The Most Secret Place on Earth – The CIA’s Covert War in Laos, directed by Marc Eberle and written by Marc Eberle and Tom Vater has just been broadcast on the History Channel.
The film traces the origin and development of the largest clandestine CIA operation to date (at least as far as the agency actually acknowledges) and talks so many of the main architects and some of the opponents of the Secret War, which killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and makes Laos the most heavily bombed country on the planet. Amazingly, the US got away with this huge atrocity without hardly anyone knowing about it and our film tries to set the record straight and makes a case for crimes against humanity committed by the CIA and the executive branch between 1960 and 1973. Most interestingly, the CIA used a proxy army of hill tribe mercenaries, some of the Hmong resident in Laos, to fight the communist Pathet Lao and this tactic, which helped the US lose the war in Laos, appears to be in use today – from Libya to Afghanistan.