Book Review

Tony Poe’s CIA War: A Secret War Waged by
His Paramilitary Army in Southeast Asia
By Richard Gough
Knox Press (July 1, 2024)
292 pages
Available in paperback and Kindle

A Well-Known Legend of a Secret War

By Marc Yablonka

Though much is surmised about the often infamously thought of CIA agent Anthony Poshepny, known to most in the US Intel community as Tony Poe, it took British author, the late Richard Gough, to write the book that reads like a play by play of Poe’s clandestine operations in Southeast Asia during the Cold War to set Poe’s record straight.

Gough does so by laying Poe’s ascendance to notoriety against shorter biographies of several of his fellow CIA agents and pilots who flew for Air America in Indochina during the Vietnam War, and the tangential battles fought during what was termed the secret war in Laos.

Gough, himself a veteran of the UK’s war in 1950s Malaya as a member of the Gurka Brigade, and later, the Parachute Regiment and Intelligence Corps, passed away mere weeks after his book Tony Poe’s CIA War (Knox Press, imprint of Permuted Press, New York, pp. 273, paperback $19.99, Kindle $9.99) was published. By delving into the extraordinary life of this paramilitary agent, Gough left us with a meticulously researched biography of a complex and controversial figure. Along with Hmong Royal Lao Army General Vang Pao, Poe was one of the key players in the war against communism and its emissaries in Laos, the Pathet Lao.

Controversies surround Poe’s life. Perhaps the one that is most often stated erroneously is that Poe was the model for the Colonel Kurtz character played by Marlon Brando in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now. Poe denied this. And Coppola denied it as well, stating instead that his model for the Brando character was US Army Special Forces Gen. Robert Rheault, who was accused of ordering the controversial 1969 murder of Thai Khac Chuyen, a South Vietnamese double agent, because the latter had compromised intelligence operations.

Another controversy, widely thought to be true, is that Poe ordered his Hmong hilltribe Special Guerilla Units during the secret war to bring him the ears of dead Pathet Lao cadres in exchange for monetary reward. It was purported that he horrified his superiors by sending them bags full of the ears. Poe only stopped the practice when he himself was mortified to learn that some Hmong SGUs fell into the practice of cutting off their own children’s ears, bringing them to Poe for financial gain.

“One [Air America] pilot, Richard Craft, recalled how Tony had his own system. `When visiting outposts, he would return to the aircraft with a bag with what looked like a string of apricots, and back at base, he emptied the contents into a green canvas bag nailed to the doorframe of his hut,’” Gough revealed.

The ear cutting may have been a tactic Poe picked up as a World War II Marine in the Solomon Islands of the Southwest Pacific with the 2nd Parachute Battalion, which was “carrying out hit and run raids, killing Japanese, and cutting off their ears as souvenirs,” according to Gough, who also paints a normal picture of Poe, telling us, “Apart from his university studies (at what is now San Jose State University in California, where he majored in history), Poe was a boxer, teetotaler, nonsmoker, popular with girls, and a practicing Roman Catholic.”

“His end-of-course evaluation may have described him as quick-thinking, irreverent, and independent—all the right qualities needed for the mission the CIA may have in mind for him,” Gough wrote in Tony Poe’s CIA War. “Some colleagues, however, may have thought him loud, bad tempered, and with no respect for authority,” Gough countered.

In 1952, Poe would add the Central Intelligence Agency to his résumé when he joined its Office of Policy Coordination, a covert action branch of the CIA, which did not admit to the branch’s existence until 1982. Nonetheless, Poe fit the OPC’s bill.

Another CIA front organization Poe was assigned to was the Bangkok-based Overseas Southeast Asia Supply, which provided military matériel to Kuomintang forces based in Burma. In 1958, Poe tried unsuccessfully to arrange a military uprising against Indonesian President Sukarno. From 1958 to 1960, he trained different groups while with the company.

According to Wikipedia.com, those included Tibetan Khampas and Hui Muslims for anti-government operations inside China.

Nine years and several clandestine operations in Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia later, Poe found himself in Laos, “The land of a million elephants and the white parasol.”

It’s important to note that within one year after Poe’s arrival in Laos, the 1962 Geneva Accords stipulated that Laos was to be a neutral country in the ongoing fight between Ho Chi Minh’s communist forces of North Vietnam and their Viet Cong “cousins” in South Vietnam, against the American-supported government in Saigon headed by Ngo Dinh Diem.

As Gough recounts for us in Tony Poe’s CIA War, “In 1962, fourteen countries signed the Declaration of Neutrality of Laos. The peace agreement required all foreign military personnel to leave Laos in 12 weeks. Nearly 800 US personnel crossed the Mekong River into Thailand while only 40 North Vietnamese soldiers from an estimated 7,000 [NVA] troops in Laos passed through the [International] Control Commission’s border checkpoint into Vietnam.”

It’s really here, in the last half of Gough’s book, that it becomes an engrossing narrative with graphic accounts of covert operations involving the 17,000 Hmong soldiers that Poe commanded from 1961 to 1970. It shows a man conflicted by war, yet addicted to the adrenaline rush of it at the same time.

He was also enveloped by the bizarre nature of the trappings of war.

He and fellow CIA agent Jack Shirley learned that a certain leftist neutralist Royal Lao Army commander paid regular visits to his favorite girl in a local Vientiane brothel. Shirley suggested to Poe that, with the girl’s cooperation, “the colonel could be terminated, with a smile on his face,” according to Gough.

“The girl agreed and told Shirley she would tell him when the colonel was next expected. On the appropriate evening, they saw his

Jeep arrive, and watched as he entered the bar. They spun a coin to see who would gun him down. Following the pair up the stairs, they waited in the corridor for a signal from the girl,” Gough wrote.

“The walls were thin with a gap at the top to allow air to circulate,” Gough continued, “and they could hear whispered pillow talk and heavy breathing. When the colonel was approaching the climax of his visit, they burst through the door. Poe’s weapon jammed and Shirley shot the colonel.”

The reality of the war soon set in.

Almost overnight,” Gough tells readers, “The skies over [CIA base] Long Tieng filled with planes bringing pallets of weapons, bullets, shells, mortars, and equipment. On the ramp, Poe was giving directions to the pilots or hurrying his teams to load choppers awaiting take off to restock the hilltop outposts.”

“When he first arrived in Laos, his role was to seek out new landing strips surrounding the ridgeways of the PDJ [Plain of Jars]. Now, using these airstrips, a very enthusiastic Poe took the war into enemy territory, airlifting his assault teams from hilltop to hilltop, liberating a 50-mile strip in Sam Neua Province to his outposts at Phou Pha Thi and Hong Non.”

Among the weaponry Tony Poe, the CIA, Air America, and the clandestine sheep-dipped US Air Force Ravens had at their disposal in the fight against the Pathet Lao and NVA communists, was the North American T-28 Trojan.

Of Air America’s use of the T-28, Gough wrote, “One morning Joe Hazen was among five Air America pilots called to a briefing to bring them up to date on the enemy threat moving down Route 7. All five had flown the T-28 and were trained in close support roles. When asked to volunteer to fly T-28s to bomb enemy convoys, they all enthusiastically agreed. The successful Tango program was born and the pilots became the A Team (A for American).”

“Early one morning while it was still dark,” Gough continued, “the five T-28s took a 20-minute flight to Wattay Airfield, where they were hooked up with 500 lb. bombs, rockets, and ammunition. In the early dawn they flew across the southwest corner of the PDJ. Seeing them fly over, Tony grabbed the radio mike and growled, `Go get em!’”

For all of his vitality, vim, and vigor for the smell of battle, at the end of his life, Tony Poe had become a beaten down man. He succumbed to complications from diabetes on June 27th, 2003 at the age of 78 at the San Francisco Veterans Medical Center.

Author Richard Gough tells us in his fascinating, action-packed biography Tony Poe’s CIA War that the evening of his funeral at St. Francis Catholic Church in Sonoma, Calif., 150 family, friends, colleagues, including Hmong, Air America pilots, and former CIA agents, celebrated a man who had put his life on the line for his country in far away places for 40 years. Gough’s book is a must-read that will enlighten anyone remotely attuned to the wars in Indochina, whether they fought there or not.