Birthday Party at Lucy's - May 1984

All the photos and captions below have been kindly provided by Bill and Davone Dettori. You can contact Bill at: billdee@access.inet.co.th or try clicking on his address. Also visit new page, "Bill's Photo Page", upcountry with Bill and Tony Poe.

from back left, Bill Dettori, Willie Utterback, Tony Poe, Jack Shirley, and in front Stan

Wilson

Jack Shirley passed away recently, the following epitaph was published recently in THE

WASHINGTON TIMES

" TOP AGENT IN CIA'S 'SECRET WAR' DIES"

by

Richard S. Ehrlich -----------------------------------------------------------

BANGKOK - ” Jack Shirley, a legendary former CIA official who helped run America's

failed "secret war" in Laos, died yesterday in the Thai beach resort of Pattaya after a long

bout with cancer. He was 76, according to his Thai wife, Pen. "Most people don't realize,

the CIA was created to do the things the country couldn't do out in the open," Mr. Shirley

was once quoted as saying. "Nothing we did was legal. Everything we did was illegal.

'Plausible deniability' was the name of the game." Mr. Shirley, an American, reached his

professional zenith during the Vietnam War, when the CIA armed minority ethnic

Hmong tribesmen in Laos against communist Pathet Lao guerrillas and North

Vietnamese fighters. During the horror of those years, the U.S. unleashed on Laos the

heaviest aerial bombardment any country had ever suffered. Nevertheless, many of his

Laotian friends remained loyal to him after the war was lost. In recent years, he was a

lively personality inside the small, quiet Madrid Bar ” favored by retired U.S.

government and military officials ” on Patpong Road in Bangkok's red-light district.

Mr. Shirley, who settled in Thailand, regaled listeners with tales of gossip, scandal,

adventures and bumbling within the CIA and the armed forces. "He had a very sharp wit

and a very good sense of humor. He had a real, genuine affection for Asia and its

people," said Canadian screenwriter Dave Walker.

Mr. Shirley expressed occasional bitterness over the Vietnam War. "Jack complained

about a lot of the [U.S.] bureaucracy during the war and the needless loss of life," Mr.

Walker said. During Washington's 15 years of trying to contain communism, more than 1

million Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians were estimated killed alongside more than

50,000 Americans.

It was a time when "hundreds of CIA and other officers in god-awful circumstances did

their [best] to do what they were told was their duty," wrote historian Harold P. Ford.

Mr. Shirley joined the CIA in its early years after World War II. The CIA, meanwhile,

slipped into impoverished, landlocked Laos in 1954 after French colonialists retreated.

For America, Laos became a line drawn across

lush mountains to stop North Vietnam's communism from infecting the region. Starting

in 1961, Mr. Shirley and other CIA officers gave weapons and cash to rugged, indigenous

Hmong tribesmen ” former allies of the French — and

aimed them at Vietnamese communists encroaching into Laos. Vietnamese used eastern

Laos as a so-called "Ho Chi Minh Trail" to zigzag across the border during attacks

against U.S. forces in South Vietnam. While fighting for the CIA, the Hmong's fragile

culture was mostly obliterated and thousands of them perished. Thousands of others fled

to

refugee camps in Thailand. Washington, however, was pleased that the Hmong disrupted

the Ho Chi Minh

Trail and saved American lives. Mr. Shirley worked in Laos for the CIA from 1961-68,

according to the

investigative, archival Web site, NameBase. "After the 1973 truce, the CIA's cowboys

and their proxies shrugged their

shoulders and went to Thailand or the U.S. to retire on their pensions. They left behind a

country ... full of bomb craters, antipersonnel bomblets, and amputees on crutches,"

NameBase says.

One of Mr. Shirley's closest partners was a fabled CIA legend ” Anthony Poshepny, aka

Tony Poe (see "Bill's Photo Page”) who became immortalized as the insane, bloodthirsty

intelligence officer Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando in the film

"Apocalypse Now." "He [Poshepny] once said he was collecting heads for humanitarian

reasons. He had been paying a bounty for ears [of dead communists in Laos], until he ran

into a little boy with his ears missing," Mr. Shirley told the San

Francisco Weekly. "The boy said his father had cut them off and sold them [to Poshepny

for a reward]. Tony was so shocked, he gave the boy a few hundred kip [a small amount

of Laotian currency], and immediately decided he would accept only heads from then

on," Mr. Shirley said.

-----------------------------------------------------------

This article was from The Washington Times

Davone Dettori and Bob Moberg

Jimmy "the Belgium", Jim Coyne and Tiger

Arnie Swanson, Tiger and ????(do you know?)

Alan Dawson, his wife Tuk, and Tiger

Davone Dettori, Tiger and Tony Sandford

Visit the American Foreign Legion Convention Feb. 1984, in Bangkok, by clicking on

the following; THE AMERICAN FOREIGN LEGION PAGE

Email to: art@savacool.com

Bill's Photo Page

More photos from my good friend, Bill Dettori. You can contact Bill at: billdee@access.inet.co.th or try clicking on his address.

Bill Dettori, and Tony Poe, at Tony's home in Udon Thani

Seng Poe, Bill and Davone Dettori (Tony's house)

Bill Dettori and Tony Poe, whose pickup I don't know.