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Interview with Ernest C. Kuhn Library of Congress Interview with Ernest C. Kuhn The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project Foreign Assistance Series ERNEST C. KUHN Interviewed by: Arthur J. Dommen Initial interview date: March 25, 1995 Copyright 1998 ADST Q: Would you like to tell us some basic facts about how you got to Laos? First of all your name and what you were doing when you were sent to Laos. From the Peace Corps to USAID, 1963-1965 KUHN: Okay. My name is Ernest C. Kuhn, Ernie Kuhn. I was in the Peace Corps in Thailand from 1963 through mid-1965 working in a...I'm going to use the politically incorrect term of Meo rather than Hmong because at the time we are talking about no one referred to anyone as Hmong...I was living in a Meo village up near the Thai/Lao border in Loei province. While I was in the Peace Corps two of our directors in Bangkok had been AID employees in Laos and were familiar with the program and basically recruited me or suggested that I might be interested in working up in Laos. They set up a trip for myself and four other Peace Corps volunteers the summer of 1965. We went up to Laos, were interviewed and I was offered a job immediately on contract at first and later on became a full Foreign Service officer. Rural Development Division (RDD), 1965 Interview with Ernest C. Kuhn http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000646 Library of Congress I arrived in Laos to work in September 1965. I was assigned to the Rural Development Division (RDD). Under the RDD there were mainly three different sections or subdivisions within that division. One was the cluster program. A cluster program was straight community development work. Working with groups of villages, hence the name clusters, anywhere from three to five villages. The AID employees, or in many cases they were IVS (International Voluntary Services) people, lived in one of the villages and worked in the cluster. The second major office in RDD was the Forward Area Program. These again were either AID or IVS people who lived in one village which was in an area of general intermittent fighting or least civic or military tension. Hence the term, forward area, they were a little bit forward of the mainstream Lao village security. Q: What province was this? KUHN: Well, these were all over. There were cluster and forward area people in Sayaboury, in Savannakhet, outside of Saravane, the Pakse area, Muong Soui, generally all over. Refugee Work, 1965-1966 Q: Did you move around from one to the other? KUHN: I wasn't in the Forward Area Program, but they didn't really move around. They would be in one village basically conducting political, social and agricultural programs and things like that. Those people were in a more exposed area than people who were working in the clusters which was just general rural development work. The third section, the one that got all the raised eyebrows in Vientiane, and we were all suspected of not being AID employees. In fact, people would say to our face, “You people are all CIA agents and not AID people.” That section was the refugee relief program. This Interview with Ernest C. Kuhn http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000646 Library of Congress was the program that by 1966 was almost driving the AID program there. The refugee relief program was broad and included the whole school system, the medical system and, of course, the relief part. After the cease fire of 1973, the attention turned from relief to more resettlement. So by the early '70s we were sort of half relief and half resettlement and by 1973-74-75, we were strictly trying to resettle people. But the refugee relief work was the most dangerous, the most exposed. We had at Sam Thong at various times, where I was assigned, anywhere from three to five people; Luang Prabang usually had one or two people and Ban Houei Sai had either one or two. Later on, people were assigned to Savannakhet and Pakse in refugee relief. When I got there the primary emphasis was in the north. The program had been started by a man by the name of Edgar “Pop” Buell. Pop, along with whatever support he could get from the CIA, whatever support he could get from any source available, really started the refugee relief program and, of course, later on AID picked it up and it became a huge operation. Q: Was he still in the country when you arrived? KUHN: Oh, yes. I was interviewed by Pop and hired by Pop. He was the one who had the final say as to who was sent to Sam Thong. He was there until Sam Thong fell in March 1970. Later on, he retired but still stayed in Vientiane until 1975 when he went down to Bangkok. He died in Manila visiting a mutual friend there. So, Pop was quite the character. There were two people who were widely instrumental in promoting the refugee relief program and really making it a success, at least we considered it a success at the time. The other man was Dr. Charles Weldon, “Jiggs” Weldon, and his wife, Dr. Pat McCready, the Field Marshal. These two people along with Pop were able to put together an integrated program with medical relief, educational facilities, agricultural programs that was really quite remarkable for its breadth and scope, the number of people that we served given the conditions that we served under. Q: Do you have any general number of people you were serving? Interview with Ernest C. Kuhn http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000646 Library of Congress KUHN: Well, there were times when we were feeding well over 300,000 people. Now, of course, that included people in the south, too. I suppose in the north at any given time we probably had upward to 200,000 or more people. Those people were mostly served by air. We had an extraordinary system using both Air America and Continental Air Services. People don't really give much credit to Continental because the popular perception is that Air America was the CIA airline and did all the work. But, in fact, a major part of the work was done by Continental Air Services. Bob Six who was the owner of Continental Airlines had started up this subsidiary to get a piece of the pie. Bob Six and his wife, Audrey Meadows who played the wife of Jackie Gleason on the Honeymooners, took a personal interest in the program. In fact, they would themselves come over to Sam Thong and even donated a jeep to Pop back in the days when AID was not giving him any support. So Continental was a major player. Later on, there were other smaller airlines, helicopter airlines. I can't think of names right now but there was a series of little airlines who got contracts with AID. The way these contracts worked both with Continental and Air America was on a cost sharing basis. Even though Air America was a proprietary airline somebody had to pay the bills. So, once or twice a year there were these huge meetings where the AID contracting people and the Air America contracting people, the Requirements Office, which supported the government troops, and the CIA representatives all sat down and tried to figure out who was going to pay what portion of the bills. It got sort of arcane and bizarre because at any given air drop, at any given location we might have SGU troops which would get support from the CIA, we might have refugees who got support from AID, we might have dependents of FAR troops who would get support through the RO (Requirements Office). So these things became rather bizarre in trying to split up the costs of the aircraft. Q: This raises an interesting question. How much of these costs were actually secret? Presumably the AID budget was all public. Interview with Ernest C. Kuhn http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000646 Library of Congress KUHN: Many of these things were simply lumped under the category of refugee relief, AID. I honestly don't know what was published in the way of air costs, if anything. That was something I wasn't ever involved in and as long as the planes kept flying and the rice kept dropping, I was happy. Q: Who was the AID director at the time you arrived in Laos? KUHN: When I arrived there, it was Joe Mendenhall. Ambassador [William H.] Sullivan had just arrived not too long before I had gotten there. I guess Doug Blaufarb was the station chief. Q: He later produced a voluminous document on counterinsurgency in Laos. KUHN: I have seen it so many times referenced but have never gotten a copy of it yet. Q: It is practically unreadable. It is so technical. Not the sort of thing you would read at bedtime. KUHN: Okay, I didn't know anything in Laos was all that technical. Q: Well, organizational rather than technical. A whole series of acronyms, etc. KUHN: Oh. Q: So Sam Thong was your first assignment in Laos? KUHN: Yes, I was there until medevaced out in January 1970 with a suspected ulcer. Q: Can you say a little bit about what was there at the time you arrived? KUHN: Before I answer that, let me go back to one other point in terms of the refugee relief program and being hired.
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