Legendary Burma-born CIA operative in Laos dead in Chiang Mai

Legendary Burma-born CIA operative in Laos dead in Chiang Mai
by -
Jim Andrews

Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – More than 100 Lahu, Wa and other hill tribe mourners packed Chiang Mai’s protestant Community Church on Monday night for the first of two funeral services for an American ex-CIA agent they had regarded as a trusted friend.

William ‘Bill’ Young, who it appears took his own life in Chiang Mai on Friday, was found dead with a gunshot wound to the head. One source said he was found with a gun in one hand and a crucifix in the other.

Burial services in Chiang Mai will reportedly include a 21-gun salute by the Free Burma Rangers, a group that provides cross-border medical services to Burmese refugees.

Young was born in a Shan village in Burma 76 years ago, into a renowned Christian missionary family. He grew up in Shan and Lahu villages, forging friendships and contacts that were later to prove invaluable when he worked for the CIA in America’s ‘secret war’ in Laos.

Bill Young’s grandfather had given up a relatively comfortable life in the US in the late 19th century to preach the Christian Gospel, and his work was carried on by his son Harold—Bill Young’s father. In the years following World War II and Mao Ze Dong’s Communist Party victory in China, Harold Young was enlisted to spy for the US in the southern Chinese provinces.

Bill Young followed his father into intelligence work for the US. The CIA was impressed by his knowledge of the terrain, traditions and languages of the region where the US was waging its ‘secret war’.

As the real war waged in neighboring Vietnam, Bill Young assembled a small army of Lahu and Wa tribesmen who were paid to disrupt North Vietnamese supplies passing along the section of the Ho Chi Minh Trail that passed through Laos.

Laos was officially neutral during the Vietnam War and the US operation on its territory was top secret, mostly organized by CIA operatives like Young.

In the early stages of the operation, Young was air-dropped into central Laos on a mission to seek out a suitable site for an air base. Touring the mountainous terrain on foot, he found a hidden valley near the Plain of Jars and the site, Long Cheng, rapidly grew into one of the busiest airfields in Southeast Asia and the base of a CIA-created airline called Air America.

Long Cheng appeared on no maps, yet a small city shot up around the airstrip.

“It had brothels and bars, casinos, fast food outlets—everything a serviceman could ask for,” Bill Young recalled during a series of long conversations at his rambling home on the outskirts of Chiang Mai.

He spoke openly about Air America’s involvement in the drugs trade that helped finance the CIA’s secret operations. Young parted company with the CIA in the late 1960s, reportedly because of disagreements over US policies in Southeast Asia.

Young’s base as a CIA operative was a comfortable house on the Thai banks of the Mekong River, opposite Laos. He liked to party, and his home became open house to a steady stream of air hostesses and nurses heading for the Air America base. He married one, but the marriage ended in divorce after his wife pressed him to return to a desk job in the US.

Back in Thailand, and following his departure from CIA service, he was snapped up by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The contacts he had built up as a CIA undercover agent in Laos proved invaluable—our long conversations were regularly interrupted by phone calls conducted in one of the four or five hill tribe languages Young spoke fluently.

Young worked closely with Thai anti-narcotics authorities, and the information he received from his contacts within Laos and Burma reportedly contributed to several large seizures of smuggled opium and heroin.

He was also a close friend of organizations battling human rights abuses in the border states of Burma. Among the wreaths that swathed his coffin in Chiang Mai’s Community Church were floral tributes from the Free Burma Rangers and a shadowy organization called ‘The Unknown Warriors.’

In our long talks, Young never sought to play down the brutality of his work for the CIA, and several deaths lay on his Christian conscience. ‘Killing was part of the job,’ he once said. ‘It was often a case of killing or being killed yourself.’

One of his missions was to hunt down the killers responsible for the Chiang Mai abduction and murder of the wife of a personal friend, who was head of the DEA in Northern Thailand.

The young woman was bundled, with her daughter, into a song thaew pickup taxi and driven to a city market, where police cornered the vehicle and tried for several hours to negotiate with the driver.

‘The driver held a gun to the woman’s head the whole time, and we think that he grew tired after several hours and let it slip. It went off, killing her instantly. Her young daughter survived.’

The infamous drug lord Kuhn Sa figured on Young’s list of suspects in the abduction and murder, but the trail grew cold in the mountains of Northern Thailand and the case was never solved.

Kuhn Sa remained a will-o’-the-wisp renegade, eluding his pursuers, finally ending his days under house arrest in Rangoon—well out of the reach of Young and the DEA.

Despite his fallout with the CIA, Young looked back nostalgically at his years with the agency. Pride of place in his Chiang Mai living room was given to a faded photograph of a muscular young man in a jungle setting, a machete in his hand.

‘Yes, that’s me,” smiled Young. “Those were the days…’