https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/b...ions-lx2056nl8
Britain provided covert assistance to western forces in the Vietnam War by flying secret missions over Laos, the daughter of a former Royal Air Force navigator has claimed. Flight Lieutenant Donald Roberts, who was based in Asia with the RAF at the time, confided in his family decades later that he had taken part in flying Handley Page Hastings transport aircraft over Laos in the second half of 1962.
The alleged secret flights were designed to help close off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a key logistics route that was used to resupply the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army fighting in the South. The RAF helped to transport New Zealand SAS personnel and other cargo to the remote and mountainous area, Roberts told his daughter, Priscilla Roberts, a professor at City University of Macau, years after the event.
She has detailed his narrative in a published paper for a Cold War history initiative convened by the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, a think tank in Washington. Her father, who died in 2014, aged 84, was unable to provide proof of his claims, as he told his daughter that the airmen had been forbidden to record the flights in their logbooks. He had, however, been permitted to record flights between his permanent base in Changi, Singapore, and Thailand. It was from Chiang Mai airfield in northern Thailand or Don Muang airport near Bangkok that the Laos missions were launched, he recalled.
In one entry in his flying logbook he had written “Radio Compass Malfunction!” next to details of a flight from Singapore to Chiang Mai.
Professor Roberts wrote, however: “My father confirmed to me that nothing of the sort had occurred. Given the particular sensitivity of this flight, with a British airplane ferrying NZSAS operatives on a mission into supposedly neutralised Laos, this entry may have been a precaution, just in case word of this flight did eventually leak out. In the interests of plausible deniability this would have allowed the British government to cite navigational difficulties as the reason for intruding into Laotian airspace.” She added: “Tight security was evident in other aspects. My father recalled that as this group of men were waiting on the tarmac to board the aircraft he attempted to chat with the team members, introducing himself and asking who they were. Those who replied all laconically informed him that their name was ‘Smith’.”
Keeping the involvement over Laos secret would have been imperative to Britain as it had played a significant role in securing the neutral status of the nation in the war, having co-chaired a global conference to agree the terms. Britain, along with the US, Soviet Union, China and ten other nations, signed the deal in July 1962, pledging to respect the neutrality of Laos.
Roberts told his daughter that the first of six missions he flew over Laos took place just as the Geneva agreements were being signed. His explanation for Britain being drawn into Laos was that the RAF had the four-engine Handley Page Hastings aircraft, which were more reliable for flights over the mountainous terrain than America’s single and twin-engine aircraft.
London was also under immense political pressure from Washington to contribute in the war. Roberts said that at the end of 1962 he believed that the flights were taken over by Air America, the passenger and cargo airline secretly owned by the US government from 1950 to 1976.
Captain John Sullivan, 84, a friend of Roberts and a contemporary at RAF Changi in the 1960s, said that he had not been aware of the Laos flights but confirmed that secret missions had taken place. “It’s quite possible. We did occasionally do things like that, but I wasn’t involved [in these alleged flights],” he said.
A search of RAF records and declassified UK intelligence reports in the National Archives did not yield proof of the alleged missions but senior military figures believe that the claims are plausible. Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Graydon, a former head of the RAF, said: “I cannot be sure that the flights described took place but the evidence is convincing; moreover, 48 Squadron was based at Changi up until 1967 and equipped at that time with the Hastings aircraft which, being four-engined, would have been better for operations in the rugged terrain of Laos than twin-engine aircraft.”
Professor Roberts, 63, said she hoped that her paper would encourage others with any knowledge of the missions to come forward.