Inside the Tor Chor Dor

The threat of communist takeover was a major factor in the formation of the Border Patrol Police (BPP) 60 years ago, according to a new history on the Tor Chor Dor, which describes the BPP as Thailand’s “most widely respected paramilitary organisation”.

After the outbreak of the Korean War and Chinese invasion of Tibet, the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency believed Thailand needed a paramilitary capable of protecting its long frontiers.

The head of the Thai police at that time, General Phao Sriyanond, had been happy to support the CIA’s clandestine operations in southern China – and welcomed the chance to command a paramilitary unit, Australian professor Des Ball says in his latest tome.

Police General Phao was “corrupt and brutal”, Ball writes. Having a paramilitary unit under his command would enable him to achieve “a virtual monopoly over opium and heroin trafficking into Thailand from the Golden Triangle”, plus a bounty of CIA funds, weapons and equipment.

The 1950s saw periods of political turmoil, and not all powerbrokers were well-disposed to the CIA-backed operations here, particularly its dealings with Police General Phao, who ended up fleeing the country when Army chief General Sarit Thanarat overthrew the Phibun regime in 1957.

“Sarit hated all the CIA’s covert police programs, which he saw as rivals to his army … He especially hated the PARU” – the police paratroop unit known as the Police Aerial Reinforcement Unit. However the PARU and the Border Police had support not only from the CIA but also the Royal Family.

“The relationship between the BPP and the palace was forged in the BPP’s formative years, when the young King Bhumibol was just assuming his royal duties,” Ball writes. In 1953, the CIA and Police chief General Phao had “shrewdly located” the PARU’s home base in Hua Hin, near the King’s summer palace, Klai Kangwon. Two years later, the police commandos were named the Royal Guards.

One of the PARU’s functions was to protect and evacuate the Royal Family in the event of a communist attack. The King formed a close relationship with the men at both the PARU’s Naresuan camp, which the King had opened in 1954, and the BPP’s Rama VI camp in Cha-am, Ball says.

The US, meanwhile, flew a senior officer out to tell Sarit he couldn’t abolish the Border Police, as “they were needed to deal with communists in border regions”. Sarit’s plans to dismantle both outfits had to be shelved, and the CIA was forced to repackage its operations here.

The Border Patrol Police enjoyed a revival in the late 1950s and early ’60s partly through its civic action programmes. The BPP had begun building schools in remote areas in 1956, to establish contact with highland minorities in isolated areas, and this work was stepped up in 1959 following reports of communist infiltration and subversion.

By the end of 1962 the BPP had built 150 schools in remote areas, installed water supplies, helped hilltribes with pig and chicken farming, and given training in medical assistance and personal hygiene.

In October in the same year, US Defence Secretary Robert MacNamara and senior military chiefs “decided that strengthening Thailand’s paramilitary capabilities was now the highest priority for US military assistance” – there were not enough police guarding provinces along the Mekong. The BPP was completely re-equipped with modern weapons, radio communications and vehicles, Ball writes.

Links with the Royal Family also got closer. HRH the Princess Mother began to visit BPP camps and schools in hilltribe areas in 1964, and she granted royal patronage to the border force. “The BPP served as an eager agency of the Royal Family’s devotion to rural development,” explains Ball.

Over the next decade, as war escalated in Indochina, both His Majesty the King and his mother, who passed away in July 1995, became frequent visitors to BPP bases in the north “sponsoring and promoting the BPP’s ‘people-focused’ border development projects”.

The CIA’s efforts in training Thai police and assistance in Thailand is documented at length in Prof Ball’s book, as is the PARU’s extensive involvement in the “secret war” in Laos from 1960 until 1975 – the largest CIA operation in its history until the invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

By the mid-’60s, the BPP had become a lead agency in the struggle against communist insurgents. “BPP units were among the first Thai security agencies to encounter insurgent groups… and among the first to become victims of the Communist Party of Thailand’s initiation of armed operations”.

Meanwhile, the BPP’s efforts to counter the socioeconomic forces that led tribal people to produce opium and to help hilltribes to give up opium farming won high praise from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. A UNODC report in 1969 said the BPP had a “remarkable record” and energy and sympathy shown to tribal people was impressive. The BPP had benefited from the Royal Family’s close interest in its work, it said, noting that this may have helped the force attract “extremely clever and efficient” leaders.

But it wasn’t all rosy. There were problems in dealings with Hmong villagers in the North and upper Northeast, clashes with villagers near Udon, and BPP involvement in the massacre at Thammasat in 1976. From 1976-’78, some 335 BPP officers were killed fighting communist insurgents.

In 1982, the BPP formed a special 800-strong force to capture Ban Hin Taek, the base of opium warlord Khun Sa, near the Burmese border in Chiang Rai. Fighting raged for days, with 16 BPP troops killed and wounded, while the drug lord’s Shan United Army suffered 300 killed or wounded.

BPP clashes with Cambodian and Vietnamese forces on the Cambodian frontier from the mid-’70s to the early ’90s are also documented, as well as clashes with communist insurgents in the far South.

“Tor Chor Dor” is a very detailed study, a whopping two-volume set which covers everything from songs about the BPP to the organisation’s structure, the weapons it has used, its recruitment policies and even profiles about a dozen officers (senior and lower officers, including women).

It is well-written and easy to read, but for me the “gold” is the history, penned by an outsider with superb critical analysis but also admiration for the BPP and its years of good work. People with a security or police background will get more value from these many other facets.

Prof Ball is one of Australia’s top defence analysts and no stranger to Thailand, having spent months touring the Kingdom in most years since the early 1980s. The Canberra-based academic has written more than 40 books on different facets of security, from signals intelligence and interception, strategic nuclear targeting, regional arms networks, to “shadow wars” in Southeast Asia – and paramilitary groups in Thailand.

His greatest claim to fame is a tribute by former US president Jimmy Carter, who said Ball had helped save the world from potential nuclear holocaust, by persuading the US that its plan to target selected Soviet facilities, in the event of a nuclear war, was flawed and would not work.

Ball has had a long-running interesting in the Thai-Myanmar border. He has also published books on “Burma’s Military Secrets” (1998), the Thahan Phran or Thai border rangers (“The Boys in Black”, 2004) and the Or Sor (“Militia Redux”, 2007).

The size and depth of his latest offering may deter some, as the first volume is 600 pages, but the history outlined here is worth the price alone.

(Note: More on volume 2 shortly).

 

 

 

 

Tor Chor Dor, Thailand’s Border Patrol Police: History, Organization, Equipment and Personnel (Vol 1)

By Desmond Ball

Published by White Lotus

Available at Asia Books, Kinokuniya, Bt1,750 

Reviewed by Jim Pollard