THE RUSSIANS IN LAOS

What goes on in the rebel-controlled stronghold of north-central Laos? Last week TIME Correspondent James Wilde got a rare chance to see for himself. The Russians have been busily wooing Prince Souvanna Phouma, 59, who was Premier of Laos until he fled to exile in Cambodia last December. Fortnight ago, over dinner and a bottle of vodka at Russian Ambassador Aleksandr Abramov's house in the Cambodian capital of Pnompenh, Prince Souvanna agreed to visit the rebel stronghold. He took along his old friend, Correspondent Wilde, who flew out last week with Souvanna and filed an eye-witness account.

THE trip had all the trappings of a state visit, all the secrecy of a Communist plot. At Pnompenh airport, Ambassador Abramov and Chinese Communist Ambassador Wang Yu-ping huddled about the ramp of the twin-engined Ilyushin-14 warned that the plane would have to fly "very high" and be blacked out. Reason: "U.S. jets" might try to shoot it down. At Hanoi that night. North Viet Nam Premier Pham Van Dong turned out at the runway with a cluster of pretty little girls bearing flowers, then drove Prince Souvanna off to the state guesthouse in a long cortege of limousines through streets dark and deserted except for the squads of soldiers guarding intersections. Early next morning, the Ilyushin flew over the mist-shrouded mountains of northern Laos to a grassy landing strip on the Plaine des Jarres, an 800 sq. mi. plateau, so named because it is dotted by ancient, granite burial jars weighing up to 100 tons.

Arsenal. The entire Plaine des Jarres is bulging with Russian armaments and swarming with Vietnamese. The Ilyu-shins, which are lined up 18 deep at Hanoi airport, drone in by the hour, bringing 45 tons of equipment a day. About once a week, a convoy of 50 Gorky trucks rolls in over primitive Route Seven from Vinh in North Viet Nam. The rebels have more than 60 Gorky trucks. 40 Soviet jeeps, about 25 command cars and six Russian armored cars. They have Kalashnikov submachine guns. Simonov carbines. Degtiarev light machine guns, ZPU antiaircraft machine guns, as well as Russian assault guns and 60-and 81-mm. mortars. In the hills around the plain are new Russian 85-mm. cannon manned by Viet Minh "technicians." The Viet Minh are everywhere. They drive trucks, operate radios, build roads, teach tactics, run a 300-bed hospital in an assembly of tents and shacks. In the village of Phongsavan, a Viet Minh "people's store"dispenses cigarettes, food and a sweet North Vietnamese liquor called moka.

Brotherly Host. Souvanna's host was his own half brother, Red Prince Souphanouvong, who leads the Pathet Lao.

"We have men and weapons now-we are strong," bragged the Red prince, who has fought a guerrilla war for the past six years. "This is what I have come to see," replied Souvanna. At night they dined under a bower of silk parachutes, along with Captain Kong Le, the moody leftist who set off the civil war last August by mutinying with his battalion of paratroopers. Souvanna hailed the "fusion" of Kong Le's soldiers and the Pathet Lao. But in private, the Communists admitted that they were as puzzled as has been many a Western diplomat by Souvanna's fuzzy political ideas. "A very complicated man," said a Soviet journalist. "He says one thing one day and something entirely different the next."

Takeover. For the Communists have thoroughly taken over what Souvanna envisioned as a popular uprising aimed at making Laos a neutralist state. Kong Le's officers now mouth Communist slogans such as "Down with Fascist American imperialism," and the Pathet Lao's supreme military commander, Colonel Sinkapo. now runs the military forces. The 150 students who followed Kong Le into the Plaine des Jarres have all been shipped off to Hanoi for Communist schooling. "Let the American imperialists dare attack us." says Sisana Sisane. editor of a Pathet Lao newspaper. "Behind us we have millions and millions of friends. We fight for an ideal, not for liquor and women like the others." One morning, when a U.S. transport plane flew into sight, Pathet Lao officers identified it to their men as "a jet from the Seventh Fleet-it has just machine-gunned a hospital."

Cocky and well disciplined, the rebels are contemptuous of the royal army (though not of the wild Meo tribesmen. who ambush rebel patrols). Neither the rebels nor their foreign advisers talk of peace. "Our side could take over all of Laos in three days," boasted a Russian reporter, one of a dozen Communist-bloc newsmen on the scene. "We have been patient, very patient. It is only a matter of time."

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