Tchepone Operation

The Tchepone Operation (19 October – 13 November 1970) was an interdiction campaign by the Royal Lao Armed Forces aimed at disrupting the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) supply line, the Ho Chi Minh trail. The pair of three-battalion Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored Royalist irregulars aimed at a communist garrison at Moung Phine, and the vital transshipment point of Tchepone. The Muang Phine thrust was fruitless. The Tchepone column stalled on Route 9 only 13 kilometers from the logistics center on 31 October. Between 1 and 10 November, the PAVN fiercely attacked while reinforced with nine antiaircraft guns and six mortars. The Royalist guerrillas retreated to base under cover of tactical air strikes by the Royal Lao Air Force and U.S. Air Force that inflicted heavy casualties on the PAVN, including close air support delivered within 20 meters of the Royalists. Analysis of the results of the Tchepone Operation convinced the CIA that regimental operations should replace multi-battalion ones.

Beginning in 1946, France began fighting the communist Viet Minh in French Indochina. The 1954 Geneva Agreements that ended that First Indochina War resulted in a neutral independent Kingdom of Laos. The Agreement specified all foreign military forces had to withdraw from Laos; the only exception was a residual French training mission. However, a North Vietnamese-backed insurrection had settled into northeastern Laos near their home border during the opium harvest season of 1953. After it failed to withdraw, the United States evaded the 1954 Agreement by filling the Programs Evaluation Office with purportedly civilian paramilitary instructors to support the Royal Lao Armed Forces. The Annamese Cordillera in southern Laos became the haven for a communist logistics network, the Ho Chi Minh trail. The communist war effort in South Vietnam depended on that supply route. In 1961, as the Battle of Vientiane upended the Royal Lao Government (RLG), Central Intelligence Agency espionage agent James William Lair designed a paramilitary program to train a guerrilla army of hill tribesmen to defend it.

...
Wikipedia