Paul H. Skuse.
Source: Photo courtesy of Kimberley MacGregor.
Paul Howard Skuse (1909–1994) was a Boston patrolman and naval officer in the Pacific theater of World War II and the Korean War who served from 1946 to 1958 as a police adviser in Okinawa (Ryukyu Islands). Afterwards, he became a police adviser in Indonesia, Laos, and Vietnam working under the United States Agency of International Development (USAID)’s Office of Public Safety (OPS), which was established by the Kennedy administration to mobilize foreign police forces to counter communist subversion. Skuse’s career provides a window into US clandestine operations during the Cold War in Okinawa and Southeast Asia that have remained largely hidden from public view and are left out of most history books. The clandestine operations were never publicized because they involved fundamentally undemocratic means. As a member of the so-called “greatest generation,” Skuse believed deeply in the creed of American exceptionalism and considered the vanquishing of communism to be part of a righteous crusade. However, the “dirty work” that he carried out was similar to that of clandestine agents of traditional colonial powers that were intent on subduing native rebellions and preserving their own hegemony.Footnote 1
The confusion about the term “empire” in the US stems in part from the anti-imperial origins of the US and the evolution of the US as more of an informal empire compared to its European predecessors, relying heavily on native proxies and a light footprint approach along with soft power. Police programs in this context take on special importance as a key mechanism by which the US exerted its global influence and power through the Cold War era and beyond (McCoy Reference McCoy2009; Kuzmarov Reference Kuzmarov2012). A graduate of the Massachusetts Maritime Academy who held a certificate in political science from Columbia University, Skuse was but one of many foot soldiers carrying out police training operations in the Cold War. From what we know about him, he seems to be largely a man of his time with conventional attitudes who participated in certain key Cold War operations that make him a good person on which to focus an academic study.
I first came upon Skuse while conducting research for my book, Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012). His name appeared in some important memos pertaining to US police training programs in Laos. Later, I came to learn more about Skuse after becoming friends with his granddaughter, Kimberley Macgregor, who read my book and reached out to me. She was intrigued that her grandfather was discussed in my book and had wanted to learn more about his career as a secret government agent. MacGregor’s grandmother, Kosoom Skuse, was from Thailand and met Skuse while still a teenager and then married him. The relationship, as Kimberley herself sees it, seemed to be right out of The Quiet American (by Graham Greene) and part and parcel of a colonial history by which Western men take young Asian girls as sexual partners or wives as a kind of entitlement and aspect of their privilege.
Skuse may have himself scoffed at the notion of being called a colonial agent; however, the actions that he took very clearly fit that moniker. For example, as this article details, he spied on protesters and oversaw the suppression of a prison riot led by leftists who were against the construction of US military bases in Okinawa. Skuse also worked with paramilitary units of the Laos police that were mobilized to fight against the left-wing Pathet Lao who had led the country’s liberation struggle against France. Skuse additionally helped broker an alliance in Laos between the CIA and the Hmong minority group, who were used as cannon fodder in a secret war. These latter actions can only be described as imperialistic as they involved the trampling of local sovereignty and manipulation of tribal minority groups in support of larger geopolitical objectives.
US Pacific empire and outraged Okinawans
The US first established a Pacific empire in the mid-1800s when it acquired American Samoa and over one hundred islands in the Pacific, including Midway Island, which later served as a key battleground in the Pacific War (Evers and Grynaviski Reference Evers and Grynaviski2024). During congressional debates over the colonization of the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, pro-imperialists like Albert Beveridge (R-Ind.) specified that control over Asia and its rich natural resources was key to American global domination (D’Haeseleer and Peace Reference D’Haeseleer and Peace2016). After achieving victory over its chief imperial rival, Japan, in World War II, the US set up a chain of military bases from the Ryukyu Islands (Okinawa) through the Aleutian Islands that was designed, in the words of General Douglas MacArthur, commander of US forces in the Pacific War and of the US military occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1952, to ensure that the US could “dominate with sea and air power every Asiatic port from Vladivostok to Singapore” and make the Pacific Ocean “the friendly aspect of a peaceful lake” (Sempa Reference Sempa2015). Japan was the “Super-Domino” in postwar Pacific grand strategy; its economy was integrated with South Korea’s and built up as a bulwark against Communist China (Friedman and Selden Reference Friedman and Selden1971; Chomsky Reference Chomsky1973; Cumings Reference Cumings1981; Dower Reference Dower2000). The CIA covertly poured in secret funds—derived in part from stolen Japanese gold—to secure the power of the center-right Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which adopted pro-US policies throughout the Cold War (Seagrave and Seagrave Reference Seagrave and Seagrave2005).
The post-World War II US colonization of Okinawa—which Paul Skuse played an unheralded but important role in—lasted until 1972, when Okinawa was ceded to Japan under an agreement whereby Japan agreed to preserve US military bases that had been established there at the end of the Pacific War. Lt. Gen Simon Buckner Boliver Jr. described Okinawa as a “vital strategic base to use for preventing trouble from any Asiatic power. It looks right down Japan’s throat, gives us access to the China Sea and the Asiatic Coast…and gives our fleet of Air Forces an operational base connected to Iwo-Jima and the Marianas with a line of bases that cannot well be broken or isolated” (Sarantakes Reference Sarantakes2000: 25).Footnote 2 A 1958 article in Harper’s Magazine by former Marine officer Barton N. Biggs entitled “The Outraged Okinawans” noted that Okinawa had become the “key to US defense strategy in the Pacific” and a “sort of dagger pointed directly at the heart of Communist China” that was home to a “sizeable American force including the Army’s principal Pacific supply depot, a naval service and air installation and huge Air Force base” (Biggs Reference Biggs1959).Footnote 3 Biggs went on to chronicle how American troops mistreated Okinawans, including by fueling an epidemic of prostitution and venereal disease among local girls. According to Biggs, most of the 700,000 Okinawans didn’t like and often “hated Americans,” and wished that “our troops would get off their island.”Footnote 4
Okinawa had been an independent kingdom that was made a tributary state to Japan in 1609 and was incorporated more formally into Japan in 1879 (Hara Reference Hara2015). In August 1945, Okinawa was the scene of the culminating Pacific War land battle between the US and Japan, which resulted in the death of nearly a third of the island’s civilian population (Johnson Reference Johnson1999; Falk Reference Falk2016). General Douglas MacArthur told George F. Kennan in 1948 that Okinawans were a “simple and good natured people who would pick up a good deal of money and have a reasonably happy existence from American base development [after the war] in the Ryukyus” (Aldous Reference Aldous2003: 486). Time Magazine, however, acknowledged in 1957 that US requisitioning of land for military purposes had resulted in the seizure of one-fifth of Okinawa’s arable land without any compensation and the dispossession of 50,000 Okinawans who were not too happy about it (Time 1957).Footnote 5 Paul Caraway, Okinawa’s High Commissioner from 1961 to 1964, compared Okinawa under American rule to French-ruled Algeria—implying that the locals lacked basic civil rights and freedoms (Sarantakes Reference Sarantakes2000: 69).Footnote 6
Paul Caraway, left, during his first press conference in Okinawa.
Source: commons.wikimedia.org.
The job of police advisers like Skuse was to help keep order in Okinawa during the period of American military occupation and to improve the professionalism of the Okinawan police while supplying them with modern policing equipment and technology. Under a democratic policing model, police are supposed to be politically neutral, however, in the context of the Cold War, Skuse and his colleagues instructed police to spy on, and when necessary, repress leftist groups. Central among these groups was the Okinawa People’s Party (OPP), a branch of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP), which sought the removal of US military bases and Okinawa’s independence from foreign colonial rule, favoring the reversion of Okinawa to Japan.Footnote 7
A window into the kind of work that Skuse was doing and his mindset was evident in a December 29, 1954 article published in the English language Okinawa Morning Star titled “7 Convicts Shot in Okinawa Prison Riot.” The article, which I obtained from Skuse’s private papers,Footnote 8 started by noting that seven prisoners were wounded in a prison riot at the Okinawa penitentiary. Kamejiro Senaga, Secretary General of the OPP and a representative to the Okinawa legislature who served as Mayor of Naha from 1957 to 1967, was among the wounded.Footnote 9
Time Magazine described him as “an emaciated little man with a jet-black mustache and eyes that glare from behind thick spectacles who called the US occupation authorities criminals, murderers, rapists, arsonists and thieves” (Time 1957). Senaga had been convicted that October of harboring a fugitive and of perjury and was sentenced to one year in prison. The fugitive was a member of the JCP who had received deportation orders but was staying at Senaga’s house.
Kamejiro Senaga being released from prison.
Source: en.wikipedia.org.
The prison riot began around dinnertime when 35 inmates of the cell block holding Senaga refused to return to their cells after eating. Two guards were taken hostage as the prisoners demanded to see the prison warden to present a petition voicing their complaints about conditions in the prison. As they tried to free the hostages, the article said that special Okinawa police units—trained and equipped by US occupation forces—“fired a couple of blasts” that struck the legs of several of the prisoners. Subsequently, the police used tear gas. Senaga was treated for his wounds at a prison dispensary, while rioters who were seriously wounded were taken to a local area hospital.
Paul Skuse was referenced in the article as being the Director of Public Safety for the government of the Ryukyus. He told the author of the Okinawa Morning Star article that the Okinawa prison riot “followed a pattern. The first riot in which prisoners presented demands to their wardens occurred shortly after Senaga was confined.” Skuse said in turn that he “was expecting Monday’s flare up.” The implications of Skuse’s comments are clear. He identified Senaga as a troublemaker because of his communist affiliation and anti-American political agenda.
Photo of Paul H. Skuse with his daughter when he was a member of the Boston Police Department.
Source: Photo Courtesy of Kimberley MacGregor.
Skuse was a die-in-the-wool cold warrior who had been conditioned to see the world in black and white terms. There is no record of him voicing any concern over the contradictions of US policy in Okinawa by which “the power in the world most against the basic philosophy of colonialism should find itself ruling a foreign area and its inhabitants,” as Olcott H. Deming, the US Consul General in Okinawa, put it (Sarantakes Reference Sarantakes2000: 61). As Director of Public Safety for the government of the Ryukyu Islands, Skuse’s job was partly to manage Okinawa’s prison system while helping the police to identify political subversives that might challenge US colonial governance. In 1952, Skuse somewhat ironically filed a complaint with Brigadier General F. L. Hayden, Okinawa’s Military Governor from 1946 to 1948, citing his disgust with the “total disregard” that Okinawa’s military police showed for the civil rights of Okinawa residents.
According to Skuse, the Okinawa military police “constantly raided Okinawan villages to confiscate stolen US property when most Okinawan possessions, including clothing, came from the Americans.” Skuse considered these raids “an abuse of police power characteristic of the OCPU, NKVD, Kempe-Tai and other feared organizations of fascist and communist states” (Sarantakes Reference Sarantakes2000: 58). After issuing the complaint, Skuse was promoted by Hayden by one civil service grade. The raids were ended after the military police burst into a Naha restaurant and conducted body searches on a number of Okinawan officers who had stolen American property. US governing authorities recognized that police excesses were creating disaffection towards the Americans and undermining US claims to be trying to advance democracy.
Skuse’s concern about the abuse of civil liberties did not extend to the deprivations experienced by the prisoners who rioted in the Okinawan jail in December 1954 nor to the incarceration of political prisoners, which Senaga was.Footnote 10 The contradiction in his worldview reflects that of Cold War liberals who viewed communists in dehumanized terms and supported harsh treatment of them (or people associated with them or adopting similar political positions) while otherwise displaying a commitment to democratic practices and protection of civil rights. Skuse saw his job as instilling democratic standards among the Okinawan police, though because he considered the OPP a subversive organization intent on destroying democracy and dismantling the US military base network, he supported antidemocratic methods targeting them.
Total surveillance and modernizing police repression
In August 2024, I reviewed the records of the Public Safety division of the Ryukyu Islands at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. I found Skuse’s name on a couple of memos in those records, which mostly involved mundane bureaucratic matters associated with the Okinawan police. Skuse’s successor as public safety director was Harriman N. Simmons Jr. (1904–1985), a Korean War veteran from New Jersey who had a background in military intelligence.Footnote 11
Harriman N. Simmons, director, Public Safety Dept., US Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands, presents certificates of achievement to Ryukyuan police officers, May 12, 1967. Receiving the certificates (L-R) are Yuichi Omura, chief, Criminal Affairs Division, Police Headquarters; Kitoku Azama, chief, Futenma Police Station; Yosei Arakaki (partly shown), chief, Koza Police Station; Shukuju Arakaki, chief, Police Headquarters; Mozen Toyosaki, chief, Security Section, Police Headquarters; and Toshio Ota, assistant chief, Naha Police Station. Each participant successfully completed a program in the field of police criminal affairs, police public safety, and police administration in Taiwan during the period June 20 to July 11, 1966.
Source: ww2.archives.pref.okinawa.ip.
The declassified police records display how Simmons and the public safety division helped equip the Okinawan police with riot control dispensers and grenades as part of their effort to help advance social control.Footnote 12 US governing authorities did not want American troops directly confronting Okinawan protesters, so the police training programs were particularly important to sustaining the US colonial occupation of Okinawa.Footnote 13 Reports of beatings by US military personnel of Okinawan farmers trying to protect their land in the mid-1950s triggered fears of a much wider revolt (Aldous Reference Aldous2003: 493). Simmons oversaw courses that were offered to police on the use of chemical gas agents and on how to control civil disturbances.Footnote 14 Skuse would have learned to work with chemical gas agents in the Boston Police, which had developed its own tear gas division in the 1930s and used tear gas against strikers.Footnote 15
In 1958, a counterinsurgency section was established within the Okinawan police, which worked closely with US intelligence agencies—including to identify locals involved in anti-base protests.Footnote 16 The CIA established a major base in Okinawa that provided logistical support for the Agency’s far-flung units (McGehee Reference McGehee1999: 21). Some Okinawan police were sent for training courses in Taiwan on counterinsurgency and intelligence. Taiwan was used as a base for mounting covert operations across Southeast Asia after the US helped install Chiang Kai-Shek as the ruler there following his defeat in China’s Civil War. (Chiang was succeeded by his son Chiang Chung-Kuo, who served as intelligence chief in Taiwan for many years.)
Simmons oversaw a vast surveillance apparatus, receiving regular reports on the meetings of the OPP and their activities from local police and spies recruited from the police.Footnote 17 The police would track Okinawan travelers to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and provide summaries of Senaga’s speeches that accused the US of invading the skies over China with military aircraft and called for the removal of US military bases in Okinawa.Footnote 18 Simmons’ agents further provided reports on speeches by OPP leaders praising China for “fantastic achievements in education, economy, and social welfare under socialism,” and accusing the US military of acquiring land for military purposes “through bayonets and bulldozers” (like on White Beach in the Kanbu village of Gushikawa).Footnote 19 Reports were additionally made about the activities of the Japanese Socialist Party in Okinawa, which allied with the OPP.Footnote 20 Senaga was blamed for inspiring riots near Ishigaki after bitterly denouncing the US as “imperialists responsible for direct mass deployment of police troops to interfere with local elections.”Footnote 21
Senaga delivering a speech denouncing US imperialism in Okinawa. He was spied on ceaselessly by Harriman N. Simmons’ public safety division and its agents in the 1950s and 1960s.
Source: dajf.org.
The 1956 Price report published by the US House Armed Services Committee codified the unjust system where Okinawan landowners were compensated only 6% of their land value (McCormick and Norimatsu Reference McCormick and Norimatsu2012: 78, 80).Footnote 22 Historian Christopher Aldous wrote that this report helped spawn an “island wide struggle,” typified by mass rallies on June 20, 1956, when more than 160,000 Okinawans participated in 56 different demonstrations. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles admitted thereafter, with what Aldous calls “masterly understatement,” that the US colonial policy in Okinawa did “not seem to win complete favor among the Okinawans” (Aldous Reference Aldous2003: 492).
The use of US military facilities in Okinawa to bomb North Korea during the Korean War (1950–1953) and Vietnam during the Vietnam War (1965–1973) only made the Americans more despised. The Public Safety branch reported on a demonstration in July 1966 that was staged outside the Toyo oil company because it helped fuel US fighter jets bombing Vietnam and planned projects with Gulf Oil and Esso expected to contribute to water and air pollution. Other protests conveyed popular outrage about incidents where US military vehicles or contractors ran over local kids.Footnote 23
Okinawa People’s Party protests that the US public safety division was monitoring.
Source: coisasdojapao.com.
An Okinawan who worked on US military bases and was imprisoned for subversion and forced to emigrate to Bolivia stated that “the Americans may have been nice as individuals but politically they would immediately label us as ‘reds’ if we participated in demonstrations” (Johnson Reference Johnson1999: 59). Skuse and his colleagues in the public safety division fit this description with their embrace of the obsessive anticommunism that predominated during the Cold War.
Some protests that they monitored sought to prohibit the development of atomic and hydrogen bombs and further nuclear testing. A 1965 Bikini Day rally, timed for the anniversary of 1954 hydrogen bomb tests off the Marshall Islands, paid tribute to Aikichi Kuboyama, the crew member of a Japanese fishing vessel who died as a result of being showered by radioactive dust from a hydrogen bomb tested by the US. The US stored nuclear weapons at bases in Kadena, Naha, and Henoko, along with chemical weapons, such as Agent Orange, that were used in Vietnam (McCormick and Norimatsu Reference McCormick and Norimatsu2012: 58, 83; Falk Reference Falk2016; Mitchell Reference Mitchell2017).Footnote 24 Simmons’ agent reported that people at the Bikini Day rally sang a song called “Forbid Nuclear Bombs” while denouncing US aggression in Vietnam. Some of the speakers advocated for medical assistance to atomic bomb victims and expressed opposition to the US buildup of Japan’s Self-Defense Force—in violation of Japan’s pacifist constitution.Footnote 25 Simmons wrote to the US High Commissioner in Okinawa that the information from this and other rallies was “obtained from a usually reliable public safety source.”Footnote 26
Protest of the kind monitored by the PSD before Kadena Air Base, March 1971.
Source: apjjf.org.
The boom in base construction during the Vietnam War resulted in heightened protest known as the shimagurumi toso, or all-island struggle, which local police, under the direction of the public safety division, were called upon to surveil and try to control (McCormick and Norimatsu Reference McCormick and Norimatsu2012: 80).Footnote 27 During the 1971 Koza riots, Okinawans, outraged over an incident where a US military vehicle overran an Okinawan civilian, destroyed more than 80 US military and private vehicles before they were subdued by Okinawan police and US troops who sprayed tear gas into the crowds (Kim Reference Kim2023: 40). Up to this point, the Okinawan police had been monitoring the Black Power movement among US GIs because of concerns about its potentially radicalizing effect among the local population. By contrast, the police rarely arrested or reprimanded US troops who committed crimes like sexual assaults.Footnote 28
The impunity enjoyed by US troops in Okinawa and the blatantly repressive function of US-trained police underscore the colonial context in which Paul Skuse, Harriman N. Simmons, and their associates operated. The public safety division records offer a window into the monitoring of all oppositional political activity in Okinawa and progressive movements (including among US GIs), which police training programs were central to. They further reveal the US role in modernizing state repression through their importation of policing and other social control technologies like chemical gas agents, which were banned by the US in 1997 after ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention.Footnote 29
Wider pattern
US police training programs in Okinawa fit with a wider pattern during the Cold War. These programs were conceived as a key covert strategy for monitoring and ultimately destroying left-wing groups that threatened the US worldwide military supremacy. Police advisers provided modern police equipment and training to foreign police forces in an attempt to bolster their professionalism, including in the realms of political surveillance, prison management, and counterinsurgency (Kuzmarov Reference Kuzmarov2012; Siegel Reference Siegel2018; Schrader Reference Schrader2019).
Source: umasspress.com.
Police were considered particularly valuable assets in collecting intelligence and carrying out sweep operations that often yielded significant human rights abuses (Kuzmarov Reference Kuzmarov2012).Footnote 30 After his decade plus tenure in Okinawa, Paul Skuse went to work for USAID’s Office of Public Safety (OPS) in Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Indonesia, where he did the same kind of dirty work as in Okinawa. In Indonesia, Skuse participated in police programs that set the groundwork for a bloody CIA-backed right-wing coup in 1965, which culminated in the massacre of Indonesian communists and anyone suspected of affiliation with them (Kuzmarov Reference Kuzmarov2012; Bevins Reference Bevins2020). Besides riot control training, Skuse and his associates helped the Indonesian police to upgrade record keeping so they could systemize lists of communist “subversives” subjected ultimately to liquidation—like in the Vietnam Phoenix program with which Skuse was also involved (Valentine Reference Valentine1990).
One of Skuse’s colleagues who worked with him in Indonesia, Laos, and Vietnam was Jack Ryan, whose name was the same as the fictional clandestine agent in Tom Clancy’s best-selling novels (The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games). Like Skuse, the real-life Ryan held a conservative political outlook—he investigated “communist subversion” for the FBI in the auto industry in Lansing, Michigan (home of GM, Ford, and Chrysler plants)—and warned about the over-militarization of US-trained police forces valued for intelligence gathering and their importance to counterinsurgency operations. Ryan met a most tragic fate as he was murdered by a fellow police adviser in South Vietnam, a murder that OPS Director Byron Engle and the CIA helped cover up (Sullivan Reference Sullivan2025).
The real Jack Ryan with two South Vietnamese police officials before he was killed in 1965.
Source: facebook.com.
Skuse’s undercover work for the CIA was evident in March 1959 when he forged a liaison with Touby Lyfoung, chief of the Hmong ethnic minority in Laos whom the CIA recruited to form a clandestine army to fight against the Communist Pathet Lao. The Hmong army functioned as a substitute for the US-subsidized Royal Lao Army (RLA), which the US could not rely on to fight the Pathet Lao because of its corruption, brutality, and inefficiency. The US could also negotiate with the Hmong independent of international treaties (McCoy and Adams Reference McCoy and Adams1970).Footnote 31
A memo on record at the National Archives discusses a dinner held by Skuse, then serving as the chief of the International Cooperation Administration (ICA—precursor to USAID)’s public safety division, at his villa in Vientiane with Touby, whose successor, Vang Pao, became head of the CIA’s clandestine Hmong army in Laos (Kuzmarov Reference Kuzmarov2012: 121). Skuse reported to his superior, Willard O. Brown, acting director of the public safety division in Laos, that Touby was accompanied to the meeting at his villa by his brother Toulia, who allied with the Pathet Lao. The two explained that the Hmong—referred to pejoratively as Meo—had migrated to Laos from Yunnan Province in China. The people had a common language but were divided in their political loyalties, with some supporting the Royal Lao government backed by the US and others the Pathet Lao, which was supported by North Vietnam and Communist China.
Touby Lyfoung Source: hmonglessons.com.
In the report, Skuse touts the leadership of Vang Pao, then a commander in the RLA in charge of a Non-Commissioned Officers (NCO) school near Phonsavan. Skuse said that the Meo (Hmong) members of the auto-defense unit—a paramilitary wing of the Royal Lao police trained by CIA advisers working under the cover of the ICA’s public safety division—looked up to Vang Pao as their leader in the absence of Touby, who was busy as the head of the National Assembly. Skuse further reported that the Hmong told Chackhoueng, a member of the Royal family who had led underground fighters against Japanese invaders in World War II, that if Vang Pao was put in charge of the auto-defense units, they would fight the Pathet Lao rebels so long as they received their bonus money (which they were not currently receiving) (Kuzmarov Reference Kuzmarov2012: 121).
The CIA’s mercenary Hmong army.
Source: covertactionmagazine.com.
The Pathet Lao ironically had won the 1958 elections, which the CIA subverted, and were then driven underground. Their leader, Prince Souphanouvong, a close ally of Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh, was scheduled to be executed, though he escaped from prison during a violent rainstorm after convincing his captors that he was on the right side of history (Burchett Reference Burchett1963, Reference Burchett1970). The CIA’s recruitment of the Hmong to fight the Pathet Lao fit with a colonialist strategy in which the Agency recruited tribal minorities to fight on behalf of an outside power. During the secret war that lasted until 1975, Laos became the most heavily bombed country in history, with the Hmong providing intelligence that was used by the US Air Force for target selection (Branfman Reference Branfman1972).
Documents at the National Archives show Skuse’s role in helping to supply the Lao National Police (LNP) and Hmong with military grade equipment to fight in the secret war, as well as his oversight of training for riot control and of an identity card program similar to that in Vietnam, where police set up checkpoints to screen people for their political affiliations and seize weapons and material being sent to leftist guerrillas (Kuzmarov Reference Kuzmarov2012: 137). Skuse touted the importance of police to counterinsurgency operations and nation-building in Laos in memos acknowledging heavy-handed practices of the US-subsidized RLA (Kuzmarov Reference Kuzmarov2012: 135, 136, 137). Like in Okinawa, Skuse came to lament the human rights abuses carried out by US-trained police and paramilitary forces, including the Hmong auto-defense units, which, he said, “arrested anyone thought to be inimical to the Royal Lao Government (backed by the US)” (Kuzmarov Reference Kuzmarov2012: 135).
In a 1965 report, Skuse and two other Public Safety advisers, Frank WaltonFootnote 32 and Wendell Motter, wrote that US-trained police had evolved into a “private army of Generals Siho Lamphouthacoul and Phoumi Nosavan [right-wing, Pentagon-CIA backed military officers] who organized vice and the considerable traffic in smuggling into Thailand as a means of raising money for a wave of repression against political opponents, including mass jailings and executions.” Siho’s men, according to the report, engaged in “Gestapo-like tactics,” carrying out operations that “rivaled anything ever heard of in terms of brutal, corrupt activity” (Kuzmarov Reference Kuzmarov2012: 121).Footnote 33 These comments provide an antidote to triumphalist narratives about the Cold War that prevail today in the US (Schrecker Reference Schrecker2004).Footnote 34 They epitomize the dirty work that covert operators like Skuse were behind in countries like Laos, Okinawa, and others around the world in the service of the US empire.
Contradictions of a liberal cold warrior
During his lifetime, Paul Skuse and his operations were unknown to the American public. It is only through archival research and retrieval of obscure newspaper clippings and other documents preserved by family members that we can trace his activities in Okinawa and Southeast Asia. Skuse’s career is particularly interesting because he was not elite educated or part of the top echelons of the CIA’s “old boys network” about which so much has been written (Hersh Reference Hersh2001). Rather, he was a rank-and-file shadow operator of working-class background doing grunt work training foreign police forces in the service of the Cold War. A champion of the then-vogue concept of counterinsurgency and the importance of the police to it, Skuse comes across in the available documents as a man of great contradictions. At once, he was concerned about upholding civil liberties and democratic police standards, though at the same time, he helped provide cutting-edge riot control technologies and supported police suppression of leftists like Senaga, who stood up for social justice. Additionally, Skuse was instrumental in building widescale surveillance networks and the CIA’s Hmong clandestine army in Laos, which was implicated in gross human rights abuses. Skuse’s contradictions embody those of Cold War liberals writ large, whose ideals were compromised by their fervid anticommunism and commitment to advancing American imperial interests around the world. The same contradictions are apparent today in liberals who champion overseas foreign policy interventions under the guise of democracy promotion and perpetuate the empire that Skuse’s generation was formative in developing.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Kimberley Macgregor for her help in uncovering documentation about her grandfather, as well as the staff at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. I would also like to thank Mark Selden, Louis Wolf, Alfred W. McCoy, Mary McCarthy, and an anonymous reviewer.
Author Biography
Jeremy Kuzmarov teaches at Brooklyn College and Tulsa Community College and is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is author of nine book on US politics and foreign policy. More information about him can be found here: https://jeremykuzmarov.com/.
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