Indigenizing the Cold War: The Border Patrol Police and Nation-Building in Thailand 9780824895891

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Notes on Transliterations and Thai Names
Notes on Sources and Methods
Introduction Coming to Terms with Postcolonial Nation-Building and the Cold War
CHAPTER ONE From CIA Brainchild to Civic Action Agent, 1947–1962
CHAPTER TWO Building a Human Border, 1962–1980
CHAPTER THREE The Saga of the Black Panther, 1950–1976
CHAPTER FOUR Crusade from the Borders to Bangkok, 1969–1976
CHAPTER FIVE Mission Incomplete
Conclusion Whose War Was Cold?
Postscript The Border Patrol Police in Bangkok Again, 2020
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

INDIGENIZING THE COLD WAR

INDIGENIZING THE COLD WAR The Border Patrol Police and Nation-­Building in Thailand

Sinae Hyun

University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu

© 2023 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca First printing, 2023 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hyun, Sinae, author. Title: Indigenizing the Cold War : the border patrol police and nation-building in Thailand / Sinae Hyun. Other titles: Border patrol police and nation-building in Thailand Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022051295 (print) | LCCN 2022051296 (ebook) | ISBN 9780824894085 (hardback) | ISBN 9780824895891 (pdf) | ISBN 9780824895907 (epub) | ISBN 9780824895914 (kindle edition) Subjects: LCSH: Thailand. Tamrūat Trawēn Chāidǣn—History. | Nation-building—Thailand. | Cold War. | Thailand—Politics and Government—1945-1988. Classification: LCC HV8252.55.A45 H98 2023 (print) | LCC HV8252.55.A45 (ebook) | DDC 363.209593—dc23/eng/20230130 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022051295 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022051296 Cover photo: Students at the Ban Poe Mue Border Patrol Police Study Center in Mae Sarjang learning how to write in Thai language (June 2010). Photo by the author. University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-­free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources.

 To My Families in Jeju Island, Madison, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Madurai, and in Heaven

Contents

Preface

ix

Acknowl­edgments

xi

Abbreviations

xv

Notes on Transliterations and Thai Names

xvii

Notes on Sources and Methods

xix

Introduction: Coming to Terms with Postcolonial Nation-­Building and the Cold War Chapter One

From CIA Brainchild to Civic Action Agent, 1947–1962 Chapter Two

Building a ­Human Border, 1962–1980 Chapter Three

The Saga of the Black Panther, 1950–1976 Chapter Four

Crusade from the Borders to Bangkok, 1969–1976 Chapter Five

1 17 49 83 110

Mission Incomplete

137

Conclusion: Whose War Was Cold?

163

Postscript: The Border Patrol Police in Bangkok Again, 2020

169

Notes

171

Bibliography

199

Index

221

vii

Preface

One hot summer day sometime in the early 1990s, I walked to a public library in Jeju Island and picked up a book in the ­children’s corner and began turning the pages. I saw a boy’s face looking at a dark blue pond. The story described how this ugly, ill-­tempered boy pushed his own b ­ rother into the pond a­ fter a minor dispute. The boy’s name was Kim Jong-­Il, who would soon become the leader of North ­Korea ­after his ­father’s death in 1994. The next pages showed a red-­colored kingdom where fat, greasy-­faced men in military fatigues devoured grilled chickens and other expensive delights. Beneath them ­were ­people who looked hungry and tired, with no proper clothes to hide their destitute bodies, lying in despair and hopelessness. Throughout my elementary and secondary education in South ­Korea between the mid-1980s and 1990s, I had been taught that the Cold War began when the North Korean Army invaded South K ­ orea in June 1950. This may be true. If the Koreans knew what it meant to be a communist before the Korean War in 1950, over 30,000 p ­ eople in Jeju Island, including my relatives, might have not been wiped out for opposing the national election in April 1948 that was to divide K ­ orea. Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, South ­Korea quickly began to swim with the tide of globalization. In the first half of the 1990s, starting with the ­People’s Republic of China, it opened trade and foreign relations with communist countries, including Vietnam, where my ­uncle had fought for the liberation of the Viet­nam­ese ­people from communism. I never learned what exactly communism is ­until I went to college in Seoul in 1999. All I knew was that communism was an evil ideology that poor, lazy ­people who did not want to work hard believe in. It was the ideology that divided ­Korea, separating families and friends who had once lived together happily and prosperously. It was Kim’s dynasty in the North, where the p ­ eople had red ­faces and looked angry and hungry all the time. It was like the image that I saw in the public library of a boy pushing his own b ­ rother into a pond. All I knew was how brutal it was, not why it existed.

ix

x  Preface

Since the ceasefire agreement in 1953, the ­enemy of South ­Korea has always been communism embodied by North K ­ orea. Unlike other Asian countries, K ­ orea had its own sort of Berlin Wall. In a way, the thirty-­eighth parallel and the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) around the line helped the South Koreans, ­whether educated or not, know where to stand. That line also determined sides during the Cold War and divided the Koreans. If you live below that line, you must be a pro-­American. If you sympathize with North K ­ orea, you are communist. For me, having spent my first fifteen years living u ­ nder military dictatorship, the Cold War demarcation was between t­ hose who ­were pro-­Americans and anti–­North Korean and ­t hose who ­were anti-­American and pro–­North Korean. While the hot civil war between the North and the South had ended in 1953, another civil war between the anticommunist military regime and anti-­military civil society continued in South K ­ orea ­until the 1990s. On November 30, 2002, I was standing with over ten thousand protesters in Seoul, the capital city of South K ­ orea, demanding immediate withdrawal of the US armed forces from ­Korea as well as the repeal of the US-­South ­Korea Status of Forces Agreement. The direct trigger of this mass protest was the killing of two fourteen-­year-­old middle-­school girls by the US military armored vehicle in Gyeonggi Province, right next to Seoul. A ­ fter speakers vehemently criticized the outdated Cold War politics that had permitted the US military forces to station in post–­Cold War ­Korea, a group of activist singers came out and began to sing their protest song titled “Fuckin’ USA.” This song provoked several questions in me. Say, the United States is bad, but what about “us”? Why have we permitted the United States to do all t­ hese bad ­t hings at home over the past half a c­ entury? And why do we have to blame every­ thing on the United States? In what way has the Korean relationship with the American superpower since the end of World War II contributed to the growing ambivalence t­ oward Americans? By the time the activist group finished singing the song, I came to at least one conclusion: it is too easy to blame the United States for all the wrongs that happened in my homeland. By blaming the Americans, we are giving a carte blanche to the Korean government and politicians to evade their responsibility for the tragic death of two innocent teenage schoolgirls who w ­ ere walking home a­ fter school. At the same time, by insisting that the United States did every­t hing wrong, we are unwittingly eulogizing the greatness of Pax Americana. That is where my initial idea about local elites’ indigenization of the Cold War kicked off.

Acknowl­e dgments

I gave up writing this book manuscript in 2018, while grading hundreds of papers and responding to seemingly endless emails. Meanwhile, the good fifteen-­ year journey of research and writing has rewarded me with families and friends who do not judge me by the length of the publication list but with the length of personal strug­gle. Foremost, I sincerely thank my Jeju ­family who kindly and patiently put up with me during the ordeal of completing research and the book manuscript. My late ­father, Kildo Hyun, and my caring m ­ other, Minae Kim, deserve the seats before any prominent scholars for obvious reasons. My b ­ rother, Myungho Hyun, and sister-­in-­law, Deul Yoon, and our joys of life, Samuel and Hannah, have the uncontested seats next to my parents. My late Thai language teacher who was more like a ­mother to me, Ajan Kannikar Elbow, and the Elbow f­amily—­Kent, Paul, Santi, Steven, Heder, and Mary-­Kate—­showered me with such warmth in the ­middle of horrendous Wisconsin weather. I also sincerely thank Sojeong Kim for being both f­amily and a friend since we met at age seven. I am also grateful for the heartwarming support and care I have received from my Ban Buntham f­ amily in Chiang Mai and the Velu families in Madurai. In a sense, I felt this book has become “complete” ­after Thongchai Winichakul published his book entitled Moments of Silence in 2020. Although I had conceived this research proj­ect during Katherine Bowie’s “Po­liti­cal Anthropology” class in the spring of 2006, it was my numerous and, admittedly, challenging conversations with Ajan Thongchai that pushed me to pursue the research. I cannot imagine how much pain I have unintentionally given to him but that still does not change how much I admire his courage, compassion, and commitment. I am also endlessly grateful to my Mad Town mentors: Michael Cullinane, Alfred McCoy, Katherine Bowie, Larry Ashmun, R. Anderson Sutton, Paul Hutchcroft, Ian Coxhead, Janpanit Surasin, and Patcharin Peyasantiwong. On the other side of the globe, I have been inspired by Thai scholars and cared for by friends: Pitch Pongsawat, Tanet Charoenmuang, Pornson Liengboonlertchai, Nattapoll Chaiching, Thanapol Limapichart, Chaiyan Rajchagool, Kullada xi

xii  Acknowl­ e dgments

Kesboonchoo-­Mead, Prajak Kongkirati, Yukti, and Kusra Mukdawijitra and Puangthong Pawakapan. I am also grateful to members of the Thai Border Patrol Police members, both retired and incumbent, who ­wholeheartedly assisted my research. I am very sorry that I cannot list them as I do not want them to be disadvantaged by having their names in this book. Still, I dare to openly thank Police Major General Manas Khantatatbumroong and Police General Kraisook Sinsook for their unfailing, heartfelt support throughout my field research in Thailand during 2009–2011. The fifteen-­year-­long pro­cess of research and writing could have not been undertaken without generous funding and fellowships from vari­ous organ­izations, including the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-­ Madison, the Andrew Mellon Pre-­Doctoral Fellowship, the Korean Association of Southeast Asian Studies, Posco TJ Park Foundation’s Fellowship and the Empowering Network for International Thai Studies (ENITS) Scholarship from the Institute of Thai Studies Chulalongkorn University. I am also grateful to the Global Asia Research Cluster at Nanyang Technological University and History Department at the University of Wisconsin-­W hitewater for their generous support for my fieldwork research. I especially want to thank Gregg Brazinsky at George Washington University for his warm welcome and support. I would also like to recognize the assistance of the National Research Council of Thailand for its support of my research in Thailand. My Mad Town friends have been always cheerleaders, guides, and ­family to me: Supaluck Pornkulwat, Sheila Zamar, Maureen Justiniano, Yosef Djakababa, Ruth De Llobet, La Sripanawongsa, David Dettmann, Clemen Montero, E. Arti Wulandari, Taylor Easum, Joshua Gedacht, Somrudee Winichakul, So Yeon Bae, Marguerite Antoinette Roulet, Frank Smith, Mary McCoy, Joseph Harris, Cleo Calimbahin, Amelia Liwe, Erick Danzer, Kate Tillery Danzer, Boonlert Visetpricha, Neeranooch Melangpoo, Dadit Hidayat, Glyn Philips, Timothy Shea, Anthony Irwin, and Chaiyaporn Singdee. Even though we are apart now, I still feel we are close to each other. My special thanks to Linda Chhath and Vaneesa Cook for proofreading my humongous manuscripts. I am also deeply grateful to my dearest friends Michael Montesano and Shawn McHale for the long-­distance conversations that have inspired and emboldened me. The final push for completing this book was done by Patrick Jory and Simon Creak, whom I cannot thank more. In Singapore, Bernado Brown, whom I used to call “mi padre,” and my Nanyang Technological University f­amily, including Hallam Stevens, Yvonne Alina Ruperty, Els Van Dongen, and So Jeong Park, helped me remain sane and sound. I miss the numerous Mexican kitchen talks with my Whitewater colleagues Adam Paddock and Bert Kreitlow and my caring friend Nathan McGovern. I am looking

Acknowl­ e dgments  xiii

forward to our reunion. My Sogang ­family has my gratitude for their generous welcome and support: foremost Yoonhwan Shin, Hanwoo Lee, Jongho Kim, Jeonghun Jeong, Heejung Kang, Myeon Jeong, and Junghun Park. I also wish to acknowledge all my students, who make me feel the strongest desire to be a good teacher. My old buddies in K ­ orea, Japan, and Thailand still pamper me as if t­ here is no time lapse between our spontaneous reunions. I have spent days and nights in old pubs and ­humble kitchens with Younghye Yoo, Hyungnam Kim, Myungook Hyun, Jeongseo Kim, Jinwon Chang, Minhee Guk, Myungwoo Kim, Yunsil Chang, Jiyoung Choi, Sungil Jung, Min Choi, Tomotaro ­Inoue, Hyodo Keiji, John Buchanan, and Matt Wheeler talking about life, the f­ uture, ideals, realities, and dreams. Friends, old and new, have become my extended f­ amily, and have ­gently lightened my load and shone a light on the unpaved road. B ­ ecause of them, I can keep ­going.

Abbreviations

ARD ­Accelerated Rural Development (Thailand-US) BDP ­Border Defense Police (Thailand) BIC ­Border Information Center (Thailand) BPP ­Border Patrol Police (Thailand) BSVT ­Border Security Volunteer Teams (Thailand) CIA ­Central Intelligence Agency (US) CITC ­Counterinsurgency Training Centers (Thailand) CPA ­Civil Police Administration (US) CPT ­Communist Party of Thailand (Thailand) CSOC ­Communist Suppression Operations Command (Thailand) DEVCON ­Development Con­sul­tants International (US) ICA ­International Cooperation Administration (US) JUSMAG ­Joint US Military Advisory Group (US) KMT ­Kuomintang, Chinese Nationalist Party (Chinese) MAP ­Military Assistance Program (US) MDUs ­Mobile Development Units (Thailand) MEDCOIN ­Medical Counterinsurgency Program (Thailand-­US) MMT ­Mobile Medical Team (Thailand-­US) NSCT ­National Student Center of Thailand (Thailand) OPC ­Office of Policy Coordination (US) OPS ­Office of Public Safety (US) OSS ­Office of Strategic Ser­v ices (US) PARU ­Police Aerial Reinforcement Unit (Thailand) PFF ­Police Field Force (Thailand, Malaysia) PMCF ­Princess ­Mother’s Charities Fund of Thailand, Inc. (Thailand) PMMV ­Princess ­Mother’s Medical Volunteers Foundation (Thailand) xv

xvi  Abbreviations

PSB ­Psychological Strategy Board (US) PSD ­Public Safety Division (US) RASD ­Remote Area Security Development (Thailand-­US) RLAF ­Royal Lao Air Force SEA Supply ­South East Asia Supply Corporation (US) SEATO ­Southeast Asia Treaty Organ­ization SGU ­Special Guerrilla Unit (Laos) TDP ­Territorial Defense Police (Thailand) TNPD ­Thai National Police Department UDP ­Uplands Development Proj­ect (Thailand-­US) USAID ­United States Agency for International Development USIS ­US Information Ser­v ice USOM ­US Operations Mission VDC ­Volunteer Defense Corps (Thailand) VSOC ­Village Scout Operational Center (Thailand)

Notes on Transliterations and Thai Names

Several systems are commonly used for transliterating Thai. With the exception of proper names and place names, I am following the sound-­based General System of transliteration in the Romanization Guide for Thai Script (Bangkok: Royal Institute, 1982), with some alternative spellings in footnotes to clarify differences in pronunciation. Proper names are transliterated according to the General System, except when the interviewees provided their preferred En­glish names. Thais are frequently referred to by their first name. In this book, I use both first and last names the first time an individual is mentioned in the text, and I subsequently refer to Thais by their first names. Similarly, Thai sources in the bibliography are listed alphabetically by first names in accordance with Thai convention. ­Unless other­wise noted, all translations of texts and conversations are mine.

xvii

Notes on Sources and Methods

Over the years of researching and writing about the Thai Border Patrol Police (BPP), I have been asked how I, as an Asian ­woman, could successfully conduct research with the Thai paramilitary police. Two rules worked well during my fieldwork with the Thai BPP between August  2009 and June  2011. One is “do my homework” and the other is “never play dumb and never pre­sent to be a know-­a ll person.” Since I became interested in the Thai BPP history in 2006, I have consulted extensive primary sources through interlibrary research and online archives of governmental and nongovernmental organ­izations. When I arrived in Bangkok in August 2009, I spent the first month in the Thailand Information Center (TIC; now called the Thailand and ASEAN Information Center [TAIC]) at the Chulalongkorn University’s Central Library. This library research prepared me well for my dealings with the Thai BPP members b ­ ecause I knew what information I needed from them. I applied for research permission to the National Research Council of Thailand (NRCT) before I left for Thailand. It was the NRCT that had contacted the Border Patrol Police General Headquarters in Bangkok and obtained the letter of permission for me to conduct research in the BPP Headquarters. On my first visit to the headquarters, I was introduced to an officer who would oversee my research. I also requested an official copy of the permission letter from the headquarters. This letter, which was signed by the deputy commissioner of the BPP, became almost a f­ ree pass for my research during the next twenty-­t wo months in Thailand. From the outset, I frequented the headquarters, asking questions of the officers or simply chitchatting with them, searching for historical documents or books, and becoming familiar with the atmosphere and ­people in the compound. I utilized the materials I received from the TIC and other libraries to learn the names of the BPP officers who ­were active in the civic action programs and the Police Aerial Reinforcement Unit (PARU) operations during the Cold War. I asked the incumbent BPP officers if they had heard of any names on my list and this led to my meeting with the former deputy commissioner Police Major General Manas Khantatatbumroong. He was the main author of the BPP’s official publications on xix

xx   Sources and Methods

its institutional histories, worked with the CIA and on royal proj­ects, and engaged in Village Scout activities. I was also introduced to the collections, which ­were h ­ oused in storage rooms and included of donations from former BPP officials, notably by Somkhuan Harikul, the Border Patrol Police commander who founded the Village Scouts and the former commissioner of the Royal Thai Police, Suraphon Chulaphram. Th ­ ese private collections had both Thai and En­glish language sources, which helped me see the kinds of information that their American counter­parts shared with the BPP members. ­After I moved to Chiang Mai in June 2010, I visited the Third Regional Division Headquarters, where I was introduced to an officer who would assist me in getting in touch with subregional commanders. With the letter from the Bangkok Headquarters and personal introduction from officers to officers, I was able to arrange trips to BPP camps and schools. Usually, I met with the BPP teachers in their schools and civic action officers in the regional camps. Between June and November 2010, I visited fifty-­four BPP schools scattered around the nine border provinces and interviewed one hundred and twenty-­three BPP teacher-­cum-­ officers. In addition to visiting the Third Regional Division Headquarters in Chiang Mai, I also visited all four subdivision camps that cover seventeen provinces in northern Thailand. I also interviewed thirty officers in charge of the BPP’s civic actions in the region. I typically spent a night in the school where I interviewed BPP teachers and in the subregional camps where I interviewed civic action officers. During the visit to the schools and camps, I also collected old ­children’s textbooks and took pictures inside and around the school. I walked around the villages nearby when it was safe to do so. A ­ fter a series of trips to the remote border areas for about six months, I moved back to Bangkok in December 2010. Before I completed my field research in June 2011, I made additional visits to BPP camps and BPP-­related events such as Village Scout initiations. In retrospect, ­t here are two reasons why I feel my fieldwork was successful. First, I sought my own sources. My original plan for fieldwork was focused on documentary and archival research. However, from the first day of visiting the National Archives and Library, I realized how young the BPP organ­ization was and how recent the Cold War history was. Simply put, t­ here w ­ ere not many sources I could use in the established archives. I also learned that the police force does not keep old documents. Police forces deal with daily events, not history, and they destroy the related documents periodically. Consequently, I had to rely on ­people and their private collections. This is why my research came to include a considerable number of ethnographies.

Sources and Methods   xxi

Second, I tried my best to do every­t hing by the book in order to retain my credentials as well as to ensure my safety. As I have already noted, it is not easy to conduct research about the security force especially when the researcher is an Asian ­woman. This was the reason why I secured the letter of permission to research from the very beginning. At first, it was a document needed to get a visitor’s badge to the Headquarters. L ­ ater in the jungles and remote hills, it became an amulet that protected me from harassment and belittlement especially by the men in uniform. In addition, I tried to make my research as formal and professional as pos­si­ble. I typed up interview questionnaires to give to interviewees before starting the conversations. I also created a document that interviewees signed afterward, giving permission to use the interview in my writings. Interviews ­were recorded with permission too. ­These formalities helped me gain the trust of BPP officers in regional camps. As the fieldwork progressed and as the number of my trips to remote areas increased, word of my interest spread among the officers. Some became curious, and some became willing to share their stories. Mutual re­spect and trust not only enriched my research, but also protected me during the twenty-­two months I spent working in Thailand.

Introduction Coming to Terms with Postcolonial Nation-­Building and the Cold War

For many observers around the world, the first historical event that inscribed the name Thai Border Patrol Police (BPP) onto the public imagination was the massacre at Thammasat University on October 6, 1976. Mass protests against dictatorship and the state’s subsequent suppression of protesters may be nothing new to ­those who have witnessed similar events in their own countries, especially in many Asian countries where a number of democ­ratization movements against military dictatorships took place during the Cold War. Likewise, it is not strange for a government to call up the police force to a protest site, as their first duty is to ensure peace and order. Why, then, does the BPP’s presence in the October 6 Massacre in Bangkok m ­ atter so much in the history of Thailand and of the broader Cold War? It is all in the name: the “Border Patrol Police.” The name asks us to question what kind of border this police organ­ization protected in Bangkok by killing a still unknown number of civilians protesting the return of military dictators. The BPP was formed as a paramilitary intelligence force by the Thai and US governments in the early 1950s. When its American patrons, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), withdrew from Thailand around the end of the Second Indochina War in 1975, the BPP had already become an arm of the Thai royal ­family intent on building a royalist nation. It was, in effect, what I call a symbolic missionary of royalist nationalism. ­After the October 6 Massacre, students and civilian activists moved to the countryside and jungles and continued their fight. By the time the well-­k nown royalist prime minister Prem Tinsulanonda declared the shift from militant suppressions to po­liti­cal offensives in the Thai government’s anticommunist counterinsurgency policies in 1980, communist movements in Thailand had already declined considerably, ending what I call the Thai counterinsurgency era. The BPP and its mass movement, the Village Scout, which committed unimaginable vio­lence at Thammasat University on October  6, 1976, have ­remained active ­until ­today. The transformation of the Thai BPP from a US-­ sponsored local agency into the Thai royal f­ amily’s symbolic missionary thus deserves further scrutiny, as does the nature of the assistance that the BPP provided 1

2  Introduction

to the monarchy and its royalist network in their nation-­building proj­ects throughout the Cold War period. As many have argued, the global Cold War was felt and experienced as a series of hot wars in Asia, where its c­ auses ­were entangled with the building of postcolonial nation-­states. In­de­pen­dent Asian countries ­were seeking not only to build new states ­free from Euro-­American and Japa­nese colonial legacies, but also new nations f­ ree from the influence of internal collaborators with foreign colonial regimes. The rise of the rivalry between the American-­led ­Free World and the Soviet Union–led Communist Bloc further complicated nation-­building pro­ cesses in the postcolonial Asia. Particularly in the Southeast Asian and East Asian countries that allied with the United States, ­people lived with two dif­fer­ent types of wars throughout the second half of the twentieth ­century: an ideological war between the anticommunist and revolutionary nationalist—­not always communist—on the one hand, and a hard war between the pro-­A merican and anti-­ American groups on the other, both of which had considerable influence on the pro­cess of postcolonial nation-­building. ­W hether intended or not, the US influence in several Asian countries such as South ­Korea and Thailand allowed local ruling elites to utilize the American Cold War system built upon the modernization theory and counterinsurgency strategy to “take off” from the colonial past to the postcolonial ­future. Meanwhile, a majority of Asian p ­ eople viewed their polarizing socie­ties in the postcolonial era as hard evidence of enduring foreign imperial rule and protested global superpowers’ support of dictatorial governments. In­de­pen­dence was already difficult to gain, but the post-­independence realities ­were even harder to grasp. This book surveys how the global Cold War system assisted the ruling elites in Southeast Asia in building postcolonial nations as well as retaining their own dominance. The conceptual framework that I use to explain the collaboration between the Thai and US ruling elites is indigenization, which means adaptation and transformation of the foreign/external cause to achieve one’s own goal. The local ruling elite indigenized the global Cold War system in order to advance their nation-­ building, and in a way that in Thailand and elsewhere in Southeast Asia became inevitably hot. Postcolonial nation-­building indeed left many po­liti­cal regimes built on “a mountain of skele­tons” and the p ­ eople with unforgettable traumas.1

Postcolonial Nation-­Building A British historical sociologist Anthony Smith states that the term “nation-­ building” refers to “a nationalist programme of building the institutions and roles of the ‘nation-­state,’ ” but in practice, it is more concerned with “state-­building”

Postcolonial Nation-Building  3

than “nation-­creation.”2 Three caveats need to be noted before we can take up the meaning of postcolonial nation-­building in Southeast Asia. First, if we agree that ­those who ­were nation-­building ­were more concerned with state-­building, as Smith argues, then nation-­building does not have to be a nationalist program. Eu­ ro­pean and American colonizers also built institutions and managed the roles of their colonial states, and postcolonial states in Southeast Asia did not make a sharp departure from the previous colonial systems.3 Second, as ­will be examined shortly, “postcolonial” does not refer only to the states that gained in­de­pen­dence in the twentieth ­century. “Postcolonial” in this study should be understood as a temporal space where the desire to get rid of colonial legacies was prevalent in both previously colonized and noncolonized nations.4 Fi­nally, “nation” in postcolonial Southeast Asia should be understood as a far more fluid and inclusive concept than it is in the Eu­ro­pean context.5 “Nation” ­here means not only ­imagined coherence but also an image materialized and mobilized by the ruling elite and their agents.6 The global Cold War system prompted redefining the nation-­building pro­ cess from a ­simple ‘nation-­making’ to a more complex ‘nation and state matching’ in the newly emerging nation-­states. The Korean peninsula was saved from further war tragedies ­after the thirty-­eighth parallel was confirmed as a state boundary by the 1953 ceasefire treaty.7 Afterward, South K ­ orea strug­gled to build an anticommunist nation. In the pro­cess, South Korean governments ­were always in need of a North Korean communist regime to place in contrast to their own. In other words, South Korean nation-­building focused not only on building an anticommunist nation but also on constructing tangible images of a communist nation in the North through a con­ve­nient and effective “othering” pro­cess. In this context, the thirty-­ eighth parallel line became a protective cordon between the two dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal, economic, and social cultures within the peninsula. Above the line was a Juche (self-­ reliance) ideology and numerous Kim Il-­Sung statues with titles such as “Supreme Leader,” “Fatherly Leader,” or “the G ­ reat Sun.” Below the line was a personality cult built around the military dictator Park Chung-­Hee and his Yushin (rejuvenation) doctrine, which promoted Park as the f­ather of modernization (Geundaehwa). Similarly, Suharto reigned over the Orde Baru (New Order) regime in Indonesia for over three de­cades, and Ferdinand Marcos pushed forward his vision of Bagong Lipunan (New Society) in the Philippines during the Cold War. In this way, postcolonial nation-­building ­under the global Cold War system was a statist proj­ect of creating psychological borders between friend and foe, us and them, by the ruling elite, and they went about setting strict rules to protect the line. Postcolonial nation-­building pro­cesses in Asia ­were exceptionally bloody and fiery b ­ ecause they involved determining where to draw the border between communism and anticommunism from scratch. The boundary between communism

4  Introduction

and anticommunism had been always unclear to the ­people b ­ ecause the way it was defined and applied to everyday lives by the state was arbitrary. Protesting against the government policy was often framed as communism u ­ nder the military dictatorship, but being pro-­government did not guarantee that the person was anticommunist ­either. The ambiguous criteria for determining who the communist and anticommnuist were essentially helped the ruling elites to build a nation that knows and fears the authority of the state ­because only the state can decide whom to punish or reward. The National Security Act issued in 1949 by the first president of the Republic of ­Korea, Rhee Syngman, was intentionally ambiguous in defining what would be considered as a threat to national security, leaving the ­people unsure if they could voice their opinions and act accordingly. Article 112 of the Thai Criminal Code, more popularly known as the lèse-­majesté law in Thailand, has been applied to anyone accused of insulting the royal ­family, but its unrestrained interpretation of “insult,” “defame,” or “threaten” has been utilized as a means of silencing critics of the dictatorial regime or the monarchy.8 This law was used by the rightwing groups to vilify the civilian protesters in Thammasat University, which led to the October 6 Massacre in 1976. In a sense, the thirty-­eighth parallel was useful in that it helped global superpowers decide where their money and energy needed to be invested. The United States began constructing its ­free world bastion in Western Eu­rope by initiating the Marshal Plan in 1948 and the North Atlantic Treaty Organ­ization in 1949. ­After Germany was divided in late 1949, Western and Eastern Eu­ro­pean countries could focus on their economic recovery and po­liti­cal stabilization ­under dif­ fer­ent superpower patrons, which essentially brought about the so-­called Long Peace to once war-­plagued Eu­ro­pean lands. Likewise, with the signing of the Mutual Defense Treaty between the United States and the Republic of K ­ orea in October 1953, massive amounts of military and economic aid began flowing into South K ­ orea, helping the anticommunist nation-­building paradigm of modernization (Geundaehwa), which would prevail for the next de­cades. Thailand, South Vietnam, Laos, and Indonesia likewise began receiving lucrative US foreign aid packages a­ fter the launch of Harry Truman’s Point Four Program in the early 1950s.9 Thailand began hosting US military personnel and providing bases in the mid-1950s, especially for the Air Force, which would drop bombs in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam during the Second Indochina War. The Cold War was also a mechanism that enabled former colonies or weak states that had been represented to the world through colonial powers to transform themselves into legitimate, sovereign members of the international community. Po­liti­cal, economic, and military alliances with superpowers provided the

Postcolonial Nation-Building  5

ruling elites in Southeast Asia an opportunity to push forward their postcolonial nation-­building agenda. Of course, the elites’ ultimate goal was liberating their home country from poverty with the help of superpowers’ foreign aid, so that they could fully stand on their feet. The Thai monarchy’s story provides a good example. Once a feeble prince who had lost his b ­ rother King Ananda Mahidol in a mysterious gunshot accident, Rama the Ninth, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, became a symbol of anticommunist modernization in the US-­led ­free world. He spoke in the US Congress in June 1960 during his first state visit. At the end of the speech, he remarked: “American assistance is to enable the Thai to achieve their objective through their own efforts. We are grateful for American aid. But we intend one day to do without it.”10 King Bhumibol indeed kept his word by making US-­led anticommunist modernization his own and refashioning himself as the f­ ather of the modern nation-­state in Thailand. The global Cold War system required multiple agencies that could reinforce not only the physical but also the psychological borders of the new nation-­states. In Thailand, the formation of the Border Patrol Police in the early 1950s began a new chapter of nation-­building history. The Thai BPP’s work was not ­limited to patrolling and safeguarding Thailand’s state boundary or to fighting drug traffickers and illegal immigrants. The essential mission that the Thai BPP has carried out since its formation has been building “a ­human border” such that the ­people themselves, their minds and hearts inoculated against the foreign disease of communism, could repel any false claims that a communist takeover could better their lots. In this pro­cess of building a ­human border for the anticommunist Thai nation, the BPP became a symbolic missionary of nationalism patronized and emboldened by the Thai ruling elite, especially the monarchy.11 The BPP was also a point of contact and collaboration between the United States and the Thai monarchy u ­ ntil 1974, when the Office of Public Safety ­under USAID, which had provided financial aid and technical advisors to the BPP, officially withdrew from Thailand and was abolished in the same year. To build a h ­ uman border for an anticommunist nation, the ruling elite indigenized the global Cold War system, which would provide them a common language, as well as the ideological and visual tools to cope with the international trend, such as modernization, development, and even democ­ratization. The system also provided lucrative financial and technological support to the allegedly modern, progressive, and in­de­pen­dent nation-­states not in need of Western tutelage. The Thai BPP and the monarchy ­were not simply pawns of the American Cold War crusade in Southeast Asia. They ­were willing indigenizers of the Cold War.

6  Introduction

The Cold War How have the generations of scholars defined and understood the Cold War? The dominant trends in Cold War studies can be summarized as follows: first, the Cold War refers to the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union to gain international ascendancy. Second, the rivalry s­ topped short of a war such as the World Wars, which is why it has been called a “cold” war. Third, for the Soviet Union the Cold War was an ideological one heavi­ly influenced by Leninist-­ Marxism, whereas the United States was far more inclined ­toward a realpolitik approach to defending its economic, po­liti­cal, and security interests around the world.12 ­These trends have become the main analytical lens for studying Cold War developments, and they gave rise to the three schools of Cold War studies: traditionalist, revisionist, and post-­revisionist. According to Geir Lundestad, the traditionalists see the Soviet Union as largely responsible for the Cold War, whereas the revisionists tend to see the United States as bearing a larger share of the blame. Post-­revisionists blame both the United States and the Soviet Union for perpetuating the global rivalries.13 This focus on the superpowers’ competition tends to exclude the so-­called third world, which includes newly emerged postcolonial nation-­states but which “defies easy generalization,” as John Lewis Gaddis writes in his renowned book, We Now Know. ­There he concludes that “the ‘third world’ did not, in the end, determine the Cold War’s outcome.”14 The conventional assumption that the Cold War was primarily a superpower competition has inevitably treated decolonization and the Cold War as separate historical pro­cesses, creating a gap between ­t hese coterminous historical events and treating local actors as an insignificant ­factor in the development of the global Cold War.15 In response, post-­revisionists have urged historians to take a holistic view of the concurrent pro­cesses of decolonization and the Cold War in order to see historical continuities rather than searching for “the post-­colonial Other” or considering the Cold War to be an isolated po­liti­cal development.16 Since the early 2000s, ­t here have been numerous attempts to move past the confines of the conventional “Cold War lens” and bring the third world into focus in global Cold War histories.17 Post-­revisionist Cold War studies examine the convergence and divergence of po­liti­cal interests between the superpowers and new nation-­states, as well as the internal dynamics that catalyzed the local elite’s proactive responses to the bipolar world system. Notably, Mark Bradley’s Imagining Vietnam and Amer­i­ca attempts to recast the relationship between Vietnam and the United States “within the larger sweep of the international history of the twentieth ­century in which the global discourse and practices of colonialism, race,

Postcolonial Nation-Building  7

modernism, and postcolonial state making at once preceded, w ­ ere profoundly implicated in, and ultimately transcended the dynamics of the Cold War.”18 Matthew Connelly’s studies of the Algerian war for in­de­pen­dence articulate the ways in which the Algerian anticolonialists “planned to harness the Cold War to their cause” by making international tensions serve their g­ rand strategy.19 Connecting Histories, a volume co-­edited by Christopher Goscha and Christian Ostermann, brings forward the role of ideology and the importance of smaller powers by highlighting the interconnectedness between decolonization and Cold War histories in Southeast Asia and by recognizing the global South as an impor­tant ­factor in the making of the Cold War.20 The role of ideology in traditional Cold War studies has also been challenged by vari­ous scholars. Anders Stephanson, for example, identifies the Cold War as an American ideology.21 The US foreign policymaking establishment assumed that US-­led modernization would help move previous colonies beyond traditional socie­ties and away from communism. Consequently, Michael Latham argues that modernization theory was an American Cold War ideology. In short, t­ hese post-­ revisionists’ analyses of the interaction between colonial legacies and Cold War impacts accentuate the continuity of historical developments throughout the twentieth ­century. Gaddis recently observed that the new Cold War history should allow us to see that the superpowers “­were never super enough to operate at full strength everywhere” and that small powers “­were often in a position to influence the actions of their larger counter­parts.”22 Thanks to economic growth and po­liti­cal modernization, as well as massive migration during and ­after the Cold War, the “home scholars” with Asian origins who “study the country, region, or location that they consider their home” began taking a lead in rethinking Cold War histories from a local perspective.23 No longer would the Vietnam War be seen as an American Cold War crusade, as Viet­nam­ese and Viet­nam­ese American scholars began writing histories of the “American and Viet­nam­ese War” focusing on the internal politics of North and South Vietnam.24 Lien-­Hang T. Nguyen argues in her Hanoi’s War that placing “Hanoi and not Washington at the center of an international history of the Vietnam War” shows the “ability of Hanoi to frustrate Washington in the international arena” and demonstrates “how ‘small power’ global politics managed to undermine superpower diplomacy.”25 Second and third generations of Hmong Americans have also been proactively rewriting the national history of the Hmong p ­ eople by shifting the images of the p ­ eople from the militant rebels against Qing China to the loyal nationalist of the Hmong kingdom. They further demand the US government’s full and formal recognition of their parents’ generation’s sacrifice during the so-­called secret war in Laos.26 ­These new trends in Cold War studies have

8  Introduction

been reshaping the understanding of the roles of third world countries and their ­peoples in the global Cold War. As Heonik Kwon observes in The Other Cold War, ­t hese recent works “emphasize the locally contrasting experiences of the global cold war and the related need to shift the analytical perspective away from the centrality of the Eu­ro­pean and North American experience.”27 In the words of Tuong Vu, scholars are further tasked to reconceptualize the Cold War histories “as an intercontinental synchronization in which Asian actors shared equal responsibilities with the superpowers in the spread of the conflict.”28 ­Whether it is from the post-­revisionist or the local, home scholar point of view, recent Cold War scholarship has strived to overcome the conventional superpower-­ centered framework and identify the international and local ­factors that enabled the indigenous elite to voluntarily and selectively adapt the global superpowers’ Cold War paradigms.29 However, ­because of their adherence to a foreign-­relations focus or, more broadly, to diplomatic history, their research has not been able to explain why the Cold War was hot in Asia. John Smail compares the foreign relations approach with an “automobile headlight on a moonlit night; it illuminates a part of the scene very brightly but distracts attention from the rest.”30 Not only the colonial historiography of Southeast Asia but also its postcolonial national histories have not been autonomous; rather, they have involved internal po­liti­ cal dynamics that prompted the local elites to jump into the global Cold War battleground. A further development in recent Cold War studies involves what Ang Cheng Guan calls the “so-­called cultural turn” in his book Southeast Asia’s Cold War.31 Indeed, several scholars have explic­itly expressed their discomfort with “too much politics” in Cold War historiography or, in Kwon’s view, with not enough local ­human experience.32 While praising this new cultural emphasis in Cold War studies for adding “a more h ­ uman dimension,” Ang warns against an overemphasis on ­t hose “non-­political aspects, impor­tant as they may be, at the expanse of the diplomatic,” which, he says, “seems to me to put the cart before the h ­ orse.”33 The reason why Ang is taking an extra precaution for this “so-­called cultural turn” is ­because it could hamper the scholarly attempt to create a standard Southeast Asian Cold War historiography. He states that this prob­lem can be overcome by writing the Southeast Asian experience as an international history and identifying more complex local ­causes and meanings of the Cold War that differ from ­those of foreign historians or conventional viewers.34 The lack of a standard narrative of Southeast Asia’s Cold War history derives from the presumed roles of the power­f ul and the powerless not only in Cold War politics but also in scholarship. Thongchai Winichakul observes that Asian studies have ­limited their role by not trespassing on the Euro-­American scholarship

Postcolonial Nation-Building  9

that has produced the dominant theories.35 A division of l­ abor in the production of knowledge has been based largely on the assumption that scholars from power­ ful countries such as the United States or China create metanarratives or g­ rand theories, whereas the scholars from less power­ful countries provide raw materials from their archives and libraries—­a situation that resembles colonial relations and conventional trends in the Cold War studies. The same is true of the analy­sis of “localization” or “internalization” of the global Cold War by Asian states and socie­ties. Th ­ ese analytical frameworks assume that the po­liti­cal elites in the newly emerged nation-­states ­were mere local agents of the global superpowers’ Cold War and that over time they unwittingly internalized that war in their domestic politics. How then can we move the center of attention away from Eu­rope and the United States and write an autonomous history of Asia’s Cold War? The first premise ­here is that the local elites did not simply comply to the polarized world order or mimic the superpowers. They instead proactively harnessed the superpower competition to their own ­causes, especially in their nation-­building efforts and work to preserve their own power. The Cold War system was not hegemonic to the extent that local politics and socie­ties had to submit completely out of fear and anxiety. Rather, the two superpowers’ rivalry for world domination created a system that the regional allies could take advantage of in their own nation-­building at home. Again, Thailand offers an excellent example of the importance of understanding the Cold War as every­one’s war and sheds light on how to write an autonomous history of modern Southeast Asia. Although Thailand has never experienced the direct colonial rule to which its neighbors in Southeast Asia w ­ ere subjected, this does not mean that Thailand could avoid the influence or the power grabs of the colonial empires in the first half of the twentieth c­ entury or e­ arlier. Several studies on the semi-­coloniality of Siam/Thailand have already provided ample examples that show that while evading direct colonial rule, Siam/Thailand did abide by the global order set by the Eu­ro­pean and American colonial powers.36 Likewise, Thailand was u ­ nder the influence of a worldwide quest for decolonization ­after the end of the Second World War, when the Eu­ro­pean and American colonial powers began revamping their world domination in the name of the Cold War.37 Thailand’s choice was to side with the US-led ­free world, which promised extravagant foreign aid and technical assistance needed for Thai nation-­building. In what ways, then, can scholars include the third world into a metanarrative of global Cold War history while shedding light on their individual postcolonial demands in the second half of the twentieth c­ entury? This is where the indigenization framework comes into play.

10  Introduction

Indigenization ­ ere are two key historical and conceptual configurations that led me to view Th Thailand’s postcolonial nation-­building as an indigenization of the American Cold War system. First, the Thai and US governments chose to create a new modern police force to guard Thailand, an anticommunist bastion in Southeast Asia, instead of mobilizing extant militaries. Their choice calls attention to the role of new police whose duty was extended to inculcating the state order among the populace on top of their regular duty of safeguarding internal security since the nineteenth ­century.38 Robert Storch, who studied the police of Northern ­England, describes En­glish policemen as “domestic missionaries,” whose role was to reform the morals of the urban working classes in the late eigh­teenth c­ entury by applying constant surveillance to all the key institutions of the working-­class neighborhood. This missionary force was to replace the local practices and “illegal be­ hav­iors” in the northern En­glish industrial towns with the “civilization and decorum” of London.39 Storch’s conceptualization of the police as a domestic missionary resonates with the role that the BPP has played in remote areas of Thailand throughout and beyond the Cold War period. The BPP became the missionaries of royalist nationalism, an essential vehicle of the Thai monarchy’s indigenization of the American Cold War. Second, the American Cold War crusade against the expansion of communism in Southeast Asia, which culminated in the Vietnam War quagmire, derived from its self-­imposed moral obligation to bring anticommunist modernization to the third world. Walt W. Rostow, the f­ather of American modernization theory and a policy mentor to President John F. Kennedy, recalled in a 1984 essay: “As individuals, most of us felt, I suspect, some kind of moral or religious impulse to help ­t hose striving to come forward through development. In that sense we w ­ ere in the line that reached back a ­century and more to the missionaries from Western socie­ties who went out to distant and often obscure places, not merely to promulgate the faith but also to teach and to heal.”40 This self-­imposed moral obligation of spreading Western modernity was demonstrated most conspicuously by American Protestant missionaries that had embarked on their long, arduous journey since the nineteenth ­century to bring forward a Christian empire through their indigenization efforts. In missiology, “missionization” refers to the work and practice of missionaries who sought not only to convert indigenous p ­ eople to Chris­tian­ity but also to bring local converts ­under their mission’s influence and control. The latter goal of the missionization is close to what is known as the “civilizing missions” that have often amounted to “cultural imposition.”41 Eu­ro­pean and l­ater American

Postcolonial Nation-Building  11

Protestant missionaries had accumulated the experiences of failure and re­sis­tance to their missions from the local converts, enough to learn that missionization alone cannot expand God’s kingdom. Some missionaries also came to admire indigenous cultures and felt it necessary to “accommodate” the target population’s customs and beliefs when preaching the gospel.42 It was ­these Protestant missionaries who promoted indigenization of their mission works abroad. Ruy O. Costa defines indigenization as “the translation into ‘native’ cultures of a Missio Dei previously a­ dopted by the missionary.”43 Instead of imposing Western Christian civilization, t­ hese missionaries promoted autonomous, self-­supporting indigenous churches. 44 It should be noted, according to Costa, that the foreign missionaries’ efforts at indigenizing their missions involves “conscious power strug­gles between foreign missionaries and national leaders.”45 Expansion of the Protestant missionaries’ indigenization efforts soon met new challenges generated by the growing autonomy and authority of their target population of conversion in the mission fields. Local converts began indigenizing Western Chris­tian­ity by donning it with local fabrics and translating God’s word into their vernaculars. The kingdom of God began to be ­imagined in indigenous terms. That is where the meaning and role of indigenization began to diverge and become a two-­way pro­cess: From the Western Christian missionaries’ perspective, allowing the local, indigenous leaders to control their domestic business on their own terms, as long as it did not hinder the missionaries’ objectives, was believed to be beneficial for the success of their missions. From the local perspectives, using the external sources and influences to assure their p ­ eople’s freedom from life sufferings and autonomy from foreign intervention was preferable to waiting for salvation and in­de­pen­dence, both of which seemed almost unfeasible. Indigenization through collaboration and adaptation thus became a key mechanism to increase indigenous conversion, although it eventually complicated the relationship between the foreign and local missionaries and intermediaries. I argue that this two-­way pro­cess of indigenization occurred during the Cold War between the US government and the Asian local ruling elite. The global Cold War, be it a historical period, international system, or mentality that dominated the second half of the twentieth c­ entury, was conducive to promoting anticommunist modernization and counterinsurgency in many US allies. The self-­ designated American mission of spreading liberal capitalism through the provision of foreign aid and technical assistance to newly emerging nation-­states in Asia was welcomed by them. The United States provided financial aid to whoever desired to be on their side, and the local ruling elite utilized it down to a penny to advance their own nation-­building agenda and maintain their power. W ­ hether negative or positive, the local ruling elite’s use of American dollars and tools for

12  Introduction

nation-­building has been quite successful in many re­spects. ­A fter all, both the nation-­states and their ruling elite have survived the cold and hot wars, contributed to the increasing membership of the United Nations, and come to exercise some influence, small or significant, over con­temporary international politics. In this book, I posit that both the Thai BPP, acting as a local missionary, and US organ­izations such as the CIA and USAID, acting as foreign missionaries in Thailand, w ­ ere tasked to propagate anticommunism. To make the Thai ruling elite their reliable ally, the United States provided financial aid and technical assistance and jointly formed the BPP to advance American anticommunist modernization and counterinsurgency programs in Southeast Asia. With the Thai monarchy’s growing support from the early 1960s, the BPP became a symbolic missionary of the royal ­family’s nation-­building proj­ects propagating royalist nationalism and building ­human borders. ­Whether the BPP’s American partners welcomed its shift of loyalty away from them or not, their collaboration did not cease, b ­ ecause Thai royalists’ nation-­building shared the same tenet as American modernization: anticommunism. How, then, does the indigenization framework help us better understand the global Cold War system and postcolonial nation-­building agenda? Foremost, it helps us view the second half of the twentieth ­century world as a continuous history without creating “the other” Cold War in the third world. The Cold War was not a ­simple rivalry between two worlds or ideological blocs. It was an open, fluid, international system that absorbed diverse local actors and their reactions to postcolonial power realignments.46 The use of the term “indigenization” instead of “localization” is impor­tant to highlight the reciprocity of the pro­cess for creating and sustaining conditions for collaboration and adaptation between the United States and its Southeast Asian allies during the Cold War. Collaboration is a prerequisite for indigenization for both foreign and domestic actors, while adaptation highlights indigenous p ­ eoples’ exercise of control and influence over the foreign ideologies and practices. Again, throughout the indigenization pro­cess, the main goals of collaboration and adaptation between the foreign and domestic actors remain congruent. Even if the United States and Thai ruling elites had bumpy relations, their shared goal of making Thailand an anticommunist bastion did not change. In this way, the indigenization framework can embrace multifaceted, multilateral interactions between the global superpowers and new nation-­states that the localization and internalization frameworks have not yet been able to do.47 Who, then, benefited most from Thailand’s Cold War? The local elite group that ­rose to overwhelming dominance and prominence in Thailand is the monarchy. As the rest of the book describes, modern Thai nation-­building was led first by the military leaders and l­ater by the monarchy while the royalist groups

Postcolonial Nation-Building  13

s­ ystematically enforced a traditional concept of national unity and pro­gress throughout the Cold War period. Thailand’s indigenized Cold War left two legacies: One is a continuation of “othering” in the nation-­building pro­cesses to achieve national unity and pro­gress, or more precisely to protect the royalist Thai nation. The other is expansion of what Thak Chaloemtiarana calls “paternalistic despotism” and a Thai-­style democracy.48 The two most vocalized slogans of Thailand’s Cold War, national pro­gress and unity, reinvigorated the traditional hierarchy system and culture by making the king a ­father and a head of the Thai nation-­state. The Thai monarchy had been stripped of absolute power ­after the ­People’s Party’s 1932 coup and kept a low profile u ­ ntil 1957, when the former leader of the P ­ eople’s Party, Phibun Songkhram, was toppled by Sarit Thanarat. The global Cold War provided an opportunity to the late King Bhumibol to refashion himself to be a modern nation-­builder as well as a ­father of the Thai nation, as it did for Park Chung-­Hee in South ­Korea, Suharto in Indonesia, and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. The monarchy’s new role as the leader of national pro­gress and the center of national unity and the growing power of the royalist network in the Thai state and society would become sources of tension and conflict throughout the Cold War. Particularly the royalist group’s promotion of a Thai-­style democracy (prachathipatai bep thai), which casts the monarchy as the head of the state and imposes unquestioning loyalty to the nation, its religion, and its monarchy, has often halted and reversed the Thai ­people’s democ­ratization efforts, even to the pre­sent day. In sum, t­ here have been numerous attempts to diversify Cold War studies by bringing back the third world into twentieth-­century world history and by emphasizing the role of Asian local ruling elite in sustaining both the global superpower rivalry and internal conflicts. Even so, conventional Cold War histories, be they local or global, cannot explain the hotness represented by the sustained vio­lence and silence, endless discovery of mass graves and alienated ghosts, and the continuing debates on the essence of democracy in Southeast Asia. Before the October 6 Massacre in Bangkok, the national security forces of Thailand committed other acts of vio­lence, including the Red Drum (thang daeng) atrocities in Phatthalung province in 1972. Villa­gers w ­ ere taken to a nearby army camp, forced to confess to being communist, and then dumped into a drum filled with petroleum and then burned to death. Unofficially, more than three thousand ­people w ­ ere murdered in this “red drum,” or e­ lse shot dead, or thrown out of he­ li­cop­ters ­a fter being accused of being communists or sympathizers.49 Another atrocity against the civilians was committed by a combined force of BPP officers and Village Defense Volunteers on January 24, 1975, in the northeastern border village of Ban Na Sai. Three villa­gers ­were killed, and 106 ­houses ­were burned. Other villa­gers w ­ ere arrested and taken away on charges of being communists.

14  Introduction

Tyrell Haberkorn argues that “state refutations of accountability for the burning of Ban Na Sai and the thang daeng killings heralded the production of impunity” that led to more vio­lence against the civilians, including the October 6 Massacre.50 Killing unarmed civilians in broad daylight continued in the post–­Cold War era. When around 200,000 Thai civilians marched and called for the resignation of the General Suchinda Kraprayun government in May 1992, armed soldiers immediately joined riot control operations, as they had on October 14, 1973, and killed over seventy p ­ eople and injured many hundreds. Again, in April and May of 2010, when the so-­called Red Shirts protesters gathered to call for an early election and l­ater the resignation of the government u ­ nder the Demo­crat Party leader Abhisit Vejjajiva, more blood was shed by the military’s armed attacks in the streets of Bangkok. When Major General Khattiya Sawatdiphol joined the Red Shirts’ protest, the military shot him in the head when he was being interviewed by a reporter from the New York Times as if they wanted to boast to the world that they w ­ ere not afraid of how the world views them.51 Thailand is not the only country that experienced the hotness of the Cold War and sustained state vio­lence against the members of its nation. The Khmer Rouge not only committed Cambodian genocide but also sowed the seed for the Third Indochina War by exhorting young Cambodians to “[b]eware the ­enemy from Vietnam who takes Khmer heads as trophies and ingredients for the g­ iant pot in which he boils w ­ ater for his master’s tea!”52 Suharto’s Orde Baru regime, which had been built on oceans of blood and mountains of skele­tons from the mass killings of 1965– 1966, established a police state that only added more body counts before its eventual collapse in 1998.53 Ferdinand Marcos’ Bagong Lipunan regime also kept pace with its neighbors in torturing and killing p ­ eople, only to be replaced by the ­People Power in 1986.54 The Cold War in Southeast Asia was submerged in the blood of innocent ­people not only shed by the unpre­ce­dented numbers of bombs dropped by the United States but also by the tortures and extrajudicial killings commanded by the local Asian ruling elite. This urges us to consider how undervalued the impacts of the nation-­building by the authoritarian regimes overtly supported by the global Cold War system w ­ ere in the history of the twentieth c­ entury compared with that of the US-­Soviet rivalry in the conventional Cold War studies. My understanding of the development of the hot Cold War in Southeast Asia as a consequence of the local ruling elite’s indigenization pro­cess is, in this sense, not a new argument. It is more of an alternative view to the extant studies that have focused on how the Cold War ­shaped the goals and pro­cesses of postcolonial nation-­building, one that reverses the premise and looks at how postcolonial nation-­building indigenized the course and nature of the global Cold War system in Southeast Asia.

Postcolonial Nation-Building  15

Looking Ahead The story begins with the history of an agency of the Cold War indigenization in Thailand: the Border Patrol Police. The BPP emerged from a convergence of interests between the US government and Thai military leaders in making Thailand an anticommunist bastion of the American Cold War in the early 1950s. Although the organ­ization was formed as a paramilitary intelligence unit, the BPP expanded its policework and influence beyond intelligence and eventually transformed itself into a key development agency of the Thai royal ­family in the early 1960s. Chapter One looks at how the stage for indigenization of the American Cold War was set in Thailand by the ruling elites. It provides the context for how the Thai BPP was formed and transformed to respond to its American and Thai patrons’ evolving relations between 1947 and 1962. It divides the period into three phases punctuated by major po­liti­cal events that influenced the evolving characteristics of the BPP. The first phase, 1947–1950, highlights Field Marshal Phibun Songkhram’s return to office ­after a coup in 1947 and how his second premiership won the f­ avor of the United States. The second phase, 1950–1957, is marked by the birth of the BPP and its early activities as CIA paramilitary intelligence and shows how the geopo­liti­cal importance and relative stability of Thailand provided an opportunity for the Thai elites to utilize American Cold War politics in pushing forward their po­liti­cal goals. The 1957 coup staged by Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat became a life-­or-­death crisis for the BPP as its Thai and American patrons ­were forced to leave. The third phase, 1957–1962, thus focuses on the ways in which the BPP dealt with its existential crisis and how two institutions, the United States Operations Mission to Thailand (USOM) and the Thai monarchy, came to join the BPP’s civic actions. The year 1962 marks the beginning of the Thai counterinsurgency era and the BPP’s shift of its loyalty from the United States to the Thai monarchy. Chapters Two through Four dive into the indigenization pro­cesses undertaken by the BPP and the Thai royal f­ amily during the years 1962–1980, which I posit to be the Thai counterinsurgency era. Thai security studies scholars often mark the so-­called Gun-­Firing Day (wan siang puen tek), when the Thai communists attacked the police in the northeast province on August 7, 1965, as the beginning of the communist insurgency in Thailand. In fact, ­t here w ­ ere numerous confrontations between Thai government armed forces and alleged communist insurgents before 1965, and already by 1962, both the US and Thai governments w ­ ere becoming increasingly alarmed by the growing influence of communist movements. If 1962 was the beginning of the Thai counterinsurgency era, its end came with the

16  Introduction

Thai government’s announcement of Order Number 66/2523 in 1980, entitled “Policy of Strug­gle to Win over Communism.” Chapters Two through Chapter Four share two common goals: First, they look at how the American Cold War system that promoted anticommunist modernization and counterinsurgency was indigenized by the BPP and Thai monarchy and spread among the Thai populace. Second, t­ hese chapters show that the Thai ruling elite, including military and royal ­family members, participated in the contest of winning hearts and minds of the general Thai populace through their anti­ communist nation-­building proj­ects. Chapter Two begins with an examination of how the American modernization theory and counterinsurgency strategies influenced the BPP’s transformation into a civic action agency and why the Thai royal ­family stepped into this arena of the po­liti­cal counterinsurgency against communism in the early 1960s. In par­tic­u­lar, this chapter delves into the ways in which the BPP’s and USOM’s joint civic action programs became a key laboratory for creating a psychological border for an anticommunist, royalist Thai nation. Chapters Three and Four survey the development of the Police Aerial Reinforcement Unit (PARU) and the Village Scouts to better understand the expansion of the royalist and anticommunist network among the ruling elite and the masses. PARU was formed separately from the BPP in the early 1950s, but it came to be fully integrated ­under the command of the BPP at the end of the Second Indochina War. The unit would become a leading force in the October 6 Massacre. Development of ultra-­royalist movements through the BPP’s Village Scout training from the late 1960s as described in Chapter Four shows the ways in which the Thai royal ­family came to have the upper hand in undertaking its own Cold War set against the demo­cratizing populace. All t­ hese efforts culminated in the October 6 Massacre in 1976. The monarchy gained tenacious hold of bases of po­liti­cal power as well as durable legitimacy through the indigenization of the American Cold War system and became a final victor of Thailand’s Cold War. Chapter Five surveys the aftermath of the October 6 Massacre and considers the long-­term impacts of Cold War indigenization in Thailand. The rise of General Prem Tinsulanonda to premiership and his proclamation of a shift to a civilian counterinsurgency paved the way for making the king a modern nation-­builder with full support from the royalist network and the mass in the 1980s. The BPP’s institutional autonomy was restored in 1972, and the organ­ization’s mission and standing have not changed much to the pre­sent day. The BPP as a symbolic missionary of royalist nationalism, however, has brought the organ­ization into an identity strug­gle as a national security force. The global Cold War ended in the early 1990s, but the BPP’s Cold War strug­gle to extend its lifespan has not ended yet, and neither has that of its royal patrons.

C HA P T E R ON E

From CIA Brainchild to Civic Action Agent, 1947–1962

In November 1946, the Thai government revoked the Act Concerning Communism proclaimed by the last absolute monarch, King Prajadhipok, in 1933.1 Fear of communism had abated, and Thailand could reestablish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.2 Thailand also joined the United Nations in 1946, which meant that instead of relying on traditional bilateral relationships with Eu­ro­pean states, it could ally with multiple international powers in the postwar era. Then how and why did Thailand become an anticommunist bastion of the American-­ led Cold War in the late 1940s? What are the historical and po­liti­cal conditions that convinced the United States to form an indigenous agency such as the Border Patrol Police (BPP) in Thailand? And fi­nally, what was the Thai ruling elite’s view on the role of communist movements while they w ­ ere engaged in their postcolonial nation-­building?

Setting the Stage for Indigenization A special, covert relationship between the United States and Thailand started in 1942, when the Office of Strategic Ser­v ices (OSS) began cooperating with the Seri (­Free) Thai movement against Japa­nese occupation in Southeast Asia. Led by Pridi Banomyong, the Seri Thai also opposed Thailand’s official alliance with the Japa­ nese, which had been established by Phibun Songkhram, the de facto military dictator of the country since 1938. His ouster in 1944, which preceded the defeat of Japan in 1945, cleared the way for the civilian government of Pridi, which lasted ­until 1947, when a group of Phibun’s former officers staged a coup that brought him back into power in 1948. Extant examinations of the Japa­nese occupation in Thailand between 1942– 1945 have been more focused on the activities of the Seri Thai and its relationship with the United States, not paying sufficient attention to the Thai army that would play a key role in building one of the longest-­living authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia that the United States greatly relied on throughout the Cold War period. Although Pridi had sought to establish a demo­cratic government and the 17

18  Chapter 1

United States was an ardent supporter of this effort, the perceived threat from communism convinced the United States to forget Phibun’s brief perfidy in 1942 and to trust his staunch anticommunism and military regime to bring desired peace and order in Thailand.3 Following the border conflict between Thailand and France by the Mekong River in 1940–1941 that had met with a nationwide irredentist movement in Thailand, Phibun deployed the Phayap army division in northern Thailand to invade the Shan States. The army occupied Kengtung, the capital city of the Shan States, in May 1942, and Major General Phin Chunhawan, assistant commander-­in-­chief of the Phayap division, became the military governor of the United Thai States (Saharat Thai Doem). ­After Phibun’s ouster and the end of WWII, the Thai civilian government agreed to return the Shan States to the British and subsequently called for an immediate return home of Thai troops. Adding to their bitterness from the government’s ignorance of the hardship in the foreign lands for four years, sudden withdrawal from the Shan States roused strong antipathy among ­these army officers.4 Among t­hese embittered officers w ­ ere Army Lieutenant General Phin Chunhawan, Col­o­nel Kat Katsongkhram, Col­o­nel Phao Siyanon, and Col­o­nel Sarit Thanarat, who became the key members of the coup group in 1947. While Phin and Kat came from the old military establishment, Phao and Sarit represented a new generation of military officers, and they would become the key players in establishing and transforming the Thai Border Patrol Police in the years to come. Phibun sought to protect his precarious position in his second administration. When he returned to office in 1948, officers such as Col­o­nel Sarit Thanarat and Col­o­nel Phao Siyanon attempted to consolidate fragmented military factions ­under their command and remove Phibun from power. U ­ nder the circumstances, the United States could be helpful. Bringing lucrative economic and military aid as well as po­liti­cal support from the United States could enhance Phibun’s position against newly rising military power competitors and garner popu­lar support for his regime. By taking a hardline stance in the postwar anticommunist movement, Phibun believed he could win support from both the Thai p ­ eople and the US government.5 Phibun’s new survival strategy and the Americans’ renewed interest in collaborating with the Thai military did not come out of nowhere. President Harry Truman had begun refurbishing his administration’s foreign policies to fight the Soviet Union on coming to office in April 1945. On January 22, 1946, he issued an executive order to establish the Central Intelligence Group, and in the following year, the US Congress passed the National Security Act, which established the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as the centralized peacetime intelligence organ­ ization.6 Since the former head of the OSS, William Donovan, helped to establish

CIA’s Brainchild  19

the new “agency, many” former veteran officials of the OSS transferred to the CIA, most of the po­liti­cal warfare strategies utilized in the OSS’s clandestine operations moved with them.7 In addition, the newly enacted National Security Act of 1947 did not restrict this civilian intelligence group’s activities with specific provisions or conditions. Most of the significant operations of the CIA ­were arbitrarily justified ­under the assigned task of “other functions” by the act. Obscurity allowed for the extension of the CIA’s range of operations from open intelligence to clandestine po­liti­c al sabotage and even secret warfare in the coming years.8 Another distinctive foreign policy that President Truman initiated was offering economic aid to bolster its allies—­and US alliances. As the historian Andrew Rotter and o ­ thers contend, the changes in the US attitude to Southeast Asia in 1949 derived from American interests in keeping the indigenous nation-­states in the geopo­liti­c al categorization of “Southeast Asia,” economic protectionism, and opposition to the despotism and colonialism.9 On January 20, 1949, in his inaugural address, Truman announced the Point Four Program, which saw the Southeast Asian region as “an integral part of that ­great crescent formed by the Indian peninsular, Australia and Japan” and sought “to encourage the SEA [Southeast Asia] region to develop in harmony with the Atlantic Community and the rest of the ­Free World.”10 In September 1949 the Truman administration managed to shift $75 million from the China Aid Act, which had originally been passed with the Marshal Plan in 1948, and made it available for economic and military aid for “the general area of China” which, in fact, implied Southeast Asia.11 With the growing possibility of communist expansion to the southern parts of China, as well as the presence of a large number of overseas Chinese in the region, Southeast Asia became a central focus for American foreign policymakers.12 Not long ­after, the Chinese government began accusing the United States of acting as an imperialist threat and its allies of collaborating with imperialism. On January 26, 1950, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs officially accused Phibun of mistreating the Chinese in Thailand. In addition to the protest from Beijing, the Chinese press in Thailand provoked local Chinese to resist Phibun.13 In response, Phibun declared that the Thai Defense Board would exercise “resolute mea­sures” against communist activities and threatened to close pro-­communist newspapers on February 1, 1950.14 Pressure by the American anticommunist alliance and fear of the Chinese grudge led Phibun to formally recognize Bao Dai as the leader of South Vietnam on February 28, 1950. In April of 1950, as a token of appreciation, the US Congress sent Allen Griffin’s hastily or­ga­nized Economic Survey Mission to Southeast Asia to observe economic conditions and propose

20  Chapter 1

appropriate levels of foreign aid to the countries in the region. Speaking about the Thai economic situation, the mission team concluded: ­There is hardly any impor­tant economic urgency. ­There is a po­liti­cal urgency. A quick gesture calculated to impress Government leaders and the ­people—­particularly the educated elite in Bangkok—­may produce much more desirable po­liti­cal results than a long range economic proj­ect. . . . ​As a country that has come out solidly for the West, Thailand needs prompt evidence that its partnership is valued.15 Griffin’s survey team thus proposed $11.4 million in economic and technical assistance to Thailand.16 The outbreak of the Korean War on June 25, 1950, further affected US foreign policy and US-­Thai relations. Perhaps the most notable impact was a clear demarcation between the friends and enemies of a US-­led ­free world. At the same time, newly established leadership in the in­de­pen­dent Asian states had to choose where to seek economic aid and po­liti­cal support to strengthen their unstable regimes. Phibun, who saw the war as an opportunity to tighten his grip over the Thai military and other po­liti­cal rivals, took advantage accordingly, and on July 3, 1950, he announced that Thailand would dispatch four thousand Thai troops along with rice supplies to K ­ orea, making Thailand the first Asian country that promised support for US involvement in the Korean War. According to the New York Times, by mid-­August, the Thai Ministry of Defense was proudly reporting that it had to stop receiving more volunteers for an expeditionary force to K ­ orea since ­there 17 ­were already nearly eleven thousand applicants. By mid-­September, a correspondent for the New York Times said that the original offer of four thousand men was scaled down since the Thai government could not assem­ble, equip, or train that many men in time.18 Phibun’s prompt declaration of support for the United States in the Korean War was part of his plan to fully utilize US foreign aid for his cause. In a written interview with the New York Times on July 21, 1950, Phibun reiterated that US economic and military aid would play a key role in defending Thailand from communists: New York Times: Do you feel that American aid in sufficient quantities could insure Thailand permanently against communism? Phibun: If we are given enough aid in the way of arms and equipment, we ­w ill be able to control the borders against anything short of a major invasion. But a major invasion could not be successfully resisted without outside equipment and troops. With enough arms we could withstand perhaps three divisions, but for anything above that we’d need help.

CIA’s Brainchild  21

New York Times: What American aid specifically and how much does Thailand need most? Phibun: The more the better. The more we can develop our country both militarily and eco­nom­ically the thicker our armor against communism ­w ill be.19 A US military aid mission team arrived in Bangkok on August 26, 1950, to survey the needs of the Thai military. The Thai-­American Economic and Technical Agreement was signed on September 8, 1950, and subsequently on October 17, 1950, both governments ratified the Military Assistance Agreement, expecting that the assistance “­will enable Thailand to strengthen the security forces required for the protection of her freedom and in­de­pen­dence.”20 The US government distributed approximately $8 million in aid funds by the end of that year. It also encouraged the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development, also known as the World Bank, to direct grants ranging from $250,000 to $400,000 to development programs in Thailand. By the end of 1950, the United States had equipped Thai army battalions stationed in the northeastern and northern region with American arms. Washington expected the refurbishment of Thai armed forces would not only prepare them to fight communist threats but also uphold anticommunist morale.21 As the New York Times correspondent commented in December, both the Thai and US governments believed that Thailand “­w ill consolidate its status as one of the most advanced and prosperous nations of Asia.”22 ­After all the commitments ­were made, the Thai armed forces left for ­Korea. Although the Korean War did not seem to greatly disturb the Thai government, tensions between suspected communists at home and government officials began to arise. When Phibun declared the deployment of the Thai troops to K ­ orea, the press launched a barrage of criticism against the government’s decision. Consequently, on July 20, 1950, the police department issued a six-­month ban prohibiting all publications and comments on international politics that may “adversely affect diplomatic relations with regard to Thailand.”23 Chinese communists’ support of the Viet Minh in their fight against the French in Indochina also became a source of concern that year. Beginning in late 1950, the Thai government started to deport Chinese immigrants involved in po­liti­cal activity, crush ­labor ­unions, and use the military and Buddhist organ­ization (sangha) for anticommunist propaganda.24 The fear intensified with rumors that the success of Viet Minh forces would bring Pridi back to Thailand as the leader of a communist group.25 In February 1952, the government passed an emergency law that provided wide powers of arrest and press censorship.26 Not long a­ fter the Thai military left for K ­ orea, some Thai socialists and leftist intellectuals started a peace movement (khabuankan santiphap) that called for the

22  Chapter 1

return of the Thai troops from K ­ orea and the promotion of nonviolent means for resolving prob­lems. The movement soon received over a hundred thousand signatures, which led it to or­ga­nize local branches in both urban and rural areas. Phibun’s government responded heavy-­handedly, calling the movement a “peace revolt” (kabot santiphap) and accusing it of plotting a coup. Mass arrest began on November 10, 1952, and placed over a thousand individuals, including Pridi’s wife and son, ­behind prison bars.27 Despite Phibun’s newfound power and control, growing tension among politicians in parliament, a shifting balance of power between old and new military factions, and the increasing number of student protests against the government’s anticommunism policy contributed to instability in Thai society. The sense of insecurity also grew among t­ hose who participated in the 1947 coup, including Sarit and Phao, and on November 29, 1951, they announced their intention to suspend parliament and abrogate the 1949 constitution on the radio, citing the growing communist threat and the government’s inability of dealing with the prob­lem: Owing to the pre­sent state of emergency in world conditions, serious communist danger is pressing. The pre­sent Council of Ministers as well as Parliament is largely infiltrated by communist ele­ments. Tried as it might, the Government has been unable to solve the communist prob­lem. Nor has it been able to stamp out the so-­called corruption as has been its intention. Disintegration has spread so deeply as to cause grave anx­i­eties for the continued existence of the nation in its pre­sent po­liti­cal danger.28 As Thak Chaloemtiarana notes, the so-­called Radio Coup used the communist threat as a major justification for a coup for the first time in Thai history. W ­ hether or not t­ here was serious concern about communist activities within parliament, ­t hose involved in the coup likely thought that their anticommunist stance would guarantee a smoother transition from the old to new cabinet without disturbing the US government. To their relief, Washington responded on the same day of the coup announcing that it anticipated no changes in the US government’s foreign policy with regard to Thailand.29 ­These changes in Thailand dovetailed with changes in the US Cold War stance. The year 1953 marked the beginning of a more hostile anticommunist policy in the US government with the arrival of two prominent cold warriors: President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Director of the CIA Allen W. Dulles. From the time he campaigned for presidency, Eisenhower cited the communist victory in China, the Soviet occupation of Eastern Eu­rope, and the Korean War as evidence that inaction had undermined the effectiveness of US foreign policy. Decisive moves by

CIA’s Brainchild  23

Chinese communists, including entry into the Korean War in November 1950, and opposition to American support for the Chinese Nationalist Party had already confirmed Eisenhower’s suspicion of the communist bloc’s desire for territorial expansion and further heightened the so-­called Red Scare among US foreign policymakers.30 Subsequently, the CIA became an essential ele­ment in implementing US foreign policy. As a former war veteran in the OSS and b ­ rother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, the new CIA director, Allen Dulles, was able to bring CIA objectives to bear on the entire US foreign policymaking establishment. The CIA could now undertake clandestine operations in the newly emerged nation-­states.31 In early 1953, the Chinese communists formed a “Thai Autonomous ­People’s Government” in Sipsong Panna near the southern Chinese province of Yunnan that borders Burma and Vietnam. Not long ­after, Viet Minh forces overran its borders and most of the Viet­nam­ese countryside. In April 1953, they reached Luang Phrabang, a Lao capital that borders Northern Thailand. Alarmed by the rapid expansion of Viet Minh, President Eisenhower approved the use of psychological warfare in Thailand and Laos in the second week of May, and the US National Security Council ordered the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) to prepare detailed plans for such an undertaking. The board presented its report titled “U.S. Psychological Strategy with Re­spect to the Thai P ­ eoples of Southeast Asia,” on 32 July 2, 1953. Shortened as the PSB D-23, the plan suggested a wide-­ranging set of operations that could help turn Thailand into an “anti-­communist bastion.”33 Several noticeable events that happened in the latter half of 1953 signaled the beginning of this unconventional war in Thailand. In August, William Donovan, former head of the OSS and founder of the CIA, arrived in Thailand as the US ambassador succeeding Edwin Stanton. Before he arrived in Bangkok, Donovan began to contact former OSS veterans to or­ga­nize a group that would plan and carry out covert operations in Thailand.34 According to a former CIA member who operated in Thailand at that time, Donovan had personal charge of the CIA agents and their activities while he served as ambassador to Thailand from September 1953 to August 1954.35 Shortly ­after his arrival, Donovan helped to or­ga­nize a high-­ranking US-­Thai psychological warfare committee chaired by Prime Minister Phibun Songkhram. Prompted by the dramatic development of communist movements in the Asian region, Eisenhower and Dulles sought to develop a regional collective defense organ­ization among pro-­American Asian and Western countries. This effort resulted in the Manila Pact of September 1954. Subsequently, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organ­ization (SEATO) was established on February 19, 1955, at a meeting in Bangkok among the representatives from the United States, France, ­Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Pakistan.

24  Chapter 1

The establishment of SEATO was, in fact, contemplated well before 1954 as shown in NSC-48/2, a 1949 National Security Council report that recommended that the United States “should make known its sympathy with the efforts of Asian leaders to form regional associations of non-­Communist states of the vari­ous Asian areas.” The NSC-48/2 also added the caveat that the United States “must not take such an active part in the early stages of the formation of such an association that it w ­ ill be subject to the charge of using the Asiatic nations to further United States ambitions.”36 While the Eisenhower administration attempted to follow the NSC-48/2 warning by not appearing as the leader of SEATO, it was apparent to the nonaligned members of Asia and the eight members within the organ­ization that SEATO was intended to strengthen the military ties between the pro-­A merican countries and the United States. As Robert McMahon puts it, the treaty drew “a clear line in the sand for China or any potential aggressor,” and this line would, as Dulles clarified, “serve notice on the e­ nemy” and give the e­ nemy “an opportunity to retreat or stay.”37 In addition, the treaty helped the Eisenhower administration avoid increasing its military bud­get, which had been significantly affected by the Korean War. While the United States and the pro-­US allies tensed up a­ fter the seemingly successful nonalignment movement conference in Bandung, May 1955, Phibun focused more on the domestic politics. Several events that occurred between 1955 and 1957 show Phibun’s attempts to shift the old military politics to a more populist and, allegedly, more demo­cratic direction. But ­there was competition. While he established a Hyde Park–­style Speakers’ Corner, Sarit and Phao also sought to win popu­lar support.38 On April 17, 1955, for instance, Phao proposed the “Democracy by 1962” plan to make Thailand a “full-­fledged democracy.”39 For Phibun, Phao, who was in charge of the police, the largest internal security force of the country, posed a growing threat.40 On August 2, Phibun reshuffled the cabinet and assumed the office of the minister of interior. He relieved Phao from his position as deputy minister of finance and General Phin Chunhawan, Phao’s father-­in-­law, from his position as the deputy minister of defense.41 To tighten his grip over the cabinet, Phibun appointed his supporter, Lieutenant General Thanom Kittikachorn, then commander of the First Army, as the deputy minister of cooperatives.42 On August 25, Phibun took over the responsibility of supervising all police policies that had been u ­ nder the command of Phao since the early 1950s.43 On September 2, Phibun announced large-­scale police reforms and shortly a­ fter, he freed the press from police censorship and banned police officers from business activities.44 Phibun tried vari­ous other mea­sures to consolidate his popu­lar power base. On August 9, the government announced the drafting of the Po­liti­cal Party Bill, which would permit military officers to join po­liti­cal parties.45 ­After its enactment

CIA’s Brainchild  25

in 1955, twenty-­five parties competed in the election on February 26, 1957. Not surprisingly, Phibun’s Seri Manangkhasila party won the majority in the cabinet, and the Demo­crat Party won the second majority. The press and many Demo­crat Party members protested the result. In response, Phibun proclaimed a state of emergency on March 2, justifying his order as a necessary action to c­ ounter a plot to overthrow the government by force.46 Sarit, who was also outraged by the result, said to reporters that “Thailand is now divided into three groups—it is worse than China.”47 On August 20, 1957, Sarit declared his resignation as the minister of defense. Subsequently, forty-­six military leaders resigned from Phibun’s party. At that time, Sarit commanded increasing popularity among the press, public, and parliament. Sarit knew that his resignation would critically damage Phibun as well as Phao. As predicted, Phao resigned from the ministry of the interior that he had held less than six months and from his position as secretary general of the Seri Manangkhasila party on September 12. On the following day, Sarit and his followers demanded Phibun’s resignation. On September 15, crowds gathered in the Speakers’ Corner of Sanam Luang and marched on to Sarit’s ­house to support the army’s demands for Phibun’s resignation. The very next day, Sarit staged a coup against Phibun’s government. As James Ockey argues, the period 1955–1957 can be seen as a short experimental period of democracy in Thai po­liti­cal history.48 Still, it should be noted that the Thai military government’s efforts to ostensibly “de­moc­ra­tize” authoritarian rule in the period 1955–1957 contributed to the development of populist military politics. Thai po­liti­cal leaders came to focus more on winning popu­lar support to strengthen their po­liti­cal base than actually demo­cratizing the po­liti­ cal system. All t­ hose leaders also contended for US f­avor to extract more foreign aid, which in turn enabled them to augment their po­liti­cal influences. This was particularly evident in the case of Phibun in his second premiership. When some politicians requested that the government seek aid from other countries, including some in the communist bloc, to resolve the drought prob­lems in the northeast region, Phibun responded, “If Thailand ever wants to welcome foreign aid for the relief of the northeast, that aid must come from the United States and nowhere ­else.”  49 Phibun’s dependence on US aid and Sarit’s and Phao’s strug­gle to divert the expanding foreign aid to their armed forces vividly show that ­t hose Thai military politicians came to perceive the United States as a useful foreign partner not only for their country’s survival but also for achieving power. Their recognition of the importance of US support for their po­liti­cal advancement helps us understand why the Thai ruling elite sought to indigenize the American Cold War in Southeast Asia. Thailand’s Border Patrol Police was born in this context.

26  Chapter 1

Formation of a Paramilitary Police Force, 1950–1957 Police Major General Soem Yakhasem, former deputy commissioner of the Border Patrol Police General Headquarters, traces the organ­ization’s origin to the Police Field Force (tamruat sanam, PFF). Established by the order of Supreme Commander Phibun on November 28, 1940, this military police force was ­under the command of the army.50 Soem explains in an unpublished manuscript about the BPP that the force “­were to operate in the ground like military” similar to the Police Field Force of Malaysia, or the Constabulary in the Philippines. He argues that the BPP inherited its paramilitary characteristics from the Thai Police Field Force.51 ­Later in 1987, former director-­general of the Thai National Police Department (TNPD), Police General Sisuk Mahinthonrathep, confirmed Soem’s statement in his memoir. As one of the founding members of the Police Field Force of Thailand, Sisuk recalled that the TNPD had ordered the building of four PFF platoons in Nakhon Phanom province to circumscribe the border skirmishes around the Mekong River in late November 1940.52 When fighting broke out between Thailand and France in the following month, the TNPD released an official order dated December 5, 1940, for the establishment of PFF in thirteen northeastern and eastern border provinces. Since the PFF was to fight alongside the army during war­time, the Provincial Police commanders including Sisuk trained the regular police force in conventional warfare, shooting, and military tactics. A year l­ater, when the tension in the borders began to wind down, the TNPD designated some regional subdivisions of the Provincial Police located by the territorial borderlines in the north, northeast, east, west, and south to become the PFF. From his firsthand experience, Sisuk concluded that the PFF could act as the “model of the Border Defense Police and Border Patrol Police when the Police General Phao Siyanon came to office” ­because “their missions and military characteristics in carry­ing out the intelligence and counterinsurgency operations against the communist insurgents ­were similar.”53 It might be true that the BPP had missions similar to that of the PFF, as Soem and Sisuk suggest, but they had dif­fer­ent backgrounds in terms of formation and found­ers. Simply put, while the US government initiated the formation of BPP, the PFF was the Thai government’s own proj­ect devised to defend border security during the Second World War. To protect the Thai boundary, the Phibun government replaced the Military Police Department with the Territorial Defense Department by passing a new National Defense Act in 1938. Army Major General Yuth Somboon explains the Thai government felt the necessity of reor­ga­niz­ ing territorial defense policies in 1938, and the new Territorial Defense Department was designed to “educate the ­people in the field of discipline, courage,

CIA’s Brainchild  27

endurance, sacrifice, unity, honesty e­ tc. and to educate them so that they are able to develop and protect their territory.”54 In this context, the PFF was mobilized against pos­si­ble attacks from the French colonialists during the Thailand-­France border conflict in 1940–1941. By contrast, the BPP was initiated, designed, and trained directly by the United States, and the roles of Thai military and police leaders ­were rather ­limited, at least in the formative years. Moreover, while the PFF ­were formed to fight the foreign enemies that attempted to extend their influence into Thai territory, the BPP ­were expected to specifically target communist infiltrators and agitators, regardless of their nationality and ethnicity, at the border and in rural areas. In fact, the formation of the BPP in the early 1950s shows us that the concept of sovereign territory and boundary changed alongside evolving regional po­liti­cal environments. If the PFF was a locally initiated armed force to be mobilized in conventional warfare against an external e­ nemy, the BPP was a transnational cold warrior designed to operate in an unconventional warfare against both the internal and external enemies. In August 1950 when the US technical experts traveled to Thailand, the first set of military equipment also arrived.55 Many US foreign policymakers asserted that the demands of the Cold War enabled the use of aid funds as “a contribution to governmental stability through support to what­ever leaders may be found who possess enough or­ga­nized strength to stave off collapse.”56 While undertaking an overt military assistance program, the United States also initiated covert operations in Thailand. Former OSS officers based in Thailand re­united and planned covert actions and intelligence activities within and beyond Thai borders by using their connections to the CIA and Thai military cronies. In the view of the United States, and especially the CIA, economic and military aid provided an effective cover for the supply of arms and manpower to the Thai armed forces and could assist the anticommunist campaign in Thailand and other local allies in Southeast Asia. In this context, the CIA developed a close relationship with a figure who would become its local agent of influence: Phao Siyanon. Phao’s rise in the 1950s reflects both the nature of collaboration between the US and Thai governments and the rise of new military cliques freer from colonial legacies than t­ hose of Phibun and Phin. While serving as the deputy director-­ general of the Thai National Police Department during 1949–1950, Phao strengthened the department greatly with the help of Phibun.57 In 1949, the TNPD included a mounted division, a mechanized division, a tank division, a mobile division, and even a speedboat division.58 In addition, Washington generously supplied modern armaments and military trainers to Phao’s police from the early 1950s. A ­ fter Phao assumed the director-­general position in 1951, the CIA also began to assist the police’s anticommunist unit, the Criminal Investigation Department.

28  Chapter 1

As a result, Phao’s police became the largest division of the Thai armed forces by mid-1951. Out of a total armed force estimated at 85,000, the militarized police force accounted for about 40,000. At its pinnacle, the police force exceeded more than 53,000 men. Not only was the manpower of the police im­mense, but its stockpile of armaments was even more remarkable. TNPD possessed armored cars, Bren guns and mortars, and a number of policemen trained in guerrilla warfare.59 On the US side, former OSS officer Willis Bird emerged as a central figure in organ­izing covert programs in Thailand and perhaps, beyond. A ­ fter the OSS was disbanded, Bird moved permanently to Bangkok in 1946 and established himself as an exporter and investment broker.60 He had a wide array of connections within the Thai government and the CIA, where his old ­battle friends from the Seri Thai operations had become influential military members and civilian intelligence agents. In par­tic­u­lar, Air Marshal Siddhi Savetsila, who was a member of the Seri Thai movement during the Pacific War, became a brother-­in-­law of Bird, and thus both Siddhi and Bird became the main liaisons between the CIA and Phao Siyanon.61 With ­these connections, Bird helped to or­ga­nize a secret group of Thai military and po­liti­cal figures, ­later known as the Naresuan Committee, in December 1950. According to Nakhon Siwanit, former commander of the Police Aerial Reinforcement Unit (PARU), it was William Donovan who convinced Phibun to have this secret joint meeting to develop an anticommunist program and a strategy for fighting the imminent communist threat.62 The Naresuan Committee was set up between leading Thai army generals including Prime Minister Field Marshal Phibun Songkhram, Deputy Prime Minister Marshal Phin Chunhawan, Commander in Chief of the Royal Thai Army General Sarit Thanarat, Director-­General of the TNPD Police General Luangchattrakankosin, Deputy Director-­General of TNPD Police Lieutenant General Phao Siyanon, Commander of Guards Division of Royal Thai Army Major General Thanom Kittikachorn, Air Chief Marshal Fuen Ro Ritthakhani, Navy General Luang Chamnan Atthayut, Police Lieutenant General Lamai Utthayananon, and Minister of Foreign Affairs Nai Worakanbancha, as well as American representatives such as William Donovan and members of the CIA. From April  1951, Siddhi formally joined the meeting with the Air Chief Marshal Fuen’s recommendation and served as the secretary of the committee.63 ­After several meetings, the committee members agreed to form a paramilitary police unit that could carry out unconventional warfare with a considerable focus on psychological operations.64 Why, then, did the Thai and US governments agree to build the police force as the first security force in the border areas? A ­ fter the border clash between Thailand and France, both governments signed a peace treaty in 1941 that prevented

CIA’s Brainchild  29

military activities in the border areas. Thus, setting up a military force along the Mekong River or border regions in the north, northeast, and east of Thailand was a violation of the treaty, and it could give rise to a direct confrontation with neighboring countries.65 The Thai government accordingly justified the building of a new paramilitary police in the border areas, saying that “in time of peace only the police, and not the army, w ­ ere allowed to patrol border areas.” 66 Phibun ­wholeheartedly supported Phao and his police force’s expansion in the early 1950s. In her memoir, Phibun’s wife, La-­iad Phibunsongkhram, remarks that the US aid given to Phao’s police served the purpose of “keeping the police on a par with the army in strength so as to insure an internal balance of power,” ­because Phibun was “no doubt interested in keeping an approximate balance of power between his two younger colleagues [Sarit and Phao].”67 Surachart Bamrungsuk similarly contends that Phibun intentionally permitted the police force to be increased in order to counterbalance Kat Katsongkhram’s popularity in the army, as well as the navy’s influence in politics.68 The US government, meanwhile, regarded Phao’s police as “more flexible, more open to new roles and responsibilities than Sarit’s bureaucratically entrenched armed forces.”69 The CIA likewise saw Phao’s police as versatile enough to adapt new techniques in anti-­guerrilla training and psychological warfare, which means the use of propaganda and other psychological actions to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and be­hav­ior of opponent groups. As such the CIA promised Phibun that they would aid the Thai police so that the Thai government would shoulder fewer burdens in financing the new paramilitary police force.70 As predicted by the Naresuan Committee, regional security in the border areas of northeastern and northern Thailand was an issue from 1951. The clash between the Viet Minh and French colonial forces had extended to Laos and Cambodia. The dramatically increasing influence of the Viet Minh forced the Thai government to become more suspicious ­toward the Viet­nam­ese refugee groups in the northeastern region of Thailand. In the north, the Chinese nationalist army (Kuomintang, KMT) was stationed on the Burmese side of the border areas directly across from Fang district in Chiang Mai province.71 In par­tic­u­lar, prolonged tension between the Karen and the Burmese government as well as the increased flow of southern Chinese immigrants led both governments to pay close attention to the presence of highland minorities in Thailand’s northern borders.72 In the south, expanding insurgencies by the Malay Communist Party against the British colonialist and indigenous Malay elite concerned the Thai government. Phibun had made a mutual agreement with the Malay government in 1949 that allowed Malay police to pursue communist guerrillas as far as ten miles from the Thai border.73

30  Chapter 1

In this context, the Thai government, with the help of a US advisory group, hastily or­ga­nized a gendarmerie-­t ype police unit called the Territorial Defense Police (tamruat raksa dinden, TDP) u ­ nder the command of the Office of the Inspector-­General of the TNPD in 1951. To train the first group of TDP, TNPD ordered the building of a police camp in Udon Thani, l­ater called the Senironayut camp, in March 1952. The United States delivered modern armaments such as M1 r­ ifles, carbines, light machine guns, mortars, bazookas, radios, grenades, and ­others to the Quartermasters Division of TNPD.74 By April 1952, 120 policemen had received the special weapons and under­gone guerrilla combat training in the Udon Thani camp. The deputy commander of the Provincial Police’s Fourth Regional Division became the commander of this northeast region TDP com­pany. In the following month, the Senironayut camp was officially opened, and it became one of the first official BPP camps.75 ­A fter completing training, the first twenty-­two platoons consisting of 836 men w ­ ere deployed along the north, northeast, and eastern borders of Thailand.76 In the meantime, Phao ordered the preparation of a special training course for the Police Aerial Reinforcement Unit (PARU) in Lopburi province in April 1951.77 To assist Phao, the CIA and Bird worked closely to launch special paratroopers training in Thailand. Paul Helliwell, an old friend of Bird’s from the OSS, created the South East Asia Supply Corporation (SEA Supply) in Miami as a cover organ­ization for the CIA’s operation in Thailand.78 The CIA, in turn, helped Helliwell to open a SEA Supply branch office right across from the National Stadium, next to Rama I road in Bangkok in the same year.79 Police General Suraphon Chulaphram, former commissioner of BPP Headquarters and director-­ general of the TNPD, recalls that the US government proceeded with g­ reat caution. All the CIA members ostensibly hired by SEA Supply to train the Thai police, especially the BPP and PARU, disguised themselves as civilian advisers (thi prueksa phonlaruean) even though most BPP and PARU members knew that they ­were military veterans. In the early years, the CIA sent only two “civilian advisers” at a time and frequently rotated them with new agents.80 SEA Supply started a paratrooper’s training course in April 1951 at the military’s Erawan camp in Lopburi, which could train fifty policemen at a time in airborne and guerrilla warfare.81 To establish an eight-­week course in parachuting, heavy weapons training, and guerrilla warfare tactics, the CIA assigned James William Lair—­better known as Bill Lair—­who arrived in Bangkok in March 1951 on his first overseas CIA assignment.82 Another training adviser, Jeffrey Cheek, also arrived around the same time.83 On April 25, 1951, William Donovan and Phao invited Phibun, the Thai commander of the army, air force, and navy, and

CIA’s Brainchild  31

some high-­ranking military officers to the American trainers’ demonstrations of parachuting, and shooting of the US special weapons and mortars in Erawan camp.84 ­After receiving compliments from the Thai military, the CIA moved on to training the police volunteers. From the beginning, the CIA and SEA Supply controlled both the se­lection and training procedures with assistance from Thai military and police commanders.85 The unconventional warfare course in the Erawan camp trained a total of eleven paratrooper teams in a two-­year period. The first three teams consisted of the recruits from the police only, then in the fourth term, the course admitted applicants from the army and air force.86 However, trainings held with mixed security forces, especially t­ hose with instructors from the army and police, encountered serious obstacles due to discrepancies in their operational procedures, and a suitable compromise could not be reached. Thus, joint trainings with the police and army took place only once, in 1951, during the Erawan camp years.87 Out of the first group of five hundred trainees, Bill Lair and the Thai police commanders selected fifty men to constitute a unit called the Police Paratroopers (tamruat phonrom) in 1951, which became the Police Aerial Reinforcement Unit (PARU) in 1953.88 In the meantime, Phao helped Bill Lair to open the Naresuan camp in Hua Hin, Prachuap Khirikhan province, directly across from Klai Kangwon Palace, the royal ­family’s summer residence, as a central base for the newly established PARU u ­ nder the Police Motor Vehicle Division of the TNPD. ­After this unit completed another modern weapons training in Ubon Ratchathani and Chiang Mai, PARU and all SEA Supply trainers moved to Hua Hin. The Naresuan camp became the major PARU base from its official opening, presided over by King Bhumibol and Queen Sirikit, on April 27, 1954, to the pre­sent.89 Although President Eisenhower relied more and more on the use of military force in countering communist expansion in Asian countries, he began “recognizing the police as the first line of defense against subversion and insurgency.”90 Eisenhower’s renewed interest in utilizing local police forces in the US anticommunist counterinsurgency program was mainly drawn from the conclusion of the 1953 PSB-­D23 report, which emphasized the significance of village-­level security guarded by the indigenous paramilitary groups.91 Particularly inspired by the Malay experience, Eisenhower came to believe that psychological warfare could yield satisfactory and permanent impacts if indigenous police fought what w ­ ere in essence regional conflicts.92 Members of the Malay Communist Party had continued fighting in the jungles near Thai-­Malay borders, but the numbers of guerrilla fighters rapidly decreased in 1952 ­after the implementation of the Briggs plan that had focused on the control of the alleged communists and their sympathizers’

32  Chapter 1

movements through a resettlement program, and Sir Gerald Templer’s counterinsurgency strategy of winning the hearts and minds of both the Chinese and Malay communists. Immediately ­after the Viet Minh’s invasion of Laos, Phao issued an official order establishing the Border Defense Police (BDP) for the Northeastern Region (tamruat raksa chaidaen phak isan) on May 6, 1953, and the TNPD began training trainees in the Suranaree camp in Nakhon Ratchasima province. To recruit ­those trainees, the TNPD called for volunteers from the Provincial Police in sixty-­ eight provinces and or­ga­nized them into platoons comprised of twelve personnel and one commissioned officer. The first round of weapons and military tactics trainings took place during May 12–17, 1953. During the first year of training, Training Center of the BDP Headquarters in Nakhon Ratchasima received about a thousand volunteers.93 ­After the first eight weeks of training, twenty-­six platoons ­were dispatched to vari­ous towns in northeastern Thailand. In the same year, Burmese military and KMT forces clashed in the north, prompting the Ministry of Interior to establish the Border Defense Police for Phayap Region (tamruat raksa chaidaen phak phayap) with three companies of police forces on August 3.94 Phao took uncontested leadership of the newly founded BDP in May 1953. By the time the Thai government issued an order to formalize the Border Patrol Police in late 1954, the force had grown to ninety-­four platoons in total.95 However, as the size of the existing TDP and the newly founded BDP grew rapidly, their conflicting responsibilities and fields of operations caused confusion.96 For instance, the BDP could receive travel expense reimbursement for their operational trips to the remote border areas, whereas the TDP could not. The reason for this was that while the TDP was considered as a local stationary force, the BDP was seen as the mobile police, and thus only the BDP could receive travel support. Moreover, b ­ ecause of its hasty installation, the military capacity of TDP was far lower than that of the BDP, which had received more streamlined unconventional warfare training in the Suranaree camp before appointment. The line of command was also dif­fer­ent: Phao directly controlled the BDP, while the TDP was ­u nder the supervision of the Provincial Police and regional military commanders.97 To end the confusion between the TDP and BDP, TNPD ordered the integration of both forces into the Border Patrol Police (tamruat trawen chaidaen) on December 15, 1954, and the reor­ga­ni­za­tion became official on January 4, 1955.98 Phao again assumed the position of first commissioner over the unit, which was comprised of 114 platoons.99 Upon establishing the Border Patrol Police General Headquarters, the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Defense, and the American advisory group outlined together the responsibilities of the BPP to patrol the borders, ­counter infiltration, and suppress insurgencies in the border areas dur-

CIA’s Brainchild  33

ing peacetime. In war­time, the force was to support the military and defeat any ­enemy attack.100 ­After the Naresuan Committee had set up a paramilitary force—­t hat is, the TDP—­why did the Thai government and the CIA form the BDP and eventually the BPP? What is the implication of the change of name from “territorial” (dinden) to “border” (chaidaen) between 1951 and 1953? Foremost, it is impor­tant to understand the general po­liti­cal and historical contexts that gave rise to the paramilitary police force—­including the Police Field Force in 1940—­w ith dif­fer­ent names. The word “territorial” means inside Thailand, as encircled by a national boundary, while the word “border” implies the ­actual boundary or the dividing line itself. Therefore, the Territorial Defense Police’s operations could take place anywhere within Thailand’s sovereign territory. The Border Defense Police and Border Patrol Police w ­ ere to operate mainly in the Thai border towns, but sometimes, they could go beyond the Thai boundary to protect Thailand’s territorial borderlines. In this re­spect, the change of the name from “territorial” to “border” implies that the Thai concept of national security had extended from “within the nation” to “intra-­national” or “transnational.” Overall, the separate formations of the Police Field Force, the Territorial Defense Police, the Border Defense Police, and fi­nally, the Border Patrol Police mirror the gradual changes in Thai perceptions of national and regional security. In the five years between the official organ­ization of the BPP in 1955 and its demotion u ­ nder the Provincial Police in 1960, the BPP launched several proj­ects that, in turn, ultimately allowed the unit to survive the most serious crisis in its history—­pos­si­ble disbandment when Sarit staged a coup in 1957 and Phao left Thailand promptly. The primary duties of the BPP ­were to protect the border areas from e­ nemy’s infiltration; to collect intelligence from border p ­ eople; and to suppress conflicts and illegal activities both in peacetime and war­time. In addition to ­t hese missions, the BPP initiated civic actions like building schools and medical clinics for the highland ethnic minorities in the border areas.101 On February 10, 1954, while waiting for the order of the BPP’s establishment to become official, Phao, with King Bhumibol’s approval, ordered the creation of a Volunteer Defense Corps (kong asa raksa dinden, VDC) ­under the Ministry of Interior as a supplementary civilian force for the BPP.102 Although it was the Territorial Defense Department that had proposed the formation of this civilian defense group, Phao appointed the BPP as the main trainer and administrator of the organ­ ization.103 The BPP took responsibility for recruiting, training, and administering the VDC operations from the outset. The BPP also facilitated several military training courses for the Village Defense Corps and other paramilitary forces. Police Col­ o­nel Krachang Phonlaphoem, who l­ater became the third commissioner of the BPP

34  Chapter 1

Headquarters, in 1961–1971, served as the head of the VDC at the time. ­Under Krachang’s leadership, the BPP built the main VDC operational camp, which had 960 officers. Additionally, in BPP training camps, BPP officers trained 2,359 civilians and recruited 555 specialists such as nurses, radio officers, and reserve forces to support the regular VDC operations. Th ­ ese trainees functioned like a village vigilante team in their border hometowns next to Laos and Burma. U ­ ntil the army took over the responsibility of administering this civilian defense organ­ization in 1974, the BPP trained approximately 25,000 VDC members.104 In addition, the BPP or­ga­nized training courses for foreign armed forces. In 1954, for instance, a total of twenty-­four Cambodian military and police officers came to Suranaree camp, Nakhon Ratchasima province, to receive training in weapons and special combat for eight weeks. In 1955, twenty-­six Viet­nam­ese officers consisting of civilian, military, and police received training from the BPP and PARU in basic intelligence, sabotage, tactics, unconventional warfare, special weapons, and small-­unit combat for eight weeks in Naresuan camp.105 Additionally, the BPP provided a special police training course for twenty-­three Viet­ nam­ese commissioned police officers, twenty-­four Cambodian commissioned police officers, and 496 Lao commissioned police officers ­until 1957. According to a former BPP member’s account, when po­liti­cal tensions intensified with the Viet Minh’s invasion of Laos in 1953 and its aftermath, a total of ten thousand Lao forces resided and trained in ­every BPP training camp.106 While developing unconventional warfare strategies and psychological operation programs in Thailand, the BPP served as a transnational agency that supported the US government’s indigenous military buildup in Southeast Asia. Predictably, the BPP gained much popularity among the national and foreign forces in t­ hose years. According to Army Major General Yuth Somboon, the BPP could offer such extensive training to members of the VDC ­because the unit received an enormous amount of US foreign aid and had sufficient manpower.107 Thanks to the Americans’ efforts to build an intimate relationship with the BPP members, former commissioner Police General Suraphon Chulaphram fondly remembered most CIA advisers who came to train the BPP. He noted that ­those American advisers stayed with the BPP for twenty-­four hours, working, sleeping, and eating Thai food together. Sometimes, conflicts occurred between the Thai and US instructors, but differences in their opinions and attitudes w ­ ere easily resolved, and more importantly, the US advisers did not display condescending attitudes t­ oward their Thai counter­parts. This was ­because, according to Suraphon’s understanding, ­those advisers “loved Thai p ­ eople and Thailand very much.”108 Like members of the CIA, other American officials and military officers also showed their interest in and re­spect for the BPP. While Donovan served as US

CIA’s Brainchild  35

ambassador to Thailand in 1953–1954, he often spent weekends in the Lopburi paramilitary training camp with his CIA friends and Phao.109 In addition, the director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, along with a group of American military officers and SEA Supply man­ag­ers, visited the Naresuan camp to inspect PARU’s training pro­gress in 1956.110 ­These informal contacts made Donovan and other CIA members major supporters of Phao and the BPP/PARU. Phao also gained other foreign supports as his police became popu­lar among the Southeast Asian regional forces. Shortly ­after the formation of the BDP, Phao had a meeting with Malay government officials in Singapore in August 1953 and agreed to launch a joint action program of the Thai BDP and Malay constabulary and military to suppress Malay communist insurgencies in the southern Thai and northern Malay border areas.111 On February 4, 1957, Malay Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman paid a visit to inspect BPP trainings in Betong, Yala province, and complimented the Thai police’s guerrilla warfare training.112 The Thai monarchy’s close relationship with Phao and the BPP was also remarkable. As a young but feeble monarch who had succeeded to the throne a­ fter his ­brother’s sudden death, King Bhumibol came to appreciate Phao’s dominance in Thai politics and thus cultivated a close relationship with him. Since his return to Thailand in 1951, the king frequently attended police ceremonies with Phao. Whenever he traveled to Klai Kangwon Palace in Hua Hin for vacations, he visited PARU’s Naresuan camp, which was con­ve­niently located right across from the Palace, and he played sports with the BPP. One of his hobbies was range shooting at that time, and thus the king often visited the BPP’s camps ­either in Hua Hin or Lopburi to receive instruction from professional BPP and PARU shooters.113 On November 11, 1955, the king and queen embarked on their first, twenty-­day rural tour of the northeastern provinces. Despite the tight schedule, the king and queen made a visit to two BPP camps in the region: the Suranaree camp in Nakhon Ratchasima province on November 4, 1955, and the Senironayut camp in Udon Thani province on November 8, 2011.114 Apparently, this direct contact with the king produced profound loyalty among the BPP and PARU and a desire to protect the monarchy from any threats.115 The BPP and PARU could enjoy both the prestige and the privilege that came with being a paramilitary force trained in high-­end armaments by American war veterans and a distinctive armed force that received special attention from the monarchy.116 More importantly, the head of ­t hese units, Phao Siyanon, was one of the most influential figures within the Thai military government at that time. But the dramatic growth of the police force and the increased stockpile of modern armaments u ­ nder Phao’s leadership, along with the support for Phao given by the United States and royal f­ amily, rankled Army General Sarit Thanarat. In the

36  Chapter 1

eyes of Sarit and other army officials, Phao was using the police department as a cover to build his own private military that could rival Sarit’s army. Phao’s indigenization of the American Cold War mission by developing the BPP came to an end when Sarit’s suspicion and resentment reached a peak in September 1957.

Searching for New Partners, 1957–1962 Sarit’s coup in 1957 considerably changed the characteristics of the BPP. On the night of the coup, Sarit’s army troops swept through Bangkok and the CIA station. CIA advisers spent the night burning documents and most advisers left the country soon ­after fearing Sarit’s revenge. Thereafter, SEA Supply Com­pany kept a low profile for months.117 Scholars see the army’s suspicion of and resentment ­toward the BPP as originating during Phibun’s second administration, when he attempted to counterbalance Sarit’s growing power by supporting Phao and his police. Many agree that the BPP and PARU ­were po­liti­cal instruments created to help Phao strengthen his power over the armed forces. Alfred McCoy furthermore contends that the unit was specifically utilized for expanding Phao’s and the CIA’s drug business, which in turn fed and enlarged his po­liti­cal networks.118 The intense rivalry between Sarit and Phao has been regarded as the main reason for Sarit’s demotion of the BPP a­ fter the 1957 coup. Retired Thai BPP members remember the 1957 coup as a catastrophe. A former deputy commissioner to the BPP Headquarters describes the coup as “the po­liti­cal storm that blew harshly to the extent it almost abolished our standing at that time.”119 Nakhon Siwanit, commander of PARU in 1957, observed that “if the director-­general Phao prepared PARU as his po­liti­cal force, then he should have called the combat unit to Bangkok with the armaments, which w ­ ere far superior to that of the army. Since I was a commander at that time, I should have known about the coup attempt beforehand. But I had no clue!”120 Not knowing what was g­ oing on in Bangkok—­even the fact that eight members of PARU w ­ ere killed on the night of the coup—­t hose in Hua Hin ­were following their routine. That midnight, PARU received an order from the army’s supreme command that suspended all the police forces’ activities. Two days l­ ater, army commanders came to the Naresuan camp to confiscate weapons, explosives, and parachutes, and left several army guards in the camp. Up to this point, according to Nakhon, members of PARU did not realize how the coup would affect their f­ uture, but they could at least sense that their autonomy had vanished. Shortly a­ fter, the Thai newspapers began publishing stories about an aborted coup by PARU, or “black panther” (suea dam), a name that came from a sign on one of the buildings in the Naresuan camp that says, “We are gentlemen in the camp,

CIA’s Brainchild  37

Figure 1.1. PARU’s Signs in Naresuan Camp, Hua Hin

but are wild tigers in the battlefield” (rao pen suphap burut nai khai te pen suea rai nai sanam rop). (See Figures 1.1 and 1.2.) According to Nakhon Siwanit, it was the Phim Thai newspaper that first used “black panther” when reporting about the alleged PARU conspiracy to stage a coup u ­ nder the command of the CIA and Phao.121 Most of the articles that covered the PARU story highlighted its outstanding military strength as well as its extraordinary stockpile of modern armaments in a way that could legitimize Sarit’s put down of the attempted coup by a mysterious force ­under the CIA and Phao.122 Without hesitation, Sarit defanged Phao’s police forces. On October  11, 1957, one of Sarit’s close ju­nior officers, Brigadier General Chan Angsuchot, received a phone call from Army General Sawai Sawaisenyakon, the then interim director-­general of the TNPD. Sawai asked Chan to become acting commissioner of the BPP Headquarters overseeing a large-­scale reform to reduce their military prowess and reor­ga­nize them to be a regular security force. In addition, since the BPP and PARU received a massive amount of American funding, Chan was assigned to manage the US aid and assistance to t­hese units and the TNPD.123 The Ministry of Interior order that had established BPP ­General Headquarters was revoked on December 27, 1957.124 The Police Motor ­Vehicle Division where PARU belonged was dissolved, and most heavy weapons and modern vehicles in the division w ­ ere confiscated and sent to the army. The majority of PARU’s forces ­were transferred to the Phitsanulok military camp and renamed a “special battalion” (kongphan phiset), while the remaining PARU platoons ­were placed ­under the BPP.125 Shortly a­ fter the second coup in October 1958, Sarit assumed the post of TNPD director-­general, and in 1960, he demoted the BPP to fall u ­ nder the command of the Provincial Police.126 The BPP was renamed the Border Provincial Police (tamruat

38  Chapter 1

Figure 1.2. PARU’s Black Panther Statue in Naresuan Camp, Hua Hin

phuthon chaidaen). At least the BPP and PARU w ­ ere secured from disbandment, although they ­were disarmed. The rivalry between Sarit and Phao and Sarit’s resentment of Phao might not have been the only trigger to Sarit’s taking action to emasculate Phao’s police, including the BPP. In fact, the Thai military’s sense of insecu-

CIA’s Brainchild  39

rity about their own military capacity when compared with t­hese modern paramilitary police units also contributed. The military’s fear of the BPP and PARU was well demonstrated in Army General Praphat Charusathien’s response to a request to reinstate the BPP Headquarters in the early 1970s. He marked that he was still suspicious about the princi­ples of BPP ­because it operated like military. He added that, if reestablished, this police organ­ization would be still the “up in the air” (luk phi luk khon) force.127 The reestablishment of the BPP became a “banned ” (tong ham) issue among the armed forces.128 The period between Sarit’s coup in 1957 and the BPP’s institutional restoration in 1972, therefore, became a critical test period for the BPP to prove its contribution to Thailand’s national security. Although the demotion order forced the unit to become a subordinate to the Provincial Police from 1960, the BPP could maintain some autonomy from its superiors since its duties and activities could not be assumed by the Provincial Police. The newly founded Border Provincial Police Division secured administration and support subdivisions, headed by the Provincial Police commissioner.129 Despite their precarious position a­ fter the demotion and loss of the Thai and American patrons, the BPP did not terminate its operations ­after the 1957 coup. Instead, the BPP moved its operational focus to “civic action” programs in the remote areas of the north and northeast regions. Officially, the BPP began its first civic action, Development and Aid for Hill Tribe P ­ eople and P ­ eople Far from Communication (kan songkhro chaopa chaokhao lae prachachon klai khamanakhom), ­under the auspices of the Ministry of Interior in 1956.130 Phibun had set up a “Committee to Aid Hill Tribe ­People and ­People Far from Communication” (khanakammakan songkhro prachachon klai khamanakhom), and the TNPD assigned the BPP to the proj­ect by Ministry of Interior order 653/2499 on August 7, 1956.131 The BPP—­also known as the Gendarme Police Force at that time—­prepared a report for the committee in both Thai and En­glish entitled Aid Given to Hill Tribe ­People and ­People Far from Communication (kan songkhro chaopa chaokhao lae prachachon klai khamanakhom) to introduce its ser­vices for the highland minorities and also to seek material support from vari­ ous governmental organ­izations. According to this 1956 report, the central goals of the BPP’s action plan ­were to provide security and protection; give advice on sanitation and health and provide medicine and medical treatment; establish schools for ­children and adults; distribute ­free educational materials; give advice on how to improve their way of living and introduce modern techniques to enhance agriculture, trade, and lifestyles; and provide better communication tools, such as radios. Why were these aids necessary for the p ­ eople in the remote areas? The author of the report remarks that if ­these “uneducated” ­people w ­ ere not “led to the right way” by the Thai government, they “may be a tool of the ­enemy.” In addition, since

40  Chapter 1

they ­were accustomed to jungle living, the BPP could “use them as guide and [to] carry ­things” in exchange for fair wages, and they would become the “eyes and ears” for the Thai authority during peacetime. During war­time, the “Hill P ­ eople” could help the armed forces by guiding them and transporting supplies, and if they received proper training, they could also be “used to help in the combat.”132 The action plans proposed and implemented by the BPP ­were intended to prepare to expand the state surveillance by the Thai government and also the operational bases for another sponsor of its proj­ect: the CIA. The first target population was the ­people in the remote border areas of northern Thailand, especially chao khao, or the so-­called hill tribes, who at that time neither showed a sense of belonging to the Thai nation-­state nor confined how they obtained their livelihoods within Thailand’s borders. The original objective of the CIA in mobilizing the highland minorities in northern Thailand was to obtain intelligence about the Chinese communist infiltration and to identify areas for f­uture operations b ­ ehind the Chinese ­enemy lines, at least u ­ ntil the end of the 1950s. In addition, the CIA wanted to control the highland minorities who ­were the major opium cultivators and traders. As Alfred McCoy exhaustively investigated in his book The Politics of Heroin, the KMT forces stationed in the Thai-­Burma border areas utilized the opium trade as a source of funding for their b ­ attle against the communists and for private ventures. Leaders of the BPP did not perceive the highland minorities as a simpleminded, under-­civilized population. Police General Suraphon Chulaphram and Police Lieutenant General Charoenrit Chamratromran ­were well aware that the highland minorities w ­ ere accustomed to jungle living. If fighting ­were to take place and the minority ­peoples w ­ ere to be mobilized by the enemies in the mountainous border areas of Thailand, their military strength would not be negligible.133 Suraphon mentioned that during the First Indochina War, both the French and Viet­nam­ese mobilized the ethnic minorities as their foot soldiers, and that ­these forces ­were very fierce.134 Similarly, Charoenrit warned of the potential danger posed by the ethnic minority groups based on his own experience during the Pacific War: I got a lesson about the hill tribes from the Pacific War. The military forces u ­ nder my command w ­ ere ambushed by Musser [Lahu] tribes. Eight soldiers ­were killed on site and only one survived. ­Later, I went to inspect the ambush site but found only twenty bullet casings. The corpses ­were severely damaged as far as I can remember. The military had superior weapons to the ­enemy though.135 Oliver Gordon Young, author of The Hill Tribes of Northern Thailand and a good friend and colleague of Charoenrit in the 1960s, recalled Charoenrit’s telling him

CIA’s Brainchild  41

this story in person and saying that “thousands of Thai and Japa­nese soldiers died” by Lahu guerrilla leader Sara Chakaw’s relentless attacks to their camps and convoys. Then Charoenrit told Gordon that the “Lahu broke my back” at that time.136 ­These perceptions ultimately gave the impetus to send PARU survey teams and their foreign advisers to the northern and northeastern borders. At the end of 1955, thirty PARU teams w ­ ere dispatched to survey the conditions of remote villages and to find a site for building a Border Information Center (sun ruam khao chaidaen, BIC).137 According to PARU’s account, the basic objectives of establishing the BIC were to prepare the operational ground for unconventional warfare in the f­ uture; to facilitate intelligence gathering by befriending the villa­gers; to launch basic civic action programs such as building schools and providing medical ser­vice; and to expand the police surveillance over the population and areas of responsibility by stationing a lightly armed patrol team t­ here.138 As soon as the BIC camp building was prepared, the members of PARU went out to search for c­ hildren in the village. At first, they could find only three or four ­children willing to reside with strangers. PARU provided accommodation for ­t hese ­children in the BIC camp and began teaching them the Thai language. Soon the number of students increased to two hundred. Based on this success, PARU-­BIC teams managed to build a total of eleven centers in the remote border areas of northern and northeastern Thailand.139 Not long ­after, the BIC proj­ect developed into a larger and more durable proj­ ect: the Border Patrol Police school. The first official BPP school opened on January 7, 1956, in Chiang Rai province and was named Border Patrol Police Sponsored School No. 1 (rongrian tamruat trawen chaidaen bamrung thi nueng). In the first year of the proj­ect, the BPP opened eigh­teen schools. From 1956, the Ministry of Education supplied textbooks and notebooks, pencils and slate boards, rulers and erasers to the schools. Similarly, the Public Health Department provided medi­cations such as pain relievers and anti-­malaria tablets to be distributed among the highland minorities by the BPP in 1956. The Public Welfare Department gave four thousand pieces of clothing in early 1957.140 In addition, the BPP began receiving private donations, and soon, the royal ­family became the mediating channel between the donors and the BPP.141 The BPP’s school-­building efforts ­were temporarily halted by Sarit’s coup in September of 1957. The Ministry of Education and the Public Welfare Division pulled their financial and material support for the BPP schools. Nevertheless, the number of BPP schools increased drastically in the years following Sarit’s coup: between the first coup in September 1957 and second coup on October 20, 1958, sixty-­five new BPP schools w ­ ere built. Even a­ fter the second coup by Sarit in 1958, the BPP managed to build some sixty more schools before being demoted to

42  Chapter 1

operating u ­ nder the Provincial Police in 1960, implying that the resources for building schools did not come only from the Thai government side.142 In this way, the school proj­ect became the main emblem of BPP civic actions. Overall, t­ hose e­ arlier civic actions allowed the BPP to gain substantial knowledge and experience of the border villages. In addition, the unit increased its efforts to build close relationships with highland villa­gers during this period by learning local dialects, volunteering to assist in community proj­ects in remote northern villages, and fraternizing with villa­gers as much as pos­si­ble.143 ­After the 1957 coup, the BPP increased its civic action programs to prove that it was the one and only force that could sustain the remote area development proj­ects. Chan Angsuchot, commissioner of BPP Headquarters, came to learn that civic action programs carried out by the BPP had contributed to building a bridge between the government authority and the border p ­ eople. Chan thus began persuading the military to sustain the BPP and its civic actions. In this context, the BPP’s shift from a paramilitary intelligence unit into a development agency for remote areas was rather smooth. The BPP asserted its institutional legitimacy to Sarit and other military groups with its contribution to expanding the police surveillance through civic actions in the border areas. Its shift of operational focus to civic actions was expected to reduce the army’s suspicion of the BPP’s military strength. Interestingly enough, the desired recognition did not come from Sarit’s new military regime. The BPP’s chance at recovery came from the Thai royal ­family.

The Rise of Indigenous Cold War Patrons Our monarchy is quite distinctive from ­t hose in other countries. In one dimension it is an institution that stays above politics. Yet, in a spiritual dimension, the monarchy is a persuasive force that is more effective than the law itself. Apparently, as a constitutional monarch, His Majesty has no duty or power to relieve po­liti­cal gridlocks. But in crises when all existing systems are paralysed and failed to function properly, only His Majesty can promptly restore harmony to society. —­Dr. Sumet Tantivelkul, June 13, 2006

The P ­ eople’s Party led by Phibun Songkhram and Pridi Banomyong staged a coup in 1932 and abolished absolute monarchy, and the monarchy of Thailand was transformed to a constitutional monarchy in which the king became a symbolic head of state. A ­ fter King Prajadhipok (Rama VII) abdicated the throne in 1935, Ananda Mahidol, a 10-­year-­old nephew of the king living in Switzerland, succeeded Rama VII, but the new king was found dead in his bedroom in 1946.

CIA’s Brainchild  43

Ananda Mahidol’s younger ­brother Prince Bhumibol Adulyadej became a new monarch (Rama IX) and, a­ fter a brief stay in Thailand a­ fter ascending the throne, he returned to Switzerland to finish his studies. A council of regents was appointed, and the prime minister and the national assembly ran the government in his stead. ­After the Radio Coup in November 1951, a formal recognition from the US government of the new Thai military regime posed a hurdle that the coup group had to overcome.144 On December 2, 1951, with his studies in Switzerland completed, the twenty-­t hree-­year-­old King Bhumibol Adulyadej returned with his ­family to Thailand. To the coup members’ ­great relief, the king met with cabinet members the day a­ fter his arrival and heard an explanation from then–­Prime Minister Phibun Songkhram about the coup and related changes in the government. In his speech of greeting to the king, Phibun stated that he would transfer to the king the authority he had previously held as head of the regency. In response, the king said that he would cooperate with the government.145 He then assigned Phibun to lead the pro­cess of reor­ga­niz­ing the cabinet. The coup cabinet resigned on the night of December 4, so that the king could go through the constitutional formality of appointing new ministries. Thereafter, the government could petition for the recognition of foreign nations. As shown in his prompt po­liti­cal moves from the day of his return, King Bhumibol did not stay above politics. Although he said that he “learned that politics is a filthy business,” as the rest of the book ­w ill show, the king became a beloved ­father of the nation ­because of his direct and indirect involvement in politics.146 The American Cold War crusade in Southeast Asia indeed offered an opportunity to King Bhumibol to construct the images of benevolent, legitimate leadership. Even when he was least power­f ul, surrounded by ambitious military politicians including Phibun, who was one of the leaders of the ­People’s Party that had abolished the absolute monarchy in 1932, King Bhumibol was always defended by the Thai belief in dhammaraja, “the selfless king who rules by the Buddhist code of dhamma (or dhar­ma).”147 A number of foreign observers also observed that Thailand had a higher degree of national identity thanks to “a long tradition of monarchy, the dominance of Buddhism as a national religion, and the absence of a colonial heritage.”148 The institution was already endowed with a source of legitimacy, and it contributed to national unity, as well as being intimately bound up in Thai culture and tradition.149 The Thai monarchy was also an ardent promoter of anticommunism. This traditional institution was u ­ nder harsh attack from communist and progressive public discourses in the postcolonial period. Jit Poumisak, a preeminent Thai radical, referred to the king as the “big Land-­Lord of saktina” (feudalist system) in

44  Chapter 1

the late 1950s.150 Although Jit did not confine his criticism against the saktina to the king, he indeed raised a consciousness that it was the king and his extended and extensive f­ amily “who monopolized the ruling class’s privileges and rights to exploitation.”151 His provocative works that defined the traditional role of king as the pinnacle of the feudal system triggered fierce debates. Consequently, Jit was accused of being a communist and arrested in 1957. The military government justified Jit’s six-­year imprisonment by saying that communists ­were antiroyalist and thus needed to be isolated from the public.152 Alongside the persecution of Jit Poumisak, merciless communist hunting committed by the military and police from the 1950s shows why the monarchy could not coexist with communism. Communism denied the legitimacy of the monarchy ­because the institution was innately feudalist, and this thesis alone was threatening enough to make the royal f­amily staunchly anticommunist.153 King Bhumibol expressed his aversion to communism in his interview with Look magazine in 1967: Communism is impractical. Life is not each to his needs. The one who works ­today should get the money and the goods, not the one who ­doesn’t work. Communism can be worse than the Nazis or the Fascists. In practice, it is more terrible than a dictatorship. If, however, a dictator is a good man, he can do many ­t hings for the ­people. For a short while, Mussolini did many good ­t hings for the Italian ­people. But once he was bitten by the “bug of empire,” he was finished.154 Given the young Thai king’s active re­sis­tance to communism together with his traditional prestige, the US government was certain that he could serve as a symbol of anticommunism in the region and become a reliable ally. The American po­liti­cal scientist Thomas Lobe states that the CIA encouraged and nurtured the close relationship between the BPP, PARU, and the royal ­family ­because such a strategic alliance with an “institution that has traditional re­spect and reverence” would give “their long-­term efforts greater legitimacy as po­liti­cal leaders come and go,” and thus ­t hese new paramilitary groups would be seen “as the protector of King and country.”155 By contrast, Phibun did not want the royal ­family to return to the public scene and thus actively sought to restrain the role of monarchy in both politics and public spheres.156 It was only in 1955, a­ fter several debates with the palace, that Phibun reluctantly allowed the royal ­family to conduct rural tours. On November 11, 1955, the king and queen embarked upon their first rural tour to the northeastern provinces.157 This trip turned out to be a tremendous success. It aroused con-

CIA’s Brainchild  45

siderable enthusiasm among rural p ­ eople who could physically see the king and queen for the first time. Film footage and photographic rec­ords show p ­ eople lining the roads or crowding t­ emple courtyards as King Bhumibol and Queen Sirikit proceeded from one place to another, their own image burnished in the pro­cess. Sarit did not overlook this grandiose drama. When he staged a coup against Phibun, Sarit already had confidence in the king’s approval for his regime b ­ ecause he was well aware of the royal f­ amily’s antipathy ­toward Phibun. He remarked, “What should the king say—­every­thing was already finished” right ­after the coup.158 To Sarit, the monarchy could function as the most power­f ul po­liti­cal legitimizer of his regime and also as the symbolic repre­sen­ta­tion of Thai national unity.159 Therefore, Sarit sought to promote the royal ­family’s social activities, urging that “it has become internationally well-­ known that Thailand is lucky to have a king worthy of worship.”160 Sarit encouraged the royal ­family to travel to ­every corner of Thailand and abroad. The royal ­couple’s second rural tour to the northern provinces came in March 1958. A year ­later, they traveled to the south.161 Before the Thai royal ­family actively engaged in the rural development programs in the 1960s, they had focused on charitable activities. One of the earliest royal charity organ­izations, the Ananda Mahidol Scholarship (Thun Ananda Mahidon), was launched in 1955 to assist medical students to study abroad. In 1959, the scholarship program became the first royally sponsored foundation, Ananda Mahidol Scholarship Foundation.162 Additionally, the royal f­ amily made regular donations to other scholarships, t­ emples, and poor hospitals and schools in provincial areas. By representing themselves as generous donors for the impoverished and socially, eco­nom­ically, and po­liti­cally marginalized population, the royal ­family attempted to establish the image of a virtuous patron of the nation.163 At the same time, they also strived to create a po­liti­cal network by reaching out to the influential politicians and elites. The palace became interested in the BPP as early as the mid-1950s, when Phao was exerting dominant influence over politics and the United States was assisting this police group in becoming an elite paramilitary force in the region. The royal ­family had known about the existence of the BPP from the very early years of its formation, and King Bhumibol and Queen Sirikit had often mingled with the PARU force in Hua Hin. In addition to his personal visits to the PARU camp, the king launched his first rural development initiatives to build a communal road in Huai Mongkhon village in 1952 and borrowed bulldozers from the PARU camp in Hua Hin to that end.164 The royal ­family’s support for the BPP did not cease even a­ fter Phao left Thailand. The king and queen made official visits to the BPP’s Camp Dararatsami in Chiang Mai on

46  Chapter 1

March 9, 1958, and the Camp Ingkhayutthaborihan in Pattani on March 19, 1959, to encourage the BPP to continue its activities in their areas of responsibility regions.165 While administrative reforms and scandals surrounding Sarit’s illegal wealth consumed the Thai government ­after his death, the royal ­family quietly stepped into the b ­ attle of modernization by publicly supporting the BPP’s civic actions. Expanding the BPP’s civic action programs with the lucrative American support seemed to be a further way for the young royal c­ ouple to gain the a po­liti­cal power base among the rural population. The royal ­family began their regular trips to Chiang Mai, where the Thai army built a new royal residence called Bhubing Palace in the m ­ iddle of Doi Suthep mountain nearby the sacred t­ emple Wat Phrathat Doi Suthep. Bhubing Palace became a royal winter residence in 1959 and was where royal proj­ects ­were conceived.166 Charoenrit, then a BPP commander in charge of civic action, tells an anecdote about how in early 1962, the king went to stay overnight in Bhubing Palace. When the king’s motorcade approached the palace, BPP teachers who brought a group of Hmong students from Doi Pui hill ordered the c­ hildren to sing the royal anthem (sansoen phrabarami). The king’s motorcade ­stopped in front of the students, and the king asked his aide who had taught ­t hese “hill tribe” c­ hildren to sing the anthem. The aide answered that it was the BPP teachers.167 Not long ­after, the royal ­couple made a visit to the BPP Area Division 5 camp in Chiang Mai and gave 13,500 baht (equivalent to around 637 US dollars) to build more schools for the highland minorities ­under royal patronage.168 From the early 1960s, whenever the royal ­family made a trip to the provinces, the BPP unit escorted them by he­li­cop­ter and by land vehicles. King Bhumibol frequently used PARU’s Bo Fai air base in Hua Hin to travel elsewhere.169 Likewise, whenever the Princess ­Mother Sinakharinthra, the ­mother of King Bhumibol, attended opening ceremonies of BPP schools and health clinics in the remote areas, BPP members accompanied her in he­li­cop­ters. All t­ hese he­li­cop­ter trips ­were provided by vari­ous airline companies and funded officially by the United States Operations Mission (USOM), but it was the CIA that actually paid the fee .170 On August 27, 1964, while Bill Lair and PARU w ­ ere undertaking secret missions in Laos, the king summoned Lair and eigh­teen members of PARU to Klai Kangwon palace and gave him a medal of honor.171 It might have been to the royal ­family’s advantage to have an elite, but not politicized, force on their side to shore up the fragile institution against fierce power competition among the military generals. Although King Bhumibol did not have direct control over the BPP, t­ here w ­ ere certain benefits he could gain from it. First,

CIA’s Brainchild  47

the unit was furnished with American high-­end armaments and financial support, though it lacked a­ ctual po­liti­cal leadership a­ fter Phao left Thailand. The size of the force was manageable and made it relatively inconspicuous, but at the same time, the unit was highly trained in unconventional warfare and psychological operations that could be con­ve­niently utilized in propagating the legitimacy and influence of the monarchy among the larger populace. Moreover, its civic action programs had been further expanded and strengthened by the BPP’s accumulated experiences and outstanding knowledge about Thai border areas and p ­ eople, and USOM and the CIA w ­ ere in f­ avor of continuing their sponsorship of the BPP. The US support and its relatively apo­liti­cal, inconspicuous standing made the BPP a prospective candidate for a private royal force. By transforming the CIA’s brainchild left without a Thai patron into a development agency ­under the royal guidance, the royal f­ amily sought to reinvigorate monarchical power in the Thai society. In other words, the Thai royal ­family “indigenized” the American local cold warrior and made them its own force. In sum, both the Thai military leaders and the United States saw that the revival of monarchical influence would be useful. The United States believed the Thai monarchy could play a key role in its anticommunist campaign, while the Thai military elites, particularly Sarit, actively utilized the monarchy to legitimize their regime. Likewise, the monarch was an anticommunist who saw a new opportunity in the growing influence of the Cold War at home and abroad. Increasing popu­lar and military support for the monarchy and the US government’s friendly attitude ­toward it encouraged the royal ­couple to further extend their roles into the po­liti­cal arena and transform the traditional monarch into a “king of development” and “builder of nation,” essentially making this institution a sole power legitimizer in the age of modernization and nation-­building.172 King Bhumibol had already hinted to the US government that he would take sole leadership in building the royalist Thai nation when he spoke in the US Congress in June 1960, saying that “we are grateful for American aid. But we intend one day to do without it.”173 This chapter has explored the historical and po­liti­cal context in which the Thai ruling elite and the US government came to see each other as an indispensable partner for ensuring their po­liti­cal domination in the domestic and international arenas, which in turn set the stage for indigenizing the American Cold War by the Thai ruling elite. The Thai military proactively collaborated with the US government and adapted American anticommunist campaigns, and in the pro­ cess, the Thai Border Patrol Police was formed. Although the BPP experienced a

48  Chapter 1

life-­or-­death crisis and lost its Thai patron, Phao, when Sarit staged a coup in 1957, it would soon find a more power­f ul patron: the monarchy. King Bhumibol and his f­amily chose to adopt the BPP as its symbolic royal force to ensure its survival in a dramatically changing po­liti­cal environment at home and abroad. How the Thai royal f­ amily indigenized the American Cold War is the subject of the following chapter.

C HA P T E R T WO

Building a ­Human Border, 1962–1980

We must become guardians of the development pro­cess rather than custodians of the status quo. We must be pro-­modernization as well as anti-­communist. —­Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Department of State’s Foreign Ser­vice Institute, June 11, 1962

Modernization was, and perhaps still is, a nation-­building ideology. Both in the United States and in newly emerged states, the ideology has been almost unanimously agreed upon, aggressively mobilized, and widely advocated in building postcolonial nation-­states from the dawn of the Cold War to the pre­sent. The American historian Nils Gilman argues that US foreign policymakers and social scientists believed modernization, or “development,” to be the generic solution for the increasing po­liti­cal instabilities and uncertainties in the postcolonial world.1 Throughout the Cold War, American social scientists’ modernization theories ­were the ideological foundation of the anticommunist counterinsurgency strategies, as is well summed up by the key slogan of the Office of Public Safety (OPS) in the United States Agency for International Development (USAID): “development for security.” Modernization theories justified anticommunist counterinsurgency strategies that focused on controlling not only communists but also anti-­government movements. The Thai Border Patrol Police (BPP) and the royal ­family indigenized this ideological backbone of the American Cold War crusade in Southeast Asia to promote royalist nationalism among the border population and the Thais. Popularization of the modernization theory in the 1950s reflects major changes in Washington’s outlook on foreign aid policies. ­After a ceasefire agreement was signed on the Korean peninsula in mid-1953, Eisenhower asserted that US foreign aid policies should return to “normality” and encourage “private initiative, vigorous competition, and the f­ ree market” in the global economy.2 The attempt was halted by the Soviet Union’s so-­called economic offensive. To persuade developing nation-­states that socialism could save the p ­ eople from protracted poverty, 49

50  Chapter 2

the Soviet Union began providing development funds to Asia, Africa, the ­Middle East, and Latin Amer­i­ca from 1954 onward.3 To ­counter this “po­liti­cal penetration in disguise,” the Eisenhower administration established the International Cooperation Administration (ICA) in June 1955 to prepare for the “economic phase of the Cold War” and shift from the stance of “trade, not aid” to that of “trade and aid.” Despite changes in the outlook and strategic framework of the foreign aid policy, US foreign aid fell 23 ­percent in real terms between 1953 and 1960, which invited harsh criticism from a young, ambitious senator from Mas­sa­chu­setts.4 With suggestions from his policy mentor, Walt Whitman Rostow, John F. Kennedy’s “De­cade of Development” policy envisioned the 1960s to be the “period when many less developed nations make the transitions to self-­sustained growth.”5 Throughout de­cades of promoting his modernization theory, Rostow argued that the transition from a “traditional” to a “modern” society in developing countries was “inherently painful and volatile.” However, this difficulty could be assuaged if the developing nations w ­ ere to “concentrate their reactive nationalist impulses on the task of modernization itself as opposed to other pos­si­ble expressions of nationalist sentiment.” At the same time, if the United States, as an advanced, modern society, ­were to “encourage . . . ​[a] concentration of scarce talents, resources, and po­liti­cal energies as well as to provide supplementary external sources,” then ­these transitional countries would gain enough time “to find their feet and go forward on their own.”6 As Mark Haefele, remarks, Kennedy’s “De­cade of Development” not only “significantly changed U.S. foreign policy” but also “contributed to the globalization of the Cold War.”7 Following the vision of the new president and his policy mentor, Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act on September 4, 1961. The act reor­ga­nized the US foreign assistance program, which had been run by loosely coalesced interdepartmental organ­izations including the ICA and separated military from economic aid, and replaced it with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in the same year. According to USAID’s own history, President Kennedy understood “the need to unite development into a single agency responsible for administering aid to foreign countries to promote social and economic development.” Once the agency was launched, “international development assistance opportunities grew tremendously.”8 When the new foreign assistance act was on the ­table, Kennedy proposed $4 billion dollars for the fiscal year 1962 consisting of $1.6 billion for military spending and $2.4 billion for economic assistance.9 With the installment of USAID, the Kennedy administration could successfully secure the economic and military aid up to a total of $6.9 billion dollars in 1962.10 Critics of American modernization theory during the Cold War by and large agree that it had two innate weaknesses. The first derived from being its “reduc-

Human Border  51

tionist in its conception of change abroad, fundamentally conservative in its politics, and blindly reflective of the po­liti­cal and social prejudices of the mid-­ century American Establishment.”11 Modernization theorists including Rostow assumed that t­here exists a common, singular path of global historical change from “traditional” to “modern” socie­ties. In the pro­cess, as Burton Kaufman argues, modernization theorists failed to consider that the goals of “anticommunism, stability, and democracy ­were not necessarily compatible.”12 The reductionist tendency of modernization theory, which does not take into account the multifaceted nature of the local socie­ties of postcolonial states, leaves “a pair of abstract and hardly precise binary distinctions” between the sophisticated, complex, and rapidly changing world.13 Second, the theory served the growing American sense of being, in the words of Kennedy, “a wise leader and good neighbor in the interdependent community of f­ ree nations.”14 The main motivation of the Kennedy administration in promoting increased American assistance and aid for less-­developed nations around the globe was to safeguard American national security and economic interests and preserve “a world environment within which our [Americans’] form of demo­cratic society can persist and develop.”15 Michael Latham argues that modernization theory could function powerfully in the 1960s ­because the theory “promised to accelerate the ‘pro­gress’ of a world requiring Amer­i­ca’s resources and enlightened tutelage.”16 In this re­spect, American modernization resembled the civilizing mission of Eu­ro­pean imperialism. Regardless of its weaknesses, this American ideology of modernization proved attractive not only to US foreign policymakers but also to the ruling elites in Southeast Asia during the Cold War b ­ ecause modernization helped them justify the launching of anticommunist counterinsurgency campaigns before engaging in po­ liti­cal reforms. To ensure its successful implementation, American anticommunist counterinsurgency programs emphasized the role of the state and strong leadership in transforming an unstable traditional society into a modern, stable one. Thus numerous dictatorships ­were largely tolerated, if not encouraged, in the non-­ Western underdeveloped world.17 Why then did the Thai Border Patrol Police, not the military, became the “first line of defense against subversion and insurgency” in the American Cold War crusade in Southeast Asia? Generally speaking, both the military and the police are state forces whose primary duty is defending security: The military fights the external e­ nemy, and the police fight the ­enemy within. Although their use of arms is quite ­limited compared to the military’s use of massively destructive weapons, only police can legally open fire on suspects or civilians. They can also dissolve violent demonstrations with their legalized form of coercion.18 Moreover, while military operations

52  Chapter 2

are confined to the battlefield, the police force function extends to all of the society. The police are ubiquitous in the daily life of society, and their ubiquity is accepted as normal and mundane. In this way, police, the force that Robert Storch called “domestic missionaries,” represent noncoercive state control via their constant presence in the society, which in turn inculcates order among ordinary citizens.19 It was during the Eisenhower presidency that indigenous police forces became the “first line of defense against subversion and insurgency.”20 Assisted by the United States, indigenous police ­were mobilized to carry out the US anticommunist counterinsurgency proj­ects overseas. To help guard national security, the Eisenhower administration established the Civil Police Administration (CPA) ­under the ICA. While most CPA programs focused on developing police ser­v ices such as administration, rec­ords, traffic control, and other technical duties, they could also be used as a cover for CIA operations, as was the case in Thailand ­after Sarit’s coup in 1957.21 The role of the local police as guardians of internal security gained even more favorable recognition from the Kennedy administration. In June 1961, speaking in front of eighty multinational military and police officers at Fort Bragg, Rostow asserted: “Communism is best understood as a disease of the transition to modernization.”22 ­Because he identified communist guerrilla warfare as the medium of transmitting this fatal disease to the minds of the ­people in the traditional, underdeveloped countries, Rostow asserted that a guerrilla war “must be fought primarily by ­those on the spot.”23 Accordingly, Kennedy made it clear that the police, not the military, should lead his administration’s anticommunist campaign in underdeveloped countries. In 1962, Kennedy’s administration reor­ga­nized the CPA into the Office of Public Safety (OPS) ­under the auspices of USAID and vested OPS with the responsibility of coordinating all US assistance to police and paramilitary groups24 so that they could function as bridges between government and citizens and defenders of demo­cratic institutions. Given such a broad mandate, the range of assignments delegated to OPS continued to broaden accordingly. OPS established the International Police Acad­emy in Washington, DC, to train “representative police administrators from friendly nations.” Over about a de­cade of its existence between 1963 and 1974, 5,024 students from seventy-­seven countries ­were trained and graduated.25 The training of modern police also took place “on the spot” of ­battle, redefining roles of police forces throughout the Cold War. By mid-1973, 114 professional police advisers ­under the auspices of the Public Safety Division (PSD) of the United States Operations Mission ­were operating in eigh­teen non-­Western countries.26 A USAID administrator said in 1971 that the police are “not only agents

Human Border  53

of order; they are also the agents of change” who help “shift dissatisfaction from the barricade to the ballot.”27 In its termination report submitted to USAID-­Washington in mid-1974, the PSD of the United States Operations Mission to Thailand concluded that its sixteen-­year-­long support of the Thai National Police Department (TNPD) enhanced the law enforcement and counterinsurgency capability of the Thai police. Between 1957–1973, the US government spent over $91.4 million to improve the TNPD and hired a total of 620 American personnel to work with the Thai policemen to achieve t­ hese goals. According to the termination report, the majority of the US effort between 1957 and 1965 was directed ­toward the Border Patrol Police, the Central Investigations Bureau, the Special Branch, the Immigration Division, and the Metropolitan Police.28 From 1965, while a major portion of the PSD bud­get as well as professional assistance w ­ ere redistributed to other security-­ oriented proj­ects, the PSD continued providing financial and material support for the BPP’s Remote Area Security Development proj­ect. Overall, about 71 personnel out of a total 620 (11.5 ­percent) w ­ ere assigned to training the BPP between 1957 and 1973, although its manpower had hardly exceeded 10 ­percent of the entire Thai police force in the same period. Between 1962 and 1971, of $78.9 million allocated to the TNPD, $8.4 million (10.4 ­percent) was invested in the BPP’s Remote Area Security Development proj­ects.29 Although it is unknown how much aid flowed from the CIA to the BPP, several CIA agents u ­ nder the cover of the PSD did attempt to induce bigger developmental proj­ects and funding for the BPP. All this time, however, the royal f­amily was a staunch supporter of the BPP and its civic action programs especially among the highland communities in northern Thailand. Why, then, did this small band of paramilitary police and its activities in northern Thailand ­matter so greatly to both the United States and the Thai royal ­family during the Cold War?

The Thai Counterinsurgency Era The term “counterinsurgency” (kantotan kankokhwam maisangop) gained currency in Thai military and po­liti­cal circles in the early 1960s. When the international conference in Geneva on the settlement of the Laotian Question resulted in the International Agreement on the Neutrality of Laos on July 23, 1962,30 and the Viet Minh became involved in conflicts in Laos in February 1962, the US government changed the direction of its foreign policy, particularly for dealing with the growing local communist insurgency.31 In Washington, on March 6, 1962, the foreign minister of Thailand, Thanat Khoman, and the US secretary of state, Dean Rusk, together announced that direct US military involvement in Thailand for

54  Chapter 2

countering the aggressions in Laos and Vietnam would increase.32 Subsequently, Sarit coordinated a demonstration of forces with the Southeast Asia Treaty Organ­ ization (SEATO) member states and staged a large joint-­military maneuver in the northeastern region of Thailand on April 15, 1962.33 On May 15, 1962, President Kennedy deployed approximately five thousand US Army and Marine combat forces to Thailand.34 Sarit also established the Thai military’s Mobile Development Units (MDUs) in late 1962, when the CIA began filling USOM-­PSD adviser positions. It should also be noted that 1962 was when Princess Sinakharinthra, ­mother of King Bhumibol, first became officially involved in the BPP’s civic actions. Most works on the Thai security studies regard the “Gun-­Firing Day (wan siang puen tek)” as the beginning point of the Thai counterinsurgency history b ­ ecause the Thai military government began accepting that the militant suppression of the insurgencies alone cannot guarantee peace and order in the Thai society. As the rest of the case studies in this chapter w ­ ill tell, the Thai counterinsurgency era began in 1962, when USOM and the monarchy entered the b ­ attle of winning hearts and minds of the Thai populace to make Thailand an anticommunist bastion of Southeast Asia. Among the aims of the early civic action programs of the BPP was utilizing the border population for enhancing the intelligence and paramilitary capacity of the unit and expanding CIA action ­behind the ­enemy line—­t hat of the Chinese communists. While ­these ­earlier works ultimately helped the BPP to survive the 1957 coup debacle, the CIA lost control over the BPP’s civic action when Sarit came into office. The US government thus shifted its support to the Civilian Police Administration (CPA), which then served as cover for CIA operations. ­Until the PSD assumed the mandate in 1961, about half of the funds allocated for training the Thai police went to the BPP. In mid-1961, the USAID director stated that foreign aid to the Thai police would phase out by the end of fiscal year 1962, as it had received enough financial and technical support to enhance its organ­ization.35 Nevertheless, that year, the PSD, which had taken up the ICA’s works, began officially supporting the BPP’s hill tribe aid proj­ect, but ­under the new name of Remote Area Security Development (RASD), which drew directly on the Kennedy administration’s “De­cade of Development” paradigm. The PSD’s decision to support BPP civic actions was a strategic choice.36 When the PSD was installed to make civilian-­centered development programs a key component of US counterinsurgency in the early 1960s, it could easily take advantage of the BPP’s presence in the border areas, mostly as teachers at the BPP schools and members of development platoons. USOM officials, mostly transferred from the ICA or the CIA, w ­ ere already well informed about the BPP civic actions in the remote border areas and had a high regard for the BPP’s operational capability.

Human Border  55

For instance, USOM’s 1963 pamphlet explains that civic action programs require “many years of experience and physical sturdiness for men to reach and work effectively among the many dif­fer­ent tribal ­peoples found in the remote areas” and that the BPP have “all t­ hese qualifications from over eight years of living and working with t­ hese remote p ­ eoples.”37 From the BPP’s perspective, USOM’s support for its civic action came at just the right time, in the right format. A ­ fter Sarit demoted the BPP and placed it ­under the Provincial Police in late 1960, the CIA was no longer an attractive patron to the BPP b ­ ecause the unit had to show its distance from any types of po­liti­ cal organ­ization and any clandestine operations devised by foreigners. Although many CIA members participated in the PSD, this organ­ization looked rather innocuous, civilian-­oriented, and apo­liti­cal compared with the CIA, and indeed, the PSD did sponsor development-­oriented proj­ects in agriculture and husbandry by providing boar pigs, chickens, and high-­y ielding crop seeds.38 The official work plan between the PSD and the BPP was developed in early 1962. The PSD appointed a full-­time civic action adviser, such as Gordon Young, while BPP Headquarters designated a se­nior officer as a counterpart, such as the then Thai Police Col­o­nel Charoenrit Chamratromran, to jointly implement civic actions. ­After streamlining the bureaucratic structure, the PSD reviewed previous BPP actions and de­cided to integrate education, medical assistance, and agriculture into the PSD’s development for security programs. Since the launch of the RASD program, the PSD focused on improving elementary education, medical assistance, village development, economic promotion, youth activities, and psychological operations.39 ­Because Sarit had exercised such an ironfisted rule, Thanom Kittikachorn inherited a relatively stable government in late 1963, ­after the death of Sarit. Meanwhile, inspired by the success of the Viet Minh and Pathet Lao and also outraged by the direct US intervention in the Thai politics and economy, Radio Hanoi and ­Radio Peking announced the formation of the Thailand In­de­pen­dence Movement in November 1964 and the Patriotic Front of Thailand in January 1965 to liberate Thailand via armed strug­gle.40 On August 7, 1965, Thai communists perpetrated their first armed attack, in Nakhon Phanom province in the northeast.41 Before this so-­called Gun-­Firing Day, the “war” with communism was largely imaginary, since the Thai military viewed communists as an external threat, not an internal ­enemy.42 Not so afterward. In late 1965 the Thanom government declared that it would take control of the counterinsurgency program.43 It hastily began examining the counterinsurgency program inherited from the Sarit administration only to find that it lacked “effective methods to ­counter and destroy the threat.”44 In order to control both rural insurgencies within the border and

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communist aggression in neighboring countries, Thanom needed a successful counterinsurgency program. The Thanom government thus increased its effort to establish counterinsurgency agencies and armed forces. To oversee the general counterinsurgency proj­ ects, the Thai government established the Communist Suppression Operations Headquarters in November 1965, which was ­later renamed Communist Suppression Operations Command (CSOC) in 1967.45 To assist the Thai military government’s new civilian counterinsurgency initiatives, offices for the USOM-­initiated proj­ect called Accelerated Rural Development (ARD) w ­ ere set up as a department in the office of the prime minister in January 1966, with Army General Praphat Charusathien as chair of the Central Committee of the ARD. With the administrative details finalized, the committee established provincial administrations responsible for the ARD operations in six northeastern provinces.46 Sarit’s Mobile Development Unit proj­ect likewise began to expand ARD to provinces from 1965 onward.47 Interestingly, Thanom’s government began to launch civic action programs similar to that of USOM and the BPP, but it operated almost exclusively with the Joint US Military Advisory Group (JUSMAG) and other governmental institutions, as w ­ ill be discussed shortly. Witnessing the deteriorating internal security condition in Thailand a­ fter 1965, USOM de­cided to participate and fund all BPP’s civic action proj­ects and created a separate bud­get for the program in fiscal year 1966. It lasted ­until 1971.48 USAID’s e­ arlier phased-­down plan was abandoned, as the CIA’s covert operation in Laos did not yield satisfactory results. ­Under the circumstances, Washington could not reduce its level of assistance to and cooperation with its most trusted ally in Southeast Asia.49 As a consequence, the amount of US foreign aid and assistance to the Thai police and government skyrocketed during the rest of the 1960s. For instance, the Office of Public Safety aid levels in Thailand increased from 2,165,000 US dollars in 1964 to 12,774,000 US dollars in 1968, nearly six times in a mere four years.50 As the amount of aid grew, tension between USOM-­PSD officials and CIA members in the disguise of the PSD adviser to the RASD program also grew ­because the increased aid meant a higher stake in the competition for assuming the control of counterinsurgency programs in Thailand. Although they ­were working together in the same office, the USOM-­ PSD officials, mainly consisting of specialists from the fields of agriculture, rural development, or economics, ­were not always in agreement with the CIA members that w ­ ere more focused on collecting information and conducting clandestine operations. The competition between ­t hese two American advisory groups essentially offered a chance to enlarge the role of the BPP and other local leadership that came to exert dominant influence over the program in due course.

Human Border  57

Between 1962 and 1971, USOM-­PSD provided a total of $6.9 million to support the BPP’s implementation of the RASD program.51 With this help, the BPP was able to extend its operations to twelve official civic action programs in areas such as medicine, education, agriculture, public relations, disaster relief, training, and vari­ous village security and hill tribes proj­ects, among o ­ thers.52 USOM’s assistance and funds had also greatly contributed to the expansion of the BPP from remote border areas to provincial towns. In a broader historical perspective, ­there are three notable changes in the views of the US foreign policymaking establishment during the Thai counterinsurgency era between 1962–1980. First, the area on which counterinsurgency campaigns ­were waged against the growing communism threat shifted along with the Americanization of the Second Indochina War. In the 1950s, the US government, especially the CIA, was far more concerned about the growing influence of the Chinese communists in the border areas of Thailand, Burma, and Laos, so intelligence activities, including the clandestine proj­ect of “building a bridge” to Chinese-­ origin ethnic minorities in northern Thailand, had received most of the United States’ attention and support. As the US government became increasingly involved in the Lao and Viet­nam­ese civil war in the early 1960s, its attention moved to Indochina, and the northeastern region of Thailand next to Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam became a key battleground of anticommunist campaigns in the mid-1960s. The target population of the US government and the Thai military regime also moved along with its shift of geographic focus. In the 1950s, both governments viewed communism more as an external threat that targeted the border ­people and ethnic minority groups who, it was assumed, had no sense of belonging to any adjunct modern nation-­states. In par­tic­u­lar, the ethnic minorities in the jungles or remote areas, the so-­called hill tribes, w ­ ere considered to be the most susceptible to communist propaganda in the e­ arlier period.53 However, growing local insurgencies in the rural areas of Thailand since the early 1960s convinced the United States and the Thai military that t­ hese could have their “origins in domestic ­causes rather than external influences from China and Indochina.”54 Consequently, the target population of the US and Thai governments expanded from the border p ­ eople to rural Thais in the lowlands. In 1969, 75 ­percent of the US government’s foreign aid to Thailand was invested in programs related to the rural counterinsurgency campaign, and roughly 68 ­percent of the entire USOM program bud­get was poured into the northeastern and northern regions.55 ­These shifts of focus and priorities came along with changes in the US and Thai governments’ counterinsurgency approaches. As mentioned ­earlier, the Eisenhower administration focused more on military counterinsurgency approaches while gradually increasing the participation of a police force. Kennedy’s

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administration depended more on civilian counterinsurgency underpinned by anticommunist modernization to defend internal security. Thanom’s administration followed this approach, and in the mid-1960s, it adapted its rural development programs accordingly. However, Thanom’s military government was not prepared enough for this “politico-­military doctrine” in countering the growing local unrests and oppositions.56 The Thai military’s increased presence in the previously neglected, underdeveloped rural areas was not welcomed by the local ­people who saw the army as the force of repression and the source of corruption rather than as an agent of development, peace, and order.57 While the military’s counterinsurgency campaign floundered in the rural areas, the BPP’s civic action proj­ects quietly extended to the entirety of Thailand, making the organ­ization an embodiment of civilian counterinsurgency. The US government and the Thai monarchy channeled sufficient funding to sustain the BPP’s activities, and with their special sponsorship, the BPP could also gain long-­ desired recognition in Thai security circles.58 As mentioned before, the military regime’s constant suspicion of the BPP prevented the unit from regaining orga­ nizational autonomy and armed strength ­after its demotion in 1960. Now, however, the BPP’s paramilitary training and civic action proj­ects prepared the organ­ ization to be a counterinsurgency force. As Jeffrey Race, a former US Army officer, explains: The BPP who had previously been responsible for operating in the upland areas of Thailand w ­ ere specially trained and equipped for jungle operations, had individuals who spoke the tribal languages, and employed small-­unit tactics which emphasized patrolling and engaging opponents outside of village complexes. The army, on the other hand, had not been trained for small-­unit jungle operations, and had no hill-­tribe language capability. Consequently, as soon as deployed the army forces began to suffer very heavy casualties, principally from sniping and booby traps.59 In 1969, through a prime minister’s order, Thanom openly showed his interest in shifting counterinsurgency policies away from armed suppression to “po­ liti­cal mea­sures, psychological operations and public relations.”60 When the Thai National Police Department (TNPD) initiated a special counterinsurgency training program in 1970, it appointed BPP leaders as instructors in the new Counterinsurgency Training Centers (CITCs).61 In addition to the BPP’s having gained recognition from the military, this appointment was also a sign of ac­cep­tance of the ascendancy of the civilian counterinsurgency strategy for suppressing

Human Border  59

communist movements. Some military members urged relocating the BPP u ­ nder the Ministry of Defense to facilitate efficient communication and joint operations with the military.62 Moreover, the royal ­family’s influence further contributed to the resurrection of the BPP. King Bhumibol not only supported the BPP’s civic actions in the remote border areas but also maintained a close relationship with the BPP and PARU, and this, according to former chief of the royal court police, Police General Vasit Dejkunjorn, became “well-­k nown in uniformed circles.”63 A definite sign of recovery of the Border Patrol Police organ­ization and its autonomy arose a­ fter Thanom, an ardent supporter of the royal ­family, executed a coup against his own government in November 1971 to continue staying in power. ­After his Revolutionary Council (sapha borihan khana patiwat) reviewed the BPP’s appeal to restore its general headquarters, Thanom issued order number 130, dated April 22, 1972, officially separating the Border Provincial Police from the Provincial Police and restoring the original name Border Patrol Police.64 He also commanded the building of a new headquarters building in Bangkok in 1972 as a token of appreciation to the BPP. In addition, PARU was also removed from the Provincial Police command and became a sub-­unit of the BPP.65 The 1972 order also assigned specific duties and areas of responsibility for the BPP’s field operations with a par­tic­u­lar emphasis on the unit’s principal missions in safeguarding border security, collecting intelligence, assisting p ­ eople in the remote areas, and providing counterinsurgency trainings for other armed forces.66 ­After the National Administration Reformation Council executed a coup on October 6, 1976, the BPP was allowed to partake in the military operations u ­ nder 67 the Royal Thai Armed Forces. Since then, the BPP has been actively engaged in the border security missions without significant institutional changes. Meanwhile, the Thai government shifted its counterinsurgency efforts from the military to a po­liti­cal offensive in 1980, which further extended the lifespan of the BPP. Overall, the Thai counterinsurgency era had two significant implications for Thailand’s Cold War history. First, it brought four impor­tant cold warriors into the po­liti­cal arena: the Border Patrol Police, the Thai military, the royal f­amily, and the US government. The period also saw the contest between the civilian counterinsurgency implemented by the BPP and royal ­family on the one side and the military counterinsurgency approaches undertaken by the Thai military and the United States on the other side. As the 1980 declaration reveals, the victory clearly went to civilian, po­liti­cal counterinsurgency tactics, although military counterinsurgency tactics had not completely abandoned. In addition, the Thai royal f­ amily ­rose to dominance throughout the Thai counterinsurgency era. Through its support for the BPP’s civic action programs, the monarchy’s influence expanded to the entirety of Thailand, and the royal

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f­ amily’s popularity easily surpassed that of the military government. What makes the Thai counterinsurgency era significant in the course of Thailand’s nation-­ building is that it helped spread royalist nationalism among the Thai populace through the royal ­family’s own effort at indigenizing American anticommunist modernization and counterinsurgency strategies. Both strategies prescribed that the United States as the leader of the ­free world should collaborate with local elites and have them lead the traditional, malleable masses in their socie­ties. As Latham argues, the elites in the “developing areas” took a hard look at modernization theory’s categories and “selectively appropriated its ideals to suit their own diverse needs and purposes.”68 In this way, the American Cold War “rarely produced the kind of effects its advocates anticipated on paper.”69

Building the Border of Thainess In northern Thailand, the b ­ itter memory of being colonized u ­ nder Siamese-­British rule in the late nineteenth c­ entury remained strong u ­ ntil the early twentieth ­century, especially when the use of local language in public offices was forbidden by the Siamese rulers.70 Nevertheless, Bangkok elites believed the northern Thais had been more or less integrated into the Thai nation. Thus, US Air Force Major Edward B. Hanrahan reported that the Thai ­people in the north ­were “prob­ably more culturally involved with the Central Thai than . . . ​­either the northeasterners or the southerners.”71 What attracted the American and Thai government’s attention to northern Thailand from the early 1950s was the large presence of ethnic minority groups with diverse cultural, po­liti­cal, and economic backgrounds. Both governments focused on the similar prob­lems associated with highland minorities, such as opium growing and addiction and slash-­and-­burn cultivation, as well as their migratory lifestyle and absence of national loyalty ­towards the Thai nation. As Hanrahan remarked, the “4,000 to 5,000 armed insurgents ­under CPT [Communist Party of Thailand] control have been essentially highland tribal p ­ eople.”72 What should be noted h ­ ere is that while the remoteness of Thai p ­ eople in the border areas meant that they ­were “deprived” of opportunities to enjoy modern facilities such as public transportation or department malls, the highland minorities ­were also thought to be “indifferent” to pro­gress and development. E ­ ither way, ­t hese minority groups ­were seen as not only ignorant and “other,” but also outside the pale of Thai nationalism. The BPP’s attitude in its early civic action programs is telling in this regard. Well into the 1990s, the BPP’s school building proj­ect was called the School for the Hill Tribes and ­People Far from Communication.73 According to BPP accounts, “the ­people far from communication”

Human Border  61

­(prachachon klai khamanakhom) ­were the Thai citizens who inhabited the remote areas and ­were thus deprived of educational opportunities and other welfare ser­ vices from the government. ­These ­were distinct from the hill tribes (chao khao chao pa or chao khao in general), the “minority groups who migrated from the Union of Burma and the Kingdom of Laos and had dispersed in Thailand about a hundred years ago. . . . ​Their villages are located in the hills higher than three-­ hundred meters above sea level, and that made them the hill ­people.”74 The school proj­ect’s title suggests that the highland minorities and the p ­ eople in the remote areas w ­ ere to be targeted separately. They ­were also to be targeted differently, by tactics that aimed at ­either suppression or domestication. An internal document entitled “Border Patrol Police: Program for the Hill Tribe Areas” created in May 1968 confirms this view. Reasoning that ­because “an ethnic minority is a ready-­made target for communist subversive attempts,” communist insurgents have been mostly “working to bring the hill tribes into conflict with the Thais,” rather than attempting to subvert rural Thais.75 The Thai military and the BPP’s differentiation of the highland minorities from the “­people far from communication” indeed had an impact on their treatment of the target population during the counterinsurgency campaign. Hanrahan remarks in 1975: “While RTG [Royal Thai Government] concern has been mostly with the Northeast ­because of ethnic Thai involvement in the insurgency, the RTG has possibly been more aggressive in the North ­because of the low involvement of ethnic Thai. The RTG policy in the North has been to bomb and burn the Meo [Hmong] into submission.”76 More importantly, the presence of the highland minorities in the remote border areas enabled the “othering” pro­cess of Thai nation-­building during the Cold War. The Thai and US governments, the BPP, and the monarchy all urged integration of the ethnic minority into the Thai nation-­state, but their assimilation did not guarantee equal treatment with the Thais or even their safety in Thailand. As a Thai historian, Thongchai Winichakul, argues, “The creation of otherness, the e­ nemy in par­tic­u­lar, is necessary to justify the existing po­liti­cal and social control against rivals from without as well as from within.”77 The “othering” of the highland minorities, ­whether they ­were threats to the national security or not, gave legitimacy to the numerous royal proj­ects created for the integration and development of the chao khao in northern Thailand. Through their nation-­building, both the BPP and the royal f­ amily attempted to construct a “­human border” for the Thai nation-­state, not only to defend Thailand from communism but also to spread royalist nationalism. As the case studies below ­w ill demonstrate, the royalist nationalism that the BPP and Thai monarchy propagated was inherently hierarchical and it did not contribute to integrating ethnic minorities into the Thai

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nation. Simply put, the highland minority had to remain other to the Thai nation in order to legitimize the Thai nation-­building pro­cesses by the extant ruling elite. The civic action programs (ngankitchakan phonlaruean) of the Thai BPP and USOM-­PSD focused on five fields of operation: education, health and sanitation, community and rural development, village security, and narcotics suppression. Before discussing each of t­ hese, it should be noted that other organ­izations w ­ ere involved in ­t hese proj­ects. Thus, whereas the BPP received material or financial support from governmental organ­izations such as the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Public as well as private organ­izations such as the Thai W ­ omen’s Society and the Princess ­Mother’s Charities Fund, to name a few. USOM-­PSD and the CIA hired private groups such as Development Con­sul­tants International and Air Amer­i­ca to carry out its Remote Area Security Development programs between 1966 and 1974. Moreover, USOM supported both the BPP and the Thai government, while the PSD was more directly engaged with the BPP’s civic actions. Another point worth calling attention to is that the development proj­ects ­were often named differently by the BPP and USOM, and this discrepancy reflected their dif­fer­ent goals and agendas for the same proj­ect.

Sanitation and Health In the immediate years of the organ­ization’s formation, the BPP tried to gain ­favor from the highland minority villa­gers by offering medical ser­v ices and distributing pills f­ ree of charge. BPP schools became semi–­public health clinics where the villa­gers could get f­ ree medicines or basic medical treatment from BPP teachers who had received medical training before their appointments. Starting in the mid1950s, according to the PSD report in 1974, BPP medics had treated approximately 100,000 villa­gers annually.78 In addition, the BPP provided rehabilitation treatment to 150 opium addicts among the highland minorities between 1964– 1966 and also trained twenty-­nine midwives recruited from twenty-­one minority villages in 1965.79 To assist the BPP’s sanitation and health proj­ects in the remote border areas, the PSD provided additional medical commodities as well as training for the BPP medics.80 The BPP Headquarters thus concluded in 1968 that among the BPP civic action programs, the medical proj­ect had obtained the most favorable receptions from the highland minorities.81 When USOM began aiding the BPP, the Princess M ­ other Sinakharinthra joined the BPP’s civic action proj­ects. At first, the princess ­mother brought professional doctors and financial assistance to treat members of the BPP in remote areas. She also encouraged BPP medics to increase their medical ser­v ice provisions for the remote area villa­gers with a pi­lot proj­ect called the Volunteer Flying Doctor Units launched in 1969. In 1985, a­ fter the princess m ­ other donated one

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million baht to reestablish it as a royally sponsored foundation, it became the Princess ­Mother’s Medical Volunteers Foundation (munithi phet asa somdetphra sinakharinthra boromratchachonani, PMMV).82 The PMMV proj­ect has been undertaken by the volunteer groups of doctors and nurses from major towns to the pre­sent day. In its early years, volunteers traveled to the remote areas by he­li­cop­ter on weekends to offer professional medical treatment and prescriptions for villa­gers. Since the princess m ­ other conceived the proj­ect in conjunction with the BPP civic actions in the border areas, the target villages w ­ ere determined by the BPP, which also arranged the trips. According to Betty Dumaine, the American president of the Princess ­Mother’s Charities Fund of Thailand, 2,850 professional personnel volunteered to join the proj­ect in the first year.83 In that year, the PMMV volunteers coordinated with the BPP officers in the Area 5 camp in Chiang Mai and selected a total of forty-­t wo villages in northern Thailand for their operations. A total of twenty PMMV local branches ­were built in most of the border provinces of Thailand in the first year. Between 1969 and 1982, the number of PMMV local branches increased to forty-­eight.84 In support of the princess ­mother’s and BPP’s medical proj­ect, King Bhumibol commanded the royal medics to treat highland minority patients from over forty villages in Chiang Rai and Nan provinces in the late 1960s.85 From the early 1960s, USOM initiated several rural health proj­ects. In mid1966, ­t hese Comprehensive Rural Health Programs ­were supplemented by Medical Civic Action, a new initiative that was designed to enhance the counterinsurgency capability of the Thai Ministry of Public Health.86 As such, the Medical Civic Action focused mainly on advertising the Thai government’s interest in improving the ­people’s health and sanitation. Soon, the program integrated extant medical operations carried out separately by the US Air Commandos, the BPP, and paramedics from the Thai Ministry of Public Health into the Medical Counterinsurgency Program (MEDCOIN).87 A Mobile Medical Team (MMT) proj­ect was initiated as a part of the MEDCOIN programs in fiscal year 1966, and in 1967, a total of twenty-­eight teams operated in eleven border provinces of northern and northeastern Thailand. By October of 1968, t­ here ­were thirty-­t hree teams covering a total of fourteen provinces. In the period between fiscal year 1966 and 1971, USOM provided the MMTs with commodity support in the form of drugs, medical equipment, and health information pamphlets for the villa­gers.88 One noteworthy difference between MEDCOIN and the PMMV is in their area coverage. Whereas the PMMV branch offices spread across all four regions of Thailand from the first year, MEDCOIN did not expand beyond the north and northeast ­because the proj­ect was tied to USOM and the Thai government–­ sponsored Accelerated Rural Development program that was l­imited to the

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northeastern and northern provinces. Despite the concentration of financial and material sources in t­ hese security-­sensitive regions, the communist activities and their influences in ­these regions visibly increased.89 While the BPP and other royal proj­ects ­were building their popu­lar base in all parts of Thailand, the US and Thai military government’s rural development programs ­limited their area focus and objectives within the confine of security goals, which in a sense envisaged the eventual failure of their programs in the long run. The civilian counterinsurgency programs aimed at winning the hearts and minds of the rural populace so that they would not turn to support the insurgents’ c­ auses such as communism or separatism. What the counterinsurgency programs of the Thai military government and the United States did not gain ­were the hearts and minds of the ­people. Despite the increasing number of proj­ects, rural insurgencies against the government did not subside. On the contrary, they became more violent. The root cause for the failure was with the military itself, ­because the concept of counterinsurgency was too unfamiliar to the Thai military and, more importantly, the military began its operations with the assumption that the population they ­were to deal with ­were potential enemies. The lack of understanding of their strategy and target led the military government to lose.

Rural Economic Development One of the US government’s first rural development programs, titled “Community Development,” was launched in 1957 and continued operating u ­ ntil fiscal year 1972. The program was inherently l­ imited from the start, b ­ ecause it focused mainly on providing technical, bureaucratic training for Thai officials and rural p ­ eople rather than on initiating or implementing a­ ctual development activities such as creating self-­governance training or enhancing the communication between the government officials and the villa­gers. Additionally, the proj­ect was heavi­ly concentrated on northeastern Thailand.90 In the early 1960s, USOM sought to redress ­these limitations by joining the Community Development with the BPP’s civic action programs. Funding came from the RASD proj­ect of the PSD. ­After the Thai communists attacked the police in Nakhon Phanom province in August 1965, the PSD began Development Center (sun phathana) and Key Village (muban lak) proj­ects, which continued to use the BPP’s civic action as a foundation. USOM contracted with Development Con­sul­tants International (DEVCON, as abbreviated by the PSD) to advise the Development Center proj­ect during fiscal year 1965–1966.91 Upon arriving in Thailand, DEVCON advisers created a program to train five-­man teams of highland minority volunteers from forty-­four remote villages in agriculture, animal husbandry, and medicine. One of the central objectives of the Development Centers and Key Village programs

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was to “incorporate the villages into the Thai border security system.” Accordingly, a complete background survey of villa­gers, h ­ ouse­holds, and relations with neighboring communities was recommended as the first mission, to be undertaken by “­t hose who the police feel can be trusted” and can be given “weapons and training.” ­These recruits soon developed into a village security group.92 Between 1965 and 1974, a total of 290 teams ­were trained ­under the proj­ect and sent back to the forty-­four Key Villages to build the Development Centers mostly in the northern and northeastern parts of Thailand. Th ­ ese centers’ trainees oversaw BPP school activities, Border Security Volunteer Teams, and other agricultural proj­ ects including ­those of the royal ­family.93 In ­these ways, the Development Center program was expected to strengthen the village-­level security as well as the police surveillance. While the BPP’s cooperation in this proj­ect was crucial, it had its own initiatives such as the Hill Tribe Development Center (sun phathana kan chaokhao) to focus on. Consequently, the number of USOM Development Centers decreased from 227 to 172 by 1974.94 For the purposes of its programs in agriculture and husbandry in the border areas, the BPP had created Development Platoons (muat phathana) consisting of construction crews and an advisory group. To mobilize ­these units more efficiently, the US government funded a special training and development program which recruited thirty-­nine men from the US naval “Seabee” construction team in 1967–1968. Seabee teams had been assigned to facilitate the rural development program, and, in par­tic­u­lar, to improve infrastructures in northeastern Thailand and Southern Vietnam since 1963. In November of 1966, the US government redirected the group to cooperate with the BPP’s Development Platoons ­under the RASD proj­ect.95 At first, Seabee teams w ­ ere supposed to provide training to the BPP in basic sanitation, construction, and mechanical and electrical techniques required in the civic action proj­ects for lowland villa­gers. Th ­ ese trainings intended to prevent “blowback” from the lowland Thais in case “they observe that the main force of this development attempt is directed at the hill ­people.”96 At the same time, the Seabee proj­ect was designed to demonstrate that the Thai government was “seriously interested in helping the village” through the “­people to p ­ eople assistance programs” with the BPP so that they could gain confidence and necessary information from the local ­people.97 ­Under ­these objectives, the first round of training was given to the BPP and some selected highland minorities in the BPP’s Area 5 camp in Chiang Mai between 1965 and 1966. From 1967, fifteen BPP officers w ­ ere selected from each subdivision, and in all, eight BPP-­Provincial Police operational regions received training from the Seabee team in Saritsena camp in Phitsanulok, which produced three classes of BPP trainees u ­ ntil 1968.98

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In the meantime, in 1965, the royal ­family initiated a Bordercraft proj­ect—­ also known as the Hill Tribe Handicraft Program—to promote cottage industries among ethnic minorities. According to the BPP, the proj­ect was initially launched when King Bhumibol donated 10,000 baht to the BPP to establish the Center for Promoting the Hill Tribes Crafts ­under Royal Support (sunsongsoem phlitphan chaokhao nai phraboromratchanukhro) in Chiang Mai. The proj­ect intended to increase the alternative source of cash income for the minority groups in place of opium cultivation.99 It was also intended to expedite the highland minority’s exposure to the market system in the lowlands and to increase their communication and experience with the majority Thais.100 In the beginning, village ­women from seven ethnic groups—­Hmong, Yunnanese immigrants (called chin haw by the Thais), Karen, Akha, Lahu, Thai Lue, and Lisu—­f rom seventeen northern provinces were employed and trained ­under this proj­ect. USOM provided advisory ser­vices and some funding for the proj­ect in 1967–1968. ­After all the American advisers left, the princess ­mother loaned 30,000 baht to the BPP to continue the proj­ect.101 Overall, over two thousand highland minorities from fifty villages came to participate in the proj­ect between 1965 and 1974 u ­ nder the direction of the BPP’s Area 5 camp in Chiang Mai.102 In January  1980, the Center for Promoting Hill Tribes Crafts became the Thai Hill Tribe Products Promotion Foundation u ­ nder Royal Support (munithi songsoem phlitphan chao thai phu khao nai phraboromratchanukhro). Currently, the shop and foundation are located in front of Wat Suandok in Chiang Mai, but the number of trainees and sponsorship for the proj­ect has decreased considerably from the 1980s.103 This Bordercraft proj­ect would eventually become the Princess M ­ other’s Mae Fah Luang Foundation in the late 1980s. The princess m ­ other’s ­earlier development proj­ects, including the Bordercraft proj­ect, began expanding to other regions alongside the increasing areas of coverage by the BPP civic actions. One notable rural development proj­ect that had resembled DEVCON’s Key Villages program was launched in the Kalasin province of northeastern Thailand u ­ nder the title “Building Security in the Rural Villages Proj­ect u ­ nder the Princess M ­ other’s Royal Patronage” (khrongkan sang khuammankhong nai chonabot thi muban nai phra upatham somdetphra sinakharinthra boromratchachonani).104 Former commissioner of the BPP Headquarters Police General Wiphat Wipunlakon proposed the plan in 1977, and in 1981, it joined the list of royal proj­ects ­under the princess m ­ other’s patronage. The proj­ect aimed primarily at installing the BPP’s “development for security,” which is BPP’s main slogan for promoting economic security before po­liti­cal and social stability, to village-­level governance and community activities, and to this end, the BPP conducted research about environmental, po­liti­cal, economic, and social

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conditions in the remote villages of northeastern Thailand. The princess ­mother donated a total of 1,350,000 baht in June 1981, and soon, a preeminent Thai businessman named Suwit Osathanukhro donated 2,650,000 baht to the princess ­mother so that the BPP could increase their proj­ect areas. Consequently, the initial experiment in Kalasin province extended to adjunct and border provinces such as Khon Kaen, Ubon Ratchathani, Sisaket, Loei, Phetburi, and Tak. ­After the princess m ­ other passed away in 1995, the proj­ect changed its primary mission statement to “commemorate the royal charity activities of the Princess M ­ other,” and by 2005, the proj­ect had extended to a total of 173 villages in the rural provinces of northern and northeastern Thailand.105 Like her medical proj­ect, the princess m ­ other’s rural development proj­ect also did not limit its operational area to northern border areas and highland minorities. Throughout the 1960s, wherever the BPP went, royal proj­ects followed. Now the villages u ­ nder the proj­ect have become not only the guardians but also the ardent promoter of the royal ­family and their symbolic roles as the national savior, leader of the development, and ­mother and f­ ather of the nation.

Village Security Around 1965, forty-­seven of the BPP Reserve Platoons w ­ ere deployed to “sensitive” areas, but the number was not sufficient to c­ ounter the growing communist threat, especially in the remote border villages. Thus, the BPP and PSD or­ga­nized a new quick reaction force of Mobile Reserve Platoons (MRPs) with thirty-­five men in each. They w ­ ere dispatched to eight BPP area camps in September of 1966 (Map 1). Soon ­these MRPs would be directly mobilized for the TNPD-­PSD’s special missions with the Provincial Police’s Special Action Forces.106 ­After the rapid increase of insurgencies by the highland minorities in northern Thailand around 1967–1968, the BPP initiated a military training program for the highland villa­gers ­under the title of “Hill Tribe Volunteers Team” (chut ratsadon asa samak chaokhao) in September 1968 in the BPP’s Mae Teng training camp in Chiang Mai. The primary goal of the program was to supplement BPP manpower, particularly in the MRPs and the Line Platoon in the remote border areas of the northern provinces.107 The initial training program for the Hill Tribe Volunteers Team covered weapons and their use, tactics, po­liti­cal indoctrination and psychological operations, village development and civic action, discipline, regulation and o ­ rders, and morale.108 In 1969, a­ fter six months of training and screening, the first ten thirty-­man teams led by four BPP commanders (called ratsami, or “halo,” in Thai) ­were deployed to Chiang Rai and Nan provinces. Subsequently, USOM and the Thai Communist Suppression Operations Command (CSOC) joined the program and thus the proj­ect was officially established as the

Map 1. Public Safety Division Activities in Thailand, September 1966

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Border Security Volunteer Team (chut chaokhao pongkan chaidaen, BSVT) in September  1969.109 Between 1970 and 1972, another fourteen BSVT teams ­were trained, and by mid-1974, twenty-­four BSVT teams with a total of 712 men operated in almost all the border provinces of northern and northeastern Thailand.110 Eventually, the Thai government discontinued its funding for the proj­ect in 1975, blaming the “ambiguous positions” of the ethnic minority trainees. What made this BSVT proj­ect stand out was that it was an official, government-­sponsored program that trained highland minorities in military techniques and equipped them with US-­and BPP-­provided weapons. Throughout its brief existence, however, the Thai military regime remained suspicious of the ethnic minority trainees’ loyalty to the Thai nation, and did not transfer funding to the BPP on a regular basis. Most trainees received old weapons that the BPP had used, but t­ hose w ­ ere far inferior to their alleged ­enemy’s armament. Worse yet, b ­ ecause of their unsettled citizenship, lack of education, and lack of language proficiency, t­ hose ethnic minority trainees could not be promoted to official positions within the Thai civil ser­v ice.111 When the proj­ect faced an uncertain f­ uture, the princess m ­ other stepped in again. She recognized the significance and potential of the BSVT proj­ect and provided funding for food and training to sustain it. The proj­ect thus survived, and in the latter half of the 1970s, t­ hese BSVT members w ­ ere mobilized in the princess ­mother’s Building Security in the Rural Villages Proj­ect in northeastern Thailand.112 With her assistance and aid, the proj­ect fi­nally expanded beyond northern Thailand, along with the BPP’s new rural development proj­ects, and the number of forces reached a total of forty-­t hree teams in the mid-1990s.113 To supplement the BSVT proj­ect, in early 1969, the BPP’s Area 4 camp in Udon Thani and Area 6 camp in Tak jointly launched a rural military training program called Volunteers of Border Villa­gers (asa samak chaoban chaidaen). The BPP members selected thirty men from four border villages for training in Chiang Khan, Loei province, in the spring of 1969. According to the BPP, ­these first exercises emphasized friendly relations between the trainees and the BPP trainers, and the BPP tried to maintain fraternal relations with the villa­ger volunteers. ­After experimenting with vari­ous ways of organ­izing the rural Thais into vigilante groups, the commander of the BPP’s Area 4 camp, Police Col­o­nel Somkhuan Harikul, learned that the trained volunteers needed to be assisted by a larger reserve force. Therefore, the Area 4 camp launched a scout training with the Volunteers of Border Villa­gers. The first four groups of Border Village Scouts (luksuea chaoban chaidaen) ­were initiated in August 1971.114 As ­w ill be discussed further in the following chapter, the Village Scout movement was born out of the BPP’s numerous village security development proj­ects, which ­were intended to create auxiliary forces to supplement manpower and area coverage during war­time.

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Meanwhile, the Thanom administration built Counterinsurgency Training Centers (CITCs) in security-­sensitive regions and ordered the BPP to be in charge of training the general police forces as well as some civilian militia in unconventional warfare tactics. The first CITC was built in 1970 in what had been Rama the Sixth’s summer residence, Maruekkhathayawan Palace in Cha-am, Phetburi province. That same year, additional CITCs w ­ ere installed in Ubon Ratchathani, Udon Thani, Chiang Mai, and Songkhla provinces and a year l­ ater, the sixth CITC was built in Thungsong, Nakhon Si Thammarat province.115 All t­hese CITCs are now merged into the BPP’s Special Training Division (kongbangkhap kanfuek phiset). To the pre­sent day, the BPP is still in charge of training rural security forces, such as the Volunteer Defense Corps and Village Security Force, so that in times of conflict, ­these forces can assist the regular security forces, such as the Provincial Police, and in peacetime, serve as vigilantes.116 While the Thai military regime was investing its counterinsurgency campaign and resources in the northeastern region, where most of the U.S. government’s support had already been concentrated, the BPP’s activities and its auxiliary forces expanded from the north to other rural border areas of Thailand. The building of village militias u ­ nder the BPP civic action reached its heyday when the royal ­family came to sponsor the Village Scouts in the early 1970s.

Narcotics Suppression In 1956, the CIA reported that the Chinese communists w ­ ere involved in the opium business in order to fund communist activities in China and other areas like north Vietnam.117 The BPP was immediately assigned to suppress opium cultivation and trade in the northern border areas, and soon the counternarcotics campaign became a central mission of the BPP. The CIA and BPP paid par­tic­u­lar attention to highland minorities such as the Hmong and the Mien, who had migrated from southern China and w ­ ere longtime opium cultivators and traders.118 Together with suspicion of their ethnic origins and pos­si­ble sympathy t­ oward the Chinese communists, their opium cultivation for cash became another stigma that alienated them from the general Thai population and essentially made them a potential ­enemy of the state. The royal ­family enthusiastically engaged in the anti-­opium campaign ­after Sarit declared an official ban on opium in June 1959. He demolished the opium shops and dens in Bangkok and invited vari­ous international and domestic organ­ izations to join in his government’s counternarcotics campaigns.119 The royal ­family did not waste much time in utilizing a campaign to eulogize Sarit even ­after his death in 1963 and condemn the previous regime that had ended absolute monarchy. In the Hall of Opium located inside the princess ­mother’s Doi Tung

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Development Proj­ect in Chiang Rai province, ­t here is a Thailand’s opium history section. It says: “The 1932 po­liti­cal reform in Thailand not only continued opium trade in Thailand, but also expanded the government’s role by promoting opium growing in the northern part of the country” (Figure 2.1). In this way, the monarchy could exonerate itself for its mono­poly over the opium business before the 1932 revolution. In the late 1960s, a­ fter Sarit died, the royal f­ amily initiated a counternarcotics campaign focused on promoting alternative agriculture and ethnic minority heritage programs to increase cash income for ethnic minorities and, more impor­ tant, to instill the belief that opium cultivation is a non-­Thai tradition. Almost all royal support for the BPP’s civic actions and other rural development proj­ects in northern Thailand has been publicized as a key ele­ment of the modernization, which includes attempts to eliminate alleged barbarian, non-­Thai traditions like opium cultivation and trade among the highland minorities.

Figure 2.1. “Opium Trade a­ fter the 1932 Po­liti­cal Reform” in the Hall of Opium

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A renewed recognition of the BPP’s counternarcotic mission came a­ fter US President Richard Nixon declared the “War on Drugs” in 1971. In September of that year, the US and Thai governments agreed to establish the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (soon changed to the Drug Enforcement Administration) and Special Narcotics Organ­ization in northern Thailand. A ­ fter official funding for the Remote Area Security Development proj­ects ceased in 1971, USOM-­ PSD reassigned the BPP to the narcotics suppression program in northern Thailand in 1973. A month before the TNPD officially established the Police Narcotics Suppression Center in March 1973, the BPP had or­ga­nized eight-­man narcotics suppression teams and the PSD allocated $11,430 for an additional purchase of commodities as well as payment for special training to improve the unit’s operations in the same year.120 With US support, the number of the BPP’s counternarcotic units grew to forty teams in mid-1974. In addition, through a USAID proj­ect agreement with the Thai government, the US government provided five rotary wing utility aircraft in May 1974 and added another $4.1 million for equipping “airlift capability for one BPP platoon” consisting of fifty-­eight men.121 While the PSD was preparing to wrap up its missions in Thailand, USOM launched the Uplands Development Proj­ect (UDP) in 1973 in order to reduce “international traffic in opium-­based narcotics which have their origins in the Golden Triangle” (where the borders of Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar meet at the confluence of the Mekong River) and also to offer “income earning alternatives for hilltribe [sic] growers of the opium poppy.”122 Predictably, the UDP primarily targeted the ethnic minorities who had been “obliged to use opium” as an analgesic and a source of income to justify its mission of preventing ethnic minorities from joining the “foreign-­inspired insurgency against the Government.”123 ­Under this UDP program, USOM also aided the Thai monarchy’s proj­ects for creating new sources of cash income for the highland minorities. One such royal proj­ect was “Hill Tribe Preserved Food,” which built small canning factories to pro­cess local fruits and vegetables produced by the minority groups in northern Thailand. USOM provided a total of $25,000 for this proj­ect in June 1973.124 Ultimately, all ­these US-­sponsored highland development programs w ­ ere incorporated into royal proj­ect. The BPP has been the first line of defense against the opium trade in the border areas, and at the same time, they have been the royal agents of modernization for the highland minorities. The BPP’s counternarcotic campaigns are to eliminate the highland minorities’ traditions and help them become members of the civilized Thai nation. Numerous royal proj­ects have been launched with the goal of providing alternative means of income and developing the highland minority communities in the border areas since the 1960s, and more ethnic minorities have

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become involved in ­t hese royal proj­ects to survive. This does not mean that ­every person has gained Thai citizenship or due re­spect from the Thais. Ironically, the highland minority has remained as “­others” to the Thai nation so that the royal ­family could legitimately continue their royalist Thai nation-­building.

Education Official BPP school history rec­ords that the proj­ect was conceived by Police Lieutenant Thawi Phanusophon of the Chiang Rai regional com­pany, who proposed to build a school for highland minority youth groups in the civic action division in the Dararatsami camp in Mae Rim, Chiang Mai province, in 1956.125 At that time, Police Major Thawin Yuyen, Police Lieutenant Col­o­nel Suraphon Chulaphram, and Police Col­o­nel Charoenrit Chamratromran ­were in charge of the administrative subdivision in the BPP’s Bangkok Headquarters and also worked closely with the CIA’s cover organ­ization called Southeast Asia Supply Corporation (SEA Supply). They understood the necessity of building a school for the highland minorities and villa­gers in the remote border areas ­because no governmental organ­izations, including the Ministry of Education, could reach ­t hose areas. As explained ­earlier, they believed that if the highland minority ­people w ­ ere to remain strangers to the Thai nation-­state, then ­these ­people could be easily duped by the enemies and would become threats to the Thai national security from within.126 The solution was clear: make them Thai ­people. On receiving the proposal for building a school in the remote border areas from the BPP’s Area 5 camp in Chiang Mai, Charoenrit, the then deputy secretary of the Committee to Aid Hill Tribe ­People and ­People Far from Communication reported to Director-­General Phao Siyanon. Upon Phao’s approval, Charoenrit contacted SEA Supply and asked for medical aid kits and other supplies to prepare for a survey trip to the northern border areas by the committee. The CIA agreed and sent airplanes and pi­lots to facilitate the trip in addition to the requested items.127 ­After the committee’s visit, the BPP was officially appointed to be the central government agency to carry out the aid proj­ect for the highland minorities, and shortly ­after, the Border Information Center that PARU had built to facilitate its intelligence gathering and police surveillance in the remote border areas was merged with the BPP school proj­ect.128 The BPP opened its first official school, the Border Patrol Police Sponsored School No. 1 (rongrian tamruat trawen chaidaen bamrung thi nueng), on January 7, 1956, in Ban Don Mahawan in Chiang Khong district of Chiang Rai province, which was where Police Lieutenant Thawi had initially suggested building a school.129 The Ministry of Education still did not provide a bud­get for a permanent school building, and thus this school was constructed with money and materials

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from the BPP and villa­gers.130 In the first year of the official BPP school program, the BPP built eigh­teen schools in northern and northeastern border areas; of ­these, fifteen ­were located in northern border provinces with vari­ous ethnic minorities.131 The BPP taught c­ hildren how to speak and read the Thai language ­under the trees or in the backyards of the thatched h ­ ouses. In the beginning years, the BPP teachers and villa­gers spent their own pocket money to buy nails and wire to build temporary classrooms, while BPP development platoons went to the hills and found wood and rocks to build a classroom.132 Both the Bangkok Headquarters of the BPP and regional subdivisions advertised the BPP school proj­ects to other governmental organ­izations seeking supplies and fringe funding and to private organ­izations and businesses seeking donations.133 Official BPP school histories emphasize that it was the sacrifice and dedication of the BPP rather than the Thai government’s support that contributed to educating highland minorities and remote villa­gers in the border areas. The next task ­after building schools was recruiting teachers. Since ­t here ­were neither teachers available in such remote areas nor funds to hire them, members of the BPP themselves became teachers. Thus BPP Headquarters and the Ministry of Education jointly set up a training course starting in 1957.134 In a speech opening one of the courses, which took place in Phaya Thai School in Bangkok in 1958, the head of the Department of General Education (krom samansueksa) emphasized that the regular Thai curriculum or teaching skills ­were not appropriate for the BPP school since the majority of prospective students did not know the Thai language, and w ­ ere from dif­fer­ent ethnic groups.135 Therefore, most of the teachers’ training focused on finding ways to narrow the gap between the Thai BPP teachers and the highland minorities. In addition to producing a special curriculum for the BPP schools, certain techniques to raise the target population’s awareness of Thai nationhood, such as teaching the ­children songs to learn the meaning of the three colors in the Thai national flag (trai rong thong thai), the five Buddhist precepts (sin la ha), and the Thai national anthem w ­ ere proposed.136 All the BPP’s efforts for building schools ­were temporarily halted by Sarit’s coup in September 1957. Nevertheless, the BPP managed to overcome this critical moment by continuously undertaking, or even augmenting, the civic action proj­ects. Notably, the number of BPP schools almost tripled in the years following Sarit’s coup. In addition, according to then–interim commissioner of the BPP Headquarters, Chan Angsuchot, the BPP had surveyed 95,721 p ­ eople out of 137 300,000 highland minorities as of 1958. The BPP also offered medical assistance and clothing for school ­children with help from the Ministries of Health and Education, the Department of Public Welfare, and the Thai ­Women’s Society.138 Starting in 1962, USOM began funding the BPP’s civic actions through the

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­ emote Area Security Development proj­ect. With USOM’s w R ­ holehearted support, the BPP had constructed over 200 schools and distributed tools, seeds, breed animals, and medicines to the highland villa­gers. Along with the increase in the number of schools, the range of border areas that the BPP’s school proj­ect had covered expanded from the remote areas to the central northern and northeastern parts of Thailand. Around this time, the royal f­ amily began to show interest in the BPP’s civic actions. King Bhumibol donated money to build ten schools and thus the BPP named them King-­Sponsored Schools (chao pho luang upatham). Likewise, Queen Sirikit provided funds to build two more schools for highland minority ­children, and ­t hese ­were named Queen-­Sponsored Schools (chao mae luang upatham).139 The princess m ­ other channeled vari­ous donations to build a total of 140 BPP schools, and she visited all ­t hese schools to attend opening ceremonies and distribute school supplies,140 ­until the late 1970s, when a ­daughter of the king, Princess Sirindhorn, started to do so on her behalf.141 In addition, Princess Sirindhorn initiated her own royal proj­ects with the BPP schools starting in 1980. As of academic year 2017, BPP Headquarters was in charge of 213 BPP schools, including two secondary schools, with a total of 25,953 students and 1,378 BPP teachers.142 All of ­t hese BPP schools are part of Princess Sirindhorn’s royal proj­ect for Development of C ­ hildren and Youth in Remote Areas (khrongkan kanphathana dek lae yawachon nai thin thurakandan). What roles have BPP schools played in the border areas?143 The first priority of the BPP school proj­ect since the mid-1950s was teaching the Thai language to the ethnic minorities, focusing especially on speaking and reading. Their proficiency in the Thai language was vital to the ability of the BPP to collect intelligence related to border security. Through the efforts of enhancing literacy, the BPP also believed that the highland minorities would become gradually aware that they belong to Thailand. Language education for the highland minorities was considered a key to open a door to civilized, modern Thailand. Chan Angsuchot affirmed that teaching the Thai language would promote “the spread of modernization in the remote villages in the coming years”; only with literacy would “the new civilization [arayatham] pro­cess” reach them.144 Meticulous instructions for introducing modern Thailand to the highland minorities was given by Suraphon Chulaphram: When the BPP teachers befriend the c­ hildren, they should introduce teaching and learning materials such as beautiful pictures of mountains, forests, streams, ­houses to . . . ​excite them. Then, the teachers pre­sent the pictures of Thai alphabet, like ko kai kho khai and so on. Next, the pictures

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of King, Queen, Princess ­Mother, and other royal f­ amily members, along with pictures of motor vehicles, trains, airplanes, boats, roads, sea, beautiful sceneries of other provinces that the students had never seen before should be presented. The hidden objective in ­these activities is to show the pro­gress [khuam charoen] of Thailand. Let the ­children become interested in ­t hose images first. Then the interests would make them be willing to learn Thai and would induce them to go to school.145 The BPP school was like a development for a security program designed for remote area villa­gers. Once the school building was prepared and the teachers began teaching, the BPP could stay in the village without attracting suspicion. To justify its financial aid to the Remote Area Security Development programs, USOM stated that the agency supported the BPP’s remote area schools b ­ ecause they “serve as local development centers and as information collection points.”146 By introducing Thai educational curriculums, new agricultural techniques, medicines, and modern ways of life to the students and their parents, the BPP school proj­ect carried out its multifaceted mission to spread the language of state and national loyalty, as well as the modernization imperatives. Essentially, all t­ hese activities ­were intended to build a “­human border” along the territorial border.147 The BPP was aware that the territorial boundary over the mountains and rivers was porous and even meaningless to the border p ­ eople and that the poor, “uncivilized” frontier villages could provide a suitable haven for external enemies like communists. Therefore, the civilization and assimilation of ­t hese highland minority ­people was imperative for building a modern, united Thai nation-­state. Education and sanitation w ­ ere considered fundamental ele­ments to raise t­hese marginalized p ­ eople up to the level of Thai citizens.148 The everyday practice of the Thai language, culture, tradition, and modern way of living in the schools was expected to gradually bring the highland minorities ­under the influence of Thai authority. Nevertheless, the BPP school proj­ect failed to achieve its goal of integrating the highland minorities into the Thai nation due to the priority given to the security missions and the hierarchical nature of the assimilation pro­cess. Since the beginning of the proj­ect, the number of BPP schools has corresponded to the po­liti­ cal and security conditions of each region.149 Figure 2.2 shows the number of BPP schools by year and region in the period of 1956–2006.150 ­Until the late 1970s, the northern (Region 3) and northeastern (Region 2) regions had the highest numbers of BPP schools, compared with the central (Region 1) and southern (Region 4) ­regions ­u ntil the late 1970s. The concentration in the north and northeast implies that ­these two regions w ­ ere considered the most security-­sensitive areas from

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Figure 2.2. Number of BPP Schools, 1956–2006

the beginning of BPP civic actions in the mid-1950s. In a similar vein, a gradual increase in the number of schools in southern Thailand since the early 1980s reveals the BPP’s increasing efforts to expand civilian counterinsurgency programs to suppress the region’s unrest. The correspondence between Thai po­liti­cal conditions and BPP schools is much clearer in Figure 2.3, which shows the number of newly built schools by year. ­There are three outstanding hikes, in 1958, 1967, and 1985. The increase in 1958 is derived from the impact of Sarit’s coup that essentially forced the BPP to shift its operation focus to civic actions. The second hike in 1967 generally reflects the BPP’s expansion of civic actions from mid-1965 to ­counter the Thai communists’ armed strug­g le. It is also noteworthy that most new schools w ­ ere built in the northern region a­ fter the 1967 outbreak of local insurgencies by the highland minorities, often known as “Red Meo [Hmong] War.”151 However, in the following year, the number of schools dropped rapidly in the northern region. Even though the Thai army and the BPP attempted to suppress the local insurgencies and bring peace and order back to the region from early 1967, thirteen BPP schools in the north had to be closed within a year due to the uncertain security conditions.152 Fi­nally, in 1985, the number of newly built schools increased considerably along with the expansion of Princess Sirindhorn’s royal proj­ect with the BPP.

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Figure 2.3. New BPP Schools Built by Year, 1956–2006

Figure 2.4, on the number of BPP schools transferred to the Ministry of Education, indicates the leveling off of insurgency and security prob­lems in each region. The transfer of any BPP school to the Ministry of Education must meet certain conditions stipulated by the Ministry, including that the villages housing the schools be secure so that the teachers employed by the Ministry of Education can safely reside and implement their work in the area.153 Figure 2.4 shows that the largest number of school transfers occurred in the northeastern region between the 1970s and early 1980s. With the concentrated efforts from the Thai military and the US government to c­ ounter insurgency in the northeast, the region developed to the extent that it did not need BPP schools. One con­spic­u­ous effect of ­t hese efforts is the paved roads, which made the region more accessible for ordinary government employees. Figure 2.3 confirms that the number of new BPP schools in the northeastern region started to decline in the 1970s, when the transfer of schools began to increase. Because the northeastern region became a stronghold for the Thai military especially a­ fter 1965, the BPP’s civic actions ­were relatively less developed in this region. By contrast, the northern region has been a central base for the BPP’s civic actions and police work since the formation of the BPP to the pre­sent owing to the region’s mountainous environments and the presence of the largest number of highland minorities. Overall, this analy­sis reveals that the BPP school proj­ect aimed not only to

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Figure 2.4. BPP Schools Transferred to the Ministry of Education, 1956–2006

expand formal educational opportunities for the border population but also to build an outpost for implementing border security missions. Another cause for the BPP school proj­ect’s failure to integrate the highland minorities is found in the ways the BPP and monarchy undertook assimilation and modernization through their civic actions and royal proj­ects. The then commissioner Chan said in 1958 that it was easier for the BPP to deal with c­ hildren than with adults. As the Thai saying goes, “Young sparrows are easy to tame, old sparrows are difficult to tame” (mai on dat ngai mai ke dat yak).154 In actuality, even the mature ethnic minorities and mountain ­people ­were treated like ­children ­because of their otherness. Even in the pre­sent day, ­those villa­gers are considered as living evidence of exoticism and underdevelopment, and they have been widely utilized as a tourist attraction in northern Thailand not only for foreigners, but also for the Thai ­people. The notion of backwardness and immaturity attributed to highland minorities also remains strong among the Thai authorities and the BPP ­because in that way, the superiority of the Thai over other ethnics can be preserved.155 As Princess Sirindhorn said in 1990, constant care and assistance must be provided to ­these ­people: ­There are good and bad impacts and this made me think what we should do more for the p ­ eople that we are protecting and taking care of in terms of

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knowledge, ability and education. When the country progresses forward, it ­will give vari­ous opportunities to the ­people to develop for themselves and conditions for more. The country opened the opportunities for pro­gress but we have to think carefully ­whether p ­ eople u ­ nder our protection are able to develop further along the opportunities given for them or not.156 The teacher-­student-­like hierarchical relationship was the heart of the assimilation pro­cess in the BPP schools. The BPP and its foreign and royal sponsors’ attempts at assimilation ­were restricted to the “border of Thainess,” which reluctantly accepted the minorities inside the geo-­body but not well into the domain of Thainess.157 Overall, the BPP’s civic actions and its school proj­ect intended to build a united Thai nation-­state by safeguarding the territorial border and by securing the loyalty of populations who would eventually constitute a “­human border” at Thailand’s international territorial boundary. This ­human border was expected to be far more effective than the territorial border ­because the latter is not enforceable in the jungles and rivers through which transnational mi­grants and external enemies might enter Thailand. The most workable and efficient way to protect Thailand’s territorial border is for ­t hose who live ­t here to have a sense of belonging to the Thai nation and a desire to prevent and expel any infiltrations from the external ­enemy. At the same time, another underpinning of Cold War nation-­building is maintaining the ascendancy of the Thai over other ethnicities, and Bangkok over peripheries. In this regard, a ­human border that the BPP and royal ­family has constructed through the school proj­ects vividly demonstrates both the hierarchical nature of Thai nation-­building and the othering pro­cesses during the Thai counterinsurgency era and into the pre­sent.

Leaders of the Thai Counterinsurgency All the BPP’s civic action proj­ects continued to expand in the 1960s and 1970s thanks to USOM-­PSD sponsorship channeled through the Remote Area Security Development proj­ect and the Thai monarchy’s unfailing support. The expansion and development of the BPP’s civic actions during this time involved several significant developments. First, when previous BPP civic action programs and aid for the highland minorities and remote border ­people w ­ ere incorporated and institutionalized by USOM-­PSD in the latter half of the 1960s, they came to emphasize anticommunist modernization and counterinsurgency objectives. Civic action proj­ects such as rural medical programs, Border Security Volunteer Teams, and the Uplands Development Programs had been carried out by the BPP since

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the mid-1950s, but a­ fter 1965, the PSD made them serve as a prototype for other security agencies’ counterinsurgency campaigns. It is apparent that the Thai military government’s Mobile Medical Team proj­ect, Village Security Force proj­ect, and Communist Suppression Operations Command w ­ ere modeled a­ fter the BPP’s civic actions. Second, b ­ ecause the US and Thai governments wanted to cover their counterinsurgency campaigns with civilian clothes, they sought a nonpo­liti­cal symbol that could make their actions appear “apo­liti­cal.” In this context, the Thai monarchy came to receive lavish attention from the United States in the mid-1960s. A noteworthy, intriguing point in USOM-­PSD’s 1974 termination report is that while it complained about the Thai government’s indifference t­oward growing communist threats and its reluctance in undertaking civilian counterinsurgency programs, it w ­ holeheartedly welcomed the royal ­family’s “excellent relationship” with the BPP, which was “highly trained” in controlling the “borders.”158 The royal ­family not only became a symbol of the civilian counterinsurgency campaign, but they also took over the leadership of the Thai nation-­building pro­cess against communist expansion. Most of USOM-­PSD’s programs pertaining to BPP civic actions ­were ultimately merged into the royal proj­ects, as exemplified by the BPP schools, the Bordercraft proj­ect, the PMMV, and the Hill Tribe Preserved Food proj­ects. Indeed, the Thai monarchy’s counterinsurgency campaigns to circumscribe communist subversion as well as rural unrest achieved success beyond the United States’ expectations. The royal f­ amily could also circumvent their po­liti­ cal rivals and build their own power bases among the Thai p ­ eople by indigenizing American anticommunist modernization and using it to build the royalist Thai nation. This chapter examined the development of modernization theory as a Cold War nation-­building ideology in the 1950s and how it affected American foreign policy goals in Southeast Asia. Throughout the Cold War in Southeast Asia, modernization was the most popu­lar religion. Modernization was an imperative for the countries to prove not only their po­liti­cal in­de­pen­dence from Western colonial powers but also their economic, social, and cultural liberation from the instabilities caused by the turbulent decolonization pro­cess. Thailand might have suffered less from the decolonization pains than did other countries, but the pro­ cess of building a united, progressive nation-­state was not an easy task. As in other pro-­American countries, the Thai ruling elite indigenized American anticommunist modernization goals, focusing their energy on accelerating economic development for national security. ­After the 1957 coup, Sarit Thanarat invited the royal ­family to participate in the same urgent task of expanding the po­liti­cal base, and the princess ­mother led the way for the long-­term survival of the monarchy.

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During the Thai counterinsurgency era, the Border Patrol Police transformed into a symbolic missionary of royalist nationalism through nation-­building proj­ ects among the highland minorities. Since t­ hose w ­ ere considered to occupy the lowest rung on the modernization ladder, they could be used to restyle the royal ­family as a modern nation-­builder, even as they w ­ ere used as a h ­ uman border for the royalist Thai nation-­state. This is how the Thai royal f­amily and their loyal agent indigenized the American Cold War crusade, and b ­ ecause of its successful per­for­mance, the monarchy would gain irrevocable popularity and authority among the Thai populace.

C HA P T E R T H R E E

The Saga of the Black Panther, 1950–1976

The Police Aerial Reinforcement Unit (PARU) has a foundation anniversary ceremony apart from the BPP. In that ceremony and at reunions, former and incumbent members of PARU sing the “Naresuan March” instead of the official BPP song. Retired PARU members have strong feelings t­ oward their unit, and although it became a subunit of the BPP, its characteristics, histories, and missions have not always been congruent with t­ hose of its superior. The BPP and PARU ­were founded separately by the CIA and the Thai government to fight the growing influence of communist movements in Southeast Asia. ­After Sarit’s coup in 1957, the BPP transformed into an anticommunist modernization agency that assisted the United States Operations Mission to Thailand and the royal ­family. PARU on the other hand continued to work closely with the CIA, and a majority of the forces ­were mobilized in its American patron’s clandestine operation in Laos throughout the 1960s. PARU’s inglorious homecoming in the early 1970s illuminates the unsuccessful indigenization of the Cold War by the United States. The unit was at the cusp of dismantlement ­after the failure of the CIA’s covert war in Laos. Just as Vang Pao’s Hmong soldiers had to flee ­after the end of Second Indochina War, PARU could have been disbanded ­because the United States was unable to protect its local agents. It was the Thai monarchy that fostered this war orphan and made PARU another missionary of royalist nationalism. The BPP unit that was deployed to the Thammasat University in the early morning of October 6, 1976, was PARU. This chapter focuses on the major historical events that PARU was involved in both apart from and as a part of the BPP organ­ization to better understand how PARU was mobilized in indigenizing the American Cold War by its CIA patron, Thai military rulers, and the monarchy.

Raising a Black Panther As discussed briefly in Chapter One, the Naresuan Committee, which was comprised of Prime Minister Phibun Songkhram, Thai military leaders, and US 83

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government representatives, had envisioned creating a special police force trained in paramilitary tactics and guerrilla warfare to defend the volatile border areas. PARU was formed in early 1951 alongside the Territorial Defense Police.1 Police Captain Suchat Lueanchawi, then commander of the first police com­ pany at Pathumwan Police Constable School, received an order from the Thai National Police Department to join an En­glish language class hosted by the Ministry of Defense. ­A fter Suchat completed the three-­month course, Deputy Director-­General Phao Siyanon appointed him commander of a police paratrooper camp in Lopburi, at the site where the Japa­nese army had built a military camp during the Pacific War. It was officially named the Erawan Special Weapon and Parachute Training Camp (khai fuek awut phiset lae phonrom, erawan). Suchat recalled in his 1975 memoir that “to preserve the honor of a Thai policeman working with the American instructors and also to alleviate my ­family’s burden,” Phao generously created a special stipend for Suchat of about 2,000 baht per month on top of his regular police salary and allowances—­which was 190 baht per month at that time.2 Suchat had traveled between Bangkok and Lopburi with the American advisers and they fi­nally opened the Erawan camp. One intriguing PARU tradition that started from the Erawan camp years is the naming of trainee classes, or run in Thai.3 A PARU run is named ­a fter the number of initial volunteers who entered training or the final number of trainees who completed the program.4 In mid-1950, students at the Metropolitan Police School had received an order to apply for the paratrooper training at Erawan, and five hundred men applied. The first PARU class was thus named “run 500.” One member of this class was the then Police Sub-­Lieutenant Choetchamrat Chitkarunarat. In a memoir published in 2011, Choetchamrat wrote that he became a member of run 500 on July 24, 1950, and that he had received regular police training before he arrived at Erawan. From the run 500, Thai police commanders and American instructors selected fifty men who ­were single, physically strong, disciplined, and had good morale, and included them in the first paratrooper’s training, which started on March 13, 1951.5 American instructors conducted two main courses for this first group of paratrooper trainees: weapons and tactics for the first four weeks and parachuting for the following four weeks—­t he latter comprised of three weeks of ground training and one week of airborne parachute training.6 The first course included training in modern weapons, de­mo­li­tion, guerrilla tactics, jungle survival, and judo. Trainees also practiced jumping from a thirty-­four-foot tower. The modern weapons training course covered the use of light machine guns in preparation of guerrilla and jungle fighting. The training also included heavy weapons like mortars, bazookas, grenade launchers, and landmines to destroy bridges and trains.

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De­mo­li­tion courses taught the use of vari­ous explosives like dynamite and Molotov cocktails for sabotage. Tactics w ­ ere mostly concerned with guerrilla and jungle warfare. Considering the mountainous topography of general Southeast Asia, special courses on how to survive in the jungles was also provided.7 ­After completing the weapons and tactics course, the trainees moved on to the parachute training. A ­ fter three times jumping from airplanes provided by SEA Supply—­the CIA cover organ­ization in Thailand—the trainee was qualified to become a paratrooper. The first group of trainees, however, had to postpone their parachute training b ­ ecause the tower for ground training was still ­under construction, and at the end of April  1951 this first group, called Erawan run one, returned to Bangkok. In May, the American instructors received a second group of trainees, Erawan run two. Choetchamrat was one of the trainees in this second group, which included twenty-­five men from the Thai army and twenty-­five men from the Thai air force, in addition to fifty men from the police (from run 500). Once they completed training in weapons and tactics, they w ­ ere able to move on to parachute training using the newly constructed tower. This course, which was also attended by the previous group of trainees, began on July  13, 1951.8 To PARU, run 500 is considered a legend ­because they ­were the first Thai armed force to have received unconventional warfare and parachute training from the Americans and also b ­ ecause most of the influential PARU leaders in its history came from this run. Additionally, only ­t hese first two groups received the full eight-­week training. L ­ ater trainees w ­ ere trained for only about a month on average.9 While the training and recruiting ­were well ­under way, Erawan was officially opened in a ceremony on April 17, 1951, led by the director-­general of the Thai National Police Department (TNPD) Police General Luangchattrakankosin along with several high-­ranking military and police officers. Police Captain Suchat Lueanchawi became the first commander of the camp and Police Sub-­Lieutenants Sane Sitthiphan and Suwan Ratnachuen became deputy commanders. The American instructors’ team was hired by SEA Supply and headed by Col­o­nel Pete Joost, a veteran of the Office of Strategic Ser­v ices (OSS) during World War II.10 Joost’s team included James William (Bill) Lair, deputy commander in chief of the training, who worked closely with the American embassy; Ray Babino, deputy chief of the training; Walter P. Kuzmak, SEA Supply man­ag­er and also an instructor for parachute training; Jeffery Cheek, who was recruited from Texas A&M University with Bill Lair and became an instructor for explosives and bombing; Richard Van Winkle, former marine during World War II and an instructor for the Underwater De­mo­li­tion Team training; and two unnamed physicians who ­were in charge of medics training.11 Most of t­ hese instructors ­were experienced

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veterans who had operated in several Eu­ro­pean and Asian countries during World War II—­which is to say that the training courses for the Thai police were intended to prepare them for warfare, not simply for patrol work. To facilitate the training, American instructors selected a total of twenty Thai assistant-­instructors from the run 500. Among them, four instructors became group leaders of twenty-­five-­men groups and controlled daily and special trainings. Choetchamrat, who was one of the assistant instructors, praised this system b ­ ecause it enabled the Thai assistant-­instructors to proceed to higher education and training and advance in rank much faster than other Thai policemen.12 Since the first two groups’ training yielded satisfactory results, Thai and American commanders increased the number of police trainees from fifty per class to one hundred in the third round of training. Most trainees ­were recruited from the noncommissioned police officers and cadets, but in the early years in Erawan, the TNPD assigned fifteen high-­ranking commissioned military and police officers to parachute training. Among ­these, one notable figure was the military medical doctor Nakhon Siwanit, who ­later became the third commander of the Naresuan camp in Hua Hin. Phao’s special bodyguard called Asawin also joined the training, but without registering their names.13 Meanwhile, another special weapons’ training for the police took place from 1952 in a temporary training camp called Ubon Ratchathani Special Weapon Training Camp (khai fuek awut phiset ubon ratchathani) located in the Police Constable School in Ubon Ratchathani province. This training camp yielded five more runs, a total of 450 men.14 By February 1953, SEA Supply’s paratrooper program had trained about one thousand Thai armed forces—­mainly the police comprised of eleven runs in Erawan and five runs in Ubon Ratchathani. The total number of Thai armed force trainees who had received special weapons and parachute training from the American advisers reached about 1,500 in less than two years.15 The police paratrooper’s training course at Erawan was briefly halted in early 1953, when US military advisers came to Thailand to launch special military training for the Royal Thai Army, and the Thai army reclaimed the Erawan camp.16 The TNPD returned to the Erawan camp on March 1, 1953, and moved to the Ubon camp temporarily.17 While stationed in the Ubon camp, a group of volunteer trainees received commandership training for about two months in preparation for organ­izing the administrative wings of PARU.18 By an order dated April 1, 1953, the TNPD officially announced the formation of a police paratrooper unit (tamruat phonrom) ­under the Motor Vehicle Division (kong kamkapkan yanyon or tamruat rot thang) in Naresuan camp in Hua Hin.19 At that time it was called the Naresuan Camp Paratroopers Unit (nuai tamruat phonrom khai naresuan); in 1960, the TNPD changed its official title to

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Police Aerial Reinforcement Unit Subdivision. The first commander of the Naresuan camp was the deputy commander of the Erawan camp, Police Captain Sane Sitthiphan, and the platoon commanders w ­ ere recruited from the new gradu­ates in the Royal Police Cadet Acad­emy and other police units. This group of commanders included Police Sub-­Lieutenant Narong Suechit, Somkhuan Harikul—­ who would become a founder of the Village Scouts—and Wichian Kanchanarat. SEA Supply instructors, who had already received the formal Thai police title by then, constituted the American advisory group to PARU in Hua Hin. They included Police Col­o­nel Bill Lair, Police Captain Jeffrey Cheek, and Police Captain Jack Shirley.20 The com­pany had three platoons, with thirty-­five men in each, comprised mainly of volunteers who had completed training in Lopburi and Ubon Ratchathani. In addition, the TNPD received supplementary applicants who had foreign language proficiency and a higher education background.21 Although the Naresuan camp opened in April 1953, most training still took place in the compound of Maruekkhathayawan Palace u ­ ntil the training fa­cil­i­t y in Hua Hin be22 came available. One of the first missions assigned to the police paratroopers between 1952 and 1954 was a joint operation with the Border Defense Police (BDP), which Phao or­ ga­nized in May 1953. Paratrooper instructors and seventy volunteers from the Naresuan camp ­were deployed to suppress communist insurgents at the Thai-­Lao border. In August 1953, another unit of the BDP was formed in Chiang Mai to defend the northern Thai border areas from the clashes between the Burmese government and Chinese Nationalist Party’s forces and to suppress drug trafficking by the Yunnanese immigrant groups whom the Thais used to call chin haw. To further curtail the flow of opium and to arrest drug dealers and producers, the TNPD ordered PARU to operate with the BDP in the Phayap Region in 1954. Bill Lair and three platoons of police paratroopers moved to a temporary camp in the compound of Suandok t­ emple in Chiang Mai and coordinated the BDP’s narcotics suppression. Meanwhile, PARU began collecting intelligence in the highland minority villages in the northern Thai border areas.23 The TNPD also assigned PARU to provide security ser­vices for the royal ­family.24 It was not a coincidence that PARU’s Naresuan camp was built right across from Klai Kangwon Palace, the royal ­family’s summer residence in Hua Hin. Initially, the camp site had been allocated to the army’s royal guard to provide security to the royal f­ amily, but as soon as Bill Lair proposed the site for building a camp for PARU, both Phao and the royal ­family agreed to give the land to PARU instead of the army.25 From the time when he began searching for a place for the PARU camp, Bill Lair was always mindful about maintaining a close relationship with the royal f­ amily, as he believed that in the m ­ iddle of turbulent, unpredictable

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Thai po­liti­cal conditions, only the king could provide a stable support for his brightest child, PARU. One day when PARU members ­were in training at the Maruekkhathayawan Palace, an aide of the royal ­family approached Lair and said that the king wanted to have a sailing race with him. Shortly a­ fter, King Bhumibol and Lair raced and then became close friends. Upon learning that the king was interested in range shooting, Lair offered him access to the shooting ground at the Naresuan camp. The king literally walked to the camp from the Klai Kangwon Palace and practiced shooting freely with Lair and members of PARU. Lair ­later recalled that the king did not want the Thai public to see his shooting practice b ­ ecause it might remind them of the tragic accident that had killed his own ­brother.26 Impressed by the king’s sincere, intimate friendship, Lair told the king that if something happened to him, PARU would take him to a safe place.27 He could make this promise b ­ ecause the Boe Fai airfield near the Maruekkhathayawan Palace had become PARU’s major field for training and operation, allowing them to take off and land freely.28 Fi­nally, Naresuan camp was officially opened on April 27, 1954, on the training ground next to the Maruekkhathayawan Palace in Cha-am, Phetburi province. To receive the special guests, the host, PARU, prepared two big tents: one for King Bhumibol, Queen Sirikit, and Phao Siyanon and the other for US Ambassador John Peurifoy and other unnamed guests of honor.29 April 27 became the official founding day of PARU. At the end of 1954, Lair proposed that a secret jungle camp by the Thai-­Burmese border be built in order to extend the training of the PARU com­pany in special warfare, parachuting, and intelligence gathering in the deep jungles. It was also to serve as the shelter in case PARU must retreat from its Naresuan camp. Lair’s colleague Jeffery Cheek and a group of PARU members searched for a place to build a jungle camp and de­cided on Huai Sat Yai in Phetburi province, next to the border with Burma. A ­ fter the camp was completed in early 1955, it was mandatory for e­ very new PARU trainee to receive the special jungle warfare and parachute training t­here between three months to one year ­until the 1957 coup.30 Unlike the open setting of the Naresuan camp in Hua Hin, the Huai Sat Yai jungle camp was the most suitable and safe place to undertake secret training and operations. In 1956, a group of se­nior American military officers and government officials visited to observe PARU’s training with CIA-­SEA Supply instructors and spent a night with PARU members in this camp. The Americans included Allen W. Dulles, director of the CIA; Army General Graves B. Erskine, assistant to the secretary of defense for special operations; Max W. Bishop, American ambassador to Thailand; Alfred C. Ulmer Jr., CIA officer in charge of Far East operations and also an inspector from SEA Supply; Col­o­nel Harry Lambert, commander of the chief of

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staff in Hawaii; Col­o­nel Eben F. Swift of the US Army’s Third Paratrooper Team; Lieutenant Col­o­nel Robert H. Zimmerman, military adviser to Thailand; and Walter  P. Kuzmak, SEA Supply man­ag­er.31 ­Every American visitor to the camp praised the unpre­ce­dented success of the CIA operation in Thailand and also PARU’s capability to operate in this kind of deep jungle setting. Notably, Allen Dulles wrote in the visitor’s book, “impressed by the mastery that I want to see all the time. The operations undertaken h ­ ere are most impor­tant.”32 Satisfied with PARU’s overall activities and abilities, Dulles told Lair that he could come straight to the director of central intelligence’s office and talk to Dulles if anything urgent happened to PARU and Lair.33 A year l­ater, as Lair had envisioned, the Huai Sat Yai camp served the purpose of facilitating PARU’s retreat from the Naresuan camp. When Sarit staged a coup in 1957 and sent the Thai army to disarm PARU, t­ hose army officers could confiscate the weapons from Naresuan camp immediately. As for the army inspector assigned to investigate the Huai Sat Yai camp, a trip t­ here took a fair amount of time, long enough for PARU to bury weapons in the jungle.34 ­There is another distinctive mission that PARU undertook before 1957. PARU’s patrol teams in the remote border areas w ­ ere to collect geographic and demographic information, including detailed information about border villages and p ­ eople, their ethnicity and religion, village politics, and so on. Lair found an able man in the border areas with whom the CIA could collaborate named Vang Pao.35 The patrol team reported the survey results to the Naresuan camp commanders ­every day, and this information was relayed to Washington via the American instructors in the camp.36 The Border Information Center (sun ruam khao chaidaen, BIC) emerged out of this pro­cess in 1955, when the center was built in Pueng Khlueng village located in the passageway between the Thai and Burmese border in Umphang district, Tak province.37 Since then, eleven BICs ­were built in northern and northeastern Thailand (­Table 3.1). The Huai Sat Yai camp also had a Border Information Center ­because it was located near the Burmese border and ­there w ­ ere many highland minorities including the Karen ­people mostly not familiar with the Thai language and customs. The Karen was the largest group among the highland minorities in Thailand. One of the first PARU civic actions was launched by PARU development platoon 712  in Ban Palau village and platoon 713  in Ban Padeng nearby the Huai Sat Yai camp. Appreciating their hard work, King Bhumibol donated a D4 tractor to PARU at Hua Hin to enhance their development proj­ects in ­these villages. Soon ­these villages came ­under the king’s royal development proj­ ect.38 This Border Information Center proj­ect gave birth to the BPP school proj­ect. As it was for the BPP, Sarit’s coup in 1957 was a crisis for PARU, b ­ ecause the coup threatened the organ­ization’s autonomy and continuation. When the Royal

90  Chapter 3 ­Table 3.1. ​PARU’s Border Information Centers (sun ruam khao chaidaen)

BIC no. 1 BIC no. 2 BIC no. 3 BIC no. 4 BIC no. 5 BIC no. 6 BIC no. 7 BIC no. 8 BIC no. 9 BIC no. 10 BIC no. 11

Ban (Village)

Tambon (Subdistrict)

Amphor (District)

Changwat (Province)

Pueng Klueng Naranae Mae Usu Mae Lana Tha Tafang Nam Muap Ngop Buakmi Kaeng Nang Sanwae Huai Sat Yai

Mae Chan Lahansai Mae Tan Mae Lana

Umphang Lahansai Tha Song Yang Mueang Mae Sariang Sa Thung Chang Pua Nakae Nakae Kaengkrachan

Tak Buriram Tak Mae Hong Son Mae Hong Son Nan Nan Nan Nakhon Phanom Nakhon Phanom Phetburi

Koktum Koktum Songphinong

Source: Police Aerial Reinforcement Unit Subdivision, Prawat khai naresuan [History of Camp Naresuan], (Thailand: Police Aerial Reinforcement Unit Subdivision, Border Patrol Police Headquarters, 1992), 16. Note: In the source, each Border Information Center is called so cho, in a Thai abbreviation, and each center is listed in Thai alphabetical order. Since the transliteration of the Thai alphabet might be confusing, I used the numbers instead. It is not clear w ­ hether ­t hese centers ­were built according to the order of listing.

Thai Army came to confiscate armaments from Naresuan, all PARU members ­were summoned to the camp’s training ground. An army lieutenant col­o­nel quickly read the order from the coup group and suspended the com­pany’s training and operations. The TNPD gave individual members of PARU permission to transfer to other police units without any disadvantage or retaliation. In fact, Lair and Phao had sensed the army’s growing jealousy of PARU, and thus Lair tried to keep the unit from being seen as military and po­liti­cal. One of his attempts to protect PARU from the army’s resentment involved giving the group the nonmilitary name of Police Aerial Reinforcement Unit. Another attempt was inviting military physician Nakhon Siwanit to the PARU commandership ­a fter the former commander, Police Major Asawin Tungkhadecha, was killed in an airplane accident in 1955. This was also the reason why Lair and Phao kept the then Police Major Pranet Ritluechai as the deputy commander ­because, unlike Nakhon, Pranet had a more extensive military background and a cantankerous personality that could cause uncomfortable feelings within the army circles.39 Shortly ­after the coup, Commander Nakhon was transferred to another police unit and the deputy commander, Police Major Pranet Ritluechai, became an

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a­ cting commander. Pranet told PARU that regardless of ­whether they faced disbandment or not, they should stay together in Naresuan camp. No single PARU member moved out to other police units ­a fter the coup except for Nakhon Siwanit.40 In fact, it was not only Pranet’s urging that convinced PARU to remain in the Naresuan camp. It was also their pride in being the first paratroopers in Thai history on top of being a close guard of the royal ­family. But then, too, ­because PARU had the backing of the US government and the royal f­ amily, the coups did not necessarily mean the end of the unit. As Choetchamrat remarked, its members assured themselves that “one day we w ­ ill rise again” (sak wan nueng khong tong pen wan khong rao klap khuen ma).41 Not long a­ fter the coup, the CIA and PARU commanders found a solution. They suggested moving PARU ­under the Border Patrol Police and mobilizing the unit in the CIA’s special operations in Laos in exchange for the US government’s increase and in aid to Sarit’s administration. PARU and the BPP operated separately u ­ ntil Sarit’s coup, but the high-­ranking officers of the two units ­were not separated. The key connector between the BPP and PARU was doubtlessly Phao, the founder of both t­ hese units with the CIA. ­Under Phao, ­t here w ­ ere several commissioned army officers who had moved to the police department when Phao became the deputy director-­general. Notably, Army Captains Charoenrit Chamratromran, Suraphon Chulaphram, and Samak Waiyanon had been transferred from the army to the TNPD, and the first two played a central role in establishing the Border Defense Police and PARU. In par­ tic­u­lar, as a close aide of Phao, Charoenrit had actively participated in building the Erawan camp with the CIA starting in 1950, and he also accompanied Phao whenever he visited PARU training teams.42 Meanwhile, PARU had several experiences of jointly operating with the BPP. Between 1952 and 1954, PARU w ­ ere deployed to suppress communist insurgents and drug traffickers in the Thai-­Lao border and in. Chiang Mai, as mentioned e­ arlier. In this regard, it was not a coincidence that ­these two units came to be merged ­under the name of the Border Patrol Police, although we cannot overlook the ­bitter, incon­ve­nient feelings of PARU members for becoming a subordinate to the BPP. Nevertheless, the new organ­ ization of the BPP and PARU ultimately secured both units from disbandment. ­After Sarit’s reform of the TNPD, PARU’s superior, the Motor Vehicle Division, was dismantled, and its armaments ­were transferred to the army. By a restructuring order in 1960, the Naresuan camp paratrooper’s unit officially changed its name to the Police Aerial Reinforcement Unit Subdivision (kongkamkapkan sanapsanun thang akat) u ­ nder the BPP.

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Sarit’s Cold War Quartet ­ hether or not the CIA or the US government liked Sarit Thanarat as much as W Phao Siyanon, he came to power a­ fter staging two successful coups in 1957 and 1958. Sarit appointed himself a prime minister in October 1958 and assumed the director-­generalship of the Thai National Police Department in 1959. Sarit also resumed building a close relationship with the US government, particularly with the Department of Defense and the CIA. Meanwhile, Sarit extended his invitation to the Thai po­liti­cal arena to the young monarch. By the time Kennedy came to office in 1961, Sarit had completed organ­izing his Cold War quartet, comprised of the United States, the Royal Thai Army, the TNPD, and the Thai royal ­family, all of which would play a significant role in implementing his Cold War policies as well as shaping despotic paternalism in Thailand. The CIA’s so-­called secret war in Laos has often been regarded as the work of the Kennedy administration. In fact, it was Eisenhower who paved a way for the CIA’s clandestine operations during the Lao civil war b ­ ecause Laos had strategic, geopo­liti­cal importance for the Viet­nam­ese conflict, especially for blocking the Ho Chi Minh trail and protecting the South Viet­nam­ese borders.43 Washington’s suspicion of Laos’ ambiguous po­liti­cal orientation began when the Lao anticolonial nationalist movement called “Lao Issara” gradually split into three groups—­ communists, neutralist, and rightwing groups. In August 1950, Prince Souphanouvong formed the Pathet Lao, and Prince Souvanna Phouma became the prime minister of Laos in November 1951. During the First Indochina War, Northern Viet­nam­ese forces overran the Viet­nam­ese countryside and swept across Laos, fi­nally reaching Luang Phrabang in March 1953. Northern Viet­nam­ese installed the procommunist Pathet Lao in Sam Neua, a provincial capital of Houaphan, that same month. In October 1953, France granted Laos its in­de­pen­dence. While the Geneva Conference on resolving the prob­lems, which resulted from the Korean War and the war between Vietnam and France (First Indochina War), was being held between April and July of 1954, the Eisenhower administration began intervening directly in the Lao civil war. In August 1954, the US National Security Council resolved that it would “make ­every pos­si­ble effort, not openly inconsistent with the U.S. government position as to the Geneva armistice agreements, to defeat communist subversion and influence and to maintain and support friendly non-­ communist governments in Southeast Asia.” Subsequently more than 90 ­percent of nearly $50 million in foreign aid to Laos flowed into military buildup and paid for the entire military bud­get of the twenty-­five-­thousand-­man Royal Lao Army.44 Although Pathet Lao, the leftwing group of Laos u ­ nder Prince Souphanouvong, did not officially control provincial governments, the Eisenhower adminis-

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tration viewed the existence of this procommunist group with ­g reat concern. Rather than directly deploying US forces, Eisenhower recommended that the president elect, John F. Kennedy, utilize regional organ­izations as a façade for intervention, particularly when approaching the Lao issues.45 The creation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organ­ization (SEATO) allowed member states such as the United States and Thailand to commit to defending the newly in­de­pen­dent states including Laos, from a pos­si­ble communist invasion. However, neutralist Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma posed a hurdle to the US and Thai governments’ efforts by agreeing to form a co­a li­tion government with Pathet Lao in November  1957. Prince Souphanouvong subsequently agreed to integrate Pathet Lao troops into the Royal Lao Army in February 1958, which greatly panicked the US government. Around this time, the CIA discovered a pro-­Western Lao military general, Phoumi Nosavan, who seemed to be suitable for assisting its clandestine operations in Laos. In a parliamentary election held in February 1958, the CIA secretly funded Phoumi Nosavan’s new conservative co­ali­tion, and this group fi­ nally succeeded in ousting Prince Souvanna Phouma that August. With the help of the CIA, Phoumi Nosavan seized power in April 1960.46 On August 9, 1960, Kong Le, a captain from the Royal Lao Army, led a coup that brought Souvanna Phouma back to power. Frustrated by the neutralists’ victory, Phoumi allied with a Hmong leader named Touby Lyfoung. The Hmong w ­ ere one of the ethnic minority groups that constituted about 8 ­percent of Laos’ population, and soon they became one of the major constituents of Phoumi ’s rightwing groups who opposed Kong Le. From the fall of 1960, Hmong p ­ eople began drawing military supplies from Phoumi and his local supporter, notably Prince Boun Oum na Champasak and the CIA. With backing from Hmong groups and the CIA, Phoumi’s forces marched on Vientiane and forced Kong Le and Pathet Lao to flee in late 1960. Kong Le’s troops retreated to the north and captured the Plaine des Jarres in Xiang Khuang province in January 1961. At this point, the North Viet­nam­ese volunteer forces joined to assist Kong Le and the Pathet Lao troops. Si­mul­ta­neously, the Soviet Union began transporting aircraft to the Plaine des Jarres, now a major Pathet Lao base on the Xiang Khuang plateau, to support ­t hese leftwing groups, eliciting intense protest from the US government.47 The Kennedy administration’s perspective on the ongoing civil war in Laos was not very dif­fer­ent from that of his pre­de­ces­sor, but it tried new strategies to achieve the goal of preventing communism in Indochina. One of Kennedy’s first ­trials on resolving the Lao question was directly discussed with the leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, in Vienna in June 1961. Before and a­ fter the meeting, through official and personal letters, Kennedy tried to assure Khru­ shchev that the United States had no intention of interfering in the affairs of Laos.

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In the letter to Khrushchev on October 16, 1961, Kennedy stated, “As you note, the withdrawal of foreign troops from the territory of Laos is an essential condition to preserving that nation’s in­de­pen­dence and neutrality,” which satisfied Khrushchev.48 In the meantime, Kenneth Landon from the Operations Coordinating Board at the State Department submitted a paper titled “A New Look at Laos” to the new administration in February 1961. In this paper, Landon stated that “the United States wants no war, no appeasement and no collapse in Laos. To prevent all this we need a dif­fer­ent kind of commitment and a radically new sort of action.”49 Accordingly, the Kennedy administration shifted from a seemingly passive intervention to a dif­fer­ent kind of anticommunist campaign that would soon come to be known as counterinsurgency.50 A former station chief of the CIA in Vientiane, Douglas Blaufarb, praised the counterinsurgency program as an “engagement of ­people in defending newfound improvements in the quality of life and hopes for further pro­g ress along the same lines.” Nevertheless, the embracement of the counterinsurgency scheme by the Kennedy administration was intended neither as the cessation of military intervention nor the withdrawal of the CIA’s covert operations. By contrast, the number of mobile special force training units, or White Star teams, that had been dispatched to Laos in the fall of 1960 increased greatly ­under the Kennedy administration. As the Northern Viet­nam­ese forces grew larger in Laos, Kennedy authorized the CIA to increase the size of the Hmong army. By the end of 1963, the number of Hmong soldiers reached twenty thousand.51 One of the most urgent policy goals in the early years of the Kennedy administration was strengthening the anticommunist frontlines among Laos, Thailand, and South Vietnam. The president’s deputy special assistant for National Security Affairs, W. W. Rostow, recommended that Kennedy “vigorously encourage cooperation among Phoumi [Nosavan], Sarit and [Ngo Dinh] Diem on a substantial basis to mop up and to hold southern Laos.”52 This Southeast Asian anticommunist trio consisting of Phoumi, Sarit, and Diem was to become a key mediator between the local military and the US government ­because their intervention in Lao affairs would reduce the suspicion of direct American intervention. Building a friendly relationship between Sarit and Phoumi was easy ­because they ­were relatives, and Sarit was strongly inclined to support Phoumi in stopping the Pathet Lao and Kong Le’s coup group. Sarit also shared a common anticommunist nation-­building vision with Diem. However, the two leaders in Laos and Vietnam began wearing out the patience of the United States as they ­were unable to put down the domestic crisis and utilize the US aid program for showcasing the American-­style modernization in their countries. By contrast, Sarit quickly prevailed among the po­liti­cal opposition groups and rivalries in the Thai

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po­liti­cal arena, and his development policies showed signs of success in the eyes of the US government. When its impatience with Phoumi’s incompetence grew considerably in the latter half of 1961, Sarit was believed to be the only man who could control Phoumi. Secretary of State Dean Rusk advised Kenneth Young, the US ambassador to Thailand, in late 1962 that “Sarit’s influence with Phoumi is indispensable” and he was told to encourage Sarit to stay in close touch with Phoumi.53 Sarit’s ironfisted rule won the US government’s attention and ­favor, raking in more aid money and personnel to Thailand. Indeed, Sarit made Thailand the anticommunist bastion of Southeast Asia. In May of 1958, John Foster Dulles received a letter from Sarit requesting an increase in US aid to Thailand. Dulles assessed that although Sarit aimed primarily to fortify his army, he felt obliged to pre­sent Sarit’s request to Congress ­because, in his words, the “proposed defense support program formulated on basis needs ­Free World nations faced by Communist threat have already been presented Congress.”54 Likewise, ­after receiving the Thai royal ­couple’s visit to the United States, President Eisenhower sent a letter to Sarit in November 1960 saying that he considered Thailand “a bulwark of ­free world strength in Asia” and highlighting that while US aid had decreased in many countries, defense support for Thailand in the fiscal year 1961 was higher than the previous year and confirmed that “a substantially increased level of military assistance is programmed” for Sarit’s government.55 As the US government’s trust and reliance on Sarit’s strongman rule grew significantly, Sarit’s poor health and succession became an issue that the Kennedy administration had to be prepared for. When the director of the CIA, John McCone, visited Thailand in June 1962, he had a meeting with Thailand’s CIA country team and learned that Sarit’s health condition was not getting any better. Sarit received medical checkups from the US military medical teams, and his health condition was reported directly to the US government ­until his death in December 1963.56 To Sarit, American intervention in Laos was one fortuitous opportunity that he could take full advantage of. From the beginning, Sarit was willing to cooperate with the CIA and Phoumi ­because Phoumi was his relative and also ­because Laos was so close to Thailand and his home province, Mukdahan. Losing Laos to communists meant opening a f­ ree passageway to Thailand for the Northern Viet­ nam­ese and the Soviet-­Chinese communist bloc. Luckily, the US government already looked favorably on him for bringing in e­ very pos­si­ble resource to defend Thailand from communists. While Diem could not spare enough forces to c­ ounter the Pathet Lao invasion even to the South Viet­nam­ese borders, and Phoumi’s leadership and ability ­were viewed as unreliable, Sarit was useful to the United States. For his part, Sarit insisted that SEATO should seek to be an Asian NATO,

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which could exercise a preemptive military strike against the communist groups.57 Sarit’s effort indeed resulted in coordinating a large joint-­military maneuver by SEATO member states in Thailand’s northeastern province on April 15, 1962. Sarit’s priority was modernizing his army with US help. In November 1962, the US Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs proposed that the government allocate a bud­ get to the Military Assistance Program (MAP) for Thailand that would be twice that of USAID’s bud­get in fiscal year 1963—­MAP $76 million, AID $32 million.58 This lucrative bud­get proposal was a response to Sarit’s protest against Kennedy’s decision to withdraw a portion of US combat troops from Thailand and relocating them in other Asian countries. Although Sarit acquiesced to the redeployment plan, he made it clear to the American ambassador Kenneth Young that “we have no choice. We have jumped into pool with you and we are now swimming together.”59 Sensing that Sarit had turned sour, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara advised Dean Rusk to prepare a “package deal” that could ameliorate Sarit’s frustration with the United States’ decision to withdraw.60 Accordingly, the Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs suggested the increase of the MAP bud­get to provide training to enhance the Thai army’s mobility and communication and movement into remote areas, as well as to support the creation of new counterinsurgency and conventional warfare units. In addition, proposed USAID programs concentrated on improving communication in the remote areas and building infrastructures that could facilitate the military’s preparation for war­time operations. In the same proposal, the bureau also stressed the necessity of raising the strength of the BPP from 4,800 men to seven thousand in fiscal year 1963.61 The US government sped up equipping its military bases in Thailand for the upcoming air strike and paramilitary operations in Laos and Vietnam. The American armed forces ­were distributed among the four major air bases in the Thai northeastern provinces—­Udon Thani, Nakhon Phanom, Ubon Ratchathani, and Nakhon Ratchasima (Korat). The Thai government’s proportional expenditure for this region ­rose from 8.9 ­percent of the national total in 1960 to 15.5 ­percent of the total in 1965. Most of this increase went to building roads and airfields, as well as expanding electricity and communication.62 At the dawn of the Vietnam War, air bases in Nakhon Sawan (Takhli), Udon Thani, and Nakhon Phanom provinces had hundreds of he­li­cop­ters, light planes, and bombers that carried CIA and US military forces and millions of bombs from Thailand to Laos and Vietnam.63 In August 1966, one of the largest, best-­equipped B-52 super-­bomber bases, with its 11,500-­foot runways, the Sattahip (U-­Tapao) Air Base was opened, marking a high point in US efforts to build military facilities in Thailand. By that time, Thailand ­housed about 35,000 US forces.64

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As US support for his regime seemed reliable, Sarit turned to internal politics to build a stable ground for implementing his anticommunist modernization policies. The Royal Thai Army was already u ­ nder his control, so he directed his energy to taking control of third parties: the Thai police, which lacked a strong leadership ­after Phao had left, and the royal ­family, which could symbolize Thailand’s stability and continuity set against communism, as the previous Chakri kings had vis-­à-­vis Western colonialism. More importantly, this traditional institution could offer the desired legitimacy for Sarit’s military regime in the eyes of the general Thai populace. With Sarit’s enthusiastic support and coordination, the royal c­ ouple launched an impressive po­liti­cal debut in the global Cold War arena first by making grandiose official visits to the Eu­ro­pean countries and the United States in 1960–1961. In the same post-­v isit letter to Sarit in November 1960, President Eisenhower observed that “His Majesty and I likewise noted that the staunch adherence of Thailand and the United States to the Southeast Asia Treaty Organ­ ization demonstrates a mutual determination to preserve the frontiers of the f­ ree world from aggression and to promote the peaceful objectives shared by both countries.”65 Sarit and the royal f­ amily shared a common interest in having the US government use Thailand as an anticommunist bastion. To Sarit and King Bhumibol, communism was the most threatening ideological movement that could uproot the traditional elite and paternalistic leadership in the Thai society. Against this tide, both Sarit and the young monarch wanted to reconstruct their po­liti­cal legitimacy for their own survival. The CIA’s request to mobilize PARU for its covert operation in Laos came at the right moment for Sarit.

Black Panther in Laos, 1960–1974 In late 1960, Bill Lair and Pranet, accompanied by the station chief of the CIA in Bangkok, Robert J. Jantzen, who was disguised ­under the position of the first secretary of the US embassy, went to meet Sarit. They w ­ ere invited to a residence in the compound of Suan Kulap Palace where the First Division of the Royal Thai Army was stationed. Upon arrival, Pranet and Bill Lair encountered Army Col­o­nel Saiyud Kerdphol—­a legendary Thai military general who became a director of the Communist Suppression Operations Command and created the concept of civilian-­ police-­military joint operation as a counterinsurgency strategy—­with an unnamed director general of army strategy. Their meeting with Sarit was fruitful: Sarit allowed the CIA to mobilize PARU in its Lao actions with the condition that the Thai army jointly operate in the secret proj­ects to help the Lao army ­under Phoumi’s

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command. However, ­because the deployment of the Thai force to Laos would violate the 1954 Geneva Convention and provoke the Communist Bloc’s protests, ­t hose who would be deployed in Laos had to disguise themselves as volunteers, related neither to the Thai nor to the US government. All the “volunteers” ­were required to resign from their current official positions and depart to Laos secretly. The US government had already promised to pay for all the expenses needed for purchasing weapons, conducting supplementary training, and providing living allowances for the volunteers.66 From its formation, PARU was prepared for mobilization in the CIA’s special missions in Southeast Asia. Even before Kong Le’s coup in 1960, the CIA had already dispatched PARU’s pathfinder unit to the Lao border to establish strategic posts in Vientiane, Paksan on the Lao side, and Mukdahan on the Thai side across from Savannakhet. From ­t hese posts, PARU freely crossed the border.67 One of the leaders of the PARU operational team in Laos said that the communication training with the American radio and code systems, patrol duties in the remotest parts of Thai border areas, and the building of the Border Information Centers all helped PARU to readily carry out the CIA’s covert actions in Laos.68 Lair built the Huai Sat Yai camp to train PARU members in night parachuting in the jungles, which would be useful for undertaking the CIA’s operations.69 PARU’s other top-­secret mission, “Operation Romeo,” also prepared the unit for carry­ing out clandestine missions. The operation supported anticommunist movements in vari­ous Asian countries, such as China, Indonesia, and Indochinese countries with the Civil Air Transport (CAT), owned by the CIA. The CIA brought a PARU team to Takhli Air Base, in Nakhon Sawan province, and assisted CAT’s aerial reconnaissance.70 In other words, the CIA had prepared PARU to become a region-­ wide mobile force that could be called into action wherever the US government needed it. ­After years of harboring suspicion and embitterment ­toward this “black panther” of his archrival, Phao, Sarit consented to the CIA’s plan for mobilizing PARU in Laos ­because he was interested in “taking both direct and indirect ways to agitate, attack, kill and destroy the communist e­ nemy not to let them set up a base to invade across the Mekong River and the mountain borders to Thailand.”71 Witnessing his relative Phoumi helplessly retreating from Vientiane a­ fter Kong Le’s coup in August 1960, Sarit was indeed convinced that Pathet Lao and the Northern Viet­nam­ese communists could overflow the porous borders between Thailand and Laos. He had to take decisive action against t­ hese communist enemies, but he could not make any hostile movements against his neighboring countries. Therefore, Sarit utilized the CIA’s action plan to c­ ounter Lao and Viet­nam­ese communists in Laos. He also believed that Thailand’s support for the CIA covert

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­ peration in Laos would induce increased US foreign aid for his rural development o programs and his armies. Lair l­ater recalled that Sarit asked CIA officials to use his army in the CIA’s Lao operation so that the Thai army would win recognition from the US government.72 Sarit did not want only PARU to be mobilized in the CIA’s covert operations in other Southeast Asian countries b ­ ecause the CIA’s continuous support for the unit would maintain PARU’s military strength and prestige. While agreeing to send PARU to the Lao battleground, Sarit made sure that his army would play a central role in the operation. At the same time, although he did not openly express it, Sarit hoped that PARU would suffer heavy losses.73 Sarit thus or­ga­nized the Administrative Committee on Countering Communist Infiltration (khanakammakan amnuaikan totan kanseksuem khong khommiunit, or khotho) ­under the Army’s Tactical Operations Center 309 (sunpathibatkan kongthapbok 309). Soon, this advisory group became the Combined Task Force 333 or more popularly known as Headquarters 333 (kongbanchakan nuai phasom 333, or boko 333). It controlled both the Thai military and the PARU operations in Laos from the Udon Thani Royal Thai Air Force base.74 The Minister of Defense Army Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn, became its first chairman. Subsequently in October 1960, the first group of Thai commanders carefully selected from the police and the army left for Vientiane to build the regional headquarters for the Combined Task Force 333 at the Wattai Airport.75 The US Military Assistance Advisory Group to Laos was established in Savannakhet si­mul­ta­ neously, and it worked closely with the Thai army groups in Udon Thani and Vientiane.76 Among the first seven commanders in the Vientiane headquarters, Bill Lair and Pranet played key roles in forming unconventional warfare tactics and guerrilla units in Laos b ­ ecause the original covert action plan in Laos came out of ­t hese two protégés of the CIA. Police Sub-­Lieutenant Amnuai Pradapphongsa, an officer in charge of communication and intelligence in the Naresuan camp, also joined Lair and Pranet in Vientiane.77 PARU and Bill Lair had one significant objective to accomplish through the Lao action: survival. Bill Lair wanted to secure PARU from disbandment by contributing to destroying the communist guerrillas. He was certain that PARU was the only unit that could carry out the mission.78 Likewise, to Pranet, the Lao operation was an invaluable opportunity that could help restore the unit’s institutional autonomy and prestige. A ­ fter they received the green light from Sarit in the secret meeting at Suan Kulap Palace, Pranet and Lair returned to Hua Hin to finalize the Lao action plan. They or­ga­nized five PARU operational teams with five men in each, which ­were tasked with collecting intelligence for Headquarters 333 in Vientiane; assisting the Lao army in the battlegrounds; and setting up local militia groups among the ethnic minority volunteers, namely the Hmong, the

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Mien, the Lao Theung, the Tai dam (Black Thai), and the Kha in the Boloven region, which was ­under the control of Phoumi.79 On December 8, 1960, the five teams boarded an Air Amer­i­ca Dakota C47 airplane at Boe Fai Airport in Hua Hin at midnight and flew to Sepon Airport in Savannakhet, Laos. The PARU teams chose Savannakhet as their first destination ­because the CIA and the Thai commanders had already built a friendly relationship with Prince Boun Oum na Champasak, the head of a southern Lao royal ­family, and Phoumi and Prince Boun Oum helped facilitate PARU’s activities in Laos.80 As soon as they arrived in Laos, the five team leaders received Royal Lao Army rank equal to sub-­lieutenant to disguise them as local soldiers. Then, each team departed to its designated operational area. Choetchamrat was the leader of Team B assigned to assist Phoumi’s Twenty-­ Sixth Infantry Battalion in Pak Kading, Khammouane province. When this Lao army battalion attacked Kong Le’s force in Vientiane in late 1960, Team B fought with them. A ­ fter recapturing Vientiane, Phoumi came to Choetchamrat and held his hand tightly, thanking the Thai PARU for their impressive assistance. To Choetchamrat, in fact, the b ­ attle in Vientiane was so easy that his team did not waste bullets.81 While retreating from Vientiane, Kong Le and the Pathet Lao group successfully expelled the twenty-­first local Lao army battalion u ­ nder Vang Pao’s command from the Plaine des Jarres. When Vang Pao’s army retreated to Tha Vieng, Pranet and Lair arranged a meeting with the PARU operational team D leader and Vang Pao.82 Vang Pao immediately accepted Pranet and Lair’s proposal to train the Hmong soldiers for guerrilla warfare, and the three boarded a he­li­cop­ter to decide where to build the operational headquarters. They de­cided to build a temporary camp in Ban Padong, near Long Cheng in Xiang Khuang province.83 In the meantime, Sarit ordered the building of a secret battalion camp called Saritsena camp in Phitsanulok province to prepare the Thai armed forces in guerrilla warfare.84 Members of PARU ­were appointed to the positions of instructor, adviser, and main fighter. When the camp building in Phitsanulok was completed, about four hundred remaining forces in the Naresuan camp w ­ ere divided into two units. ­Until 1963, 256 PARU members had the special battalion in Saritsena camp, while about 140 PARU men remained in Hua Hin as a reserve force. The training program was provided to recruits from the army, police, air force, civilian and commercial aviation groups, immigrations and customs, and other governmental organ­izations. Between August and November 1964, members of PARU received extra training in air rescue with other American commanders in addition to the regular curriculum in Saritsena.85 ­There w ­ ere two major tasks that PARU w ­ ere assigned to carry out in Laos: first, to train the local soldiers and militias, mainly the Hmong army ­under Vang Pao’s

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command; and second, to assist the CIA and USOM officials’ civic actions in Laos by transporting supplies, food, and personnel. As for the first task, the BPP and PARU created two separate training courses for the Lao and Hmong guerrilla forces in Thailand and Laos. From the mid-1950s, PARU and the BPP had secretly provided unconventional war training courses for the foreign military officers and civilian officials. In 1956, sixty noncommissioned officers selected from Sam Neua and Phongsali came to the Chiang Mai jungle camp located in Samoeng subdistrict and received training in guerrilla fighting from the BPP. Right a­ fter Kong Le’s coup in Vientiane, thirty Lao soldiers from the Sixth Infantry Battalion in Savannakhet received a three-­week training ­under the supervision of PARU in the Maruekkhathayawan Palace camp. Due to the urgency of pushing Kong Le’s group out of Vientiane, ­t hese Lao army trainees received intensive training in weapons, de­mo­li­tion, raid, and sabotage and w ­ ere deployed immediately thereafter. Once the war began in Laos, and a­ fter Vang Pao joined the CIA operation in late 1960, the size and frequency of the BPP and PARU’s foreign military training grew rapidly. Between 1961 and 1962, about three hundred Hmong soldiers from local battalions in Military Region Two came to Thailand and received training in communications and special operations. Th ­ ese officers w ­ ere soon promoted to high-­ranking commands and assigned to vari­ous local military units in Laos.86 Right before fourteen states signed the international agreement on the neutrality of Laos in Geneva in July 1962, PARU began focusing on the training of civilian militias or village security groups in the strategically impor­tant villages. This mission was called the Special Guerrilla Unit (kong chon phiset, SGU). According to official accounts, SGU training began in 1962 in the Maruekkhathayawan Palace camp. Choetchamrat, who had been temporarily released from the Lao action due to injury, was ordered to oversee it. From June 1962, one hundred Hmong and Lao Theung soldiers ­were trained in weapons and guerrilla warfare so that they could replace other Lao infantries and paramilitaries. With the US government’s material and financial support, PARU trained three battalions with a total of 1,500 Hmong soldiers in Thailand and sent them back to the Lao battlefields. Vang Pao flew to Hua Hin to compliment and encourage the Hmong trainees in Thailand. ­Because the training of the Hmong soldiers in PARU’s Maruekkhathayawan Palace camp was expanding and thus could not remain secret from the public, special guerrilla training moved to the Saritsena camp in Phitsanulok.87 In Laos, the initial training of Vang Pao’s ethnic armies was carried out by PARU operational Team D in Ban Padong, and by May 1961, PARU completed the training of twenty companies of Auto-­Defense de Choc. ­Because the training program grew rapidly, it was moved to the Pha Khao area near Long Cheng, where

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new training camps ­were built.88 The United States immediately recognized the initial success of PARU’s training of the Hmong soldiers in Thailand and Laos. In a memorandum to President Kennedy’s military adviser General Maxwell Taylor in July 1961, General Edward Lansdale noted that “99 PARU personnel have been introduced covertly to assist the Meos [Hmong] in operations in Laos,” and added that “combat reports of t­ hese operations have included exceptionally heroic and meritorious actions by PARU personnel. The PARU teams have provided timely intelligence and have worked effectively with local tribes.”89 While training the local militias, PARU and the BPP also assisted in extending the civic action programs of the US Operations Mission (USOM) to Laos. US economic and military aids had begun to flow to Laos in 1950, and in January 1955, USOM established its Laos branch office in Vientiane. In June 1960, an Indiana farmer named Edgar “Pop” Buell came to Laos and joined Lair’s proj­ect of distributing supplies and foods to the Hmong villa­gers near the Plaine des Jarres.90 Experienced BPP civic action agents w ­ ere called to Laos to assist the development for security programs in Laos from the early 1960s. The town of Long Cheng was on the priority list for this development for a security proj­ect to showcase the American modernization model, and as soon as the CIA team known as SKY built its base camp, it became a distinctively modern town in the mountains.91 Unlike other rural villages in Laos, it had electricity, markets, paved roads, and small and medium-size airports with several airplanes flying between Long Cheng and Vientiane. In 1967, Vang Pao even built a royal palace for King Sisavang Vatthana in this town.92 One notable activity of the Thai BPP in Long Cheng was the opening of radio stations to implement propaganda campaigns. Manas Khantatatbumroong, who had overseen BPP’s civic action program in Thailand, was called into Laos in 1966. Manas had experience working in the BPP radio stations in Thailand and thus he was assigned to work with CIA adviser Edward Johnson to set up the United Lao Ethnics Radio Station (sathanni withayu lao ruam phao).93 By the time Manas returned to Thailand in 1967, he had broadcasted news about the situation in Laos and anticommunist propaganda three times a day in three languages—­Lao, Hmong, and Lao Theung.94 Another impor­tant development proj­ect assigned to the BPP in Laos was building airstrips in the remote villages. From the early 1950s, one of the first tasks for the BPP patrol was building a short take-­off and landing airfield so that the regional headquarters could send them supplies, foods, medicines, and other necessary materials. Similarly, when the CIA and Headquarters 333 designated an area of operation for PARU operational teams, the villa­gers in the area ­were mobilized to build airstrips so that the stationed PARU members could receive food, medicine, and weapons. While training the local militias, PARU operational

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teams also built schools and medical clinics as the BPP did in Thailand.95 However, ­these development proj­ects did not improve the villa­gers’ lives and ended up refurbishing the military bases for the CIA, USOM-Laos, and the Thai and Lao armies, hence they were unable to yield long-­term impacts on the modernization of Laos. Apparently, the Kennedy administration’s growing disenchantment with and suspicion of Phoumi Nosavan for his ability to control the Pathet Lao’s growing influence as well as his own army worried Phoumi himself, who now relied heavi­ly on CIA money and arms to retain his power. Rostow told Kennedy in August 1961 that the US government should not trust that “Phoumi’s forces could, on their own, give a very good account of themselves if they ­were to be substantially engaged with the Pathet Lao.”96 As expected by Dean Rusk, who had warned Kennedy a year ­earlier, Phoumi fi­nally fabricated a communist aggression in Luang Nam Tha province in May 1962, hindering the US government’s effort to po­liti­ cally resolve the Lao issue with the Soviet Union. Shortly ­after the clash in Luang Nam Tha, Kennedy met with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna to discuss the internal situation in Laos. In the following months, the US del­e­ga­tion, led by the diplomat Averell Harriman, joined the Geneva Conference and pushed an agreement with the Soviets to re­spect Lao’s neutrality and to end all military operations inside the country.97 This ostensible ceasefire between the United States and the Soviet Union in fact became a cover for the Kennedy administration’s military buildup in Thailand. It supplied more he­li­cop­ters to the air bases in northeastern Thailand and aided the Royal Lao Army to enhance its military strength. CIA agents scattered around Xiang Khuang province built secret bases for Hmong guerrilla training and patrolled the Lao-­Vietnamese border areas.

Inglorious Homecoming Even from the beginning, several PARU operational teams in Laos sensed the ominous signs of communist victory as they witnessed local villa­gers’ growing animosity t­ oward “strangers” like PARU and the CIA. It was common for PARU operational teams to stay in one area for a short time and then move to other posts. The reasons for terminating PARU’s operations in the villages varied from area to area, but an incident in Mueang Ngat shows why the CIA’s and PARU’s covert operations had to close in the late 1960s. ­A fter successfully assisting Phoumi’s b ­ attle to recapture Vientiane, Choetchamrat was reassigned to be a leader of Team N and moved to Mueang Ngat village, which was only nine kilo­meters from the Viet­nam­ese border. In June 1961, Team N’s PARU instructors trained three company-­size units of local militias in machine-­gun and mortar fire. When the training was completed, they distributed

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weapons and ammunition so that ­t hese militias, or SGUs, could defend their villages. Only two days a­ fter completing the first round of SGU training, about three battalions of Northern Viet­nam­ese communist forces attacked Mueang Ngat in October 1961. The local militias who had completed the training learned of the Northern Viet­nam­ese’s attack on their village in advance and a majority of them ran away, leaving less than forty men ­behind with seven members of PARU. In this b ­ attle, Choetchamrat lost three of his PARU subordinates, and he himself was injured. Choetchamrat recalled the Mueang Ngat ­battle bitterly ­because the village trainees did not inform him about the attack and left PARU in such danger.98 The ­bitter times continued for PARU in Laos. In early October 1962, Kamon Bunsoemsap, the leader of Team J in Ban Phu Hua Mui, Sayaburi province, heard from the Team E leader, China Wechakawi, that his team would move back to Thailand. L ­ ater Kamon learned from the Hmong villa­gers that China had a prob­ lem with the Hmong village headman in Phu Kong where Team E had operated, and thus China had to move the team to a safer place. Soon, Kamon heard that the son of a village headman in Phu Kong who had received SGU training in Hua Hin in June 1962 had snuck into Ban Phu Hua Mui, asked the village militia to kill all the members of the PARU team, and said he would take over Kamon’s position a­ fter they w ­ ere gone. Kamon had not given serious thought to this information at that time, but shortly ­after he moved to the other post, Team J was attacked by unidentified enemies and had to retreat to Long Cheng in October 1963. Kamon ­later said he was not sure how much the son of the Hmong village headman had “felt embittered about the Thai p ­ eople” when he heard the rumor of attack. He was sorry that PARU’s efforts over two years to promote community development and build the SGU had to be terminated without any success.99 As the Lao civil war was prolonged, PARU’s disillusion gradually transformed to hostility. Team O in Xiang Khuang province was attacked by the Lao Army Col­o­nel Sombun, the supervisor of the local militia trained by PARU. In this surprise attack, PARU lost three members. Enraged by the betrayal, the surviving PARU chased Col­o­nel Sombun for two years and fi­nally captured him. They beheaded him and brought the traitor’s head to Hua Hin to let “all the PARU know that we revenged the evil that had betrayed us.” The acting commander of the Naresuan camp, however, refused to let PARU bring the traitor’s head inside the camp, so they burnt it in the jungle.100 The hostility displayed in this story may be extreme, but it vividly shows the crumbling relationship between PARU and the local ­people in Laos. Nevertheless, PARU still had to recruit and train more local militia as the number of attacks from the Northern Viet­nam­ese and Pathet Lao increased. Even so, the PARU teams w ­ ere not sure on which side the villa­gers’ loyalty lay, and

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­ hether t­ hese trainees would fight communists before the communists convinced w them to join the war against the Americans and Thais. Fi­nally, a full-­scale ­battle broke out in February 1964, when Northern Viet­ nam­ese and Pathet Lao forces advanced to Thakhek near Savannakhet province. Since the strength of the Hmong army declined a­ fter the numerous ­battles in 1963, the US government de­cided to increase the use of air power to support ground forces. In 1964, in preparation for an air strike, the United States began arming the Royal Lao Air Force (RLAF) and increased the number of T-28 aircraft being flown. Although t­ hese aircraft had RLAF markings, they w ­ ere actually flown by Thai pi­lots who wore the RLAF insignia and uniforms to support Vang Pao’s ground operations.101 Right a­ fter Thai Army General Vithoon Yasawat joined the Udon Headquarters in late 1963, twenty pi­lots from the Royal Thai Air Force w ­ ere dispatched to Laos ­under the operation name “Firefly,” and the Army’s artillery com­pany ­under the name “Sunrise” soon followed them. Between 1963 and 1970, thirty special forces battalions and six artillery battalions with approximately 550 men in each battalion joined the Firefly and Sunrise teams in Laos, fi­nally amounting to over 20,000 Thai soldiers to Laos.102 From 1965, the US Air Force based in the northeastern Thai air bases began bombing the Pathet Lao and Northern Viet­ nam­ese supply lines. U ­ ntil 1968, the rate of sorties in Laos had remained at ten to twenty per day, but ­after the Tet Offensive in late 1968, the rate increased sharply, reaching three hundred per day. By 1969, Air Amer­i­ca, previously known as Civil Air Transport (CAT) u ­ ntil 1959, had twenty-­nine he­li­cop­ters, twenty light planes, nineteen medium transports, and more than eight thousand employees.103 The war against the Northern Viet­nam­ese and Pathet Lao turned from bad to worse in 1969. On March 1, 1969, Ban Nakhang village next to Sam Neua collapsed and several members of PARU w ­ ere captured or killed by the Northern Viet­nam­ese forces. Subsequently, in late 1969, Northern Viet­nam­ese forces defeated Mueang Souy and Sam Thong, and then fi­nally reached Long Cheng. The American SKY advisers left Long Cheng by airplane as soon as they heard that the Northern Viet­nam­ese ­were coming. Vang Pao was in Vientiane at the time of attack, and only thirty-­ four PARU ­were in the Long Cheng Headquarters when the Northern Viet­nam­ ese armies arrived nearby. A ­ fter a brief meeting, the leaders of PARU teams de­ cided to remain and fight the two battalions of Northern Viet­nam­ese forces to save the honor of PARU. In the early morning on the next day, the commander of Headquarters 333, Thai Army General Vithoon Yasawat, sent special forces from Thailand to Long Cheng, and when the Thai armies arrived, the Northern Viet­nam­ese soldiers retreated. PARU prided themselves that they had secured this “skyline” town, although eventually Long Cheng suffered Northern Viet­ nam­ese invasion in 1972.104

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In January 1970, the Thanom government de­cided to deploy more armed forces ­under the disguise of “volunteers.” When the Northern Viet­nam­ese army occupied Sam Thong in Xiang Khuang on March 17, 1970, three thousand Thai troops arrived at Long Cheng to support the operations in northern Laos. In June 1970, the Lao government asked Thai leaders to supply more troops. Although the Thanom administration was well aware of the impending threat of the Northern Viet­nam­ese forces, it also did not want to play a vis­i­ble role in the war. Thus, the Thai government recruited volunteer forces instead of sending regular army troops. The US government paid the cost of arming and dispatching ­t hese Thai volunteer battalions.105 In October 1970, one battalion of Thai Army Rangers (thahan suea phran) went to aid t­ hose units in Laos only to learn that the number of forces was still insufficient.106 ­Earlier, starting in February 1970, a­ fter receiving a formal request from the Lao government, the United States began its first B-52 strikes on the Plaine des Jarres, Xiang Khuang, which had been the main battlefield between the CIA’s secret army and the Pathet Lao since 1964. Between 1970 and 1973, when the bombing fi­nally ­stopped, 2,518 sorties dropped 58,374 tons of bombs in northern Laos.107 The total number of bombs dropped in Laos between 1964 and 1973 has been estimated at around two million tons, making Laos the most heavi­ly bombed country in world history.108 From December 1971 to May 1972, one of the crucial b ­ attles of the Second Indochina War took place in Xiang Khuang province, where 8,500 North Viet­ nam­ese forces attacked the Hmong army in Long Cheng. Despite the increase in air support, the Hmong army diminished drastically, and the poorly trained Lao army could not resist the waves of Northern Viet­nam­ese and Pathet Lao forces on the ground b ­ attles. As the number of Hmong forces declined rapidly, Thai volunteers became the largest group among the combat forces. In 1974 when Thai forces withdrew from Laos, their number amounted to 17,000.109 The ­battles between the CIA-­Thai-­Hmong soldiers and the Vietnamese-­Lao communists climaxed between December 1971 and March 1972 around Long Cheng. Although Vang Pao managed to recover Long Cheng with the help of Thai volunteer forces and the CIA, a ­battle in April 1972 turned out to be the last victory for the anticommunist forces in Laos. The United States and North Vietnam signed the peace agreements in Paris in January 1973, allowing the Lao government to or­ga­nize a co­ali­tion government with Pathet Lao. ­After sacrificing 2,482 lives out of almost forty thousand Thai men deployed to Laos between 1961 and 1974, the defeated and demoralized Thai soldiers and PARU members returned to Thailand.110 Their homecoming was not as glorious and honorable as they had expected. The war against communists in Laos was si­ mul­ta­neously taking place in Thailand, and in fact, the Thai rural insurgencies

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had increased drastically by the time the PARU operational teams returned from Laos. Indeed, the number of PARU casualties in Thailand in the late 1960s exceeded the number of PARU men who died in Laos during more than a decade-­ long operation.111 For the PARU returnees, the experience from Laos left them with more bitterness than a sense of honor. Betrayed by the very p ­ eople they had trained and armed in Laos, they had also witnessed the American SKY team abandoning them when their lives ­were at risk. The moments of honor and victory ­were quickly submerged beneath their bitterness and confusion. A number of returnees began leaving PARU shortly thereafter. Many commissioned officers of PARU who had participated in the Lao operations w ­ ere promoted to higher level positions, but some of them also left PARU. One of the last PARU men who had been captured in Laos in 1969 was among the total of 214 prisoners of war that the Thai and Viet­ nam­ese governments exchanged in September 19–29, 1974. ­After spending more than four years in vari­ous prisons from Laos to Vietnam, this PARU man fi­nally made it home and found he had been promoted to a commissioned officer rank in the year when the Northern Viet­nam­ese captured him. Without hesitation, this prisoner of war resigned from the Thai police and left PARU.112 Aside from the injuries and casualties, it was difficult for the PARU returnees to accept that their honorable actions in Laos to help the ­free world allies stop communist expansion had to remain unknown to the public. The Thai government’s treatment of ­these cold warriors was even more disappointing ­because not only did their activities go unrecognized, but also their compensations ­were not distributed fairly. Having resigned from the Thai police when they left for Laos, along with other Thai soldiers, all had given up the right to receive official compensation for any injury or damage they suffered while in action ­because the entire Lao operation had been top secret u ­ ntil recently.113 When Choetchamrat was injured in Mueang Ngat in October 1961 and was transferred to Thailand for medical treatment, Suraphon Chulaphram received him at Don Mueang Airport and immediately took him to a private clinic where the BPP and CIA had contracted to treat the injured from Laos. For the next three months of rehabilitation, Choetchamrat was forbidden to enter any public medical installations, and as soon as he recovered, he was sent to train the SGU in the Maruekkhathayawan Palace camp.114 ­After their operations in Laos failed, PARU had to remain subordinate to the BPP, which only increased their embitterment t­ oward the Thai government. According to an internal report prepared in 1975, a company-­size PARU group remained in the Saritsena camp. The other 1,450 or so PARU men w ­ ere redistributed in vari­ous security-­sensitive areas such as Mae Sot located between the Thai and Burmese border, Chiang Rai near the Lao border, and Nakhon Si Thammarat, a

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mid-­south border province. U ­ nder the command of BPP Headquarters, PARU was assigned to assist the BPP force in the border security operations or support civic actions such as the BPP schools and development centers. They ­were also mobilized alongside the BPP in assisting the royal proj­ects in the southern provinces.115 What kept PARU united throughout its years of operation was royal support. The royal ­family repeatedly visited the PARU camp in Hua Hin during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s. In 1965, Prince Vajiralongkorn came to practice zip-­line riding and ground-­parachuting with PARU instructors. While attending the Australian military acad­emy, he again came to receive private parachute training in the Naresuan camp in 1971.116 On this occasion, Prince Vajiralongkorn insisted on jumping from the real airplane like the PARU parachutists. Pranet responded that the big airplane might destroy the entire jumping ground in the Hua Hin camp.117 Whenever the royal f­amily came to Hua Hin, Prachuap Khirikhan, or Phetburi province, they often made official and unofficial visits to PARU camps, so as to maintain a close relationship with members of PARU.118 On April  10, 1966, the royal c­ ouple traveled to the Huai Sat Yai camp and adjunct Karen villages to inspect PARU’s activities. A year l­ ater, the king visited the Hua Hin camp and gave a Husky Bea­gle light aircraft to PARU to be used in its operations. On the f­ ourteenth anniversary of the Naresuan Camp opening in 1968, the US ambassador to Thailand, Leonard S. Unger, accompanied the royal c­ ouple to the Maruekkhathayawan Palace camp and watched a PARU parachuting and artillery demonstration with other foreign guests. In addition to t­ hese official visits, ­t here w ­ ere numerous informal occasions when the royal ­family made a point of meeting and encouraging PARU in Hua Hin and Phetburi.119 While returned PARU w ­ ere recuperating from the wounds and sense of defeat from their Lao experience, the Lao P ­ eople’s Revolutionary Party made the Lao monarch “voluntarily” abdicate the throne in November 1975 and announced the establishment of the Lao P ­ eople’s Demo­cratic Republic in the following month, ending the civil war. Communists had already seized power in Cambodia and Vietnam. The nightmare of the domino theory began haunting Thailand. While the Thai royal f­ amily had rapidly increased their visits to the rural areas to propagate the danger of communism, the US government announced the withdrawal of its armed forces from Thailand. Amid po­liti­cal chaos, one of the most painful and unacceptable defeats for PARU would have been the success of the October 14 movement led by the students and civil activists in 1973, toppling the military government and sending Thanom into exile. For PARU members, this was seen as a victory of communism in disguise of democ­ratization. Worse yet, the student activists heightened their criticism against the now ousted Thanom government for

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supporting the unjustifiable American wars in Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia, further deeply demoralizing PARU returnees.120 And yet, PARU might have sympathized with the democ­ratization movement at home. In Choetchamrat’s view, “the war in Laos was the war between the rich and the poor” (pen kansurop rawang khonruai kap khonchon).121 The growing tension in Thailand was also between the rich and the poor. What student and civilian activists ardently called for during the 1973–1976 period was the end of authoritarian leadership, unfair re­distribution of wealth, and heavy reliance on American domination, which all had contributed to maintaining the unequal, hierarchical Thai society.122 Meanwhile, the monarchy and its royalist network felt threatened by the Thai p ­ eople’s calls for change b ­ ecause that very change could dismantle their standing. War, therefore, did not end, ­either in Thailand or for PARU. The end of the Second Indochina War was only the beginning of more civil wars in Southeast Asia. This chapter has explored the PARU side of the hot Cold War history. PARU was formed in the early 1950s to be mobilized in a larger war that the United States was undertaking in Southeast Asia. The prestige and privilege that PARU had enjoyed as the CIA’s paramilitary force ultimately threatened the organ­ization’s standing when Sarit seized power in the 1957 coup. To survive, PARU went to Laos and carried out the CIA’s clandestine operations. Predictably, Sarit gained the desired US military aid to modernize his army by agreeing to send PARU to Laos. Sarit’s successor, Thanom, inherited and continued Sarit’s legacy and indeed made Thailand the American anticommunist bastion in Southeast Asia. The CIA was successful in saving the unit from Sarit’s retaliation, but as soon as it became clear the operation in Laos was failing, PARU again faced a life-­or-­death crisis. When they came back home to Thailand, the unit was an orphan, demoralized by the protracted war. The monarchy became a foster parent of this orphan of the American Cold War, making PARU its own agent of indigenization and an acting missionary arm of royalist nationalism. Not long a­ fter their return home, PARU men would be roaming Thammasat University with one of the largest royalist forces in Thai history, the Village Scouts, to protect their foster parents.

C HA P T E R F OU R

Crusade from the Borders to Bangkok, 1969–1976

In the early morning of October 6, 1976, the Police Aerial Reinforcement Unit, the Village Scouts, the Metropolitan Police, and other ultra-­r ightwing groups stormed into Thammasat University in Bangkok. The subsequent carnage carried out by ­t hese forces left an indelible scar on Thailand, allegedly known as a land of the f­ ree, that has not healed. The Border Patrol Police had long desired public recognition for their contribution to defending the Thai nation from external threats, including communists, but the event inscribed the name of the BPP in Thailand’s most tragic, ugliest part of its history. This chapter surveys the formation of the Village Scouts by the BPP and how this anticommunist, royalist force ended up taking part in the October 6 Massacre, a well-­k nown but still understudied subject in Thai history. Whereas the previous chapter focused on PARU’s side of the Cold War experiences, this chapter considers the Village Scouts, another institutional perpetrator of the October 6 Massacre, w ­ ere conceived and became one of the largest royalist forces during the Thai counterinsurgency era. Building upon t­ hese backgrounds, the survey w ­ ill then delve into an “ambivalent memory” of the role of the BPP, PARU, and the Village Scouts in the massacre.1 Overall, this chapter intends to identify the short-­ term impacts of the Thai ruling elite’s indigenization of the American Cold War, especially on the monarchy. Despite the complexity of the BPP’s history and the Thai ruling elite’s indigenization of the American Cold War crusade, the conclusion of this story is rather ­simple: The winner of the American Cold War is the Thai monarchy, especially King Bhumibol, and that is why we are still seeing the Border Patrol Police operating in Bangkok t­ oday.

“Not So Civilian” Village Scout Movement, 1969–1976 On May 13, 1980, Charoenrit Chamratromran and Somkhuan Harikul went to receive the excellence in leadership award from Prime Minister Army General Prem Tinsulanonda at the Government House. On this occasion, Niphon Sasithorn, rector of Srinakharinwirot University, praised the Village Scout movement that in 110

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his words, “Somkhuan conceived, Charoenrit pioneered.”2 The Village Scout movement not only created village vigilante groups, but was also intended as a vehicle to promote the BPP’s and the royal f­ amily’s anticommunist nation-­building proj­ects. It also evolved into one of the largest sociopo­liti­cal movements in Thailand during the Cold War. In order to understand how it did so, it is worthwhile examining the stories of the two found­ers of the Village Scouts. Born into a poor ­family in Krabi province, Somkhuan Harikul grabbed an opportunity to enter the Royal Police Cadet Acad­emy in 1950 a­ fter serving in a local provincial police station for two years. While in his third year at the acad­ emy, he met Charoenrit, who had been appointed to teach a course in tactics. Thereafter, Somkhuan called Charoenrit “teacher.” Before graduation, Charoenrit recruited Somkhuan and his cohort, Wichian Kanchanarat, who l­ ater became the assistant director-­general of the Thai National Police Department (TNPD), and sent them to the newly founded Border Defense Police. Soon Somkhuan and Wichian w ­ ere reassigned to the PARU camp in Hua Hin, and Somkhuan became the deputy commander of PARU in 1953.3 In addition to undergoing paratrooper training in Naresuan, Somkhuan also studied intelligence and psychological operations and took both police and army commander courses in vari­ous military institutions.4 Somkhuan served in a special governmental mission in a third country between 1961 and 1963, while he still belonged to PARU. ­Later, Bill Lair suggested that Somkhuan was likely to have been in Laos—­and possibly in Cambodia too—­during ­t hese years since almost ­every member of PARU in Hua Hin was sent to Laos to assist the CIA’s covert operation ­t here.5 Given that Somkhuan had been assigned to inspect policing in the Philippines and South Vietnam before he went on the special mission, Lair is prob­ably correct. ­After ten years as deputy commander of the Naresuan camp, Somkhuan became commander of the BPP Area 4 camp in Udon Thani. ­There, he befriended Army General Saiyud Kerdphol and Prem Tinsulanonda, who had shared a common interest in developing civilian counterinsurgency strategies for the anticommunist campaign. According to Saiyud, Somkhuan had a profound understanding of how to fight communism, and he agreed with Saiyud’s strategy of instilling anticommunist and patriotic sentiments in the general populace through a coordinated civilian, police, and military campaign.6 In creating an intricate network among the BPP, Thai army, politicians, and the royal f­amily, Charoenrit Chamratromran played a pivotal role. Born into a military ­family, Charoenrit graduated from the Chulachomklao Royal Military Acad­emy and became an army officer in the Cavalry Squadron in 1940. In an auto­ biography published by the BPP General Headquarters to commemorate his ninetieth birthday in 2011, Charoenrit wrote that he absolutely did not want to

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become a police officer ­because he wanted to continue in the ­family tradition. In addition, the police w ­ ere regarded as lower and meaner than the army.7 Nonetheless, Phao Siyanon convinced Charoenrit to join the police when Phao became a deputy director-­general of the TNPD ­after the 1947 coup. To Phao, Charoenrit, who had been in the Shan States expedition mission ­under the command of Phin Chunhawan and had built up a military ­career in vari­ous positions within a relatively short time period, was the right person to renovate the entire police organ­ ization. As it turned out, the personal network that Charoenrit had established before he was transferred to the TNPD and the military heritage that went back to his grand­father became useful assets when he became a police officer. Phao assigned special missions to Charoenrit as soon as he moved to the TNPD: first, prepare the action plans in case of a military coup in Bangkok; second, enhance the Police Education Bureau; third, establish an official ceremony for the TNPD; and fi­nally, attend international meetings, such as the Geneva Conference and SEATO preparation meeting in Manila in 1954, as a Thai police delegate. Essentially, from the time he became the deputy director-­general of the TNPD, Phao had a vision to militarize the Thai police so that they could match the army and thus, he brought several capable, well-­connected army officers like Charoenrit to the police department. Although Charoenrit did not want to be transferred to the TNPD, he soon found that Phao had the qualities of being a real “boss.”8 In this regard, it could be said that the ­actual militarization of the Thai police started in 1949 when Charoenrit and other army members joined the TNPD ­under Phao’s intimate sponsorship. Broadly speaking, Charoenrit’s army and police ­careers show an intricate army network within the Thai ruling elite. ­After the 1947 coup, several influential figures in the army had been transferred to other armed force organ­izations but still had kept in touch with their classmates or had extended their networks through marriages. The d ­ aughter of Chan Angsuchot, who was in the Thai army and served as the commissioner of the Border Patrol Police Headquarters between 1957–1961 married Thanom’s son, and thus when he was appointed to be an acting commissioner of the BPP right ­after the 1957 coup, Chan Angsuchot could get the needed support from his connections to participants in the coup group and saved the BPP from disbandment.9 Likewise, Charoenrit invited his old classmates from Chulachomklao and comrades from the vari­ous army missions in the border areas to support his new paramilitary police units—­t he BPP and PARU. His classmates Suraphon Chulaphram and Thawin Yuyen ­were also transferred to the TNPD and served in the administrative command during the years when Charoenrit and Phao formed the Border Defense Police. Another friend from Chulachomklao, Chit Lilayut, became a commander of BPP Area 5 Division and had launched the

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BPP civic action proj­ect in the mid-1950s. In addition, it is noteworthy that Charoenrit’s cohorts at Chulachomklao included several army generals who played a key role in Thai politics throughout the 1970s: Chatichai Chunhawan, Chalat Hiransiri, Soem Na Nakhon, Saiyud Kerdphol, and Chao Sawatdisongkhram to name a few. Charoenrit was president of this class’s alumni association in 1975– 1976.10 Through this personal network, Charoenrit also stayed in touch with the reemerged Phibun-­Phin-­Phao clique led by Army General Praman Adireksan and Chatichai Chunhawan a­ fter October  1973 and could obtain support from other military factions when expanding the BPP and Village Scouts’ activities in the 1970s.11 Most importantly, Phao attracted royal attention for the BPP and Charoenrit before the 1957 coup. It was Phao and Charoenrit who had created the National Police Day (wan tamruat) in 1951, and the first assignment for Charoenrit was to invite the royal ­couple to the ceremony.12 To strengthen the royal support for his police, Phao ordered Charoenrit to provide protection to the royal ­couple when they visited Klai Kangwon Palace in Hua Hin for their wedding anniversaries. Hua Hin became the first place where Charoenrit had a personal encounter with King Bhumibol in the early 1950s.13 Indeed, Phao Siyanon was the real boss who had, in Charoenrit’s words, “destined my life to be a parasitic plant of the police (phu likhit chiwit tamruat kafak khong khapchao)” and had prepared the necessary po­liti­cal network that Charoenrit could effectively utilize when he developed the BPP, PARU, and the Village Scout movement throughout the Cold War.14 In consideration of the founding ­father’s personal background, the Village Scout movement conceived by Somkhuan and pioneered by Charoenrit was a po­ liti­cal campaign that was furthered by the closely knitted ties among the government, the military, the BPP, and the royal f­amily. Their individual purposes in ­promoting the movement could have been varied, but the ultimate goal was ­congruent: save the monarchy and retain elite power against the growing public quest for change. Although communists w ­ ere presented as the first e­ nemy, their ­actual enemies w ­ ere the leftwing politicians and activists who sought democracy without military dictatorship and feudalist leadership (sakdina), overturning traditional po­liti­cal and social hierarchies. Then in what context did Somkhuan Harikul conceive the Village Scout movement and how did the movement develop in the 1970s? As mentioned ­earlier, Somkhuan Harikul conceived forming a civilian defense group for village security in the late 1960s to c­ ounter growing rural insurgencies alongside the intensifying hot wars in Laos and Vietnam. One of the direct triggers that reinforced Somkhuan’s motivation in building a village security group was a series of Hmong insurgents’ intrusions into BPP schools in Loei province.

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­ fter surveying highland minority villages in the Phukhithao mountain ranges A that connect Loei, Phetchatbun, and Phitsanulok provinces, Somkhuan, then commander of BPP Area 4, and his BPP development team chose two border villages in which to build a BPP school in 1967. In less than a year a­ fter the opening, Hmong insurgents began attacking ­t hese BPP schools and nearby villages, and fi­nally at the end of 1968, the schools w ­ ere burnt down. In one of the b ­ attles that took place in the Phukhithao jungles, one BPP platoon was ambushed and several members died in the ­battle. Somkhuan boarded a he­li­cop­ter to find the corpses and remains of his fellow BPP members and brought them back to the Senironayut camp in Udon Thani, where the BPP Area 4 camp was located. As American anthropologist who eye-­witnessed and researched the Village Scouts in the 1970s Katherine Bowie vividly describes, this disheartening memory led Somkhuan to launch the Village Scout movement.15 Based on the BPP experiences of carry­ing out border security missions, Somkhuan’s first attempt to strengthen village defense was building local militias following the example of the Border Security Volunteer Teams proj­ect in northern Thailand. Not long ­after the school burning, Somkhuan established the Border Village Volunteers (asa samak chaoban chaidaen) in BPP Area 4 in 1969. The first training of this border village defense group, co-­sponsored by the Communist Suppression Operations Command, took place between March 5 and May 14 in Loei province.16 At that time, the director-­general of the CSOC in Army Region 2 was Army General Saiyud Kerdphol, and he was interested in Somkhuan’s proposal for building a civilian defense group in the northeastern region.17 Despite Saiyud’s w ­ holehearted assistance and sponsorship, Somkhuan encountered several prob­lems with the first group of trainees, who wanted the BPP to guarantee their official status and to receive compensation for their training. Although Somkhuan eventually resolved ­these issues, the experience taught him at least two lessons: first, it was imperative to have reliable financial support for the proj­ect, and second, it was more efficient to create civilian self-­help groups than militias as the former did not require official standing, salaries, or weapons.18 To have stable funding, he created the Border Patrol Police Area 4 Members Organ­ization (ongkon samachik tamruat trawen chaidaen khet 4), which included local officials such as the subdistrict chief (kamnan) and the head of the village (phuyaiban), as well as wealthy businessmen. In its first year, the organ­ization gained 4,421 members from Nakhon Phanom, Loei, and Nong Khai provinces.19 In Thailand, King Vajiravudh ­adopted British scouting in May 1911. As its founder, Robert Baden-­Powell had envisioned, Vajiravudh’s Wild Tiger Corps (kong suea pa) was intended to form a kind of home guard or local militia among “the King’s compatriots” and “instill in them a spirit of sacrifice for the lives of

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their fellows and for King, Nation, and Religion” (chat, banmuang [sic], sasana) through the scout training.20 Since then, scouting in Thailand has been regarded as a way to show one’s loyalty to the nation, religion, and the monarchy. Scouting is part of the school curriculum in Thailand and receives strong support from the government and royal f­ amily. As part of its civic action program, the BPP had established the Cub Scouts (luksuea samrong) curriculum in BPP schools in July 1966 and required BPP officers and teachers to receive scout training from the national scout organ­ization and the Ministry of Education. Somkhuan was one of the BPP commanders who attended a seven-­day se­nior scout training in Sakon Nakhon province in 1969.21 Realizing that scouting activities at BPP schools and se­nior scout initiations helped develop self-­ discipline and intimate relationships among the scouts, Somkhuan de­cided to adopt the scouting model in the village defense system. He also extended the scout training from childhood to adulthood, in par­tic­u­lar among the border villa­gers who ­were regarded as the most vulnerable to the communist infiltration.22 On August 1, 1971, Somkhuan invited local governors and officials from the Ministry of Education provincial branches to set up a training curriculum and select scout instructors. A week a­ fter the meeting, Somkhuan initiated the first Border Village Scout (luksuea chaoban chaidaen) training in Ban Laow Ko Hok, a village that was in the subdistrict where the deadly b ­ attle between the BPP and Hmong insurgents took place in 1968. The first group of Border Village Volunteers was also selected from this village in 1969.23 ­After the first training session in August 1971, which was attended by 125 ­people, eight more w ­ ere conducted in the same year in Loei, Nong Khai, Mukdahan, Udon Thani, and Nakhon Phanom provinces. Up to that time, BPP General Headquarters did not have any par­tic­u­lar interest in this proj­ect titled Border Village Scout Training Proj­ect in Area 4 (khrongkan fuek oprom luksuea chaoban chaidaen khet 4). To call attention to it, Somkhuan met with Charoenrit Chamratromran, then assistant commissioner of the BPP Headquarters in Nakhon Si Thammarat province, and asked him to promote the Village Scout proj­ect in the Bangkok Headquarters. Not long ­after Somkhuan’s visit, Charoenrit traveled to observe one of the training sessions in the northeastern provinces. He immediately sensed that the proj­ect had the potential to create a massive popu­lar anticommunist movement, but again the BPP did not take any interest in Somkhuan’s Border Village Scouts. Subsequently, Charoenrit created an opportunity for Somkhuan to introduce the proj­ect directly to the royal ­family.24 On November 29, 1971, the princess ­mother, accompanied by King Bhumibol’s ­sister Princess Galyani and by Army Lieutenant Phayom Phahunrat and

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Army Major Prem Tinsulanonda from Region 2 visited a Village Scout training session in Nakhon Phanom province. During the visit, the princess m ­ other summoned Somkhuan to explain the proj­ect to her, and a­ fter learning that it was urgent to have more trained scout instructors to spread the Village Scout movement to other regions, the princess m ­ other gave 238,000 baht to Somkhuan to fund the instructor’s training courses.25 Once twenty-­six classes of Village Scout trainings ­were completed in the northeastern provinces, Charoenrit reported to King Bhumibol and Queen Sirikit, calling attention to the benefits of expanding the program to the entire country. ­After hearing this report and then visiting the BPP Area 4 Division’s Senironayut camp on March 19, 1972, the king summoned Charoenrit and Somkhuan and gave them official permission to instate the Village Scouts ­under royal patronage. The king also donated 100,000 baht to produce scarves, scarf buckles, tiger-­face badges, identification cards, and certificates for the Village Scouts who completed training.26 ­These ­were distributed by the House­w ife Volunteers Foundation (munithi maeban asa),27 an organ­ization initially established by the wives of politicians and police and army officers, most of whom had received the noble title of khun ying, with the princess ­mother’s donation to help the military, police, and volunteers in the border areas.28 With the royal f­ amily’s support and Charoenrit’s coordination, Somkhuan fi­ nally proposed a meeting to the BPP General Headquarters to discuss the expansion of the Village Scout movement with the Ministry of Education and the National Scout Organ­ization of Thailand in mid-1972 at the Royal Thai Army Region 2 Headquarters. From then on, the Village Scouts suddenly snowballed in numbers and sizes and stretched out from the northeastern provinces throughout Thailand, as shown in ­Table 4.1. To administer the rapidly expanding Scout movement, BPP Headquarters declared that the proj­ect would be a part of official BPP civic actions in July 1972.29 That and the royal patronage of the movement attracted government support, and by an order of the Minister of Interior Army Marshal Praphat Charusathien dated October 30, 1972, all local governors w ­ ere appointed director of Village Scouts in their respective provinces (changwat), districts (amphoe), and subdistricts (tambon). Praphat remarked that the implementation of the Village Scout movement was “to affect the psy­chol­ogy of villa­ger groups and extend their unity as the King intended.” Since the appointment was official, the government paid for the travel expenses of the local governors when they attended the Village Scout–­related events.30 Local governors, politicians, businessmen, and commissioned military officers voluntarily participated in the Village Scout movement ­because its initiations and training sessions provided a venue where they could widen their social and

­Table 4.1. ​Village Scout Trainees and Royal Donations, 1971–1993 Year

Number of Village Scout Classes

Number of Village Scout Trainees

Royal Donations (Thai baht)

1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 Total

8 113 413 680 690 2,497 2,606 2,650 1,310 421 212 263 192 213 200 201 251 196 195 511 329 225 230 14,606 classes

2,000 24,516 98,375 193,279 198,891 1,032,703 588,106 802,615 393,000 84,493 41,205 163,803 36,519 38,935 37,926 36,320 43,196 30,128 26,413 83,462 48,936 33,204 35,224 4,073,249 p ­ eople

0 0 381,250 1,410,582.25 2,105,170.10 8,535,107.74 5,955,693.40 4,731,999 5,363,819.95 NA

Sources: Village Scout Operational Center, Rai-­ngan kitchakan luksuea chaoban pi 2522 (Report on Village Scout Activities in 1979), internal Report (Bangkok: Border Patrol Police Headquarters, 1979), 1, 25, appendix; Manas Khantatatbumroong, “Kanborihan ngan luksuea chaoban nai khuam rapphitchoep khong sun pattibatkan luksuea chaoban” (Administration of the Village Scout ­under the Responsibility of Village Scout Operational Center), thesis, Royal Thai Army War College, 1983), 13. The numbers of Village Scouts for 1983–1993 are from Village Scout Operational Center, 23 pi luksuea chaoban nai phraboromratchanukhro (23 Years of Village Scouts ­under Royal Patronage), (Bangkok: Village Scout Operational Center, 1994), 134. Note: Although the 1994 data include a comprehensive number of Village Scouts, I use the figures provided by Manas Khantatatbumroong who oversaw the Village Scout proj­ect in the 1970s b ­ ecause he mentioned that the numbers in the ­later Village Scout Operational Center’s official volumes w ­ ere exaggerated. In the 1994 account, the total numbers of Village Scouts trained between 1971 and 1993 w ­ ere given as a total of 14,270 classes and a total of 5,095,170 members.

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po­liti­cal networks and have some connection to the royal ­family.31 The rapid growth of the Village Scout movement from 1972 thus was a result of collective promotion by vari­ous po­liti­cal interest groups and the royal ­family.32 Witnessing the dramatic increase of Village Scout membership alongside the growing presence of royal support from 1972, the National Scout Organ­ization of Thailand fi­nally accepted the request for taking the Village Scouts as an official member of the Thai national scout movement in July 1973. In August 1976, the Secretariat of Cabinet made it clear that the Village Scout’s activities w ­ ere a part of government business, and thus the provincial governors ­were required to attend Village Scout events, for which they w ­ ere reimbursed.33 By this time, the movement was no longer one of the BPP’s civic action programs. It became an ideological war machine that had absorbed the general populace and the local and national-­ level politicians.

Creating the Royal Force According to the manual Village Scout instructors published in 1973, organ­izing a Village Scout training should demonstrate to the ­people that it is locally oriented and villager-­centered. The organizers w ­ ere to encourage villa­gers to come freely and see the training sessions and even to invite the local leaders and government officials in the areas to the events. In the beginning, the number of trainees per session was ­limited to a maximum of two hundred, and the recruits had to meet the following criteria: At least 30 ­percent w ­ ere to be female; 35 ­percent w ­ ere to be between the ages of fifteen and nineteen; 30 p ­ ercent w ­ ere to be between twenty and twenty-­five; 20 p ­ ercent w ­ ere to be between thirty-­six and forty-­five; and the remaining 15  ­percent were to come from other age groups. Since creating the sense of unity (samakhi) among the participants was one of the most significant goals of the training sessions, instructors ­were to emphasize that anyone over age fifteen had an equal opportunity to join the Village Scout training, even if the candidates ­were insurgents or bad ­people (khon chuea), to show how “inclusive” the Village Scout is. All the trainees ­were asked to bring enough of their own food and supplies for five days, as well as tools to build their campsites and other facilities during the training. The training location would be ­either the school ground, a t­ emple compound, or any open space where the villa­gers could get together easily. During the training, scarves or armbands in dif­fer­ent colors w ­ ere used to identify individual teams. A ­ fter completion, scarves, tiger-­face badges, and other emblems w ­ ere distributed in the closing ceremony.34 Like all other scouts, the Village Scouts had to learn the Scout Promise, which was modified from “On my honour I promise that I ­w ill do my best, To do my

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duty to God and the King (or to God and my Country), To help other p ­ eople at all times; To obey the Scout Law”35 to “On my honor, I promise to be loyal to nation, religion and monarchy.”36 Since the training was villager-­centered and locally oriented, the instructors ­were to use local dialects, if able, to make their instructions easily comprehensible; to be restrained from giving a lecture for more than thirty minutes; to sing frequently so that the trainees would not become bored; and to use examples from the daily lives of local p ­ eople when teaching scout 37 princi­ples and regulations. In par­tic­u­lar, singing Village Scout songs was considered “an integral part of the training activities” and thus one-­third of the course had to be devoted to singing.38 The main goal of ­t hese instructions was creating a sense of loyalty to the nation, religion, and monarchy; a sense of fraternity (khuam pen phi nong kan); and a sense of unity. The Village Scout also came ­under royal regulations stipulated by King Bhumibol39 and compiled by Charoenrit in a Royal Policy (phraboromratchobai) of the Village Scout Activities consisting of twelve articles:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Do not let Village Scout activities be related to the politics. Do not pre­sent military practices in the Village Scout activities. Do not let officials use the Village Scout activities for their own purpose. Village Scout should not have uniforms or any symbols. Village Scout activities should be done by the ­people and for the ­people. Have the Village Scouts become a leader for the development of self, profession, and local areas. 7. Have the Village Scout be the leader in following rules, being disciplined, and practicing thriftiness. 8. Do not make extravagant expenditures for training and the campfire events and do not allow any alcoholic drinks during the training. 9. Adhere to the team system of the Village Scout and disclose it to the general public to create the sense that the unity and una­nim­i­ty are the one and only ­t hing to uphold. 10. Do not use po­liti­cal funds for Village Scout activities. 11. Have the Village Scouts become a model of using Thai goods and consuming Thai produce. 12. Have the Village Scouts become a leader of restoring and preserving the good traditions and culture of their own regions.40 One noteworthy characteristic of the Village Scout movement ­shaped by the king’s order and the BPP’s instruction is its alleged apoliticism. According to the instructors’ manual,

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Instructors must not talk about po­liti­cal ideology, military issues, or any types of [current] news, and must only talk about the nation, religion, monarchy, tradition, law, regulations, cultures, scout disciplines, unity, and daily life issues that could be useful for the villa­gers in their occupation, and learning of diligence, be­hav­ior, society and so on.41 In addition, instructors w ­ ere to ensure that trainees voluntarily advertise to other fellow villa­gers that the Village Scouts are not harmful and do not kill anyone, even communist insurgents.42 Charoenrit contended that the BPP and scout instructors never talked directly about who constituted the ­enemy of the Village Scouts.43 Nevertheless, as Manas revealed in his confidential report in 1985, the movement began as a part of an “ideological, organ­ization [sic] and psychological warfare” ­under the BPP civic action programs. Moreover, this par­tic­u­lar proj­ ect could have not expanded at such an astounding speed and size without the support from the government and royal ­family.44 The anticommunist campaign was the most po­liti­cal movement during the Cold War in Thailand and elsewhere, ­whether the organizers ­were civilian or military. Even if ­t here was no vis­i­ble military training, po­liti­cal discussion, or outright social protest in the Village Scout training, the October 6 Massacre committed by the Village Scouts tells vividly that they w ­ ere indeed a po­liti­cally motivated organ­ization. The somewhat excessive emphasis given to the nonpartisanship of the Village Scouts is related to several f­ actors. One has to do with the fact that the BPP publicized their mission as bringing development and modernization, not politics, to remote rural villages. Since the found­ers of the Village Scouts were BPP commanders, the movement remained nonpartisan. Another is that King Bhumibol promoted the idea that the Thai monarchy is above politics, ­because in his words “politics is a filthy business.”45 Thus, being overseen by the BPP and having royal patronage, the Village Scouts had to appear to stay apart from politics. Being seen as a nonpartisan movement was also a strategy ­because politics can divide ­people. To freely spread royalist nationalism to the fellow rural villa­gers, Village Scouts tried not to be related to any po­liti­cal movement, believing that royalist nationalism was not divisive. In addition, rural villa­gers (chao bannok) w ­ ere assumed to be unable to understand complex politics, even in the security-­sensitive border regions of northern and northeastern Thailand, where most Village Scout training took place (see ­Table 4.2). Thus, Village Scout instructors focused on creating a fun, daycare-­like environment for the villa­gers, including singing songs, preparing per­for­mances and skits for campfire events, and playing games.46 In addition, the late king did not want to have the Village Scouts visibly operate in bigger towns. Just as the BPP

Crusade  121 ­Table 4.2. ​Village Scout Membership Distribution, 1971–1986

Region/Area

Number of runs

Number of Members Male

Female

Total

Region 1/Area 2 Region 1/Area 7 Bangkok (Area 1) Region 1 Total

1,593 1,511 403 3,507

262,077 266,900 64,759 595,199

226,826 214,781 57,687 501,062

488,903 481,681 122,446 1,096,171

Region 2/Area 3 Region 2/Area 4 Region 2 Total

1,663 2,095 3,758

271,181 337,705 616,465

137,925 184,940 328,885

409,106 522,645 945,350

Region 3/Area 5 Region 3/Area 6 Region 3 Total

1,704 1,206 2,910

279,292 203,797 487,484

206,638 134,018 344,173

485,903 337, 805 831,657

Region 4/Area 8 Region 4/Area 9 Region 4 Total

882 823 1,705

119,225 101,146 222,386

103,262 42,680 147,203

222,487 143,826 369,589

11,864

1,921,678

1,321,335

3,243,013

­Grand Total

Sources: Village Scout Operational Center, Prawatsat luksuea chaoban (History of the Village Scouts) (Bangkok: Modern Press L ­ imited, 1987), 239; Village Scout Operational Center, Khomopkai thawaiwai naibueangbat haeng phrarakhurat rueangsi tai rom phraboromratchachakriwong, chatphim naiwara 100 pi sua pa lae 40 pi luksuea chaoban, phutthasakkarat 2554 (Entrusting Ourselves to the Royal Land ­Under the Chakri Dynasty, Published on the Occasion of the 100th Anniversary of Wild Tiger Corps and 40th Anniversary of the Village Scouts, 2011) (Bangkok: Chulalongkorn University Printing House, 2011), 197. Note: The division of Village Scout regions and areas is the same as t­ hose of the areas of responsibility of BPP. At pre­sent, the Village Scout regions are divided into six regions: North, Northeast, West, East, South, and Bangkok.

operations supposedly remained in the border areas, the Village Scouts ­were told to stay in the rural villages where the trainings by the BPP and Village Scout instructors could exert more influence in defending local and national security. How then did the BPP and Village Scout movement perceive the growing communist influence and democ­ratization movements in Thailand? According to official Village Scout accounts, the BPP and scout members had received warning signs from the Communist Party of Thailand, like a pos­si­ble communist infiltration into the training or attack on the trainees shortly ­after training had begun in August 1971. In September of 1975, a­ fter a Village Scouts training in the Khiansa district in Surat Thai province was completed, twenty-­two Village Scout instructors ­were allegedly ambushed by the communist insurgents on their way

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home. Three ­were killed and nineteen injured. Several days l­ ater, King Bhumibol and Queen Sirikit visited the Surat Thani provincial hospital to console the injured members and donated money for their medical treatment.47 Several Village Scouts accounts explain that communists attempted to break down their nonpartisan morale by accusing the organ­ization of being a po­liti­cal weapon of the military dictators and royal f­amily, and they proclaimed that the first e­ nemy of the Thai liberation army was the Village Scout movement.48 In the eyes of the BPP and the related parties, the success of the October 14 democ­ratization movement that overthrew the military government and dictators in 1973 only helped increase the number and influence of communists ­because the movement was led by students and civilian activists who the BPP and o ­ thers regarded as communists. ­Because the number of enemies increased, the BPP ­were pressured to create more reserve forces. The Village Scout membership increased exponentially during the 1973–1976 period, reaching a climax in the first half of 1976. As King Bhumibol had said back in 1972, if the number of Village Scouts increased up to five million, then this movement could solve the prob­lems in national politics.49 He also encouraged membership, remarking in a speech during a Village Scout training session in Satun province on September 9, 1975, “I hope every­one joins the Village Scouts.”50 The king’s special gifts of scarves, buckles, and scout badges also contributed to the skyrocketing number of trainees. Former prime minister Kukrit Pramoj said that Village Scouts believed that t­ hese royal emblems would bring them fortune and luck, prompting more villa­gers to join the organ­ization.51 In addition, the Village Scout training provided a ground where the villa­gers could socialize and feel a sense of bonding, as it did for local politicians and officials. The Village Scout training attempted to inculcate unity through the practice of five communal activities (ha ruam)—­t hat is, eating together, staying together, studying together, working together, and solving prob­lems together—­during the training. To heighten the sense of bonding, instructors and scouts repeatedly and deliberately said, “We are b ­ rothers” (rao phi nong kan)” inside and outside the training camps.52 BPP commanders also helped create camaraderie among trainee cohorts by identifying them as a run, or “class,” as PARU and other armed forces did, while the king also gave special flags to each run. This run system had created not only fraternity but also a sort of hierarchy among the Village Scout members. The word “run” in the Thai language has a meaning of class, generation, or age group and in the case of Village Scouts, the numeral name of the run creates an organ­ization where the members build a relationship not based on their age but the name of their run, and determines who should be respected as a se­ nior and who should be taken care of as a ju­nior. As Manas said, naming groups

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of Village Scouts ­a fter their run has been one of the most effective means to strengthen attachment to the larger Village Scout organ­ization.53 Through t­ hese conscious efforts to build unity and a sense of bonding, the Village Scout members could transform into a f­ amily of loyal patriots. As Katherine Bowie observed in a closing ceremony, almost all the Village Scout members broke into tears.54 ­After completing the training in one of the villages where the BPP had spent difficult times to invite villa­gers to join the Village Scout training, and seeing tears breaking out among trainees in a closing ceremony, Somkhuan, too, shed tears and turned to Charoenrit and said, “Achan, we won already. We won for sure!”55 The real victory that the BPP and Village Scouts remember to the pre­sent day came just three years ­after the success of the pro-­democracy movement in 1973. As the influence of the leftists grew large, so did that of their counter­parts. As the number of Village Scout memberships increased rapidly, royal visits to training grounds became more frequent. And as the civilian government faltered u ­ nder internal fighting and the military’s factional rivalries, and as leftwing groups sharpened their criticism against the ruling elite, the time was getting ripe for the BPP and Village Scouts to expel the ­enemy from their nation and resolve the confusion and crisis in the society.

A Showdown, October 6, 1976 ­ fter this miraculous event [on August 12, 1976], Village Scout leaders’ A oath resulted in subsiding the October 6, 1976 incident and let our country return to normal. The event was the true evidence that idiosyncratic characteristics, culture, and tradition of the Thai nation that had constantly allowed us to adjust ourselves to vari­ous conditions proved to be able to turn even the mishap [het rai] into good deeds in the end. —­Police Major General Manas Khantatatbumroong, 1994

On August 12, 1976, Queen Sirikit invited about a thousand local leaders of the Village Scout organ­ization from all provinces to a special banquet prepared for her birthday.56 Afterward, t­ hese leaders ­were invited to a Thai traditional play and then to make merit at the Emerald Buddha; they vowed that in the times of difficulties, the Village Scouts would unite to bring stability and to protect Thailand from dangers and disasters.57 They kept their promise. In the early morning of October 6, 1976, several hundred riot police, BPP, and members of rightwing groups including the Village Scouts stormed into Thammasat University and opened fire on students and civilians who had gathered to protest against the return of former dictator Thanom Kittikachorn. Heavi­ly armed with machine guns

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and other assault weapons, the “BPP force from Hua Hin” swiftly surrounded the university and fired on the unarmed civilians, helping other right-­w ing groups to commit brutal acts of vio­lence.58 In the aftermath of the massacre, a military faction staged a coup on the same day, and the supreme commander announced the newly formed National Administrative Reform Council had seized power to bring peace and order back to Thai society. To the Village Scouts and members of the BPP, the October 6 event was a demonstration of their unity and loyalty t­oward the nation, their religion, and the king against the threat of communists and antiroyalists. Manas concluded in his 1985 confidential report that the Village Scout movement was an example of “how our government attempts to defeat the Communist Party of Thailand” and that it proved to be successful.59 In 2011, Manas reaffirmed that since the Village Scouts had successfully acted against the communists in Thammasat University on October 6, 1976, Thailand had not seen any communist threats to the nation.60 He might have forgotten the fact that, in actuality, ­t here was a surge of communist insurgencies in the rural areas of Thailand a­ fter the 1976 military coup. Prem Tinsulanonda’s administration proclaimed the cessation of the military counterinsurgency only in the early 1980s. It was not Thailand at large, but perhaps the Bangkokians who did not see communist threats in the royal land of the Thais. Although the Village Scouts and BPP remember the October 6 Massacre (hok tula) as the first real victory against the Thai communist movement, t­ here have been no substantial accounts on the event from ­either BPP Headquarters or the Village Scout Operational Center. Thongchai Winichakul, who was a student activist at Thammasat University at the time of the massacre, argues that the October 6 event has remained absent from the history of Thailand b ­ ecause of the three forms of silencing: the threat of po­liti­cal repercussions, the sense of guilt among the victims and perpetrators, and the ideology of national history that excludes anomalies.61 The following pages detail what voices of the key rightwing groups, namely the BPP, PARU, and the Village Scouts, have said about being part of the scene of the atrocity and why they have tried to obliterate it from their supposedly “ ‘victorious” past. In 1996, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the massacre, Somkhuan gave an interview to a Thai magazine in which he flatly denied that the Village Scouts had participated in it. He said instead that t­ here w ­ ere “third hands” (mue thi sam) that could have fabricated the presence of the Village Scouts.62 In fact, though, Somkhuan was well aware of the brutality and vio­lence that the Village Scouts could commit. Only about a month ­after the massacre, Somkhuan issued a special warning to instructors to avoid militant protest or po­liti­cal demonstrations. He subsequently stressed that in order not to become an e­ nemy of

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the “other” ­people, Village Scouts must not have any weapons. The goal of the Village Scouts was to build unity and to encourage togetherness among the ­people so that they could diminish or extinguish the “bad ­people” (khon chuea). Village Scouts members w ­ ere to use officially permitted weapons only when circumstances ­were beyond their control. But before taking up the arms, they w ­ ere to persuade the ­enemy that unity is the most impor­tant weapon to fight a po­liti­cal crisis. He added that Thais should not fight Thais.63 That this warning was issued in a special booklet prepared for a November 1976 training is revealing.64 It is also noteworthy that in his introduction to the Village Scouts’ history and activities in a volume entitled Scouts in the Four Reigns by Prayut Sitthiphan in 1976, Charoenrit wrote that one of the Village Scouts’ missions is to “help suppress the bad p ­ eople” (khon chuea), such as thieves, argumentative persons, bullies, and t­ hose who do not work but earn a living by exploiting o ­ thers. He urged that the Village Scouts should help t­ hose become good p ­ eople so that the khon chuea would no longer exist in Thai society. He also made the point that Village Scouts should “not forget that the best way to fix the prob­lem is not to use vio­ lence but instead to treat t­ hose khon chuea ­gently so that they would feel they are the Thais like us.” 65 In early November 1976, Charoenrit gave an interview (not published u ­ ntil 2002) in which he said that he had received intelligence from an in­for­mant before October 1976 that ­there would be a group of ­people protesting during the royal activities. He was assured that the Village Scouts could demonstrate their loyalty and protect the monarchy and the nation by stopping the agitation. Thus, he allowed the scout members to gather up in Dusit Zoo and commanded them to wait ­until an order came through. He then emphasized that most Village Scouts who came to Dusit Zoo ­were from provinces, not “only” from Bangkok. As soon as the Village Scouts in the provinces heard the news that t­ here would be about twenty thousand protesters, they mobilized and came to Bangkok without an order from the BPP Headquarters. At this point, Charoenrit added that he himself had to send groups from about ten provinces back home, ensuring them nothing would happen.66 Charoenrit reiterated this in 1982 in an interview with the Nation: As to the events on October  6, h ­ ere we must think carefully. Th ­ ere ­were pictures which pointed to Lese Majeste. But, the scouts turned up, and no one told them to come out. I told them to stay where they w ­ ere and not to create any trou­ble. To stay calm and let the government do the job. If they turned up without any discipline, then, the ­whole ­thing would have become a real mess. They understand now. So ­there is no need to worry.67

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Charoenrit’s account reveals that the BPP members in charge of the Village Scouts had already known about the protest in Bangkok before October 6, 1976. It is hard to believe that Somkhuan, who was then the assistant commissioner of BPP Headquarters in Bangkok and a founder of the Village Scouts, was not informed about the gathering at that time. Other than t­ hese two found­ers of the Village Scouts, who e­ lse might have been directly involved or at least informed beforehand about the protest that led to the October 6 Massacre? The commissioner of BPP Headquarters, Suraphon Chulaphram, was promoted to assistant director-­general of the TNPD in 1975.68 The director-­general at that time was Police General Sisuk Mahinthonrathep, who had assisted the Border Defense Police Area 5 Division in September 1953, when he served as the commander of Provincial Police in Chiang Mai. Police Major General Angkun Thatanon was appointed as a BPP commissioner on March 10, 1976, and then on October 1, he was promoted to the rank of Police Lieutenant General. Angkun was one of the first commanders of the Border Defense Police in the northeastern region established in 1953. Like most of the first group of commanders of the BDP and the BPP, Angkun had also been a commander of the army infantry battalion before he moved to the Provincial Police in 1951, and he had served as the chief of the royal guard army division between 1946 and 1948. He was appointed as the commander of BPP Area 5 Division in Chiang Mai in April 1958 and thus had an opportunity to receive royal visits especially from the princess ­mother. According to Charoenrit, Angkun was a close aide to the princess ­mother and had traveled with her whenever she made royal visits to the provinces.69 Pranet Ritluechai was deputy commissioner ­under Angkun. Pranet, a legendary PARU man, had served as the Naresuan camp commander for more than fifteen years and moved to Bangkok when the BPP Headquarters was officially reestablished in May 1972 by the order of Prime Minister Thanom. He was first appointed as assistant commissioner in 1972 and then became deputy commissioner in 1974.70 In place of Pranet, Police Lieutenant Col­o­nel Prasoet Kuangkaeo became the commander of PARU starting in 1975, succeeding Police Col­o­nel Samroeng Singhiran. Prasoet was one of the first PARU operational team commanders who had been deployed to Laos in December 1960, and Samroeng and Prasoet shared the common experiences of fighting Pathet Lao and Northern Viet­nam­ese soldiers in Laos before they returned to Hua Hin.71 Another legendary PARU police major, Sarot Panya, who had also participated in the Laos action with the CIA, became the deputy commander of PARU when Prasoet held the commandership. In short, PARU veterans who had operated in Laos came to dominate the commander of the BPP and PARU ­after 1974.

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The BPP force from Hua Hin called into the anti-­riot operation in Thammasat University on October 6, 1976, was PARU. This was the only police unit that could be mobilized in short notice at that time. According to an internal report from 1975, PARU was particularly qualified in rapid and mobile operation, and it could reach any designated areas in Thailand within four hours,72 even if deployment of the unit was a last-­minute decision. In addition, most PARU commanders at that time, including Prasoet, Sarot, and Pranet in the BPP’s Headquarters had close, personal relations with the key army figures in the 1976 coup group ­because a number of rising military leadership at that time had participated in the covert mission in Laos. As mentioned e­ arlier, their inglorious return to Thailand left growing bitterness against the civilian government that had not given the desired compensation or even recognition to their sacrifice in Laos. ­After the secret operation in Laos failed, most of the returned PARU members ­were demoralized, and a considerable number of them departed the unit. ­Under the circumstances, it can be assumed that PARU commanders felt the urgency of heightening PARU members’ morale and unity by seizing an opportunity wherein PARU units could demonstrate their ability to defeat communists. Last but not least, PARU was the only unit of the BPP that was straightforwardly assigned to provide protection to the royal ­family. If the royal ­family’s safety was at risk, the first BPP unit that should be mobilized was PARU. Since the immediate trigger that incited the rightwing groups’ attack against the student and civilian activists gathered in Thammasat University was the publication of a fabricated photo­graph showing the hanging of someone resembling Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn, the protesters ­were seen as a direct threat to the monarchy. Thus, clearing up the agitation fell to PARU. Indeed, the Naresuan camp history rec­ords that on October 7, 1976, a com­pany of PARU’s special action forces and a weapons platoon ­were deployed to Thammasat University and that Sarot Panya was in charge of this riot-­suppression operation (pattibatkan kotdan prappram kanko chalachon).73 According to Thongchai, Chatichai Chunhawan, a former prime minister, brought Charoenrit to a special cabinet meeting held in the morning of October 6 to declare a state emergency and disperse all the rightwing and leftwing gatherings around Thammasat University and adjunct areas. In this meeting, Chatichai, along with Charoenrit and Vice Prime Minister Praman Adireksan, argued that this could be an opportunity to uproot the students and “erase the name of the National Student Center of Thailand,” the leading student activist organ­ization at that time.74 Charoenrit might have thought that the BPP and Village Scouts must execute the mission of suppressing the radical civilians in Thammasat University b ­ ecause they w ­ ere the forces of the royal f­ amily. His longtime friend General

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Chatichai might have concurred with Charoenrit on this point. Even if their decisions to deploy PARU and the Village Scouts might bring unintended consequences, Charoenrit and Chatichai could still survive u ­ nder royal protection. That is likely the reason why Charoenrit confidently assured cabinet members that t­ hese combined forces of civilians and police could eradicate the radical student activists and communists from Bangkok. Still, Charoenrit’s po­liti­cal calculation alone does not explain the unimaginable brutality and vio­lence undertaken by the Village Scouts and BPP-­PARU on that day. More importantly, this supposedly victorious moment for the Village Scouts, BPP, and PARU of repelling communists from Bangkok has neither been remembered nor honored by themselves even to the pre­sent. Then, what happened to ­these perpetrators ­after the hok tula? How do they remember this tragic, ugly atrocity in Thai history that they had committed? ­After the October 6 coup in 1976, by an order of the National Administrative Reform Council dated October 21, 1976, BPP Headquarters reor­ga­nized its divisions and subdivisions to meet the newly assigned national security missions. Prime Minister Thanin Kraivichien issued an order to integrate the BPP ­under the command of the Royal Thai Armed Forces Headquarters in 1977 and to place the Ministry of Defense in command of mobilizing the BPP for military operations while the Ministry of Interior and Thai National Police Department still held a direct command over the unit.75 Therefore, the BPP Headquarters has been ­under the direct control of both the Royal Thai Police and the Ministry of Defense since 1977.76 Additional orga­nizational reforms ­were made in 1979 and 1986, but ­t hese changes w ­ ere rather minor adjustments, so that the BPP’s mission has remained by and large the same since the early 1960s. Although Thai newspapers reported that the new military regime halted further initiations of the Village Scouts a month ­after the hok tula massacre ­until mid-­ May  1977,77 trainings and initiations actually continued. Between November  1976 and May  1977, the princess ­mother made nineteen royal visits to personally bestow flags and scarves on Village Scouts in southern, northeastern, and northern provinces.78 According to the list of Village Scout trainings that I acquired from a BPP officer in charge of the Village Scouts in northern Thailand, between October 1976 and May 1977, t­ here w ­ ere eigh­teen initiations in Kamphengphet province, twenty-­eight in Nakhon Sawan province, thirteen in Tak province, and nineteen in Uthai Thani province.79 Notably, ­t here w ­ ere twenty-­ three initiations in October, including on the day of the massacre, and thirty-­one initiations in t­ hose four provinces of northern Thailand in November a­ fter the cessation was declared by the new military regime. ­There was a brief vacation between January and April 1977 for ­t hese provinces’ initiations before the end of

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moratorium in May, but by and large, the BPP did not stop training more Village Scout members. Manas said that the Village Scout movement returned from abnormality to normalcy a­ fter the October 6 Massacre.80 As shown in T ­ able 4.1, the number of trainings increased a­ fter 1976, but the number of initiates decreased. This declining number of initiations was evidence of returning to normalcy b ­ ecause each Village Scout training should have about two hundred trainees at a time. The number of initiations only started decreasing ­after 1979 when the royal donations to the Village Scouts decreased, an indication that the movement still maintained its strength and influence in the aftermath of the 1976 massacre. The Village Scout Operational Center (sun pattibatkan luksuea chaoban nai phraborom-­ratchanukhro, VSOC) was officially established by the order of Prime Minister Army General Kriangsak Chomanan and Deputy Minister of Interior Army General Prem Tinsulanonda; they appointed Charoenrit as the first director and Somkhuan as the deputy director of the center in April 1977.81 Kriangsak visited the BPP Headquarters to open the Village Scout Operational Center’s building in 1978, showing his strong support for the Village Scouts.82 In the meantime, the royal ­family’s visit to the Village Scout training and events had continued ­after the 1976 coup. Speaking at a Village Scout training in Buriram province in January 1974, the princess ­mother said: “This proj­ect is making democracy reside inside yourself and also in your moral.”83 The former and incumbent BPP officers overseeing the Village Scouts say that BPP instructors have always prioritized creating a sense of unity among the trainees and instilling a belief that the Village Scouts are demo­cratic. What makes the Village Scouts democratic are their grassroots participation, regardless of individual’s class, gender, generation, or creed. But the kind of democracy that the BPP instructors endeavored to inculcate among the Village Scouts was a democracy with the king as the head of state. The unity they emphasized was a prerequisite for the defense of Thailand ­under the phrabarami, royal charisma. The BPP’s inculcation of the “unity” (samakhi) among the Village Scout members to protect the demo­cratic Thai nation with the king as the head of state helps us understand how the BPP and Village Scouts viewed the rising student activism of 1973–1976. During that time the royal ­family criticized the civilian government, claiming that it brought only disunity to the Thai ­people.84 In the eyes of the BPP and Village Scouts, the student activists promoted a demo­cratic government that denied monarchy, a symbol of Thai unity, and thus caused unrest and the disintegration of the Thai nation. From the perpetrators’ view, it was a competition between the Village Scouts who upheld a Thai-­style democracy with the king as a head of state and the students who denied it, as well reflected in an anecdote that Charoenrit recalled.

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When Sanya Thammasak was prime minister (between 1973–1975), a leader of the Yung Thong group of the National Student Center of Thailand (NSCT) from Thammasat University contacted the BPP Headquarters and asked if he could observe a Village Scout training. Permission was granted, the student was sent to a training in the provinces, and upon returning, he wrote a report, which he submitted to both the NSCT and BPP Headquarters. Charoenrit received a copy of this report and was delighted to find that the student leader’s assessment of the Village Scout movement was unexpectedly favorable. In Charoenrit’s words, the student leader concluded: “The Village Scout training appeals to the ­people to be interested in the demo­cratic system by introducing it in an easily accessible way. Therefore, the NSCT does not have to send its democracy propaganda team to the villages where the Village Scout training takes place.” A ­ fter reading this report, Charoenrit said to Somkhuan: “Somkhuan, we won already.”85 The BPP instructors of the Village Scout training viewed it their duty to remind the trainees that they must be united and protect the Thai-­style democracy from all opposition. In one of my visits to the Naresuan camp in Hua Hin, a PARU commander gave me a compilation CD of the Village Scout songs, one of which they sang when they marched to “fight communists” in the past.86 Oh cheerful, exuberantly cheerful When the sky turns a golden color, who w ­ ill die? ­Because we came to the Village Scout training to unite, Do not insult that we are only as small as toothpicks. We can be bigger when tied together. Oh cheerful, exuberantly cheerful When the sky turns a golden color, who w ­ ill die? ­Because we are ­here, we can eat rice with chicken, And we can drink coffee, with eggs and patangko, as usual.87 Even at the least, we can still have rice with curry, which is much better than the sun-­dried rice. Oh cheerful, exuberantly cheerful When the sky turns a golden color, who w ­ ill die? This is the scarf that the royal f­ amily gave to us. Village Scouts are truly delighted. It is the symbol of unity that we Village Scouts admire. Oh cheerful, exuberantly cheerful When the sky turns a golden color, who w ­ ill die? Pastimes ­here are enjoyable and every­one is entertained, not like in the jungles. Life in the jungle is so pitiful.

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We are singing merrily to relieve the sadness, ­W hether they envy us or not, you comrades. The refrain “when the sky turns a golden color” came from one of the popu­ lar catchphrases of the leftist movements at that time: “When the sky turns a golden color, p ­ eople w ­ ill reign over their land” (mua thongfa sithong fong amphai prachachon cha pen yai nai phendin).”88 To the Village Scouts, when the sky turns golden, meaning when the leftists achieve their revolution, would be a time of mourning, when someone has to dis­appear or die as expressed through the phrase “who ­will die?” The rest of the lyr­ics depicting what they eat and what they do in the Village Scout training are to show that their conditions are much better than ­those in the jungles, a reference to the activists who joined communists. The song is telling ­those “comrades” (sahai) that they cannot guarantee anything good by saying that even the modest meal with rice and curry in the Village Scout camp is still much better than eating the sun-­dried rice in the jungles. Through this song, the Scout members intended to ridicule the student activists who had joined communists in the jungles ­because the royal ­family was on their side, represented with the scarf that the royal f­amily gave to the Scouts, and they w ­ ere certain of their victory over communists and the student activists. Did the alleged victory against communists on October 6, 1976, make the BPP and Village Scouts winners? In the higher po­liti­cal circles, t­ here was a clear division between the winners and the losers ­after a military group staged a coup on the after­noon of October 6. The military members outside the coup group w ­ ere advised to leave the country or dis­appear from the public scene as shown in the case of Vithoon Yasawat, who had been suspected of belonging to an opposite military faction of the coup group.89 Director-­general of the TNPD Sisuk Mahinthonrathep was removed from the TNPD and transferred to the Ministry of Interior. During the massacre, the army radio had accused Sisuk of being “weak-­minded and timid,” but when he was forced to move to the Office of the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Interior, Sisuk’s new appointment was widely announced through the TV and radio broadcastings to show off the coup group’s inclusion of all parties and factions in the new regime. Sisuk therefore left with a bittersweet outcry against this government appointment in 1979: “Chaiyo (Cheers)!”90 His subordinate, Suraphon Chulaphram, remained in the TNPD and was soon promoted to the position of director-­general in 1981. It was Charoenrit who helped Suraphon work with Charoenrit’s grand­father, director of the Territorial Defense Department, ­after their graduation in 1940. Then again, Charoenrit recruited Suraphon to work with the BDP and the BPP in 1953. Charoenrit was from a prominent military ­family and thus helped his friend

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Suraphon survive unpredictable Thai politics. However, ­because Charoenrit was a close aide to Phao, his track of promotion in the police and army was more or less blocked ­a fter the 1957 coup. Then, his unequivocal influence over the Village Scouts as well as an intimate relationship with the royal f­ amily forced him to stay low. In 1996, Charoenrit remarked on the reversed fate between him and his close friend, saying that “since then, I became a subordinate (luk nong) to Suraphon at all times.”91 Suraphon retired with the rank of police general ­after serving as the director-­general of the TNPD, while Charoenrit retired with the rank of police lieutenant general ­after he served as commissioner of BPP General Headquarters and director of the Village Scout Operational Center. Charoenrit’s faithful student, Somkhuan Harikul, was promoted to the rank of police lieutenant general and officially recognized as the founder of the Village Scouts. Yet, Somkhuan could not attain the BPP commissionership, and he retired in 1985 from his deputy commissioner position. By contrast, Pranet Ritluechai immediately succeeded Angkun Thatanon and became the BPP commissioner in 1980. In consideration of the fact that Charoenrit had achieved the position of commissioner in 1981 a­ fter Pranet, his rise to power is quite impressive. Pranet retired a­ fter serving as the deputy director-­general of the TNPD in 1986 and became a senator. Notably he received the police general rank a­ fter his retirement from the TNPD.92 Feeling sorry that Pranet did not have a proper ­house to match his rank and title, King Bhumibol bestowed Pranet’s f­amily with land and a h ­ ouse.93 His subordinate, who was in charge of the Thammasat University operation in 1976, Sarot Panya, became the BPP Headquarters commissioner during the years 2001–2004; a­ fter his retirement, Sarot served as the director of the Village Scout Operational Center. As mentioned ­earlier, Somkhuan denied the Village Scouts’ involvement in the October 6 Massacre. Indeed, t­ here is a blank page in the BPP’s numerous volumes of historical accounts, which is October 6, 1976. Although Manas said to me in 2011 that communists w ­ ere expelled from Thailand a­ fter the successful suppression of the Village Scouts in Thammasat University on October 6, 1976, he himself has never written about their alleged victory over communists in the official BPP history, and the Village Scouts never write about the massacre.94 Why has their victorious past been absent from their histories? ­There are two constraints that force the BPP and Village Scouts not to talk about their alleged victory over communists on October 6, 1976. In simplest terms, the October 6 operation in Bangkok contradicted the Border Patrol Police’s raison d’être and princi­ples. As its name indicates, their primary police duty should be ­limited to the remote border areas that cannot be reached by other governmental agencies. The BPP’s participation in the 1976 massacre therefore leaves ques-

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tions about what kind of “border” the BPP had been defending and which “border” the BPP had to protect in Bangkok in 1976. As long as t­hese questions concerning their identity and mission are not clearly answered, their victorious past in 1976 cannot be recognized. Second, it is a well-­k nown fact that the BPP and PARU have been the most beloved forces of the royal f­ amily since the early 1950s. The presence of the BPP, PARU, and the Village Scouts at Thammasat University on October  6, 1976, therefore reasonably provokes suspicion about the indirect and direct involvement of the monarchy in the massacre and coup on that day. Thus, to avoid questions on the pos­si­ble involvement of the royal ­family, the BPP, PARU, and the Village Scouts refrain from speaking about their presence in the massacre. To the pre­sent day, an impor­tant source of pride for the BPP is the belief that they are the most people-­oriented police force. However, their brutal suppression of civilians at Thammasat University in 1976 had greatly tarnished their “people-­ oriented” image and princi­ples. This does not mean that t­ here w ­ ere no opponents or enemies against the BPP before or ­after 1976. Also, it does not mean that the BPP or PARU had not been involved in any brutal atrocities before or ­after 1976. Nonetheless, even the fiercest b ­ attles between the BPP and enemies such as opium traders or communist insurgents did not make their name as (in)famous as the 1976 case. In fact, the BPP has been struggling to bring more public attention and recognition to their mission of defending national security and leading rural development in the remote border areas. Ironically, it fi­nally gained popularity and attention among the general populace of Thailand by inscribing the name BPP in the most traumatic event in the Thai history. At last, before the sky turned a golden color, the BPP, PARU, and the Village Scouts crushed leftwing groups in Bangkok and brought the desired victory. Yet, the stories of victory have not found a place in ­t hese perpetrators’ histories to the pre­sent. What, then, is the implication of the October 6 Massacre for Thailand’s Cold War history? Between 1973 and 1976, the antiwar and pro-­democracy movement grew large in Thailand. Particularly ­after the success of the October 14 democ­ ratization movement, student activists increased their criticism of the Thai military government for its collaboration with the United States in the Second Indochina War. Student activists also demanded immediate, full withdrawal of American troops so that Thailand could be truly in­de­pen­dent from Western imperialism. In fact, before the students’ massive protest in front of the American embassy on March 21, 1976, the United States had declared its troops’ withdrawal but did not meet its promised deadline in late March 1976. Pressed by the student protests, the American ambassador instead asked the Thai government for a four-­ month extension, which led only to more protests.95 For the military, however,

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the withdrawal of US armed forces from Thailand meant the loss of major financial sources for the Thai army. The US military aid that had flowed since 1950 helped expand the Thai army establishment. To sustain t­ hese forces, the US government’s continuous support was essential. In addition, a large number of pro-­American Thais believed the presence of US troops in their home country served as a wall against a communist influx from neighboring countries. For the United States, although the government was u ­ nder the harsh criticism by the antiwar movements at home, Thailand was still one of the most vital American allies in fighting communism in Southeast Asia. Thus, the US government was hesitant to withdraw all of its armed forces from Thailand. ­These circumstances have led to speculations about the possibility of American involvement in the 1976 massacre and the coup to secure a US-­friendly Thai government. Thomas Lobe, who conducted research about the CIA, USOM, and the BPP in the early 1970s, noted in 1977 that the US government’s aid and assistance in developing the Thai police and military had “played a significant role in the buildup for the [1976] coup and are now playing a major role in ­running the country.” He also argued that the US government’s “consistent application of certain kinds of foreign assistance over years had created the pre-­conditions, the infrastructure, and the readiness for a more coercive, repressive, and vehemently anti-­communist set of political-­military leaders.”96 The history of the BPP and the growing influence of the monarchy during the Thai counterinsurgency era do support Thomas Lobe’s arguments. At the same time, this book has demonstrated that the United States did not attain hegemonic power in Thai domestic politics. The October 6 Massacre is a good example of how the Thai ruling elite, be they military or monarchy, have successfully indigenized the American strategies of anticommunist modernization and counterinsurgency to their cause. The public discourse about the withdrawal of the US armed forces heightened the tension between the rightwing and leftwing movements before the massacre. However, the direct trigger of the massacre was the mysteriously doctored picture of the prince. The perpetrators of the massacre called for the defense of nation, religion, and king from the communists. The communist ­enemy in the massacre w ­ ere accused of being anti-­nationalists, anti-­Buddhists, and antiroyalists. Through the pro­cess of nation-­building during the Thai counterinsurgency era, the monarchy became a symbol of anticommunism, which in turn made any challenger of the institution a communist. Lobe highlights US influence in the 1976 event by stressing the fact that the CIA-­PSDtrained BPP was deployed to Thammasat with American M-16 r­ ifles to kill the communists.97 However, even if the weapons used during the massacre w ­ ere from the United States, the level of brutality was beyond what the weapons could

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do, as Thongchai recalls: “It was a Wednesday morning in which the deaths by gunshot seemed to be the least painful and most civilized of murders.”98 ­After all, one of the most notable impacts of the October 6 Massacre is that it ended the public discourse surrounding the meaning of democracy. Many Thai citizens watched the massacre on TV before coverage was blacked out by government censorship that morning.99 Unimaginable atrocities committed by not only the state armed forces but also by civilians planted the fear of open discussion about changes in Thai politics and society. A lesson that the October 6 Massacre taught was clear and ­simple: If you do not re­spect the Thai-­style democracy with the king as a head of state, you automatically become an ­enemy of the Thai nation. The price of becoming an e­ nemy of the Thai nation was too high as many had seen on TV or heard on radio broadcasts on the morning of October 6, 1976. The October 6 Massacre not only silenced the victims but also the perpetrators as the latter did not dare to tarnish the monarchy ­because they too well knew the price of defamation. The United States supplied the weapons that helped sustain the military domination of Thai politics. It also aided rural development proj­ects that influenced the shaping of the Thai ruling elite’s anticommunist campaigns and greatly contributed to elevating the monarchy’s authority and popularity, but the United States did not create the lèse-­majesté law. It might have propagated the idea that the communists ­were the ­enemy of the state, but it did not identify who the communists ­were in Thailand. The October 6 Massacre was an outcome of the Thai ruling elite’s indigenization of the American Cold War systems and ideology, not the goal of the Americans. From their formative years, the Village Scouts ­were expected to become a popu­ lar base of the Border Patrol Police and the royal f­ amily for spreading royalist nationalism and building a ­human border at the border of “Thainess.” Accordingly, the Village Scouts w ­ ere designed to accommodate at least three distinctive Cold War missions of the BPP and the royal ­family. First, they ­were a vehicle for spreading the imperative of protecting the Thai-­style democracy with the king as a head of state. Anyone who had challenged the Thai-­style democracy automatically became an e­ nemy of the Thai nation-­state. Second, the Village Scouts w ­ ere to be a nonpartisan royalist force that could appeal to the larger populace in Thailand. On the presumption that the rural p ­ eople, chao bannok, ­were apo­liti­cal, the BPP and the royal ­family concentrated their energies on increasing the number of Village Scout memberships in the rural provinces. Third, the October 6 Massacre in the view of the BPP and Village Scouts was clearly a victory over communists and the most successful demonstration of their loyalty to the king and the Thai nation-­state. Nevertheless, this victorious past has not found a place in the

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official histories of the BPP and the Village Scouts, ­because their show of pride in being a loyal force that became involved in the ugliest part of Thai history could surely damage the royal f­ amily. If the United States w ­ ere involved in the October 6 Massacre, it would have had a dif­fer­ent outcome b ­ ecause, admittedly, the United States is such an easy target for open criticism. By contrast, the Thai monarchy, the final winner of Thailand’s Cold War, has gained irrevocable power through its creative indigenization of the American Cold War—so much so that the monarchy could obtain the silence of every­one involved without even asking for it.

C HA P T E R F I V E

Mission Incomplete

In April 1980, Prime Minister Prem Tinsulanonda proclaimed a shift in the Thai government’s anticommunist counterinsurgency strategy from armed suppression to po­liti­cal offensive in Order No. 66/2523 entitled “Policy of Strug­gle to Win over Communism.” The Government is determined to maintain strictly the nation, religion and monarchy and the demo­cratic form of government with the King as the head of state to administer the country, taking into consideration of the p ­ eople’s welfare; harmonize the p ­ eople’s interests and preserve the Thai national identity; resolve economic, po­liti­cal, and social prob­lems justly and peacefully, and instill in the Thais a sense of idealism, especially one which encourages the sacrifice of personal for common interest. . . . ​The armed forces w ­ ill have as its major role the defense of nation, the protection of national in­de­pen­dence and democracy with the King as head of state.1 The bottom line of this order is that the government’s anticommunist policies would promote po­liti­cal modernization and socioeconomic development to suppress communist insurgencies. It also prepared the ground for the armed forces to legitimately participate in civilian politics by refashioning themselves into the proponents of a demo­cratic government with the king as the head of state. The shift from a military to a po­liti­cal counterinsurgency strategy was further elaborated in the ensuing Prime Minister Order No. 65/2525, “Plan for Po­liti­cal Offensive,” in May 1982.2 The shift to po­liti­cal offensive implies that the promotion of anticommunist modernization came to constitute one critical ele­ment for continuing the populist military rule. In retrospect, it was Sarit who first attempted to legitimize his authoritarian rule by promoting development for security proj­ects ­under US guidance and aid. Sarit’s anticommunist modernization strategies ­were, however, a placebo. Sarit never abandoned militant counterinsurgency against the alleged

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communist insurgents and poured lucrative US military aid into modernizing the Thai military. Sarit’s rural development programs, such as the Mobile Development Units, w ­ ere undertaken by the military. In the wake of the 1965 insurgency, the Thanom administration accelerated US government–­sponsored anticommunist modernization proj­ects in the security-­sensitive areas, but Thanom did not reduce the military suppression of the alleged insurgents. Just as the monarchy utilized its participation in the BPP’s civic action to transform itself into a modern nation-­builder, the new generations of Thai military who had grown up in the so-­called American era sought to gain po­liti­cal legitimacy and ascendancy by ostensibly promoting democ­ratization and development as expressed in the order regarding the new “Policy of Strug­gle to Win over Communism.”3 Nevertheless, neither the Demo­cratic Soldiers’ nor the Prem administration’s propagation of democracy resulted in a genuine demo­cratic revolution that allowed for open participation of the ­people.4 As presented in the order, Thai-­style democracy casts the king as head of state, playing the role of “supreme mediator” and “center of unity of all Thais.”5 Order 66/2523 was in this sense a confirmation that the Thai monarchy had successfully indigenized the American Cold War. Throughout the history of the Border Patrol Police (BPP) and the development of its civic actions, the expansion of royal influence, and the growing domestic and external support for the monarchy’s anticommunist modernization campaigns during the Thai counterinsurgency era, t­ here are two historical continuities, which constitute key components of Thailand’s Cold War indigenization pro­cess. First, the Thai ruling elite proactively collaborated with the US government in making Thailand an anticommunist bastion of the American Cold War in order to maintain their domination in politics and society. Second, Thai military leaders and the royal f­ amily pushed forward their own po­liti­cal agendas before the US Cold War foreign policies to increase the number of Thai converts to anticommunist, royalist nationalism. Together, the atrocities committed by the BPP, PARU, and the Village Scouts in defense of the royalist Thai nation in 1976 and the withdrawal of the US armed forces and government officials from Southeast Asia show who won the Cold War in Thailand. What, then, is the long-­term impact of the indigenized Cold War? And what happened to the Border Patrol Police in the post–­Cold War era?

Impacts of the Indigenized Cold War The Thai monarchy is a nominal head of state, and the institution is supposed to stay above politics. Several academic analyses have attempted to define the role and characteristics of the Thai monarchy ranging from a constitutional monarchy to a

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network monarchy.6 Like Paul Handley, who wrote the controversial biography The King Never Smiles argues, many scholars as well as the general Thai populace agree that King Bhumibol Adulyadej had a power­ful and somewhat unworldly aura, which has been often explained with the term dhammaraja or selfless king, but this actually complicated his role as a king.7 We know how influential he was, but we do not know what role he was supposed to play. The difficulty in defining the late monarch’s po­liti­cal, cultural, and historical role implies that the institution has never fully belonged to ­either the state or the nation but remained above both, ­free from judgment or control by the government and the p ­ eople. How, then, did the Cold War enable the royal f­ amily’s rise to both sacred and secular power? And what is the broader impact of Cold War indigenization for Thailand’s postcolonial nation-­building? Throughout the Thai counterinsurgency era the image of the monarch as “sacred, popu­lar and demo­cratic” was propagated in three main ways:8 legends, royal proj­ects, and royal visits (kansadet). The Thai royal ­family has been revered as demigods. At the same time, though, the secularity of King Bhumibol was demonstrated through his voluntary exposure, especially through kansadet, to his subjects. By making endless official and unofficial visits to rural areas, the royal ­family has attempted to indoctrinate the notion that they are the ­people’s monarchy and are able to act beyond the confines of hallowed royalty. In this re­spect, the most significant medium that connects sacredness and secularity is the royal proj­ects that provide the venue for royal visits and the chance to construct numerous legendary stories about the royal ­family. Thousands of royal proj­ects initiated by Princess ­Mother Sinakharinthra, King Bhumibol, Queen Sirikit, and Princess Sirindhorn now cover the entirety of Thailand, elongating the lifespan of this traditional institution and sustaining its monarchical authority.

Legend and Legacy of “Mae Fah Luang” ­ ere are several speculations about the origin of the name Mae Fah Luang,9 but Th the following excerpts from the Mae Fah Luang Foundation u ­ nder Royal Patronage (munithi mae fa luang nai phraboromratchupatham) has become a standard story that the Thais reiterate t­ oday. Mae Fah Luang is the title given to Princess Srinagarindra [Sinakharinthra] by the hill tribe ­people in the north of Thailand. Since the late 1960s, the Princess ­Mother worked to improve the living conditions of rural Thais, particularly the ethnic minorities in remote mountainous areas that ­were only accessible by he­li­cop­ter.  .  .  . ​It was this very image of

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the Princess M ­ other descending from the skies that gave rise to the name “Mae Fah Luang” (meaning Royal ­Mother from the Sky) and became the affectionate title by which the local ­people address the Princess ­Mother.10 The commemoration volume for the princess ­mother published by Princess Sirindhorn in 1998 tells another story—­namely, that it was the BPP who coined the name around 1967. The volume’s editor’s explanation begins with a question about the unusual combination of fah (sky) and luang (royal). Mae (­mother), fah, and luang are common Thai words, and luang has been conventionally used to refer to a sovereign ruler both in central and northern Thailand. However, since the combination of fah and luang is not typically found in Thai royal custom, the author hypothesizes that fah was the highland minorities’ contribution ­because they use the word “sky” to indicate the heavenly, sacred leadership. Thus the volume’s editor argues that it was the BPP who translated the highland minority’s vocabulary for a ruler into the Thai equivalent word for “sky” and attached it to the general Thai term “luang.” Another reason why the editor believes that the BPP coined this title derives from the previous examples of naming the royal proj­ects. BPP schools built with the king’s donation w ­ ere named “Chao Pho Luang” and t­ hose with the queen’s as “Chao Mae Luang” in the early 1960s. When the princess ­mother began to sponsor the BPP school proj­ect, the BPP created the title “Chao Mae Ya Luang,” meaning the royal paternal grand­mother, but as the villa­gers did not use the term much, it soon dis­appeared.11 In fact, most Thai ­people, and the highland minorities as well, call the princess m ­ other somdetya, the royal grand­mother, which might have been also created by the BPP.12 The title “Mae Fah Luang” suddenly became popu­lar among the lowland Thais in 1984–1985, when the Mae Fah Luang Foundation was officially launched in place of the previous Thai Hillcrafts Foundation (Bordercraft Proj­ect). The story about the origin of “Mae Fah Luang” described ­earlier began spreading through mass media, becoming a standard legend ­until ­today.13 The story of how and why the princess m ­ other gained the title “Mae Fah Luang” could be true, but again it was not the term that the highland minorities created or used in the past. It is a legend purposefully in­ven­ted to exalt the princess ­mother as the royal ­mother of the highland minorities in the eyes of outsiders like the Bangkokians. The princess m ­ other’s dedication to helping the marginalized ­people in the remote border areas might have been genuine, but at the same time, her numerous royal proj­ects and trips to the border areas did not stay completely “above” politics. As mentioned ­earlier, the princess ­mother’s royal proj­ects ­were built on the BPP’s civic actions and extended from the provision of basic medical ser­vices and education to the development of the rural economy and security volunteers proj­ects. Particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, she frequently made

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royal visits (kansadet) to demonstrate royal sponsorship for BPP proj­ects. Her exposure to the public became a reminder to the ­people that the presence of monarchy extended to ­every corner of Thailand. The princess ­mother made a total of 267 royal visits to BPP-­related events between 1963 and 1991. While the regional distribution of her trips is quite balanced among the four regions, it is noteworthy that 263 out of 267 trips ­were made before 1980, as shown in Figure 5.1. Starting in 1971, she attended events such as school openings, and Village Scouts initiations, as well as making donations to BPP area camps. Not surprisingly, her visits to the BPP schools constitute more than a half of the total visits (140 times), and her attendance at the Village Scout initiations (85 times) ranks the second. The number of the princess ­mother’s royal visits peaked several times, with thirty-­one visits in 1967, forty-­four in 1973, and a high of fifty-­three in 1975. In 1967, eleven out of thirty-­one trips ­were made to open new BPP schools in northern Thailand. Considering that she made only ten visits in the previous year, the number of the princess ­mother’s royal trips tripled in the year 1967, which is consistent with the rapid increase of schools in the northern region in the same year (see Figure 2.2). As the tension grew from the escalating insurgencies in the north, the BPP accelerated their civic action programs by building more schools and initiating new proj­ects such as Border Security Volunteer Teams and United States Naval Construction Battalions called Seabee

Figure 5.1. The Princess M ­ other’s Visits to BPP-­Related Activities

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training in 1967. In addition, this is also the year when the princess ­mother began participating in and acting as a royal patron of the Bordercraft proj­ect, the forerunner of the Mae Fah Luang Foundation. The number of trips climaxed in 1973 and 1975. One notable difference between 1973 and 1975 is her destination. In 1973, out of the total forty-­four visits twenty-­ nine ­were to schools and four w ­ ere to Village Scout initiations—­one initiation per region. In 1975, however, out of a total of fifty-­three visits, she attended thirty-­five Village Scout initiations, but only fifteen BPP schools in the same year. ­These figures clearly demonstrate a shift in royal attention between 1973 and 1975. Fi­nally, it is noteworthy that the number of her royal visits dropped dramatically a­ fter 1977. Whereas the princess m ­ other made a total of twenty-­nine trips to the provinces to attend the BPP-­sponsored events in 1977, the next year, she visited only two Village Scout initiations in Nakhon Nayok and Nakhon Ratchasima provinces, which are close to Bangkok. In short, the princess ­mother’s royal visits took place where security concerns arose, where the number of insurgents grew, and where the presence of authority was urgently demanded to lead a successful counterinsurgency campaign. When the princess m ­ other visited BPP school opening ceremonies or BPP camps, she usually brought school supplies, uniforms, books, toys, photos of the king and queen, and images of the Bud­dha for the students, and medicine, food, clothes, and transistor radios for the villa­gers. She also donated money to build or repair facilities in BPP camps. The first two BPP schools built ­under the princess ­mother’s sponsorship ­were the Ananda Border Patrol Police School in Palau village, Prachuap Khirikhan province—­which apparently contains a commemoration of her deceased son—­and the Walai Border Patrol Police School in Hua Hin. To build t­ hese two schools, she donated 110,000 baht in 1964. However, such direct funding is not typical of royally sponsored BPP schools. According to the BPP’s account, only ten schools w ­ ere built with the princess m ­ other’s money alone and thus, ­t hese schools are named and numbered ­a fter the princess ­mother’s maiden name or official title, as in “Sangwanwit” or “Somdet phraratchachonani.” In most cases, the princess ­mother received donations from individuals and governmental and nongovernmental organ­izations to support the BPP’s civic action programs in the remote areas. In the end, the royal ­family supported the building of a total of 198 BPP schools by donating almost sixteen million baht between 1962 and 2006; the schools that received full or partial support from the princess ­mother between 1963–1991 amount to 140.14 BPP schools are usually named ­after the main donors, and ­there are thousands of donors to the royal proj­ect, ranging from individuals to major business companies, which generally receive tax-­deductions in turn. Thus, the money given to

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BPP civic action programs “through” the royal f­ amily is not solely from their own pockets. This also holds true for the princess m ­ other’s proj­ects and sponsorship. One of the notable sources of funding that has enabled the princess ­mother to support the BPP civic action programs is the Princess M ­ other’s Charities Fund of Thailand (munithi kongthun kankuson somdetphra sinakharinthra boromratchachonani, PMCF). It is unclear when this nonprofit corporation was established, but according to Sangwon Krairoek, former committee member of the organ­ization, it became an official royal foundation in November 1980 in cele­bration of the princess m ­ other’s eightieth birthday. For the first four years of the establishment, the former minister of foreign affairs and the then head of the Demo­crat Party, Thanat Khoman, served as president of its central committee.15 An a­ ctual leader of the PMCF, however, was a lifetime friend of the princess ­mother, Betty Dumaine, whom she met in boarding school in Boston in 1919. Dumaine wanted to set up a non-­profit organ­ization to financially support her royal friend’s rural development and charity proj­ects in Thailand. She therefore established the PMCF in Pinehurst, North Carolina, and then set up a branch office in Sathon Road in Bangkok. The PMCF attracted several notable figures such as Lieutenant General Richard G. Stilwell, who had served as the commander of the US Military Assistance Command in Thailand between 1965 and 1967 and the German pharmacist and businessman Herbert Link, who ­later offered the PMCF a ­free office in the com­pany building.16 One of the first proj­ects that the PMCF undertook was rebuilding the Betty Dumaine Border Patrol Police School in Chiang Rai province, which had been allegedly burned down by the communist terrorists. To this end, Dumaine brought in $50,000 dollars from the United States in 1967. Up to the pre­sent, donations to the PMCF continue to flow to BPP schools, as well as funding what is called the Princess ­Mother’s Scholarship (thun somdetya).17 To show her appreciation, the princess m ­ other bestowed than phuying, the highest noninheritable lifetime title for a non-­royal w ­ oman, on Dumaine. Soon, ­t here emerged a number of nonprofit organ­izations ­u nder the princess ­mother’s royal patronage to support BPP civic actions, such as the Mae Fah Luang Foundation and the Princess Srinagarindra Award Foundation (munithi rangwan somdetphra sinakharinthra boromratchachonani).18 A number of local groups also supported the princess m ­ other’s proj­ects, including the Thai W ­ omen’s Society (samakhom satri thai), headed by Udomlak Siyanon, wife of Phao Siyanon.19 Between 1954 and 1957, when she left for Switzerland with Phao, Udomlak extended the society’s charities to the BPP school proj­ects by donating money and school supplies.20 In 1961, a year ­after Phao’s death in Switzerland, Udomlak returned to Thailand and resumed her charitable activities and served again on the Committee of the Thai ­Women’s Society from 1975

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­ ntil her death in 1981. According to memoirs by former commissioners of the u BPP and TNPD, Udomlak had actively contributed to the welfare ser­v ices of Thai policemen, alongside her generous support for the BPP activities, especially the princess ­mother’s Building Security in the Rural Villages Proj­ect.21 In addition, numerous social organ­izations both at home and abroad have made donations to the royal f­ amily to be conveyed to BPP civic action proj­ects such as the Red Cross in Thailand, the Faculty of Medicine in Siriraj Hospital, and the Young Buddhist Association of Thailand.22 So have major business companies such as the Siam Cement Corporation and OSOTSPA and popu­lar politicians such as Prime Minister Thanom Kittikachorn and the US ambassador to Thailand.23 Although ­t hese collective efforts contributed to developing Thailand’s margins, most of the time, it was the royal ­family who gained attention and affection from the Thai populace. In this way, the princess m ­ other could make herself the direct royal patron of the BPP and the marginalized ­people in the remote border areas. What, then, is the legacy of the princess ­mother’s work with the BPP and Thai society during the Cold War u ­ ntil the time of her passing in 1995? First, she brought the marginalized ­people to the center of Thai society and politics. In this pro­cess, the princess ­mother propagated two significant images, one as a sacred ­mother of the nation and the other as a secular, humane monarch who is close to her subjects. Often, her effort to bring the highland minorities into the Thai nation was interpreted by the general Thai p ­ eople as the extended generosity and compassion of the monarchy for the marginalized, b ­ ecause other state apparatuses seemed to remain indifferent to t­ hese ­people. As a commoner who married a royal prince and gave birth to two kings of Thailand, her tireless commitment to “open a path to civilization for remote border villages” created a positive image of the princess ­mother, and by extension, the entire monarchy, as a benevolent royal savior from the sky.24 The combination of a royal m ­ other from the sky and a half-­royal and half-­commoner monarch of the marginalized transcended the gap between sacredness and secularity, generating a popu­lar legend. Second, through her participation in BPP civic actions and the expansion of her royal proj­ects, which became key components of the institutional infrastructure of the monarchy’s nation-­building, the princess ­mother secured the BPP too. ­Because of her vested interest in expanding royal proj­ects with the BPP, the Thai military government could not express its outright suspicion of and discomfort with the existence of the BPP. At the same time, the BPP, as a beloved child of the princess m ­ other, has benefited from the images of the princess m ­ other as a professional, benevolent monarch b ­ ecause the unit acted as the closest royal agents to the royal ­family members.

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Ultimately, as the princess m ­ other’s proj­ects in northern Thailand became the foundation for the first official royal proj­ect launched in 1969, she actually laid the ground for the survival of the Thai monarchy both as a traditional patron of the nation and as a modern, professional state apparatus to the pre­sent day. As she was nearing retirement in the early 1980s, it was time for her son, the late King Bhumibol, to take over her legacies and imprint his footsteps over the royalist Thai nation.

“In His Majesty’s Footsteps” Former chief of the royal court police, Police General Vasit Dejkunjorn published a memoir in 2001 entitled In His Majesty’s Footsteps, to share his experiences safeguarding the royal f­ amily during their trips in the rural areas. Seven years a­ fter the book came out, Thai gradu­ate student Prakan Klinfung wrote an article in a journal with a similar title to describe what was the ­actual goal of ­those royal visits to the rural areas during the Cold War.25 While the well-­k nown royalist Police General Vasit tells of the king’s tireless efforts to meet the marginalized p ­ eople of rural Thailand, Prakan argues that the king’s journeys were a purposeful public display of his outright promotion of anticommunist movements in the rural areas. At the least, ­these two accounts share a common presumption that royal visits, kansadet, aimed at increasing to boosting the popularity of the monarchy among the general Thais. They also show the extent the royal ­family invested in the anticommunist nation-­building during the Cold War period. In addition to legends of the royal ­mother from the sky and the legacies of phrabarami (royal charisma), the images of Thai monarchs as people-­oriented, selfless rulers have been laboriously created and reproduced through countless photo­graphs and footage of the royal visits. In the nineteenth ­century, the royal ­family’s travel outside Bangkok was in the form of a recreational trip called sadet praphatton (royal journey), which was regarded as “the rulers’ attempts to overcome or suspend social distance and hierarchy by traveling in disguise.”26 During the Cold War period, this royal journey transformed into a field trip whereby the royal ­family could learn more about their subjects and their grievances and demonstrate that their influence could reach the remotest areas of the Thai territorial bound­aries, unlike other state apparatuses. An illustrated book published by the Bureau of Royal House­hold in 1996, entitled The Royal Journey Becomes the Royal Proj­ect (sadet praphatton ma pen khrongkan phraratchadamri),27 vividly shows the evolution of the royal ­family’s public relations between the 1960s and 1970s in two exemplary groups of photos: In one, the king plays m ­ usic in a boat with a number

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of anonymous farang (foreigner) guests; in the other, the king is in uniform, inspecting a military camp and practicing shooting. It should be noted that King Bhumibol’s and Queen Sirikit’s visits to the rural areas and the symbolic images of the development king began to be pop­u ­lar­ ized in the 1970s. A ­ fter his return to Thailand in December 1951 and throughout the 1950s, the king’s activities mostly included attending government, military, and private functions; holding audiences for the cabinet, bureaucrats, citizens, foreign dignitaries, and royalty; engaging in traditional and private ceremonies; meeting with students and subjects; and traveling abroad. As Prakan points out, ­until the early 1960s, most royal trips to the provincial areas w ­ ere made to receive foreign guests in their royal residences or to participate in royal rituals in par­tic­ u­lar towns. But in the 1960s, a majority of royal visits w ­ ere to military camps, newly built or renovated royal palaces, and adjunct villages in the provinces.28 While the young royal ­couple w ­ ere busy making themselves public celebrities and increasing their ties with influential military generals, Princess ­Mother Sinakharinthra initiated medical and educational proj­ects with the BPP in the BPP in northern Thailand. Dressed in BPP fatigues and a beret, the princess m ­ other made the arduous trips to the remote border areas of Thailand in CIA-­sponsored he­li­cop­ters and in the pro­cess constructed an image of a modest and modern royal patron of the p ­ eople. Ultimately, her close relationship with the BPP and a number of her royal proj­ects became valuable assets for her son, especially for transforming the traditional monarchy into a modern, professional, and people-­oriented institution.29 King Bhumibol fully committed himself to the princess m ­ other’s development proj­ects in the late 1960s, when it was time for him to take on the role of ­father of the Thai nation. Thereafter, images of the king working with the government and local officials in rural areas began to replace t­ hose that recorded recreational trips. The Thai government and the US Information Ser­v ices produced millions of photo­g raphs and footage from kansadet, and the photos of the royal ­family’s down-­to-­earth attitude t­ oward the rural p ­ eople w ­ ere immediately and massively displayed in public spaces. Therefore, the kansadet was a means to spread the “in­ ven­ted tradition” of the “development king.”30 By mid-1981, ­t here w ­ ere well over a thousand Royal Development proj­ects launched across Thailand, ranging from irrigation to agriculture, and environmental protection to transportation, public health and welfare, and more.31 The princess m ­ other could narrow the gap between the divine royalty and her subjects thanks to her commoner background. The late king, on the other hand, attempted to narrow the distance between the monarchy and the ­people by making himself a demo­cratic king who allegedly worked for his subjects’ wellbeing.

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As several scholars have noted, the king’s perception of democracy was heavi­ly influenced by Sarit’s po­liti­cal philosophy, which asserted that Western-­style democracy does not fit Thailand, and that Thai society is more inclined to a strong leader who is able to unify and stabilize the country. Like a f­ amily, a nation would be peaceful if a strong, kind f­ ather took care of the h ­ ouse­hold. Kukrit Pramoj, a promoter of “Thai-­style government,” thus proposed that King Bhumibol make more rural visits to “create a sense of belonging and, as a consequence, the monarchy would be identified as one with the p ­ eople.”32 Or, as Thai po­liti­cal scientist Thak Chaloemtiarana notes, “the father-­leader visits his c­ hildren to listen and to observe their needs directly.”33 In effect, Thai-­style democracy at heart was a means to protect Thailand’s longstanding hierarchical system and culture where the monarchy sits at the apex of the pyramid. King Bhumibol considered himself “­really an elected king,” as he said in an interview with an American journalist in June 1967. He added, “If the ­people do not want me, they can throw me out, eh? Then I w ­ ill be out of a job.”34 In December 1970, he asserted that the Thais must “create genuine and appropriate democracy” and that “democracy without wisdom ­w ill turn into chaos. And that chaos ­w ill develop into anarchy.”35 Thus he spoke of constitutional monarchy in an interview with the Leaders magazine in 1982 as follows: The word monarch or king or queen is difficult to understand—­even in the minds of some of the ­people who read your magazine, who are themselves leaders. A king is like a fairy­tale. Even a constitutional monarch is like a fairy­tale. It is very difficult to describe the role of the king, ­because each situation is dif­fer­ent. But the basic role of our constitutional monarch is to be the head of state. In fact, it is like a figurehead. But we must have a figurehead like we have a country. Even the communist countries have names for their countries, and they also have their leaders. A leader is like a symbol, ­whether he happens to have power or not. So a constitutional monarch is first a symbol of the country and if that constitutional monarch is successful he must become a living symbol of the country. He must change with the country but, at the same time, he must keep the spirit of the country. It’s like being a representative of our embodiment, or the soul of the country. That means that all the ­people who compose a country have dif­fer­ent characters, but the common character of a ­people must be embodied by the king.36 King Bhumibol’s definition of democracy was confined to the concept of “democracy with the monarchy as the head of the state.” And b ­ ecause the king is presumed to be the highest moral authority and to have the phrabarami (royal

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charisma) that surpasses ordinary politicians, his perception of democracy with the king as a “living symbol of the country” has paved the way for locating himself “above” demo­cratic politics.37 Contrary to what he claimed about staying above politics, he did engage in politics. One of the most con­spic­u­ous po­liti­cal events that the late king intervened in took place in 1973. On the morning of October 14, a crowd of students and civilians moved t­ oward the Chitralada Villa at the Dusit Palace, and the palace gates ­were opened to provide refuge to the demonstrators that ­were urging the release of the po­liti­cal activists and students arrested for demanding a permanent constitution and the resignation of the military dictators. King Bhumibol and his royal ­family walked around the palace grounds to greet the demonstrators. That eve­ning, the king appeared on national tele­v i­sion, saying “­Today is a day of ­great sorrow, the most grievous in the history of our Thai nation.”38 As Thongchai remarked, “the new role of the monarchy in democracy began” on that day: a demo­cratic king.39 ­After the fall of Saigon in April 1975, “the palace began to see student, ­labour and farm leaders as communist agitators, or at least as deeply influenced by such ele­ments.”40 The open politics ­under civilian government since 1973 was projected as a source of conflict and instability, and most importantly, a threat to the very foundations of the monarchy. By contrast, pictures of the king greeting the student and civilian protesters in the palace on October 14, 1973, generated the images of a highly moral, demo­cratic, and fatherly leader who mediates conflicts between his subjects. Borwornsak Uwanno, a well-­k nown advocate of Thai-­style democracy, asserted in 2006 that the king had exercised the “royal prerogative as ‘the supreme mediator’ when the country ­faces a crisis that po­liti­cal and other institutions are unable to resolve through any po­liti­cal means available,” which is to say that the king’s po­liti­cal intervention is legitimate. The king played the role of “center of unity of all Thais,” and thus, the monarchy intended to remain as “the main pillar of the country’s government.”41 Then, what was the role, or influence at the least, of monarchy in the October 6 Massacre in 1976? On September 23, 1976, King Bhumibol and Queen Sirikit visited a ­temple where the returned military dictator Thanom was staying as a novice. Although a monk ­there testified that the king and the queen did not meet Thanom, the timing suggested that the royal c­ ouple endorsed the former dictator’s return to Thailand. Even if ­there is no hard evidence of the royal ­family’s direct involvement in the massacre, their influence on the perpetrators of the massacre can be found in many places. To begin with, the king was an anticommunist, and he claimed communism was impractical in 1967.42 To prevent communists from building a nation-­state that denies the presence of traditional elites or feu-

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dalists, royalists had to make p ­ eople believe that communists w ­ ere antinationalist and antiroyalist.43 According to the testimony of a former rector of Thammasat University, Puey Ungphakorn in 1977, when the rightwing groups harassed the students and activists who ­were forced to lie with their heads down on the football field in the morning of October 6, 1976, the perpetrators began tearing off Buddhist amulets from the students and activists and saying that “­t hese communists are not ­really Buddhists.” The October 6 Massacre was justified ­under the banner of royalist nationalism, which reinforced the idea that “any type of socialism is Communism,” and it was “not sinful to kill Communist” per Kittiwutho, a Buddhist monk.44 Above all, the ­actual trigger of the October 6 Massacre was a fabricated photo of the strangled crown prince published in rightwing newspapers. It was the royalist nationalism that had divided Thailand between the royalists and antiroyalists by equating this division with the nationalists versus antinationalists. Two days a­ fter the October 6 coup staged by the National Administration Reform Council led by Admiral Sa-­ngad Chaloryoo, Thanin Kraivichien was appointed prime minister. The late king stood his ground and endorsed the coup as the supreme authority of the Thai state by appointing Thanin a privy councilor.45 King Bhumibol’s perception of democracy is quite similar to that of the military leaders, not only Sarit but also several rising army factions in the late 1970s, such as the Young Turks and the Demo­cratic Soldiers. As a former commander-­ in-­chief of the Royal Thai Army and also a mastermind of Prime Minister Order 66/2523, General Chavalit Yongchaiyudh blamed the “dark influences” of corrupt, unprincipled politicians and local businessmen in obstructing democracy in Thailand. However, Chavalit and other army leaders’ criticism of the “dark influences” was to disparage electoral politics. As the Thai po­liti­cal scientist Suchit Bunbongkarn argues, the army believed that an election “may not necessarily be a demo­cratic pro­cess if it cannot produce responsible and honest legislative members.” Instead, they believed that “appointed senators, carefully selected from all walks of life is [sic] a prerequisite of a ‘true’ democracy.”46 The army’s sharpened criticism of electoral politics shows that their target became corruption instead of communism. As the propagation of so-­ c alled clean politics increased among the public intellectuals and army leaders, it resulted in an increased suspicion of the electoral pro­cess and w ­ hether it was a “trustworthy means to democracy.” Instead, the army promoted “moral authority as the superior and ultimate legitimacy.” 47 The pro­cess of constructing the images of a sacred, popu­lar, and demo­cratic monarchy during the Cold War continued in 1979, when the Foundation of King Rama Nine, The G ­ reat (munithi 5 thanwa maharat) began sponsoring a public ceremony commemorating his birthday. This is one of the numerous “grass-­roots”

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organ­izations that ­were created to spread royalist nationalism among the general populace, as clearly demonstrated in its mission statement of supporting the p ­ eople in demonstrating their loyalty to the nation, religion, and monarchy; helping Thai ­people from ­every walk of life; supporting other institutions that have similar intentions; and, engaging in vari­ous public charity works that support “democracy with the monarchy as the head of the state.” The foundation does not give financial or other support to politicians and po­liti­cal parties.48 It is one among vari­ous purposeful programs that helped the king become an embodiment of the Thai nation. As Kobkua Suwannathat-­Pian’s puts it, ­ fter fifty-­t hree years of royal dedication, the p A ­ eople solidly belong to the King. The Throne, the dynasty and the nation have become one. They are personified in Bhumibol, Somdet Phra Phathara Maharaja, the Beloved ­Great King.49 As King Bhumibol reached “the apex of his undisputed charisma as well as po­liti­cal authority,” around the sixtieth anniversary of his ascension to the throne in 2006, leading public intellectuals began suggesting that a Thai-­style democracy “must be based on Buddhist princi­ples, which include the ideas of good governance, a righ­teous ruler, and Buddhist Dharmic kingship.”50 By constantly reminding the Thai p ­ eople that the monarchy represents the supreme moral authority and should rule and reign the Thai nation, Thai-­style democracy has been utilized to strengthen the hegemonic influence of the monarchy and royalist elites in con­temporary Thai society. In this regard, the most salient impacts of the indigenized Cold War can be found in the spread of royalist nationalism. Throughout the Thai counterinsurgency era, royalist nationalism developed a contradictory quality that still affects Thai politics. First, royalist nationalism has a disintegrative function. Since the early nineteenth c­ entury when the three pillars of nation, religion, and monarchy ­were proclaimed by King Vajiravudh, they became the criteria for differentiating the Thais from o ­ thers. During the Cold War, communists w ­ ere depicted as the opponents of all three. Regarding Thai military intervention in rural development for security proj­ects in the south, Shane Tarr remarks that the military often equated Thai communists with “dark forces” and that this propaganda was “complemented by more subtle references to communists being opposed to the monarchy and opposing all forms of Buddhism.”51 Despite its divisive nature, royalist nationalism has become the statist’s means of assimilation. The Thai government promoted King Bhumibol and Queen Sirikit as the ­father and ­mother of the nation. Not surprisingly, Thailand’s ­father’s and

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­ other’s days are the birthdays of the late king and queen.52 When I was conductm ing field research in northern Thailand, I visited a BPP school in the Tha Song Yang district in Tak province. When I spotted pictures of the king and queen in front of the main classroom building, I ­stopped. I pointed to the picture of the king and asked the students who ­were attired in their Karen dresses: “Who is this?” The students unanimously answered: “pho” (­father). I then pointed to the picture of the queen and asked the same question. Then the students said: “mae” (­mother).53 This anecdote shows the level of acculturation that the royalist nationalism has achieved within the Thai society. W ­ hether it is truthful or pretentious, “Thais love the King (rao rak nai luang)” has become a way of being or becoming a Thai. Likewise, unity (samakhi) has become the most significant value of the nation. As the king said on July 3, 1973, “Unity is how every­one can work for the general benefit, and develop themselves, loving each other, so the country can be at peace and attain rapid development.”54 With the king at the center of national unity and pro­gress, loyalty to the king became a crucial component of Thainess. Although ­t here existed insurmountable barriers among Bangkok elites, lowland Thai villa­ gers, and highland minorities, the latter two groups could be accepted within the border of Thainess as long as they pledged their loyalty t­oward the Thai nation, Buddhism, and the monarchy. Nevertheless, this does not mean that simply anyone who believes in royalist nationalism is treated equally. In addition, when any type of opposition against the state or government emerges, ­t hose involved are quickly pushed outside the border of Thainess and stigmatized as antiroyalists and antinationalists, thus becoming the anti-­or non-­Thai. Despite the belief in the role of monarchy as the axis of Thai unity, the royalists’ efforts to consolidate the nation u ­ nder the umbrella of phrabarami has indeed been a hierarchical assimilation pro­cess bolstered by vari­ous other attempts. It is this royalist nationalism that has been inculcated in the general Thai populace through conscious po­liti­cal campaigns, mostly involving the p ­ eople’s everyday exposure to pictures of the royal f­amily in the street or on TV news. And this par­tic­u­lar type of Thai nationalism has also been guarded by the state through the imposition of lèse-­majesté law, which has “always served the primary ‘­enemy function.’ ”55

Cold Warriors Moving into the Post–­Cold War Era The mission of the Special Training Division is to build the qualified, honorable, and ideal Border Patrol Police that can operate effectively as military, police and civilian. Mission Statement of the Border Patrol Police Special Training Division

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BPP Commander: ​Sinae, the Border Patrol Police is like a duck. Do you know why? Sinae: ​No, why? BPP Commander: ​Can a duck fly? Sinae: ​Yes. BPP Commander: ​Can a duck swim? Sinae: ​Yes. BPP Commander: ​A duck can run too? Sinae: ​Right. BPP Commander: ​So a duck can fly, swim, and run, right? Sinae: ​Right! BPP Commander: ​But can a duck run faster than a h ­ orse? Sinae: ​No, it cannot. BPP Commander: ​Can a duck dive deeper than fish? Can a duck fly higher than birds? Sinae: ​No, surely not. BPP Commander: ​A duck cannot beat them. That is the Border Patrol Police. Personal conversation with a BPP commander, December 27, 2010 Whereas no drastic changes occurred in the BPP organ­ization and its mission since its 1972 reestablishment, Thai society has gone through several impor­ tant turning points since the end of the Thai counterinsurgency era in 1980. Manas Khantatatbumroong, former deputy commissioner of BPP Headquarters, said that Order 66/2523 and changes in the military’s thinking did not affect the BPP organ­ization ­because the unit had already undertaken the po­liti­cal offensives from the mid-1950s through its extended civic actions.56 One good example of the BPP’s pioneering role in developing a po­liti­cal counterinsurgency strategy is the initiation of the Village Scout proj­ect in the early 1970s, and it remained the largest and most influential rural po­liti­cal movement u ­ ntil the early 1980s.57 Reflecting on this historical lesson, Order 65/2525 in 1982 emphasized “popu­lar participation” in po­liti­cal activities to enable “the ­people to have more practical experience which can serve to strength their attachment to an understanding of the princi­ ples of popu­lar sovereignty.”58 Accordingly, the army began local organ­izations such as the National Defense Volunteers, Volunteer Development, and Self-­Defense

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Figure 5.2. Mission Statement of the Border Patrol Police Special Training Division

Villages, although ­t hese proj­ects turned out to be less successful in terms of their size and impact than the Village Scouts.59 In sum, the military government’s po­ liti­cal and strategic changes that took place a­fter the proclamation of Order 66/2523 thus had ­little effect on the mission and characteristics of the BPP. Order 66/2523 and Order 65/2525 also did not result in the cessation of the army’s suspicions of the role of the BPP as a security force. To evaluate the potential contribution of the BPP to the new national security policies, BPP General Headquarters or­ga­nized a seminar during its annual meeting in December 1983 and received recommendations and comments from high-­ranking military officers and civilian officials. One notable speaker at this seminar was Army General Athit Kamlang-ek, Supreme Commander of the Royal Thai Armed Forces. General Athit praised the past deeds and contributions of the BPP to national security, but then pointed out that the mixed characteristics of police, military, and civilians of the unit would lead the BPP to encounter a number of challenges and they would not achieve professionalism. To address the prob­lems, Athit emphasized improving the military and police characteristics of the BPP and focusing on combat and intelligence duties with the army more closely.60 In contrast, Deputy Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of the Interior Charoenchit Na Songkhla

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strongly encouraged the BPP to further develop its police and civilian missions as well as public relations programs such as the Village Scouts. As long as the BPP was committed to the remote area development programs, especially the BPP school proj­ects, and worked closely with local governments, the Ministry of Interior would continue supporting the BPP.61 In retrospect, the BPP could have chosen to focus on ­limited missions as General Athit and Charoenchit suggested. Nevertheless, the BPP chose to stay as a nebulous security force with military, police, and civilian characteristics. The Thai National Police Department’s (TNPD’s) guidelines released on April 24, 1987, defined the BPP mission as defending peace and order and preventing crime and drug trafficking; defending border security and conducting counterinsurgency operations; assisting civilian development programs for national security; providing training and instructions for the police force; and administering security units ­under the BPP’s command.62 However, the BPP’s role as a police force is l­ imited. For instance, it has no l­ egal power to conduct investigations. When the BPP rounds up suspects, they must be transferred to the Provincial Police or other investigative divisions.63 As a BPP area commander said in the personal conversation that appears at the beginning of this section, the BPP as a security force could do every­ thing or nothing. Despite the BPP’s ambiguous characteristics as a national security force, the Thai military government could not simply remove or reor­ga­nize the BPP ­because it was in effect a royal agent, and its role as a symbolic missionary of royalist nationalism had been critical for demonstrating the monarchy’s benevolence and po­liti­cal legitimacy since the early 1960s. Over the years of researching the history of the Border Patrol Police, I have learned that the weakness of the BPP is actually its strength. The BPP’s versatility of operating in military, police, and civilian arenas has largely contributed to diluting its institutional identity, but this very nebulousness is what made them a perfect candidate to be royal agents. Naturally, as a royal agent, the BPP’s fate has been tied up with the fate of the monarchy. As long as the monarchy survives and its vested interest in the royal development proj­ects pertaining to the BPP’s civic action continues, the BPP w ­ ill remain active and continue to carry out the same missions. As long as the Thai monarchy continues to play the role of modern nation-­builder, the BPP ­w ill survive to spread the royal cause. Since the BPP has been complicating its police mission by its claim of being a multi-­taskforce, it has also suffered from a lack of professionalism, like in the story that a BPP commander told me above. “A duck cannot beat a h ­ orse, fish, and a bird.” But then members of the BPP have told me that the BPP needs to play multiple roles in the border areas b ­ ecause none of the governmental agencies or organ­izations can reach t­ hese villages, or they are sim-

Map 2. The Border Patrol Police’s Areas of Responsibility, since 1986

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ply not interested in the villages in remote areas. They also added that only the monarchy has been interested in t­ hese remote, unreachable margins of Thailand. I then asked how the royal ­family knows about ­those villages that do not even exist in a map. An answer comes from an incident described by a civic action commander who was involved in the building of study centers that are like a branch of the BPP schools set up in the most remote mountain areas. In 2002, Princess Sirindhorn was traveling to BPP schools in northern Thailand by he­li­cop­ter and through her binoculars, she saw small villages clustered in the mountains. She checked ­t hose areas with the BPP and other officials and found that ­t here w ­ ere no educational facilities. Therefore, the princess ordered the BPP to build what was ­later named as the Study Center of the Border Patrol Police School (sun kanrian rongrian tamruat trawen chaidaen). She added that ­because ­those highland villa­gers are living within Thai territories, the BPP must teach them Thai customs and language to make them Thais.64 Building t­ hose study centers in such remote, unknown mountain ranges was not an aty­pi­cal task for the BPP, but it was still a remarkable achievement. Between February and the beginning of April in 2002, only two months from the time that Princess Sirindhorn issued her order, BPP Regional Subdivision 34 in Tak province managed to build seven study centers and stocked them with school supplies, sports equipment, cooking equipment, and medicine. The subdivision also deployed three BPP teachers to each center, and they started teaching the Thai language to c­ hildren during the daytime and to the villa­gers in the eve­ning. As soon as the Thai language classes began, a BPP operational unit started building school farms to launch one of Princess Sirindhorn’s signature royal projects, the Agriculture for School Lunch proj­ect. By the end of 2002, BPP Regional Subdivision 34 reported that all the centers ­were in full operation.65 Four more study centers w ­ ere built in Tak province in 2003–2004, and four o ­ thers in Mae Hong Son province in 2007–2008. As of 2013, ­there w ­ ere fifteen centers in northern Thailand and one in northeastern Thailand.66 The speed and efficiency with which ­t hese study centers ­were built are due mainly to the fact that the BPP is a direct agent of the royal f­amily and the fact that governmental organ­izations w ­ ere not involved. The princess’s office provided a bud­get to build classrooms and to equip facilities for the royal proj­ects, and local villa­gers and prospective students w ­ ere mobilized to complete the mission. The objective in building t­ hese study centers was clear: to increase the use of the Thai language and spread the royal cause of modernization among the highland minorities and remote border p ­ eople. Th ­ ese efforts in turn facilitated the royal initiatives and demonstrated the omnipotence of the monarchy. In order to complete

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this mission, the Border Patrol Police must play the roles of military, police, and civilian all together. The degree of professionalism is not an issue ­because the BPP must carry out anything that the royal ­family commands and cannot openly criticize the validity, efficiency, or necessity of the royal proj­ects they undertake. The second prob­lem that the BPP has been dealing with is institutional insecurity. ­Because of the excessive workload and scanty recognition for their hardships and sacrifice, the BPP has suffered from a shortage of personnel. According to an internal report on the number of police personnel that I received from the BPP Bangkok Headquarters in July 2013, whereas the Royal Thai Police authorized the employment of 36,946 men, as of January 2012, the BPP had only 21,450 men, or just 68 ­percent of the required manpower.67 The shortage of personnel was also a recurring issue when I asked about the current prob­lems to the BPP officers and teachers during my field research in Thailand between 2009–2011. As a deputy commander complained in 2010, many BPP members wanted to move to other police units if they could. It was predictable that the personnel deficiency prob­lem would persist for the BPP.68 The lack of professionalism and personnel in the BPP now raises the question of the fate of its civic action programs. When I asked Manas w ­ hether the BPP should continue them, he answered, “yes,” b ­ ecause the civic action program is the most distinctive characteristic of the BPP. Manas’ answer reflects the general opinion of the BPP civic action officers and teachers. Most of the members of the BPP whom I interviewed agreed that civic action was the key ele­ment that distinguishes the BPP from other police units and drew mass support for the BPP in the border areas. In fact, the BPP does not have to keep ­every civic action program they have now, especially with the social, po­liti­cal, and economic conditions changing fast. For instance, the BPP school proj­ect may need to be continued, but its efficiency remains in question, as t­ here are fewer BPP members who want to work for it. Another representative civic action program of the BPP is the Village Scouts. Manas said that the Village Scouts is the most significant proj­ect for garnering mass support for the BPP and for defending royal prestige.69 However, the po­liti­cal and social influence of the movement has wound down since the late 1970s, and as a consequence, the number of scouts and training sessions has declined considerably since then (see T ­ able 4.1). The stability and sustainability of the BPP organ­ization became more uncertain when King Bhumibol was succeeded by his son, King Vajiralongkorn. At that time, the BPP has made the choice to stay closer to Princess Sirindhorn b ­ ecause she has been regarded as a less po­liti­cally driven and more ­people-oriented heir. Unlike the current king, Princess Sirindhorn has accumulated massive popularity

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and credibility from the general Thai public through her de­cades of dedication to the royal proj­ects in e­ very corner of Thailand. ­After the 2006 military coup, she especially endeavored to keep her distance from Bangkokian politics and redirected her attention to northern Thailand. Between 2007 and 2009, for instance, Princess Sirindhorn continued making royal visits to the BPP schools. Of her 111 visits in this period, forty-­eight w ­ ere to northern Thailand; t­ hese accounted for 43 ­percent of her royal visits to BPP schools in all four regions.70 She also expanded the BPP study center proj­ects and initiated new royal proj­ects such as building medical stations (khrongkan suksala). In the pro­cess, Princess Sirindhorn developed a close relationship with the Ministries of Education, Public Health, Agriculture and Cooperatives, and Culture, to name a few. In addition, from August 2010 to September 2015, Princess Sirindhorn assumed the role of Special Commander of the Chulachomklao Royal Thai Military Acad­emy.71 In other words, Princess Sirindhorn has built a solid power base that may enable her to continue all her royal proj­ects, which would in turn extend the lifespan of her closest royal agent, the BPP. Nevertheless, Princess Sirindhorn’s popularity and authority do not automatically guarantee the durability of the BPP in the long run. The most salient prob­ lem is that she lacks a successor. ­Under the circumstances, it may become necessary to disassemble the BPP’s missions and incorporate them in other extant governmental organ­izations. For example, the BPP schools can be incorporated into the Office of Non-­Formal and Informal Education ­under the Ministry of Education; the drug suppression and illegal immigrant issues can be dealt with by the Narcotics Suppression and Immigration Police bureaus; and other paramilitary duties can be easily integrated into the vari­ous Thai army organ­izations. The lesson that we can glean from the BPP’s standing in the post–­Cold War era is that its identity as a royal agent has made it vulnerable. In a way, the BPP’s ambiguous identity mirrors the role of the Thai monarchy in the post–­Cold War period. Just as the BPP serves all purposes, the Thai monarchy is now supposed to serve all seasons.72 The late monarch acted like an omnipotent, omnipresent patron of the Thai nation-­state. The exhaustive list of royal proj­ects initiated by the royal f­ amily is the undeniable evidence of King Bhumibol’s multifaceted, multiplied role over the seven and a half de­cades of his reign. Nevertheless, the presumable omnipotent and omnipresent influence of the late king in the pro­cess of making the modern Thai nation-­state was not made pos­si­ ble by the royal ­family alone. ­Here, we encounter the irony of pit thong lang phra (literally, attaching a gold leaf on the back of the Bud­dha image). All the working personnel, agencies, and the p ­ eople of Thailand who have dedicated themselves to

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building the modern Thai nation-­state still remain b ­ ehind the phra (the Bud­dha or the king).73

Do Good by Stealth During my field research in Thailand in 2009–2011, I learned the two Thai phrases pit thong lang phra, which can be translated to “do good by stealth,” and phakchi roi na, win­dow dressing. Almost e­ very BPP member whom I met in the headquarters, camps, border areas, and BPP schools described his or her work as pit thong lang phra. In my understanding, the phrase was used to highlight their hardships in remote areas where modern comfort and con­ve­nience had not been reached, so had the ­people’s attention and appreciation of their sacrifice for developing remote areas. At the same time, I also learned that the demonstration of pit thong lang phra was operated by a system of phakchi roi na. Many BPP teachers hesitated to discuss the negative impacts of the royal proj­ects, perhaps b ­ ecause only the pro­gress and benefits of the royal proj­ects should be presented to the Thai public who are ­eager to see the result, not the pro­cess. The real­ity that the BPP learn immediately a­ fter their arrival in the border areas, however, is the lack of time, energy, and resources required to accomplish development and security. Despite the support of the royal ­family and the government, the BPP is still a small band of police who cannot perform miracles all at once. The many positive outcomes of the royal proj­ects presented to the public have come from an ad hoc phakchi roi na treatment. I learned that the conflict between pit thong lang phra and phakchi roi na reaches a climax when the BPP schools host royal visits (rapsadet). ­Every year, Princess Sirindhorn, accompanied by governmental and private delegates, travels to inspect the real condition of the schools.74 According to several BPP civic action officers in northern Thailand, ­these visits bring “prompt” development and modernization.75 For instance, when I was traveling to the remote border areas, I usually got a ­ride in the BPP’s truck that can travel unpaved roads in the mountains. Looking at me bumping inside the truck, a driver said that Thailand’s development proj­ect is all about “twenty meters of pro­gress” (khuam charoen yisip met). He was referring to short patches of paved road interspersed between long lengths that are unpaved. When I asked why ­these roads are not continuously paved, the driver said that neither the provincial nor the subdistrict administrative organ­izations had enough in the bud­get to cover the entire road, so they took care of it bit by bit, sometimes ten meters, five meters, or twenty meters depending on their bud­get. Then, I asked if Princess Sirindhorn had also traveled this

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same road to the BPP schools. The driver answered that that would be the only way to solve this never-­ending road-­building prob­lem, but that she usually travels to the BPP schools by he­li­cop­ter. Another BPP officer added, “If the princess traveled by land, this road would be completely paved within a month, and then in the following month, it would start cracking.”76 One eve­ning, in my conversations over dinner with a regional commander in northern Thailand, I asked how the BPP prepared for the princess’s visits to the BPP schools. The commander said that the preparation pro­cess starts three months before the rapsadet. Since the princess does not inform the BPP about which school she wants to see, regional commanders select three or four schools that she has not visited in past years and send BPP engineers to repair the school facilities. Two months before the visit, the commanders order the selected schools to continue cleaning and to plant all the vegetables that the royal proj­ect recommends. They also train students and villa­gers to properly behave in the royal presence. Sometimes, BPP teachers begin teaching royal vocabularies (ratchasap) to selected students so that they can answer the princess’s inquiries properly. Fi­nally, a month before her arrival, when the royal secretary informs the BPP which schools she ­w ill visit, the commander and regional divisions pull the supplies and engineer units from the unchosen schools and concentrate ­t hese resources on the selected schools for the rapsadet.77 The burden now falls to the students and teachers to complete the preparations. One BPP teacher in Chiang Rai province told me that students have to spend at least two months cleaning and preparing for the royal visit. The teacher added, “­Children cannot focus on studying for about two months before the princess’s visit. That is the busiest time for both the BPP school teachers and students.”78 At the end of December 2010, I fi­nally had a chance to observe the rapsadet pro­cess in two BPP schools in Tak province, which I had visited e­ arlier that year. Not surprisingly, when I returned a day before Princess Sirindhorn’s scheduled visit, I saw that all the classrooms w ­ ere cleaned, and their win­dows and doors w ­ ere fixed and decorated with colorful ribbons and brand-­new posters. The BPP development unit built new toilets in the school compound and repaired all the broken facilities that I had seen three months ago. One of the most impressive scenes was the school farm filled with the green vegetables, which ­were obviously planted just a c­ ouple of days ago. I heard from a BPP member about transporting vegetables to this school to transplant them in the farm. The barren, empty school compound suddenly became a green, flourishing, and vibrant center of development in less than three months.79 I stayed a night in another school. In the morning of the rapsadet, I saw that the purple tents that the medical volunteers and local development workers had

Mission Incomplete  161

set up to provide dental checkups and blood tests w ­ ere crowded with students and villa­gers. The villa­gers, dressed in their ethnic dress, ­were sitting next to the Village Scouts in the tents. Local government officials in uniform w ­ ere busily cleaning the school’s nursing room, the vocational training center, and the like. Guards from the Royal Thai Police and Royal Thai Army w ­ ere busily patrolling the area for a final check, while Explosive Ordinance Disposal Teams ­were inspecting the corners of the school compound. Four female PARU members assigned to be the personal bodyguards of the princess ­were also checking the designated paths for the princess’s inspection. The students and teachers who ­were to give a pre­sen­ta­tion to the princess about the pro­gress of royal proj­ects in the school ­were anxiously memorizing their scripts in the classrooms. This par­tic­u­lar school was designated to serve lunch to the princess. Students from Rajabhat University, a teacher’s college in Tak province, prepared the lunch u ­ nder their professors’ direction. To the ­people who ­were preparing the event, her lunch break meant extended hours of reception and pre­sen­ta­tion, in contrast to ­those at other schools where the princess’s visit would last less than two hours.80 ­These vignettes show how the pit thong lang phra ideal operates by a phakchi roi na system in the BPP schools and possibly in general in Thai society. Even though BPP teachers and civic action officers are aware of the impossibility of adequately sustaining all the royal proj­ects of the princess, none can be abandoned ­because the BPP’s most essential mission now is spreading royal initiatives to the ­people. In my own experience of meeting and interviewing over one hundred BPP teachers, I found that a majority of them have the pit thong lang phra ideal, but their energies ­were drained by the phakchi roi na system, which is not for the border p ­ eople per se but for the Bangkok p ­ eople or the Thais who want to see why the monarchy’s benevolence has been a “­factor of pro­gress” for the Thai nation. They then make private donations to support the proj­ects.81 In this sense, it is not surprising that the BPP schools have failed to accommodate the rapidly changing socioeconomic conditions and the diversified needs of the students and villa­gers and that the quality of education has suffered accordingly.82 As a consequence, a considerable number of BPP teachers and civic action officers said that the sooner the BPP transfers its schools to the Ministry of Education, the better for students and teachers.83 In fact, the number of BPP schools and students began to decline in 2008, when the government announced a ­Free Education for Fifteen Years and not a small number of BPP students transferred to the regular elementary schools.84 The decrease especially ­after 2008 indicates that if the parents can afford some extra costs, they would prefer to send their ­children to a regular elementary school rather than the cost-­free BPP school in their ­v illages. If the BPP schools continue to operate to showcase the monarchical

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benevolence, particularly by insisting on having all the royal proj­ects continue and by constantly delaying the enhancement of the educational quality for both teachers and students, the BPP’s civic action proj­ect w ­ ill remain more of a symbol of phakchi roi na, not the system of pit thong lang phra. The most notable aspect of the BPP is its integration of military, police, and civilian functions, which served the mandates of Thailand’s Cold War: the strug­ gle against anticommunism, the need to protect the border, and the effort to instill royalist nationalism. “Anticommunism” signifies its origin, as the unit was conceived as an indigenous paramilitary force to defend Thailand from the communist movement in the beginning of the Cold War. The border marks where Thainess must be set against otherness, and defending the borders of Thailand and Thainess is the BPP’s central mission. Fi­nally, the objective of instilling “royalist nationalism” speaks to the ideological underpinning of the BPP’s anticommunist modernization and counterinsurgency programs. A ­ fter all, the BPP’s missions of assimilating and modernizing the border population intended to build a ­human border constituted by the ­people who gave their loyalty to the three pillars of the Thai nation, particularly the monarchy. Therefore, the border that the BPP protects is not only the state boundary but also the border of Thainess constructed ­under phrabarami, royal charisma. Up to the pre­sent, the BPP has been the missionary of royalist nationalism in military, police, and civilian clothes. This chapter has examined the end of the Thai counterinsurgency era, the transformation of the monarchy, and the post–­Cold War missions of the Border Patrol Police. King Bhumibol’s transformation from a traditional royal patron to a modern nation-­builder through the undertakings of royal proj­ects and royal visits during the Cold War left two distinctive legacies in Thai society: Thai-­style democracy and royalist nationalism. Th ­ ese legacies of Thailand’s Cold War nation-­ building show how successfully the monarchy indigenized the American Cold War. Thai-­style democracy with the king as a head of state has exerted a tremendous influence over Thai society to the pre­sent day. Likewise, the BPP is still active t­ oday, a­ fter it shifted its loyalties from its American patrons to the Thai monarchy. However, their position as a righthand force of the monarchy has become the very threat to their continuation in the near f­ uture. The BPP also encounters numerous prob­lems related to its own ambiguous identity constructed during the Cold War. Like the Thai nation-­state has been constructed u ­ nder the umbrella of phrabarami, which enabled the prevalence of royalist nationalism ­today, the BPP has to go on with the missions they have carried out as the missionary of the royalist nationalism during the Cold War.

Conclusion Whose War Was Cold?

This research proj­ect began with a question: Why did the Border Patrol Police kill civilians in Bangkok? What kind of border ­were they patrolling in Bangkok? Royalist nation-­building during the Thai counterinsurgency era constructed a psychological border of Thainess set against the supposed ­enemy of the Thai nation at the physical boundary of Thailand. The BPP was defending this border of Thainess at Thammasat University on October  6, 1976. In this regard, the history of the BPP’s transformation illuminates the interactive developments of the global Cold War system and local nation-­building proj­ects. The Thai ruling elite indigenized American anticommunist modernization theories and counterinsurgency strategies to undertake their nation-­building proj­ects. The nature of elite-­centered nation-­building was hierarchical assimilation of vari­ous power relations, which essentially continued othering and intolerance against the obscure ­enemy of the nation-­state defined by the governing elite. The widening gap between the borders of Thailand and Thainess brought the BPP to Bangkok in 1976. The conceptual framework of indigenization helps us see the context, conduct, and consequence of the collaboration between the American and Thai ruling elites. The formation of the BPP was a US contingency plan in its anticommunist campaigns in Southeast Asia, but the organ­ization became a symbolic missionary of Thai royalist nationalism by assisting this monarchy’s nation-­building. The BPP was thus able to save itself from disbandment even when its found­ers left Thailand. In this sense, the most salient evidence of the monarchy’s successful indigenization is the continuation of this Cold War contingency force well into the post–­Cold War era. ­There are two significant legacies of the indigenized Cold War politics in con­temporary Thai society. One is the persisting myth of national unity and pro­g ress, and the other is the royalist pursuit of the paternalistic ruling elites and the promotion of compromised democracy l­imited to serve the local ruling elites.

163

164  Conclusion

The Myth of National Unity and Pro­gress The popularly used term “nation-­state” has two innate limitations. First, it presumes the conflation between one nation and one state. The postcolonial real­ity that former colonies faced, however, was the emergence of transcultural socie­ties consisting of numerous interest groups that represented vari­ous ethnic, cultural, spatial, and socioeconomic demands. The nation-­building effort led by local elites or ruling ethnic groups was intended to place ­t hese multifarious groups ­under one state’s rule. The second limitation lies in the presumed homogeneity of the nation and state. The diverse demands from vari­ous interest groups should abide by one goal—­t heir unification within the physical state boundary. Just as the anticolonial movement emphasized national solidarity to achieve full in­de­pen­dence, national unity in the postcolonial period has been set up as a prerequisite to accomplishing national pro­gress regardless of global superpowers’ economic or po­ liti­cal intrusion. The new sovereign in­de­pen­dent nation-­state, however, did not bring about full autonomy and liberation for ­every walk of life. The ruling elites of the newly formed nation-­states ­after World War II indigenized the global Cold War system to circumscribe diversifying demands from vari­ous interest groups unleashed by decolonization and to convert them into a subject of the new state. The United States assisted its Asian allies’ nation-­building with anticommunist modernization theories and counterinsurgency strategies alongside lucrative foreign aid. Modernization theory provided an ideology that advocated a singular, vertical path of pro­gress, thereby simplifying “the complicated world-­historical prob­lems of decolonization and industrialization.”1 It paved the way for the United States to intervene eco­nom­ically and militarily in the newly emerged nation-­states. Counterinsurgency strategy emphasized development for security as a generic solution for stabilizing a society beleaguered by pressures for change from below. ­These two Cold War ideologies legitimized the local elite’s nation-­building agendas to achieve the hierarchical assimilation of the ­people while destroying or marginalizing the ­others. The preexisting nations and ethnic groups that ­were not able to assume power in the postcolonial states w ­ ere thus categorized as potential insurgents. Anticommunist nation-­building in the postcolonial era used the “othering” pro­cess to strengthen national unity and pro­gress. Th ­ ose “­others” of a nation-­state have functioned as the nation’s ­enemy and helped ruling regimes unite their populace u ­ nder the development for security scheme, which sustained the developmental dictators for de­cades. In Thailand, the assimilation of the ethnic minorities into the Thai nation through the BPP’s civic actions and the monarchy’s royal proj­ects was a part of this othering pro­cess. From the beginning, the ethnic

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minorities ­were treated as chao pa chao khao, as simpleminded jungle dwellers and mountain p ­ eople who lacked a sense of belonging to an established state, or as outcasts who practiced shamanism or believed in ghosts—­a perfect counterpart to Thainess (khwam pen thai). Likewise, Thai communists and the democ­ratization activists who were said to be against the Thai nation, Buddhism, and the monarchy w ­ ere treated as a major threat to Thai national unity and pro­gress. Nevertheless, the national unity and pro­gress propagated by the Cold War indigenizers became a source of tension and conflict ­because of its inherently hierarchical, divisive, and suppressive nature. In Thailand, where the presence of the monarchy has been celebrated for its supposed role in promoting national unity and pro­gress, the institution itself became the source of conflicts, especially since 2006, ­after the Royal Thai Army staged a coup against the elected prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. The soaring number of lèse-majesté charges and strict censorship of both the media and academia a­ fter the coup have revealed how divisive royalist nationalism is. Sustaining the monarchy means the continuation of the traditional, paternalistic, hierarchical system with the royal f­ amily at its apex of this order, and this arrangement has become the single most effective barrier to national unity.

Quest for the F ­ ather of the Nation ­ ere are two main mechanisms that have sustained paternalistic elites’ dominaTh tion in the post–­Cold War period. The first is the creation of legend, similar to what Eric Hobsbawm calls an “in­ven­ted tradition,” by the ruling elites to sustain popu­lar support for them.2 In the beginning of the Cold War, the long-­held belief that Siam was never colonized by the western empires facilitated the fashioning of the Thai monarchy as a savior of the nation, similar to the roles played by anticolonial nationalists such as Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam or Jose Rizal in the Philippines.3 During the Cold War, King Bhumibol was projected as “the most valuable socio-­political pillar on which rests the nation’s identity, strength and well-­being” in the course of his conscientious transformation into a f­ ather of rural development and Thai-­style democracy.4 From the early 1980s, the royalist elite ­under Prem Tinsulanonda’s regime demanded the Thai ­people’s unquestioned loyalty to “democracy with the monarchy as the head of the state,” and numerous nongovernmental, civilian organ­izations have acted as a popu­lar force for safeguarding the monarchy, as did the Village Scouts in the 1970s. The growing popu­lar movement for the defense of the Thai monarchy was another form of “in­ven­ted tradition” that has fostered “the corporate sense of superiority of élites” well into the post–­Cold War period.5

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The second mechanism for the paternalistic elites’ domination is the growth of the royalist elite network, which has become a “para-­political institution” for sustaining a “form of semi-­monarchical rule.”6 King Bhumibol began accumulating his power base since Sarit’s regime. A ­ fter Sarit passed away, the king took over the role that Sarit had played as the (despotic) f­ather of the nation and the leader of national development (phathana). The monarchy’s indigenization of the American Cold War essentially endowed King Bhumibol with authority and legitimacy as well as a consolidating royalist elite network, all of which assisted the monarchy’s nation-­building proj­ects. The symbiotic relationship between the monarchy and royalist elite network was further tightened, reaching its climax with Prem’s presidency in the Privy Council in the late 1990s. Making King Bhumibol the symbol of national unity and pro­gress has elevated the paternalistic image of the king. In addition, to promote him as a demo­ cratic king, the definition of democracy was adjusted, as the phrase “Thai-­style democracy” shows. The king’s role as a head of state above politics also meant that he had inborn moral authority and was the “supreme mediator” when the country faced a crisis that po­liti­cal and other institutions w ­ ere unable to resolve. In real­ity, the monarchy was “simply underwriting a series of inept governments” and sustaining the monarchy’s desire to preserve “a partly dysfunctional po­liti­cal order” that demands intervention by the monarchy.7 In this re­spect, Thai-­style democracy is at best a “semi-­democracy,” which denies a leadership role for the politicians elected by the ­people.8

Indigenization Can Happen Anywhere The indigenization of the global Cold War system by Asian ruling elites has far more durable impacts on the dynamics of change and stabilization in con­ temporary society. A fatherly figure has been projected as the ideal leader for undertaking modernization and democ­ratization in the local style. Miraculous tales of modernization during the Cold War have been associated with personified regimes in several Asian countries. The elite network that had solidified and expanded u ­ nder local strongmen continued to reproduce legends about the ­father of national development, to the extent that p ­ eople came to believe that without ­these ­fathers, the country would not have been modernized at the pace that it was. Not only Thailand but other Asian countries witnessed the overgrown nostalgia for the ­father of the nation in the post–­Cold War era. South ­Korea saw the last military dictators in the 1980s ­after the massive democ­ratization rallies by the students and urban middle-­class in June 1987. Although the successor of the last military dictator was also military, he was pressured to lift the ban against

Indigenizing  167

politicians’ and civilians’ po­liti­cal freedom, which eventually led to the election of a civilian president in 1993. In 1998, Kim Dae Jung, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient who had been almost killed by the dictator Park in 1973 and sentenced to death by the succeeding military dictator in 1980, was elected to be the fifteenth president of the Republic of ­Korea. However, the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997 that had begun in Thailand hit South ­Korea very badly, traumatizing the Korean ­people who witnessed the number of h ­ ouse­holds u ­ nder the poverty line rising to 9 12 ­percent of total ­house­holds. The fear that South K ­ orea was vulnerable to the international crisis essentially resulted in the quest for the return of a ­father of the nation who was believed to be able to save ­Korea from becoming poor again by not a negligible number of Koreans.10 The growing hope, if not illusion, that ­Korea should recover its past when the annual economic growth rate achieved two-­digit numbers eventually allowed the eldest d ­ aughter of dictator Park to be elected as the seventeenth president in 2012.11 ­After Ferdinand Marcos fled into exile amid the P ­ eople Power revolution in the Philippines in 1986, President Corazon (Cory) Aquino was threatened by four major coup attempts during her presidency and eventually saw Marcos’ cousin General Fidel V. Ramos elected to president in May 1992. Perhaps from the time when a half million p ­ eople gathered in Epifanio de los Santos (EDSA) Ave­nue in 1986, the protesters might have sensed that the old soldiers would never die. Philippine democracy since then has strug­gled to establish peaceful electoral transitions, while addressing the issues such as poverty and in­equality, which resulted in a series of uprisings named EDSA II and EDSA III. In the meantime, the wife and two c­ hildren of dictator Marcos returned to the Philippines and gained enough votes from their hometown Ilocos Norte to serve in the congress. Even before the injuries from the two-­decade dictatorship healed, the Marcos era was refashioned as the “golden age” in which Filipinos “had peace and order and corruption was minimal.” The resurgence of the Marcos myth or historical revisionism initiated by the Marcos ­family and their supporters admonishes the p ­ eople to move on from a past filled with torture, corruption, and murder, which ­were the hallmarks of Marcos’ Bagong Lipunan. Not surprisingly, no one makes an apology for what happened during the “golden age.”12 The Cold War generation had been constantly strained by governmental propaganda and l­ egal enforcements such as lèse-majesté law in Thailand and the National Security Act in South K ­ orea. No open criticism of ­people in high places has been allowed, and thus, ­t hese national leaders and ­fathers have stayed almost irreproachable. The impacts of state propaganda and indoctrination vary from person to person, from society to society, but they are not negligible. Indeed, the undying quest for a charismatic, paternalistic leader as a solution to the economic

168  Conclusion

and po­liti­cal crises in many Asian countries even t­ oday reveals that the postcolonial nation-­building ­under the f­ athers of modernization during the Cold War emanates considerable influence over post–­Cold War politics and socie­ties. ­Those quests for a Thai-­, Korean-­, or Philippine-­style democracy as well as for ­fathers of ­these nations would continue to arise in times of crisis b ­ ecause the Cold War indigenizers and the conventional Cold War studies have thrived on a binary image of the Cold War: The United States and the Soviet Union, ­t hose omnipotent powers that manipulated the local ruling elites to do dirty work on their behalf, are the villains while t­ hose powerless local ruling elites in Asia who allegedly stood on their feet and furthered their nation’s pro­g ress despite external threats and pressures are the heroes. If we move away from this “Cold War lens,” it w ­ ill soon become apparent that the local ruling elites built nations where they could thrive by indigenizing the global Cold War system, oftentimes making themselves the first line of defense against the p ­ eople’s aspiration of building a nation-­state where they no longer would be treated as a subject of colonialism, royalism, racism, and even nationalism.

 Postscript The Border Patrol Police in Bangkok Again, 2020

On October 16, 2020, beneath the Bangkok Mass Transit System sky-­train station at Pathumwan Intersection, Border Patrol Police forces with their shields stood before the South Korean–­made ­water cannon vehicles deployed to remove protesters.1 Protesters appealed for the chance to retreat peacefully, but the vehicles soon sprayed blue-­tinted, chemical-­laced ­water on them. This was the third occasion when the BPP operated against civilian protesters in central Bangkok: the first was on October 6, 1976, in Thammasat University; and the second was during the Red Shirt demonstrations in April–­May 2010 in the Ratprasong-­Siam Square area. This third time, antigovernment protesters had gathered to demand the redrafting of the constitution, the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-­ o-­cha, and the reform of the monarchy. Only a small number of BPP forces in military fatigues have been deployed to strategic or symbolic locations. As was the case in 2010, in 2020 the BPP appeared in the Rama I Road–­Siam Square area that adjoins Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn’s residence, Sa Pathum Palace. As discussed extensively in this book, the BPP has been Princess Sirindhorn’s righthand force since the early 1980s, and thus symbolically, Siam Square could be considered their area of responsibility. In fact, though, the BPP has never had its own area of operation in Bangkok from its formation in the early 1950s. Only a close look at the arm badges of the police would allow observers to know which police unit came to suppress the protests ­because they all look the same. In the second half of 2020, t­ hose forces from the Metropolitan Police (tamruat nakhonban) deployed to the protest sites wore navy-colored fatigues, ­were fully geared up, and had plastic shields bearing “police” in En­glish letters. The BPP wore khaki fatigues and carried a plastic shield bearing the abbreviation to cho do for tamruat trawen chaidaen, or Border Patrol Police in Thai. Their presence, which called up the traumatic memories of the October 6 Massacre, seemed to be a warning to the protesters of the consequence of standing against the government and monarchy. The BPP was again protecting the border of the royalist

169

170    Postscript

Thai nation in the ­middle of Bangkok against protesters who w ­ ere again calling for the cessation of authoritarian rule. It was a historical déjà vu. At that time in 2020, when global COVID-19 was underway, the princess had suffered injuries that put her in a wheel chair, and so the royal visits to remote areas that she had been wont to take w ­ ere suspended, as w ­ ere the numerous photo­ graphs that documented t­ hese visits.2 Accordingly, the BPP’s appearance in the popu­lar media as the loyal force of the monarchy who shed light on the path to pro­gress for the ­people in the hinterlands of Thailand was reduced. Instead, photos of the BPP b ­ ehind ­water cannons, pushing the protesters with their plastic shields with their abbreviation to cho do, came to the fore. The BPP again inscribed its name and image of fighting the young protesters in the ­middle of Bangkok in 2020. On August 2, 2021, protesters led by Thalu Fah (Through the Sky), a pro-­ democracy activist group mainly consisting of student activists from the protest in 2020, and its leader, Jatuphat Boonpattararaksa, marched through the Police Club and then to the Border Patrol Police Region 1 Headquarters in Pathum Thani to demand the release of their friends, who had been detained in the same place as the Red Shirt leaders ­were in 2010.3 The young Thai generation may not know a lot about the 1976 Massacre or the traumatic experiences that their parents’ generation went through during the Cold War. But they clearly know that the BPP is not on the side of the ­people who desire changes in Thailand. The BPP again fails to win the hearts and minds of the Thai ­people, especially the young generation who create alliances across Asia, defying the bound­aries and the politics of fear of the old state.

Notes

Introduction 1. ​Anderson, “Indonesian Nationalism ­Today and in the F ­ uture,” 7. 2. ​Anthony D. Smith, “Nationalism and the Historians,” in Smith, Ethnicity and Nationalism, 76n20. Some scholars use the term “nation-­state building”; see, for example, Tuong Vu, “Cold War Studies and the Cultural Cold War in Asia,” in Vu and Wongsurawat, Dynamics of the Cold War in Asia, 8–9. 3. ​Emmerson, “The Bureaucracy in Po­liti­cal Context.” 4. ​G oscha and Ostermann, Connecting Histories; Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and Amer­i­ca. 5. ​Smith, Nationalism; Gellner, Nations and Nationalism; Smith, Ethnicity and Nationalism; Connor, Ethnonationalism; Balakrishnan, Mapping the Nation; Anderson, ­Imagined Communities; Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments. 6. ​Thongchai, Siam Mapped, 15–16. 7. ​Robinson, ­Korea’s Twentieth-­Century Odyssey, 100–120. 8. ​Haberkorn, “Dictatorship, Monarchy, and Freedom of Expression in Thailand.” 9. ​Nichole, “United States Aid to South and Southeast Asia.” 10. ​“At the White House,” Time, July 11, 1960, repr. Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand (FCCT), The King of Thailand in World Focus, 62. 11. ​Storch, “The Policeman as Domestic Missionary.” 12. ​This is a summary of vari­ous views of Cold War studies in Westad, Reviewing the Cold War, especially the chapters by Odd Arne Westad, “Introduction: Reviewing the Cold War”; John Lewis Gaddis, “On Starting All Over Again: A Naïve Approach to the Study of the Cold War”; Melvyn P. Leffler, “Bringing It Together: The Parts and the Whole”; Geir Lundestad, “How (Not) to Study the Origins of the Cold War”; and Anders Stephanson, “Liberty or Death: The Cold War as US Ideology.” See also Gaddis, We Now Know; Goscha and Ostermann, Connecting Histories, 1–12. 13. ​Lundestad, “How (Not) to Study the Origins of the Cold War,” 64–65. 14. ​Gaddis, We Now Know, 286. 15. ​Latham, Modernization as Ideology, 6–9. 16. ​McClintock, “The Angel of Pro­gress,” 86. Emphasis in original. 17. ​Connelly, “Taking Off the Cold War Lens,” 742. 18. ​Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and Amer­i­ca, 8. 19. ​Connelly, “Taking off the Cold War Lens,” 740–741, 767; Connelly, “Rethinking the Cold War and Decolonization,” 222. 20. ​Goscha and Ostermann, Connecting Histories, 7–8.

171

172   Notes to Pages 7–13 21. ​Stephanson, “Liberty or Death,” 87. 22. ​Gaddis, “On Starting All Over Again,” 31. 23. ​In “Writing at the Interstices,” Thongchai defines “home scholars, or scholars (historians) of the home, . . . ​[as] ­t hose who study the country, region, or location that they consider their home, and whose works are read, debated, and become, in a sustained manner, part of the scholarly discourse and cultural politics of their home society” (6). Emphasis in original. 24. ​Logevall, Choosing War; Miller, Misalliance; Ruth, In Bud­dha’s Com­pany. 25. ​Nguyen, Hanoi’s War, 4. 26. ​Lee, Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom; Vang, Hmong Amer­i­ca; Quincy, Hmong; Chan, Hmong Means ­Free. 27. ​Kwon, The Other Cold War, 7. 28. ​Vu, “Cold War Studies and the Cultural Cold War in Asia,” 3. 29. ​Robinson, “Non-­European Foundations of Eu­ro­pean Imperialism.” See also Connelly, “Rethinking the Cold War and Decolonization”; McMahon, “Eisenhower and Third World Nationalism”; Painter, “Research Note”: Merle C. Ricklefs, “The Cold War in Hindsight: Local Realities and the Limits of Global Power,” in Murfett, Cold War Southeast Asia, 322–343. 30. ​Smail, “On the Possibility of an Autonomous History of Modern Southeast Asia,” 98. 31. ​Klein, Cold War Orientalism; Day and Liem, Cultures at War; Phillips, Thailand in the Cold War; Masuda, Cold War Crucible. 32. ​Kwon, The Other Cold War, 6–9; Vu, “Cold War Studies and the Cultural Cold War in Asia,” 1–13; H-­Diplo, “H-­Diplo Roundtable XX-39 on Southeast Asia’s Cold War: An Interpretive History,” H-­Diplo, May  20, 2019, https://­networks​.­h​-­net​.­org ​/­node​/­28443​/­d iscussions​ /­4084118​/­h​-­diplo​-­roundtable​-­x x​-­39​-­southeast​-­asia%E2%80%99s​-­cold​-­war​-­interpretive. 33. ​Ang, Southeast Asia’s Cold War, 4. 34. ​Ang, Southeast Asia’s Cold War, 3–6. 35. ​Thongchai, “Asian Studies across Academies,” 888–889. 36. ​Herzfeld, “The Absent Presence”; Thongchai, “The Quest for ‘Siwilai’ ”; Hong, “Invisible Semicolony”; Jackson, “The Performative State”; Harrison and Jackson, The Ambiguous Allure of the West. 37. ​Herzfeld, “The Absent Presence,” 901, 919–921. 38. ​Philip, “The New Police.” 39. ​Storch, “The Policeman as Domestic Missionary.” 40. ​Rostow, “Development,” 240. Emphases are mine. 41. ​Hutchison, Errand to the World, 62–90. 42. ​Bosch, Transforming Mission, 294–295, 450. 43. ​Costa, “Introduction,” xii. 4 4. ​Hutchison, Errand to the World, 15–42, 77–78; Conroy-­K rutz, Christian Imperialism, 205–213. 45. ​Costa, “Introduction,” xiii. 46. ​Kwon, The Other Cold War, 6–7. 47. ​See Lundestad, “How (Not) to Study,” 75; Leffler, “Bringing It Together,” 53. 4 8. ​For the Thai-­style democracy, see Connors, Democracy and National Identity in Thailand. 49. ​Norman Peagam, “Probing the ‘Red Drum’ Atrocities,” Far Eastern Economic Review, March 14, 1975, 22.

Notes to Pages 14–21   173 50. ​Haberkorn, In Plain Sight, 81. 51. ​Thomas Fuller and Seth Mydans, “Thai General Linked to Protests Is Shot in Head during Interview,” New York Times, May 13, 2010, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2010​/­05​/­14​/­world​/­asia​ /­14thai​.­html. 52. ​Locard, Pol Pot’s L ­ ittle Red Book, 178. See also Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia ­under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79. 53. ​Anderson, Vio­lence and the State in Suharto’s Indonesia. 54. ​De Dios et al., Dictatorship and Revolution.

Chapter 1.  From CIA Brainchild to Civic Action Agent, 1947–1962 1. ​Thak, Thai Politics, 236–237. 2. ​Thak, Thailand, 20. 3. ​Kobkua, “Thai War­time Leadership Reconsidered,” 174–175. 4. ​Murashima, “Commemorative Character of Thai Historiography”; Strate, Lost Territories, 94–122; Thak, Thailand, 26–27. 5. ​Fineman, Special Relationship, 69, 75; Thak, Thailand, 35–42. 6. ​Jeffreys-­Jones, “Why Was the CIA Established in 1947?,” 21. For the backgrounds of the National Security Act of 1947 and the CIG, see US Senate, Foreign and Military Intelligence, 21–22, 99–101, 483–490 (hereafter, Foreign and Military Intelligence 1976). 7. ​ Foreign and Military Intelligence 1976, 98, 101–102. 8. ​US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1947, 712–761 (here­ after FRUS 1947); Foreign and Military Intelligence 1976, 103, 426–427, 476–481. 9. ​Rotter, The Path to Vietnam, 109–113. 10. ​The Policy Planning Staff (PPS) Paper 51, “United States Policy ­toward Southeast Asia,” in United States Department of State. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1949, 1128 (hereafter, FRUS 1949). 11. ​FRUS 1949, 1220; Rotter, Path to Vietnam, 116. 12. ​Rotter, Path to Vietnam, 30; McMahon, The Limits of Empire, 42. 13. ​Fineman, Special Relationship, 106–107. 14. ​“Thailand to Act on Reds,” New York Times, February 2, 1950, 7. 15. ​Quoted in Caldwell, American Economic Aid to Thailand, 39. Emphasis is mine. 16. ​Fineman, Special Relationship, 115. 17. ​“11,000 Volunteers in Thailand,” New York Times, August 13, 1950, 3. 18. ​“Thai Force Getting Ready,” New York Times, September 29, 1950, 3. 19. ​“Thailand Plans to Send Troops to ­Korea; Material and Food Aid also Is Proposed,” New York Times, July 21, 1950, 4. 20. ​Thak, Thai Politics, 814–815. 21. ​Tillman Durdin, “U.S. Arms to Equip Thai Border Force,” New York Times, November 30, 1950, 20. 22. ​Tillman Durdin, “Thai Aid Proj­ects Put at $35,000,000,” New York Times, December 11, 1950, 6. 23. ​Kasian, Commodifying Marxism, 159. 24. ​Baker and Phongpaichit, A History of Thailand, 145. 25. ​C. L. Sulzberger, “Coup in Thailand Prepared by Reds,” New York Times, May 8, 1950, 7. 26. ​Thak, Thailand, 69.

174   Notes to Pages 22–28 27. ​Suthachai, Saithan prawatsat prachathipatai thai, 77; Baker and Phongpaichit, A History of Thailand, 145; Kasian, Commodifying Marxism, 299. 28. ​Thak, Thai Politics, 675. Emphasis is mine. 29. ​“Premier Pibul Ousted in Thailand, Only to Head Successor Regime,” New York Times, November 30, 1951, 4. 30. ​Foreign and Military Intelligence 1976, 109. See also Statler and Johns, The Eisenhower Administration. 31. ​Foreign and Military Intelligence 1976, 111. 32. ​Barnes, “The Secret Cold War,” 657; Fineman, Special Relationship, 170–171. 33. ​From the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) paper titled “U.S. Psychological Strategy with Re­spect to the Thai ­Peoples of Southeast Asia,” 5 (hereafter, PSB-­D23). 34. ​Fineman, Special Relationship, 181. 35. ​Email communication with Gordon Young, November 21, 2011. 36. ​“NSC 48/2 The Position of the United States with Re­spect to Asia,” FRUS 1949, 1215–1216. 37. ​McMahon, The Limits of Empire, 67; “Memorandum of Conversation between Secretary of State John F. Dulles, Arthur W. Radford, Commander-­in-­chief, and ­others on May 9, 1954,” in US Department of States, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, 465 (hereafter FRUS 1952–1954). 38. ​Ockey, “Civil Society and Street Politics,” 122. 39. ​“Thai police chief asks democracy; Offers 7-­Year Plan to Give Local Governments More Control Over Affairs,” New York Times, April 24, 1955, 7. 40. ​Ockey, “Civil Society and Street Politics,” 108. 41. ​Thak, Thailand, 71. 42. ​“Pibul Tightens Grip on Thailand,” New York Times, August 7, 1955, 11. 43. ​“Thai Police Chief Curbed,” New York Times, August 26, 1955, 3. 4 4. ​“Premier to Snub Thai Police Chief,” New York Times, September 4, 1955, 5. 45. ​“Pibul Depriving Ministers of Authority as Thailand Acts to Abolish Monopolies,” New York Times, August 11, 1955, 3. 46. ​Bernard Kalb, “Emergency Rule Imposed in Thailand; Tank Patrols Par Post-­Election Strife,” New York Times, March 2, 1957, 3. 47. ​“Thai Police Alerted for Session Opening,” New York Times, March 14, 1957, 9. 48. ​Ockey, “Civil Society and Street Politics,” 107–108. 49. ​“Premier Suspects Plot in Thailand,” New York Times, August 23, 1957, 2. 50. ​A copy of this order is from Soem, “Rueang tamruat trawen chaidaen,” 6–7. 51. ​Soem, “Rueang tamruat trawen chaidaen,” 6. 52. ​Sisuk, “Tosono kap tochodo,” 135. 53. ​Sisuk, “Tosono kap tochodo,” 136, 139, 141–142. 54. ​Yuth, The Development of Thailand’s Territorial Defense, 1. 55. ​Stanton, “Spotlight on Thailand,” 83. 56. ​Montgomery, The Politics of Foreign Aid, 276. 57. ​Lim, Siam’s New Detectives, 115–119, 123–126, 135–136. 58. ​Fineman, Special Relationship, 134. 59. ​Henry R. Lieberman, “Thai Police Force Bigger Than Army,” New York Times, July 23, 1951, 2. 60. ​Smith, OSS, 273fn.

Notes to Pages 28–31   175 61. ​Nakhon, Kamnoet phonrom thai, 4–8; Siddhi, “Tamruat trawen chaidaen nai khuam songcham khong khapchao,” in Kong banchakan tamruat trawen chaidaen thiraluek nai kanpoet akhan bocho tochodo, 7 phruetsaphakhom 2518, 123 (hereafter, Kong banchakan 1975). Siddhi Savetsila ­later served as the minister of foreign affairs between 1980 and 1990. 62. ​Nakhon, Kamnoet phonrom thai, 2–3; Smith, OSS, 273. 63. ​BPP Headquarters, Sisippi tochodo, 6 phruetsaphakhom 2536, 29 (hereafter, Sisippi tochodo); Fineman, Special Relationship, 133. 6 4. ​BPP Headquarters, Tai rom phrabarami hasippi tochodo, 1-8 (hereafter, Tai rom phrabarami). 65. ​Sisippi tochodo, 29; Manas, Prawat kongbanchakan tamruat trawen chaidaen, 18 phruetsachikayon 2537, 2 (hereafter, Prawat kongbanchakan); Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Bilateral Treaties and Agreements, 225–226. 66. ​La-­iad, “Po­liti­cal Memoirs,” 212. 67. ​La-­iad, “Po­liti­cal Memoirs,” 212–213. 68. ​Surachart, United States Foreign Policy and Thai Military Rule, 58. 69. ​Lobe, United States National Security Policy and Aid to the Thailand Police, 20. 70. ​Phibun’s wife, La-­iad, specifically named “Sea Supplies” as representative of US government efforts. La-­iad, “Po­liti­cal Memoirs,” 212. 71. ​Kong banchakan 1975, 103. 72. ​Chang, “Beyond the Military.” 73. ​American University, Casebook on Insurgency and Revolutionary Warfare, 78. 74. ​Interview with Manas Khantatatbumroong, April 9, 2010. 75. ​Tai rom phrabarami, 185. 76. ​Manas, Prawat kongbanchakan, 5; Sisippi tochodo, 33; BPP Headquarters, Anuson phon tamruat ek suraphon chulaphram, 81. 77. ​Police Aerial Reinforcement Unit Subdivision, Prawat khai naresuan, 5–6 (hereafter, Prawat khai naresuan). 78. ​Tai rom phrabarami, 3. 79. ​Suraphon, “Tochodo nai yisip et pi thi phan ma,” 81; Fineman, Special Relationship, 134. Interview with Manas Khantatatbumroong, February 1, 2010. The New York Times reported on September 20, 1957, that the “Sea Supplies Corporation is a private United States enterprise with headquarters in Miami. It has a contract with Thailand to train and equip Thai police,” quoted in Tillman Durdin, “Thai Police Shorn of Military Units,” New York Times, September 20, 1957, 7). 80. ​Suraphon, “Langchak kan chattang tamruat raksa chaidaen lae kong asa raksa dinden,” 81. 81. ​Sisippi tochodo, 67. 82. ​Conboy, Shadow War, 57. To PARU members, Bill Lair was introduced as the Police Col­o­nel James William Lair. See Prawat khai naresuan, 7; Kong banchakan 1975, 105. 83. ​In the BPP’s and PARU’s accounts, t­ here is confusion around the name of Jeffrey Cheek, often confused with Jefferson, as he was called “Jeff” all the time. Bill Lair confirmed to me that it was Jeffrey Cheek. Nakhon, Kamnoet phonrom thai, 8.; Interview with Bill Lair, February 14, 2013. 84. ​Prawat khai naresuan, 5–6. 85. ​Lobe, “U.S. Police Assistance for the Third World,” 155. 86. ​According to Suraphon, the fourth-term trainees ­were comprised of one hundred men from the police, fifty from the army, and another fifty from the air force. Suraphon, “Tochodo nai yisip et pi,” 80.

176   Notes to Pages 31–37 87. ​Kong banchakan 1975, 105. 88. ​Prawat khai naresuan, 6–7; Sisippi tochodo, 66–67. 89. ​ Prawat khai naresuan, 9; Tai rom phrabarami, 75–77; Sisippi tochodo, 69. 90. ​Quoted in Shafer, Deadly Paradigms, 86. 91. ​ PSB-­D23, 5. 92. ​Fineman, Special Relationship, 173. 93. ​Suraphon, “Tochodo nai yisip et pi,” 76. 94. ​Tai rom phrabarami, 11. 95. ​Suraphon, “Langchak kan chattang,” 82. 96. ​By 1954, the TDP had grown to fourty-eight platoons and BDP to fourty-four platoons. See Soem, Rueang tamruat trawen chaidaen, 13. 97. ​ Kong banchakan 1975, 106. 98. ​The BPP was also known as the Gendarme Police Force among the foreign advisers in the early years, but starting in 1958, its leaders de­cided to call the force the Border Patrol Police. Interview with Manas Khantatatbumroong, February 21, 2011. The 1956 bilingual report is BPP Headquarters, Kan songkhro chaopa chaokhao lae prachachon klai khamanakhom/Aid Given to Hill Tribe ­People and ­People far from Communication (hereafter, Aid Given to Hill Tribe ­People). 99. ​Suraphon, “Langchak kan chattang,” 82. 100. ​Kong banchakan 1975, 106, 109. 101. ​For this ­earlier civic action of the BPP, see Manas, Khrongkan phathana phuea khuammankhong; Aid Given to Hill Tribe ­People. 102. ​Volunteer Defense Corps Office, Warasan asa raksa dinden chabap phiset, 25 (here­ after, Warasan asa raksa dinden). 103. ​Yuth, The Development of Thailand’s Territorial Defense, 14. 104. ​Suraphon, “Tochodo nai yisip et pi,” 82; Warasan asa raksa dinden, 25–33. 105. ​Pranet et al., “Prawat kan fuek dot rom khong krom tamruat,” 154. 106. ​Suraphon, “Tochodo nai yisip et pi,” 82, 85. 107. ​Yuth, The Development of Thailand’s Territorial Defense, 24. 108. ​Suraphon, “Tochodo nai yisip et pi,” 90–91. 109. ​Fineman, Special Relationship, 181. 110. ​Nakhon, Kamnoet phonrom thai, 2. 111. ​Sisippi tochodo, 37–38. 112. ​Sisippi tochodo, 80; Suraphon, “Tochodo nai yisip et pi,” 81–82. 113. ​Handley, The King Never Smiles, 124, 163. 114. ​Manas, “Bantuek khuam songcham phra maha karuna thikhun lon klao lon kra moem ke tamruat trawen chaidaen lae luksuea chaoban,” 2. 115. ​Vasit, In His Majesty’s Footsteps, 20. 116. ​Lobe, United States National Security Policy and Aid, 23; Suraphon, “Tochodo nai yisip et pi,” 91–92. 117. ​Conboy, Shadow War, 58. 118. ​McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 182–184. 119. ​Interview with Manas Khantatatbumroong, April 9, 2010. 120. ​Nakhon, Kamnoet phonrom thai, 6. 121. ​Suea Dam was also a title of a popu­lar crime fiction written by Pricha Intharapalit based on the real-­life stories of Suea Bai, Suea Wat, Suea Mahesuan, and Suea Fai, who w ­ ere

Notes to Pages 37–43   177 active during the Second World War. The novel was l­ ater adapted to a feature film in 1951 with the same title. It is unclear if ­t here is a direct connection between the stories of Suea Dam and the Phim Thai’s naming of PARU as Suea Dam. 122. ​Nakhon, Kamnoet phonrom thai, 275–281. 123. ​Chan Angsuchot, “Phuean tamruat trawen chaidaen lae tamruat phonrom thi rak thang lai,” 60. 124. ​Manas, Prawat kongbanchakan, 18. 125. ​Sisippi tochodo, 69. 126. ​Kong banchakan 1975, 110. 127. ​The Thai idiom luk phi luk khon literally translates to “child of ghost, child of man.” Some may translate it as “up in the air.” Cited in Kong banchakan 1975, 113. 128. ​Kong banchakan 1975, 113. 129. ​The ­table of organ­ization is available in Kong banchakan 1975, 111. 130. Soem, Rueang tamruat trawen chaidaen, 39–40. 131. ​The committee consisted of the under-­secretary of interior, the director-­general of the Thai National Police Department; the director-­generals of the Interior, Health, Domestic Trade, Public Welfare, Land, and Forestry Departments; representatives of the Ministries of Education and Agriculture; the secretary-­general of the National Institute of Culture; the commissioner of Gendarme Police Force (Border Patrol Police) General Headquarters; and the chief of the Self-­Settlement Section who served as a secretary of the committee. See: from Aid Given to Hill Tribe ­People. 132. ​Aid Given to Hill Tribe ­People, 4–5. 133. ​Suraphon Chulaphram Cremation Volume, 81. 134. ​BPP Headquarters, Sisippi rongrian tochodo, 50 (hereafter, Sisippi rongrian tochodo). 135. ​Sisippi rongrian tochodo, 81. 136. ​Interview with Gordon Young, March 14, 2012; Young, Journey from Banna, 217–218. ­A fter several years, Sara Chakaw confirmed this attack against the Thai and Japa­nese armed forces in the Shan States in person to Gordon Young. 137. ​Manas, Khrongkan phathana, 1; Layton, “Thailand’s Border Patrol Police,” 26; Nakhon, Kamnoet phonrom thai, 209; Sisippi rongrian tochodo, 433. 138. ​Prawat khai naresuan,15–16. 139. ​Nakhon, Kamnoet phonrom thai, 209–211; Prawat khai naresuan, 16. 140. ​Sisippi rongrian tochodo, 41, 84; Aid Given to Hill Tribe ­People, 9–13. 141. ​Handley, The King Never Smiles, 130–131. 142. ​The number of new schools is the author’s estimate, compiled from the list of schools in Sisippi rongrian tochodo, 448–464; BPP Headquarters, Duai chongrak lae pakdi hasippi rongrian tochodo, 353–357, 364 (hereafter, Duai chongrak lae pakdi). 143. ​Lobe, “U.S. Police Assistance for the Third World,” 200. 144. ​Dr. Sumet Tantivejkul, quoted in “The Working Monarch,” Bangkok Post, June 13, 2006, http://­w ww​.­bangkokpost​.­com​/­60yrsthrone​/­working​/­index​.­html. 145. ​Tillman Durdin, “New Thai Regime Tightening Reins,” New York Times, December 4, 1951, 3. 146. ​“King Bhumibol: Politics Is a Filthy Business,” Far Eastern Economic Review, October 18, 1974; repr. FCCT, The King of Thailand in World Focus, 47. 147. ​Handley, The King Never Smiles, 5.

178   Notes to Pages 43–50 148. ​Nuechterlein, “Thailand: Another Vietnam?” Military Review 47 (June 1967): 60; Hewison, “The Monarchy and Demo­cratisation,” in Hewison, Po­liti­cal Change in Thailand, 62; Darling, Thailand, 36; Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era, 171. 149. ​Hewison, “The Monarchy and Demo­cratisation,” 59–61. 150. ​Reynolds, Thai Radical Discourse, 12. 151. ​For Thai feudalism, known as Sakdina and Saktina, see Chaiyan, The Rise and Fall of the Thai Absolute Monarchy, 41–80, 175. 152. ​Reynolds, Thai Radical Discourse, 9–41. 153. ​Grossman and Faulder, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, 114. 154. ​Gereon Zimmerman, “A Visit with the King and Queen of Thailand,” Look, June 27, 1967 repr. FCCT, The King of Thailand in World Focus, 58. 155. ​Lobe, “U.S. Police Assistance for the Third World,” 157, 460nn31–32. 156. ​Grossman and Faulder, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, 96–97. 157. ​Handley, The King Never Smiles, 127. 158. ​Murray Fromson, “The King and Marshal Sarit,” Associated Press, September 17, 1957; repr. FCCT, The King of Thailand in World Focus, 46. 159. ​Thak, Thailand, 205–206. 160. ​Grossman and Faulder, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, 106. 161. ​Handley, The King Never Smiles, 143. 162. ​Chanida, Khrongkan annueang ma chak phraratchadamri, 64–65. 163. ​Handley, The King Never Smiles, 122. See also Chanida, Khrongkan annueang ma chak ­phraratchadamri, 62–87. 164. ​Chanida, Khrongkan annueang ma chak phraratchadamri, 68. 165. ​Manas, Bantuek khuam songcham, 2. 166. ​Bhubing Palace was also where the royal ­family received several foreign royal and celebrity guests in 1959, including Sukarno from Indonesia. It was officially promoted to the Palace in 1962. See more about the palace’s history in Prayut, Wang chao, 285–288. 167. ​This anecdote is from Charoenrit’s memoir in Sisippi rongrian tochodo, 85. Doi means hill or mountain in Thai. 168. ​Duai chongrak lae pakdi, 111. 169. ​Handley, The King Never Smiles, 124. 170. ​Interview with Gordon Young, March 14, 2012. 171. ​Roger Warner says this occurred when Laos fell to the communists, but in fact, Bill Lair received the medal from the king in 1964 according to the Thai Rath newspaper published on August 27, 1964. Warner, Shooting at the Moon, 373. 172. ​Kobkua, “The Monarchy and Constitutional Change since 1972,” 57. 173. ​“At the White House,” Time, July 11, 1960, repr. FCCT, The King of Thailand in World Focus, 62.

Chapter 2.  Building a ­Human Border, 1962–1980 1. ​Gilman, Mandarins of the F ­ uture, 32–33. 2. ​Adamson, “ ‘The Most Impor­tant Single Aspect of Our Foreign Policy,’ ” 48–49. 3. ​Kaufman, Trade and Aid, 58–73; Rostow, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Foreign Aid, 13–35. 4. ​Adamson, “The Most Impor­tant Single Aspect,” 48, 57; Rostow, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Foreign Aid, 112; Kaufman, Trade and Aid, 34–57.

Notes to Pages 50–53   179 5. ​Cited in Haefele, “Walt Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth,” 95. 6. ​Rostow, “Development,” 238–239, 257–258. 7. ​Haefele, “Walt Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth,” 81. 8. ​US Agency for International Development, “USAID History,” last updated on December 13, 2020, https://­w ww​.­usaid​.­gov​/­who​-­we​-­are​/­usaid​-­history. 9. ​Pearce, Rostow, Kennedy, and the Rhe­toric of Foreign Aid, 97–98. 10. ​From the data given in the essay in Hollis  B. Chenery, “Objectives and Criteria for Foreign Assistance,” in Goldwin, Why Foreign Aid?, 42. 11. ​Gilman, Mandarins of the F ­ uture, 3. 12. ​Kaufman, Trade and Aid, 98. 13. ​Pletsch, “The Three Worlds,” 573. 14. ​President John F. Kennedy, “Foreign Aid, 1961,” in Goldwin, Why Foreign Aid?, 3. 15. ​Rostow, “Development,” 243. 16. ​Latham, Modernization as Ideology, 209. 17. ​Gilman, Mandarins of the F ­ uture, 11–12; Shafer, Deadly Paradigms, 63–64. 18. ​Waddington, “Armed and Unarmed Policing,” 153–154. 19. ​Storch, “The Policeman as Domestic Missionary,” 481–509. 20. ​Quoted in Shafer, Deadly Paradigms, 86; originally from the USAID, Office of Public Safety, “History of OPS, 1955–­Pre­sent” 45. 21. ​Curtis, A Brief History of USOM Support, 4; Agency for International Development (AID), Termination Phase-­Out Study, 3–4. 22. ​Rostow, “Countering Guerrilla Attack,” 466. 23. ​Rostow “Countering Guerrilla Attack,” 468–469. 24. ​Lobe, United States National Security Policy and Aid, 5; Shafer, Deadly Paradigms, 87–88. 25. ​Comptroller General of the United States, Stopping U.S. Assistance to Foreign Police and Prisons, 14–15. 26. ​Lefever, U.S. Public Safety Assistance, 2. 27. ​Speech by Dr. John A. Hannah in Washington, DC, April 16, 1971, quoted in Lefever, U.S. Public Safety Assistance, 37. 28. ​Curtis, Brief History of USOM Support, 1–4; AID, Termination Phase-­Out Study, 1. 29. ​The figures are compiled from vari­ous sources, including Office of Program, Summary of U.S. Economic AID to Thailand; Research and Evaluation Staff, RTG/USOM Economic and Technical Proj­ect Summary FY 1951–1972; AID, Termination Phase-­Out Study; Curtis, Brief History of USOM Support. 30. ​To stop a full-­scale civil war between the Lao radical nationalist group Pathet Lao and the anticommunist groups in Laos, representatives of fourteen governments gathered in Geneva in May 1961 and ­a fter year-­long discussions and negotiations, they all signed a declaration assuring the neutrality of Laos in July 1962. ­A fter the Bay of Pigs debacle, newly elected President John F. Kennedy strove to negotiate with the Soviet Union and stop both the Viet­ nam­ese and Soviet Union’s support for the Pathet Lao and Lao communist movements. See Czyzak and Salans, “The International Conference on the Settlement of the Laotian Question and the Geneva Agreements of 1962.” 31. ​Hanrahan, An Overview of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Thailand, 6–7; Race, “The War in Northern Thailand,” 92–95.

180   Notes to Pages 54–58 32. ​US Department of State, Historical Division, American Foreign Policy Current Documents, 1962, 1091–1093. 33. ​Thak, Thailand, 165. 34. ​Koburger, “Thailand, A Confrontation,” 53. 35. ​Lobe, “U.S. Police Assistance for the Third World,” 170–173. 36. ​Jones and Batson, Brief History of USOM Support; Agency for International Development (AID), USOM in Perspective; Hill, An Overview of USAID Participation in the Thailand Programs; US Operations Mission (USOM), Aid Program in Thailand. See also Lobe, “U.S. Police Assistance for the Third World,” 330–331. 37. ​Public Safety Division, USOM to Thailand, The Civic Action Program, 3–4. ­Later, I was told that the a­ ctual author of this report was Gordon Young. 38. ​Public Safety Division, Civic Action Program, 15. 39. ​Coffey, Thailand, 2. 40. ​Poole, “Thailand’s Viet­nam­ese Minority,” 894n20; Saiyud, The Strug­gle for Thailand, 23–24. 41. ​Saiyud, The Strug­gle for Thailand, 180. 42. ​Chai-­a nan, Kusuma, and Suchit, From Armed Suppression, 49. 43. ​Hanrahan, Overview of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency, 57. 4 4. ​Saiyud, The Strug­gle for Thailand, 24. 45. ​­Under the CSOC, several suborganizations for village defense ­were or­ga­nized, such as civilian-­police-­military (CPM) units, village security teams (VSTs), and joint security centers (JSCs). Saiyud, The Strug­gle for Thailand, 29–33. CSOC was renamed the “Internal Security Operations Command” (ISOC) in 1973. 46. ​Prasong, “Development for Security,” 9. The first six ARD provinces ­were Ubon Ratchathani, Nakhon Phanom, Sakon Nakhon, Nong Khai, Udon Thani, and Loei. See Dawson and Thomas, A Brief History of USOM Support, 1–3, appendix A. 47. ​USOM, Mobile Development Unit Proj­ect Review, appendix C. 48. ​Coffey, Thailand, 4; Hill, Overview of USAID Participation, 6; Curtis, Brief History of USOM Support, 26. Hill reports that the RASD lasted u ­ ntil 1971, but Curtis says that the program was terminated in the fiscal year 1970. 49. ​Caldwell, American Economic Aid to Thailand, 47–62. 50. ​Lobe, “U.S. Police Assistance for the Third World,” 225. 51. ​Research and Evaluation Staff, RTG/USOM Economic and Technical Proj­ect Summary FY 1951–1972; Hill, Overview of USAID Participation, 6. 52. ​Manas, Khrongkan phathana, 4. 53. ​Bowie, Rituals of National Loyalty, 55–111; Jonsson, Mien Relations, 44–72; ­Toyota, “Subjects of the Nation,” 115–118; Christopher R. Duncan, “Legislating Modernity among the Marginalized,” in Duncan, Civilizing the Margins, 7–8; Kathleen Gillogly, “Developing the ‘Hill Tribes’ of Northern Thailand,” in Duncan, Civilizing the Margins, 120–131. 54. ​Tarr, “The Nature of Military Intervention,” 43. 55. ​Office of Program, Summary of U.S. Economic AID to Thailand, ­table 4. 56. ​“Politico-­military doctrine” is from Shafer, Deadly Paradigms, 24. Italic in original. 57. ​Tarr, “The Nature of Military Intervention,” 38, 42. 58. ​The official accounts from the BPP state that the Thai government felt the necessity of mobilizing the military and police forces together due to increasing insurgencies. See Tai rom phrabarami, 18.

Notes to Pages 58–64   181 59. ​Race, “The War in Northern Thailand,” 103. 60. ​Cited in Chai-­a nan, Kusuma, and Suchit, From Armed Suppression, 60. 61. ​Curtis, Brief History of USOM Support, 11. 62. ​Yuth, The Development of Thailand’s Territorial Defense, 24. 63. ​Vasit, In His Majesty’s Footsteps, 19. 6 4. ​“Prakat khong khana patiwat chabap thi 130” (Announcement of the Revolutionary Council No. 130),” Ratchakitchanubeksa lem 89 ton thi 66 25 mesayon 2515 (Royal Gazettes Book 89, Part 66, April 25, 1972); BPP Headquarters, “Botkhuam phiset,” 54; Kong banchakan 1975, 114. 65. ​Prawat khai naresuan, 24. 66. ​Manas, Prawat kongbanchakan, 22. 67. ​Manas, Prawat kongbanchakan, 24, 29; Tai rom phrabarami, 18. For the original military ­orders, see Soem, “Rueang tamruat trawen chaidaen,” 50, 55–57. 68. ​Latham, “Introduction,” in Engerman et al., Staging Growth, 3. 69. ​Latham, Modernization as Ideology, 18. 70. ​Tanet, Khon Mueang, 17–22, 93–99. 71. ​Hanrahan, Overview of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency, 12, 16. 72. ​Manas, Khrongkan phathana, 1–2; Hanrahan, Overview of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency, 16. 73. ​Manas, “Rongrian chaokhao lae prachachon klai khamanakhom,” 230; Chan, “Kan chattang rongrian tamruat chaidaen,” 13. 74. ​Manas, Khrongkan phathana, 1. 75. ​“Border Patrol Police: Program for the Hill Tribes Areas,” 1. 76. ​Hanrahan, Overview of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency, 16. See also Thaxton, “Modernization and Counter-­Revolution in Thailand,” 34–37. 77. ​Thongchai, Siam Mapped, 167. 78. ​AID, Termination Phase-­Out Study, 43. According to Manas, the BPP medics treated 252,138 p ­ eople in the remote border areas in 1973; Manas, Khrongkan phathana, 5. 79. ​Manas, Khrongkan phathana, 6. 80. ​Brandt, Training for BPP. 81. ​“Border Patrol Police: Program for the Hill Tribes Areas,” 2. 82. ​Yongyut, “Phet asa khong somdetya,” 63–64. 83. ​Dumaine and Layton, Somdetphra boromratchachonani, 137. 84. ​Yongyut, “Phet asa khong somdetya,” 65. The number of branches is compiled from the PMMV Foundation, “Raicheu changwat phor or sor wor” (list of PMMV in provinces), last accessed August 23, 2022, https://­w ww​.­pmmv​.­or​.­t h​/­province​.­php. 85. ​Manas, Khrongkan phathana, 6. 86. ​John H. Brandt, Chief Sanitarian Adviser to Kertin H. Tank, Acting Director, Memorandum: Medical Civic Action Proj­ect, Ref your note 8/15/66 (1966). 87. ​Nelson, Medical Counterinsurgency, 1. 88. ​Wilson, Proj­ect Paper, 1–6. 89. ​Dawson and Thomas, USOM Support to the Office of Accelerated Rural Development, 2–3. 90. ​For example, in 1967, out of total twenty-­seven provinces that had undertaken USOM’s Community Development program, fifteen provinces from northeastern Thailand and four provinces from central, northern, and southern Thailand participated in this program. Voran, Statistics on CD Area Coverage; Non-­Capital Proj­ect Paper (PROP) Community Development.

182   Notes to Pages 64–69 91. ​According to Thomas Lobe’s 1975 account, Suraphon Chulaphram went to Washington in 1965 and met with William Colby, then CIA Far Eastern Bureau chief. Colby introduced Joseph Z. Taylor, an ex-­marine and also the head of the CIA-­f ront consulting firm DEVCON, to facilitate the BPP’s civic action programs with the CIA’s assistance. Lobe, “U.S. Police Assistance for the Third World,” 334. 92. ​“Border Patrol Police: Program for the Hill Tribes Areas,” 2. 93. ​AID, Termination Phase-­Out Study, 40–41. 94. ​Interview with Manas Khantatatbumroong, January  12, 2010; Manas, Khrongkan phathana, 7. 95. ​Fowler, SEABEE Teams in Thailand; Naval History and Heritage Command, “Seabee History: Southeast Asia,” accessed August 23, 2022, https://­w ww​.­h istory​.­navy​.­m il​/­research​ /­library​/­online​-­reading​-­room​/­title​-­list​-­a lphabetically​/­s​/­seabee​-­history0​/­v ietnam​.­html. 96. ​Layton, Employment of the SEABEE Teams. It is noteworthy that Gilbert Layton, the then ­PSD adviser was actually a CIA official who stayed and actively engaged in the PSD-­BPP operations during 1965–1968. See Lobe, “U.S. Police Assistance for the Third World,” 536; AID, Termination Phase-­Out Study, 39. 97. ​National Security Command, “Border Patrol Police and SEABEE Construction.” 98. ​Sisippi tochodo, 77. 99. ​Lobe notes the program begun by American Christian missionaries, but in the fall of 1966, the BPP provided 60,000 baht to increase this business. See Lobe, “U.S. Police Assistance for the Third World,” 338. 100. ​Sunsongsoem phlitphan chaokhao, 5. 101. ​Sunsongsoem phlitphan chaokhao, 1; AID, Termination Phase-­Out Study, 39. Lobe argues that it was DEVCON that persuaded the Princess ­Mother to loan 30,000 baht for this proj­ect. Lobe, “U.S. Police Assistance for the Third World,” 338. 102. ​Manas, Khrongkan phathana, 9. 103. ​Sunsongsoem phlitphan chaokhao, 1–2; personal Communication with the BPP officer in charge of the BPP & Hill Tribe Shop on June 15, 2010. 104. ​BPP Headquarters, “Khrongkan sang khuammankhong nai chonabot thi muban nai phra upatham somdetphra sinakharinthra boromratchachonani (somobo tochodo sowo),” in Anuson phon tamruat ek wiphat wipunlakon, 83 (hereafter, Wiphat Wipunlakon Cremation Volume). 105. ​Wiphat Wipunlakon Cremation Volume, 83–86. 106. ​AID, Termination Phase-­Out Study, 26–27, 39. 107. ​Phairot, “Somdetya kap kansakatkan kankhayai itthiphon khong phak khommiunit haeng prathet thai,” 58–59. 108. ​Champagne, The Border Security Volunteer Team Program, 3. 109. ​“Chut chaokhao pongkan chaidaen” in the Thai language literally means “Hill Tribes Border Defense Team,” but the USOM translation was “Border Security Volunteer Teams.” 110. ​Phairot, “Somdetya kap kansakatkan kankhayai itthiphon,” 59–60; AID, Termination Phase-­Out Study, 39. 111. ​Champagne, Border Security Volunteer Team, 8–10. 112. ​Wiphat Wipunlakon Cremation Volume, 85. 113. ​Interview with Manas Khantatatbumroong, May 26, 2010; Phairot, “Somdetya kap kansakatkan kankhayai itthiphon,” 60–61.

Notes to Pages 69–74   183 114. ​Village Scout Operational Center, Prawatsat luksuea chaoban, 13–15 (hereafter, Prawatsat luksuea chaoban). The first four villages ­under the Volunteers of Border Villa­gers are Ban Laokohok and Ban Sengpha in Loei, Ban Bophak in Phitsanulok, and Tambon Nadi in Samut Prakan provinces. ­Later, the Volunteers of Border Villages was officially called Border Villa­gers Defense Team (chut cha ban raksa chaidaen). 115. ​Curtis, Brief History of USOM Support, 11; AID, Termination Phase-­Out Study, 38. Now, the palace shares the same compound with the BPP’s Special Training Subdivision 1 camp called the Rama 6 camp (khai phraram hok), which is right next to PARU’s new camp in Naresuan. 116. ​Tarr, “The Nature of Military Intervention,” 40–42, 45–46; AID, Termination Phase-­ Out Study, 27. 117. ​Central Intelligence Agency, Intelligence Memorandum. 118. ​Hmong and Mien (Thai p ­ eople often use the terms “Meo” and “Yao”) had received the most attention from the US-­CIA and the BPP b ­ ecause of their complicity in the opium trade and their jungle fighting capability. See, Coffey et al., Contractors Semi-­Annual Report; interview with Manas Khantatatbumroong, December 3, 2009. 119. ​McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 183–184, 189–190. 120. ​AID, Termination Phase-­Out Study, 95–98. 121. ​“Proj­ect Agreement: Narcotics Enforcement” (Agreement No. 238–4024, May 20, 1974), 2, https://­pdf​.­usaid​.­gov​/­pdf​_­docs​/­PDABA994​.­pdf. 122. ​The rationale for this new proj­ect was that “more rapid economic development and increased Government presence and ser­v ices should reduce the vulnerability of the population to Communist subversion.” “Non-­C apital Proj­ect Paper (PROP) Uplands Development Proj­ect (UDP)” (Thailand: September 15, 1972), 2–3, 6. https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PDA​ AD706B1.pdf. 123. ​AID, Termination Phase-­Out Study, 95; “Non-­Capital Proj­ect Paper (PROP) Uplands Development Proj­ect (UDP),” 2. 124. ​“Proj­ect Agreement: Hill Tribe Preserved Food” (Agreement No. 248–3027, June 30, 1973), 1–2. https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PDABA767.pdf. 125. ​Chan, “Botkhuam phiset,” 51. 126. ​Suraphon, “Rongrian tochodo,” 432. 127. ​Charoenrit, “Rongrian tochodo nai khuam songcham khong khapchao,” 81–82. 128. ​The Ministry of Education did not recognize the previously established Border Information Centers or BPP schools as official educational institutions. 129. ​Sisippi rongrian tochodo, 41; Chan, “Botkhuam phiset,” 51. 130. ​Rongrian chaokhao lae prachachon klai, 3. 131. ​Sisippi rongrian tochodo, 84. Charoenrit states that in the first year, the BPP built eigh­ teen schools. The BPP Headquarters report on the aid to the Hill Tribes says that eigh­teen BPP schools w ­ ere in operation. It should be remembered that the number of schools listed in the first year could be dif­fer­ent from the a­ ctual number of schools that w ­ ere operating unofficially and officially. Th ­ ese eigh­teen schools included eight in Chiang Rai, three in Chiang Mai, one in Mae Hong Son, three in Tak, one in Prachinburi, one in Sisakhet, and one in Loei province. See BPP Headquarters, Kan songkhro chaopa chaokhao lae prachachon klai khamanakhom, 10–13. 132. ​Rongrian chaokhao lae prachachon klai, 3; Sisippi rongrian tochodo, 52, 84. 133. ​The BPP schools w ­ ere named ­a fter donors. Sisippi rongrian tochodo, 44–46. 134. ​Rongrian chaokhao lae prachachon klai, 13.

184   Notes to Pages 74–80 135. ​Department of General Education, Kanprachum khru rongrian tamruat chaidaen, ko (Meeting of the Border Police School Teacher). 136. ​Bunruean Chaidet and Wichai Noiseni, “Phleng samrap chan prathomsueksa” (Songs for the Elementary Education Level), in Department of General Education, Kanprachum khru rongrian tamruat chaidaen, 137–146. 137. ​Chan, “Kan chattang rongrian tamruat chaidaen,” 13. According to Gordon Young’s 1961 report, the number of highland minorities based on known villages, h ­ ouses, and average persons per h ­ ouse was about 217,000 as of November 1960. Young, The Hilltribes of Northern Thailand, 113. 138. ​McMillan, Report on Completion of Assignment, 20. 139. ​The list of schools sponsored by the king and queen can be found in Duai chongrak lae pakdi, 62–67, 76–77. 140. ​Layton, “Royal ­Mother from the Sky”; Duai chongrak lae pakdi, 89. 141. ​Winyu, Somdetya mae fa luang, 94; Duai chongrak lae pakdi, 114. 142. ​Email communication with Police Lieutenant Col­o­nel Ladawan Chatthai on February 19, 2018. 143. ​For more details, see Hyun, “Building a ­Human Border.” 144. ​Sisippi rongrian tochodo, 56. 145. ​Sisippi rongrian tochodo, 437. Emphases are mine. 146. ​US Operations Mission, Thai/Aid Proj­ects, 3. 147. ​Building a “­human barrier” or “­human border” was a recurring theme in BPP teacher interviews. 148. ​Ministry of Interior, The Border Patrol Police and Community Development Works, 17–18. 149. ​The BPP divides its areas of responsibility into four regions: Region 1 is central Thailand, Region 2 is northeastern Thailand, Region 3 is northern Thailand, and Region 4 is southern Thailand. 150. ​The number of schools between 1956 and 2006, as shown in Figures 2.2–2.4, came from multiple sources. The estimate for 1956–1981 comes from BPP Headquarters, Sisippi rongrian tochodo, 448–464; BPP Headquarters, Duai chongrak lae pakdi, 353–357, 364. The estimate for 1982–2006 comes from multiple official reports on the BPP school proj­ect obtained from the BPP Headquarters in Bangkok. 151. ​Race, “The War in Northern Thailand,” 85–112. 152. ​­These thirteen BPP schools w ­ ere dispersed in Chiang Rai (four schools), Phayao (six schools), Nan (two schools), and Mae Hong Son (one school) provinces and w ­ ere operating in the areas where the clash between the government forces and Hmong took place; Sisippi rongrian tochodo, 464. 153. ​In 2006, the criteria for transferring to the ministry w ­ ere that the educational institutions had to have been operating for at least five years; they had to be farther than five kilo­ meters from the nearest school; the security condition of surrounding villages had to be safe and stable; the number of students attending had to be more than 120; the school grounds had to be bigger than six rai; and the instructors had to meet the basic qualifications. See Phonnipha, Prakat samnakngan khanakammakan kansueksa, 3; personal communication, Police Lieutenant Colonel Sudalak Bunkhlueap, June 23, 2011. 154. ​Chan, “Kan chattang rongrian tamruat chaidaen,” 14. 155. ​Thongchai, “The ­Others Within,” 52. 156. ​Duai chongrak lae pakdi, 123. 157. ​Thongchai, Siam Mapped, 170.

Notes to Pages 81–87   185 158. ​AID, Termination Phase-­Out Study, 45–46. It is noteworthy that in this 120-­page report, only the BPP has a conclusion titled “Royal House­hold Attitude.”

Chapter 3.  The Saga of the Black Panther, 1950–1976 1. ​Pranet et al., “Prawat kan fuek dot rom,” 133. 2. ​Suchat, “Prawat khai fuek awut phiset,” 143. 3. ​Run literally means generation, age, or period, and when it is used for a batch of ­people in the military or civilian groups, it means a group of cohorts or class. For the armed forces in Thailand, it is used to indicate a group that received certain curricular training together so it can be translated to “class.” I use the transliteration run ­here to emphasize the military origin and characteristics of the BPP and PARU and l­ ater, of the Village Scouts. 4. ​­There is no clear rule on how PARU decides the run names, but surely it came out from the number of trainees. See the list of PARU runs between 1951 and 1996 in, Prawat khai naresuan, 77–78, as well as PARU, “Prapheni wan run.” This class naming tradition has been discontinued. 5. ​Choetchamrat, “Kamnoet tamruat phonrom,” 19. 6. ​Pranet et al., “Prawat kan fuek dot rom,” 134. 7. ​Suchat, “Prawat khai fuek awut phiset,” 145–147; Pranet et  al., “Prawat kan fuek dot rom,” 134; Choetchamrat, “Kamnoet tamruat phonrom,” 24. 8. ​Suchat, “Prawat khai fuek awut phiset,” 148; Choetchamrat, “Kamnoet tamruat phonrom,” 19–22; Pranet et al., “Prawat kan fuek dot rom,” 135. 9. ​Kamon, “ ‘Pharu rop nai lao,’ ” 20. 10. ​Interview with James William (Bill) Lair, February 16, 2013. 11. ​Compiled from Suchat, “Prawat khai fuek awut phiset,” 143–144; Nakhon, Kamnoet phonrom thai, 225; Choetchamrat, “Kamnoet tamruat phonrom,” 19, 27; interview with James William (Bill) Lair, February 14–16, 2013. In Choetchamrat’s account, more names such as Jack, Paul, Bird, and Jod are listed, but ­there is no description of ­these instructors. For Richard Van Winkle’s personal rec­ord, “Richard Demott Van Winkle (1926–2006),” Find a Grave Memorial webpage, accessed September 13, 2019, https://­w ww​.­findagrave​.­com​/­memorial​/­14767216. 12. ​Choetchamrat, “Kamnoet tamruat phonrom,” 26–27. E ­ arlier accounts from the BPP Headquarters noted that ­there ­were eigh­teen assistant instructors. However, Choetchamrat, who was one of the instructors, listed the names of twenty Thai assistant instructors in his memoir. See, Prawat khai naresuan, 76. 13. ​Choetchamrat, “Kamnoet tamruat phonrom,” 18. For the Phao’s Asawin police, see Thak, Thailand, 58–59. 14. ​Choetchamrat, “Kamnoet tamruat phonrom,” 18. 15. ​Pranet et al., “Prawat kan fuek dot rom,” 135; BPP Headquarters, Tai rom phrabarami, 76. 16. ​Choetchamrat, “Kamnoet tamruat phonrom,” 19–20. 17. ​For detailed information about building this Ubon camp with the American advisers, see Nakhon, Kamnoet phonrom thai, 116–124. This camp l­ ater became the Kromphraya Damrong Ratchanuphap Camp of BPP Regional Division 2. 18. ​Choetchamrat, “Kamnoet tamruat phonrom,” 29–30; Pranet et al., “Prawat kan fuek dot rom,” 135. 19. ​Khai Naresuan, internal report, circa 1975, 2 (hereafter, Khai Naresuan). 20. ​According to Lair, Phao commanded that if PARU w ­ ere to be officially formed and operated ­u nder the TNPD, then SEA Supply advisers should be also appointed as Thai police

186   Notes to Pages 87–94 officers. Therefore, Phao designated Lair, Cheek, and Shirley to the Thai police rank. Interview with James William (Bill) Lair, February 14, 2013. 21. ​Prawat khai naresuan, 9. 22. ​Choetchamrat, “Kamnoet tamruat phonrom,” 31. 23. ​Prawat khai naresuan, 11. 24. ​Pranet et al., “Prawat kan fuek dot rom,” 135. 25. ​Choetchamrat, “Kamnoet tamruat phonrom,” 35. 26. ​Interview with James William (Bill) Lair, February 13–16, 2013. 27. ​“Interview with Bill Lair,” Vietnam Center & Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive (VNCA)’s Virtual Vietnam Archive, December 11, 2001, accessed September 13, 2019, https://­v va​.­v ietnam​ .­t tu​.­edu​/­repositories​/­2​/­digital​_­objects​/­63769, 70 (page numbers as indicated in the transcript) (hereafter, “Bill Lair Oral History”). 28. ​Interview with James William (Bill) Lair, February 16, 2013. 29. ​Narong, Kua cha pen (tamruat) phonrom, 117. 30. ​Nakhon, Kamnoet phonrom thai, 226–230; Prawat khai naresuan, 10. 31. ​The original list of visitors and a short description are from Nakhon, Kamnoet phonrom thai, 225. I compiled each person’s information from Foreign Relations of the United States and vari­ous newspapers. See “Alfred C. Ulmer Jr., 83, Officer in U.S. Intelligence Agencies,” New York Times, July 1, 2000, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2000​/­07​/­01​/­world​/­a lfred​-­c​-­u lmer​-­jr​-­83​ -­officer​-­in​-­us​-­intelligence​-­agencies​.­html. 32. ​Quoted in Nakhon, Kamnoet phonrom thai, 226. 33. ​Interview with James William (Bill) Lair, February 15, 2013. 34. ​Choetchamrat, “Kamnoet tamruat phonrom,” 34–36. 35. ​Interview with James William (Bill) Lair, February 14, 2013. 36. ​Kamon, “Pharu rop nai lao,” 22. 37. ​Nakhon, Kamnoet phonrom thai, 209–210. The leader of the patrol team who suggested building a BIC in Pueng Khlueng was Police Lance Corporal China Wechakawi, who became the leader of the PARU operational team in Laos in late 1960. 38. ​Prawat khai naresuan, 10–11, 16. 39. ​Interview with James William (Bill) Lair, February 16, 2013. See also Lair’s memorial, “To The F ­ amily of Police General Pranet Ritluechai.” 40. ​Choetchamrat, “Kamnoet tamruat phonrom,” 35. 41. ​Choetchamrat, “Kamnoet tamruat phonrom,” 45. 42. ​Suraphon, “Langchak kan chattang,” 81–82; Suchat, “Prawat khai fuek awut phiset,” 143; Choetchamrat, “Kamnoet tamruat phonrom,” 22–23, 30. 43. ​Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars, 261. 4 4. ​Karabell, Architects of Intervention, 209; International Cooperation Administration, U.S. External Assistance. 45. ​“Notes of Conversation between President-­Elect Kennedy and President Eisenhower, Washington, January 19, 1961,” in US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, 19–25 (hereafter, FRUS 1961–1963). 46. ​McCoy, “Amer­i­ca’s Secret War in Laos,” 285–286; Blaufarb, Counterinsurgency Era, 141. 47. ​Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars, 266; ­Castle, At War in the Shadow of Vietnam, 47–61. 48. ​“Letter From President Kennedy to Chairman Khrushchev, Hyannis Port, October 16, 1961” in FRUS 1961–1963, Vol. VI, 44; “Editorial Note,” in FRUS 1961–1963, 473–474. 49. ​Cited in Karabell, Architects of Intervention, 216.

Notes to Pages 94–99   187 50. ​Blaufarb, Counterinsurgency Era, 128–129. 51. ​Leary, Foreword, xiv; Shaplen, “Our Involvement in Laos.” 52. ​“Memorandum From the President’s Deputy Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Rostow) to President Kennedy, Washington August 4, 1961,” in FRUS 1961–1963, 344. 53. ​“Memorandum From the President’s Deputy Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Rostow) to President Kennedy, Washington, July 21, 1961” and “Tele­gram From the Department of State to the Embassy in Laos, Washington, November 9, 1962, 4:50 p.m.,” in FRUS 1961–1963, 307, 914. 5 4. ​“ Tele­g ram from the Department of State to the Embassy in Thailand, Washington June 28, 1958, 8:17 p.m.,” in US State Department, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958– 1960, 1036 (hereafter, FRUS 1958–1960). 55. ​“Letter from President Eisenhower to Prime Minister Sarit Thanarat. Washington, November 8, 1960,” in FRUS 1958–1960, 1153–1154. 56. ​One good example is the note by McCone cited in the text above. A night before Sarit’s death on December 8, 1963, the American embassy in Bangkok provided the secretary of state a medical summary prepared by an American military general on December 6. “Tele­gram from CAS Bangkok to Secretary of State on December 7, 1963, 7:23 AM,” Declassified Documents Reference System, University of Wisconsin-­Madison. 57. ​“Tele­gram From the Department of State to the Embassy in Laos, Washington, July 18, 1961, 9:35 p.m.,” in FRUS 1961–1963, 304–305; Fineman, Special Relationship, 196. 58. ​“Paper Prepared in the Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs, Washington, November 7, 1962. Thailand,” in FRUS 1961–1963, 982–983. 59. ​“Memorandum from the Director, Far East Region, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (Heinz) to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (Nitze), Washington, June 26, 1962,” in FRUS 1961– 1963, 949. 60. ​“Memorandum from Secretary of Defense McNamara to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (Bundy), Washington, August 13, 1962,” in FRUS 1961–1963, 959. 61. ​“Paper Prepared in the Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs,” 982–983. 62. ​Viksnins, “United States Military Spending and the Economy of Thailand,” 446. 63. ​Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars, 276. 6 4. ​Harrison E. Salisbury, “Thailand: Officially, Nothing is Happening Th ­ ere,” New York Times, September 4, 1966, 137. 65. ​“Letter from President Eisenhower to Prime Minister Sarit Thanarat,” 1153. 66. ​Choetchamrat, “Kamnoet tamruat phonrom,” 45. Bill Lair says that Robert Jantzen got along with Sarit very well. See “Bill Lair Oral History,” 82. 67. ​Conboy, Shadow War, 59. 68. ​Kamon, “Pharu rop nai lao,” 23–24. 69. ​“Bill Lair Oral History,” 67–68. 70. ​Kamon, “Pharu rop nai lao,” 26; interview with James William (Bill) Lair, February 15, 2013. 71. ​Kamon, “Pharu rop nai lao,” 19. 72. ​“Bill Lair Oral History,” 96; interview with James William (Bill) Lair, February 16, 2013. 73. ​Theerevat, “Historical Background of Unknown Soldiers,” 50; Conboy, Shadow War, 66, n. 4.

188   Notes to Pages 99–101 74. ​Theerevat, “Historical Background of Unknown Soldiers,” 53; Leary, “The CIA and the ‘Secret War’ in Laos.” 75. ​Unknown Warrior Association (UWA) 333, Editorial Department, “Songkhram indochin phak 2 songkhram yen (songkhram latthi), kanrop khong nakrop niranam 333” (Second Indochina War during the Cold War (War of Ideology), B ­ attle of the Unknown Warrior 333), in UWA 333, Songkhram pokpong chat sasana kasat, 217; Kamon, “Pharu rop nai lao,” 24, 28, 49–50, 66–68. The seven commanders are Army Major General Chamnian Phongphairot (Jak), Army Col­o­nel Chawon Wannarat (Nop), Police Col­o­nel Pranet Ritluechai (Non-­Liwang), Police Col­o­nel James Bill Lair (Khap), Major Prayun Bunnak (Phon), Captain Suchit Mongkhonkhamnuankhet (Don), and Police Sub-­Lieutenant Amnuai Pradapphongsa (Ek). The names in parentheses are their codenames. 76. ​UWA 333, “Songkhram indochin phak 2,” 217. 77. ​Lair, “To The ­Family of Police General Pranet Ritluechai,” 62–64; Kamon, “Pharu rop nai lao,” 66–67. 78. ​Interview with James William (Bill) Lair, February 16, 2013. Bill Lair recalled that the then chief of the Far East Division Desmond FitzGerald in the CIA saved PARU with the concurrence of Allen Dulles and asked Lair to write a report on how to mobilize PARU in the Lao action. See “Bill Lair Oral History,” 85–86. 79. ​Headquarters 333 was originally set up in Vientiane. As tension grew in northern Laos, the Combined Task Force 333 in Vientiane moved to Nong Khai in Thailand in October 1962 and then a year l­ater to Udon Thani. When it moved to Udon Airbase in November 1963, the Combined Task Force changed its name to Headquarters 333, and Army Col­o­nel Vithoon Yasawat was appointed as the commander in chief of the headquarters in July 1964. UWA 333, “Songkhram indochin phak 2,” 218; Kamon, “Pharu rop nai lao,” 24. 80. ​Choetchamrat, “Kamnoet tamruat phonrom,” 47. 81. ​Choetchamrat, “Kamnoet tamruat phonrom,” 47–48. 82. ​William Leary remarks that Bill Lair met with Vang Pao in late December 1959. It is, however, still unclear who had recruited Vang Pao in the first place. One of the key CIA members of the Lao operation was Gordon Young’s ­brother, William (Bill) Young, who, according to my interview with Gordon Young on March 12, 2012, was the one who recruited Vang Pao ­because he could speak vari­ous ethnic languages and had been organ­izing ethnic groups to conduct intelligence in Laos since 1958. Only two days ­a fter the New York Times published Bill Young’s obituary on April 3, 2011, a correction was made to the ­earlier version saying that it was not Young but Bill Lair who recruited Vang Pao. See Leary, “Supporting the ‘Secret War,’ ” 77; Thomas Fuller, “William Young, Who Helped U.S. Or­ga­nize Secret War in Laos, Is Dead at 76,” New York Times, April 3, 2011, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2011​/­04​/­04​/­world​/­asia​/­04young​ .­html; interview with Gordon Young, March 11–12, 2012. 83. ​Kamon, “Pharu rop nai lao,” 50. 84. ​Kamon, “Pharu rop nai lao,” 45. 85. ​K hai Naresuan, 10; Kamon, “Pharu rop nai lao,” 19–27. Saritsena Special Battalion Camp in Phitsanulok province was also called Phits Camp by PARU, the Thai army, and American advisers at that time. 86. ​Pranet et al., “Prawat kan fuek dot rom,” 155. 87. ​Pranet et  al., “Prawat kan fuek dot rom,” 155; Choetchamrat, “Kamnoet tamruat phonrom,” 48; Kamon, “Pharu rop nai lao,” 33; interview with James William (Bill) Lair, February 16, 2013.

Notes to Pages 102–106   189 88. ​Kamon, “Pharu rop nai lao,” 51. 89. ​Sheehan et al., The Pentagon Papers, 133. 90. ​Leary, “Supporting the ‘Secret War,’ ” 73, 78. 91. ​Since the CIA agents could not disclose that they ­were hired by the US government, they used the codename SKY at all times. During the Lao operation period, ­t here ­were on average 10–12 SKY team members. Interview with James William (Bill) Lair, February 16, 2013. 92. ​King Sisavang Vatthana also visited Long Cheng to open the first radio station set up by the BPP and CIA on March 17, 1967. Kamon, “Pharu rop nai lao,” 61–62. 93. ​Two CIA officers in the American SKY team who worked closely with the BPP and PARU in Laos, Louis O’Jibway and Edward Johnson, died in an aircraft accident when they crossed the Mekong River from Laos to Udon Thani, Thailand, on August 20, 1965. Interview with Manas Khantatatbumroong, February  21, 2011; Choetchamrat, “Kamnoet tamruat phonrom,” 48–49; Leary, “CIA and the ‘Secret War,’ ” 517. 94. ​Interview with Manas Khantatatbumroong, January 24, 2011, and February 21, 2011. 95. ​Kamon, “Pharu rop nai lao,” 38–43. 96. ​“Memorandum From the President’s Deputy Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Rostow) to President Kennedy, Washington, August 17, 1961” in FRUS 1961–1963, 371–372. 97. ​McCoy, “Amer­i­ca’s Secret War in Laos,” 287. 98. ​Choetchamrat, “Kamnoet tamruat phonrom,” 49. 99. ​Kamon, “Pharu rop nai lao,” 29, 41–45. 100. ​Kamon, “Pharu rop nai lao,” 29–30, 36–37, 55. The col­o­nel’s last name is not given. It is noteworthy that Kamon repeats this story of revenge against Col­o­nel Sombun three times in his memoir. 101. ​Leary, Foreword, xviii; Blaufarb, Counterinsurgency Era, 160; Salisbury, “Thailand: Officially, Nothing Is Happening ­There,” 137. 102. ​UWA 333, “Songkhram indochin phak 2,” 218–219. A se­nior CIA officer commented that Vithoon Yasawat was the Thai general who had direct, private access to both the Lao and Thai prime ministers and was “the single most impor­tant player in the Laos program.” Cited in Leary, “Supporting the ‘Secret War,’ ” 81. For further information, see, Rueangyot, Duai khuamrusuek lae songcham nai wanwan khong thep 333. 103. ​L eary, Foreword, xviii; Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars, 277; ­C astle, At War in the Shadow of Vietnam, 70–71. 104. ​Kamon, “Pharu rop nai lao,” 45–46, 61–63, 76–77. 105. ​Leary, “CIA and the ‘Secret War,’ ” 509; Leary, Foreword, xix. 106. ​Pricha, “Pattibatkan nakrop niranam,” 56–57. Rangers in Thailand are the volunteer units. 107. ​Leary, “CIA and the ‘Secret War,’ ” 508; McCoy, “Amer­i­ca’s Secret War in Laos,” 290–291. 108. ​Kiernan and Owen, “Making More Enemies than We Kill?”; Mullin, “The World’s Most Bombed Country.” 109. ​Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars, 293. 110. ​UWA 333, “Songkhram indochin phak 2,” 221; Pricha Nithisupha (Spotlight), “Prawatsat kanrop nai lao khong nakrop niranam 333,” 12. During the operation in Laos between 1963 and 1972, ninety PARU members lost their lives and forty-­one ­were injured. Considering that the average number of each team had five men, it is not a small number of casualties. Worse yet, most of t­ hose dead bodies could not be taken back to Thailand. See the number of casualties in Lao action in Khai Naresuan, 18.

190   Notes to Pages 107–113 111. ​See the list of PARU casualties in Thailand and Laos in, Prawat khai naresuan, 175–178. 112. ​Kamon, “Pharu rop nai lao,” 46. 113. ​Theerevat, “Historical Background of Unknown Soldiers,” 57. According to the UWA accounts, the association received semi-­official approval from the Thai government to disclose its activities in Laos in 2010. See the details in UWA 333, “Sarup khuampenpai rueang khoyokluek chankhuamlap boko phasom 333 (Briefing on the Possibility to Declassify about the Combined Task Force 333),” in UWA 333, Songkhram pokpong chat sasana kasat, 16–18. 114. ​Choetchamrat, “Kamnoet tamruat phonrom,” 48, 50–51. 115. ​Khai Naresuan, 18–21. 116. ​The PARU accounts state that Prince Vajiralongkorn was attending the military acad­emy in Australia, but Michael Ruffles argues that he was not yet attending the Royal Military College, Duntroon. Michael Ruffles, “The Miseducation of King Rama X,” Sydney Morning Herald, August 30, 2020, https://­w ww​.­smh​.­com​.­au​/­national​/­t he​-­miseducation​-­of​-­k ing​-­rama​ -­x​-­20200824​-­p55otc​.­html. 117. ​P ranet et  al., “Prawat kan fuek dot rom,”; Choetchamrat, “Kamnoet tamruat phonrom,” 36. 118. ​One of the unofficial visits by the royal c­ ouple and their invitation of PARU members to Klai Kangwon Palace dinner are well documented in Vasit’s memoir, In His Majesty’s Footsteps, 1–6. 119. ​Bureau of Royal House­hold, Sadet praphatton ma pen khrongkan phraratchadamri, phoso, 148–179, 210–225, 264–275, 344–351. 120. ​Morell and Chai-­a nan, Po­liti­cal Conflict in Thailand, 165. 121. ​Choetchamrat, “Kamnoet tamruat phonrom,” 49. 122. ​Suthachai, Saithan prawatsat prachathipatai thai, 138–149.

Chapter 4.  Crusade from the Borders to Bangkok, 1969–1976 1. ​Thongchai, Moments of Silence, 11. 2. ​Charoenrit, “Somkhuan tonkhit charoenrit bukboek,” 57. 3. ​Charoenrit, “Kitthueng khun somkhuan,” 60. 4. ​Anuson ngan phraratchathan phloengsop phon tamruat tho somkhuan harikun, ­12–13, 19 (hereafter, Somkhuan Harikul Cremation Volume); Song phrakaruna protklao protkramoem haiphim phraratchathan nueang nai ngan phraratchathan phloengsop phon tamruat tho somkhuan harikun wan sao thi 24 mokarakhom phutthasakkarat 2547, 23 (hereafter, Somkhuan Harikul Royal Cremation Volume); Prawatsat luksuea chaoban, 136–137. 5. ​Interview with James William (Bill) Lair, February 14, 2013. 6. ​Saiyud, “Waialai phon tamruat tho somkhuan harikun,” 47. 7. ​Charoenrit, 90 pi kap khuamsongcham, 83–84. 8. ​Charoenrit, 90 pi kap khuamsongcham, 84–101. 9. ​Interview with Manas Khantatatbumroong, January 24, 2011. 10. ​Charoenrit, 90 pi kap khuamsongcham, 10, 16–17. 11. ​Morell and Chai-­a nan, Po­liti­cal Conflict in Thailand, 259. 12. ​Charoenrit, 90 pi kap khuamsongcham, 93–94. 13. ​Akkhawat, “Phrabatsomdetphrachaoyuhua kap phrarat koraniyakit, samphat phon tamruat tri charoenrit chamratromran rongphubanchakan tamruat trawen chaidaen, 9 phruet-

Notes to Pages 113–119   191 sachikayon 2519” (His Majesty and the King’s Royal Duties along the Village Scout, Interview with Police Major General Charoenrit Chamratromran, Deputy Commissioner of the Border Patrol Police General Headquarters, on November 9, 1976), in Akkhawat, Nai luang khong rao, samphat 15 kharatchakan chanphuyai lae phu klaichit buang phrayukhonlabat, 186; Charoenrit, 90 pi kap khuamsongcham, 89–90. 14. ​Charoenrit’s memoir begins a picture of Phao Siyanon, and in the writings about his police c­ areer, Charoenrit repeatedly pre­sents how influential Phao was as the leader of the police and the army and cared the BPP and PARU. 15. ​Village Scout Operational Center, Khomopkai thawaiwai, 153–154 (hereafter, Khomopkai thawaiwai). See also Bowie, Rituals of National Loyalty, 56–59. 16. ​Prawatsat luksuea chaoban, 13. 17. ​Saiyud “Waialai phon tamruat tho somkhuan harikun,” 47. 18. ​Chulasan somkhuan harikun khong chomrom luksuea chaoban, 17. 19. ​Somkhuan Harikul Cremation Volume, 19. 20. ​Murashima, “The Origin of Modern Official State Ideology in Thailand,” 91. 21. ​Khomopkai thawaiwai, 158. The first BPP schools that initiated the Cub Scout training on July 19, 1966, ­were the royally sponsored schools including Chao Pho Luang Upatham 1 in Doi Pui and Chao Mae Luang Upatham 2 in Mae Rim, Chiang Mai. 22. ​Charoenrit, “Somkhuan tonkhit charoenrit bukboek,” 58. 23. ​Somkhuan Harikul Cremation Volume, 17, 22, 24. 24. ​Charoenrit, “Somkhuan tonkhit charoenrit bukboek,” 58–59, 63; Charoenrit, 90 pi kap khuamsongcham, 160. 25. ​Somkhuan Harikul Cremation Volume, 24, 39; Khomopkai thawaiwai, 206, 215. 26. ​Khomopkai thawaiwai, 220; Charoenrit, “Somkhuan tonkhit charoenrit bukboek,” 62– 64; Prawatsat luksuea chaoban, 47. 27. ​Village Scout Operational Center, 23 pi luksuea chaoban nai phraboromratchanukhro, 254 (hereafter, 23 pi luksuea chaoban). 28. ​Kukrit, “Colom soi suan phlu,” 100. 29. ​Village Scout Operational Center, Rai-­ngan kitchakan luksuea chaoban pi 2522, 15; Khomopkai thawaiwai, 182. 30. ​See the copy of Ministry of Interior order motho 0100/wo 430 on October 30, 1972, in Prawatsat luksuea chaoban, 96–97. 31. ​Bowie, Rituals of National Loyalty, 83–84, 118–125. 32. ​Prawatsat luksuea chaoban, 96; Charoenrit, “Somkhuan tonkhit charoenrit bukboek,” 57. 33. ​Prawatsat luksuea chaoban, 104. A copy of this document soro 0201/14802 on August 27, 1976, is in Prawatsat luksuea chaoban, 104. 34. ​BPP Headquarters, Khumue kanfuekoprom luksuea chaoban nai phraboromratchanukhro (chabap prapprung khrangthi 4), 9 singhakhom 2516, 18–19, 42–43 (hereafter, Khumue kanfuekoprom luksuea chaoban 1973). 35. ​World Organ­ization of the Scout Movement, “Scout Promise and Law,” accessed December 15, 2020, https://­w ww​.­scout​.­org​/­promiseandlaw. 36. ​Khumue kanfuekoprom luksuea chaoban 1973, 52. En­glish translation is from Manas, Village Scout of Thailand, 7. 37. ​Khumue kanfuekoprom luksuea chaoban 1973, 20–21, 40–41. 38. ​Manas, Village Scout of Thailand, 6.

192   Notes to Pages 119–125 39. ​Khumue kanfuekoprom luksuea chaoban 1973, 135. 4 0. ​BPP Headquarters, Khumue kanfuekoprom withayakon luksuea chaoban, changwat kamphengphet khetkansueksa 7, 11–15 phruetsachikayon 2519, 1 (hereafter, Khumue kanfuekoprom withayakon 1976); Khomopkai thawaiwai, 231. 41. ​Khumue kanfuekoprom luksuea chaoban 1973, 21. 42. ​Khumue kanfuekoprom luksuea chaoban 1973, 43. 43. ​Charoenrit, “Khrangrek khong luksuea chaoban,” 99. 4 4. ​Manas, Village Scout of Thailand, 2. 45. ​“King Bhumibol: “Politics Is a Filthy Business,” in FCCT, The King of Thailand in World Focus, 47. 46. ​Charoenrit also explained the uniqueness of the Bangkok Village Scout movement and commented that it is more po­liti­cal than the rural membership b ­ ecause most of the leaders of each class in Bangkok have been members of Parliament. See Charoenrit, 90 pi kap khuamsongcham, 196; Khomopkai thawaiwai, 179. 47. ​Nakhon Si Thammarat Rajabhat University, “Kansadet phraratchadamnoen changwat nakhon si thammarat” (Royal Visits to Nakhon Si Thammarat Province), accessed August 11, 2021, https://­w ww​.­nstru​.­ac​.­t h​/­site​/­k ingbhumibol​/­history​/­proceed​.­html. 48. ​Khomopkai thawaiwai, 314–318; Chulasan kongthun phon tamruat tho somkhuan harikun, 8. 49. ​Akkhawat, “Phrabatsomdetphrachaoyuhua,” 190; Charoenrit, 90 pi kap khuamsongcham, 163. 50. ​Prawatsat luksuea chaoban, 67. 51. ​Kukrit, “Colom soi suan phlu,” 103. 52. ​See, for instance, one of the Village Scouts’ essays: Muea phukhian oprom luksuea chaoban. See also Khomopkai thawaiwai, 162. 53. ​Interview with Manas Khantatatbumroong, May 3, 2011. 54. ​Bowie, Rituals of National Loyalty, 228–232. 55. ​Khomopkai thawaiwai, 320. 56. ​Epigraph from Manas Khantatatbumroong, “Khuam saksit khong phrakaew morakot,” 88. 57. ​Khomopkai thawaiwai, 269–279. 58. ​Puey, “Vio­lence and the Military Coup in Thailand,” 6. 59. ​Manas, Village Scout of Thailand, 2. Note that Manas wrote “government” instead of indicating the names of organ­izations and groups involved. Emphasis is mine. 60. ​Interview with Manas Khantatatbumroong, February 21, 2011. 61. ​Thongchai, “Remembering/Silencing the Traumatic Past,” 246. See also Anderson, “Withdrawal Symptoms”; Ungphakorn, “Vio­lence and the Military Coup in Thailand,” 4–12; Ji Giles, “From the City, via the Jungle, to Defeat”; Thongchai, Moments of Silence. 62. ​“Phon tamruat tho somkhuan harikun, phunam luksuea chaoban” (Police Lieutenant General Somkhuan Harikul, the Leader of Village Scouts) in “Khamhaikan khong khon run 6 tula 19,” 158–159. Also see Somkhuan Harikul Cremation Volume, 186–189. 63. ​Khumue kanfuekoprom withayakon 1976, 14–15. 6 4. ​The fourth edition was published on August 9, 1973, and the fifth revised edition came out in 1998. See Somkhuan’s foreword to the fifth edition in Village Scout Operational Center, Administrative Division, Khumue kanfuekoprom luksuea chaoban khrangthi 5.

Notes to Pages 125–131   193 65. ​Charoenrit, “Kamnoet luksuea chaoban” 465. In Thongchai’s account, ­those left-­wingers ­ ere also called “the deceived” (phu long phit). Thongchai, Siam Mapped, 169–170; Thongchai, w “Remembering/Silencing the Traumatic Past,” 253. 66. ​Akkhawat, “Phrabatsomdetphrachaoyuhua,” 197. 67. ​Vithoon, “BPP Commander Pol. Lt. Gen. Charoenrit Chamrasromran.” 68. ​Suraphon Chulaphram Cremation Volume, 39–40. 69. ​Phon tamruat tho angkun thatanon (Police Lieutenant General Angkun Thatanon); Charoenrit, 90 pi kap khuamsongcham, 165. 70. ​Pranet Ritluechai Cremation Volume, 21. 71. ​Choetchamrat, “Kamnoet tamruat phonrom,” 41–42. 72. ​Khai Naresuan, 13. 73. ​Prawat khai naresuan, 136–137. 74. ​Thongchai, “Remembering/Silencing the Traumatic Past,” 250–251. 75. ​Tai rom phrabarami, 18; Sisippi tochodo, 57–61. The Thai National Police Department was transferred from the Ministry of Interior to the Office of the Prime Minister and changed its official title to Royal Thai Police in 1998. 76. ​See the orga­nizational chart in Sisippi tochodo, 61. 77. ​Thai Rath and Daily News, November 16, 1976, from Bowie, Rituals of National Loyalty, 113. 78. ​Notably, the princess ­mother’s visits to Village Scout initiations ­were concentrated in southern, northeastern, and northern provinces in this alleged cessation period. She made twelve visits to southern provinces, Ranong (three), Phangnga (two), Phuket (two), Krabi (three), Suphanburi (one), and Ratchaburi (one) between December 1976 and February 1977; four visits to the northeast, to Khon Kaen (two) and Chaiphumi (2) in March 1977; and three visits to Chiang Mai and one each to Nan and Phrae in the northern provinces between April and May 1977. See BPP Headquarters, Tochodo sadudi 100 pi somdetya, 221–222 (hereafter, Tochodo sadudi). 79. ​BPP Regional Subdivision 34, Sathitikan fue oprom luksuea chaoban phuenthi sopoko luksuea chaoban 34. I was provided this list by a BPP officer in charge of Village Scouts in Tak province on August 11, 2010. The list includes the initiations that took place in Kamphengphet, Nakhon Sawan, Tak, and Uthai Thani provinces since 1972. 80. ​For the characteristics of “moratorium” period, see Bowie, Rituals of National Loyalty, 113–143. Interview with Manas Khantatatbumroong, February 21, 2011. 81. ​Khomopkai thawaiwai, 197. A copy of this document soro 75/2521 on April 18, 1979, along with the order from the Prem, motho 0204/6149, can be found in Prawatsat luksuea chaoban, 106–109. 82. ​Interview with Manas Khantatatbumroong, February 21, 2011. 83. ​Prawatsat luksuea chaoban, 41. 84. ​23 pi luksuea chaoban, 86. 85. ​Charoenrit, 90 pi kap khuamsongcham, 176; Charoenrit, “Somkhuan tonkhit charoenrit bukboek,” 62; Charoenrit, “Khrangrek khong luksuea chaoban,” 100. 86. ​Personal communication with a PARU commander, April 27, 2011. 87. ​Patangko is a sort of fried dough, and it is often served with coffee or tea for breakfast. 88. ​The phrase is a part of a poem called “October 14 (sipsi tula)” written by Wisa Khanthap on October 6, 1973. See the w ­ hole text at Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Arts, “Wisa

194   Notes to Pages 131–140 Khanthap. Sipsi tula (October 14),” last accessed September 22, 2019, http://­w ww​.­arts​.­chula​.­ac​ .­t h​/­~complit​/­etext​/­octobertext​/­octtext​/­w isa​.­htm. 89. ​See detailed accounts of the deportation of Vithoon from Thailand ­a fter the 1976 coup in Rueangyot, Duai khuamrusuek lae songcham nai wanwan khong thep 333, 166–172. 90. ​Sisuk was one of the fourteen p ­ eople who ­were included in the National Administrative Reform Council ­a fter the coup, and in the end he regretted that this had jeopardized his life and name. See Sisuk Mahinthonrathep Cremation Volume, 113. 91. ​Suraphon Chulaphram Cremation Volume, 260–261. 92. ​Pranet Ritluechai Cremation Volume, 21–22. 93. ​From Siddhi Savetsila’s memorial note to Pranet in Pranet Ritluechai Cremation Volume, 57. 94. ​Interview with Manas Khantatatbumroong, February 21, 2011. 95. ​Suthachai, Saithan prawatsat prachathipatai thai, 143–145; Morell and Chai-­a nan, Po­ liti­cal Conflict in Thailand, 164–167. 96. ​Lobe, United States National Security Policy and Aid, 121, 123. 97. ​Lobe, United States National Security Policy and Aid, 119. 98. ​Thongchai, “Remembering/Silencing the Traumatic Past,” 244. 99. ​Ji Giles, “From the City, via the Jungle, to Defeat,” 191.

Chapter 5.  Mission Incomplete 1. ​Excerpts of Prime Minister Order No. 66/2523, “Policy of Strug­gle to Win Over Communism,” April 23, 1980, in Suchit, The Military in Thai Politics, 90, appendix 2. See Chaloemphon, Phraratchabanyat pongkan kankratham an pen khommiunit, 151–155. 2. ​Surachart, “From Dominance to Power Sharing,” 118–123; Chai-­a nan, Kusuma, and Suchit, From Armed Suppression, 67–77; Suchit, Military in Thai Politics, 68–76. “Khamsang samnak nayok ratthamontri thi 65/2525 rueang phen rukthang kanmuang (Order of the Office of the Prime Minister No. 65/2525, Plan for Po­liti­cal Offensive),” ordered on May 27, 1982. See Chaloemphon, Anticommunist Activities Act 1952, 156–167. 3. ​Baker and Phongpaichit, A History of Thailand, 144–150. 4. ​Surachart, “From Dominance to Power Sharing,” 74–77; Suchit, Military in Thai Politics, 14–16; Chai-­a nan, , Kusuma, and Suchit, From Armed Suppression, 118–122. 5. ​Borwornsak Uwanno, “Dynamics of Thai Politics,” King Prajadhipok’s Institute website, September 19, 2006, http://­w ww​.­kpi​.­ac​.­t h​/­media ​_­kpiacth​/­pdf​/­M10​_ ­28​.­pdf. 6. ​A nderson, “Studies in the Thai State”; Handley, The King Never Smiles; McCargo, “Network Monarchy and Legitimacy Crises in Thailand”; Hewison, “Monarchy and Demo­ cratisation,” 58–74; Kobkua, Kings, Country and Constitutions; Kobkua, “Monarchy and Constitutional Change”; Ockey, “Monarch, Monarchy, Succession and Stability in Thailand”; Ivarsson and Isager, Saying the Unsayable; Kershaw, Monarchy in South-­East Asia, 136–153. 7. ​Handley, The King Never Smiles, 19–25. 8. ​Thongchai, “Toppling Democracy,” 21. 9. ​This section of the chapter is derived, in part, from Hyun, “Mae Fah Luang.” 10. ​Mae Fah Luang Foundation u ­ nder Royal Patronage, “Founder,” accessed December 17, 2020, http://­w ww​.­maefahluang​.­org​/­​?­page​_­id​=­41. Layton wrote an almost identical story about the origin of Mae Fah Luang in her 1968 article, “Royal ­Mother from the Sky.” 11. ​Supharat, Phrama malaisokla lueangsuk, 2:562–564.

Notes to Pages 140–148   195 12. ​Former BPP members say that it was the BPP who began calling the princess ­mother somdetya in the mid-1960s. See “Tha song pen ying kua bidonmanda tamruat trawen chaidaen,” 6. 13. ​Mae Fah Luang Foundation, Doi Tung Development Proj­ect, 3. 14. ​Tochodo sadudi, 210; Duai chongrak lae pakdi, 84–89, 112–114. 15. ​Sangwon, “Munithi kongthun kankuson somdetphra,” 54–55. 16. ​Princess M ­ other’s Charities Fund of Thailand, Inc., pamphlet (n.p., n.d.). The Link ­family has owned one of the oldest companies in Thailand and the forebears of Herbert Link ­were the official pharmacists to the Thai royal f­ amily in the late nineteenth c­ entury. Now, Herald Link, a son of Herbert Link’s b ­ rother, is the chairman of the PMCF Foundation as well as the B. Grimm Group in Thailand. See the details from B. Grimm Group, “History” and “Princess ­Mother’s Charities Fund of Thailand,” webpage, accessed December  17, 2020, https://­ bgrimmgroup​.­com​/­history/ and https://­bgrimmgroup​.­com​/­our​-­social​-­contribution​/­education​ -­livelihood​/­princess​-­mothers​-­charities​-­f und​-­of​-­t hailand​/­. 17. ​Sangwon, “Munithi kongthun kankuson somdetphra,” 54, 57. Betty Dumaine School History presented by the School Principal to the author on July 3, 2010, in Phayao province. 18. ​See the detailed information on the Mae Fah Luang Foundation u ­ nder Royal Patronage website, accessed December 17, 2020, http://­w ww​.­maefahluang​.­org​/­​?­p​=­644, and the Princess Srinagarindra Award Foundation website, http://­w ww​.­princess​-­srinagarindraaward​.­org​/­en. 19. ​Manas, “Rongrian chaokhao lae prachachon,” 232. 20. ​Anuson khun ying udomlak siyanon, no pagination. 21. ​Wiphat Wipunlakon Cremation Volume, 85. 22. ​Manas, “Rongrian chaokhao lae prachachon,” 232. 23. ​Dumaine and Layton, Somdetphra boromratchachonani, 48–49; Manas, “Kan songkhro chaokhao nai phak nuea,” 12–13. 24. ​Layton, “Royal ­Mother from the Sky,” 7. 25. ​Vasit, In His Majesty’s Footsteps; Prakan, “Tam roi phrayukhonlabat.” 26. ​Thongchai, “­Others Within,” 44. 27. ​Bureau of the Royal House­hold, Sadet praphatton ma pen khrongkan phraratchadamri. 28. ​Prakan, “Tam roi phrayukhonlabat,” 179–183; Chanida, Khrongkan annueang ma chak phraratchadamri, 133–134; Grossman and Faulder, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, 116–118, 127. 29. ​Grossman and Faulder, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, 117. 30. ​Chanida, Khrongkan annueang ma chak phraratchadamri, 140–141. 31. ​Grossman and Faulder, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, 142–143. 32. ​Connors, “Article of Faith,” 149. 33. ​Thak, Thailand, xiii, 100–106; Hewison and Kengkij, “ ‘Thai-­Style Democracy,’ ” 187. 34. ​Zimmerman, “A Visit with the King and Queen of Thailand,” 57–59. 35. ​“Royal Wisdom,” Bangkok Post, accessed June 27, 2013, http://­w ww​.­bangkokpost​.­com​ /­60yrsthrone​/­royalwisdom​/­index​.­html. 36. ​“Give More, Take Less: An Interview with His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej, Kingdom of Thailand,” Leaders, April–­June 1982, repr. FCCT, The King of Thailand in World Focus, 160–161. 37. ​“King Bhumibol: Politics Is a Filthy Business,” Far Eastern Economic Review, October 18, 1974, repr. FCCT, The King of Thailand in World Focus, 47. Thongchai, “Toppling Democracy,” 20. 38. ​Grossman and Faulder, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, 130.

196   Notes to Pages 148–159 39. ​Thongchai, “Toppling Democracy,” 20, 23. 40. ​Grossman and Faulder, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, 134. 41. ​Borwornsak, “Dynamics of Thai Politics.” 42. ​Zimmerman, “A Visit with the King and Queen of Thailand,” 58. 43. ​Marks, “The Thai Monarchy u ­ nder Siege.” 4 4. ​Puey “Vio­lence and the Military Coup,” 4, 8. 45. ​Grossman and Faulder, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, 135–137. 46. ​Suchit, Military in Thai Politics, 70–73. 47. ​Thongchai, “Toppling Democracy,” 25–28. 48. ​Foundation of King Rama Nine, the G ­ reat, “About Us,” webpage, accessed December 17, 2020, https:// ­belovedking5d​.­w ixsite​.­com​/­myking ​/ ­blank​-­5. 49. ​Kobkua, Kings, Country and Constitutions, 149. 50. ​Pattana, In Defense of the Thai-­Style Democracy, 4. 51. ​Tarr, “The Nature of Military Intervention,” 44. 52. ​Connors, “When the Walls Come Crumbling Down,” 661; Thongchai, “Toppling Democracy,” 21. 53. ​Research notes from Tak, August 7, 2010. 54. ​“Royal Wisdom.” 55. ​Streckfuss, “The Intricacies of Lese-­Majesty,” 129. 56. ​Interview with Manas Khantatatbumroong, January 24, 2011. 57. ​Bowie, Rituals of National Loyalty, 8, 21–23. 58. ​Excerpts of Prime Minister Order No. 65/2525, “Plan for Po­liti­cal Offensive,” in Suchit, Military in Thai Politics, 96, appendix 3. 59. ​Surachart, “From Dominance to Power Sharing,” 133–140. 60. ​Athit, Kan chai tochodo khong boko. thahan sungsut. 61. ​Charoenchit, Naew khuamkhit nai kanchai tochodo khong krasuang mahatthai. 62. ​Sisippi rongrian tochodo, 63; Manas, Prawat kongbanchakan, 36. 63. ​Interview with Manas Khantatatbumroong, May 3, 2011. Manas said that the BPP has a right to interrogate (suepsuan) but no right to investigate and take in charge/arrest (sopsuan) suspects. 6 4. ​Research notes, June 11, 2010, and September 3, 2010. 65. ​BPP Regional Subdivision 34, Sunkanrian rongrian tamruat trawen chaidaen. 66. ​From an internal report on BPP schools and students in academic year 2013 provided by the BPP Headquarters via email. 67. ​BPP Headquarters, Administrative Subdivision, Rai-­ngan sathanphap kamlangphon. 68. ​Research notes from Chiang Mai, September 3, 2010. 69. ​Interview with Manas Khantatatbumroong, May 3, 2011. 70. ​BPP Third Regional Division Headquarters, Prawat khong rongrian tamruat trawen chaidaen, 3. 71. ​Wassana Nanuam, “Princess Retires as Special Commander,” Bangkok Post, September  30, 2015, https://­w ww​.­bangkokpost​.­com​/­t hailand​/­general​/­712168​/­princess​-­retires​-­a s​ -­special​-­commander. 72. ​Kershaw, Monarchy in South-­East Asia, 141. 73. ​Phra in Thai refers to both a Buddhist monk and the royalty. 74. ​Ladawan, Kan hai kansueksa dek lae yawachon, 9, 13. 75. ​Interview with four BPP civic action officers, August 4, 2010.

Notes to Pages 160–170   197 7 6. ​Research notes from Chiang Mai, November 13, 2010. 77. ​Research notes from Phayao, July 6, 2010. 78. ​Research notes from Chiang Rai, July 1, 2010. 79. ​Research notes from Tak, September 22, 2010, and December 28, 2010. 80. ​Research notes from Tak, December 29, 2010. 81. ​Ladawan, Kan hai kansueksa dek lae yawachon, 9. 82. ​Interview with a BPP civic action officer, September 24, 2010. The BPP teachers’ relationship with the villa­gers and their delinquency is also observed by Mukdawan, “The Borders Within,” 9–17. 83. ​In some cases, but not always, if BPP teachers have accumulated enough c­ areer experience and educational qualifications, then for the sake of a smooth transition, the Ministry of Education hires ­t hose teachers to continue working in the transferred BPP schools. 84. ​Ladawan, Kan hai kansueksa dek lae yawachon, 16–17.

Conclusion 1. ​Gilman, Mandarins of the F ­ uture, 3. 2. ​Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, 2. 3. ​Anderson “Studies in the Thai State,” 198–211. 4. ​Kobkua, Kings, Country and Constitutions, 180. 5. ​Hobsbawm, “Inventing Traditions,” 10. Emphasis in original. 6. ​McCargo, “Network Monarchy,” 501. 7. ​McCargo, “Network Monarchy,” 504, 506. 8. ​Hewison and Kengkij, “ ‘Thai-­Style Democracy,’ ” 180–181, 198; Thongchai, “Antidemo­ cratic Roots.” 9. ​Robinson, ­Korea’s Twentieth-­Century Odyssey, 175. 10. ​K im, “Conclusion: The Post-­Park Era,” in Kim and Vogel, The Park Chung Hee Era, 629–631. 11. ​Emily Rauhala, “History’s Child,” Time, December 17, 2012, http://­content​.­time​.­com​ /­time​/­subscriber​/­article​/­0,33009,2130926,00​.­html. 12. ​F loyd Whaley, “30 Years ­a fter Revolution, Some Filipinos Yearn for ‘Golden Age’ of Marcos,” New York Times, February 23, 2016, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2016​/­02​/­24​/­world​/­asia​ /­30​-­years​-­a fter​-­revolution​-­some​-­fi lipinos​-­yearn​-­for​-­golden​-­age​-­of​-­marcos​.­html.

Postscript 1. ​For analy­sis of the deployment of the BPP in Bangkok in 2020, see Hyun, “Why Are the Border Patrol Police in Bangkok Now?” Jino Motors of South K ­ orea exported at least four ­water cannon vehicles to the Royal Thai Police in early 2020, according to the author’s phone conversation with com­pany staff, October 20, 2020. 2. ​“Princess Sirindhorn Sent to Hospital ­after Accident,” Khaosod En­glish, January 12, 2011, https://­w ww​.­k haosodenglish​.­com​/­news​/­2021​/­01​/­12​/­princess​-­sirindhorn​-­sent​-­to​-­hospital​-­after​ -­fall​-­accident​/­. 3. ​­Human Rights Watch, “Descent into Chaos: Thailand’s 2010 Red Shirt Protests and the Government Crackdown,” May  3, 2011, https://­w ww​.­hrw​.­org​/­report​/­2011​/­05​/­03​/­descent​ -­chaos​/­t hailands​-­2010​-­red​-­shirt​-­protests​-­a nd​-­government​-­crackdown.

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Index

Accelerated Rural Development (ARD), 56 Allen W. Dulles, 22–23, 35, 88–89 anticommunism, 3–4, 12; for the BPP, 162; monarchy as a symbol, 134, 148–149; Radio Coup, 22, 43; Thai monarchy’s view, 44, 47 anticommunist: counterinsurgency, 12, 16, 51, 60, 80, 137, 162, 163–164; modernization, 5, 10, 12, 16, 58, 60, 80–81, 137–138, 162–164; nationbuilding, 16, 111, 145; raids in Thailand, 21, 44 “anticommunist bastion,” 10, 15, 23, 95, 109, 138 autonomous history, 8–9

nationalism, 5, 12, 162; schoolteacher, 54, 74, 159, 161; in TNPD, 130–132 Border Patrol Police civic action, 33, 39, 42, 62–80, 138, 152–154, 157, 162, 164; in Laos, 101–102; royal involvement, 46–47, 59, 140, 142–144, 154; US support, 53–58; for Village Scout, 115–116, 120 Border Patrol Police school (BPP school), 41–42, 46, 60, 62, 65, 73–75, 113–115, 140–142, 151, 154; failure in assimilation, 76–80; in numbers, 183n131, 184n150; problems with the BPP teachers, 159–161; role, 75–76; study center, 156 Border Provincial Police, 37–39, 42 Border Security Volunteer Team (BSVT), 67, 69, 114, 141

Bhubing Palace, 46, 178n166 black panther (suea dam), name for Police Aerial Reinforcement Unit, 36–37, 98; fiction, 176n121 border, 33, 133, 162, 163; human border, 5, 12, 61, 76, 80, 82, 135, 162, 184n147; of Thainess, 60, 80, 15, 163 Bordercraft project, 66, 81, 142 Border Defense Police (BDP), 32–33, 35, 87, 91, 111–112, 126, 131, 176n96 Border Information Center (BIC), 41, 73, 89–90, 98 Border Patrol Police (BPP): ambiguous force, 153–157, 162; formation, 26, 32–33; Gendarme Police Force, 39, 176n98, 177n131; October 6 Massacre, 1, 16, 83, 110, 120, 123–126, 129, 131–133; present problems, 155–159; missionary of

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA): after 1957 in Thailand, 36–37, 52–56; BPP civic action, 40, 62, 70, 73; formation in the US, 18–19, 22–23; forming the BPP/ PARU, 27–35; October 6 Massacre, 134; with monarchy, 44, 46, 146; with PARU in Laos, 83, 93, 100–103, 106; with PARU in Thailand, 51, 85, 88–89, 51, 95–99 Chan Angsuchot, 37, 74–75, 79, 112 Charoenrit Chamratromran, 40–46, 55, 91, 110–112, 115–116, 125–132 Chinese communist, 21, 23, 40, 54, 57, 70 Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, KMT), 29, 32, 40 Chulachomklao Royal Thai Military Academy, 111–113, 158 civic action: as a civilian counterinsurgency, 56–59, 64, 77, 81, 94, 111

221

222  Index Cold War: “Cold War lens,” 6, 168; ideologies, 7, 164; nation-building, 3, 12; studies, 6, 13; system, 2, 4–5, 9, 11, 163 Committee to Aid Hill Tribe People and People Far from Communication, 73, 177n131 Communist Party of Thailand (CPT), 121 Communist Suppression Operations Command (CSOC), 57, 67, 81, 114, 180n45 Counterinsurgency Training Center (CITC), 58, 70 coup in 1957 (Sarit Thanarat’s coup), 25, 33, 36, 83, 89, 109 coup in 1976 (October 6 coup), 6, 134, 149 “Decade of Development,” 50, 54 decolonization, 6–7, 9, 81, 164 democratic king, 146, 148, 166 democratization, 13, 109, 121–122, 133, 138, 165–166; by military, 24–25. See also October 14 movement, 1973 development for security, 49, 55, 76, 137, 159, 164 development king, 47, 146 dhammaraja, 43, 139 Dwight D. Eisenhower, 22–23, 49, 57, 92–93, 95, 97 Erawan camp, Lopburi, 84–87, 91 Headquarters 333 (Combined Task Force 333), 99, 102, 105, 188n79 highland minority (“hill tribe,” chao khao), 46, 58, 139, 140, 151, 184n137; BPP’s aid to, 39, 41, 54, 57; opium-related, 60, 62, 70–73; othering, 57, 61–62, 73–80, 144; royal aid to, 46, 63, 67, 156; security-related, 29, 40, 69, 89, 114; underdevelopment, 58, 64–66, 72, 165 home scholars, 7–8, 172n23 Huai Sat Yai, 88–89, 108 indigenization, x, 2, 5, 10–13, 36, 60, 80–83, 109, 110, 138, 163, 166, 168; by the Thai elites, 13, 47–48, 49, 60, 81–82, 134–136, 138, 150, 162; compared to localization,

9, 12; in missiology, 10–11; in the Cold War context, 5, 15; meaning, 2, 10, 11–12 insurgency: of the ethnic minorities, 67, 77 International Cooperation Administration (ICA), 50; Civil Police Administration (CPA), 52, 54 “invented tradition,” 146, 165 James William (Bill) Lair, 30, 85, 87, 97, 99, 111, 175n82 John F. Kennedy, 50, 54, 92–94, 102–103 kansadet (royal visits), 139, 141, 145–146, 158–159, 162, 170 khon chuea (bad people), 118, 125 King Bhumibol Adulyadej, 5, 97, 110, 113, 139, 157; nation-builder, 13, 145–151, 166; support for the BPP/PARU, 33, 35, 43–48, 59, 63, 66, 132; with PARU, 31, 88–89; with Village Scout, 116, 119–120, 122. See also monarchy Klai Kangwon Palace, 31, 35, 46, 87, 113 Kong Le, 93, 98, 101 Korean War: for Phibun, 20–21; peace movement in Thailand, 22 Lao neutrality, 94, 101, 103, 179n30 Lèse-majesté, 4, 125, 135, 151, 165, 167 Long Cheng, 100–101, 104–106 Mae Fah Luang: legend, 139; Mae Fah Luang Foundation, 66, 139–140, 142 missionary: missionization, 10–11; Protestant, 11 Mobile Development Unit (MDU), 54, 56, 138 modernization, 49, 72, 81–82; criticism, 50–51; for developmental dictatorship, 3, 13; in theory, 2, 49–51, 60, 81, 164 monarchy, 2, 5, 35, 42–48, 137–139, 154, 162–163; BPP civic action, 54, 58, 61, 70–71, 79, 81, 83, 109; role, 156–158; royalist network, 12–13, 16, 166; Village Scout, 110, 113, 115, 125, 127, 129, 133–136. See also King Bhumibol Adulyadej; Princess Mother Sinakharinthra; Princess Sirindhorn; Queen Sirikit

Index  223 Nakhon Siwanit, 36, 86 Naresuan camp, Hua Hin, 31, 35, 86–88, 91, 100–101, 104, 108, 111, 126–127 Naresuan Committee, 28, 83 nation-building, 2, 49, 80, 82, 163–164; postcolonial, 2–4, 12, 14, 168 nation-state, 164–165 Ngo Dinh Diem, 94 October 14 movement, 1973, 108, 122, 133, 148 October 6 Massacre, 1976 (hok tula), 1, 4, 16, 83, 110, 120, 123–128, 132–135, 148–149, 169–170 Office of Public Safety (OPS), 5, 49, 52 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 17–19, 27–28, 85 opium, 60, 66, 70–72 Order 65/2525, 137, 152–153 Order 66/2523, 16, 137–138, 149, 152–153 othering, 13, 61–62, 80, 164 Pathet Lao, 92–93, 98, 103, 105–106, 126 People’s Party revolution, 1932, 17, 42–43 phakchi roi na (window dressing), 159, 161–162 Phao Siyanon, 18, 24–25; forming the BPP, 26–36; forming the PARU, 90–91, 98; rival with Sarit, 36–39, 45; with Charoenrit Chamratromran, 112–113, 132 Phibun Songkhram, 13, 15, 17–21, 24–25, 42–43, 44, 45, 83 Phoumi Nosavan, 93–95, 97–98, 100, 103 phrabarami (royal charisma), 129, 145, 147–148, 151, 162 pit thong lang phra (do good by stealth), 158–159, 161–162 Plaine des Jarres (PDJ), 93, 102, 106 Point Four program, 4, 19–21 police: as a counterinsurgency force, 28–29, 31–32, 51–53; as a “domestic missionary,” 10 Police Aerial Reinforcement Unit (PARU), 16, 28, 30–31, 35–38, 45–46, 59, 73, 83–84, 124, 126–127, 161; civic action, 89, 108; formation, 84–88; in Laos, 97–107;

in Saritsena camp, 100, 107; October 6 Massacre, 110, 127–128, 133; reorganization, 89–91, 100 Police Field Force (PFF), 26–27 Pranet Ritluechai, 90–91, 97, 99, 108, 126, 132 Prem Tinsulanonda, 1, 16, 110–111, 116, 124, 129, 137–138, 165–166, 193n81 Pridi Banomyong, 17, 22, 43 Prince Boun Oum na Champasak, 93, 100 Princess Mother’s Charities Fund of Thailand (PMCF), 62, 143 Princess Mother Sinakharinthra, 46, 54, 62–63, 66–67, 69, 75, 81, 115–116, 126, 128–129, 139–146, 182n101, 193n78, 195n12 Princess Mother’s Medical Volunteers (PMMV), 63, 81 Princess Sirindhorn, 75, 139–140, 156–161, 169–170 Prince Vajiralongkorn, 108, 190n116; King Vajiralongkorn, 157 progress, 13, 159, 161, 163–166 psychological operation, 23, 28, 47 Public Safety Division (PSD), 52–57, 62, 64, 67, 72, 80–81, 134 Queen Sirikit, 31, 35, 45, 75, 88, 116, 122–123, 139, 146, 150 rapsadet (receiving royal visits), 159–161 Red Shirt Protest 2010, 14, 169–170 Remote Area Security Development (RASD), 53–54, 56–57, 62, 64, 72, 74–76 royal donations, 142–144 royalist nationalism, 49, 60–61, 138, 150–151, 154, 162–163, 165 royal legends, 139–144 royal projects, 64, 66–67, 73, 79, 81, 139–140, 145–146, 156–162, 164 run (class), 84–86, 121–123, 185nn3–4 Saiyud Kerdphol, 97, 111, 113–114 saktina (feudalist system), 43–44 Sarit Thanarat, 13, 15, 18, 24–25, 35–36, 37–39, 45, 70–71, 81, 92, 94–97, 109, 137, 166

224  Index SEA Supply, 30–31, 35, 73, 85–86, 88–89, 175n70, 175n79; advisors, 185n20 Second Indochina War, 16, 57, 106, 109, 133; war in Laos, 53, 56, 83, 92; Vietnam War, 7, 96 semi-coloniality, 9 Seri (Free) Thai movement, 17, 28 Shan States mission, 18, 112 Sisuk Mahinthonrathep, 26, 126, 131, 194n90 SKY team, 102, 105, 107, 189n91, 189n93 Somkhuan Harikul, 87, 110–111, 113–116, 124, 129, 132 Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), 23–24, 54, 93, 95–96, 112 Special Guerrilla Unit (SGU), 94, 101, 103–104, 107 Suraphon Chulaphram, 30, 34, 40, 91, 107, 112, 126, 131–132 Territorial Defense Department, 26–27, 33, 131 Territorial Defense Police (TDP), 30, 32–33, 83, 176n96 Thai counterinsurgency era, 1, 15–16, 53, 57, 59–60, 82, 110, 162, 163; Gun-Firing day, 15, 54–55 Thai National Police Department (TNPD): after 1957 coup, 37, 39, 91; before 1957 coup, 26–28, 30–32; counterinsurgency, 58; support for the PARU, 84–87, 90; under Phao-Charoenrit, 111–112; US support, 53. See also Phao Siyanon Thainess, 135, 151, 162, 163, 165

Thai-style democracy, 13, 129–130, 135, 138, 147–148, 150, 162, 165–166 Thai volunteers in Laos, 106 Thanom Kittikachorn, 24, 28, 55–56, 58–59, 70, 99, 106, 108–109, 112, 123, 126, 138, 144, 148 United States Operations Mission (USOM), 1, 46–47, 134; to Laos, 101–103; to Thailand, 15–16 unity (samakhi), 13, 118–119, 123, 129, 148, 151, 163–166 Vang Pao, 83, 100–102, 105, 188n82 Viet Minh, 23, 29, 53, 55 Vietnamese soldiers: in Laos, 92, 94–95, 104–107, 126 Village Scout, 1, 16, 69, 135, 152–154, 157, 161, 165; characteristics, 119–121; democratic force, 129–130; expansion, 116–118, 122–123; founder Charoenrit, 111–113; founder Somkhuan, 111; formation, 113–116; October 6 Massacre, 110, 120, 123–126, 128, 132–133; royal visits and patronage, 115–116, 141–142; training, 128–131. See also October 6 Massacre Vithoon Yasawat, 105, 131, 188n79, 189n102, 194n89 Volunteer Defense Corps (VDC), 33 Walt Whitman Rostow, 50, 94, 103 William Donovan, 18, 23, 28, 34–35 Willis Bird, 28

About the Author

Sinae Hyun is a research professor at the Institute for East Asian Studies at Sogang University, South ­Korea. She gained her master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Wisconsin-­Madison. Her research interests include nationalism, the Cold War, ethnic minorities, counterinsurgency strategy, and the history of missionization and indigenization. She was a Mellon Fellow at the Institute for Eu­ro­pean, Rus­sian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University in 2012–2013. Her articles on the civic actions of the Thai Border Patrol Police and the identity politics of highland minorities have appeared in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Sojourn, Cold War History, and in an edited volume and online journals. She also writes and lectures on the history of Southeast Asia and Thailand in the Korean language. Currently, she is researching the history of American Protestant missionary activities in the intersections of the British and Chinese Empires and Southeast Asian kingdoms since the early nineteenth c­ entury.