indeed.

The next day I too headed back to Bangkok. I would return only once more, but not for quite some time.

Meanwhile, Laos began to change. On August 23, 1975, Vientiane radio broadcast a rally allegedly of 300,000 people, a colossal size given that the whole population of the country was barely 3 million. It was as though 30 million Americans had decided to rally in Washington one summer weekend. The purpose of the rally was to “welcome the people’s revolutionary administration,” though the formal creation of the Peoples Democratic Republic of Laos and, hence its national day, would not come until December 2, when the monarchy was officially deposed.

Over the course of the next year, I tried repeatedly to return to Laos, but to no avail. In typical Laotian fashion, there was no rejection, simply silence. Finally I was notified that my visa had been approved, and on August 23, 1976, I boarded a Thai Airways flight for Vientiane. It was as though I had stepped through the looking glass. My room at the Lane Xang Hotel was waiting—scarcely surprising, since I was just about the only guest. What had been a bustling crossroads of foreign journalists, diplomats, and aid workers was now a shell of its former self, the weeds growing wildly out front and a single bellhop snoozing quietly in the corner.

The first of some 30,000 Laotians to undergo “reeducation” were returning, prepared with the least prompting to recite the catechism of the Pathet Lao—“the people must understand.” Moreover, “Laos is rich in natural resources and we should develop them, and before, under the old regime, we were not working hard enough, we just asked foreigners for help.”

But there was more. The Pathet Lao took over a nation that had been stripped of thousands of its most talented and resourceful people. Indeed anyone with the will or the desire had fled across the Mekong to neighboring Thailand. The population had fallen sharply, and the new regime decided on the draconian measure of banning all birth control, in an effort to repopulate the nation. It seems to have worked, since over the next 30 years the population has nearly doubled.

Food was also beginning to return to the public markets, though often the prices on a gray-market scale were substantially higher than those mandated by the ai nong, the Pathet Lao enforcers, who were everywhere. Still, there was little bloodshed, nor would there be. Laos was to remain much as it always had been—a quiet, peaceful, all but undiscovered corner of Asia.

After a week or so making my rounds, including dinner with the chargÉ at the American Embassy, which unlike in Saigon and Phnom Penh continued to function even after the takeover, I found an urgent message awaiting me at the hotel. Would I be so kind as to present myself the next day at the Ministry of Information, whose minister I had interviewed just the day before. I was puzzled, but I appeared as requested.

A sheepish official awaited me. “How is your work coming?” He smiled nervously.

“Fine,” I replied.

“How long before you finish?” he asked, more nervously.

I shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Another few days, I would guess.”

“Could you finish more quickly?” he asked.

“How quickly?”

“Could you be on the plane this afternoon?”

By judicious questioning, I determined that the Ministry of Information was in big trouble. Some Pathet Lao official in the Interior Ministry, going down the list of foreigners to whom visas had been issued, stumbled on my name—an American and, even worse, a New York Times correspondent. The race was on to see how quickly I could be hustled out of the country.

I have never set foot in Laos again. But I did follow the progress of this remarkable little nation. Indeed, there are some things to celebrate and that have been insufficiently chronicled. Laos, it must be remembered, was the one nearly bloodless takeover in Indochina. There was no mass genocide, as in Cambodia, or even mass killing, as in Vietnam. A relatively small number of people went off to be “reeducated” and then quietly resumed their role in society. Those who wanted to flee generally found a way out of the country without having the undergo the trauma and perils of the boat people of Vietnam.

Only the royal family and a few dozen of the senior political and military officers from the pre-communist regime did meet untimely deaths, and they probably account for a large part of the bloodshed that followed the takeover. Nearly two years after he was deposed King Savang Vatthana, who had continued to live quietly in the royal palace, was suddenly spirited away by helicopter, along with Queen Khamboui and Crown Prince Say Vongsavang, to a remote reeducation camp, where the crown prince died in May 1978 and the king 11 days later of starvation. The queen died in December 1981. Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma was allowed to live quietly in Vientiane until he died, apparently of natural causes, at age 82 in January 1984.

More than a decade ago, about the time Glasnost was bringing capitalism to Russia, Laos abandoned its attempts to sustain a communist economy and became, officially, capitalist. But the Pathet Lao maintained a tight hold over the nation, shedding along the way its revolutionary name and adopting its current designation as the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party. In August 1991 all references to socialism were purged from the new constitution. Still, the party retained a monopoly on power, and political dissent was harshly suppressed. In the last parliamentary “elections” in 2002, 165 of the 166 candidates were members of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party.

Still, most of the 11-member Politburo are the aging survivors of the Pathet Lao regime that was just emerging from the jungle when I was last there 30 years ago. The remaining unresolved question is what will happen when they die. Will Laos move more resolutely to becoming a more modern developing nation?

For the moment, the nation has been pursuing improved relations with such former enemies as China, Thailand (which has become an important trading partner), and even the United States, to the extent that Laos was admitted to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 1997. The United States has never closed its embassy in Laos and in fact has lifted its ban on aid to the country, which remains one of the world's poorest on a per capita basis, though it recently moved past Cambodia on some poverty indexes.

It has also remained more isolated from the world community than any of its neighbors, including Vietnam, which has made major financial and diplomatic overtures to the United States in recent years. All that could change with the construction of a large hydroelectric dam on the Mekong River, which is to be underwritten by World Bank funding, though some environmentalists are opposed, fearing its impact on the giant Mekong catfish.

As for the U.S. aid program, its focus most recently has been on crop substitution, according to one senior American official. Laos is no longer the world’s third largest producer of opium.

—David A. Andelman, now executive editor of Forbes.com, is writing a book on the fallout from the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 for the publisher John Wiley & Sons.