The 1962 Geneva accords obliged America to withdraw all military personnel from Laos. Nearly eight hundred individuals, including military attachés, advisors to the RLA, MAAG staff, and the members of the White Star teams, packed up and left the country.[i] Even the White Star’s new logistics center at Sam Thong was abandoned with supplies still on warehouse shelves and in dispensary cabinets. Hmong quickly swept over the facility and carried everything away.[ii]

Washington also ordered the CIA out of the country. The entire Vientiane station moved to Bangkok, but two of Lair’s agents, Tony Poe and Vinton Lawrence, illegally remained behind at Long Cheng along with a PARU team. Lair was too high profile to stay behind, so he set up a temporary headquarters for his paramilitary operation at Nong Khai, a Thai village across the Mekong from Vientiane. The location kept Lair close to his Hmong, but it lacked security. Local villagers and complete strangers wandered into his facility.

Lair finally transferred his headquarters to Udorn Air Base in Thailand. The CIA owned property there, a rundown wooden bungalow just off the huge concrete runway constructed by the US Strategic Air command in the early 1950s. The bungalow was designated with a simple sign as building AB-1[iii]

In the beginning, Lair’s work at AB-1 was circumscribed. He was not allowed to ship arms and supplies to the Hmong or sponsor more training. However, Washington did authorize humanitarian aid for the Hmong and this gave Lair plenty to do. He channeled funds into Edgar Buell’s refugee relief program and oversaw the logistics of getting supplies into the field. It wasn’t the same as fighting a war, but at least it kept the Hmong from starving.

North Vietnam honored the Geneva agreement by infiltrating additional troops into Laos to augment the nearly twenty thousand Pathet Lao already in the field.[iv]Vang Pao’s intelligence network reported a steady stream of North Vietnamese trucks carrying troops and supplies down Route 6 from Vietnam onto the Plain of Jars. American Voodoo jets, high-flying twin-engine reconnaissance planes, also confirmed the presence of the truck convoys in their aerial photographs.[v] By the fall of 1962, the North Vietnamese had expanded their presence in Laos to ten thousand men.

One reason for the buildup was the failure of the Pathet Lao to bring Kong-Lê into their fold. He took his neutralism seriously and was openly critical of the Pathet Lao’s slavish dependence on the North Vietnamese, calling them kapkap (the Lao expression for toads) because of their penchant for aping the North Vietnamese obsession with digging trenches.[vi] Kong-Lê had forty-five hundred troops under his direct command, distributed over the Plain of Jars, in the Ban Ban Valley, and at Xieng Khouangville. Another fifty-five hundred were scattered throughout central Laos in small garrisons. Once Hanoi realized it could not count on these troops and might very well have to face them in combat, the decision was made to dramatically expand the presence of the NVA.

In March 1963 a sudden escalation in clashes between Neutralists and Pathet Lao forces began to unravel the ten-month-old coalition government. Pathet Lao antiaircraft guns shot down two American transport planes, killing two U.S. pilots attempting to deliver supplies to the Neutralists. This incident caused the Kennedy administration to reconsider the feasibility of a coalition. Even Souvanna Phouma, who had so often championed the coalition idea, began to question its viability, especially after receiving confirmation of a buildup of North Vietnamese forces in his country.[vii]

In the end it was the communists who scuttled the coalition by assassinating two of Kong-Lê’s top officers. The Neutralists retaliated, gunning down Quinim Pholsena on the front steps of his Vientiane residence. A former librarian and part-time radical, Quinim had jumped on the Pathet Lao bandwagon and wangled the post of foreign minister in the coalition government. Outspoken in his support of the communists, he made an ideal target.

Not wanting the revolution to lose a second hero, and with memories still green of his year in jail after the collapse of the last coalition government, Souphanouvong vacated his post as deputy prime minister and fled to his cave headquarters in Sam Neua. The other communist deputies soon joined him, returning like salmon to their natal stream.

With the coalition government no more, the Pathet Lao stepped up military action, especially against Neutralist forces. For months the communists had been cutting back on the food and military supplies going to Kong-Lê. Now they ceased delivering anything at all. In mid-April, NVA and Pathet Lao units assaulted all Neutralist strongholds on the Plain of Jars. Believing Kong-Lê’s army would be destroyed without outside support, Kennedy authorized covert deliveries of supplies to the Neutralists and directed the CIA to do what it could to save them from annihilation.