the CIA. For the CIA, this was the largest paramilitary operation they had to date. By the summer of 1970 the CIA owned airline Air America had two dozen twin-engine transports, two dozen STOL aircraft and 30 helicopters dedicated to the operations in Laos. This airline employed more than 300 pilots, copilots, flight mechanics, and airfreight specialists flying out of Laos and Thailand. Although the bombing campaign was eventually disclosed to the American public formally in 1969, stories about the Laos bombing effort were published prior to that in The New York Times. Even after the United States government made the war public, the American people were in the dark as to how large scale the bombing campaign was. Background Politics of Laos and the CIA A 1962 Time magazine article about Laos makes some points that help illustrate the context of the overt and covert actions of all sides in Laos before the Vietnam War. One of the first points the article makes is that a Laotian national identity, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, was a rare thing (since parts of Thailand and Laos were one and the same before French colonizers drew new borders and territories and Laos was part of the vast French-controlled Indochina for generations). Communist groups and those from outside, including the French colonial administration and the CIA, often exploited power vacuums that existed within the region. "Though it has a king, a government and an army and can be found on a map, Laos does not really exist. Many of its estimated 2,000,000 people would be astonished to be called Laotians since they know themselves to be Meo or Black Thai or Khalom tribesmen among other small ethnic groups that resided in the countryside. It is a land without a railroad, a single paved highway or a newspaper. Its chief cash crop was opium." Laos was dreamed up by French Diplomat Jean Chauvel, who in 1946 was France's Secretary-General of Foreign Affairs. At the time, post World War II France was trying to reassert its authority over its colonies in Indo-China. The rebellious inhabitants had no desire to return to their prewar status as colonial subjects. In place of original Indo-China, consisting of various kingdoms and principalities, Paris put together three new autonomous states within the French Union: Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos. Drawing lines on a map, Chauvel created Laos by merging