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
ISBN-10
1451667868
ISBN-13
9781451667868
Category
History
Pages
336
Language
English
Published
2017-01-24
Publisher
Simon and Schuster
Author
Joshua Kurlantzick

Description

1960. President Eisenhower was focused on Laos, a tiny Southeast Asian nation. Washington feared the country would fall to communism, triggering a domino effect in the rest of Southeast Asia. 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. Kurlantzick shows how the brutal war lasted nearly two decades, killed one-tenth of Laos's total population, and changed the nature of the CIA forever.

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