Ouane Rattikone

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (July 2013) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the German article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[:de:Ouane Rattikone]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|de|Ouane Rattikone}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

This article relies largely or entirely on a single source. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please help improve this article by introducing citations to additional sources. Find sources: "Ouane Rattikone" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (April 2021)

Major general Ouane Rattikone (Ouan Rathikoun), a Laotian senior military officer, was the commander-in-chief of the Royal Lao Armed Forces (French: Forces Armées du Royaume – FAR), the official military of the Royal Lao Government and the Kingdom of Laos, during the 1960s. He was born in 1912 in Luang Prabang.

An ally of the United States during the Vietnam War, Ouane developed a close relationship with William H. Sullivan, the U.S. ambassador to Laos, and Ted Shackley, the CIA station chief in Vientiane. Despite the intense conflicts amongst the FAR regional commanders, Ouane was pivotal in providing local military support against the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and the Pathet Lao in the northern regions of Laos.

Ouane was also heavily involved in the opium trade throughout Southeast Asia. Despite widespread conspiracy theories of CIA complicity in drug trafficking, an investigation by the U.S. Senate found no evidence of CIA involvement.^{[citation needed]} In his memoirs, Shackley unapologetically stated that the CIA essentially turned a blind eye to the drug trafficking because their resources were already being sapped by the war in neighboring Vietnam.^[1] He is believed to have died in October 1978.

• 1967 Opium War
• Thao Ty
• Thao Ma
• Phoumi Nosavan
• Vang Pao
• Royal Lao Armed Forces
• Laotian Civil War
• Colonel Bounleuth Saycocie