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A staff study by a Kennedy subcommittee concluded that a main purpose of the U.S. bombardment was “to destroy the physical and social infrastructure” in areas held by the Pathet Lao, a conclusion well supported by the factual record.13

There were also eyewitness reports of the destruction of northern Laos by Western reporters, but published overseas. T. D. Allman flew over the Plain of Jars in late 1971, reporting that “it is empty and ravaged” by the napalm and B-52 saturation bombing being “used in an attempt to extinguish all human life in the target area”; “All vegetation has been destroyed and the craters, literally, are countless” and often impossible to distinguish among the “endless patches of churned earth, repeatedly bombed.” At the same time, the Washington Post published the statement of Air Force Secretary Robert Seamans, who reported from northern Laos that “I have seen no evidence of indiscriminate bombing”; it is the North Vietnamese who are “rough,” and the people are not “against the United States—just the opposite.” The Lao-speaking Australian reporter John Everingham traveled in 1970 “through dying village after dying village” of the Hmong tribesmen who had been “naive enough to trust the CIA” and were now being offered “a one-way ‘copter ride to death’” in the CIA clandestine army, in the remains of a country where bombing had “turned more than half the total area of Laos to a land of charred ruins where people fear the sky” so that “nothing be left standing or alive for the communists to inherit.” No U.S. journal, apart from the tiny pacifist press, was interested enough to run his story, although later the media were to bewail the plight of the miserable remnants of the Hmong, put on display as “victims of Communism.” In 1970, the Bangkok World (Oct. 7) published an AP report on U.S. bombing that was “wiping out” towns, and by 1972 such reports sometimes appeared in the U.S. press.14 Later, Nayan Chanda visited the Plain of Jars, reporting overseas that from the air it “resembles a lunar landscape, pockmarked as it is with bomb craters that are a stark testimony to the years of war that denuded the area of people and buildings” during “six years of ‘secret’ bombing” by U.S. aircraft, while “at ground level, the signs of death and destruction are even more ubiquitous,” including the provincial capital, “completely razed,” as had been reported earlier by refugees who were ignored. Following the practice of American volunteers during the war, American relief workers with long experience in Laos attempted to bring information about postwar Laos to the media—with little effect—and inform us privately that their accounts were seriously distorted by New York Times reporters “by the device of omission and taking the negative side of balanced statements we made” and similar means.15

The U.S. government officially denied all of this, continuing the deception even after the facts were exposed and known in some detail to those concerned enough to learn them. Many regarded the U.S. war in Laos as “a success” (Senators Jacob Javits and Stuart Symington), or even “A spectacular success” (a former CIA officer in Laos, Thomas McCoy).16

In scale and care, the extensive analysis of refugee reports by a few young American volunteers in Laos compares very favorably to the subsequent studies of refugees from Cambodia that received massive publicity in the West after the Khmer Rouge takeover, and the story was both gruesome and highly pertinent to ongoing U.S. operations. But there was little interest, and published materials, which appeared primarily outside of the mainstream, were virtually ignored and quickly forgotten; the agency of terror was inappropriate for the needs of the doctrinal system. Media failure to report the facts when they were readily available, in 1968, and to investigate further when they were undeniable, by late 1969, contributed to the successful deception of the public, and to the continuing destruction.

When the war ended, ABC News commentator