{"title":"Ken Conboy","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into the world of special operations and counter-terrorism with Ken Conboy's expertly researched books. A must-read for military history enthusiasts seeking detailed accounts and gripping narratives.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"erawan-war-volume-2-book-ken-conboy-9781915070609","title":"The Erawan War Volume 2","description":"During a closed-door meeting of Washington policy makers on 31 March 1971, a senior CIA officer informed National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger that the agency was controlling up to 8 divisions of indigenous troops in Laos. \"When the CIA reaches the point of having the largest army in Southeast Asia,\" retorted Kissinger, \"we better review the program!\"\u003ci\u003eThe Erawan War, Volume 2\u003c\/i\u003e details how the CIA operation in Laos reached that point, becoming its largest paramilitary operation of the Cold War. With photos and maps, it covers the wide range of CIA-supported units in Laos, from guerrilla regiments that went toe-to-toe with the North Vietnamese army in pitched campaigns, to top-secret commandos that crossed borders to wage clandestine sabotage attacks.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49577416622353,"sku":"GOR012353600","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49741530923281,"sku":"NGR9781915070609","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1915070600.jpg?v=1751631644"},{"product_id":"cia-paramilitary-operations-in-tibet-book-ken-conboy-9781804510216","title":"CIA Paramilitary Operations in Tibet","description":"\u003ci\u003eCIA Paramilitary Operations in Tibet\u003c\/i\u003e is the story of how the US government - primarily through the CIA and often in cooperation with India - came to harness, nurture, and encourage Tibetan defiance in one of the most extreme covert campaigns of the Cold War. In particular, it details an important chapter in the CIA's paramilitary history. In Tibet, new kinds of equipment - aircraft and parachutes, for example - were combat-tested under the most extreme conditions imaginable. New communications techniques were tried and perfected. In many cases, these lessons learned would be applied to other Cold War battlefields like Vietnam, Laos, and elsewhere. Tibet, therefore, became a vital proving ground for CIA case officers and their spycraft.CIA Paramilitary Operations in Tibet includes over 60 color and black and white photographs of the participants in the campaign and the insignia of the organizations involved, along with specially commissioned color artworks illustrating the aircraft employed in the skies above Tibet.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49661248471313,"sku":"GOR013544442","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49778129174801,"sku":"NGR9781804510216","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1804510211.jpg?v=1751630539"},{"product_id":"erawan-war-volume-3-book-ken-conboy-9781804510223","title":"The Erawan War Volume 3","description":"\u003cb\u003e\"...a well rounded look at the Laotian armed forces during their 15 years of conflict. Well worth reading.\" - ModelingMadness.Com\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Best known by their French acronym for Forces Armées du Royaume - FAR - the Royal Lao Armed Forces were the official defense force of the Kingdom of Laos - what is now the Lao People's Democratic Republic - from 1949 until 1975. Founded in 1947, when King Sisavang Vong declared Laos an independent nation (and a Kingdom from 1949), the FAR originally included a collection of pre-existing Lao police and militarized constabulary units, regular indigenous colonial troops and locally raised irregular auxiliaries. While the latter two were described in the first two volumes of this mini-series, the emphasis in \u003ci\u003eThe Erawan War, Volume 3\u003c\/i\u003e is on the FAR, the build-up of which was constantly hampered by the developments in the First Indochina War in neighboring Vietnam. Unsurprisingly, it was only in 1952 that the National Laotian Army - the predecessor of the Royal Lao Army - began to take shape, and only in 1961 that the Laotian Armed Forces were officially renamed the Royal Lao Armed Forces.Plagued by an ineffective leadership at senior levels, and often suffering from chain-of-command problems, the FAR exerted little control over the regional commands and local military commanders for much of the 1960s. A country with a long-standing tradition of warlords - or local power-brokers - and the strong influence of an urban elite aristocracy, Laos took time to build-up effective armed forces, which reached their high tide in the second half of the 1960s, thanks to growing amounts of military aid from the USA. Eventually, the Royal Lao Armed Forces included not only a number of training centers, and several elite units, but the Royal Lao Army, the Royal Lao Air Force and the Royal Lao Navy, all of which fought a bitter war against the North Vietnamese and their local allies until the downfall of the Laotian Kingdom in 1975.Richly illustrated with authentic original photographs and custom-drawn color artworks, \u003ci\u003eThe Erawan War, Volume 3\u003c\/i\u003e is a highly authoritative single-point source of reference on the build-up and operational history of the FAR.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49743057191185,"sku":"NGR9781804510223","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50101266481425,"sku":"CIN180451022XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/180451022X.jpg?v=1751630372"},{"product_id":"feet-to-the-fire-book-ken-conboy-9781682473450","title":"Feet to the Fire","description":"Today the vast archipelago of Southeast Asia islands known as Indonesia is in the headlines because of political instability, religious tension, and violence in the streets. Forty years ago similar conditions led the Central Intelligence Agency to mount a top-secret covert action campaign designed to hold that nation's left-leaning President Sukarno's feet to the fire and prevent a strategic crossroad from falling into the communist camp. The Agency supported rebels with weapons, planes, and a memorable cast of bigger-than-life American agents. In a fast-paced, engrossing narrative evoking the novels of John LeCarré and Graham Greene, the authors provide the first unclassified, detailed case study of an operation that has escaped public scrutiny for decades. Their work adds significantly to our understanding of the CIA and American involvement in Asia.  Drawing on declassified documents and an extraordinary number of interviews with CIA and Indonesian participants, Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison reconstruct the delicate, dangerous game played by American intelligence agents across the Indonesian archipelago. This is a story of ideologues and soldiers of fortune--historic CIA legends like Allen Dulles and Franklin Wisner, and notorious special operators like Tony \"\"Poe\"\" Poshepny, whose reputation reached mythic proportions later in Laos, and Allen Pope, an indefatigable B-26 pilot who was captured and sentenced to die. But it also includes the transfixing exploits of Montana smokejumpers, Polish aircrews, Muslim anti-communist guerrillas, U.S. Navy submarine crews, and Filipino mercenary pilots flying P-51 Mustangs.  With the problems in today's Indonesia far from solved and the complex U.S.-Indonesian relationship coming under close scrutiny, this fascinating account of an American covert operation gone bad will play a significant role in shedding new light on the CIA's efforts in Southeast Asia.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51554592063761,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51554592194833,"sku":"NIN9781682473450","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52691316867345,"sku":"NLS9781682473450","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1682473457.jpg?v=1750993339"},{"product_id":"fank-book-ken-conboy-9789793780863","title":"Fank","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe first comprehensive history of Forces ArmEes Nationales KhmEres - the Cambodian National Armed Forces - this fully-illustrated volume highlights the quarter of a million members of the Cambodian army, air force, and navy that saw daily combat during the five tumultuous years of the Khmer Republic. Although the war in Cambodia has been dubbed a sideshow to the larger, more widely reported conflict in neighboring Vietnam, the battles in Cambodia-a country smaller than the state of Oklahoma-were pivotal to U.S. foreign policy and played a critical factor in the final years of the Vietnam War.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eKen Conboy\u003c\/strong\u003e heads Risk Management Advisory, a security consultancy in Jakarta. A graduate of Georgetown University and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Conboy studied at Sophia University in Tokyo and was a visiting fellow at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. A resident of Indonesia since 1992, he is author of more than two dozen books on intelligence and military history.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52334051983633,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52334053490961,"sku":"NLS9789793780863","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9789793780863.jpg?v=1758155899"},{"product_id":"divine-spears-book-ken-conboy-9786027025554","title":"Divine Spears","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eIN A NATION\u003c\/strong\u003e where the military has played an influential social and political role since its founding, perhaps no unit has wielded more power - and seen more combat - than Kopassus, Indonesia's Special Forces. And perhaps nowhere did it experience more challenging assignments than in the mountains and jungles of East Timor.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Here, two Kopassus teams - codenamed \u003cem\u003enanggala\u003c\/em\u003e, a Sanskrit term for divine spear - are documented in detail during the earliest phase of the East Timor campaign. Coming when Fretilin insurgents were at their most powerful, these Special Forces teams took on assignments ranging from airborne assaults to psychological warfare. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in unconventional warfare, contemporary Indonesian history, the struggle of Timor Leste, and the brushfire wars that have swept the Indonesian archipelago.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eKEN CONBOY\u003c\/strong\u003e is currently country manager for a private security and risk consultancy in Jakarta. Prior to that, he served as deputy director at the Asian Studies Center, an influential Washington-based think tank, where his duties included writing policy papers for the US Congress and Executive on economic and strategic relations with the nations of South and Southeast Asia. The author of nearly twenty books about Asian military history and intelligence operations, Conboy's most recent title \u003cem\u003eThe Cambodian Wars\u003c\/em\u003e has been called riveting and brilliantly researched. Conboy, a graduate of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and of Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies, was also a visiting fellow at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. He has lived in Indonesia since 1992.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52479590236433,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52479591448849,"sku":"NLS9786027025554","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9786027025554.jpg?v=1759848936"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-ken-conboy.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}