DISPUTE ON HMONG GENERAL GROWS

Controversy over a proposal to name a Madison park after a Hmong general
grew Friday into a full-blown attack on a UW-Madison history professor
whose 1972 book links the general with heroin trafficking.

About 70 Hmong, most of them veterans who fought for the United States
against communist troops during the Vietnam War, crowded the Senate parlor
at the State Capitol to express indignation at professor Alfred McCoy's
book, "The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade."
McCoy wrote that the CIA supported Gen. Vang Pao's role in trafficking
heroin in partial payment for supplying troops that fought the North
Vietnamese in Laos.

"The attacks have no merit. I stand by the work," McCoy said later Friday,
when told of the allegations. University Chancellor John Wiley and Phil
Certain, dean of the College of Letters and Science, issued a statement
that said in part, "This university will continue to support our faculty,
staff and students in their scholarly endeavors, just as we recognize the
rights of those who disagree to make their voices heard. We see no reason
to take any action to influence Professor McCoy's views."

Pao, now 72, lives in Orange County, Calif., and remains a hero and
influential figure among Hmong and Laotian refugees in the United States.
The controversy began when Locha Thao, a Hmong and member of the City Park
Commission, this spring proposed changing the name of an undeveloped,
61-acre park on the far East Side from Door Creek Park to Gen. Vang Pao
Park. The Park Commission is to consider the proposal May 8.

Pao sent a statement to Friday's Capitol gathering, which said, "I want to
state for the record that I have never been involved with drug trafficking."

Pao also denied ordering an "ambush" of McCoy during McCoy's stay in Laos,
saying, "Professor McCoy seems to have quite an imagination and should be
writing for Hollywood . . . ."

"As for the ambush, it happened," responded McCoy, "and that's why my opium
survey didn't include more villages, because officers in Vang Pao's army
set an ambush for me and we were lucky to get out with our lives."

McCoy said during the several months he spent in Laos, he went hut-to-hut
through two Hmong villages, which were part of Pao's army, doing an "opium
survey."

"They were growing opium. At the end of the growing season, they took it
down to the helipad when Vang Pao's officers arrived on Air America
helicopters. The officers bought the opium and flew it, the villagers
believed, to the CIA's base at Long Chieng," McCoy said.

But CIA-run Air America Inc. aircraft were not used to transport opium to a
heroin laboratory at Long Chieng, insisted Jack Knotts, a former Air
America pilot in Laos who flew to Madison from Tampa, Fla., to support Pao.
"We've been maligned here over the years because it was said we were the
couriers of the drug trade, which was not true at all," he said. "There was
no (heroin) factory at Long Chieng."

Also present was Jane Hamilton-Merritt of Danbury, Conn., author of the
1993 book, "Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans and the Secret Wars
for Laos 1942-1992." She said she was aware of McCoy's book while
researching her own, but in interviewing more than 1,000 people could find
"no one who could verify Long Chieng being a heroin factory and Gen. Vang
Pao being a drug trafficker."

Sen. Gary George, D-Milwaukee, said he'd ask Wiley to investigate claims
that McCoy's book contained false information. "If the remarks here today
are true, then professor McCoy owes everyone in this room an apology," he said.

McCoy responded, "My research uncovered a heroin trafficking syndicate
inside the royal Laotian army. According to a White House survey of
returning veterans, 34 percent of American troops in Vietnam were heroin
addicts. This heroin did essential damage to the U.S. Army and the lives of
U.S. soldiers. All this opium and heroin from Laos had one market - U.S.
Amy soldiers inside Vietnam."