Laos: Partially False Alarm

With no weightier weapon than the press communiqué, Laos' rattled politicians managed to convince the world last week that the brink of war was near. "Foreign forces of North Viet Nam have attacked." cried the Laotians. "An estimated strength of six battalions." Next day Information Minister Bouavan Norasingh announced dramatically that the northern provincial capital of Phongsaly had just fallen, though "our troops fought to the last bullet." Who had captured Phongsaly? Bouavan stared at the ceiling for a moment and answered: "The Viet Minh and the Chinese Communists." With no way of knowing what was actually going on along the remote frontier, the U.S. took the news with a grain of salt—but alerted its Pacific striking force.

All that had actually happened in Phongsaly was that the local army commander was out of sorts with the government and in a sulk had turned off his radio set. When Vientiane noted that radio contact had been broken off, the government assumed the worst. As for the Communist "invasion" itself, that story apparently originated when two battalions of North Vietnamese gathered near the border one dark night, set up an eerie howl and fired their weapons in all directions, touching off blind panic at the Laotian garrison in the nearby town of Nonget. It all brought memories of July 1959, when Laos cried invasion but could not produce a single Viet Minh prisoner when the U.N. sent an inspection team.

Two Men. But if world war was not at hand, little Laos was nonetheless locked in a dangerous power struggle between East and West. By week's end the possibility of a real explosion had made the U.S.'s allies so nervous that the U.S. reluctantly abandoned its long struggle to maintain pro-Western rule in Laos and started working instead to make the country a neutralized buffer zone.

For months each side has had a man in Laos. The Russians back Captain Kong Le, an ebullient paratrooper who captured Vientiane back in August with a battalion-sized coup. The U.S.'s man was General Phoumi Nosavan, a cautious soldier who four weeks ago chased Captain Kong Le out of Vientiane and installed the government of Premier Boun Oum, an easygoing prince from southern Laos.

Quick Lift. After losing the battle for Vientiane, Kong Le led the remnants of his battalion north to the jungle town of Vang Vieng. The Russians began an airlift from Hanoi to drop him supplies, and he picked up reinforcements from the Communist Pathet Lao guerrillas, who roam freely through back-country Laos.

Last week, while the attention of the world (and the Laotian army) was diverted by the supposed invasion from North Viet Nam, Russian Ilyushins slipped into a newly bulldozed airstrip at Vang Vieng, picked up Kong Le, 400 of his men and about 300 tons of supplies and dropped the whole load on the strategic Plaine des Jarres, a broad plateau that commands north central Laos (see map). Kong Le's first step was to capture an airstrip to handle the Ilyushins. Next he captured the town of Xiengkhouang.