Alex Constantine - December 26, 2024
"Vang Pao's supporters portrayed him as a father figure uniting all his people, the Hmong (an ethnic minority in Laos), on the side of the US against the communist world, [but] his critics regarded him as a charismatic but ruthless opium warlord, who made arrogant and misleading claims to speak on behalf of all Hmong. Far from uniting the Hmong, they say, he divided them. Some historians argue that he allowed his 'secret army' to be used as cannon-fodder, played as pawns on a CIA geopolitical chessboard." - The Guardian, 2-22-2011
By Alex Constantine
ANNE GARRELS, WHO DIED IN 2022, WAS A WELL-KNOWN NPR FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT. What were her bona fides for joining NPR? She was a psychological operations officer on the CIA payroll. Listeners of NPR may recall her cocksure certainty that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in the approach to the Iraq invasion. She was assigned to Baghdad during the attack and occupation that she was instrumental in selling to the American public.
Garrels on Dec. 7, 2002: "As inspectors continue looking for weapons in Iraq, the U.N. and the United States begin to examine the country's official response to charges it has ongoing weapons programs. Iraq says it has no weapons of mass destruction. The Bush Administration says Iraq is lying. ..."
She returned from Baghdad in 2003, and was interviewed on NPR's Morning edition on April 23: "Anne Garrels, Back in the U.S.A.!" How exciting. "As the war in Iraq progressed, NPR's Anne Garrels was the only U.S. network reporter to continue broadcasting from the heart of Baghdad. Her reports, delivered on a smuggled satellite phone, took listeners through some terrible times." No doubt. But why was NPR taking reports from a veteran CIA psychological operations specialist?
Garrels wrote a book all about her career as a journalist abroad -- in Nicaragua, the Soviet Union, Afghanistan, wherever the CIA was operating -- and pitched it on "Fresh Air." Portions of the book were written by Vint Lawrence, her late husband. Lawrence was best known as a political caricaturist in the MSM, and a contributing editor at The New Republic. His paramilitary career prior to picking up a cartoonist's pen was summarized in this WaPo obituary:
VINT LAWRENCE
By Harrison Smith
Washington Post, 4-112-2016
Vint Lawrence, a CIA paramilitary officer who helped organize a secret war in the jungles of Laos before becoming a critically acclaimed artist and caricaturist, illustrating wild-eyed literary giants and wide-eared politicos for such publications as the New Republic and The Washington Post, died April 9 at a hospital in New Haven, Conn. He was 76. ...
No transformation was more dazzling than that of Mr. Lawrence himself, who had just graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor’s degree in art history when he was drafted into the Army and recruited by the CIA in 1960. He found himself in Laos two years later, in the midst of a bloody civil war between the country’s Communist party and ruling monarchy.
The rugged, landlocked nation had become a crucial battlefield of the Vietnam War because of the Ho Chi Minh trail, a winding North Vietnamese supply route that carried troops and munitions through eastern Laos and south to Vietnam.
Mr. Lawrence was tasked with coordinating between American forces and a guerrilla army led by Vang Pao, a charismatic Hmong general whom CIA Director William Colby later called "the biggest hero of the Vietnam War."
For three years, Mr. Lawrence spent nearly every hour of the day with Vang Pao, planning raids on North Vietnamese soldiers and developing a 39,000-person army at a secret base in the valley of Long Cheng.
He returned to the United States in 1964, 11 years before Vang Pao and his forces were defeated by the Communists, to work as an aide for Colby — then a high-ranking deputy at the CIA — and later for Paul Nitze, deputy secretary of defense.
He seemed to have a long career in government ahead of him when he decided to drop everything and become an artist, encouraged by an unusual meeting with the dean of the Maryland Institute College of Art. ...
James Vinton Lawrence was born in New York City on June 25, 1939, and grew up in Englewood, N.J. His father was an investment counselor who served in the Office of Strategic Services, a World War II-era precursor to the CIA.
Mr. Lawrence graduated in 1956 from the private Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and in 1960 from Princeton. ...