Tony Poe's CIA War: A Secret War Waged by His Paramilitary Army in Southeast Asia
About this ebook
In 1942, at the age of seventeen, he joined the Marine Raiders. In Guadalcanal, he hunted down Japanese soldiers. In 1945, he led his machine gun section ashore across the knee-deep black sands at Red Beach on Iwo Jima. Recruited by the CIA in 1951, he was told that his role as a paramilitary agent was to carry out the Agency’s dirty work, which could be “plausibly denied.” He was the dagger in the phrase “cloak and dagger.”
In 1961, he was in Laos, where his role as field commander of the CIA’s secret war was leading 17,000 mountain villagers against a well-equipped communist force and crossing enemy lines into China. Poe spent nine years living in his mountain hideout with his tribal fighters and absorbed sufficient shrapnel in his body to set off airport security alarms. He was awarded a chest full of medals, including two Purple Hearts and the CIA’s highest award: the Intelligence Star.
About the author
Cardiff-born Richard Gough served on active service with the Gurkha Brigade in Malaya in the 1950s. Later, he volunteered for the Parachute Regiment, followed by a short stint with the Intelligence Corps. After a brief spell in politics, he created a marketing force for the UK Department for National Savings and later became the head of human resources. His wife, Rona, and he raised £8 million with their friends for breast cancer research undertaken by Cardiff University. Taking early retirement in 1985, he and Rona researched and wrote four books focused on the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in the Far East.
With the support of Welsh media in London, they voluntarily developed the Wales and London Placement Scheme. This brought more than one thousand Welsh A-level pre-university students to London on a Career Development Scheme with major trading houses, theatre, and media.
Richard and Rona began researching the Tony Poe biography in 2000. Rona died of dementia in 2021.
