James William Lair
James William Lair was an influential Central Intelligence Agency paramilitary officer from the Special Activities Division. He was a native Texan, raised in a broken family, but a good student. He joined the CIA after serving in a combat unit in Europe during World War II, followed by a geology degree from Texas A&M. In his senior year, he was recruited by the CIA.
Assigned to the Kingdom of Thailand on 1 March 1951, Lair found himself training Border Patrol Police to Special Forces standards. Originally established with an aim of opposing the invasion of Thailand by the People's Liberation Army of China, the new unit policed the Thai border areas until hostilities broke out in the neighboring Kingdom of Laos. Acting in response to the Kong Le coup of 9 August 1960, Lair's unit secretively supplied the communications liaisons needed for the successful counter-coup of 14 December 1960. Once established within Laos, Lair promptly searched out Vang Pao. With Lair's aid, Vang Pao raised an army of 30,000 guerrilla warriors to fight in the Laotian Civil War.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964, followed by the first American combat troops landing in Vietnam in May 1965, escalated the war. In mid-1966, the new CIA Chief of Station Ted Shackley promulgated increased operations against the Ho Chi Minh Trail and commitment of more troops to the fight for northern Laos. U.S. air power began to be used in Laos. The Royal Lao Air Force began its struggle to become an effective close air support force. A new covert unit, the Raven Forward Air Controllers, was formed to guide the air strikes. The use of airpower as mobile artillery to clear the path for guerrillas was successful in the short run; however, Lair believed it would lead to ultimate defeat for the Hmong, as they were used as light infantry in fixed positions. Increasingly estranged from Shackley, as well as from Ambassador William H. Sullivan, Bill Lair left Laos in August 1968. After attendance at the Army War College, Lair returned to a desk job in Bangkok. He would score one last military intelligence coup, when his Thai brother-in-law visited the dying Mao Zedong and brought back information about the political maneuvering of potential successors.
Just before Lair's retirement from the CIA, he was honored with a private audience with Thai King Bhumibol. Upon his return to the United States, Lair became a long haul trucker. He remained active within the Hmong-American community.
Early life and military service
Bill Lair was born in Hilton, Oklahoma on 4 July 1924; he moved to Borger, Texas at the age of three. His mother divorced his father for idleness, and remarried. Her second husband died as a result of a freak oilfield explosion in 1937. However, Lair's grandfather, an old-time cowboy, was an important influence in young Bill's life. Lair lived in and around Borger and Panhandle, Texas until 1940, when he moved to Waco. He graduated from 11 years of schooling at Waco High School, at age 16. He took some post-high school courses while working for the Panhandle Herald and a grocery store.As a fifth-generation Texan, Lair never lost his childhood accent. He was raised as an only child, although eventually he would come to have two younger sisters, and he grew up poor, quiet, and shy. His imagination sparked by his reading, he dreamt of becoming a pilot. He was a seventeen-year-old freshman at Texas A&M University when the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred. Anxious to defend his nation, he applied for naval pilot's training, but was rejected because of substandard eyesight. He then convinced his mother to cosign his enlistment papers into the U.S. Army as a private. He saw his first combat in the invasion of Normandy. His armored unit fought its way across Europe for the next year. Lair's unit ended World War II on the Elbe River, facing a Russian unit on the far bank. It was there that Lair became convinced the American army should have continued the war, and defeated the communists.
Once discharged postwar, Lair earned a geology degree from Texas A&M in expectation of working in the petroleum industry. However, the Central Intelligence Agency recruited him just before graduation.
CIA career
Assignment to Thailand
After training, Lair was forwarded to the Kingdom of Thailand for his first assignment, arriving on 1 March 1951. U.S. Ambassador to Thailand Edwin F. Stanton was in the throes of a postwar rapprochement between the two nations. Agreements between the two countries led to the beginning of the American buildup in Thailand. The aim was to help the Thais block any Communist Chinese incursions through the neighboring Kingdom of Laos. Lair's part in this was an assignment to train the Royal Thai Police. He used an old Imperial Japanese training camp in Hua Hin to train a select crew of Thai police in guerrilla warfare, including parachuting. In the process, Lair discovered he had a knack for getting along with the Thais. His bashfulness, his aversion to eye contact, and quiet courteous demeanor were so congruent with ideal Thai manners that his policemen bonded with him, even though he spoke broken Thai with a Texas twang. He trained with them, and underwent survival exercises with them. He even married a Thai socialite.Assistance to the effort was supplied by Southeast Asia Supply Company, a CIA front usually referred to as "Sea Supply". When the training program was threatened with cancellation due to an apparently dwindling invasion threat, Lair convinced his boss it was worth continuing due to its low cost. With this support, Thai Police General Phao Sriyanond leaned toward a militarized police force; in this, he was building himself a counter-force to troops loyal to the other two strongmen in the government, Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram and General Sarit Thanarat. By the end of 1953, 94 platoons of about 45 men each had been trained by Lair for Phao's command.
Earlier, in April 1953, Bill Lair was appointed a captain in the Royal Thai Police. He then selected 100 out of 2,000 previous trainees for advanced instruction in unconventional warfare in Hua Hin, next to King Bhumibol's palace. This elite group would undergo a further eight months of intensive military training before turning about and schooling a further 300 recruits. One of the first visitors to the new training center was Allen Dulles then Associate Director of the CIA. He would later prevent the camp from being closed. At that time, the unit's focus was repelling a Chinese Communist invasion. Nationalist Chinese troops still threatened to cross the Burmese and Lao borders into mainland China, and in turn the Chinese Communists seemed likely to retaliate with a preemptive incursion. The new training camp offered ample opportunity for the trainees to learn to live off the jungle.
Through his marriage, Lair acquired Thai citizenship and a commission in the Royal Thai Police, within which in 1954 he organized the elite Parachute Aerial Resupply Unit from selected BPP recruits. Lair would use the PARU as a private army for missions inside Burma, Cambodia and Laos, where PARU members had ethnic and clan ties. And where, as an integral part of the plan, CIA and PARU members delved into gold, drugs, arms and artifact trafficking. All this was well known to the FBN, which by 1954 had investigated CAT after a large stock of opium Li Mi was arranging to sell to CAT pilot Dutch Brongersma came to the attention of US officials.
By 1955, the new unit was ready for duty as the Royal Guards. Later renamed to their more familiar cognomen, Police Aerial Resupply Unit, or PARU. They were under the hidden patronage of the king even though they had been split away from the Royal Guards. They were deployed into mountainous northern Thailand to police the hill tribes there. They surreptitiously arrested bandits and opium smugglers while establishing ties to the tribesmen whom were despised by most Thais. During this time, many Hmong mentioned a promising young Hmong warrior in Laos named Vang Pao.
By 1957, PARU consisted of two light infantry companies, as well as a pathfinder company personally commanded by Lair. Although dubbed "police", the extensively cross-trained PARU agents were trained to special forces standards. In September 1957, the PARU narrowly escaped disbandment when General Phao was forced into exile by the head of the Royal Thai Army, General Sarit. In early 1958, they were renamed with the PARU designation. They began to shift their training base from Hua Hin to Phitsanulok, which was closer to their area of operations. In 1958, they became involved in the CIA's international operations. They rigged parachutes for dropping weapons to insurgents in Indonesia. They packed pallets of weaponry for shipment from Takhli to the anti-Chinese Communist resistance in Tibet.
Early in 1960, PARU's Pathfinder Company took up three posts along the Thai-Lao border. Each of the three stations was across the Mekong River from an important Lao town. The stations were sited near Vientiane, Mukdahan, and Pakxan. On 9 August came the Kong Le coup in Vientiane. Lair and the PARU would intrude into Laos in the wake of this coup, under complex circumstances. One was that Phoumi Nosavan, who was then the Lao head of state, was a first cousin to General Sarit. The prospect of his rival Phao losing influence as casualties sapped the PARU seems to have been another reason for Sarit's acquiescence. And even as Sarit supported intervention by the PARU, Lair briefed his CIA superiors. Lair's main selling points for leading his paramilitaries into Laos was the sheer secretiveness possible because his troopers could blend seamlessly into the Lao population. It was a demographic oddity that the majority of lowland Lao actually lived south of the Lao-Thai border. Most of Lair's PARU recruits were thus of Lao origin, though Thai citizens. It was also apparent to the agency's apparatus, which had been blindsided by the coup, that it lacked reliable military intelligence sources within Laos.