BOOK REVIEW: Revelations of a secret war

[FarCenter]

The Secret Army: Chiang Kai-shek and the Drug Warlords of the Golden Triangle by Richard M Gibson and Wenhua Chen

Reviewed by Bertil Lintner

Visitors to northern Thailand are often surprised to find prosperous Chinese settlements scattered among poor tribal villages in the hill areas near the Myanmar and Lao borders. These unusual settlements are often surrounded by tea gardens and orchards, fruit wine is frequently for sale and children attend schools where Chinese is the language of instruction. Some are even guarded by their own local militias, the legacy of a secret war that was fought well into the 1960s in the so-called Golden Triangle region.

Following their defeat in the Chinese civil war in the late 1940s, thousands of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Chinese troops retreated from southern China into the Shan States of Myanmar (then known as Burma) and later into northern Thailand. There, they established bases from which they attempted to re-take China from the Mao Zedong-led communists.

This "secret" army was supported by the Republic of China, which had retreated to the island of Taiwan, as well as the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Along with covert operations in Tibet, it was the first of other secret and not-so-secret CIA-orchestrated wars in Cuba, Nicaragua, Angola and Afghanistan.

...
The book covers the defeat of the Nationalist Chinese in Yunnan province in early 1950, their retreat into Myanmar and how the US got involved in the effort to rebuild and re-equip these forces. Gibson describes the establishment of the "Yunnan Anticommunist National Salvation Army" and the joint Sino-Myanmar operation in 1960-1961 that drove the Nationalist Chinese out of most of northern Myanmar and into Thailand. It also chronicles the support these forces lent the Thai army in battles against the China-backed CPT.

Ironically, the Nationalist Chinese involvement in the opium and its derivative heroin trades reached its height during the Indochina war in the early 1970s, when the most lucrative local market for the drugs was among US troops stationed in Vietnam. This, of course, was not appreciated but nevertheless tolerated as long as they served Thailand's and America's security interests. That's because they remained sources for crucial intelligence in areas where the Thais and Americans had little or no direct access. This information flow was especially important precisely during the Indochina war and in the fight against the CPT.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/MK19Ae02.html