Former Laotian general Vang Pao, who once commanded a CIA-backed "secret army" of Hmong guerrillas during the Vietnam War, died Thursday in a Californian hospital. He was 81. "He died today... the family was there," said a spokeswoman for the Clovis Community Medical Center, some 200 miles (322 kilometers) south-east of San Francisco, adding that he had been at the facility since December 26.
A general in the Royal Lao army and member of the Hmong ethnic minority, Vang Pao ran an irregular army in the 1960s and 70s, commanding thousands of fighters in the US-funded covert war against Vietnamese and Lao communist forces. He fled to the United States in 1975 after communists ousted Laos' royal rulers, and was credited with helping negotiate the resettlement in America of tens of thousands of fellow Hmong.