Kenneth Conboy – författare

Time after time during the Vietnam War, the United States sent Vietnamese spies and commandos behind enemy lines only to have them killed, captured or compromised into reporting back false information. This is a sobering account of the disastrous secret programme, run first by the CIA and then by the Department of Defense. It aims to reveal a previously hidden side to a frustrating war and reclaims the lost lives of those who were sacrificed for so little gain.

In the towering mountains of northern India, a chilling chapter was written in the history of international espionage. After the Chinese detonated their first nuclear test in 1964, America and India, which had just fought a border war with its northern neighbour, were both concerned. The CIA knew it needed more information on China's growing nuclear capability but had few ways of peeking behind the ""Bamboo Curtain"". Because of the extreme remoteness of Chinese testing grounds, conventional surveillance in this pre-satellite era was next to impossible. The solution to this intelligence dilemma was a joint American-Indian effort to plant a nuclear-powered sensing device on a high Himalayan peak in order to listen into China and monitor its missile launches. It was not a job that could be carried out by career spies, requiring instead the special skills possessed only by accomplished mountaineers. For this mission, cloaks and daggers were to be replaced by crampons and ice axes. This text chronicles the details of these death-defying expeditions sanctioned by US and Indian intelligence, telling the story of clandestine climbs and hair-raising exploits. Led by Indian mountaineer Mohan S. Kohli, conqueror of Everest, the mission was beset by hazardous climbs, weather delays, aborted attempts and even missing radioactive materials that may or may not still pose a contamination threat to Indian rivers. Kept under wraps for over a decade, these operations came to light in 1978 and have been long rumoured among mountaineers. ""Spies in the Himalayas"" provides an inside look at a CIA mission from participants who weren't agency employees, drawing on diaries from several of the climbers to offer impressions not usually recorded in covert operations. A host of photographs and maps puts readers on the slopes as the team attempts repeatedly to plant the sensor on a Himalayan summit.

Defiance against Chinese oppression has been a defining characteristic of Tibetan life for more than four decades, symbolized most visibly by the much revered Dalai Lama. But the story of Tibetan resistance weaves a far richer tapestry than anyone might have imagined. Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison reveal how America's Central Intelligence Agency encouraged Tibet's revolt against China—and eventually came to control its fledgling resistance movement. While the CIA's presence in Tibet has been alluded to in other works, the authors provide the first comprehensive, as well as most compelling account of this little known agency enterprise.The CIA's Secret War in Tibet takes readers from training camps in the Colorado Rockies to the scene of clandestine operations in the Himalayas, chronicling the agency's help in securing the Dalai Lama's safe passage to India and subsequent initiation of one of the most remote covert campaigns of the Cold War. Establishing a rebel army in the northern Nepali kingdom of Mustang and a para-commando force in India designed to operate behind Chinese lines, Conboy and Morrison provide previously unreported details about secret missions undertaken in extraordinarily harsh conditions. Their book greatly expands on previous memoirs by CIA officials by putting virtually every major agency participant on record with details of clandestine operations. It also calls as witnesses the people who managed and fought in the program—including Tibetan and Nepalese agents, Indian intelligence officers, and even mission aircrews.Conboy and Morrison take pains to tell the story from all perspectives, particularly that of the former Tibetan guerrillas, many of whom have gone on record here for the first time. The authors also tell how Tibet led America and India to become secret partners over the course of several presidential administrations and cite dozens of Indian and Tibetan intelligence documents directly related to these covert operations. Ultimately, they are persuasive that the Himalayan operations were far more successful as a proving ground for CIA agents who were later reassigned to southeast Asia than as a staging ground for armed rebellion. As the movement for Tibetan liberation continues to attract international support, Tibet's status remains a contentious issue in both Washington and Beijing. This book takes readers inside a covert war fought with Tibetan blood and U. S. sponsorship and allows us to better understand the true nature of that controversy.

For most Americans, Cambodia was a sideshow to the war in Vietnam, but by the time of the Vietnam invasion of Democratic Kampuchea in 1978 and the subsequent war, it had finally moved to centre stage. Kenneth Conboy chronicles the violence that plagued Cambodia from World War II until the end of the twentieth century and peels back the layers of secrecy that surrounded the CIA’s covert assistance to anticommunist forces in Cambodia during that span.Conboy’s path-breaking study provides the first complete assessment of CIA ops in two key periods—during the Khmer Republic’s existence (1970–1975), in support of American military action in Vietnam, and during the Reagan and first Bush presidencies (1981–1991), when the CIA challenged Soviet expansion by supporting exiled royalists, Republicans, and even former Communists trying to expel the Vietnamese from their country. Through interviews with dozens of CIA Cambodia veterans—as well as special forces officers from Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and Australia—he sheds new light on the contributions made by foreign intelligence services. Through information gleaned from the U.S. Defense Attache’s Office in Phnom Penh, he offers a detailed look at the development of the Khmer Rouge military structure, while his use of Vietnamese-language histories released by the People’s Army of Vietnam helps more fully illuminate the PAVN’s participation in the Cambodian wars. More than a simple exposé of CIA activities, however, The Cambodian Wars is also an authoritative history of that country’s struggles over half a century. Conboy examines Cambodia as kingdom, colony, republic, revolutionary state, and Vietnamese satellite, and offers fresh insight into the actions of key players—Norodom Sihanouk, Lon Nol, Sisowath Sirik Matak, Son Ngoc Thanh, and others—that will enlighten even those who think they know that country’s history.Three decades in the making, The Cambodian Wars tells a little known chapter in the Cold War in which non-communists pulled off a surprising victory. Featuring dozens of photos covering events from 1970 to the trial of Pol Pot in 1997, it is must reading for anyone interested in contemporary Southeast Asian history, CIA covert operations, and the Vietnam War.

This book examines the uniforms, equipment, history and organisation of the troops that fought in Cambodia in the 1970s.Kenneth Conboy and Ken Bowra's detailed text discusses all the US and Cambodian forces, including Special Operations, and summarises the course of the war. Alongside the text, uniforms are shown in full illustrated detail, highlighting the varied range of military clothing used by each of the different forces.

As World War II drew to a close, the Imperial Japanese military seized control of Laos, a French protectorate, and encouraged nationalist movements to forestall the revival of French power in the region.Despite these efforts the French re-entered Indochina and methodically retook the protectorate. By 1957, the government of Laos and the core of the Communist Laotian forces, known as the Pathet Lao, entered an uneasy truce, which plunged the country into 15 years of war.This illustrated volume explores the resulting war, providing a summary of events and profiling the Laotian government forces, the government Allied forces and the Communist forces.

During the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency's biggest and longest paramilitary operation was in the tiny kingdom of Laos. Hundreds of advisors and support personnel trained and led guerrilla formations across the mountainous Laotian countryside, as well as running smaller road-watch and agent teams that stretched from the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the Chinese frontier. Added to this number were hundreds of contract personnel providing covert aviation services.It was dangerous work. On the Memorial Wall at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, nine stars are dedicated to officers who perished in Laos. On top of this are more than one hundred from propriety airlines killed in aviation mishaps between 1961 and 1973. Combined, this grim casualty figure is orders of magnitude larger than any other CIA paramilitary operation.But for the Foreign Intelligence officers at Langley, Laos was more than a paramilitary battleground. Because of its geographic location as a buffer state, as well as its trifurcated political structure, Laos was a unique Cold War melting pot. All three of the Lao political factions, including the communist Pathet Lao, had representation in Vientiane. The Soviet Union had an extremely active embassy in the capital, while the People's Republic of China - though in the throes of the Cultural Revolution - had multiple diplomatic outposts across the kingdom. So, too, did both North and South Vietnam. All of this made Laos fertile ground for clandestine operations. This book comprehensively details the cloak-and-dagger side of the war in Laos for the first time, from agent recruitments to servicing dead-drops in Vientiane.

Elite units have long been prominent in the armies of South-East Asia and, given the turmoil in the region after the 1960s, these forces have had ample opportunity to be tested in combat.Acknowledged expert on South-East Asia Ken Conboy outlines the history, organization and insignia of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Indonesian, Malaysian and various other South-East Asian special forces from their origins up until the late 80s, covering such groups as the Vietnamese Luc Luong Dac Biet ('Special Forces') and Lien Doi Ngoui Nhia underwater demolition team and the Cambodian Airborne Brigade Group.

In 1940 Japan placed Vietnam under military occupation, restricting the local French administration to a figurehead authority.Seizing the opportunity, the Communists organised a Vietnamese independence league, the Viet Minh, whose armed forces became known as the PAVN (more commonly known to the West as the Vietcong, or NVA) and prepared to launch an uprising against the French at the war's end.This text details the history, organisation and uniforms of the People's Army of Vietnam from its origins in the fight against colonialism, through two separate wars against the US and Khmer Rouge, to its role in the modern era.

Influenced by the German use of paratroopers early in World War Two, General Sir Robert Cassels, the Commander-in-Chief India, ordered the formation of an airborne cadre in October 1940.Thus marked the origins of India's first élite units. Pakistan can trace the origins of its own army airborne to the common parentage of British-raised forces. Following the partition from India in August 1947, it raised its own Special Service Group, with individually specialised companies including desert, mountain, ranger and underwater warfare units.This remarkable volume by Kenneth Conboy details the history, organisation, uniforms and insignia of the élite forces of India and Pakistan. Also covered are the elite forces of Afghanistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh.