A GREAT PLACE TO HAVE A WAR

Book about America’s secret war in Laos in the 1960s and 1970s and how it transformed the CIA from a loose collection of spies into a military operation and a key player in American foreign policy.

Based on extensive interviews and CIA records only recently declassified, A GREAT PLACE TO HAVE A WAR is a riveting look at how Operation Momentum changed American foreign policy forever. Only in the last decade has the CIA begun to release its files on the biggest and longest covert war it ever waged, during which it dropped more bombs on Laos than the U.S. dropped on either Japan or Germany during World War II. Kurlantzick was also able to secure interviews with the key people involved. He pieced together not only the story of the Laos war, but also of how it permanently militarized the Agency and gave it unprecedented power.

Joshua Kurlantzick is a senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He has been a columnist for Time, a special correspondent for the New Republic, a senior correspondent for the American Prospect, and a contributing writer for Mother Jones. He is the winner of the Luce Scholarship for journalism in Asia and was selected as a finalist for the Osborn Elliot prize for journalism in Asia.