The Most Secret Place On Earth - The CIA's Covert War In Laos (2008)

http://www.gebrueder-beetz.de/en/productions/the-most-secret-place-on-earth

The Vietnam War was the most intensely media-covered war ever. However, next door in neighbouring Laos, the longest and largest air war in human history was underway. It eventually made Laos the most bombed country on earth. What’s more, outside of Laos no one knew about it.

The Secret War was the largest operation ever conducted by the CIA, yet to this day hardly anyone knows anything about it. Critics call it the biggest war crime of the Vietnam War era and point to striking similarities in the present conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, similarities that were tested and used back in Laos in the 1960s: Then, like now, the use of private contractors, mercenaries, as well as the exclusion of Congress and the press gave the executive branch a free hand to wage unlimited warfare as they saw fit. During the Secret War, a bomb load was dropped on Laos every eight minutes over a period of eight years – in total, 2.1 million tons of bombs fell onto this small, landlocked South East Asian nation, more than on Europe and the Pacific theatre combined during World War II. Even today much of the countryside is poisoned by Agent Orange and littered with unexploded devices. To date, the country has still not found peace, and remnants of the CIA’s secret army of Hmong hill tribe guerrillas continue to clash with Lao government troops. In “The Most Secret Place on Earth”, key players of the Secret War – former CIA agents, American pilots, Laotian fighters and American journalists – take us on a journey into the physical heart of the conflict: Top secret Long Cheng. Long Cheng was an almost uninhabited valley deep in the jungles of central Laos when the CIA built its headquarters there in 1962. Four years later, 40,000 people lived in Long Cheng, the location whence the Secret War was largely planned and executed.

Yet, Long Cheng was never marked on any official map. In the early days, Long Cheng was run by Tony Poe, who is claimed by his colleagues to have served as a template for Col Kurtz in Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now!” At the height of the war, a few hundred CIA officers and the civilian airline Air America – covertly owned by the CIA – coordinated and supplied up to 50,000 indigenous troops in the field, and the US Air Force bombed Laos back into the Stone Age – all the while being entirely unaccountable to Congress and the American public. As the war dragged on, Long Cheng became the busiest airbase in the world and a major centre for the global opium and heroin trade. Candid interviews with past and present players combined with previously unseen footage from the war as well as from the current struggle in Laos tell a story that hasn’t been documented in history books. As we journey into Long Cheng for the first time – the site has been off limits to the outside world since the end of the war in 1975 – the film reconstructs the gripping story of the operation and illustrates its relevance to current American military conflicts.