A great place to have a war : America in Laos and the birth of a military CIA
(Book)

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Published
New York : Simon & Schuster, [2017].
ISBN
1451667868, 9781451667868 (hbk.)
Physical Desc
323 pages ; 24 cm
Status
Adult Nonfiction (3rd floor)
NF 959.70438 KURLANT 2017
1 available

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Published
New York : Simon & Schuster, [2017].
Format
Book
Language
ng
ISBN
1451667868, 9781451667868 (hbk.)

Notes

Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 279-310) and index.
Description
The untold story of how America's secret war in Laos in the 1960s and 1970s transformed the CIA from a loose collection of spies into a military operation and a key player in American foreign policy. 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. The Laos war created a CIA that fights with real soldiers and weapons as much as it gathers secrets. Laos became a template for CIA proxy wars all over the world, from Central America in the 1980s to today's war on terrorism, where the CIA has taken control with little oversight. Based on extensive interviews and CIA records only recently declassified, A Great Place to Have a War is a riveting, thought-provoking look at how Operation Momentum changed American foreign policy forever.
Action
2017-01-27,TB

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Citations

APA Citation, 7th Edition (style guide)

Kurlantzick, J. (2017). A great place to have a war: America in Laos and the birth of a military CIA . Simon & Schuster.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation, 17th Edition (style guide)

Kurlantzick, Joshua, 1976-. 2017. A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA. Simon & Schuster.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities (Notes and Bibliography) Citation, 17th Edition (style guide)

Kurlantzick, Joshua, 1976-. A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA Simon & Schuster, 2017.

MLA Citation, 9th Edition (style guide)

Kurlantzick, Joshua. A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA Simon & Schuster, 2017.

Note! Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy. Citation formats are based on standards as of August 2021.