Travel Brain 
By Travel Brain
Long Cheng, the CIA’s ‘secret city’ in its long war in Laos, had been somewhere I’d wanted to visit for years. Finally, it seemed, with the Saisombun Special Zone (pi29) disbanded, getting there would be possible. So with rented dirt bikes, sunglasses and full tanks of gas, my friend Wil and I set off from Vang Vieng. First, though, a little background
From the early 1960s until May 1975, Long Cheng (also spelt Long Tien) was the heart and soul of the American war against communism in Laos. Long Cheng means ‘clear valley’ and it was the relatively open space, combined with a population of Hmong who opposed the Pathet Lao-North Vietnamese push, that appealed to the CIA when they chose it as a base for training Hmong guerrillas (see p38).
As the fighting intensified on the Plain of Jars, just 60km north, so Long Cheng grew. By 1964 a 1260m-long runway had been built and sealed. Storage facilities, a communications centre and housing were constructed. The charismatic Hmong General Vang Pao, who was even then the most important man in Laos as far as the US was concerned, coordinated his fighters from Long Cheng. By 1966 it was one of the largest US installations on foreign soil; by 1969 Long Cheng had become one of the busiest airports on earth, with a takeoff or landing roughly every minute.
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