Bill Young (CIA officer)

William Young (28 October 1934 – 1 April 2011) was a Central Intelligence Agency paramilitary officer born in Berkeley, California and raised in Burma and Thailand. Although he was Caucasian, he was reared in the local hill tribe culture. Because his father and brother already worked for the CIA and knew Bill Lair, the Agency knew of his extensive cultural contacts with the Lahu people and other Southeast Asian hill tribes. With command of several Asian languages, he was made a natural recruiter of local guerrillas for the CIA's covert operations in the secret war in the Kingdom of Laos. He was then considered for the position of case officer to the Hmong Vang Pao. He was passed over in favor of sending him on an extended reconnaissance of the Kingdom of Laos. His tour ranged westward from his start at Long Tieng, which he reported as well sited for operations in the Plain of Jars, back to familiar territory in the Golden Triangle.

While assigned to paramilitary duty in Nam Yu, Laos, in the Golden Triangle from 1962 to 1967, Young trained a militia army of several thousand hill tribesmen and spied on the People's Republic of China. In time, he clashed with his superiors over the increasing aerial bombing of Laos, and was fired. He spent almost all the rest of his life as a businessman in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Upon occasion, he would work security for an oil company in Sudan, or consult for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Plagued by ill-health in his later years, he died by suicide on 1 April 2011.