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Episode 2495 of the Vietnam Veteran News Podcast will feature portions of a paper about how the secret war in Laos was managed. The featured paper was submitted to the Scientific Research Publishing service by Professor Kenneth R. Olson of the College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois, Urbana, USA and David R. Speidel of the Natural Resource Conservation Service and Foreign Agricultural Service, Benton, Missouri, USA.
The paper is titled, United States Secret War in Laos: Long-Term Environmental and Human Health Impacts of the Use of Chemical Weapons In this episode the portions of the paper dealing with the management of the secret war in Laos and the air operations will be featured.
Starting in 1959, the United States government conducted the Secret War in Laos. The CIA took the operational lead but its interactions with and connections to other agencies and countries were complicated. The Secret War in Laos involved the CIA operatives, the US State Department via the Laos and South Vietnam Ambassadors, Department of Defense military soldiers, the White House, USDA and the governments of Laos, Thailand and South Vietnam. An additional complication was the frequent changing of Laotian Ambassadors (five times) in addition to a few South Vietnam Ambassador changes. All these Ambassadors, CIA Station Chiefs and various DOD military Generals all wanted to have their voices heard.
Olson and Speidel discovered as a result of our delivery of herbicides on the Ho Chi Minh Trail only the Laotian and Cambodian civilians in the were deprived of food. The NVA and VC soldiers brought their own food.
The primary objective of this study was to: 1) determine locations of potential dioxin TCDD and arsenic hotspots as a result the secret chemical spraying missions on the Hồ Chi Minh Trail in Laos and 2) determine environmental and human health effects from the spraying of tactical herbicides containing dioxin (TCDD) and/or arsenic.
Listen to episode 2495 and discover more about how the secret war in Laos was managed.
